The Well-Tempered Ear
The acclaimed Meccore String Quartet performs an online concert of works by Mozart, Beethoven and Penderecki this Sunday night as part of the Wisconsin Union Theater season
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The Wisconsin Union Theater will stream an online Concert Series performance by the Meccore String Quartet (below, in a photo by Arkadiusz Berbecki) this Sunday night, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m. CST.
The program is: String Quartet No. 21 in D major, K. 575, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; String Quartet No. 3 “Leaves from an Unwritten Diary” by 20th-century Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki; and String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The ensemble includes violinists Wojciech Koprowski and Aleksandra Bryla; violist Michal Bryla; and cellist Marcin Maczynski.
As one of Europe’s most compelling ensembles, the Meccore String Quartet has appeared at many influential music festivals around the globe, such as the Rheingau Musik Festival and the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The ensemble was the first-ever Polish string quartet to perform during the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the Bundestag, the national parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The Meccore String Quartet has also received many international awards, including a nomination for the Paszport Polityki award in the classical music category for its “innovative approach to the music and for breaking the musical stereotypes.”
The musicians won the Premio Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition and the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition.
When they are not performing, Meccore’s members lead chamber music and individual instrumental classes at the Frederic Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, Poland.
Praised for their technical accuracy, Meccore is also known for its deep musicality and expressiveness. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear the Meccore playing an excerpt from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 2 n G Major, Op. 18, No. 2.)
“The Meccore String Quartet brings an unparalleled energy and emotional depth to its performances,” says Wisconsin Union Theater director Elizabeth Snodgrass (below). “This ensemble is admired the world over, and our patrons will experience why the Quartet has earned global praise during its virtual Wisconsin Union Theater performance.”
Information about purchasing tickets can be found here. Tickets for this online event are $10 for UW-Madison students; $17 for Wisconsin Union members, UW-Madison staff and faculty, and students that do not attend UW-Madison; and $20 for all other patrons. Tickets are good for access for a week, through next Sunday, March 7.
The performance by the Meccore String Quartet is sponsored by the David and Kato Perlman Chamber Music Fund. The Wisconsin Union Theater presents this event, in part, with the help of financial support from Wisconsin Arts Board funding from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information about the Meccore String Quartet’s upcoming performance, visit union.wisc.edu/events-and-activities/event-calendar/event/meccore-quartet.
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Classical music: The Ancora String Quartet will play several concerts of Beethoven and Randall Thompson over this coming weekend, including one at Olbrich Gardens on Friday night
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following information from the veteran Ancora String Quartet, which will play several performances of the same program over the coming weekend in several different cities.
Members of the Ancora String Quartet (below from left, in a photo by Barry Lewis), who also play with the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, are: violinists Wes Luke and Robin Ryan; violist Marika Fischer Hoyt; and cellist Benjamin Whitcomb.
RECITAL PROGRAM:
String Quartet No. 2 in G Major by Randall Thompson
String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130, by Ludwig van Beethoven
CONCERT DATES:
Friday, Feb. 7, at noon
Interview with Wisconsin Public Radio host
Norman Gilliland on The Midday
WERN 88.7 FM
Friday, Feb.7, from 5 to 7 p.m.
Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Bolz Conservatory
3330 Atwood Ave., Madison
Tickets at the door: $5
Saturday, Feb. 8, at 7:30 p.m.
Park (“Freethinkers”) Hall
307 Polk Street, Sauk City
Tickets: $15 general, $12 children and seniors
Sunday, Feb. 9, at 2 p.m. (UPDATE: THIS CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO AN OUTBREAK OF ILLNESS AT CHAI POINT. IT WILL BE RESCHEDULED.)
Chai Point Retirement Community
1400 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee
Free and open to the public
PROGRAM NOTES:
The program opens with an unusual work, the String Quartet No. 2 in G Major, by American composer Randall Thompson (below). Better known for his choral music, Thompson wrote this quartet in 1967 to celebrate the 130th anniversary of the Harvard Musical Association.
The quartet is joyous and optimistic in character, with thoughtful and creative part-writing. The first movement brims with youthful energy, contained in smoothly flowing triplets.
