Berlioz and Nagano: Beauty & Frustration at Place des Arts

by Paul E. Robinson

The Berlioz Requiem requires an enormous orchestra with extra brass and percussion. It's a costly work to undertake and is necessarily a rarity on the concert circuit. Over the years, nevertheless, I have had the good fortune to hear a fair number of performances; the two best I ever heard – or expect to hear – were both conducted by the same man: Seiji Ozawa.

The first Ozawa rendition I heard was in Salzburg with the Orchestre de Paris and the second at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. On both occasions Ozawa effortlessly coordinated the four required brass groups situated around the hall. He not only achieved monumental and thrilling climaxes, but also captured the ethereal quality of the work which is its dominant characteristic.

Since Kent Nagano was at one time Ozawa’s assistant in Boston, I expected great things from Nagano’s own performance of the Requiem this week at Place des Arts in Montreal. I was disappointed, but I don’t think the fault was entirely, or even primarily, Nagano’s.

I have come to believe that music reviewers should begin their reports by stating the location of their seats. The same concert can sound very different depending on seat location. This is especially true of a work like the Berlioz Requiem. Berlioz’ concept was for a large chorus and orchestra to be positioned in their usual places on stage, with four brass groups stationed around the hall. In Place des Arts, for this performance, there were brass ensembles placed on either side of the main floor (Parterre). The other two groups were placed at the first balcony level (Corbeille) at the very front of the two aisles. Anyone sitting on the ground floor about half way back probably got a very good sense of what Berlioz had in mind.

In the Dies Irae movement – specifically, the section called Tuba mirum ("Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth") – the brass groups let loose a barrage of fanfares suggesting the majesty and terror of the day of judgement. Berlioz’ music is cleverly conceived to be at once powerful, awe-inspiring, and conflicted. If one is fortunate enough to have a seat more or less equidistant from each of the musical groups, the effect makes your hair stand on end. Unfortunately, my seat was in one of the worst locations for an ideal appreciation of these wondrous happenings - just a few feet away from one of the Corbeille brass groups. I heard this group just fine, but not as part of the whole, and so missed the intended effect. For me, and quite possibly for many of the people in my section, this ‘isolated’ effect was simply annoying and unpleasant!

But after all, these quadraphonic effects are really a small, if extraordinary, part of the Berlioz Requiem. Elsewhere in the piece, Nagano achieved an exquisite lyricism. The choir, prepared by guest chorus master Michael Zaugg, gave him nearly everything he wanted. In later performances the sopranos will probably do better with their first entry than they did on opening night.

The members of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) played impeccably, with flutist Timothy Hutchins performing miracles of breath control. Those famous flute/trombone chords are always treacherous in terms of intonation but the OSM musicians nailed most of them spot-on.

I have already blamed my seat location for some problems with the Dies Irae, but other weaknesses have to be laid at the feet of the hall’s dreadful acoustics and/or Kent Nagano’s direction.

Berlioz’ score for the Requiem calls for eight sets of timpani. There were only four in this performance. Nonetheless, even four timpanists can produce a bigger sound than I heard in this performance. The effect here was one of four grown men beating on tubs of marshmallows. Totally ineffectual. As for the soft cymbal strokes – a magical touch in this work and one which Wagner borrowed in Lohengrin – Nagano apparently added a Dada-esque mime episode to the Requiem. One percussionist was seen to rub two large cymbals together - but not a sound was heard. In the Salzburg Ozawa performance mentioned earlier, each of the eight timpanists executed the delicate swish with a small pair of cymbals and the sound was both exotic and otherworldly.

With a new hall for the OSM already under construction, complaints about the old one are admittedly a waste of breath. Best to talk about what Place des Arts acoustics do provide. For soft singing and playing, they are acceptable and much of the Requiem is comprised of quiet music. A case in point was the Sanctus, played and sung as beautifully as one is likely ever to hear it. Tenor Michael Schade was wisely brought down to the front of the stage for his solo. Had he been stuck back in the chorus, he might have burst a blood vessel trying to make himself heard. Nagano’s tempo was expansive, but Schade filled out the phrases with beautiful and meaningful sound.

The performance apart, I was quite taken with Dujka Smoje’s programme notes. I hope members of the audience took time to read them. They are somewhat academic, but enormously thought-provoking. I don’t recall ever hearing Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts described as “an atheist’s mass,” but Smoje has a point. He argues that the Requiems of Verdi and Brahms could be similarly described, and he might have added Britten (War Requiem).

