Review: Remembering JFK - Two Views of History

Remembering JFK - 50th Anniversary Concert
National Symphony Orchestra; Christoph Eschenbach, conductor
Ondine

This new release from Ondine is actually two historical musical documents in one. The first CD is a recording of the 50th Anniversary Concert held at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra lead by Christoph Eschenbach. This January, 2011 event took place 50 years after the January 19, 1961 Inaugural Concert for the president-elect, John F. Kennedy. The second disc has some excerpts from that historic concert.

The centerpiece of the 2011 concert is a newly-commissioned work by Peter Lieberson, "Remembering JFK, an American Elegy." Modeled along the lines of Copland's "Lincoln Portrait," the music blends quotations from JFK's speeches along with orchestral accompaniment that sets the tone for the words. It's an interesting work that sounds distinctively American, without being either crassly patriotic nor excessively maudlin. Richard Dreyfuss narrates with gravity and conviction. I'm used to hearing Kennedy's New England delivery, so I found Dreyfuss sounding a little too nasal for my taste. But that's just me.

The concert includes Leonard Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from 'West Side Story," and his "Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy." The orchestra delivers effective performances of both these works.

The concluding work is Gershwin's "Concerto in F" with pianist Tzimon Barto. Barto plays with fire and conviction, but leans more towards a classical rather than a jazz-inflected performance. The Concerto has never enjoyed the popularity of the "Rhapsody in Blue," and the serious-minded interpretation it receives here may be part of the reason why. That's not to say Eschenbach and the NSO don't do the work justice, it's just that this is a very good -- rather than great -- performance.

The second disc features some commentary and performances from the 1961 Inaugural Concert held in Constitution Hall. Washington was paralyzed by a blizzard, and many of the guests (and performers) had difficulty making it to the concert. Even the President-Elect and First Lady had to walk to the event!

Color commentary from the Mutual Radio Network broadcast is included, and for me, that alone is worth the price of admission! Tony Martin, Bill Evanson, and Dorice Bell were professionals trained in a style of announcing that's now long out of fashion. Despite the chaotic nature of the concert that was somewhat improvised due to the weather, they remain unflappable, brilliantly describing the scene in clear, well-articulated sentences with every syllable rolling effortlessly and beautifully off their tongues.

And the music's a treat, too. Included is John La Montaine's work "From Sea to Shining Sea," commissioned for the event. Maestro Howard Mitchell and members of the National Symphony Orchestra (I don't think all the performers ever made it to the event)do a fine job with this pleasant occasional work.

Also included is part of Randall Thompson's "Testament of Freedom" a choral setting of Thomas Jefferson's writings, played with the composer in the audience! The work was to have been performed by the combined male choirs of the predominantly white Georgetown University Glee Club and the black Howard University Choir. A heavily symbolic performance that would have presaged an important stance of the new administration.

Unfortunately, the Howard choir was stuck in the snow, and so the work was only performed with the Georgetown U. Glee Club. The Glee Club sounds a little anemic -- those Howard voices were sorely missed. With the two choirs, I think the music would have had a greater impact. Still, the work's inclusion makes a nice compliment to disc one's "Remembering JFK."

The CD concludes with Earl Wild performing Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." It's an interesting contrast to disc one's "Concerto in F." I don't know if Earl Wild is a necessarily a better technician than Tzimon Barto, but the music just seems to flow from his fingers. Wild captures the improvisatory nature of Gershwin's music, and manages to make this well-know work sound as if he's making it up on the spot. And the enthusiastic response by the audience confirms that this was indeed, a great performance.

Overall, "Remembering JFK" is a treasure. The commissioned works are welcome additions to the repertoire, the 2011 concert is immensely enjoyable, and the 1961 concert recording is a wonderful historical document to a truly exciting musical event.

Furtwangler's 2nd Symphony gets sympathetic treatment

Furtwangler: Symphony No. 2
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Euguen Jochum, conductor
BR-Klassic, 2010 (mono recording)

Some music is so durably constructed that it can withstand the poorest performance. If a badly-lead ensemble provided your first exposure to Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, I think you’d still be able to determine that the failings were with the musicians and not the score.

But some music requires a little extra love to make it shine. That’s the case with Wilhelm Furtwangler’s 2^nd Symphony. Furtwangler -- like Mahler -- was highly regarded as a conductor, but always thought of himself first as a composer. Like Mahler, his works were largely ignored during his lifetime, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Unlike Mahler, Furtwangler’s music has  never really caught on.

For a long time I believed it was completely the fault of the music. Furtwangler thought big – perhaps too big. His orchestral works are massive, and even his chamber pieces tend to push the one-hour mark. Plus, Furtwangler used Bruckner’s technique of gradually building to a dramatic climax, stopping, and then doing it again, giving me the impression that the work never really got off the ground.

In some of the recordings I’ve heard, the orchestra was clearly doing little more than sight-reading, and the conductor seemed to be just trying to get through the thing. As a result, the music never really engaged me. This new release with Eugen Jochum conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a live 1954 performance of Furtwangler’s 2^nd Symphony is another matter entirely.

Jochum was a close friend of Furtwangler, and took the time necessary to really get to know the score. The aging Furtwangler had been invited by Jochum to attend the performance, and he sat in on the orchestra’s rehearsals. But Furtwangler died nine days before the concert, and the work was then performed instead as part of a memorial concert.

