Our former weekly diarist, now occasional contributor, Anthea Kreston, has been unexxpectedly immersed in Max Reger.
It was a great three weeks in our little town in the lush Willamette Valley of Oregon. The girls are settling into school, we have found a crazy/amazing house built into the side of a hill – views from each window, every room on a different level, connected by stairs like a real-life treehouse. Grandparents comfortably and elatedly installed as Jason and I turned around and headed for a week with our Humboldt Streichtrio (and now KlavierQuartett as well), to rehearse and perform three concerts in the sleepy, picturesque Bavarian town of Weiden. The birthplace of Max Reger – that enigmatic, excessive, hard-drinking and puzzling composer who in turn crams a million seemingly unrelated notes down your gullet, then lifts you up with moments of pure beauty and clarity.
Volker Jacobsen (original violist of the Artemis Quartet) Markus Becker (pianist – equally dynamic with classical or jazz), Jason and I made quick, detailed work of the programs, first in Hannover, where they are Professors at the Hochschule, then in the Rathhaus of Weiden – the council chambers would be the venue for the next three nights. Walls and ceiling of dark, solid wide-planked wood, cracked oil paintings of royalty and town elders lining the walls, chandeliers which look as if they could double as lethal weapons in a pinch – the room held onto the lower registers, turning them every bit as dark and rich as the wood which surrounded us.
The things that always astound me about Germany – the quiet dedication of the audience, the deep, personal connections to the composers and performers – attending concerts seems to be just a regular part of regular lives. These things were evident in spades in that festival – three weeks, every year, dedicated to Max Reger – a composer who elicits strong reactions, and is considered fringe, at best, in North America, but who is embraced whole-heartedly in Germany – his enigmatic qualities – both as a composer and human – only enhance their love for this quirky man. His pouty, chubby countenance – lower jaw jutting forward and thick, fleshy lips pursed – he isn’t one of the “top-50” composers that lined our books as students – his bust is probably not even considered a back-order item. But one would never know it in Weiden. The concerts were packed every day – and many of the same people were there for every performance. We were followed into our post-concert pub on the first evening by a banker who began to explain to us, in detail, how the recapitulation in the first movement of the piano quartet diverted from the standard form.
Today’s final concert was a mixed affair – the beloved German actor Udo Wachtveitl (from the crime series Tatort) interspersed the Op. 133 piano quartet movements with readings by and about Max Reger – his correspondences with his imaginary friend Ludwig (he would write letters to himself from Ludwig, posting them to himself from other cities – topics included an impassioned speech on the distracting big toe of a principal ballerina in an imaginary ballet), his crazed, self-imposed work schedule – the audience was in turns laughing at the sheer, exuberant personality of this strange man, and marveling at his copious musical output. It was my first Reger – and, learning it from/with musicians who have grown up with him, who know the language and the secret keys to the funky musical structure, it was a treat to be expand into that world, and be embraced by all of the people who keep him as a living, active member of their culture and community.
The Joseph Joachim competition in Hannover, which boasted the world’s biggest pot of prizes, has long been regarded as a closed shop for favoured students of the chairman and members of the jury.
No longer.
The chairman and his cronies have been cleared out. Their successors have announced a teacher-free judging panel.
With regard to the various professional opportunities awaiting today’s violinists, Antje Weithaas and Oliver Wille have decided to adjust the jury structure. From now on, the pre-selection of participants will fall to the string section leaders of the NDR Radiophilharmonie, thus becoming part of orchestra business. The competition jury will include nine members: five violinists and four jury members from concert-related fields. The following jury members will accompany the 2021 competition: Ana Chumachenco, Suyoen Kim, David Takeno, Donald Weilerstein and Carolin Widmann,, as well as Eleonore Büning, Robert Levin, Andrew Manze (from the semi-final round on) and Christine Schäfer. As competition hosts, the artistic directors will not be part of any jury.