So why did all these great composers use traditional liturgical texts if they didn’t believe a word of them? Smoje argues that “the religious frame is only a pretext for the reconciliation with the finitude of man.” It is not necessary to be a Christian to reflect on the mysteries of life and death, good and evil, and the human condition. Believers of all faiths - and philosophers too - have been preoccupied with these matters for centuries. The true believers more often embrace firm and comforting conclusions. Philosophers and composers like Berlioz, Brahms, Verdi, Britten and Mahler go on wrestling with the questions. The words of the last movement of the Berlioz Requiem – the Agnus Dei – speak of paradise and eternal peace, but the music is not quite so reassuring.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

Heart and Soul of the Knowlton Festival - Kent Nagano

by Paul E. Robinson

Le Chapiteau was filled to capacity and the sun was shining brightly on Sunday morning when Kent Nagano gave the downbeat for Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Two hours later, after the closing chords of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, it was clear that the Knowlton Festival had ended twelve days of fine music-making in triumph. Several hundred audience members stayed after the concert to enjoy an excellent buffet lunch served in the Chapiteau lobby. From the comments I overheard, the combination of beautiful music, good weather and tasty food had made believers of nearly everyone.

Brahms Symphony # 1 Concludes Cycle
In this final concert of the Knowlton Festival 2009, Kent Nagano and the OSM concluded their Brahms cycle with the magnificent Symphony No. 1. Today's performance was of a piece with those which had preceded it. Nagano likes his Brahms lyrical and transparent. In all his readings, one notices a wealth of detail often passed over by other conductors.

That said, to my mind, Nagano’s approach to the first movement of this particular symphony was a little sleepy. The second movement began extremely slowly and I wondered whether it could be sustained. It was! The OSM strings adjusted their bowing and, in the case of the solo wind players, dug deep for extra breath to carry them through the long lines. The horn and violin solos were exquisite.

The last movement is really the heart of this masterpiece and Nagano shaped it beautifully. The whisper-soft pizzicati were perfectly coordinated. Scarcely a sound was heard from the wholly attentive audience. The performance ended in a blaze of sound with particularly vigorous contributions from the OSM timpanist.

June Anderson, Sumi Jo and Susan Platts Sing Strauss
Every festival concert this season featured vocal music. On this occasion, we heard soprano June Anderson in Beethoven’s Ah! Perfido Op. 65, and in the "Marschallin’s Monologue" from Act I of Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss. To cap the evening, Anderson was joined by soprano Sumi Jo and mezzo-soprano Susan Platts for the final scene from the same opera. Anderson and Sumi Jo are seasoned veterans, and Canadian Susan Platts held her own in this distinguished company. Nagano accompanied the artists with characteristic sensitivity, giving the audience music-making on a consistently high level.

Kudos to Maestro Kent Nagano
I had the privilege and the pleasure of attending nearly every concert in this year’s festival. It became obvious to me early on that much of the success of the Knowlton Festival depends on the artistic vision and energy of one man - Kent Nagano.

My own rough analysis suggests to me that, during the twelve days of the festival, Nagano must have commuted from Knowlton to Montreal and back at least a dozen times. Conducting seven concerts, Nagano must have been involved in at least twenty rehearsals of one kind or another, and yet, at each festival performance, he appeared fresh, involved and in total command. And let’s not forget that just days before the Knowlton Festival began, Nagano flew into Montreal from Germany, after an arduous series of opera performances – with very different repertoire - in Munich. And right after the Knowlton festival, he heads to Italy for performances of Don Giovanni with Canada’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

There’s more than energy and artistic breadth to admire about Nagano. From a musician’s perspective, his technique is exceptional. You may notice that while many conductors keep both arms in motion doing pretty much the same thing, most of Nagano’s conducting is done with his right hand. You may also notice that the right hand moves in very carefully circumscribed motions. Most musicians prefer a conductor who is not flailing his arms all over the place, one whose gestures are clear and precise. In this respect Nagano is the ideal conductor. He gives the musicians what they need to give the best of themselves. In addition, he is - in his quiet and diplomatic way - absolutely insistent on getting what he wants. Musicians don’t mind being pushed and disciplined to a certain extent, as long as the person doing the pushing is well-informed and confines his pushing to musical matters. Again, this is an accurate description of Nagano.

