Audio interviews and illustrations below. As we mention particular buildings and views, click on the relevant thumbnail.

The distinguished old master dealer, Robert Simon, held his first exhibition of a contemporary artist this past November and December. Entitled The Third Rome : Allegorical Landscapes of the Modern City, it was devoted to the current work of Pamela Talese, a Brooklyn-based painter known for her haunting views of gritty industrial sites around the Navy Yard and Red Hook. Around 2012, she found that she had exhausted this subjects and everything else in New York City, and she decided to return to Rome for the first time in twenty-two years, applying for an artist’s fellowship at the American Academy and, once there, after exploring contemporary buildings, like Renzo Piano’s Parco della Musica, she began to explore more recent neighborhoods outside the historical center. By “more recent,” I mean areas developed in the 1920s and 1930s, that is, the Fascist Era. Exploring the neighborhoods on her bicycle with her painting box and folding easel strapped on, Ms. Talese felt attracted to certain buildings that stood out for their clean, simple lines and elegant design. These were prime examples of Fascist architecture—modest, functional residential edifices, utilitarian civic structures, and a few public buildings. Virtually none of these appear in the surveys of Fascist architecture—with one notable exception, the Foro Italico (originally called the Foro Mussolini).

When I was in Rome for my post-doctoral work from 1983 to 1985, I used to take Sunday afternoons off from the Renaissance and indulge in passeggiate in some of those neighborhoods. I found something comforting in the quietude of the streets and rather more aesthetic pleasure than I expected in the same simple, elegant structures Pamela Talese,  in her paintings, has recorded and interpreted with such assurance, subtle feeling, and generous observation. Impressed by their openness to light and air, and their straightforward functionality, I assumed these buildings were constructed in the post-war years, above all the early 1930s, but no, through this exhibition and conversations with Ms. Talese, I have learned something about their history, i.e. that they belong to Mussolini’s time, and that they arose out of ideas of city planning and architectural style which he and his movement espoused.

Pamela Talese regards Mussolini as the Robert Moses of early 20th century Italy, and in that, I believe, she is absolutely correct. The two had a lot in common. One could easily imagine books on Fascist city planning and architecture and perhaps a few about and by Albert Speer on Moses’ shelves.

You can hear Ms. Talese’s perceptive, nuanced account of this in the two podcast interviews presented here: the first segment concerns her project, which still continues after several years of annual visits, and the second, the historical background of Fascist architecture. These were extrapolated from one, lengthy and very enjoyable conversation, but for coherence and accessibility I have edited it into two.

On one evening during the exhibition there was a brilliant pair of talks and conversation, moderated by Robert Simon, with Pamela Talese and the Luigi Ballerini, Emeritus Professor UCLA, Distinguished poet, translator, food historian, and critic, and author of the essay “The Foro Mussolini and The Marble Boys of Yesteryear” that accompanies the photographs by George Mott in Foro Italico (PowerHouse Books 2003). Professor Ballerini encapsulated my own feelings...

 

 

Last month I had the pleasure of chatting with Inbal Segev, a young cellist from Israel, who has been making a mark in contemporary music and the classics. She was discovered by Isaac Stern as a high school student in Israel, and he arranged for her to come the United States to study at Yale and Juilliard. On this occasion we talked about her upcoming performance of Christopher Rouse’s cello concerto with the Albany Symphony under David Allan Miller and a very interesting—and successful—contemporary music festival sponsored by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Marin Alsop. It held its inaugural season just last summer.

 

I’m very pleased to present this interview with Paavali Jumppanen, who will be playing a recital at the Frick Collection this coming Sunday, October 8, 2017, at 5 pm. He will play works by three composers he has studied in particular depth over many years: Beethoven, Debussy, and the William Duckworth (1943-2012).

Debussy: Études

Duckworth: Selections from The Time Curve Preludes

Beethoven: Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 (“Appassionata”)

Mr. Jumppanen has accomplished a great deal in the United States as well as his native Finland, primarily in Boston, where he appeared regularly at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He has also received a fellowship at Harvard and been a resident at Bucknell.

As you will learn in the podcast, he is not only a pianist of exceptional virtuosity and perception, he is interested in many different aspects of the history and theory of music. He is currently director of two festivals in Finland, one devoted to the piano, Piano Espoo,

You will find more, including online recordings and links to available CDs and vinyl recordings on his artist site and blog, Paavali’s Studio.and another, far to the north in Lapland, Kiehu Music, which is rooted in the particular mixed culture of that remote borderland between Finland and Sweden.

