CD Review: Wang and Dudamel Lost Amidst Adams’ Footnotes

If modern mainstream American academic music can seem like a never ending series of footnotes on Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, then the work of John Adams are footnotes upon those footnotes; less music than it is aural commentary on the original accomplishments of more talented predecessors; descending further into the same, exhausted ready-made gestures that may have amused long ago, but now decades later seem embarrassingly twee. 

Philipp Gershkovich infamously called Dmitri Shostakovich “a hack in a trance.” Had he lived long enough to hear Adams’ blowzy Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, the former pupil of Anton Webern would have found a more fitting target for his ire.

Composed for Yuja Wang, who premiered the work in Disney Hall last year (and from where this “live” recording was patched together), the work is a three-movement concerto of the usual Adams twitch-and-shout; awkwardly subsuming reminiscences of others’ music within a basic framework of kitsch nostalgia. 

Although the opening movement is marked “Gritty, Funky,” the music is—white boy appropriation of black urban slang from half a century ago notwithstanding—anything but. It ambles about smiling wanly, goaded forward by involuntary rhythmic tics, perhaps geriatric in inspiration. It is minimalism for bluehairs, Liberace for intellectual posers. Pastiches of Bartókian “night music” (shades of the Hungarian’s Piano Concerto No. 2) in the central slow movement give way to the “Obsession/Swing” finale. Those familiar with the composer’s Century Rolls, Chamber Symphony, and Naïve and Sentimental Music (or Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto and Capriccio, for that matter) will have heard it all before. 

Sound as per usual from DG’s recent live recordings tends to be diffuse, yet spotlit (take a listen to the cello riff at the opening). Long on surface, short on substance, the music is tailored well to Wang’s glitzy style, who bangs away as compellingly as the composer presumably hoped. Her performance of Adams’ early China Gates—Terry Riley for yuppies—is fine. Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have a solid grasp of the work, but their palpable sense of eking through the score one measure at a time suggests they have yet to fully embrace this music. 

Speaking of “Mr. Showmanship,” the underrated composer Michael Daugherty accomplished a quarter century ago in his Le Tombeau de Liberace what eluded Adams here: An ironic pop-flavored tribute/eulogy to “plastic fantastic” postwar culture. Adams’ concerto hardly approaches the brittle wit and transient moments of genuine pathos (to say nothing of originality) of Daugherty’s superior score.

For those seeking a musical equivalent to the egomaniacal, navel-gazing, grand-standing bien pensant smarminess of a Shepard Fairey or Noah Baumbach look no further. Admirers of serious new music, however, would do better to seek Daugherty’s concerto instead. 

Why must Adams have all the good commissions?

Otto Klemperer’s “Philadelphia Story” In Great Depression America

A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”

Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.

“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.

“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . .  have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.” 

Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him. 

Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”) 

Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.

“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”

Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.

“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”

A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

Richard Strauss, Alpha and Omega, At Disney Hall

Richard Strauss’ late music was many things—geriatric reverie, eloquent lamentation, a hero’s retreat from the world—but foremost among them was pointed, if wounded riposte to what he regarded as the excesses of the modernist “note-placers” of the 1920s against which he often inveighed. In his twilight years, amidst the still smouldering ashes of a ruined nation, Strauss would muse that he was likely the final chapter in the history of German music. In a sense, he was right. The postwar generations, spiritual successors of the Weimar avant-garde, turned outwards for inspiration, the legacy of German music in their eyes having become compromised by its association with the horrors of World War II. 

Maybe that was why the timing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic program of Strauss’ chamber music felt a bit off. With their Weimar Republic retrospective around the corner, this would have been more fitting as a ruminative postlude. 

The Serenade, Op. 7 for winds was the only work on the program that did not come from the composer’s final years (obliquely though it did forecast his much later “workshop” sonatinas). “Mozart’s melody is the incarnation of the Platonic ideal,” Strauss would reflect towards the end of his life. “Sought after by all the philosophers, the ideal of Eros hovering between earth and heaven.” His youthful score’s sunny glint, with its lithe yet sensual strands of song, already bear witness to this lifelong adoration of his forebear, to say nothing of establishing Strauss’ own credentials for songcraft. The group consisting of members from the orchestra’s woodwinds and brass played with appropriate control, careful to balance the ardor of its still teenage composer’s lyricism with a sobriety that would have marveled his older self. 

A lifetime later he would pen his Metamorphosen; the mature master’s melodic and contrapuntal craft channeled into the fathomless heartbreak of this elegy for the passing of the entire world he had ever known, now utterly and definitively vanquished; for the very death of culture itself. It is also marked by defiant anger rare in Strauss’ music, reflective of his embitterment with the Third Reich, then later with the Allied occupiers. “Another glorious achievement of the Nazi regime,” he fulminated in his diary weeks before the premiere of Metamorphosen. “Artists are no longer judged by their abilities, but by what Americans think of their political opinions.” 

In its guise for string septet, the tragedy takes on an intimacy which becomes almost unbearable, though the Philharmonic’s string group maintained a frosty distance from its disconsolate sorrow. Polished and precise though it was, there also was a discernible sense of unease with the deeper implications of its endless melody, the ambiguous object of its memorial. Perhaps their coolness of touch bespoke of a sense of diplomacy which preferred to leave such matters unaddressed. 

In its way, the curious arrangement of the Vier Letzte Lieder that was the program’s centerpiece was of a piece; its re-coloring keeping Straussian sentiment at arm’s length from the audience. 