Knowlton Festival Here to Stay?
The Knowlton Festival was launched last year by Kent Nagano and local businessman Marco Genoni to celebrate the glories of bel canto. Nearly all the concerts were given on successive weekends. This year, the repertoire was broadened and many more concerts were added to give music-lovers something to enjoy every night of the almost two-week long festival. Perhaps the expansion was a little too ambitious - the weeknight concerts drew smaller audiences; on the other hand, the festival certainly maintained a presence in the community it didn’t have last year.

As much as I enjoyed this new and expanded Knowlton Festival, I harbor some lingering concerns regarding its sustainability:

Maestro Kent Nagano is clearly the heart and soul of the Knowlton Festival; what will happen if he decides to leave the OSM? Would he continue his affiliation with Knowlton? Remember that the Lanaudière Festival lost Nagano and the OSM to Knowlton because Nagano is committed to being in Munich in July. How tempted will Nagano be to take on opportunities that will limit his appearances with the Knowlton Festival in the coming years?

And how long can anyone operate a summer festival featuring a major symphony orchestra in a small hall seating 850? I can’t think of any festivals anywhere in the world that can pull this off. Most successful festivals utilizing a small hall engage a student or training orchestra. A full-sized professional orchestra typically increases festival operating costs, to the point where halls seating thousands are required to balance the budget. Of course private donations and government grants are always required to make up the difference, but the fundraising challenge the Knowlton Festival has given itself appears almost insurmountable. Hopefully, festival organizers are already busy developing a sustainable long-term concept.

Festival Programming Too Many Missed!

On the penultimate day of the festival I heard some fine singing by soprano Marianne Lambert and tenor Juan Noval-Moro. Unfortunately, only about 50 people attended this ticketed concert at Chapelle St-Édouard.

I also took in part of an excellent - and well attended - master class by conductor and coach Massimiliano Muralli in West Brome. Muralli walked some young singers through excerpts from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the expertise he shared with them (and the audience) was invaluable. He emphasized the importance of language in opera – accenting Italian correctly and really understanding the meaning of the words; the need for singers to respond to the harmony in the music and to what the orchestra is “saying”; and the importance of controlling volume to produce a more beautiful sound.

Finally, I had the pleasure of seeing a wonderful children’s opera called Orfea and the Golden Harp. This was a Jeunesses Musicales Canada presentation featuring a Toronto-based group called Theatre Cotton Robes. The two performers smoothly alternated French and English and their singing and costume changes kept the children in the audience enthralled. Much of the music was taken from well-known operas. This was a fine introduction to opera and should have been seen by more people. Again, there were fewer than fifty people in the church. Perhaps a greater effort could have been made encourage parents and children in the area to attend. It would be wise, both in terms of music education and audience development, to invite this nifty little troupe back to the festival again next year. But next time make sure that local schools are alerted! Who knows? Perhaps the local school board would even consider sharing some of the cost!

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

Knowlton Festival 2009: Nagano/OSM/Hampson Outstanding in Brahms/Strauss Programme

by Paul E. Robinson

Last night at the Knowlton Festival, Kent Nagano continued his Brahms cycle with the OSM playing the Symphony No. 3 in F major Op. 90. The evening’s guest soloist was American baritone Thomas Hampson (photo: right) in three songs by Richard Strauss. It was arguably one of the best concerts of the festival.

The Brahms Third opened the programme and from the first bars, Nagano’s ear for balance and beauty of sound was again evident. As the first movement unfolded, there was more. I wouldn’t say there was abandon – that quality doesn’t seem to be a part of Nagano’s artistic persona – but there was real intensity. This symphony is regarded as autumnal and reflective, and is the only one of the four Brahms symphonies to end quietly. In the first and last movements, however, there is excitement and grandeur and Nagano and his musicians captured much of it. I must say I have rarely heard the orchestra play better. The wind solos were not just accurate, but memorable. The string textures were rich and finely detailed.

Musicians know that the Third Symphony is very difficult as an ensemble piece. Nagano and the OSM players had obviously done their wood-shedding, and it paid off. The syncopations in the last movement were exceptionally precise. Much of the credit for the standard of playing must always go to the musicians themselves, but the conductor’s perception of sound is obviously crucial to the shape of the whole.

Nagano has an ear for both the big picture and the smallest detail. As far as the big picture is concerned, I was struck by his slower than usual tempo for the second movement. At this tempo, the lower strings had time to be expansive in their phrasing; they positively glowed. In the fourth movement, Nagano chose to maintain the quick tempo right into and through the second subject, where other conductors ease up. This strategy worked perfectly and added to the excitement without any loss of melodic grace.

