Afternoon in Two “2” Time

One composer is currently being feted as a “neglected genius” whose music possesses the “potential power to… change lives for the better [author’s emphasis].” Another’s music is derided as “facile, badly orchestrated, and comically derivative.” Within a span of five years in the 1940s each of them penned their respective second symphonies. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours listening, then re-listening to each one, coming to some surprising personal conclusions.

Mieczysław Weinberg, whose music has garnered wider attention in recent years, managed to live long enough to see the first flickerings of interest in his work outside of Russia, which began shortly before his death in 1996. At the time his name was known almost exclusively to Shostakovich experts. Not only was the elder composer a mentor and personal friend of Weinberg’s, he also had esteemed his talent very highly, ranking him among his own personal favorites. 

Discussion of Weinberg’s tragic biography, with his early years being disfigured first by the aggression of Hitler, then by the paranoia of Stalin, has become difficult to disentangle from the music. In light of this, one can only marvel at Weinberg’s sheer fecundity and sense of craftsmanship, which alone are an eloquent testament of civilization’s tenacity in transcending barbarism. Remarkably, he managed to be the sole survivor of his family and even more remarkably went on to live a full life; eventually penning over 150 numbered works, some with laudably humanist themes like his opera The Passenger and his final symphony from 1991. 

Putting aside these extramusical considerations, however, it is hard to ignore the fact that he never seemed quite able to come out from under the Shostakovichian shadow which looms over all his work (although one could argue that it was he who influenced the elder composer as Weinberg’s early music sometimes eerily prefigures his mentor’s late music in texture, if not exactly in quality). Whereas Shostakovich’s absorbs and unifies various disparate elements—Honegger, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Krenek, Mahler, jazz-flavored pop, Russian folk song, and Soviet mass choruses—into a single, unmistakably original artistic voice, the only significant influence readily discernible in Weinberg is Shostakovich. So derivative is his music that one is tempted to view Weinberg’s catalog as a grand, extended musical commentary on Shostakovich.

His Symphony No. 2, Op. 30 from 1946 (recently recorded and issued by Deutsche Grammophon) vividly illustrates this problem. Composed only a handful of years after Weinberg escaped his native Poland, the symphony bares its emotional scars with uncompromising directness. Facile and badly orchestrated it most certainly is not, but the symphony’s derivativeness brings to mind how César Franck, in a fit of frustration, scrawled “poison” across the title page of his copy of the score to Tristan und Isolde, so threatened was he (and many other French composers) by the force of Wagner’s style, which he feared would reduce him to a mere imitator. If the Soviet cartoon of “Shostakovich clones” that graces the cover of the book Shostakovich In Context is any indication, the Russian symphonist’s music was similarly believed by at least some of his contemporaries to be a stifling influence on younger composers. Even those who emerged into maturity with a distinctive style haven’t been safe. One is reminded of the lamentable decline in Krzysztof Penderecki’s music after his Symphony No. 1. A few, like Tigran Mansurian or Boris Tchaikovsky, came under the influence of Shostakovich, but also possessed the willpower and strength of personality to resist being subsumed by it, instead forging ahead with their own highly individual idioms. 

Ian McDonald perceptively noted in his The New Shostakovich—by way of critique of his subject’s Symphony No. 8—that composers whom he considered, like Penderecki, to be the elder’s epigones were “one-dimensional.” 

“The tragic earnestness is laid on too thickly and too monotonously; there is little sense of perspective; and no ironic contrast, characterisation, or humor.”

He could very well have been describing Weinberg’s Symphony No. 2 which—at least to me—swings a heavy black brush relentlessly against its canvas in a manner which Shostakovich himself rarely indulged in. Worse it (and by extension most of Weinberg’s music) has little of the structural tightness, rhythmic zest, and playful surprise which his mentor had to a seemingly limitless degree. 

Listening to Tikhon Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 9 from 1942, on the other hand, proved to be a surprisingly enjoyable romp.

For most of his life, Khrennikov was best recognized at home and abroad not for his compositions, but for his over forty years as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, becoming essentially the face of Soviet musical policy. As such, he was equally courted and disliked, the latter much more so and with a vengeance once his power crumbled along with the former USSR’s. 

Disagreeable and reprehensible though he may possibly have been as a man, the professional quality of his music is beyond reproach, and is anything but “badly orchestrated.” Khrennikov in this symphony displayed an uncanny ear for orchestral brilliance and sparkle. (Not for nothing did Leopold Stokowski champion his Symphony No. 1 long before its composer became the top musical bureaucrat in the Soviet Union.) His thematic material is clear-cut and memorable; many more talented composers would have been envious of his ease with melody. And if it isn’t going to be setting the world afire with its originality, Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 2 is less derivative of, say, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Gavriil Popov than Weinberg’s corresponding symphony is of Shostakovich. Rhetoric about “Socialist Realism” and heroism notwithstanding, the symphony purports no metaphysical profundities which require searching beyond the music itself. It is simply an exuberant collage of marches, mass songs, and folk melodies which ingratiates itself to the listener with an appealingly abstract quality; contenting itself with being accepted at face value, and without having need of socio-political props.

