The Well-Tempered Ear
Here are the Top 10 online concerts to stream in March, according to critics for the New York Times
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ALERT: The online live-streamed concert by the UW-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet — scheduled for this Friday night, March 5 — in the all-Beethoven cycle of string quartets has been canceled and postponed until next year. The Friday, April 9 installment of the Beethoven cycle will be held as Installment 7 instead of 8.
By Jacob Stockinger
Classical music critics of The New York Times have once again picked their Top 10 online concerts for the month of March.
The Ear has found such lists helpful for watching and hearing, but also informative to read, if you don’t actually “attend” the concert.
If you have read these lists before, you will see that this one is typical.
It offers lots of links with background about the works and performers; concert times (Eastern); and how long the online version is accessible.
Many of the performers will not be familiar to you but others – such as pianist Mitsuko Uchida (below, in a photo by Hiroyuki Ito for the Times), who will perform an all-Schubert recital, will be very familiar.
But the critics once again emphasize new music and even several world premieres – including one by Richard Danielpour — and a path-breaking but only recently recorded live performance of the 1920 opera “Die Tote Stadt” (The Dead City) by long-neglected composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold (below), who is best known for his Hollywood movie scores but who also wrote compelling classical concert hall music. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear soprano Renée Fleming sing “Marietta’s Song.’)
But some works that are more familiar by more standard composers – including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Ravel and Copland – are also included.
The Times critics have also successfully tried to shine a spotlight on Black composers and Black performers, such as the clarinetist and music educator Anthony McGill (below top), who will perform a clarinet quintet by composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (below) and music in the setting of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
No purists, the critics also suggest famous oboe and clarinet works in transcriptions for the saxophone by composer-saxophonist Steven Banks (below).
Also featured is a mixed media performance of words and music coordinated by the award-winning Nigerian-American novelist, essayist and photographer Teju Cole (below), whose writings and photos are irresistible to The Ear.
Here is a link to the story in the Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/arts/music/classical-music-streaming-concerts.html
Are there other online concerts in March – local, regional, national or international – that you recommend in addition to the events listed in the Times?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: Happy Birthday to Lenny at 100! Here are some ways to celebrate today’s Bernstein centennial
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By Jacob Stockinger
One hundred years ago today, the versatile and world-celebrated American musician Leonard Bernstein (below) was born.
For most of his adult life, starting with his meteoric rise after his nationally broadcast debut with the New York Philharmonic, Lenny remained an international star that has continued to shine brightly long after his death at 72 in 1990.
When his father Sam was asked why he wouldn’t pay for young Lenny’s piano lessons and why he resisted the idea of a career in music for his son, he said simply: “I didn’t know he would grow up to be Leonard Bernstein.”
Lenny! The name itself is shorthand for a phenomenon, for musical greatness as a conductor, composer (below, in 1955), pianist, educator, popularizer, advocate, humanitarian and proselytizer, and so much more.
Here is a link to the Wikipedia biography where you can check out the astonishing extent of Lenny’s career and his many firsts, from being the first major American-born and American-trained conductor — he studied at Harvard University and the Curtis Institute of Music — to his revival of Gustav Mahler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bernstein
You should also view the engaging YouTube video at the bottom.
So eager have the media been to mark the centennial of Leonard Bernstein, one might well ask: “Have you had enough Lenny yet?”
New recordings and compilations of recordings have been issued and reissued.
Numerous books have been published.
Many new photos of the dramatic, expressive and photogenic Lenny (below, by Paul de Hueck) have emerged.
TV stations have discussed him and Turner Classic Movies rebroadcast several of his “Young People’s Concerts.”
For weeks, radio stations have been drowning us with his various performances, especially his performances of his own Overture to “Candide.”
Still, today is the actual Leonard Bernstein centennial and the culmination of the build-up and hype, and if you haven’t paid attention before today, chances are you wind find Encounters with Lenny unavoidable this weekend.
Yet if you pay attention, you are sure to learn new things about Lenny who seems an inexhaustible supply of insights and interesting information, a man of productive contradictions.
With that in mind, The Ear has just a few suggestions for this weekend, with other tributes coming during the season from the Madison Symphony Orchestra, the University of Wisconsin’s Mead Witter School of Music and other music groups and individuals.
You can start by listening to the radio.
For most of the daytime today Wisconsin Public Radio with pay homage to Lenny. It will start at 10 a.m. with Classics by Request when listeners will ask to hear favorite pieces and offer personal thoughts and memories. After that a couple of more hours of Bernstein’s music will be broadcast on WPR.
Then on Sunday at 2 p.m., WPR host Norman Gilliland (below top) will interview Madison Symphony Orchestra conductor John DeMain (below bottom, by Prasad) about working with Lenny.
Here, thanks to National Public Radio (NPR), is the best short overview that The Ear has heard so far:
Want to know more about Lenny the Man as well as Lenny the Musician?
Try this review from The New Yorker by David Denby of daughter Jamie Bernstein’s book (below) that has juicy anecdotes and new information about growing up with her famous father.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/leonard-bernstein-through-his-daughters-eyes
And here, from Time magazine, is the little known story of how Lenny the Humanitarian conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors (below):
http://time.com/5376731/leonard-bernstein-holocaust-survivors-concert/
What is your favorite tribute to Bernstein so far? Leave a link in the COMMENT section if you can.