Programming Major Work Before Intermission May be Wise
A minor point, but a significant one perhaps: at most of the Knowlton Festival concerts, the major work concludes the concert. At the final chord, a fair number of concert-goers – understandably – make a dash for the exits to make sure they don’t get caught up in the long lines to board busses.

Last night the Third Symphony, the major work on the programme, opened the concert. At its conclusion audience members stayed in their seats – or, more accurately, on their feet – to applaud Nagano and the OSM at the end of the performance. The ovation was warm, vocal, and sustained. Conductor and musicians clearly appreciated it.

Incidentally, in his opening remarks tonight, Knowlton Festival president and executive director Marco Genoni apologized for the transportation challenges and assured folks that these were being dealt with by management.

Baritone Thomas Hampson Beguiles Knowlton!
After intermission, one of the leading stars of the Metropolitan Opera took the stage to perform some rarely-heard songs by Richard Strauss. Thomas Hampson is by now a beloved figure in New York and around the world and everything he does is informed by scholarly preparation, intelligent phrasing and a ringing voice. He was in fine voice last night and I thoroughly enjoyed the repertoire.

Hampson sang three songs, written in the years 1897-99, around the time Strauss was composing works such as Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, but before the composition of his most famous operas.

For me, the most impressive of the songs presented was Notturno Op. 44 No. 1. The poetry is by Richard Dehmel, the same man who later inspired Schönberg in his Verklärte Nacht. Since these are orchestral songs and the composer is Richard Strauss at the top of his game, it is not surprising that something amazing happens in the orchestra in every bar.

The orchestration, with its use of trombones at the bottom of their register combined with double basses and contrabassoon, suggested a sort of dry run for Elektra or Salome. The sustained chords played by this combination of instruments were ominous and unsettling. On top of these chords were frequent violin solos – virtually the top and bottom of the orchestra playing together. The sounds were mesmerizing and gave Hampson the ideal framework for his rendering of the text. A great song and an ideal performance.

Hampson also sang Hymnus Op. 33 No. 3 and Pilgers Morgenlied Op. 33 No. 4. Even without the texts available to them, the audience loved what they heard and demanded an encore. Hampson obliged with Rheinlegendchen (Rhine Legend) from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. This is folk poetry rendered into Mahlerian folk song and Hampson sang it beautifully. With all the accompanying body language, it was obvious to the audience that Hampson was telling some kind of amusing story. One wished he had let the audience in on at least the outlines of this charming tale before he sang it.

Hampson is justly famous for his Mahler, having recorded most of the songs with Leonard Bernstein and written extensively about the composer and his music. Come to think of it, it was more than twenty years ago that he made the Bernstein recordings and Hampson sounds better than ever! Anyone wanting to know more about Hampson should visit his website. It is filled with information including titles and texts of all the songs in his repertoire.

Incidentally, the violin soloist in Strauss’ Notturno was Andrew Wan, one of the OSM’s two concertmasters. Wan just joined the orchestra last year and it is already apparent that he is a huge asset for his stellar playing and for the obvious energy and leadership he brings to the role.

Good Sound Might Go Further with Portable Shell
I have long thought that where one sits at a concert has a lot to do with one’s impression of the performance. This is probably less true in a great hall but critical in a poor or mediocre hall. Le Chapiteau (tent) at the Knowlton Festival is not a great concert hall nor does it pretend to be one. Last night I sat in the sixth row – for many of the other concerts I have been much further back and off to the side – and for the first time I really began to feel I was hearing the orchestra properly and well. I would guess that anywhere in the first ten rows one will have a similar experience. The problem is that these are also the most expensive seats. A great experience for those who can afford to sit there; for the rest of the audience, some work needs to be done to enhance the sound. A portable shell of some kind might help.

Coming Next: Today at 5 pm Susan Platts gives a free recital and tonight at 8 pm Massimiliano Muralli leads the Festival Orchestra with prize winners from Placido Domingo’s Operalia competitions in excerpts from Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, and Kent Nagano conducts excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin. Tomorrow (Saturday) morning the busiest day of the festival begins at 10 am with a children’s opera Orfea and the Golden Harp presented by Jeunesses Musicales du Canada, followed by a master class with Italian conductor Massimiliano Muralli. Marianne Lambert gives a recital at 2 pm. In the evening, there is a second performance of Bellini’s La Sonnambula led by Kent Nagano and featuring Sumi Jo. Finally, on Sunday morning at 11 am – note the unusual time for the concert – Kent Nagano conducts the OSM in the closing concert with soloists June Anderson, Sumi Jo and Susan Platts in the final scene from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. Nagano also completes his Brahms cycle with the Symphony No. 1. For more information visit the festival website.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

Knowlton Festival 2009: The Incomparable Sumi Jo in Bellini’s La Sonnambula

by Paul E. Robinson

Kent Nagano (photo: above) is music director not only of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM), but also of the Bavarian State Opera. His operatic interests are broad and all-encompassing, and he is always looking for new challenges.

