This show originally aired on August 9, 2018.

The Shostakovich story — man and music in the apocalypse of world war and Cold War — seems to get more frightfully irresistible with every remembrance, every new CD in the Boston Symphony’s Grammy winning series. With Stravinsky and Prokofiev in the trio of Russia’s 20th century immortals, Shostakovich was the one who stayed on the home ground of his music, and paid the price. This is a story of where music comes from, what it means, and who owns it. In the Soviet Union, it is a personal duel between composer and tyrant; of Stalin himself bullying Shostakovich on the telephone, and of the shy, twitchy-nervous but indomitable composer writing unmistakably in musical notation when Stalin was gone: “you’re dead, and I am alive.” 

The fourth of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies marks a low point in a tortured life. Just as clearly it marks a rallying point of courage, start of a recovery in artistic fortunes, still rising this summer of 2018 — four decades into a composer’s immortality. It is this fourth symphony from 1936 that Joseph Stalin ordered not to be performed. Pravda delivered the death threat, mocking Shostakovich’s sound as grunts and hoots — “muddle not music,” said the editorial headline.

So Shostakovich 4 was never played in Russia till 1960, after Stalin had died, after Shostakovich had been browbeaten into joining the Communist Party. It’s on the BSO’s Tanglewood program next Friday night, August 17. And like every turn in the long Shostakovich surge, Andris Nelsons’ take on the Fourth Symphony has the air of an event around it, of revelation. We’ve been listening in on rehearsals, and engaging the Maestro on Shostakovich since March.

We’re joined by the Shostakovich biographer Elizabeth Wilson, the writer Tobin Anderson, and the BSO violinist Valeria Kuchment.

This show originally aired on December 20, 2018.

A tribute to Leonard Bernstein with Nigel Simeone, Jamie Bernstein, and Augusta Read Thomas.

Leonard Bernstein, the multi-musician, did it all in his lifetime. At his 100th anniversary this year, the only question people still ask about the man is an odd one: did he do enough? Did he leave the message he came to deliver? And did we get it? In all his careers, he was in the top rank: the world’s celebrity Beethoven conductor who rediscovered Mahler and Shostakovich. He composed a light Candide and a serious Mass. He was a crackling pianist, a songwriter in the Gershwin league. Master of Broadway and Hollywood, too, for On the Waterfront. And, no doubt, television’s greatest presenter of classical music for kids of all ages. But our takeaway Lenny for all time? West Side Story.

In any argument about who was The Most American Musician of the shape-shifting 20th Century—Gershwin, Ellington, Copland, Miles, Sinatra, John Cage, maybe Elvis—there’s no getting away from Leonard Bernstein, a giant figure, at the very center of it all. Early-mid 1950s, Charlie Parker has died young. Miles and Coltrane are about to record Kind of Blue. Duke Ellington is making the best-selling album of his lifetime at the Newport Jazz Festival. Leonard Bernstein, not yet 40, has composed ballets, show songs and two symphonies; he’s conducting Beethoven at Carnegie Hall and opera with Maria Callas in Milan, and in 1955 he is sweating through the birthing of something strange for Broadway: a Romeo and Juliet story out of Shakespeare, about gangs in New York. Dancers enact the warfare, to Jazz harmonies, Cuban rhythms. The show, of course, is West Side Story. Just as the tryout performances begin, Bernstein jumps to another of his many tracks and signs on to be conductor of the New York Philharmonic, which had been Mahler’s orchestra, and Toscanini’s. These are the multiple Lenny Bernsteins remembered on his 100th anniversary this year. We are focusing this hour on one chapter of the life, West Side Story.

This show first aired on March 29, 2018. 

In the annals of rock music albums, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of a kind. In an earthy medium, it’s a masterpiece of abstraction.  Indecipherable. Irresistible. Influential. Accidental, it seemed, from the first licks in a Boston studio, in the crisis year of 1968.  It comes back 50 years later from an imagination beyond time or place: murky fables of love confronting death, lyrics unlinked from the riotous news of its day. Built on misty memories of Belfast, Van Morrison’s home town in Northern Ireland, Astral Weeks was one 23-year-old castaway’s field day with jazz men, a brave stab at a soulful pop hit. It rings today with the authority of high art and the passions that make music.

