concert review: Santa Cruz County Symphony

[calimac]

A local performance of Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time, which I'd be ready to defend as, like, the greatest choral-orchestral work of the last century, attracted my attention from the beginning, but I wasn't sure if we were going to go until my editors asked me to review it. Various logistics made it impossible for B. and me to get to the Saturday evening performance in Santa Cruz, so we opted for the Sunday matinee in Watsonville.

Watsonville. A farming and packing town way out in the dusty Pajaro Valley. (Ever read Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle? That's the Pajaro Valley.) Watsonville, which only makes the news when the crops are contaminated, or one of the packing plants closes down, both of which happen frequently.

Watsonville sounds way and the hell out to gone, but it's actually no further from us than San Francisco is in the opposite direction. I've been there before, but not often and never for a concert. But we presented ourselves at the grandly-named Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts, which proved to be an alias for the Watsonville High School auditorium. Not a bad venue by high school auditorium standards, even with the little girl kicking my seat from behind all through the first part of the concert, but a review of the rest rooms would have come with a large "INADEQUATE".

The performance was quite well-shaped and artistically effective, and in aspects - particularly the solo singers - quite impressive technically, though not flawless. But I wrote all about that in the review. This time fate allowed me to spend the first half of the review describing the music and only the second half on the performance, which is about the balance that I like, when it works out that way.

And I mentioned the slide show of local high-school art inspired by the piece. I guess the schools must have incorporated the upcoming performance into their lesson plans. Some of the pieces seemed appropriate, some not, and they were all high-school art, after all. But one student had taken the pungent lesson when you program a work inspired by the horror of Kristallnacht - a week before the concert was Yom ha-Shoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day], so yet more resonance there - given nonspecific and (one hopes) universal application by the composer who also adds hope for a brighter future, and performed in a mostly Latino farming town - this student drew a picture of the barricade wall at the Mexican-U.S. border (you can tell which wall it is by the languages on its sign). Read Tippett's narration:

Now in each nation there were some cast out by authority and tormented, made to suffer for the general wrong. Pogroms in the east, lynching in the west; Europe brooding on a war of starvation. And a great cry went up from the people.

That's the only place where Tippett is even close to specific. But the cry against immigrants today and the arrogant "What part of 'illegal' don't they understand?" from people who have probably jaywalked at least once in their lives makes the first line still relevant. As is history. I looked in the deep black face of bass Derrick Parker as he sang "lynching in the west." He knew.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Bush wants to build a wall in Iraq to keep some ethnic group in their place. "Mister Chairman, build this wall now!" I guess whether a wall is good or not depends.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

I doubt the original maker of that remark would be, mutatis mutandis, invited to an inauguration of the current administration.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Greatest choral orchestral work? Hmmm.

Certainly it is a contender, but I am not sure it wins. Personally, I would rank it behind the Glagolitic Mass, say, or the Requiem Canticles. I know that the War Requiem, Belshazzar's Feast and Schmidt's The Book with Seven Seals all have their devotees. One could even make a case for Pfitzner's On the German Soul, though I would not.

Then there are the symphonies written in C20 for chorus and orchestra - Mahler's 8 from 1906 is the most obvious contender there, but there is also the Shostakovich 13 to be reckoned with. I am sure that there are others if I were not so tired - late night here - Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony and Britten's Spring Symphony are not to my taste, but...

So I think you probably need to make that case so that I can think about whether I agree with you on mature consideration.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was slightly rhetorical, not in my opinion but in terms of readiness to write something serious about it. Of all the works you mention, the Sea Symphony is the one I'm most devoted to, especially for "On the beach at night alone," whose desolate outer sections and grippingly coherent climax makes actual poetry out of Whitman's clunky lines. But the outer movements have too much unmodulated blaring to put the work on the highest level.

Similarly for Shostakovich 13. The first movement is absolutely perfect. But it goes rather downhill from there. One of the remarkable things about Child is that it never goes downhill at all: Tippett always judges right what he needs the music to do at any given point.

