Kidane, Bartók, Scriabin, and screaming at Severance

Elim Chan continued her two-week guest stint with The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall with an engaging program of music from the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.

The concert began with Daniel Kldane’s Sun Poem, composed in 2022 and receiving its first Cleveland performances this weekend.  The work is symmetrically constructed, starting with muted trumpets, gradually joined by other instruments.  Parts of the work reminded me of the minimalism of John Adams, and it  seemed more focused on layering textures than thematic development.  The work ended quietly, much as it began.

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja then strode onstage in bare feet, wearing a red outfit for Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1 – composed in 1908 for a lover, but unpublished during his lifetime and unperformed until 1958, 14 years after the composer’s death.  I was unfamiliar with this concerto and surprised by the work’s blending of aching romanticism with modernity.  On a technical level, Kopatchinskaja played the work well.  She also put on a choreographic show that made Glenn Gould seem like a portrait of restrained normalcy.  I understand that certain mannerisms among performers can be unavoidable.  But this was pure circus act and drew attention to herself rather than the music.  Some in the audience responded positively to it, including a wannabe orator behind me whose eruptions reminded me of similar screaming I endured at a Ricky Martin concert in Las Vegas in 2017.  I wonder if he was a deranged groupie.  Kopatchinskaja played what she described as a “contemporary” work as an encore, which was a mix of catlike scratching on the instrument accompanied by grimaces and vocalizations from her.     

A sense of normalcy returned after intermission when Chan returned to lead Bartók’s  Dance Suite.  Fron 1923, this is a work of Bartók’s mature style: Modern yet not atonal.  Chan maintained perfect control over the rhythm, yet for all the propulsiveness in the work’s faster movements, the orchestra’s tone never became harsh, and the sections were all in balance.  This was about as suave as I’ve ever heard Bartók performed.

The final work was Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, a work of mystical eroticism which provided an appropriate climax for the evening.  Chan’s interpretation was guts and glory, with no holding back – yet just when it seemed the potential of the orchestra was exhausted, they kept piling on more.  The last few minutes were a sustained musical orgasm.

 

 

Stravinsky, Haydn, and Beethoven at Severance

Guest conductor Elim Chan returned to Cleveland to lead a varied program that ranged from the classical age, to the cusp of the romantic era, to the realm of neoclassicism.  As with her previous appearance here, Chan demonstrated she’s one of her generation’s most compelling conductors.

The concert opened with the 1949 version of the Suite from Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s clever reimagining of works not by just Pergolesi, as Stravinsky thought, but Gallo, Wassenaer, and Monza as well.  This ballet score has been overshadowed by the composer’s more revolutionary works in that genre like the Firebird and the Rite of Spring, but in recent years it has grown on me.  Chan led the reduced ensemble and perfectly captured the score’s blend of the antique and the modern, with wit and whimsy.  The audience was engaged and responded with some chuckles following the bumptious march and warm applause afterward.  During the ovation, Chan walked over to acknowledge each player, rather than pointing to them from the podium.

The orchestra’s principle trumpet Michael Sachs, sporting a newly grown beard, strode onstage for the concert’s next work, Franz Josef Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major.  The work was composed for the newly invented keyed trumpet, but recordings on such instruments demonstrate that when it comes to this work, the period instrument movement is sadly misguided.  Sachs delivered a spotless, effortless sounding  performance, especially notable to the liquid tone he produced in the work’s central Andante.  My father, who died nearly ten years ago, played trumpet from high school onward, and this was one of those concerts I wish I could have brought him to.

 

Following intermission Chan returned to lead the orchestra in possibly the most famous classical composition of all time: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67. This is a work which has become so well known that it’s almost impossible to listen to with fresh ears.  But Chan’s lean approach, which eschewed bombast and favored balance over volume, was most welcome.  She conducted with the score and followed the markings (including the correct placement of the ritardandi early in the third movement) rather than applying “traditional” rhetorical flourishes.  Tempi were on the brisk side, and the last movement repeat was observed.  It was a resounding conclusion to a successful night. 

If Chan isn’t on the short list to succeed music director Franz Welser-Möst, she should be added to it immediately.