The simple, graceful folk melody that opens the second movement continually reinvents itself in a set of charming variations. The third movement’s heartfelt tune expresses a deep content, setting up the finale, whose explosive energy erupts in a good-natured, light-hearted romp.
Beethoven (below) wrote the second piece on our program, the String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130, 141 years before the Thompson and many centuries beyond it in subtlety, sophistication, intellectual rigor and emotional depth.
With six movements and lasting 40 minutes, it is the composer’s longest piece of chamber music, and it stretches limits in other ways as well. The original work, completed in 1825, contained the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue) but Beethoven replaced that in 1826 with the Finale Allegro, the last full-scale movement he completed before his death in 1827.
Op. 130 bristles with contrasts, and juxtapositions of extremes, on the micro-level to the macro-level, all contained in movements ranging from a short, gnarly Presto, to a graceful Poco Scherzo, to a lyrical, innocent Alla Danza Tedesco (In the Style of a German Dance), to the fabled Cavatina, which, Beethoven wrote, moved him to tears when he even thought about it. (You can hear the Cavatina in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
In performing Op. 130, the Ancora String Quartet tackles its 14th of the 16 Beethoven string quartets. The ASQ plans to perform Op. 59, No. 3, and Op. 131, in the summer and fall, to complete the Beethoven cycle in this, the Beethoven Year when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth.
For more information, go to: facebook.com/ancoraquartet and www.ancoraquartet.com
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Classical music: How did Baroque composer Telemann get overshadowed and why is he being rediscovered? Trevor Stephenson talks about his all-Telemann concerts this weekend
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By Jacob Stockinger
This weekend, the Madison Bach Musicians (MBM) will give two performances of a concert devoted exclusively to the music of Baroque composer Georg Philip Telemann (below).
The performances are: Saturday night, Oct. 5, at 8 p.m. in the Atrium Auditorium of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, where MBM will be artists-in-residence this season; the second performance is on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6, at 3:30 p.m. at the Holy Wisdom Monastery, 4200 County Road M, in Middleton.
Tickets are $35 in advance and are available at the Willy Street Coop East and West, and at Orange Tree Imports. Tickets at the door are $38 for the general public; $35 for seniors; and $10 for student rush tickets that go on sale 30 minutes before each lecture. The lectures take place 45 minutes before the performance, at 7:15 p.m. and 2:45 p.m, respectively.
Why focus on the music of Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)?
Trevor Stephenson, the founder and director of the Madison Bach Musicians, talks about it in an email Q&A with The Ear:
Why does Telemann, who was so respected in his day, seem to get far less play, fewer performances and less mentioning today than his contemporaries Bach, Vivaldi and Handel?
Telemann was born in 1681 — three years after Vivaldi and four years before Bach and Handel. He was astonishingly prolific and it is estimated that he wrote more than Bach and Handel combined.
On top of this, he was very highly respected and was widely published and performed during his life. Remember, it was Telemann — not Bach — whom the Leipzig council wanted to hire for the music director position in 1723. But Telemann was enjoying his wonderful new post in Hamburg—a thriving port city — and was not about to go back to landlocked Leipzig where he had spent his student days.
At any rate, after the 18th century had passed and its music became somewhat marginalized, in the early 19th century it was Bach’s music, not Telemann’s, that suddenly re-emerged.
Bach’s tremendous emotional depth, contrapuntal mastery and ability to control large-scale forms in an almost heroic way spoke with greater urgency to the Romantic sensibility than did Telemann’s elegant craftsmanship. Indeed, 19th-century Bach scholars often mean-spiritedly used Telemann as a foil for Bach.
Telemann’s music nevertheless received a modicum of performances in the early 20th century, but in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Early Music movement really got rolling—and the level of period-instrument performance increased—it became apparent that Telemann’s music really was hot stuff!
Now his music is enjoying a wonderful and well-deserved revival.
What are the appealing and admirable qualities you see in Telemann’s music? Are there any drawbacks to his compositions?
Telemann had a wonderful sense of melodic invention — probably music’s analog to an artist’s ability to draw — and his tunes seem to flow out effortlessly. And although his output was opulent, he had an uncanny sense of form and how much weight – duration — any given musical scene could bear.