The Britten and Walton are very fine scores, but they just don't move me as much as the Tippett. I have never been able to come to grips with the Glagolithic Mass. And I don't know the Schmidt and Pfitzner works, and neither composer has ever convinced me that he belongs on my favorites list. (Pfitzner? Really?)

I will pass over late Mahler and late Stravinsky in silence.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm not as fond of the Mahler 8 as I am of the purely orchestral 9th and (what he completed of) 10th, and Das Lied Von Der Erdge which is a symphony in all but name. It is an insanely ambitious work - setting first the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and then the last, metaphysical, scene of Goethe's Faust. I am not sure that it works as a structure - but the writing for both soloists and chorus achieves some wonderful effects and I have heard performances that convinced me that it was a masterpiece while they were going on.

Most late Stravinsky leaves me cold as it is meant to- you can play Webern at his most cerebral so that it touches the heart strings and much of Schoenberg's serial work touches me as deeply as his late Romantic pieces and Berg is a big old softy - but Stravinsky adopted serialism as a way of being difficult, and it shows. With the exception of the Requiem Canticles which have always moved me deeply - I think because his religious faith trumped his urge to be difficult.

I am in the middle of a massive Janacek relisten, so I am not best placed to write objectively about the Glagolitic Mass; it has always inspired me with pity and terror, the way great art should.

As to the other works, well, I find it embarassing to like a composer who made his piece with the Anschluss to go on working - Schmidt - and another who left the Nazi party because they were too common. Nonetheless, I always liked Schmidt's chamber works, and the third of his symphonies and The Book With Seven Seals is worth a listen - try the Mitropolous recording. Pfitzner is harder - the man was a toad -but On the German Soul is full of extraordinary writing for soloists and chorus. I was amazed a few years ago to discover that his opera Palestrina actually works on stage, even though the old line about 'Parsifal without the jokes' is fair comment.

The Walton does not move me at all, but it is a splendid piece of musical sprezzatura, a young composer showing off everything he could do simply because he had the chance to write a piece for vast forces. (He was commissioned to write for a concert that was going to include the Berlioz Requiem).

I like the Britten as much for its technical side - the way it switches between different-sized forces - as for its emotional appeal. That's pretty much how I feel about, and why I like, the Tippett.

I would tend to agree with you about the Shostakovich, but mostly because the Babi Yar setting is so powerful it is hard to see what could have followed it. Yetvushenko wrote few poems that good - and The execution of Stepan Razin was taken. (I should have mentioned that as well, because though it is a piece of Soviet bombast, it does work. At least as a festival piece.)

You are right about the Sea Symphony - I suppose we should think about a variety of his other large-scale choral pieces come to that.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The coldness of most Stravinsky doesn't bother me - I like the Symphony of Psalms as I mentioned in a recent concert review - but serialism was a waste of a couple decades of his career, and more than that of other people's.

The same orchestra that did Child is doing Psalms next year, btw, paired with A Serenade to Music - which, if not a very big RVW, is a good one.

I'm no fonder of Das Lied than of anything else from the last decade of Mahler. Move along, nothing to see here.

Do you recommend any specific recording of the Glagolithic Mass?

I don't judge the value of a composer's music by his personal behavior, even if that included reprehensible politics. That way lies madness, the rejection of a lot of great music (Wagner, Beethoven, Dukas), and stupid arguments over whether Orff or Shostakovich were collaborationists or if Britten liked little boys too much. There's enough musical reasons to ignore Pfitzner.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I think we are just not destined to agree on some of this - late Mahler for example. Pfitzner is a minor figure, but I don't think he is a waste of time - Palestrina at least is worth at least one hearing.

As usual with Janacek, the way to go with the Mass is Charles MacKerras. He did a particularly fine performance for Supraphon, which means that the sound is mediocre.