For the Knowlton Festival, Nagano has chosen to focus on one particular aspect of operatic literature, the so-called bel canto composers who flourished in Italy in the early part of the nineteenth century. Nagano’s interest in this music paid great dividends last year with very good performances of Bellini’s Norma. This year we heard another Bellini opera, La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), dating from 1831. Again, Nagano delivered the goods.

La Sonnambula and much else in the bel canto repertoire has been mercilessly parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan. The stories are silly and the music too often begins to sound like the same simple-minded patterns repeated over and over. These operas also became corrupted by self-promoting divas who took the elaborate ornamentation to the realm of total absurdity with their own interpolations. In recent years singers of the stature of Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland and others showed that when one makes a real effort to get back to what the composers intended, many of these operas can be seen in a new and positive light.

Festival Celebrates Unique Beauty of Classic Bel Canto
Nagano is doing for the bel canto operas what the period instrument specialists have been doing for music from earlier periods. He is searching for the correct style of singing and orchestral playing. He has discovered that Bellini’s operas are less like early Verdi and more like what came before in Schubert and Mozart. This means toning down the bombast and easing up on the vibrato, especially in the string playing. It also means shortening the notes. The result is that the Bellini orchestra becomes a somewhat more robust classical or Mozart orchestra. Similarly, the singing is scaled back to become more lyrical and far more intimate.

The Knowlton Festival has become the summer home of the OSM but even this fine, hard-working ensemble has limits in the number of services it can provide. For La Sonnambula the OSM is replaced by a ‘Festival Orchestra,’ made up of some of Québec’s finest free-lance players. I have no idea how much rehearsal was needed, but the results were very fine indeed. The Festival Orchestra responded to Nagano’s meticulous direction as if they had been playing together for years.

Sumi Jo Heads Cast of Consummate Bel Canto Stars
Performances of La Sonnambula are usually mounted as vehicles for star sopranos. There is no doubt that without a first-rate singer in the role of Amina, the production is unlikely to be successful. At last year’s festival, Sumi Jo (photo: right) was sensational in a concert of operatic excerpts and this year she easily topped that appearance. Her virtuosity was nearly impeccable and her soft singing, exquisite. In the tradition of the finest bel canto artists, she is able to use the ornamentation to convey the feeling of the moment, whether it be joy or sadness or something in between.

She was not alone. Nagano had chosen a superb cast, each of whom was well-schooled in bel canto style. Tenor Barry Banks has technical challenges of his own in the role of Elvino and tossed them off without any difficulty. Riccardo Zanellato as Rodolfo was a commanding presence and cultivated a conversational style of singing perfectly suited to the role. There wasn’t a weak link in this fine cast and the OSM Chorus, functioning in the opera much of the time as a sort of Greek chorus – G & S had a field day with this kind of thing – were precise and animated.

Simple, Effective Staging and Surtitles Enrich Concert Version
This performance was a concert version of the opera with some effective bits of staging by François Racine. Another positive element was the surtitles system set up behind the chorus. The texts, in both French and English, were large enough to be easily read from the back of the tent and always related to what was being sung. We may take surtitles for granted in opera performances but in fact this job must be put in the hands of a highly-skilled professional. In so doing, the Knowlton Festival team enormously enriched the experience for its audience.

A second performance of La Sonnambula is scheduled for Saturday, August 15. Anyone with the slightest interest in opera, bel canto, and great sopranos should be there. At press time, there were a few seats available but when the word gets out about what Sumi Jo, Kent Nagano and their colleagues are up to in Knowlton, those who delay buying tickets may well be disappointed.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

BEETHOVEN: Ideals of the French Revolution

Maximilian Schell, narrator; Adrianne Pieczonka, soprano
Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, OSM Chorus / Kent Nagano
Analekta AN 2 9942-3 2CDs (108 min 15 s)
***
Musically, The General is essentially Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont. But the original Goethe text has been set aside and replaced by a new one created by the Welsh music critic Paul Griffiths. The General is based on the Rwandan experiences of Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, as recounted in his book Shake Hands With the Devil. Dallaire was head of the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1993-1994. The world simply wasn’t interested in preventing the massacre and Dallaire returned to Canada a broken man.

