Carnegie Hall Review:

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director
Camilla Tilling, Soprano
Russell Braun, Baritone
Saint Louis Symphony Chorus
The Saint Louis Children’s Choir – Concert Choir

Saturday April 1, 2006 at 8pm

A.J. Goldmann

Spring, the season of birth and renewal, is finally upon us. So why is it that all the sudden so much of New York’s classical music scene is devoted to mourning and introspection? Robert Spano, musical director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra started the trend two weeks ago when he brought his orchestra to Carnegie in a performance of Verdi’s requiem. That work was also heard last week in three performances by Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic. Most recently, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and their dynamic new musical director David Robertson, visited Carnegie for a program that paired John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” with Brahms’ “Ein Deutsches Requiem.”

Adams’ 2002 Pulitzer-prize winning composition was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Saturday night’s performance marked the Carnegie Hall debut of this half-hour long work which mixes recorded sound – voices, sirens, footsteps – with full orchestra, chorus and children’s chorus. The text is drawn primarily from the “Portraits of Grief” that ran daily in the New York Times for nearly a year after the attacks. Such a concept can easily seem heavy-handed and runs a risk of being trite; listening to the work on the recording put out by Nonesuch, one feels torn between the undeniable reverence of the work and the suspicion that it comes dangerously close to being gimmicky. However, hearing the recorded elements pumped through speakers scattered around Stern auditorium and accompanied both by the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and the St. Louis Children’s Choirs – Concert Choir was a revelation. Robertson was expert at balancing the various forces at play, making for an elegant and elegiac performance. The sounds and sirens with which the piece opens seemed to invade the hall from outside. When the orchestra of chorus came in, there was a ghostly, dissonant interplay between the strings, horns and voices softly weeping, “ The piece erupts into anguished crescendos followed by abrupt and draining silences. There are dirge-like moments to Adams’ composition and much of the dialogue sounds liturgical. But even with a work this somber, Robertson bounded with enthusiasm, an ever-present twinkle in his eye.

Would that Robertson had harnessed the forces at his disposal with equal finesse for the Brahms. “Ein Deutsches Requiem” shares little in common with other forays into the medium; less so even than Verdi’s exercise in operatic excess. To start, Brahms chose not the Latin mass for his libretto but rather fragments of scripture drawn from the old and new testaments. The work also sprang from a personal source, the death of the composer’s mother in 1865. Out of his grief, Brahms fashioned an extraordinary and innovative requiem intended for the living, rather than the dead.
The opening movement unfolded slowly and softly. With the introduction of the chorus, the orchestra seemed to be holding back a bit too much. The horns were nicely accentuated amid the chorus’ restraint. Robertson let the tempo quicken as the movement wore on, though he let the music simmer in places.
The SLSO players and chorus performed best where it mattered, in the second movement and emotional center of the work, “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras.” The violins entered shrieking. While Robertson achieved a desirable balance on the whole between the orchestra and chorus, the players could have managed at a notch or two lower. It was, suitably, the most powerful moment of the work.
In the ensuing movements, the baritone Russell Braun sang in dark, jagged tones mostly well suited to the material. The cantorial flavor of his voice could be either affecting or irritating. The Soprano Camilla Tilling made an impact with her even smaller role. Her powerful, young voice possesses a simple beauty enhanced by a pleasant crispness. In the later movements, however, some of the communication between the chorus and the musicians broke down, and one realized forlornly that the evening’s most thrilling moments

Carnegie Hall Review:

Thomas Quasthoff, Bass-Baritone
Justus Zeyen, Piano
Saturday. March 18, 2006 at 8pm