Having spent over 20 years listening to Weinberg—not only his symphonies, but also his vast catalog of chamber, vocal, and piano music—I find that not only is his music mostly unable to dispense with those props, but that sweeping them away reveals nothing but the aesthetic void they had concealed. When the listener arrives at the coda of his Symphony No. 2, one comes to the uncomfortable realization that its composer’s desire to vent his emotions exceeded his ability to impose order and cogency upon them, that the sum of his good deeds in life amounts to precious little in the cold retrospective gaze of musical posterity. 

On the occasion of what would have been Shostakovich’s 70th birthday, Khrennikov declared that to follow in his late colleague’s tradition was to commit to “uncompromising service to his affairs, to his calling as an artist of the socialist epoch.” That he himself—more Czerny than Shostakovich; his character streaked with a pungent Mephistophelian aroma—contradicted these lofty aims is a delicious irony that is positively, well, Shostakovichian. 

A skin-deep smile for skin-deep music: Tikhon Khrennikov’s moment in the spotlight in the film The Train Goes East (1947). [Wikimedia Commons]

The Double-Edged Sword of Classical Marketing

Marketing for classical music may very well be one of the most thankless jobs around. I can think of no better (worse?) example of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” kind of a situation than that experienced by these people who attempt to foment interest for a genre whose capacity to interest a wider audience becomes more difficult by the day. And rather than blame the irreversible historical processes which have led to this result, to say nothing of the endemic structural problems within the classical music business itself, it’s the marketing teams which are the first and most loudly blamed for any slump in donations and ticket sales. 

Still, their often times shrill, tonedeaf, or just plain clueless approach to the promotion of classical music makes it difficult to muster much sympathy. 

Case in point: The online calendar for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County. Did the person(s) who wrote this bother to actually read this before making their blurbs public?

“Filled with deep emotion, profound complexity and beautiful melancholy, Brahms’ 4th symphony finishes with a finale that will leave you speechless.”

This kind of hyperbole is self-defeating on a number of levels. Not least of which is that if somehow this kind of hype were to be effective in getting the kids to drop Lil Nas X and Lizzo, and come running to hear Brahms, they’ll more than likely be disappointed to find a work that is, at least on the surface to somebody who knows no better, a standard classical work, and a rather stodgy one at that. Then there is the performance itself which—unless Carl St. Clair has become the second coming of Mengelberg or Golovanov in the years since I last heard him—will definitely be neat, immaculately played, but hardly leave anybody “speechless” (unless they find themselves dozing off). I don’t think Brahms 4 left anybody “speechless” even while the ink was still wet. And as for Brahms’ “deep emotion” and “beautiful melancholy,” Tchaikovsky, for starters, would like to politely object, while Webern hardly saw much beauty in the composer’s “grey on grey” orchestration.

Even for somebody who enjoys classical music, Brahms can be a tough slog to understand; sort of like a musical oat bran or granola antipode to the luxurious culinary offerings of, say, Tchaikovsky or Wagner. I started listening to classical music at age 12, but couldn’t wrap my mind around Brahms until starting when I was 18. Even then, not all of it was immediately approachable or intelligible. It was only this year, for example, when I finally came around to understanding and enjoying his chamber music. 

Well intentioned though it may be, marketing hype is dangerous in classical music because, let’s face it, to the uninitiated it’ll rarely live up to the actual experience of the thing itself. To a young listener reared on Top 40 and the various addictive aural hooks offered by a standard 3-minute song, what excitement can a middle-of-the-road interpretation of an approximately 130-year-old work by a composer who is on the record about prioritizing structural perfection over expressive power hold? And if the music doesn’t live up to the hype the first time, what are the chances that this non-classical listener will bother to try again?

Marketing hyperbole to leave anyone “speechless”. [www.scfta.org]

In the Trenches of the Format Wars

Francis Fukuyama may have been wrong about the inevitability of global liberal democracy and its implications on future societal developments, but when it comes to playback formats, music lovers may indeed wonder whether we have reached the “end of history.” As I type this, I have just finished losslessly streaming through my phone an album of Beethoven’s wind music conducted by Karl Haas. The notion of being able to stream anything at CD quality would have seemed unthinkable to me even five years ago. But even as up-to-date though such an act may appear, the FLAC file format upon which my streaming service depends upon is nearly two decades old, and is based off of predecessor digital formats whose roots go even further back. Historical progress in musical reproduction has today converged into a static horizon point of possibility.

Even as we are on the cusp of entering the third decade of this current century, the old 20th century’s grip on music appears stronger than ever. The “vinyl renaissance” will immediately come to mind for many, of course, but perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this phenomenon is the nearly forty-year-old compact disc which, for all the disdain and snobbery it incurs from today’s “vinyl” snobs, remains stubbornly alive. Despite posting declines of sales overall, it persists as the top physical music format sold globally. We may eventually find that it will also be the last physical musical format to earn widespread public adoption, the final step in a long evolution that began with the wax cylinder. It’s worthwhile to recall at this moment that forty years into its existence, the LP was on the verge of becoming obsolete. What would the average listener in 1980 say if one had told them that people would still be listening to music in generally the same way in 2020—and with no flying cars, to boot?