Throughout the concert, I was reminded once again of what a rare treasure our orchestra is.  Whatever the issues of living in northeast Ohio, from the state’s corrupt, gerrymandered politics to the regions capricious weather, when one considers the cost of living balanced against three major sports franchises, cultural amenities including the nation’s second largest theater district, world-class museums, and of course The Cleveland Orchestra, why would a person of culture want to live anywhere else?  

The Slow, Sad Death of Sony Classical

During the 20^th Century, there were two great American Classical Music record labels, Columbia and RCA.  Columbia had sub-labels like Epic and Odyssey, and RCA had Gold Seal.  Columbia’s artist roster included conductors Bruno Walter, George Szell, and Eugene Ormandy – to name but three, along with pianist Rudolf Serkin and, for an eleven-year period, Vladimir Horowitz.  RCA had Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, Ormandy after 1968, violinist Jascha Heifetz and pianists Artur Rubinstein and Van Cliburn – along with Horowitz for most of his career. 

Columbia and RCA fought for supremacy in the American classical market.  They also marketed to Europe, but the United States was their priority - and they endured through competition with European labels including Decca/London, Deutsche Grammophon, and Philips, along with American upstarts like Mercury records.

As older generations of performing artists died, new ones rose to prominence – for example, Leonard Bernstein, who was a Columbia artist until defecting to DG.  Horowitz’s pupils Byron Janis and Gary Graffman were RCA performers until the label dumped them in favor of Cliburn, who had just won the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition.  Janis went to Mercury records, while Graffman went to Columbia – and subsequently helped persuade Horowitz to join him there after the elder artist became disenchanted with RCA’s approach to recording and marketing. 

It was during this period, the 1950s and 1960s, that both RCA and Columbia were recording large swaths of the Classical repertoire in stereo, with their labels boasting of “Living Stereo” and “360-degree sound.” 

The 1970’s saw a precipitous drop in Classical record sales.  The issue was mainly that the core repertoire had been recorded umpteen times and listeners saw little reason to buy, for example, Rubinstein’s 1971 recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy when they had a perfectly fine version with Rubinstein and the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner from 1956 – in “Living Stereo” to boot.  If memory serves, the 1956 recording sold some 250,000 copies, whereas the 1971 remake sold a mere 13,000.  “Advancements” from both RCA and Columbia including Dynagroove, Quadrophonic sound, and gimmicked microphone placement resulted in some atrocious sounding records – particularly from RCA.

But there were two changes which briefly revived sales industry-wide: the advents of digital recording and the Compact Disc.  Suddenly, the core repertoire was being recorded again with unrestricted dynamics and without tape hiss.  Telarc Records, the Mercury records of the 1980s-1990s, recorded a good deal of that repertoire with the Cleveland Orchestra.  RCA’s big names, Rubinstein, Ormandy, Horowitz, had either died, retired, or defected to other labels.  Columbia’s biggest name at the time, Leonard Bernstein, switched allegiances to Deutsche Grammophon, as did Rudolf Serkin.  Glenn Gould was dead.  For new recordings RCA and Columbia largely had to rely on solid performers who, with the exception of Yo-Yo Ma, never really caught fire with the public like the old-timers had: Emanuel Ax, Murray Perahia, Paavo Berglund.

In 1989 Sony Classical bought Columbia Masterworks and, as their first coup, signed Vladimir Horowitz for what turned out to be his last recording – and what a fine recording it is both in terms of recorded sound and performance.  By then, RCA – once such a corporate giant that it owned the NBC radio and television networks – was part of the Bertelsmann Music Group and was struggling.  Much of their business was driven by reissues of varying quality from their back catalogue.  As someone who worked at a Classical record store (the Music Box at Cleveland’s Shaker Square) in the 1980s, I saw early on how the back catalog continued to have market potential.  One day in 1985, we received four copies of Artur Rubinstein playing Tchaikovsky’s and Grieg’s Piano concertos on CD – recordings which originated in the 1960s.  My manager scoffed and said “these will never sell – CD collectors only want pure Digital recordings, not this analog crap.”  In fact, all four copies sold within a few days while newer digital recordings of the same repertoire languished.    

