In last night's dream, Yannick Nezet-Seguin was a friend of mine. We went to the Camden Aquarium with other friends who I used to hang out with when I was working on my master's degree in Music Theory in the 1980s. (I'm not sure that the Camden Aquarium was there yet, but that's not important.) Nezet-Seguin would have been about ten years old then, living in Montreal, and there's little chance I would have let him drive my friends and me through Philadelphia and over the Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden's Aquarium. This stuff happens in dreams and fiction, though, and it's fun to think about. We had a great time at the Aquarium, us four.
Yannick Nezet Seguin - Orquesta Filarmónica de Rotterdam,
photo by Quincena Musical
The truth is, he's been on my mind a lot since he took over as Music Director of my beloved Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012. Riccardo Muti was the director when I was in school then, and he was a hero, too. (I was behind him in line at the Barnes & Noble once and noticed his stack of CDs before I noticed who he was.)
In-between, there were other directors, no less fantastic, I'm sure, but they had the misfortune to populate that post when I had neither the time or the money to visit the orchestra much. Then came Yannick, and he breathed energy and vitality into the orchestra without sacrificing artistry. He's charismatic on the podium and well-known on social media.
I discovered that the orchestra has a Cyber Monday sale (the Monday after American Thanksgiving) where fans can buy tickets at a good price. I bought three sets of tickets for the three Vienna concerts in January 2016 and invited friends to attend. I was thrilled to revisit these Viennese masters I had been studying and writing about since my two trips to Vienna this summer. (Read my short blog post about Vienna's surprises here.) We heard Strauss, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Bruckner, Schumann, Brahms, at these concerts, plus a more recent composer I'd never heard of: HK Gruber.
HK Gruber was born in Vienna, was educated at the music academy there, and lives there now. In the program notes for this concert (1/16/16), Paul Griffiths describes Gruber as an "early postmodern transgressive." Rather than trying to translate that label, I'll describe him as a guy who has a lot of fun with his music and writes some interesting, energetic, and compelling stuff. You can meet him in this video:
Also from Griffiths's program notes, we learn that Gruber's first big-time composition was named Frankenstein!!, and included a part for Gruber himself as narrator in a scary style. That was 1978.
He composed the piece we heard in 1981 (Charivari) when he was obsessed with Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Perpetuum mobile" polka. Here's Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic performing that Strauss piece:
Gruber's piece is a deconstruction of the Strauss polka, and the listener can hear some of the original piece in the newer one. The name Charivari is taken from the title of a French satirical journal from the 1800s and means to bang on pots and generally make noise to annoy people (such as newlyweds). The audience at our concert demanded an encore, so Yannick and his crew performed the Strauss "Perpetuum mobile" polka. We got to hear where the newer piece came from. The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra made this recording in 2007:
I really like the idea of programming a selection of music from the same place in a concert or concerts like this. Next year, Yannick Nezet-Seguin plans to take us to PARIS!
I have had a long-term relationship with the composers of Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, and Schoenberg, but during my two-week stay in Vienna I had to focus on just two. I was in the city for a summer residency, one of the requirements of the Pan-European MFA Program in Creative Writing at Cedar Crest College. We listened to lectures on art, music, history, literature, and psychology, and visited some important places like Schonbrunn Palace, the Literature Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and further away Bratislava and Melk Abbey. I'm just skimming the surface here--we did way more than that in-between fantastic cafe meals and delicious desserts.
With my own writing projects in mind, I visited as many Johann Strauss and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart destinations as possible, and I was lucky enough to catch a tour of the famous Vienna State Opera House. This enormous building opened in 1869 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni which Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth ("Sisi") attended.
The Opera at night
The Opera's fountain
Inside the opera house
And then there's Johann Strauss II. Standing in below for JS is André Rieu at Schönbrunn Palace.
Johann Strauss II, "The Waltz King"
One of my essays for this writing program is a defense of the music of Johann Strauss. His waltzes, marches and polkas were intended to be light entertainment and succeeded in this genre. Strauss's face and music are iconic in his home city, so why is there so much resentment against him by high-brow music lovers and wannabes? In college, my classmates and I were advised to ignore him by our snooty Music History professor. My essay argues for the man and his music and will benefit from my visits to some Viennese sites.
I had a Dickens of a time finding Johann Strauss's place. It's not well-marked and it's on the first floor which in Austria means up the first flight of steps. His apartment overlooks the Praterstrasse, a fashionable boulevard in the late 1800s when he lived there. I checked out his view and he could keep an eye on a good stretch of the Praterstrasse from his front room. The high-ceilinged rooms of the apartment are decked-out with memorabilia from his exciting life as Vienna's Waltz King. I saw newspaper articles about him, sheet music covers, a lock of his first wife's curly brown hair, his piano, and his violin in a fancy gold showcase. Listening stations are set up to provide the visitor with an audio experience, and all of the items are labeled...in German. The item that made the biggest impression on me was the death mask. That was Johann Strauss's exact face in that glass case! I was surprised to see his teeth under that big mustache of his--do teeth usually show in death masks? Creepy: his right eye was slightly open. Creepy. (Photographs inside were verboten, sorry. You'll have to imagine the creepy death mask.)