All this came to mind earlier today when I took a break from writing to watch a video from Techmoan, one of my favorite YouTube channels. His latest upload deals with the format wars of the late 1940s: Namely, between Columbia’s 33 ⅓ RPM long-playing discs and RCA Victor’s 45 RPM discs. Each sought to succeed the 78 RPM format; both ultimately “won,” although the retelling of this history typically overlooks the crucial role played by classical music. 

During this period, classical music was not only an important “prestige” genre, it was also a very financially lucrative market that record labels could not ignore. Even by the 1930s, the 78 RPM was beginning to look (and sound) behind the times, with mostly classical musicians expressing their frustration with its limitations. From its very inception, many of them were skeptical or outright disdainful of a format they felt was plagued by poor quality sound reproduction and short duration. The roster of musicians whose distrust of the then comparatively primitive state of recording technology—a process which Bruno Walter late in life likened to being made to sit in “animal cages”—could not be overcome is a long and painful one. 

Because of these limitations, many larger symphonic works or operas were prohibitively expensive to record, or altogether impossible to do so, at least profitably. In 1937, Electrola recorded Act III of Wagner’s Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Dresden State Opera under Karl Böhm’s direction. Even a single act from the opera took up 15 heavy and fragile double-sided discs. Around the same time, RCA Victor recorded Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. That recording exceeded 50 discs, if I’m not mistaken. Their cumbersome bulk, not to mention price (a single 78 RPM disc in the 1930s would on average cost the equivalent of approximately US $25 – $30 today) placed such recordings far beyond what all but a very few people and institutions could afford. 

It was these problems that spurred a development mentioned in the video: RCA Victor’s failed attempt in 1931 to popularize the Victrolac, its own long-playing format. There are several reasons why they were unable to gain traction at the time, but perhaps among the most important was the growing power of the pop music market. Because while the Victrolac resolved some of the issues posed by the 78 RPM disc, it opened up new ones which alienated the pop music audience

With its comparatively modest demands in length and production, the pop music of the era was as if tailor-made for the 78 RPM format. Understandably, the average fan had no need for expensive multi-disc albums, no concerns about length. Single discs were sufficient to contain the music they desired to hear.

So when RCA Victor (in conjunction with Bell Laboratories) began experimenting, then attempted to market extended playback (and stereophonic sound), it was no surprise that instead of enlisting the pop musicians of the era to push the Victrolac, they instead relied on men like Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. Even had classical listeners been won over to the Victrolac format and managed to overlook its significant flaws, the prohibitive cost of this new format would have precluded any possibility of winning over fans of pop music, whose support was crucial to make it a viable competitor and successor to the 78 RPM. 

This become clearer when fifteen years later Columbia succeeded with its LP, which owed its triumph to two main reasons. Firstly, because the vinyl surface of its playback materials and its duration—with a single album comfortably fitting a standard-length symphony—were an undeniable improvement in fidelity over 78s. Because of that the label could count on the support of their talent roster to court the classical audience, with Igor Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, and George Szell (who appears on the far right of a group photo with LP pioneer Edward Wallerstein in the aforementioned video) all being prominently featured in their marketing. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the LP was affordable. Not only was it significantly cheaper than the Victrolac had been a decade earlier, it promised to eventually be cheaper than the 78 RPM it hoped to replace, thereby making the format accessible to an unprecedentedly broad audience. 

At the same time, RCA Victor also succeeded with the 45 RPM precisely because most pop listeners at the time had no use for albums, instead wanting to only hear the latest hit song. It’s telling that pop/jazz musicians wouldn’t really learn to effectively take advantage of the LP format until well into the 1950s. Even deep into the 1960s, many non-classical LP albums were ramshackle things consisting of a hit song or two accompanied by ten or so tracks of filler. Likewise, the possibilities afforded by tape were first explored by the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of the experimental electronic composers and easy-listening orchestras of the 1950s, with rock musicians finally bringing together elements of both in the 1960s.

The classical market, while much diminished after the 1960s, would continue to be an important force in the recording industry as late as the early 1990s. The advent and durability of the CD bears testimony to this fact. Later attempts at physical format improvements—DVD Audio, SACD, Blu-spec, and Blu-ray Audio—have only managed to appeal to a very niche audience, or have simply failed precisely because the classical audience, which tends to prioritize playback duration and fidelity of sound, has itself become an extreme niche in the wider music industry. Many, perhaps most pop music fans today appear to be quite content streaming music at low-quality bit rates. Some pop music today is even mastered on mp3. 

If present trends in listening and musical taste continue, it could very well come to be that in forty years from now, the CD, LP, and various successors to today’s present digital formats (if not the present ones themselves) will still be with us. And somehow our dreams of flying cars will, mystifyingly, remain unfulfilled. 