Jochum (probably aided by Furtwangler’s input) had the big picture, and it shows. Rather than hearing a symphony that started and stopped, with Jochum I senses that the music was actually going somewhere. Although Furtwangler’s melodies still don’t fully stick with me, I was astonished at some of the quite beautiful passages (particularly in the fourth movement) that grew organically out of the material. Jochum knew exactly what to highlight and what to move to the background to make sense of this work.

Is Furtwangler’s 2^nd Symphony a great composition? No. But the sympathetic and skillful conducting of Eugen Jochum makes the case that it is a very good work. And one that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to.

Brendel In Retirement

The Gramophone Awards ceremony took place October 1, 2010, in London. Recipient of a richly deserved lifetime achievement award was the great pianist Alfred Brendel, an Austrian born January 5, 1931, in the former Czechoslovakia, who has lived for many years in London. Recently retired in 2008, Brendel explored the great Austro-German piano repertoire to the delight of audiences around the world for almost a half century. Some listeners have characterized his playing as being analytical or cerebral. He has said that he believes the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own particular stamp on the music. "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece," he has said. He cites Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Kempff, and the conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler as particular influences.

Fortunately we have a memento of his art at the conclusion of his career with a superb recording of concert performances in Halle and Vienna, the latter in Vienna's magnificent Musikverein, with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of the late Sir Charles Mackerras, who died July 14, 2010. The recording features music of Mozart and Schubert, two of the composers at the core of his repertoire. Brendel fortunately left a vast recorded legacy.

Brendel performed many times at the Salzburg Festival, where this writer had the privilege of hearing him. If there is one indispensable Brendel recording, it would be his own selection of live performances from Salzburg in 1960-61, released on the Festival's own label. The program includes Haydn, Andante with variations for piano in F minor, H. 17/6, and Keyboard Sonata in C major, H. 16/50; Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 14 in A minor ("Grande Sonate"), D. 784 (Op. posth. 143); and Piano Sonata No. 15 in C major ("Relique"), D. 840; and Liszt, Isoldens Liebestod: Schlußszene aus Tristan und Isolde, transcription for piano (after Wagner), S. 447 (LW A239).

Brendel is at the peak of his powers. The Liszt transcription comes as close to the performance of a great singer as a pianist can manage. The sound quality is warm and resonant. Brendel's Schubert is matched by few and excelled by none. He has recorded the sonatas and other piano works a number of times, but the live performances recorded in the 1980s of D575, 894, 959 & 960, released on Philips are among the best. For those listeners who are just discovering Brendel, you will hear one of the great pianists of his era.

The "High End" and Live Performance

In the context of music reproduction, the "high end" refers to the equipment used for optimum resolution of recorded music and sometimes also to those listeners who use that equipment for listening to music.

With the arrival of digitally recorded music on CD in the early 1980s, the promise was made that we would have "perfect recordings of music forever." That claim later proved to be wildly inflated. The quality of early digital recordings on CD, particularly of classical music, to most ears was demonstrably inferior to the quality of the best recordings on traditional vinyl LP records.

The auditory gap between digital recordings and analogue recordings on vinyl has narrowed considerably, particularly with respect to recordings in new formats such as SACD and DVD-Audio, although CD still wins for convenience hands down. None of these new digital "high-rez" formats shows any sign of replacing traditional CDs, at least not any time soon.

Conversely, there is a resurgence of interest in high-quality vinyl recordings, mostly reissues of classic recordings. Download formats such as MP3 remain inferior in quality to CDs for most discriminating listeners of classical music.

Sometimes lost in the competition among formats for recorded music is precisely the objective sought to be achieved. It is assumed that the goal of recorded music is to reproduce as nearly as possible the experience of live performance (except, of course, for rock and pop, where virtually all recordings are made in the studio).

But how realistic is that goal? To achieve any semblance of the experience of live performance presupposes first, a superior recording by producers and engineers made with technical skill and musical sensitivity. Second, the listener must have a home reproduction system that can extract all the musical content from the recording and then reproduce it in a way that mimics the original performance but in a vastly different acoustic environment. To put it another way, can any recording played at home, no matter how skillfully recorded, ever convincingly correspond to the experience of hearing the performance live at Carnegie Hall?

Even to approach the live experience requires expensive, sometimes prohibitively expensive equipment. Afficionados of the high end think nothing of owning amplifiers, turntables, and speakers costing tens of thousands of dollars. A well-designed and properly configured sound reproduction system can produce a very satisfying experience for any music lover.

But even if the acoustical properties of the listening environment are optimized, does the experience truly mimic the experience of attending a concert performance live? The listener, after all, is at home, not at the Met or at La scala, two venues that differ radically from each other in almost every respect. Does a great recording of Joshua Bell played through a superior stereo system in a professionally prepared listening room really bring Joshua Bell into the room?

Some systems do an astoundingly good job of recreating the sound of Joshua Bell's performance–the quality of the sound of his violin, his phrasing, the nuances of his musical interpretation. But still, it is not like hearing him live, nor can it ever be, since the live performance is bound up so intimately with the occasion and the venue in which he performs.

Moreover, virtually every professionally made recording enables the performer to "touch up" the performance to his and the producer's satisfaction. An element of artificiality is inherently present in a recording. Still, many listeners prefer the convenience of having a recording always available for pleasure or study.

While I enjoy recordings, I still miss the sense of occasion, that frisson of tension and excitement that always precedes the curtain going up at the opera. So even though I am a devotee of the high end, it will never be equivalent to the experience of live performance. A live performance is always a bit of a hire-wire act. Hearing a performance live almost always means hearing wrong notes, but as one astute listener commented on hearing Arthur Rubinstein live, "But what wrong notes!"