The Stadtpark featuring the famous Johann Strauss II statue
While walking around in the Stadtpark (the City Park), I found the famous golden statue of The Waltz King and snapped a few photos. This statue is quite the tourist spectacle, and it was fun to watch people attempting to photograph each other posing with the golden Strauss.
The Kursalon in the Stadtpark
Nearby is the Italian Renaissance Kursalon finished in 1867, where many Johann Strauss concerts were held. If you're looking for a venue for a big celebration, this could be your place.
I had time for one more visit on my last day in Vienna, so I chose the Mozarthaus, also known as the Figarohaus or MozartWohnung. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart figures prominently in one (or maybe two?) of my essays for the program and a course I'm putting together, so this visit was an efficient use of my time. This museum was much easier to find than the Strauss house, mainly because St. Stephen's Cathedral (its own subway stop) points right to it.
St. Stephan's Cathedral at the upper left, and Mozarthaus at Domgasse 5 at center right (Thanks, Google Maps!)
Mozart's house gave me shivers, but not the same kind of shivers induced by the Strauss death mask.. Even though there wasn't much authentic Mozart "stuff" in there, I was thrilled to look out the windows and see what he saw.
Looking out Mozart's front door at the Blutgasse
Mozart and his family (one wife, one child) lived in this space from 1784 to 1787, and composed The Marriage of Figaro here (hence the name Figarohaus). The rooms of the house/apartment are in the same configuration as they were in Mozart's day and before, but we are not sure which room was which. The curators of the space made some educated guesses and hung (mostly facsimiles of ) paintings and documents in each room. An inventory of Mozart's possessions at the time of his death exists, so we can make guesses: "Perhaps this is where Mozart's billiard table was since it is the only room big enough to accommodate it," and "This was probably Mozart's bedroom." Chills happened on my spine when the audio tour narrator said, "This is most likely where the Haydn Quartets were first performed for Haydn himself with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on viola and Leopold (his father) on violin." At that moment I was standing in the Billiard Room where light streamed in from the Blutgasse. It's the closest I'll ever get to time travel, and valuable inspiration for that new essay I've been mulling over.
Mozarthaus
And now if you will excuse me, I have to go do my homework.
Last week, I wrote in this blog about a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert in their 1904 Orchestra Hall. This week, I got to hear another CSO, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in their 1978 Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. As you might expect, the Boettcher is modern, claiming to be the first concert hall in the round. Take a look at the collage above and you'll see the seats all around the stage. The top left photo shows the seating 'rings' that are actually suspended from the ceiling. Yes, there were people sitting in there for the concert we heard, but we could only see them when they stood to applaud. The center top photo shows the round acoustical panels also hanging from the ceiling. If you remember last week's Chicago Symphony post, I went on about roundness there, too. You must remember that my home symphony hall is the Kimmel Center where we sit inside a cello shape. Round is new to me.
That's the facade of the Boettcher Concert Hall on the left, among its theater-siblings in the Denver Performing Arts Center
Enough about the hall! Would you like to know what Michael Stern and the Coloradans played? Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3, Op.72a was composed for Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio in 1814. That one opera had four overtures written for it, and only the last is still attached to opera performances. The other three overtures are considered concert overtures and are named for the opera's main character, Leonore. Are you wondering who Fidelio is then? That's Leonore's named when she masquerades as a guy to visit her incarcerated husband and attempts to get him set free. Here is a video of a bearded Bernstein conducting the Bavarian Broadcast Symphony Orchestra.
Next up, soprano Sara Jakubiak sang three Mozart arias. The first two ("Misera, dove son!," K.369, and "Nehmt Meinen Dank," K. 383) are concert arias intended to be sung with orchestra, and the last, "D'oreste, d'ajace," was borrowed from one of Mozart's many orchestras, Idomeneo. I couldn't help thinking about how different these two Classical composers composed. Mozart wrote smooth, singable melodies, almost catchy tunes. Beethoven occasionally came up with lyric melodies, but he is really better known for motivic development. He would take a motive, less than a complete phrase, and repeat, embellish, transpose, and otherwise alter it. [Think of the first four famous notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and how those four notes swim around in that symphony and keep popping up in different forms.]
So, we heard a Classical opera overture, and then some Classical arias, and then a Romantic-Era symphony composed by Johannes Brahms. So what's the connection there? The Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1877. Vienna, as you probably know, was called home by Mozart and Beethoven during the times they each flourished.
Vienna (not Denver)
Justin Bartels
There's another connection I never would have thought of. Before the concert started, Principal Trumpet Justin Bartels strolled onstage to make some announcements, and told the audience that the Beethoven and Brahms each contain trumpet solos. These solos are so important to the repertoire that they are used as audition pieces for trumpeters. Mr. Bartels had a big night!
We enjoyed the Colorado Symphony concert. Thank you, Michael Stern, for a great program, and thank you for not getting mad when the audience applauded in-between movements of the Brahms! They were just swept away, I think.
Michael Stern, usually of the Kansas Symphony Orchestra