“He wants you to enjoy the full beauty of his cello.” Gregor Piatigorsky helping to sell the Columbia LP, 1947.

Cat and the fiddle

“Cats are beautiful creatures. They mean so much to me, sometimes even more than music. ”

— Silvia Marcovici during a phone interview with me on October 19, 2019.

Silvia Marcovici’s feline friends. (Photos courtesy of Silvia Marcovici.)

Wilhelm Furtwängler in Stockholm

Tod und Verklärung

As Wilhelm Furtwängler was laid to rest at the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof on December 4, 1954, few among his mourners could have anticipated the dramatic reversal of fortune his legacy would begin to enjoy within two years of his death. 

In those immediate postwar years, many perceived Furtwängler as having been tarnished by the ambiguity of his public conduct in Germany during the Nazi period; which resulted in endless fodder for squabbling by subsequent generations of listeners, musicians, and music critics. In a private diary entry from 1933, Thomas Mann excoriated Furtwängler as a “lackey” of the Third Reich. A few years later Arturo Toscanini would harshly admonish his colleague face-to-face for his political vacillation. He would not be the only conductor to do so. 

“Please bear in mind that your art was used over the years as an extremely effective means of foreign propaganda for the regime of the devil,” Bruno Walter wrote to him in 1949. “The presence and activity of a musician of your standing in Germany at that time lent those terrible criminals cultural and moral credibility, or at least helped them considerably in its acquisition.”

Despite enduring a bruising de-Nazification trial which in 1947 would clear him of all charges, antipathy to Furtwängler remained strong in former Allied territories, especially in North America where a vociferous and well-coordinated campaign had prevented him from taking the reins of the Chicago Symphony from Artur Rodziński in 1949. The memories of that incident remained at the forefront of his mind as the Berlin Philharmonic prepared for its first tour of the United States, which was scheduled for the winter of 1955. 

There was another subtler, yet perhaps more significant reason why some audiences were wary of Furtwängler. Already before the First World War, Arturo Toscanini’s career had become in the United States the glittering stuff of legend. By the year of Furtwängler’s death—which coincidentally was also when Toscanini retired—he had become the Colossus of Rhodes of the symphony orchestra, his career straddling imposingly across the Old and New Worlds. He was “The Maestro,” a symbol not only of the intense respect he had earned in America for his music-making and defiance of fascism, but also of the effectiveness of NBC’s marketing during his tenure with the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. Whereas Toscanini promulgated the notion of the performer as faithful servant, Furtwängler regarded his role akin to what a later age would refer to as an auteur: An executant who interprets the vagaries of musical notation with the authority of a collaborator to the composer. More importantly (and despite the fact that he was nearly 20 years older than Furtwängler) Toscanini’s manner of music-making—propulsively paced, sharply-etched, and direct—was reflective of the chrome-plated optimism that fueled the Atomic Age’s pursuit of the logical, its technocentric crusade against the mystical. Furtwängler’s art, on the other hand, with its subjective and tragic connotations seemed a sepia-tinted relic from a time long bygone. The fact that much of his postwar studio discography, most of which had been produced by EMI under strained circumstances, failed to live up to his reputation did not help. Next to the phonogenic polish and precision of the likes of Toscanini and Karajan, Furtwängler’s studio recordings can sound stodgy and insecure. 

As the last mounds of dirt piled upon the casket being buried in the shadow of the Königstuhl, even Furtwängler’s family and close friends would probably have at least conceded that at the time of his death his reputation had seen better days. 

Auferstehung

Yet the same label with which he had a testy relationship in life would prove to be the catalyst for the posthumous reevaluation of Furtwängler the man and artist. 

Less than two years after his death, EMI would issue a recording under his direction of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, assembled from the rehearsals and concert for the Bayreuth Festival’s postwar inauguration in 1951. Although presented in less than ideal sound even for the twilight of the mono era, Furtwängler’s searching, wayward, occasionally fallible, and often visionary performance was a thunderous retort to Toscaninian objectivity. It also revealed something else that his previous officially released recordings had failed to disclose: Furtwängler was far more charismatic and compelling live than he was in the studio. 

With listeners’ appetites whetted, record labels—some of them with the approval of Furtwängler’s estate, others sneaking under the radar in ephemeral bootleg issues—began mining public and private archives in Central Europe for more broadcasts under his direction. Over the next decades various hitherto unheard live performances would be released on LP and, later, CD. 

Now in 2019, 65 years after his death, nearly all of Furtwängler’s extant recordings have been discovered and made available commercially to the public. With this abundance of riches, it would seem that his admirers (and his detractors) have by now heard everything there is to hear from this great and often controversial figure. 

Or have they?

Swedish Rhapsody

Most of Furtwängler’s recordings were made with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. Another smaller, but sizable portion was made with the Philharmonia and Lucerne Festival Orchestras. Frequently overlooked, however, are his small, but revealing set of broadcast recordings that he made with yet another ensemble: The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Though sporadic, their relationship would last from 1920 to 1948—nearly three decades.