Spanish composer Amparo Edo Biol wrought a version of the work that compacted it into a string quintet with solo trombone substituting for the soprano. It was (possibly despite itself) a backhanded tribute to Strauss, stripping him of his say through Eichendorff and Hesse, and imbuing an unexpected clumsiness to its soaring vocal part. 

David Rejano Cantero was the excellent soloist, but no matter how fine his playing was, nothing could disguise the fact that inserting a trombone in place of a soprano was like watching an elephant attempting to mimic the delicate flight of a hummingbird. Michael Kennedy once remarked that these songs were Strauss’ final hommages to his wife, Pauline: “His long love affair with the soprano voice, her voice, is consummated in this final masterpiece.” In its stead, the trombone blustered through its flowing and florid melodies, lending an unfortunate comic tone which was bitingly accented by a handful of flubs in the opening of “Frühling.” Bereft of its shimmering orchestral raiment and even the ability to speak for itself, the result was a kind of high-brow and exceedingly pretty gebrauchsmusik. Call it a “Weimarization” of this valedictory, if you prefer.  

With typical self-deprecation, Strauss deemed his late music as having “no significance whatever for the history of music.” Judging from the outcome of her ill-fitting arrangement, it seems that Edo took his ironic quip at face value. 

Concert Review: Mehta leads Mahler 2 at Disney Hall

When I watched Zubin Mehta make his way across the Disney Hall stage last Friday night—his precarious, careful shuffling lending him an air of dignity, of wounded nobility—the question suddenly rose: Has there ever been a more dichotomous conductor than he? 

With that brash confidence bestowed only upon arrogant youth, Mehta streaked across the musical firmament of the mid-20th century. His early recordings for Decca, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the still tender age of 26 augured the arrival of a talent of earthshaking proportions. 

Then—the brilliant comet Mehta somehow, despite its once celestial trajectory, landed on the ground with a dull, resounding, disappointing thud. 

Once dazzling Southern California audiences (and others beyond the Sierra Nevada who kept a watchful, hopeful eye) with his bracing programs—Beethoven and Brahms rubbing shoulders with Varèse, Kraft, and Frank Zappa—he suddenly turned timid in middle age; a champion diver who got cold feet when he became aware of the dizzying height from which he had once plunged so fearlessly. 

His appointments to the head of the New York Philharmonic, then later the Israel Philharmonic witnessed him in comfortable retreat. The insouciant edge that had once defined the best of his work turned bland; he turned his back on aesthetic candor, embracing instead the commercial. Also-ran recordings of tired warhorses; overblown and questionable stagings of Turandot and Tosca long on spectacle, short on musical integrity; and the three-ring Three Tenors circus act which tossed out the remaining shreds of that integrity in exchange for an easy payday. 

At age 83 he remains among the last stragglers of a generation that had followed the passing of the Mengelbergs, the Furtwänglers, the Klemperers; sometimes receiving their mantle with alacrity, at other times chafing reluctantly beneath its weight. Claudio Abbado is gone, Mariss Jansons breathed his last just as 2019 dimmed to a close, Bernard Haitink finally hung up his coat and tails weeks ago, and Daniel Barenboim chugs along—sometimes indifferently, sometimes brilliantly—but who knows for how much longer? Of all of them, Mehta is arguably the most representative, for better or worse. 

And yet the heart of the old Mehta—that is to say the young Mehta—still beats within his chest, defying time’s remorseless tread. A few seasons ago he challenged jaded ears here in Los Angeles with a Schubert Ninth so lovingly phrased, so engagingly paced that he made one sit up at attention for once through this often heavenly bore of a work. Then on Friday night, as the din of applause that greeted him at Disney Hall had yet to recede, he launched into Mahler’s “Resurrection,” its growling opening string tremolo instantly searing off the decades that had weighed upon him only moments before. 

For the next 80 minutes, the youthful Mehta—and the youthful Mahler who conceived this epic score—returned. The funereal dithyramb of the “Todtenfeier” movement moved along solemnly, passionately, without a moment of slack. Lamentation without sentimentality, tearless grief. Mehta observed the composer’s luftpausen at its hair-raising climax, imparting to the proceedings a sense of wild desperation like that of a caged animal howling against its destiny. The middle movements swayed firm—sweet, sarcastic, and sacred by turns—even if one wished at times that the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings weren’t so seemingly allergic to the expressive vulnerability conveyed by the string portamenti that Mahler demands. In the final movement, a symphonic fresco depicting Judgment Day, the orchestra was roused to heights of virtuosity that outstripped its already world-beating standards. 

In recent years, Mahler’s music itself has become a bit shopworn; its originality and power dimmed by mediocre and perfunctory run-throughs; and by too many, much too many performances that have dulled the listener’s senses to its might. But on this night, both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its former music director lived out Mahler’s credo that a score is only the blueprint and that a performer must search beyond it for its music. Together with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, soloists Chen Reiss (soprano), and Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano) they grasped towards it, found it, and evangelized its otherworldly gospel to their audience with the zeal of an apocalyptic prophet. 

The listener was humbled; reminded that behind Zubin Mehta the global brand, so often the herald of the mediocre and perfunctory itself, is a musician of genuine class. For moments like those visited upon the audience in Downtown last Friday, Mehta’s usual schlock and awe is quickly forgiven and gratefully forgotten.