The making of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks album is the story of a mystical document from the realm of the miraculous. Van Morrison was a young Irishman on the loose and impatient in Boston and Cambridge 50 years ago. He had the full catalog of Irish tenors and black American blues singers in his head, John McCormack to Lead Belly. Then suddenly in March, 1968, he was live in a studio, not with a band really but with jazz players who barely knew one another, or their leader. Morrison had no tunes or harmonies written down, no instructions for his players. But then “a cloud came along,” said the recording engineer, “and we all hopped on… and we landed when it was done.” This is a cult classic of art being born, or made, when nobody knew quite what was happening. The story is wonderfully retold in book form, with a Boston accent, by the writer Ryan Walsh

Ryan Walsh—author of the new book, Astral  Weeks: A Secret History of 1968—got hooked on Van Morrison’s poetry, then his chords, then the puzzle of why he couldn’t stop listening. This winter, he took us on a tour of Morrison’s Boston. We began at Ace Recording Studios, just off Boston Common on Boylston Place, were the birthpangs of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks were first heard in demo form. 

John Payne was one of the sidemen on Astral Weeks—the flute player who’d just dropped out of Harvard in 1968. He brought his flute and soprano sax over and shared his memories of playing with Van. In the decades since, he’s been a band leader and sideman for many headlining acts, including Bonnie Raitt and Phoebe Snow. Today, he’s a music teacher in Boston—you can find his own John Payne Music Center in Brookline Village, where he teaches the rising generation of horn players.

The late Lester Bangs was a champion of underdogs in the music market. He established himself as the soul of rock criticism with a essay on Van Morrison that sounds a bit like Harold Bloom on Shakespeare. The actor Erik Jensen, who plays Lester Bangs in a one-man show off Broadway, gave us the force of Bangs’s appreciation:

The Irish poet Paul Muldoon is also a lifelong fan of Astral Weeks. He grew up in the decade after Van Morrison, on the streets of Belfast that turn up in the lyrics of Morrison’s “Madame George”.

A conversation on art, architecture, and design with Tamar Avishai, Peter Chermayeff, Ann Beha, and Sebastian Smee.

Bauhaus was the art school in Germany that created the look of the twentieth century. We just live in it: loving its white-box affordability, or hating its stripped, blank, glass-and-steel uniformity, the world around. It’s the IKEA look in the twenty-first century, the look of Chicago skyscrapers and now Chinese housing towers, the look of American kitchens and probably the typeface on your emails, all derived from the building school in Germany between the world wars. It was the first omni-art school that taught painting and architecture, made new-look tapestries and chairs. It was the less-is-more school that made ornament very nearly a crime. It stood, and stands, for a few big ideas still hotly contested.

Walter Gropius at Harvard

Bauhaus, meaning ‘building house,’ was the name of the most influential art school in the history of the man-made environment. It was born just a hundred years ago in Weimar, Germany’s old-time cultural capital, seat of the shaky Weimar Republic after World War I. Bauhaus, the school, lasted only fourteen years, till Hitler’s Nazis suffocated it in 1933. Yet Bauhaus, the model of design, some would say, has ruled the world for a century now.

To kick off the show, we take a trip to the Gropius House in Lincoln:

Gropius House

We also talked to Boston architect Ann Beha about her work updating Gropius’s US Embassy in Athens, Greece:

We didn’t have time for all the great Bauhaus content we collected during the show, but while you’re here, listen to an OS extra: designer, architect, imagineer Peter Chermayeff explain how he designed the map for the Boston T.

Esperanza Spalding’s eyes sparkle when she says she’s “drawn to greatness” in other musicians, greatness meaning the charisma of boldness in the interval between solid tradition and scary experimentalism. Listeners of all sorts can see and hear Esperanza at thirty-four, now coming into her own greatness. She’s a songwriter and singer who also dances, a go-to jazz bass master veering out of jazz, with a voice that embraces three languages and musics (plural) beyond category. There’s laughter and political edge in her conversation. She’s a self-made intellectual who says people should read more than they do, and should think more than they read.