During the 1990s, both RCA’s and Sony’s releases included a combination of new material and reissues.  RCA’s included Toscanini’s complete authorized recordings (which included a cabinet for those who purchased the complete edition), a 22-CD set of Horowitz’s RCA recordings, and, in 1999, a 107-CD deluxe edition of Rubinstein’s complete RCA recordings – which reportedly broke the bank and sold poorly until the CDs were issued individually.  During much of this period Sony was headed by Horowitz’s old manager, Peter Gelb.  Under his directions, Sony’s new releases, controversially, included non-Classical “crossover” material with artists including Yo-Yo Ma recording an album of Americana; electronic composer Vangelis recorded an album; and James Horner’s score to the film Titanic which – whether or not one agreed with including film scores under a Classical label – sold like gangbusters and made a lot of money for the label.  During this era Sony’s reissues included a well-engineered reissue of Horowitz’s complete Columbia recordings and a lavish box of composer Igor Stravinsky’s recordings.   

It was also during the Gelb era that RCA found itself in a position to be acquired and, fortuitously, it was Sony which took RCA over.  Suddenly, America’s two largest classical labels were one enormous label.

With access to both the RCA’s and Columbia’s deep back-catalogues, Sony produced some excellent boxed sets which have done their core artists proud: not just the big boys like Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Szell, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Horowitz, and Glenn Gould; but Pierre Boulez, Robert Casadesus, Cliburn, Graffman, Janis, William Kapell, Murray Perahia, Charles Rosen, both Rudolf Serkin and his son Peter, André Watts, and others too numerous to mention. 

A selection from some of Sony Classical's many 

Original Album boxed sets. 

(The Horowitz photo includes a few DG recordings.)

During this period, many claimed these issues were folly and that the era of the CD was over as the era of streaming approached.  But sales of both CDs and LPs increased during COVID, and most of the boxed sets mentioned above sold out almost immediately upon issuance – necessitating reprints and creating a lucrative resell market on eBay and other sites.

Then, last year, there was a bloodbath at Sony.  Those with knowledge of the of the label’s storied history and the ability to restore the historic recordings were given the ax.  No reason was given for this evisceration – and given the documented strong sales of these boxed sets, it’s difficult to believe they were losing the label money.  So, the reissues came to an end – and at the most inopportune moment.  Collectors were awaiting the final box of Sony’s multi-part Ormandy set comprising his post-1968 RCA recordings.  Pianophiles were also hoping that Sony would, finally, issue Horowitz’s complete privately recorded Carnegie Hall recitals from 1945-1950 – which have been floating around on the internet in poor sounding transfers.

Sony’s classical department has now been downsized so that what was once a Mississippi River of releases has slowed to a trickle.  The back-catalogue is now ignored and at this rate, Sony’s Classical division is seems poised to downsize itself out of business in the very near future. 

Brahms, Martinů, and Kaprálová with Hrůša at Severance

This weekend’s Cleveland Orchestra concerts featured the return of guest conductor Jakub Hrůša, leading the orchestra in works both familiar and unfamiliar.

The concert opened with the Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90 by Johannes Brahms.  Although it is a relatively popular symphony, it’s challenging to perform.  Even structural masters like Toscanini struggled with this work.  Hrůša plunged headlong into the opening movement, which included the repeat.  Despite the constant sense of momentum and pulse, it never seemed rushed.  The second movement was beautifully contemplative with unexaggerated pianissimos in the high strings.  The third movement, with its popular theme, featured plasticity of phrasing without descending into schmaltz.  This brought us to a finale featuring bracing syncopation and exhilaration leading to the work’s serene end.

Following intermission, Hrůša returned to conduct the Symphony No. 3 by Bohuslav Martinů.  I’d never heard this work before, either in concert or on recordings.  So, I can only comment that the work was plainly written during the Second World War.  An atmosphere of stark foreboding runs through much of the work, yet it wasn’t without moments of joy.  I look forward to familiarizing myself more with this piece.

The concert’s final work was Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Military Sinfonietta, Op. 11.  This piece was composed nearly a decade before the Martinů – even though he was Kaprálová’s teacher (and, briefly, lover).  This is the work of a young and talented composer, with numerous interesting passages, yet it does not quite gel.  Sadly, Kaprálová died when she was 25, so one is left wondering “what might have been.”

Both post-intermission works were being played by the orchestra for the first time, yet the performances were entirely assured and polished – testimony to the skills of both the orchestra and the conductor.  With the departure of music director Franz Welser-Möst in just over a year, I’ve little doubt that Hrůša is a serious contender for the post.