 

Some months ago New Yorkers enjoyed an opportunity to hear a gifted young American pianist, Thomas Nickell play Mozart’s Concerto in A Major, K. 414 and a new concerto by a living English composer, David Matthews, supported by a splendid chamber orchestra in the best English tradition, The Orchestra of the Swan, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, conducted by its founder, David Curtis. They received an especially warm response from their sold-out hall, and they have every reason to come back. This will occur in early June 2018. Meanwhile you can listen to David Curtis talk about chamber orchestras, The Orchestra of the Swan in particular, and English music, which, I believe has been rather neglected on these shores in recent years.

This may be changing. Thanks mostly to Thomas Adès, Tanglewood is doing some justice to English music this summer, and before that, Mr. Curtis and The Orchestra off the Swan will return  to New York with more treasures from their repertory In listening, you will note his healthy attitude to new music.

For our review of The Orchestra of the Swan’s concert with Thomas Nickell, click here.

For a preview of English music at Tanglewood, prefacing a review of an important performance of Elgar’s The Apostles, click here.

 

Anyone who has heard Manfred Honeck conduct his own Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Heinz Hall or in their exemplary recordings on the Exton and Reference Recordings labels will know what a treasure he is for the world of music. This week he will conduct the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with Inon Barnatan and Mahler’s First Symphony. He has made something of a speciality of this composer, a fellow Austrian. His recorded cycle with Pittsburgh now includes Symphonies No. 1, 3, and 5. Maestro Honeck also has special insight into the work of Anton Bruckner, another fellow Austrian. He has so far recorded Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and looks forward to recording the Ninth.

In this interview you will learn something about the care and intelligence he puts into preparing his performances and his warm feeling for these great composers.

Manfred Honeck’s recordings reviewed by Steven Kruger in New York Arts:

STRAUSS Elektra Suite. Der Rosenkavalier Suite • Manfred Honeck, conductor; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra • REFERENCE RECORDINGS FR-722SACD (Streaming Audio: 58:33) Live: Pittsburgh 5/13-15/2016 http://newyorkarts.net/2017/02/crop-recordings-xiii-richard-strauss-hans-rott-alberto-ginastera-robert-schumann-gabriel-faure/

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6. DVOŘÁK Rusalka Fantasy • Manfred Honeck, conductor; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra • REFERENCE RECORDINGS FR-720SACD (67:03) Live Pittsburgh 2015 http://newyorkarts.net/2016/08/crop-of-recordings-9/

BEETHOVEN Symphonies Nos. 5 and 7 • Manfred Honeck, cond; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra • REFERENCE RECORDINGS FR-718 (71:27) Live, Pittsburgh 12/5-7/2014 http://newyorkarts.net/2015/12/a-crop-of-recordings-ii-elgar-rachmaninoff-strauss-schmitt-magnard-and-beethoven/

 

 

The Norwegian pianist and scholar Christina Kobb came to wider attention in the United States when a New York Times writer picked up an article in a Scandinavian science magazine about neurological research carried out on her to analyze her movements as she played an electronic keyboard using modern and nineteenth century technique, which she has researched in her dissertation.

Her work has made a strong impression on musicians and audiences of historically informed performance practice, since most if not all of the relatively small number of pianists who have adopted historical instruments have simply adapted the technique they have been using for modern instruments and have neglected to study the manuals of pianoforte technique published in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Johann Nepomuck Hummel’s Ausführliche theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, published in 1827 is especially interesting, since, as a pupil of Mozart’s, he can be thought to have drawn his method from the master himself.

In this interview, Christina Kobb demonstrated what she learned from her researches in a most musical and fascinating way on my totally unsuitable electronic piano. Complete fortepiano performances of the pieces she excerpted can be heard here:

 

 

Listen to the interview:

This was yet another splendid summer at Marlboro. For sixty-four years now, first under the direction of Rudolf Serkin, then under Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida, now under Mitsuko Uchida alone, Marlboro has provided a unique environment for young musicians of the highest caliber to grow as artists and as people under the mentorship of some of the greatest mature musicians. Their goal and their loyal public’s benefit have been the famous weekend concerts which fill the hall every July and August. Marlboro has been and continues to be the most powerful formative force in chamber music, not only in America, but internationally. Without Marlboro chamber music would not occupy the place it does in our culture, and orchestral musicians would not enjoy the artistic enrichment of having at least one Marlboro summer. I have written extensively on the School and Festival’s history in The Berkshire Review for the Arts and will not repeat it here. (1. Marlboro at 60; 2. Marlboro Music 60th Anniversary Season: an update…)