What is you favorite composition by Bernstein?
What is your favorite performance by Bernstein?
What would you like to say or tell others about Leonard Bernstein?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: Van Cliburn biopic is in the works with young star Ansel Elgort to play the late, great American pianist. Plus, Madison maestro John DeMain remembers opera maestro Julius Rudel.
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear sees that something for both the ears and the eyes is coming down the pike.
Hollywood sources have confirmed that a biographical film –- yes, a biopic -– about the American pianist Van Cliburn (below) , who died last year at 78 of bone cancer, is in the works.
That is as it should be, despite what some classical musicians see as shortcomings in Cliburn’s artistry.
Here is a post The Ear did before about the opinions that members of the public and musicians have concerning Cliburn:
https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/classical-music-how-good-was-pianist-van-cliburn/
Cliburn was the first classical artist to make a million-selling record -– he played the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23 — on the RCA label (below and at the bottom). It was the same work with which, at age 23, he unexpectedly won the First International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958.
His victory during the height of The Cold War was an event that led to a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City (bel0w) and a meteoric career, then to premature burn-out and an early retirement from the concert stage. (You can see an archival historic footage at the bottom in a YouTube video. Complete performances by Van Cliburn of the same concerto are also on YouTube.)
And, if The Ear recalls correctly, Van Cliburn became a phenom or superstar who sold out houses, and was the first classical artist to get paid a fee of $10,000 for a one-night performance.
Not many classical musicians have the stuff to become the subject of a biopic.
Some composers, especially Ludwig van Beethoven and Frederic Chopin, have lent themselves to such a treatment, several times in the latter case. (We will overlook the case of the mentally ill performer David Helfgott in “Shine,” which seemed more a pathology than a biography.)
But The Ear can’t think of another individual performer, although he remembers more general subjects like “The Competition.”
The young actor Ansel Elgort (below), who The Ear thinks resembles the young Cliburn (who resembles fellow Texan Lyle Lovett), has been cast in the leading role, which focuses on Cliburn’s early years and his victory in Moscow. Apparently, Elgort himself also plays the piano quite well -– but my guess is that he does not play well enough to play it the way that the Juilliard School-trained Cliburn did.
But Elgort’s star is on the ascent, given his performance in the much praised and popular current release (“The Fault In Our Stars,” about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love.
Anyway here are some links to stories about Van Cliburn, Ansel Elgort and the forthcoming movie:
To CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ansel-elgort-to-star-in-van-cliburn-biopic/
To the Dallas Morning News, in Cliburn’s hometown:
To TIME magazine with a good video accompanying it:
http://time.com/2917530/ansel-elgort-van-cliburn/
To another video with good comparison photos of Cliburn and Elgort:
http://www.hitfix.com/news/ansel-elgort-playing-van-cliburn-in-new-biopic
To Norman Lebrecht’s tweet-like comment on his popular blog Slipped Disc:
http://slippedisc.com/2014/06/ansel-is-picked-to-play-van-cliburn-in-biopic/
What other classical music performers would you like to see treated on a biopic?
I nominate the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, a closeted gay man who led a dramatic life including encounters and confrontations with Soviet leaders and his American tour plus his eccentric late-life habits that included touring around Europe in a van playing in schools and old churches and using out-of-tune pianos. And perhaps also the legendary operatic soprano Maria Callas, who was known for being tempestuous and temperamental as well as supremely gifted in both singing and acting. (There was a Broadway play about her, “Master Class” by Terrence McNally, the same writer who did the “Dead Man Walking,” the opera by Jake Heggie.)
Your nominations?
The Ear wants to hear.
JOHN DeMAIN ON JULIUS RUDEL
And speaking of celebrities, John DeMain (below, in photo by Prasad), the music director and conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the artistic director of the Madison Opera, sent in his remembrance of the late, great opera conductor Julius Rudel, who led the now-defunct City Opera of New York and who died a week ago at 93:
Here is a link to the Rudel posting:
And here is John DeMain’s remembrance:
“It was my great honor to be chosen for the Julius Rudel Award at the New York City Opera in 1971. The purpose of the stipend was to allow an American conductor to work closely with Maestro Rudel to learn how to become an artistic director of an opera company.
Rudel (below) was far and away the best conductor in the house. His performances were vital, theatrical, and intensely musically expressive. His “Marriage of Figaro” was an unforgettable experience for me. I prepared the auditions of singers for the company, and got to sit in on the casting conversations, and learned the criterion for casting a singer in an opera.
Rudel was extremely demanding musically, and, of course, expanded the repertoire of the company in all directions. He had great flair for American opera and musical theater.
The bottom line for me, however, was he delivered totally engrossing performances night after night. He also was a mentor to me, and provided counsel and advice as new career opportunities presented themselves to me.
I consider Julius Rudel’s time at the City Opera as the “golden age” of that company. It was during that time that Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Norman Treigle, Beverly Sills, and many other greats were singing on that stage.
I’m grateful to have had him in my life.
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