When Furtwängler first appeared with the orchestra then known as the Stockholm Concert Society, he was 34 years old and a rising star in the German musical firmament. Already he was among the most sought after conductors in Europe, boasting not only recent appointments to the Wiener Tonkünstler Orchestra and the symphony concerts of the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, but also an impressive tenure as music director of the Mannheim National Theatre. Despite these artistic successes, the young Furtwängler was eager to earn foreign cash as Germany, still reeling from the Treaty of Versailles, was suffering its worst economic crisis since reunification. When Scandinavia beckoned him with a guest series of nine concerts and payment in kronor, the opportunity was simply too good to pass. 

Furtwängler enjoyed his stay in Stockholm, as well as the kindness of his Swedish hosts. Nevertheless, admiration for this city he described as “likeable and cozy” mingled with scorn over what he considered was the poverty of its cultural life. “Everything else [here], especially the so-called ‘spiritual’ interests exist only on the surface. A thousand times would I rather live in vanquished, depleted Germany than here among wealth and well-being which suffocates everything,” Furtwängler wrote to his mother, adding disdainfully in a foretaste of his later, deeply held skepticism of Anglo-American cultural priorities that in Sweden “you get a good idea of how things look like in England and America.” 

Despite his reservations, Furtwängler’s Stockholm Concert Society programs—aided by a healthy complement of musical works by local favorites including Franz Berwald, Ture Rangström, and Andreas Hallén—were a sensation. Eager to nab this magnetic talent, the ensemble’s board quickly offered him the role of music director. This piqued the ire of Georg Schnéevoigt, then the current holder of the title, who was chagrined at being blindsided by a young upstart. Bolstered by his own supporters, Schnéevoigt managed to make a scandal out of this unsolicited designation of successor, eventually forcing the resignation of his opponent’s supporters from the orchestra’s board. 

Aside from a pair of concerts in 1921, Furtwängler would not return to conduct the Stockholm Concert Society until 1925, a year after Schnéevoigt had finally departed. By then Furtwängler would have little time for Sweden. Not only had he succeeded Arthur Nikisch as chief of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, but he was taking on increasing responsibilities with the Vienna Philharmonic, and as if that were not enough he would soon cast his ambitions across the Atlantic to conduct the New York Philharmonic. (Stockholm would, at any rate, appoint the talented Václav Talich as its next music director.)

Another 16 years and the initiation of hostilities in a Second World War would pass when Furtwängler again sailed the Baltic Sea to stand before Swedish audiences. He would conduct only a single concert in Stockholm in 1941, but in 1942 and 1943 would lead five and four concerts in the city respectively. At the time of his return, the armies of the Third Reich were sprawled across a wide swathe of Europe, and Furtwängler was under pressure to act as a cultural ambassador in newly conquered regions. Sweden, with its delicate state of official neutrality, would be one of the few European countries where Furtwängler, who was unwilling to be used as a propaganda figure in German-occupied territories, would perform as a guest in wartime. 

After the war, Sweden would be one of the first countries he appeared in after his de-Nazification tribunal. He conducted the Stockholm Concert Society in 1947, and would return for a final appearance the following year. A further scheduled engagement with the orchestra in 1953 was cancelled because of medical problems, although Swedish audiences managed to hear him one last time in 1950 when he led the Vienna Philharmonic on tour through Scandinavia. 

Stora landsvägen

Whereas wide variances in tempi, articulation, and textural nuance can occur in the discographies of other major conductors of the early to mid-20th century, including Walter and even Toscanini, Furtwängler’s recordings—whether in the studio or in the concert hall—demonstrate a consistency of approach that may be surprising. Far from being the improvisatory things that they are often described as, Furtwängler’s various performances of the same score generally hew to an established interpretational road map, differing only in small, but crucial details from performance to performance. His work with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia benefit not only from being made with ensembles which were among the world’s finest, but also by their intimate familiarity with Furtwängler’s working methods. Each one had learned to intuitively and successfully respond to his array of physical gestures and occasionally inarticulate utterances in rehearsal. The result was as if composer, orchestra, and conductor had seamlessly fused into a single, indivisible entity. 

Today’s Royal Stockholm Philharmonic has taken its place as one of Europe’s finest orchestras, with a distinguished and growing discography providing ample testimony of their virtuosity. However, the Stockholm Concert Society of the 1940s, was a fine, but undeniably scrappy ensemble that, comparatively speaking, was considerably below the calibre of the best European orchestras from that period. Because of that, these recordings are often looked upon by collectors as being the stepchildren in Furtwängler’s discography. Closer and unbiased examination of these Stockholm performances, nevertheless, reveal not only a number of insights into the conductor’s art unavailable elsewhere, but they also possess qualities which make them worthy of enjoyment in their own right. Despite—or perhaps because—of the orchestra’s limitations and their comparative unfamiliarity with Furtwängler’s performing approach, there is a sense of playful risk-taking evident here, an awareness of walking a tightrope with no safety net below that the conductor’s better-known recordings in Berlin, Vienna, and London do not quite match. Moreover, whether by design or by default, these Stockholm performances bear a sunny glint unique among Furtwängler’s recordings. 