One person who has stood at the center of Marlboro’s work for most of its history is Frank Salomon. He arrived in 1960 and has worked as its its Co-Administrator with Anthony Checchia ever since. A man of deep knowledge of music and musicians, his talents have extended beyond Marlboro and have reached into several other important organizations, not always unrelated to Marlboro, which have left their own significant marks on the way music is played and enjoyed. At Frank Salomon Associates he is a manager of performing artists, from Sir Simon Rattle to the highly individual pianist, Alon Goldstein. He also manages the venerable People’s Symphony Concerts, founded in 1900, the Schneider Concerts at the New School (formerly known as the New School Concerts), and the New York String Orchestra Seminar, also affiliated with the New School through the Mannes School of Music, which has proven to be the entrée to Marlboro for many of the talented young musicians who have participated. Mr. Salomon likes to call it “the triple A farm team” for Marlboro. And in fact we began our conversation on Marlboro, or rather the autumn-winter-spring component of Marlboro, the concert series in various major North American cities, New York City, Brattleboro, Boston, Greenwich, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Washington D.C. Musicians from Marlboro, which will begin early next month.

You will find schedules to all of Frank Solomon’s concerts below, with links to the relevant sites.

Listen to the interview:

Musicians from Marlboro

2015-16 Season

Tour Group One: October 4 – 11, 2015

Earl Kim (1982 Marlboro Music Composer in Residence): “Three poems in French” (soprano & string quartet)

Fauré: Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 15

Mozart: String Quintet in E-Flat, K. 614

Artists:

Sarah Shafer, soprano

Kuok-Wai Lio, piano

Danbi Um, violin

Hye-Jin Kim, violin

Rebecca Albers, viola

Shuangshuang Liu, viola

Peter Stumpf, cello

Tour Group Two : January 17 – 24, 2016

Beethoven: String Trio in C Minor, Op. 9

Penderecki (2013 Marlboro Music Composer in Residence): Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio

The Bach Choir of Bethlehem

2014 Christmas Concerts

My soul doth magnify the Lord

J.S. Bach – Cantata 147: Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben

(Heart and Mind and Works and Life)

Robert Parsons – Ave Maria

Charles Villiers Stanford – Magnificat in G

Daniel Gawthrop – Mary Speaks

C.P.E. Bach – Magnificat in D

Saturday, December 6, 2014 at 8 pm

First Presbyterian Church of Allentown

Sunday, December 7, 2014 at 4 pm

First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem

* * *

Greg Funfgeld, Music Director of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, kindly met with me the afternoon before their two-concert series of Christmas Concerts, the first in Allentown, PA, the second in the First Presbyterian Church in Bethlehem. We repaired to what is actually a prayer room to chat, and you will hear little if anything of the lively activity that was going on around us. He spoke about the tradition of Bach in Bethlehem, performance practice, their annual Bach Festival, which will take place in May of this coming year for the 108th time and of the distinguished scholars he invites to speak there, along with the cantatas, the chamber and orchestral music, and of course, their traditional performance of the Mass in B Minor, which received its first complete performance in America there on March 27, 1900.

* * *

In early November New Yorkers had an opportunity to learn a striking lesson in Bach tradition from a pair of concerts, that of the Academy of Ancient Music and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra—authentic instruments, one player to a part, standing, and led from the harpsichord vs. a full, symphonic treatment on modern instruments under the baton of a conductor by an orchestra which was founded not only during Bach’s lifetime, but during his residency in Leipzig. The Gewandhaus Orchestra claims the authority of tradition—actually more than one tradition, one beginning with Bach himself and another with Bach’s renaissance under Mendelssohn’s leadership in the late 1820s, while the Academy of Ancient Music claims the authority of scholarship and “authenticity.” Riccardo Chailly, the Music Director of the Gewandhaus, is, I should mention, the most scholarly of mainstream conductors, and his directions from the podium tend to be founded on actual reasons he has found through research—not a common trait of music directors. In this he is conscious not only of how Bach and his musical associates may have played, but of how Mendelssohn, Karl Straube, Günther Ramin, and Fritz Lehmann conducted Bach with the orchestra. In sum, here is tradition, intelligently criticized and renewed.