He also was a masterful musical polyglot, able to jump back and forth easily between Italian, French and German musical idioms; and like Bach, he was also adept at integrating them into a unified style—this integration of national styles was a frequently acknowledged goal of 18th-century composers.
Telemann’s limitations are apparent when he is juxtaposed with Handel, who could dramatically really take the roof off and who could also find the inner essence of the human voice, and Bach who, like Shakespeare, through a near alchemy of sound and meaning could consistently define and further what it means to be human.
How and why did you put this program together? What unifies it and what would you like the public to know about it?
Madison Bach Musicians’ concertmaster and assistant artistic director Kangwon Kim (below left with Emily Dupere) did the heavy lifting in putting together this wonderful program of Telemann’s chamber music. MBM will present three of Telemann’s programmatic or story works, one church cantata and three purely instrumental selections.
With narration and graphics, we’ll walk you through how he cleverly depicts scenes from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, below), which had been in print only two years when Telemann wrote his topical Gulliver Suite in 1728. Telemann loved ludicrous irony, like the tiny Lilliputians dancing a heavy chaconne—which Telemann notates in a hilarious, confounding mass of 64th and 128th notes. And then there’s the Brobdingnagian giants doing their rendition of a light-footed gigue, rendered in loopy, cumbersome whole notes!
We’ll also present the marvelous Suite Burlesque based upon Cervantes’ Don Quixote (below): Quixote’s love for Dulcinea, his jousting with windmills, and how a crowd mocks Quixote’s faithful, world-weary servant Sancho Panza.
To top it off, guest artist mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski (below) will sing the droll and sweetly amusing cantata about the demise — brought about by the cat! — of a favorite and very artistic canary. Osowski will also sing the church cantata Weicht, ihr Sünden, bleibt dahinten (Yield, You Sins, and Stay Behind Me). Telemann wrote more than 1,000 church cantatas.
The concert includes non-programmatic works for string band: the dramatic and Corelli-esque Sonata à 6 in F minor for two violins, two violas, cello and continuo; and the sparkling Sinfonia Spirituosa (heard in the YouTube video at the bottom). I will also perform some fascinating Fantasy miniatures for solo harpsichord, and will give a pre-concert lecture at both events.
For more information about the program, the performers and tickets, go to: www.madisonbachmusicians.org
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Classical music: The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge sings a varied program with organ accompaniment this Wednesday night in Overture Hall
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By Jacob Stockinger
The new season of the popular Overture Concert Organ series, sponsored by the Madison Symphony Orchestra and curated by MSO organist Greg Zelek, begins this Wednesday night, Sept. 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Overture Hall.
All single tickets are $20. (A subscription to all four organ concerts is $63.)
The opening program features the world-famous Choir of Trinity College Cambridge (below), on tour from its home in the United Kingdom.
Adds Zelek:
“Our season opens with the amazing Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, named by Gramophone Magazine as one of the best choirs in the world.
“Conducted by the choir’s music director Stephen Layton (below top) and accompanied on the mighty Klais concert organ (below bottom), this 25-voice choir will present a program of music spanning many centuries that will display its beauty of tone and depth of feeling. These rich voices will make this varied program soar through Overture Hall and leave everyone in the audience breathless.”
Here are some sample reviews:
Virtuoso is the right word. I, for one, can’t immediately think of any more appropriate way of describing singing of such staggering accomplishment. – BBC Music Magazine
Sitting front and center at a recent Trinity Choir of Cambridge concert at Grace Cathedral was, sonically speaking, a heavenly experience. -The New York Times
Here is Wednesday night’s eclectic program:
William Byrd | Sing joyfully
William Byrd | O Lord, make thy servant, Elizabeth
Thomas Tallis | Salvator mundi
Henry Purcell | Thou knowest, Lord
Arvo Part | Bogoroditse Djévo
John Tavener | Mother of God, here I stand
Vasily Kalinnikov | Bogoroditse Djevo
Robert Parsons | Ave Maria
Eriks Esenvalds | The Heavens’ Flock (You can hear a different Esenvalds work, “Only in Sleep,” sung by the Trinity College Choir, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Morten Lauridsen | O magnum mysterium
Jaakko Mantyjarvi | Stuttgarter Psalmen
Herbert Howells | Take him, earth, for cherishing
Herbert Howells | Trinity St. Paul’s
For more information about the Overture Organ Series, detailed background about the Trinity College Choir and how to purchase tickets, call (608) 258-4141 or go to: https://madisonsymphony.org/concerts-events/overture-concert-organ-performances/ or https://madisonsymphony.org/event/organ-trinity-choir/
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Classical music: Mozart masterfully melds the emotional and the intellectual, says maestro Gary Thor Wedow, who will conduct two performances of “The Magic Flute” this weekend for the Madison Opera. Here is Part 1 of his two-part interview with The Ear
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Madison Opera will stage Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute this Friday night, April 21 at 8 p.m. and Sunday afternoon, April 23, at 2:30 p.m. in Overture Hall. (Production photos are courtesy of the Arizona Opera, from which the Madison Opera got its sets and costumes.)