Consider the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on disc 1 of this set. The bright uplift of this Swedish performance from December 8, 1943 is worlds away from the tragic intensity of the famous Berlin performance from 20 months prior. True, the Stockholm Concert Society is pushed to the limits of its abilities here, with its woodwinds notably sounding taxed, especially in the finale. But the joyous energy of this performance, auguring the conductor’s ebullient postwar readings of this symphony, is infectious. Even Furtwängler himself seems carried away by the euphoric jubilation of it all, with his gravelly baritone audibly joining the choir in the coda. The sound, too, is an improvement over Berlin 1942; better realizing the wide spectrum of Furtwängler’s dynamic shadings, and improving significantly upon the compressed sound that mars the former recording. Newly remastered in this set, this performance takes its rightful place among the conductor’s finest. 

On disc 2 is included a program of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, which was a favorite pairing of Furtwängler’s in his late years. His 1951 Vienna recording of the former score, like many of his EMI productions, has its virtues, but lacks the sense of headlong adventure that this Stockholm recording from November 12, 1948 has in abundance. While the thin Swedish strings are no match for the richness and depth of their Viennese counterparts, their articulative bite, to say nothing of the entire orchestra’s willingness to treat this occasion as anything but routine makes this among the more immediately thrilling outings of Furtwängler’s postwar career. What would be ponderous in the studio is here weighty and muscular, surging with purpose. Listen to the taut lines of the “Allegretto,” which evince none of the droop of the later performance; and with orchestra and conductor erupting at its expressive nodal points like the impassioned oratory of an evangelist exulting in the unvarnished truth of religious scripture. The might of the scherzo and finale, meanwhile, hurtle forward like a champion athlete in full stride, conquering and transcending all. 

Thanks to its perennial inclusion in the conductor’s Beethoven cycle for EMI, this Stockholm reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 has been the best known of Furtwängler’s Swedish broadcasts. Its familiarity bears no loss of freshness and vigor for all that. A tricky stumbling block for many conductors, Furtwängler is among the few alert to the symphony’s complexities and deeper implications. The wild harmonic modulations in the first movement’s development, for example, swing between daring and danger, foreshadowing the much later music of Carl Nielsen (somewhat appropriate given the Scandinavian provenance of this concert). Under the direction of most conductors, Beethoven’s Eighth sounds like a misfire, a curious stylistic hiccup. In Furtwängler’s hands the symphony is revealed as a remarkably prescient neoclassical statement, anticipating by a century Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s works in that vein; its irony a potent and unsettling statement on the Enlightenment’s twilight and the horizons of human reason. 

From November 19, 1948 comes one of three extant recordings of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem that emerged from his baton. Although it is hobbled by comparatively inferior vocal soloists, this Stockholm performance is also the only one that has survived complete, and in fairly decent sound no less. It is fitting that Furtwängler’s final guest appearance before the Stockholm Concert Society should also be his most successful, with the orchestra clearly playing at the utmost of their collective powers. The sound which emerges from this tape is simultaneously dignified and richly expressive, making palpable its deeply felt mourning, limning its sorrow with the glimmer of a gentle, consoling trust that even death, too, will pass. Every breath tells, even in those long moments of stillness when conductor and orchestra both seem to look over the edge into the hereafter; beautifully molding each movement into a human-scaled monument to the impermanence of our existence, and the grief of those from whom we must inevitably take leave. 

We return to wartime in the first two tracks of the final disc on this set. Strauss’ Don Juan and the Prelude to Act I and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were Furtwängler specialties and no stranger to his admirers. Both these recordings from November 25, 1942 exhibit the fine, if at moments strained playing (especially audible in the virtuoso Strauss score) that is displayed in more attractive light elsewhere on this set. 

The disc’s final track, however, affords the listener a valuable opportunity to hear Furtwängler in rehearsal. This excerpt of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 is all the more fascinating because it displays the conductor in a more talkative mood than on surviving rehearsals with the Berlin Philharmonic. Given that the Stockholm Concert Society had nothing like the almost familial bond that their German counterparts enjoyed with the conductor, his more communicative demeanor here ought not to come as a surprise, although his very matter-of-fact remarks to the musicians concerning phrasing and shifts in tempi may just be, especially considering the metaphysical qualities ascribed to his art. More than words, Furtwängler relies mainly on singing to the musicians in order to convey the sounds he wishes to hear from them. Apart from being simply stunning, the results of this rehearsal—as the Stockholmers set upon the overture’s coda at first tentatively, then bursting forth with incandescent brilliance—serve as a vivid and touching memento of a partnership that, intermittent as it was, was of lasting consequence for both Furtwängler and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. 

This essay was previously published as the liner notes for Weitblick’s reissue of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s broadcast recordings with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (formerly the Stockholm Concerts Society Orchestra). The 4-CD set is available for export from Amazon Japan, HMV Japan, and Tower Records Japan.

