Norman Lebrecht is the English culture buff and blogger, author of Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World. He’s made a lively career stalking the life inside the man’s music – and he still speaks of Gustav Mahler in the present tense, as a living force in the culture. I asked him in a conversation over Skype – about Mahler’s 9th Symphony which comes right at that “modern moment” around 1910, when everything changed, including human character. That was a century ago. I was thinking of the F. Scott Fitzgerald line that there are no second acts in American lives. I put it to Norman Lebrecht: is there a second century in Mahler’s life? The not entirely comforting answer turned out to be ‘yes.”
classical music
From the Archives • February 25, 2014
Yehudi Wyner’s Life in Music: a Composer with Piano Hands
Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a ...
Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of the canon, from Bach to Bartok, and then everything else he’s heard over 80 years, from his father’s Yiddish art songs to boogie-woogie and gospel music. “Somehow it registers in the brain and has an effect,” he says of the past. The other big thing you’ll be hearing from Yehudi Wyner is that his music has its very bodily beginning in his hands. It’s a physical, almost gymnastic test of what ten fingers can do, want to do, find themselves doing.
The centerpiece here is the Pulitzer Prize piano concerto that was a Grammy finalist this year, “Chiavi in Mano” (or “Keys in the Hand”). Yehudi Wyner wrote it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Robert Levin, “Mozart’s nephew,” as we call him here, the man who has presumed to fill in some missing elements in the “unfinished Mozart.” The one-movement “Chiavi in Mano” begins with an introspective piano solo and ends with an orchestral boogie-woogie. In between is a roaring contest of the elements. “For Bob Levin,” the composer laughs, “it’s just a skirmish, a war game with dull bayonets.” But all of it — in Yehudi Wyner’s unveiling of his process — stems from the simplest contrast of intervals between keys on the piano: the major and minor “third” between, say, C and E, then C and E-flat. It’s as simple and as grand as that: using a cellular structure to build something new and various, as different and connected in its parts as your nose and your toes.
The privilege here is to sit at the piano with a man who can think and play and talk all at once:
CL: You were playing a Bach Partita when we walked in. What does that daily dose do for a man?
YW: It gives him the feeling that he’s in touch with the greatest possible art: physical, mental, spiritual, integrated, and above all, healthy. Bach was really, I think, the greatest artist and possibly the greatest specimen of human being and thinker who ever was conceived on earth.
CL: Does the composing happen, Yehudi, between hands and ear, or do you write it with eye and pencil?
YW: Hands and ear. Hands, ear and pencil. And instrument. I work at the piano. The model for me is the indescribable, sensuous, as well as intellectual joy of dealing with Bach or Mozart. Other composers too, of course, but they above all, where every moment at whatever level of struggle… has a satisfaction, always is nourishing. I do this at the instrument and test it and feel how durable it is, how much I can stand repeating something without finding it exhausting or boring, then I think I have achieved something, I’ve found something, I’ve stumbled on some material that’s worthwhile.
CL: Is there a gold-standard “perfect” piece of music out there for you?
YW: No. If you want to say, are there 1000 pieces from the canon that I love beyond description and can find no fault with, I would say yes. But I do not feel there is one.
CL: Yehudi, give us a report to the ancestors, so to speak. A decade into the 21st Century, what’s the state of this art?
YW: I came back from the Grammys two weeks ago feeling there is very little affirmative music in contemporary America, and has not been for the last fifty years, because what passes as affirmative is really rather imperial and militaristic. It all comes from a kind of big-band, I mean marching-band society, and it blares and it proclaims, but it doesn’t really affirm. It ascribes to the affirmation that Beethoven would have, but it fails all the time because it’s very superficial and aggressive. And that applies even to the music of people we admire, like Copland and others. But it occurred to me — with all the jazz references in “Chiavi in Mano” — that that’s where the true affirmation in American music is. It’s in popular music, it’s in jazz, it’s in gospel. That music is so self-sufficient, it never proclaims its affect, or its message. It just is the message.
The music that is being promulgated, that is being produced and broadcast most widely, is aggressive, very shiny, very egocentric, very repetitive, and noisy, busy, and in some ways, mindless. It’s very physical. The problem not that that music exists, it’s that that music has inundated our culture and our youth. When you finish being conditioned by that music, there’s very little capability of any kind of other sensibility. You’re no longer sensitive to things that move at a slower pace, things that are nuanced, things that have complication and things that have lots of reference to the past.
CL: What’s the chance that we’ll get composers’ music in the public ear again — even in the manner of Copland and Gershwin?
YW: I think for the foreseeable future the chances are very slim. In the long term, things change. Certain cultures collapse and others come up, the convention of the concert hall and the function of concert music and art music is not a permanent given. The audience is certainly shrinking and certainly aging. Those things are incontrovertible. The thing that persuades us that there are possibilities for other things is the ubiquitous presence of music: people have it on their iTunes, they have it constantly at their beck and call. There is this phenomenon… people coming out of schools and forming small groups here and there, and somehow keeping the art alive, perhaps as the monks kept ancient art alive in the monasteries, in isolation during the middle ages. But I think for the foreseeable future there is no possibility for an Igor Stravinsky or a Shostakovich, or an Aaron Copland, or even an Ives on the general public screen.
Yehudi Wyner at his piano bench with Chris Lydon in Medford, Massachusetts, February 18, 2010.