A.J. Goldmann 

   
Few singers working today can sell out Carnegie Hall for a solo hour-long recital. Yet that is precisely what bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff did last Saturday night. To be sure, there is a certain crude novelty in seeing the diminutive and armless Mr. Quasthoff perform. Yet those who were compelled by morbid fascination to attend the concert would have missed the point entirely. The sole work on the program was Schubert’s great song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin.” Accompanying Mr. Quasthoff was the capable Justus Zeyen with whom Mr. Quastoff recently recorded the work for the Deutsche Grammophon label.
    The genesis of Schubert’s vocal masterwork has a telling connection with the composer’s biography. In 1823, the year he was recently diagnosed with the syphilis that would ultimately kill him, he discovered the work of the poetry Wilhelm Müller, whose deceptively simple and naïve poems are in fact a send-up of German romantic conventions. Müller’s extreme irony in the face of death was no doubt what attracted the sickly Schubert to this work. The composer somewhat amended the work for his own purposes, which tells of a young lad how is unhappily in love with the miller’s daughter. He admires her from the distance, but it is the shrewd and sexually charged hunter who succeeds in seducing the girl. In the end, the youth drowns himself in a stream.
    There are many ways for a singer to approach this lyrical yet overly dramatic material. Those used to Dietrich Fischer Dieskau’s impassioned and muscular interpretation may have found Mr. Quasthoff’s reading too soft and subtle: on the whole a bit too slight. Mr. Quasthoff lyrical baritone often embraces the listener in a delicate caress. None of his flourishes were at all rhetorical, nor did they ever encroach on melodrama. At his most spirited and soulful, there was always an introspective element that seemed to hold the dramatic potential of the performance in check. Zeyen was a careful and attentive accompanist throughout the evening, playing with delicacy and at times surprisingly independent. All around, the subtle coloring Mr. Quasthoff brought to his performance made the evening very gentle and calming. This was affirmed by his careful articulation of the German. He brought honesty and clarity to the work, often making repeated phrases sound flutter away softly. “Der Neugierige” became a caressing lullaby, partially sung in a mock-whisper that, while impossibly soft, somehow wafted gently through the hall. The most dramatic Quasthoff grew was in “Ungeduld,” in which he managed to get the point across without relying on pyrotechnics. Even in the tragic songs, Quasthoff seemed obviously to be enjoying himself. He was left himself leaving himself ample room for breathing and his voice never sounded strained. In fact, the entire recital seemed so plotted out and calculated that one actually felt a want of spontaneity. At times the performance seemed to stagnate suffering from how Quasthoff treated every word and every not like a newly discovered treasure to be savored as in “Des Müllers Blumen.” But on the whole, his reserve and care held him in good stead. Even in the tragic songs, like “Die liebe Farbe,” he managed to convey the sense of mournfulness though understatement.
 

Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul
February 19 – May 8 at MOMA

Reviewed by A.J. Goldmann

How strikingly thin the line between genius and madness can often seem is illustrated by the case of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. In the background of his most famous work, “The Scream,” Munch scribbled in a red wisp of cloud “’[The Scream] could only have been painted by a madman.” Indeed, throughout his lifetime, much of the establishment in Kristiania (present-day Oslo) and Berlin dismissed his work as the inappropriate reflections of an unsound mind. Whether a symptom or a cause of this criticism, Munch himself often felt himself going mad and even had himself committed to a Danish mental asylum.

Edvard Munch may not have been clinically mad, but he had enough neuroses to last the whole of Norway several generations. Obsessed with death, both exhilarated and terrified by sexuality, the product of a stern unbending father and a devout mother, he had a lot of personal baggage. The suggestion of madness that pervades Munch’s paintings steams from a keen understanding of the human condition and a striving to discover new techniques to express it in all its complexity and unsavoriness.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul, on view at the Museum of Modern Art through May 8th is a thoroughly engaging and entertaining retrospective that follows the recent trend of mounting “audience-proof” exhibitions. As the costs of mounting a major retrospective increases, so to does the necessity to organize a show that will not only be important but popular. Thus museums try and amass as many great and popular works of art as they can in order to satiate a public that seeks the comfort of the familiar. Aside from this general observation, one can find little fault in the exhibition itself except insofar as one doesn’t walk away from it with a substantially changed take on Munch’s oeuvre. Though Edvard Munch is beyond a doubt one of the most exciting offerings of the spring, there’s little revelatory about the show except perhaps to reacquaint New Yorkers with a cross-section of Munch’s voluminous body of work. That having been said, the question to ask about the exhibit is not whether one should go, but when? Unfortunately, the exhibit sees a perpetual stream of visitors, which can make for an uncomfortable atmosphere and a less-than-optimal viewing experience.