Arctic Daydreams of a Los Angeles – Yerevan Freeway

Not more than a few days had passed after Chile’s historic 1988 plebiscite that my parents quickly made plans to return to their homeland. Not that the dictatorship had ever been any reason for them to keep away.

Arriving in the United States in the late 1970s, they hardly were the leftist political refugees that had made up most of Chile’s emigrés in those post-Allende years. My mother, who had no strong feelings either way about the journey, simply followed my father, who had left his studies in jurisprudence, as well as a stable job in their hometown’s city hall to pursue an American adventure (I hesitate to refer to it as his “American Dream”) of dubious merit; in his mind he had erected a hedonistic mosaic that he now wanted to enact in the flesh; composed of Coca-Cola, Studebaker, John Wayne, Brian Wilson songs, and (I have always suspected) scantily-clad beach bunnies who would presumably be awaiting this rakish, new arrival in his late 20s, perhaps willing to overlook his marriage that was then going on its fifth year. Weren’t American girls supposed to be fun, after all?

Despite the distance, the presence of “Pinocho,” as my father often referred to the then Chilean head of state, was never very far away. My father alternated between lavish praise and demonical denunciation as his mercurial moods saw fit. One day, he was the destroyer of democracy; the next, he was the saviour of the nation. Mother, on the other hand, was more consistent—she was an unabashed and steadfast supporter, no surprise coming from the eldest daughter of a family with a longstanding military tradition.

Chile is an anomaly among Latin American nations in that its authorities are largely free of corruption, and are therefore widely respected. Even to this day, polls in the country regularly demonstrate that the military and carabineros—the national police—are the most trusted branches of the government. For years, Chileans had considered that those guilty of the excesses committed during the Régimen Militar were other people; not our neighbors, not our fathers, not our sons. (Although the skepticism of authority commonplace in Anglo-American countries is starting to gain a foothold in that stretch of land tenaciously clinging onto the edge of the Andes.)

My mother often told me about how she was caught in the crossfire between rebels and military in Valparaíso’s Parque Italia on September 11, 1973; how the army summoned buses to ferry her and other civilians out of harm’s way.

“For your own safety, citizens, please keep your heads ducked under the window,” she recalled one uniformed officer telling her. An irrepressible metíche—a Spanish word whose inexact meaning in English combines implications of “nosy,” “gossip,” and “busybody”—as well as contrarian, she couldn’t resist peering just over the windows.

“That’s when I saw all the bodies,” she recalled.

As the days grew closer to our trip in January 1989, I pleaded with my father to consider alternatives to a journey to Santiago by flight. Wasn’t there a ship, a freeway, a Greyhound that could take us, please? Didn’t he care about his family, about me specifically? My eyes glued to the news even at that young age, Lockerbie, Cerritos, and Korean Air were names that I knew well, names which evoked the deepest terror, far exceeding the usual nighttime disturbances of ghosts and goblins that children ordinarily feel. My father, a loving, but firm man with a streak of Old Testament discipline, quickly shot me down.

A few weeks later, hours after the Bush I inauguration, our LAN Chile flight touched down in Arturo Merino Benítez Airport. As it turned out, the flight, according to the captain on duty, had experienced an unusual degree of turbulence. Even the touchdown was rocky, so much so that the entire cabin spontaneously erupted into applause and cheers, grateful not only that their 14-hour flight was over, but that they had made it in one piece. My father kissed the ground and recited the Lord’s Prayer as soon as we had stepped off the plane. Digging into my seat in silent terror throughout the flight, I gave way to an uncontrollable fit of giddiness as soon as the wheels gripped the tarmac, cackling as if somebody had just cracked the funniest joke of my young life. I had just avoided my much too untimely demise by the skin of my teeth, so I thought.

As I type these words, the heart of my 8-year-old self is practically leaping out of my mouth. My Qatar Airways flight to Doha is approaching Baffin Island, soon to be followed by Greenland. A few hours later, our plane curves south around Finland to begin its descent into the Arabian peninsula. Ever since we began to stride along the Rocky Mountains, our plane has been beset with prolonged periods of strong turbulence. Stronger than this 38-year-old chronically terrified of air flight would prefer, at any rate.

The notification to fasten our seatbelts has lit up once again. Turbulence, strong enough to rouse mild alarm among the passengers, with the woman next to me clutching her daughter with her right arm as her left holds for dear life onto the seat in front of her, smacks our vessel about. “Isn’t it time they build a highway to Armenia?,” a childish voice from within me asks.

We’re about to cross the Davis Strait. Four hours down, eleven to go.

Qatar, not “Qatar”…

“Qàter,” the Lyft driver reminded me as she winded down the narrow, razor-sharp turns of the Pasadena Freeway. “It’s pronounced Qàter.”