For some reason Griffiths decided to tell the Rwanda story without mentioning either names or places. But without any mention of Rwanda, Dallaire, Tutsis and Hutus, Griffiths’ text is almost meaningless. This recording has been issued in both an English and a French version but neither one includes the text.

On the positive side, Nagano and the OSM play Beethoven’s music with great intensity. And the same goes for their performance of the Fifth Symphony on the second CD. Nagano’s performance indicates he has been strongly influenced by the period instrument specialists. He takes all the repeats and very quick tempi in accordance with Beethoven’s metronome markings. He has the strings play with little or no vibrato much of the time. The opening of the slow movement sounds strikingly different with this approach. There are some inconsistencies: why eliminate vibrato in the strings but allow it in the bassoon solos? And one can’t help wondering what the Fifth Symphony has to do with “the ideals of the French Revolution.”

Some fine music-making on this set but lots of questions too. Fans of Kent Nagano – and there are a growing number of them – will want to have this album as the first recorded documentation of his work in Montreal.

- Paul E. Robinson

OSM’s 75th with Mehta & Messiaen a Celebration of Sound!

reviewed by Paul Robinson

Canada doesn’t see much of Zubin Mehta these days but he still has a soft spot for Montreal and tries to return as often as he can to the city that helped him so much in his early days as a conductor. He was back again to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) last week and it turned into a great event for all concerned. Mehta has a home in Los Angeles, but he doesn’t conduct there much any more. His primary musical responsibilities are to the Israel Philharmonic – he was appointed music director for life in 1981 – and the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence, where he is currently at work on a new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Montreal Symphony and Zubin Mehta Grew Together in the 60s
In 1961, at the very beginning of his career, the OSM took a chance on 25-year-old Zubin Mehta and hired him as music director. For the next six years, he and the orchestra learned repertoire together, but within a year of his OSM appointment, Mehta also became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1962-77). His career quickly became international. In 1977, he became music director of the Israel Philharmonic, and then the New York Philharmonic (1978-91), and later, the Bavarian State Opera (1998-2006) in Munich. He is a regular guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic and has been invited by its members to conduct no fewer than four of its famous New Year’s concerts.

For his return visit to Montreal to celebrate the OSM’s 75th, Mehta put together a programme of works by Messiaen and Saint-Saens to be presented in the Notre Dame Basilica in Old Montreal. Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (Messiaen) was part of “Automne Messiaen 2008” being celebrated all over Montreal from September to December and culminating in performances of Messiaen’s opera Saint Francis of Assisi conducted by Kent Nagano. In fact, 2008 is the centenary of Messiaen’s birth: the actual date is December 10.

Mehta on Messiaen: “I really miss him!”

I had not realized that Mehta has been a great champion of Messiaen’s music over the years. At his press conference held a few days before the Montreal concert, Mehta talked about his relationship with Messiaen and his music, and passed on an amusing anecdote. It seems that Messiaen was in Tel Aviv for rehearsals of his Turangalila Symphony with the Israel Philharmonic. During the course of rehearsals the players became bored and restless and at one of the breaks some of them went to Messiaen and asked him to cut a couple of movements. Naturally, Messiaen was offended and made a counter-suggestion. Better they should cut the other work on the programme – Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony – and he would tell them exactly where to make the cuts! Mehta had to apologize to Messiaen over the incident. No word on whether anyone apologized to Mozart.

Mehta recalled that Messiaen often came to rehearsals wearing a colourful Hawaiian shirt with girls in hula skirts on it, but when it came to the performance of his music he was very serious and very strict.

Wind, Brass & Percussion Orchestration – When “Bigger” is “Better”

Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum was given its first performance in 1965 at the Church of St. Chapelle in Paris and then a month later at Chartres Cathedral. It is obviously designed to be performed in a large space with long reverberation time. The orchestra comprises only winds, brass and percussion and the music features slow-moving chords and percussion effects from various kinds of bells, gongs and tam-tams that are intended to reverberate in a large space. Notre Dame Basilica is indeed a large space, but in this case “bigger” is even better. The piece sounded wonderful in Notre Dame – especially the almost deafening percussion crescendos – but to have heard it in Chartres Cathedral would have been something else again.