It seems the folks at MOMA didn’t anticipate such an enthusiastic reaction, or else they would have distributed tickets with time slots, much the same way that they did for their monumental Matisse / Picasso show in Queens four years ago. But of course there’s a question of how on earth a museum that charges $20 for general admission could try such a thing. It seems we’re going to have to deal with bigger crowds and noisier galleries.
Once you resign yourself to these few inevitabilities, there is far too much to be enjoyed in this show in a single viewing. The MoMA has nicely reconfigured its versatile fifth floor exhibition space for the show. While housed in four spacious rooms, the exhibition teem with so many wall-to-wall paintings that it can, at times, overwhelm.

The first painting that greets the viewer is “The Dance of Life” (1889-90), which seems half-expressionist, half-surreal. The bluish-purple splotches of sky feed into the water to form a frigid background against which the eerie figures – both dancing and at rest - seems alternately emotive and blank. The exhibit continues with Munch’s naturalistic work from the 1880’s. Even in the quiet domestic scenes comprises much of his early painting, fear and uncertainty seem to lurk silently in the shadows. The earliest attempt at self-portrait from 1881-2 reveals a Flemish influence while seeming to point the way to the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Two of the most arresting fixtures in the first room feature the artist’s sister Inger. In a portrait Inger from 1892, Munch reduces the figure and background to the same plane until space and surface become one. Such flattening becomes a signature of Munch’s style and is glimpsed again in “Death in the Sickroom” (1893), which shows Munch and his family members around the sickbed of his sister Sophie who died of tuberculosis at the age of 15. However, Chillingly, Munch depicts all his family members at the age they would have been in rather than the event itself. Munch depicts his own face as a blank.

Much of the second room is given over to the work of the 1890’s and in particular “The Frieze of Life.” First exhibited first in its entirety during the Berlin Secession of 1902, the “Frieze” is the general title of a series of canvases in which Munch tackled no less that the mystery and meaning of life itself. The works in the series tell the cumulative story of Love from its wondrous conception to its inevitable demise. The Frieze includes many of Munch’s best-known works such as “The Shriek” (1893) – not on display - “Metabolism” (1899), “Madonna,” (1894-5) “Mermaid,” and “Vampire.” and many will chuckle to learn that it was initially condemned as the immoral fantasies of a sick mind. In these paintings, we glimpse the techniques that will become trademarks of Munch’s style. In many of them, he deemphasizes all unimportant detail by blurring the features. In works like “The Sick Child” (1896), “Moonlight” (1893) and “Angst” (1894) Munch strives to transcend surface reality to produce expressionistic works of deep human psychology.

Tension and loneliness pervade Munch’s work from the late 1880’s onward and occupy a central place in the Frieze. As in much of his work, the erotic content is always laced with morbidity. In “Madonna” he depicts a naked woman in a state of abandon, with her hair loose, her waist fluid and her arms contorted, as if viewed by her lover during intercourse. Woven in with this depiction of female sexuality is the explicit link with death that marks all Munch’s forays into the realm of the intimate; Munch’s Madonna wears a “corpse’s smile.” “Vampire” (1893-4) was conceived merely to depict of a woman kissing a man on the nape of his neck. The absence of anything overtly violent or supernatural feeds Munch’s suggestion that a woman can drain a man of all life. Here, the eternal kiss becomes the eternal bite.

A whole gallery space is devoted to Munch’s graphic art: etchings, lithographs, aquatint and woodcuts. Very much attracted by the promise of a wider audience, he increasingly turned his attention to graphic arts in the hopes of spreading his message even further. Among the works displayed are two lithographs of the Scream and numerous reproductions of the Frieze.

The offerings in the final room of the exhibition are all from the 20th century offer a glimpse of the lesser-known Munch. We get hints and glimmers of what Munch was up to during his four final decades, but the spotlight is so focused on the work from the 1890s that nearly everything that comes in its wake seems like an afterthought. Well, I suppose MoMA needs to leave the Munch Museum in Oslo with something to exhibit until mid-May.