Here are an introduction and some details, courtesy of the Madison Opera:
Written in the last year of his life, Mozart’s opera is part fairy tale, part adventure story, and is filled with enchantment.
Set in a fairy-tale world of day and night, the opera follows Prince Tamino and the bird-catcher Papageno as they embark on a mission to rescue Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night. Pamina had been kidnapped by Sarastro, the leader of a religious order. But it turns out that exactly who is “good” and who is “evil” is not always what it appears.
Along the way to happily-ever-after, Pamina, Tamino and Papageno face many challenges, but are assisted by a magic flute, magic bells, a trio of guiding spirits and their own clear-eyed sense of right and wrong.
“The Magic Flute has been beloved around the world since its 1791 premiere,” says Kathryn Smith (below in a photo by James Gill), Madison Opera’s general director. “It has been called a fairy tale for both adults and children, with a story that works on many levels, all set to Mozart’s glorious music. I’m so delighted to be sharing it again with Madison, with an incredible cast, director and conductor.”
The opera runs about 2 hours and 45 minutes with one intermission.
Tickets are $18 to $130.
“The Magic Flute” will be sung in German with English supertitles.
For more about the production and cast, go to:
http://www.madisonopera.org/performances-2016-2017/the-magic-flute/
And also go to:
http://www.madisonopera.org/performances-2016-2017/the-magic-flute/cast/
Dan Rigazzi, who has been on the directing staff at the Metropolitan Opera for 10 years, makes his Madison Opera debut with this beautiful production that incorporates some steampunk elements into its fairy-tale setting.
Gary Thor Wedow, a renowned Mozart conductor, makes his mainstage debut with this opera, after having conducted Opera in the Park in 2016 and 2012.
Conductor Wedow (below) recently agreed to do an email Q&A with The Ear:
Could you briefly introduce yourself to readers?
Hello! I’m an American conductor, born in LaPorte, Indiana. A faculty member at The Juilliard School, I spend a lot of time with music of the 18th century — Handel and Mozart and often earlier, like Monteverdi, Purcell and Cavalli. But I conduct everything and grew up in love with the Romantics. I’ve also always done a lot of contemporary music. I love it all.
Mozart’s music sounds so clear and easy or simple, but the reality is quite different, musicians say. What do you strive for and what qualities do you think make for great Mozart playing?
Mozart engages both the brain and the heart. He challenges your intellect with amazing feats of counterpoint, orchestration and structure while tugging at your heart, all the time pulling you along in a deep drama.
Mozart was an Italian melodist with a German contrapuntal, harmonic engine – like an incredible automobile with an Italian slick body and a German motor.
Do you share the view that opera is central to Mozart’s music, even to his solo, chamber and ensemble instrumental music? How so? What is special or unique to Mozart’s operas, and to this opera in particular?
From all accounts, Mozart (below, in his final year) was a huge personality who was full of life and a keen observer of the human condition; his letters are full of astute, often merciless and sometimes loving evaluations of family, colleagues and patrons.
Mozart’s music speaks of the human condition: its passions, loves and hopes— no matter what genre. His music is innately dramatic and primal, going immediately to the most basic and universal human emotions with breathtaking nuance, variety and depth. (You can hear the Overture to “The Magic Flute,” performed by the Metropolitan Opera orchestra under James Levine, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Tomorrow: Tricks to conducting Mozart and what to pay special attention to in this production of The Magic Flute.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Classical music: The future of Western classical music is in Asia – specifically China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Why is that?