My conversation here with Esperanza is the sort of thing we dream about: You’re on an airplane, just buckled in, and you turn and realize – wow, I’ll be sitting all the way to Chicago with the Mona Lisa, or somebody, and you say: Can we talk? And Esperanza Spalding does talk! With effervescence, about jazz and not-jazz, about sounds that woke her up, from Rimsky-Korsakov and Wayne Shorter and the poems of William Blake; about the Harvard students she’s teaching, the music therapy she’s studying, the love that holds the music together, about mothers who let artistic children happen, not least by standing back. We’re getting to know Esperanza. Fast, riffing, improvising, trying to keep up, dropping names of other prodigies in their early 30s, her age: Marcus Gilmore, the jazz drummer and Cory Henry, the Gospel keyboardist… We met Esperanza (of four Grammy awards so far) not on an airplane but in the lobby of the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on the afternoon of an evening show, and the gab took over, like a song.

Music from the show

A conversation with Greg Grandin, Valeria Luiselli, and John Lanchester.

A reckless wall-building era runs round the 21st century globe. Reckless next to the New England farmer in Robert Frost’s famous poem. He’s mending his wall in a spring like this one, well aware of “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.” “Before I built a wall,” he says, “I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.” Not so along our Southwest border that President Trump wants to fortify. Not so in the intimate geography of Israel-Palestine. Not so in the England of John Lanchester’s nightmare novel, called The Wall, post Brexit. The coastal rim of the sceptered isle is barricaded to the sky to keep nameless Others from vaulting in.

Irresistible force meets immovable object this hour: the argument is that the push outward to the frontier that defined American history and character—self-reliant wagon families heading west, the American knighthood of quiet cowboys, our “empire of freedom,” as Jefferson put it – is crashing on President Trump’s in-blocking Wall along our 2-thousand-mile border with Mexico. At the checkpoints the collision is ugly. In the cruelty to children and families, it’s grotesque. In American politics it’s explosive. But what if it cuts deepest into the ways we Americans see ourselves? On both sides of that un-built Trump border wall this hour we’re getting a miserable migration story with the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli. And we’ll get to the novel that John Lanchester drew out of a bad dream about a sky-high wall encircling what’s left of England. But the American historian Greg Grandin strikes the keynote, from his new book about us, titled The End of The Myth. It’s a modern revision of the idea that the frontier made us who we are.

A conversation with John Kaag and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen on Nietzsche, philosophy, and life.

The news about Nietzsche, as you may have heard, is that the nastiest old name in German philosophy doesn’t scare us anymore. His most famous shout, that “God is dead,” reads now like showmanship from a minister’s kid. God, in any event, had the last word at Nietzsche’s madhouse death in the year 1900. Nietzsche had lived in Bismarck’s Germany, when Hitler was unimaginable. Even then he’d been an anti-nationalist, an enemy of anti-Semitism. Nietzsche had the aphoristic wit of Oscar Wilde, but said his soul-mate among thinkers was the self-reliant American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson.

We are back to college this hour with the late lunatic, ever the scariest iconoclast on campus, the now detoxified German philosopher with the bird’s-nest mustache, Friedrich Nietzsche.  Among thinkers he was an incomparable phrase-maker, who declared the death of God, the eternal return and the Will to Power. The job in life, he thought, was to add style to one’s character, and he did it: the trick was “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book,” and he mastered it.  We feel several impulses here: One, to hear what draws college students to philosophy in the anxious atmosphere of 2019; Two, we wanted to hike through the Alps with Nietzsche alongside John Kaag, the American philosopher who took us through our own Emerson and Thoreau trails not so long ago. And Three, we were drawn by the fresh attention to Friedrich Nietzsche, who used to seem too cool for school, too funny, reckless, outrageous for polite company.