Mehta conducted the Messiaen with his customary efficiency. Messiaen pupil Pierre Boulez could hardly have done better. Nor was Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum the only Messiaen heard during the evening. The concert began with a performance of the early (1932) organ piece Apparition de l’Église éternelle played by Pierre Grandmaison. This ten-minute work begins with a series of unsettling tone clusters, but gradually out of extreme dissonance comes relief in the form of the grandest and loudest major chords one is ever likely to hear from an organ. Presumably, this is the “apparition” of the title.

Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony Pure Sound, Beautifully Balanced

The major work on the programme - and the best-known - was Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 Organ, with organist Patrick Wedd. For all its deserved popularity, this symphony is seldom heard under ideal conditions. It is most often performed in concert halls and often with electronic organs, but this performance was the real deal and I never expect to hear it done better. I was sitting about half-way back in Notre Dame, which meant that I was about the same distance from Mehta and the orchestra in front of me and the organ console and pipes behind me. Thanks to careful preparation by the performers, balances in both soft and loud passages were just about right. Given the size of the place and the vast distance between orchestra and organ this was an amazing achievement; of course, the performers have the benefit of video cameras to see and hear each other, but it still takes musicians with sharp ears and cool nerves to make it all work.

Mehta has had a lot of experience with the Organ Symphony. He has recorded it several times, most recently with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1997, and his view of the piece has become more refined over the years. Saint-Saens saves all the bombast for the last movement – this is the only time in the piece that the organ is allowed to play fortissimo – and Mehta made sure that the really big guns were saved until the end. In fact, the only other section of the score where the organ plays is the second movement ‘Poco Adagio,’ and there it mostly meshes softly with the orchestra in an accompanying role.

From the OSM Mehta got all the power he needed, but also a beautifully dark and blended sound. At the same time, Mehta had obviously asked the timpanist to use hard sticks so that the important timpani solos would register clearly in the reverberant acoustic.

In both the Messiaen and the Saint-Saens, we saw a master conductor at work. Mehta is a consummate technician, but he also loves the music he plays. It was a treat to see him at work and to hear this music so well performed.

Mehta Discography, Autobiography, and a Well Deserved Award
For listeners who wish to hear more of Mehta, there is a huge catalogue of recordings and DVDs and it continues to expand with new releases almost every month. Among his recent releases are the VPO New Year’s Concert 2007 from DG on both CD and DVD; the Israel Philharmonic’s 70th Anniversary Concert from 2007 released by Euroarts on DVD; and of special interest to those who want to see how he does it, there is a DVD called Zubin Mehta in Rehearsal from Image Entertainment. We see Mehta rehearsing Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel with the Israel Philharmonic, followed by a complete performance. Also scheduled for release on September 30 by Medici Masters is a 1977 concert with Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the title Zubin Mehta: Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For more information about Zubin Mehta, his life, recordings and upcoming performances visit his website at www.zubinmehta.net.

It was announced this week that Mehta has been awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Arts Foundation. The prize is given for lifetime achievement and is worth US$143,000. It will be officially presented in a special ceremony in Tokyo on October 15.

Finally, Mehta has recently written his autobiography. It is available now in German (Partitur meines Leben), Italian, and Hebrew, and the English version will be released by Amadeus Press November 15 with the title Zubin Mehta: a Memoir.


Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar and Sir Georg Solti: his Life and Music, both available at http://www.amazon.com/. For more about Paul E. Robinson please visit his website at http://www.theartoftheconductor.com/.

Blog Photos by Marita

Nagano & OSM Rise to the Challenge: Mahler's Epic Symphony of One Thousand!

The final ‘Chorus mysticus’ is one of the most powerful passages in his entire oeuvre, if not in the whole history of music – Henry-Louis de La Grange

It is easy to be overwhelmed by Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Few works require such vast resources - hundreds of singers and instrumentalists. Fewer still rise to such towering climaxes, and yet the Mahler Eighth is not about size, but about love and death and the meaning of it all. Mahler wrestled with these concepts his whole life and tried his best to express what he felt through his music. Kent Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal opened the OSM’s 75th season with two performances of the Eighth Symphony and the one I heard - the second - on Wednesday night, was extraordinary.

An Opera Disguised as a Symphony, or a New Kind of Symphony?
It is often remarked on that Mahler was one of the great opera conductors of his time yet wrote no operas. Each of his symphonies, however, is a music drama and many of them use one or more voices. The Eighth Symphony begins with a hymn, but its entire second part is a setting of much of Goethe’s Faust: Part Two, an operatic scene if ever there was one. At the same time, Mahler was not writing an opera disguised as a symphony; he was writing a new kind of symphony. In fact, he composed the entire first movement before he had a text and then fit his selected text to the music.

