concert review: Vienna Philharmonic
Feb. 27th, 2011 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI've been having my ears filled with the Vienna Philharmonic. Not only did I write the preview article on their three-concert residency in Berkeley, as I described earlier, I've been to two of the concerts.
I wasn't expecting this. I went to the first concert (Schubert on the one hand, Wagner and Bartok on the other) as the emergency fill-in reviewer. And a hasty substitution it was, too: Four hours after getting the call from my editor, I was prepped and had made the hour trip to Berkeley to have a very fast dinner and attend the pre-concert talk. Here's the emergency fill-in review. I found the concert highly ear-opening, particularly the Wagner which felt precision-made for their strengths. I have, of course, heard the orchestra's famous recording of Wagner's Ring with Georg Solti, but there's nothing like being there in person.
After that, there was nothing the second concert, which I attended on private benefaction, could do except confirm what a great opportunity this was (even in annoying Zellerbach, overloaded in the front seats, muffled further back). And to do it in music more to my own tastes than Wagner or Bartok, two symphonies by Schumann and Brahms. Again, lovely playing, particularly in slow movements of transcendent beauty. Cellos again leapt out at you when given Brahms's yearning themes.
Lisa Irontongue has written about and linked to others writing about a characteristic of the VP that exercises many, the fact that it consists almost exclusively of middle-aged white males. I felt obliged to mention this in both pieces, but not to explore the subject. My space there is limited, and my first priority must be the music. Also, my opinion on this is too complex for anything short of a whole article just on that. I'm old enough to remember when most orchestras were mostly middle-aged white males, and while I consider the change since then to have been entirely admirable from an employment law and equal-opportunity point of view, I don't think it's had much effect on the music - except insofar as it improves player quality due to drawing from a wider personnel pool.
But that's with ordinary-run American orchestras. The VP is in a different situation, as it already consists of players not only at the peak of the profession, but trained in a particular style which they're anxious to preserve, and I think rightly so. Other orchestras can play in other styles; the VP plays in the VP style. Lisa says she would "love to hear someone attempt to make the case that some musical performances can only be given by an orchestra composed of white men." If I were to make that case, I'd say the presumption is backward. There are millions upon millions of white men in the world, even highly talented musicians, who are not qualified to play in the Vienna Philharmonic either. What qualifies them is not just "technical skill or spirit," which as Lisa notes many orchestras have, but the particular style, training, and experience expected of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the synergy resulting from this. The way to get women and minorities in such an orchestra is to get them into the pipeline, and the choke point is initiation to the training process, not admission to the ranks of the Philharmonic. I don't know how open that choke point is, nor how many talented women and minority players want to go through that process which still smells so strongly of old white men, as opposed to other professional avenues that might be more congenial to them. Obviously some do, as there are a few women in the Philharmonic now, but this is the end of the process and it will necessarily take longer than the beginning.
But so long as the VP really does judge players on their individual qualities, and not by prejudice on their sex or race, even if most who meet the qualities are of one sex and race, and as long as there are many other fine orchestras in the world which view their mission differently, as there are, I think there's room for an orchestra that weighs so heavily on a particular tradition and a particular experience, because there's no other orchestra that sounds like this one, and weighing on that tradition and experience is the reason it does sound like that. Rather than beating on the VP for being mostly white male, I'd prefer us to expend energy and effort on creating a revival of the Women's Philharmonic, an orchestra with an explicit gender raison d'être, an orchestra with its own unique style and synergy and sound, unreplicated by anybody else, and one which I miss terribly. There are homogeneous, as well as heterogeneous, paths to artistic truth, and the results of all those paths enrich us.
I wasn't expecting this. I went to the first concert (Schubert on the one hand, Wagner and Bartok on the other) as the emergency fill-in reviewer. And a hasty substitution it was, too: Four hours after getting the call from my editor, I was prepped and had made the hour trip to Berkeley to have a very fast dinner and attend the pre-concert talk. Here's the emergency fill-in review. I found the concert highly ear-opening, particularly the Wagner which felt precision-made for their strengths. I have, of course, heard the orchestra's famous recording of Wagner's Ring with Georg Solti, but there's nothing like being there in person.
After that, there was nothing the second concert, which I attended on private benefaction, could do except confirm what a great opportunity this was (even in annoying Zellerbach, overloaded in the front seats, muffled further back). And to do it in music more to my own tastes than Wagner or Bartok, two symphonies by Schumann and Brahms. Again, lovely playing, particularly in slow movements of transcendent beauty. Cellos again leapt out at you when given Brahms's yearning themes.
Lisa Irontongue has written about and linked to others writing about a characteristic of the VP that exercises many, the fact that it consists almost exclusively of middle-aged white males. I felt obliged to mention this in both pieces, but not to explore the subject. My space there is limited, and my first priority must be the music. Also, my opinion on this is too complex for anything short of a whole article just on that. I'm old enough to remember when most orchestras were mostly middle-aged white males, and while I consider the change since then to have been entirely admirable from an employment law and equal-opportunity point of view, I don't think it's had much effect on the music - except insofar as it improves player quality due to drawing from a wider personnel pool.
But that's with ordinary-run American orchestras. The VP is in a different situation, as it already consists of players not only at the peak of the profession, but trained in a particular style which they're anxious to preserve, and I think rightly so. Other orchestras can play in other styles; the VP plays in the VP style. Lisa says she would "love to hear someone attempt to make the case that some musical performances can only be given by an orchestra composed of white men." If I were to make that case, I'd say the presumption is backward. There are millions upon millions of white men in the world, even highly talented musicians, who are not qualified to play in the Vienna Philharmonic either. What qualifies them is not just "technical skill or spirit," which as Lisa notes many orchestras have, but the particular style, training, and experience expected of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the synergy resulting from this. The way to get women and minorities in such an orchestra is to get them into the pipeline, and the choke point is initiation to the training process, not admission to the ranks of the Philharmonic. I don't know how open that choke point is, nor how many talented women and minority players want to go through that process which still smells so strongly of old white men, as opposed to other professional avenues that might be more congenial to them. Obviously some do, as there are a few women in the Philharmonic now, but this is the end of the process and it will necessarily take longer than the beginning.
But so long as the VP really does judge players on their individual qualities, and not by prejudice on their sex or race, even if most who meet the qualities are of one sex and race, and as long as there are many other fine orchestras in the world which view their mission differently, as there are, I think there's room for an orchestra that weighs so heavily on a particular tradition and a particular experience, because there's no other orchestra that sounds like this one, and weighing on that tradition and experience is the reason it does sound like that. Rather than beating on the VP for being mostly white male, I'd prefer us to expend energy and effort on creating a revival of the Women's Philharmonic, an orchestra with an explicit gender raison d'être, an orchestra with its own unique style and synergy and sound, unreplicated by anybody else, and one which I miss terribly. There are homogeneous, as well as heterogeneous, paths to artistic truth, and the results of all those paths enrich us.