The prize money has been reduced and made egalitarian:
All four finalists will receive a monetary award in the amount of EUR 10,000 each. Additionally, the new “Joseph Joachim” prize in the amount of EUR 30,000 will be awarded to a single participant from the group of finalists.
Way to go.
Vittorio Grigolo received ovations for his La Scala performance as Nemorino in L’Elisir d’amore yesterday.
Afterwards he said: ‘There will always be gossip and words designed to sell more copies of a newspaper. After 20 years of intensive work and sacrifice, the audience at La Scala … let me know that I am loved for who I am – that is, exuberant in taking the applause… energetic. I hugged some members of the chorus this evening, so I hope I won’t be having any more problems.’
Grigolo was sent home by Covent Garden and sacked by the Met after an alleged incident with a chorus member.
LA Times music critic Mark Swed has written a neatly balanced review of the life and works of Placido Domingo in the City of Angels.
Mark is full of admiration for the singer’s dedication to establishing an opera house in the city, efforts that go back to 1985, if not earlier. And he gives due credit to the scale of Domingo’s commitment, as performer, administrator, figurehead and fundraiser.
But he does not stint on the debit side either, mentioning Domingo ‘commissioning some pretty awful operas’, employing his wife as an opera director and using LA Opera ‘as a place to work on conducting’.
Reports from the UK Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse continue to unfold a horrifying catalogue of paedophile activity at the leading music schools.
We are saddened to learn of the death from cancer of Agnes Wan-Patterson, a Steinway Artist who won several interational competitions, toured extensively in Europe and taught at the Blair School of Music and Virginia State University.
Hong Kong born, Agnes studied at the universities of Iowa and Cincinnati. She died just short of her 43rd birthday and is survived by her father, husband and two sons.
The third concert in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s centennial season was another show of British shock and awe. Review by the conductor and Conservatoire teacher Christopher Morley:
CBSO at Symphony Hall
*****
If the CBSO’s programme continues to be as adventurous as tonight’s during its two-year-long centenary celebrations which have just begun, then we’re in for a fascinating journey.
Three British rarities kicked off with the Second Symphony of the 25-year-old Ruth Gipps (premiered), premiered by George Weldon and the then City of Birmingham Orchestra 73 years ago. A protegee of Weldon’s, Gipps had been the CBO’s second oboe and principal cor anglais until gossip about their relationship forced her resignation.
The symphony is strongly scored and structured, often redolent of Vaughan Williams (Gipps’ teacher), and vibrant with personality. It is in fact a “War Symphony”, conflict disturbing a pastoral idyll, and with a stamina-sapping snare-drum part which evokes Shostakovich’s recent Leningrad Symphony. Often this 20-minute work has the evocative power of film-music, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla and the CBSO rendered it with a controlled mixture of control and delicacy.
Also visually stimulating (inspired by Victoria Crowe’s paintings of trees) is the new Trumpet Concerto by Thea Musgrave, a CBSO Centenary Commission supported by the John Feeney Charitable Trust, and premiered at this summer’s Cheltenham Music Festival, played there as well as here by its dedicatee Alison Balsom.
Musgrave has picked up on Balsom’s desire to make her instrument sing, and the soloist responded gratefully to the sustained melodic lines — including a tune from the composer’s native Scotland — as well as rattling out passages of brilliant articulation.
There are also theatrical duets with various orchestra members, with one slapstick mime with the principal cellist, culminating in a highly moving collaboration with an initially offstage trumpet, the excellent Jonathan Holland eventually taking up a position onstage, ending with a radiant major third from the two instruments. Applause was deservedly prolonged.
Finally came excitement as much for the huge orchestra as well as the audience, the Symphonic Suite arranged by Christopher Palmer from the music of Walton’s only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida. This proved a real find on both sides of the footlights, a score of gripping emotion, communicative directness, positive dramatic impetus, and typically Waltonian Mediterranean warmth.
Under Mirga the CBSO produced a big, rich sound, the many showpiece solos eloquently shaped, everything perfectly placed and balanced, and a little bird tells me that these forces will be soon be recording the work in Hamburg for DG.