Podcast • February 20, 2008
Master Class: the Global Beethoven
The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in trade is the classical canon of ...
Hung-Kuan Chen, Multi-polar Pianist
The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in trade is the classical canon of European music from Mozart to Messaien, Beethoven to Bartok. His working base is the piano department chair at the Shanghai Conservatory in a country with 80-million young students of keyboard music.
He perches, so to speak, high above the three-cornered convergence of the new Big Three: China, the European Union and the United States — what Parag Khanna calls the “global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle” of the era. Hung-Kuan Chen’s life is not about battles or geo-politics, of course; it’s about art and music. What he teaches, and what we talk about in this conversation, is above all a consciousness that comes with a lifelong immersion in musical masterworks, mostly Western but Chinese as well:
What I brought [to the Shanghai Conservatory] is a certain attitude, or paradigm… that being a musician is to be an artist. And to have an artistic life means to be means highly intelligent, highly alert, discerning and sensitive to the inner world and to the outer world. All in all it is a spiritual experience… a complex life. One has to live it, experience it. I teach them that music work or art work is a by-product of such a life. When we learn a great piece of music — say by Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, it’s a two-way street. The music is itself great wisdom. Only when we are up to a certain level, we are able to see that level of wisdom in the music and beyond. And this — which is beyond — will further teach us. And if we are dedicated enough to this work, we than elevate ourself to that level. And so it’s a bit like a Jacob’s Ladder, it just goes up and up and up. And that becomes what is called an artistic life.
Hung-Kuan Chen, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the New England Conservatory, February 15, 2008
But don’t we all wonder — the moreso at the very moment when the New York Philharmonic is playing in China, on its way to North Korea, and Hung-Kwan Chen was playing Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata at Carnegie Hall last week — what are the connections and analogies in the heavy traffic of a globalizing culture?
Yes, Hung-Kwan says, he can hope to teach his students about the radical democrat in Beethoven (who in legend anyway, ripped up the dedication of his Symphony No. 3 to Napoleon Bonaparte after the standard bearer of revolutionary France crowned himself Emperor. Beethoven called his piece “Eroica” instead.) But no, Hung-Kwan continues, he cannot hope to protest China in Darfur in anything like the way his fellow pianist Leon Fleischer recently protested the war in Iraq at the White House. Hung-Kwan Chen can count on the authorities in China for prompt delivery of new pianos to his Conservatory — as he couldn’t at any music school in the US. But he also knows that nobody’s interested in his “second opinions” about politics.
Most of our conversation is about sublimity, not politics. That is Hung-Kuan’s way of getting to the point, not avoiding it. “Oh, my God,” as he says, “it’s culture that leaves a legacy, not war or money, or who wins or who places second.”
January 10, 2006
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at 250
If an unidentified page of a musical score drifted up on a wave at the beach one day, my question is: how long would it take an alert intelligence to recognize that there was genius ...
If an unidentified page of a musical score drifted up on a wave at the beach one day, my question is: how long would it take an alert intelligence to recognize that there was genius in the notes? How long to decide that it was in fact a missing fragment from the pen of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
Mozart is of course the universal definition of unaccountable, virtually divine creative energy — the moreso because his years (35) were so few, like Charlie Parker’s (34) and Franz Shubert’s (31).
But surely there is some accounting to be done of the magic we can all hear in Mozart, from “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to the Rondo in A-minor, K. 511, which many millions of us piano students keep trying to play; to the Jupiter Symphony and the “Elvira Madigan” slow movement, to which we’ve all swooned, in his 21st Piano Concerto, in C.
The late composer Earl Kim used to tell me that there was a identifiable miracle in every measure of Mozart–a tie, a dot, an interval, a question, a pulse — that makes it not just unlike anything else in music but, for players, makes it a different elixir, a fresh statement, every time they meet it. The pianist Robert Levin likes to say that in every Mozart piece — the string quartets, the symphonies, the keyboard pieces — there is without exception a human conversation going on in the notes, and a clear trace of the musical dramatist that composed Don Giovanni and the rest of the operas.
All I want in this 250th birthday year is to hear more Mozart with bigger ears, with a better grasp of the drama and the details as well as the life.
We’ll begin the Open Source conversation on Thursday with two transcendent, unconventional performers: the pianist Russell Sherman and the conductor Craig Smith.
Once upon a time, Russell was Craig’s piano teacher at the New England Conservatory. For decades now they’ve had the standing of Zen masters and standing-room-only musical cult figures–individually and together. I think of Russell Sherman as the Glenn Gould of our time and our neighborhood: an exquisitely original interpreter of the most daunting piano literature, as mesmerizing as a teacher-talker-writer as he is at the keyboard. Craig Smith found himself a conductor by accident when the Emmanuel Church in Boston was suddenly without a leader and he emerged from the students in the chorus. In 30-plus years since then he has led Emmanuel through several complete cycles of J. S. Bach’s Cantatas, and with the director Peter Sellars he has made television history and a world-famous name for restaging the Mozart operas — and Bach cantatas, too — with modern meanings in modern dress.
Together Russell Sherman and Craig Smith have for years been marking Mozart birthdays with their joint performances of the piano concertos — church concerts with the electric tension of World Series games. For the 250th Russell Sherman will be making five concerts of the complete set of Mozart’s 19 piano sonatas, starting on the birthday night, January 27. But first they are going to share a few secrets with us.