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By Jacob Stockinger
It’s not just about Lang Lang.
The signs are everywhere.
They were present at a recent piano recital by elementary school, middle school and high school students that The Ear attended.
You see it at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music and at top music schools, including the Curtis Institute of Music, across the U.S. and Western Europe. And you see it in youth groups such as the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras (below).
Western classical music recording labels, such as Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classical, are looking to develop new markets and so are signing more Asian musicians, such as the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and Shanghai String Quartet, and releasing more Asian performances. (Below is the Taiwanese-Australian, prize-winning violinist Ray Chen, who is also a master at using social media to build his meteoric career.)
All these items point to the same conclusion: The future of Western classical music looks more and more likely to be found in Asian culture and in Asia – specifically in China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. (Next season, prize-winning South Korean pianist Joyce Yang (below) returns to Madison, where she first gave a recital at the Wisconsin Union Theater, to solo with the Madison Symphony Orchestra.)
Consider some of the following:
There are, The Ear read somewhere, now more piano students in China than in all of Europe, North America and South America combined. And he is reading about more and more concert tours of China and other Asian countries by Western performers — even while in the U.S. the number of pianos in homes are on the decline.
Increasingly the winners of major international competitions — such as the Chopin competition, the Van Cliburn competition, the Tchaikovsky competition, the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium competition and the Leeds competition – come from Asia or are Asian. (Below, in a photo by Simon Fowler, is American pianist George Li, who immigrated from China as a child and attended Harvard and the New England Conservatory before winning a silver medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition. His concert career is now blossoming fast.)
In recent years, China has been building a lot of first-rate concert halls, opera houses and music schools. And the famed Juilliard School in New York City will open its second campus this fall in Tianjin, near Beijing.
China has certainly come a long way from the days of the Cultural Revolution when people could be imprisoned for listening to Beethoven, who is now a cultural icon in China — as you can hear at the bottom in the YouTube video of Li Jing Zhan conducting the orchestra at the Chinese National Opera in Beethoven’s No. 7. (Below is the striking new National Center for the Performing Arts in China.)
https://www.interlude.hk/front/culture-construction-chinas-new-concert-halls/
Nineteen of the 24 final competitors, ages 13-17, in the second Van Cliburn Junior Competition – which starts in Dallas, Texas, on May 31 and ends on June 8 – are Asian, Asian-American and Asian-Canadian, all with astonishingly impressive credentials and experience. It will be streamed live and free. Take a look and listen:
https://www.cliburn.org/2019-cliburn-junior-competitors/
Why this Asian shift is happening remains somewhat of a mystery to The Ear, although he had been thinking about for a long time.
Then he came across a op-ed column confirming the prevalence of Asian classical musicians. It was written by the American concert pianist and teacher Inna Faliks (below), who teaches at UCLA and who wrote convincingly about her recent concert experiences in China in The Washington Post.
Read it and see what you think, and tell us whether you agree:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-future-of-classical-music-is-chinese/2019/03/22/2649e9dc-4cb5-11e9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html?utm_term=.7f149e0f8eb9
Why are Asians so interested in Western classical music and music education? And why do they respect it or even revere it so much?
Does it have to do with the “tiger mom” phenomenon of strong parental pressure to succeed and achieve?
Is it largely a function of population?
Is it because of the collective teamwork required to make a lot of chamber music and orchestral music, or with the intense and instructive teacher-student relationship?
Is it because the cultural depth and seriousness in Western music education – ing contrast to the increasingly pop culture of the West – that prepares students well for the training and intellectual discipline required in other educational fields and careers, including the STEM areas (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)?
Is Asia simply fascinated by Western culture the same way that Western culture was fascinated by the exotic Asian cultures – especially in China and Japan — during the 19th century and earlier? Or is the West increasingly ignoring its own culture. (The Ear can’t recall any classical musicians performing at President Donald Trump’s White House. Can you?)
How do you see the situation and react to it? And what do you think about the causes and effects?
Please leave your reactions and thoughts in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
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