One can analyze the Eighth Symphony in purely musical terms. The first movement, for example, is in sonata form and the second movement is a kind of Lisztian symphonic poem in which themes from the first movement reappear. In both movements Mahler employs the most complex contrapuntal devices. It all hangs together as a musical structure on a very large scale, but Mahler was also trying to go beyond traditional musical forms by adding voices to the orchestra just as Beethoven had done in his Ninth or Choral symphony. The Beethoven Ninth is also coherent as a purely musical structure. Remember how Beethoven brings back themes from earlier movements to start the last movement. Mahler does the same thing in his Eighth Symphony, only on a larger scale and with a more elaborate extra-musical purpose.

Part One: The Agony of Struggle and the Ecstasy of Hope A Wild Ride to Faith
The first movement of the Eighth Symphony makes use of a Ninth Century Latin hymn attributed to Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz. It is a fervent glorification of God and the equivalent of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the hope that all men will be brothers. In the words of Maurus’ hymn:

Give us joy,
Grant us Thy grace,
Smooth our quarrels,
Preserve us in bonds of peace.

Like Beethoven, Mahler uses his soloists and chorus in this movement simply as different kinds of instruments, and so extends the expressive range and colour of the symphony orchestra. Mahler also gives us a hymn setting that goes far beyond Bach and Beethoven in its extreme emotionalism. There are moments when the music gets so wild it seems on the verge of spinning out of control.

Part Two: Repentance, Divine Love, Forgiveness and Life Everlasting
The second movement of the symphony is something else again. Here, through the medium of lines from Goethe’s Faust, Mahler continues his lifelong exploration of the mysteries of love, faith and death. In his Symphony No. 2 Resurrection, Mahler had given us a powerful vision of life after death, and in his Fourth Symphony he had shown us what heaven could be like through the eyes of a child. In the Eighth Symphony we have Goethe’s depiction of life after death as Faust’s soul is welcomed into heaven and Faust is reunited with his beloved Gretchen. In Goethe’s telling of the Faust legend, the scholar Faust makes a pact with the devil that in return for getting everything he wants in earthly life, he will serve the devil in hell. One thing leads to another - Faust falls in love with Gretchen and gets her pregnant. She gives birth but then drowns her illegitimate child. Convicted of murder, she is sent to prison. Faust is doomed to hell and damnation, but at the end of Part One, voices from heaven proclaim that Gretchen will be forgiven and saved.

By the end of Part Two, Faust is forgiven his overweening ambitions and desires and accepted in heaven where Gretchen awaits him. Like Schumann and Liszt before him, Mahler found in Goethe’s text the most profound expression of the human condition and the path to everlasting life through earthly love and Christian faith.

Thriving on Challenges, Nagano Delivers Full Scope of Mahler’s Masterpiece
Given its enormous musical and philosophical challenges, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is a daunting challenge for any conductor. Kent Nagano showed Montreal listeners once again that he thrives on challenges. He conducted with remarkable technical control and a deep sense of what lay behind the notes. The overwhelming climaxes at the end of each of the two movements were built with care and realized with maximum intensity. Yet it was often in the quiet passages that one felt Nagano’s total identification with the music. Mahler loved to storm the heavens, but some of his most profound music is whispered rather than shouted.

Nagano’s soloists were all first-rate and added immeasurably to the success of the performance. Soprano Jennifer Wilson got off to a shaky start but settled in later on to soar fearlessly over the huge orchestra. Soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme impressed me with the beautiful colour of her voice. The star soloist, however, was undoubtedly tenor Simon O’Neill (left:photo by Lisa Kohler). He has been singing some of the great Heldentenor roles in opera houses around the world and one can see why he is in such demand. In the Mahler Eighth he was heroic indeed but never lost his fine lyric sound.

The OSM Chorus sang magnificently under its guest chorus master, Michael Zaugg. The OSM winds have shown themselves capable of producing finer intonation on other nights, but then Mahler’s writing is often cruelly exposed. On the whole, however, the orchestra played with total commitment and careful attention to balances.

The eminent Mahler authority Henri-Louis de La Grange gave us something to ponder in calling the final 'Chorus Mysticus' one of “the most powerful passages in the history of music.” As Kent Nagano led his stellar ensemble of soloists, chorus and orchestra through this inspiring music at Place des Arts, one had no choice but to concur wholeheartedly.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar and Sir Georg Solti: his Life and Music, both available at http://www.amazon.com/. For more about Paul E. Robinson please visit his website at http://www.theartoftheconductor.com/.