Here in the United States we tend to consider musical tradition, especially one relating to an eighteenth-century composer, as an import, but in fact a native Bach tradition exists which antedates even Mendelssohn’s historic 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Where was the first documented performance of a Bach cantata in this country? Where were the St. John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the B Minor Mass, and the Art of Fugue first performed complete here? Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Moravian Protestants, scattered by persecution, found refuge and renewal in Saxony, under the protection of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and settled on his estate. Herrenhut, their settlement, which was roughly a day and a half’s journey from Leipzig in Bach’s time. The Count encouraged the Moravians to emigrate and spread their gospel around the world. Their first successful settlement in America was founded at Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, 1741, when J. S. Bach was still alive. The Moravians, exiles from a region where both Franz Schubert’s and Gustav Mahler’s families once lived, brought with them a rich heritage of music, treasured by them in church, home,

 

For its annual opera, Bard Summerscape has chosen Carl Maria von Weber’s seldom performed masterpiece, Euryanthe. Der Freischütz had been a great success at the Kärtnerthortheater in Vienna at its premiere in 1821, and the impresario Domenico Barbala lost no time in asking Weber for another opera of the sort. Weber, however, wanted to compose something different. He wanted to grow beyond the popular Singspiel alternation of spoke dialogue and sung numbers in favor of a freer flow of recitative, sung dialogue, and arias. Weber had considerable difficulty in deciding on a libretto, and he eventually persuaded Helmine von Chezy to take on the job—against her protests. She wrote the libretto for Schubert’s even more unsuccessful Rosamunde at the same time. Both premiered in 1823.) Euryanthe‘s failure in spite of Weber’s splendid music is generally blamed on the poor quality of Chezy’s verse and the involved, hard-to-follow plotline. Over the years, Euryanthe receives only occasional performances, but it has also aquired a passionate cult following, mainly on the basis of the excellent 1975 recording with the Dresdner Staatskapelle playing under Marek Janowski, and Jessye Norman and Nicolai Gedda, among the cast. Director Kevin Newbury and his team have worked hard to overcome Euryanthe‘s challenges, as Mr. Newbury likes to call them, and his discussion of them in this interview gives us every reason to be optimistic.

Kevin Newbury is a theatre, opera, and film director based in New York City. His outstanding work, notable for its wit, imagination, and powers of analysis, have earned him a high place in the operatic and theater community and made him very much in demand, as his tightly packed schedule shows.

Recent opera credits include the world premieres of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (San Francisco Opera), Oscar (Santa Fe Opera), Doubt (Minnesota Opera), and Paul’s Case (Urban Arias and Prototype Festival). Other recent credits include Anna Bolena (Minnesota Opera), Maria Stuarda (Houston Grand Opera, Minnesota Opera), Die Liebe der Danae (Bard SummerScape), Roberto Devereux (L’Opera de Montreal, Minnesota Opera), Falstaff and the world premiere of Lewis Spratlan’s pulitzer prize-winning Life is a Dream after Calderón de la Barca (Santa Fe Opera), Galileo Galilei (Portland Opera), Werther (Minnesota Opera), Virginia (Wexford Opera Festival, winner of the Irish Times Award for best opera production), I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Lyric Opera of Kansas City, with Joyce Di Donato), La Bohème (Central City Opera), Eugene Onegin (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), El Niño (San Francisco Symphony, conducted by John Adams), Rappahannock County (world premiere; Virginia Arts Festival, National Tour), La Cenerentola (Glimmerglass Opera), Bernstein’s Mass (Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center; Grammy nomination), Oceanic Verses (world premiere, Kennedy Center, River to River Festival, NYC).

New York theater credits include Candy and Dorothy (GLAAD Winner: Best Play, Drama Desk Nominee), The Second Tosca, and Kiss and Cry (GLAAD Nominee). Upcoming projects include the world premieres of The Manchurian Candidate (Minnesota Opera) and Bel Canto (Lyric Opera of Chicago), and new productions of Don Bucefalo (Wexford Opera Festival), Norma (San Francisco Opera, Barcelona Liceu), Candide (Baltimore Symphony), Bernstein’s Mass (Phildelphia Orchestra), Oscar (Philadelphia Opera) and Anna Bolena (Lyric Opera of Chicago). His first film, Monsura is Waiting, is currently screening at film festivals around the country.

 

John Banville and Michael Miller discuss Love in the Wars, his free English adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's play, Penthesilea, with a digression about the rest of Mr. Banville's work, before returning to the play, which will receive its world premiere at Bard College Summerscape. Kleist's theatrical ambition was to fuse Greek tragedy with Shakespearean "burlesque." The work shows his pessimistic world view spiced with black Prussian humor.