This was actually the third time in the past few days that I was reminded of my mispronunciation of Qatar, the small nation which daintily extends out like a pinky from the palm of the Arabian peninsula. A friend of mine earlier this week was the first to correct me, having erroneously rendered it previously as sounding akin to the Spanish catarro—“catarrh,” or nasal congestion. My mind was weighed with a number of other matters this week, so my usual attentiveness to such details ended up on the wayside. Here’s to hoping I remember the proper pronunciation by the time we touch ground in Doha.

The heart of the Middle East will only be a temporary waiting station on the way to my ultimate destination: Yerevan, Armenia. For the next week I’ll be walking the roads of a country whose people already existed in classical antiquity, a detail which reminds me of the Basques from whom I am descended many generations ago.

“We are close, the Basques and Armenians,” Vatsche Barsoumian, whose generosity allowed me to travel to Armenia this week told me earlier this year. “We both have endured so much.”

Indeed, Armenians have been fought over and ruled by Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Greeks again, Persians, Turks, and Russians, before finally eking out their hard-fought independence. Through it all they have managed to retain their very unique culture, swinging with outsize heft in the arena of global culture.

Chile, from where my parents came, has existed since the 16th century, around 500 years, barely an eyeblink within the span of Armenian civilization.

This will be my first time venturing outside of the U. S. in 15 years; my first ever trip outside the American continent. It is also my first journey to a country in which I have no command of its language. My accrued rudimentary knowledge of Russian and Armenian will hopefully help me through the next week. I practiced the former for a bit with my Hungarian landlord a few days ago.

“Khorosho,” he told me with a light chuckle, “a little more and maybe you make it into military service.” A student protester during the 1956 uprising in his country, he was arrested, sent to Siberia, then pressed into service in the Red Army upon his release.

Feelings of anxiety mingle with even stronger ones of anticipation.

We are beginning to board. The next time I post, I’ll be in the sweltering 118°F heat of—Qatar (pronounced similar to “cutter”).

Jörg Demus (1928 – 2019): A Personal Appreciation

Nothing lasts forever. A hard lesson repeated since time immemorial which each generation, each individual must learn as if it were new. Not only is our personal existence an impermanent thing, but as the burning of the Notre-Dame de Paris illustrated to a horrified global audience, the very world upon which we hinge our existences, too, is a transient one.

The death of Jörg Demus last month was, perhaps, a similar reminder of the ephemerality of our existence, as well as a loss of comparable magnitude.

Not that his was a household name even among the rarefied coterie of admirers of Western musical arcana. It is a testament to the man’s humility that his best-known work is, paradoxically, not as glamorous soloist, but as the eloquent and unassuming partner to such performers as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling. Not that he had anything to hide. As these or the number of solo recordings which remain highly prized amongst record-collecting congnoscenti readily testify, Demus was a musician devoted to the cultivation of beauty. His cycle of Schumann’s piano works—the first ever integral set—remain a model of poetry and poise.

But it is, perhaps, in the work of the composer whom Wilhelm Furtwängler once referred to as a “modern Schumann” where the breadth of Demus’ art is unfurled to its fullest.

That some of the greatest interpreters of Claude Debussy’s piano music were German or German-trained would have been a rueful irony to the great musicien français. Pianists like Gieseking and Arrau were among the few who most closely approximated the composer’s velvety ideal of a piano without hammers. (Comparatively, French pianists often seem to equip their instruments with ice picks.) In his own traversal, Demus follows in that Teutonic tradition, conjuring through his fingers a Debussy of poetic reveries on the verge of becoming mist.

Listen, for example, to the panoply of veiled hues he elicits in Voiles; his Des pas sur la neige of soft-focus blurs slowly coming into focus; the simple charm of his Arabesques or Rêverie; the warmth and human scale of his Études. Threading through it all are those sensitive hands carefully constructing subtly variated textures, drawing long-breathed singing lines, and shaping a dynamic flow as natural as breathing itself.

Here, as in all his best recordings, is the illusion woven by the greatest musicians, who by dint of their virtuosity of body and mind, subsume themselves seamlessly into the composer. In our time when classical music is beset by crude, egomaniacal keyboard-bangers and hair-tousslers who treat their art as merely a prop to frame their Botox-infused, PR-managed “sex appeal,” the plain sincerity of Demus’ art seems not so much as from another time, as it is from another planet. Would that more of his kind light up ours.

The late Jörg Demus at the piano. [Image credit: International Jörg Demus Festival]

Michael Gielen (1927 – 2019)

A few years ago at a record store job I once held, a customer approached me asking for recommendations of Mahler recordings. I led him over to the composer’s section in our store and began going through several which were personal favorites. He asked if there were any integral sets of the composer’s symphonies which I could suggest. We happened to have Michael Gielen’s cycle in stock and held that one out to him.

The customer just looked at me puzzled.

“Who is he?”

I replied with a very brief summary of his life and work, adding that he was to me the greatest conductor then living.

“He can’t be that great,” this customer shot back in irritation. “I’ve never even seen him on social media.”

Requiescat in pace.

Michael Gielen with the Chicago Symphony. [Photo courtesy of the CSO Archives]