Duluth Superior Magazine » Maestro

Maestro’s Musings: If Love Be The Food Of Music

robertl — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:20:18 +0000

We all know that “music be the food of love. Well, so often love be….umm…love is the food of music. Love stories, no matter how implausible, have tickled the creative imaginations of composers through the centuries. Take, for example, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, inspired by that greatest of all love stories. Implausible? Romeo meets Juliet at a party on Sunday, they fall in love, they’re married by Friar Laurence on Monday, and they’re both dead — together for eternity —by Thursday. I’ve eaten pizza older than four days. Much older. Speaking of age, Romeo is most likely around 20 years old, Juliet is 13….the good Friar would be doing time today.
Then there’s Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, an everyday tale of boy meets girl, boy kills girl’s betrothed, boy’s uncle wants to marry girl, boy transports girl to said uncle, during which transportation boy and girl determine that they like each other, decide therefore to commit suicide and drink poison prepared by girl’s handmaiden, who actually substitutes love potion, which drives them passionately into each other’s arms and leads to their ultimate demise. One has to wonder just how sincere a love it is if they need pharmaceuticals.
Gioachino Rossini’s opera La Cenerentola commissioned by the Teatro Valle of Rome tells the classic tale of Cinderella. Unfortunately the Teatro must have had a shortage of decent sopranos, and the city a similar shortage of oversized vegetation, because in place of a wicked stepmother we have Don Magnifico, basso buffo, in place of the fairy godmother we have the philosopher Alidoro, basso, and in place of the pumpkin they live happily ever after. They must have had plenty of pasta, though, because in place of a dainty glass slipper that wouldn’t have survived excess avoirdupois it’s a bracelet, for God’s sake!
That brings us to the even less likely story of Acis and Galatea, inspiration for George Frideric Handel’s most popular opera. Acis was the spirit of the Sicilian river Acis; he became enamored of the sea-nymph Galatea, an unwise move since her other suitor Polyphemus was a quite violent fellow who promptly whacked him. Acis had been warned, but of course love is illogical. Galatea, on the counsel of birds, had returned his love (OK, it’s not usually this illogical). After his death she used her magical powers to turn him into a fountain. Or perhaps a large lake, as the Duluth Festival Opera mounts an outdoor production free to all at Leif Erikson Park on August 22.
For those among you wishing to remain starry-eyed, love-struck dreamers in the mold of Mr. Handel, stop reading now and just come on over to the DFO’s production of Acis and Galatea. For you cynical realists, what Duke Orsino really said was:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
How disappointing.

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera, co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.

Maestro’s Musings: The Universal Non-Language

robertl — Sat, 29 May 2010 09:20:29 +0000

One of the extraordinary blessings of a conducting career is the opportunity to function within a wide array of cultures (and accents). From New Yawk “fuggedaboudit” to Noaf Kah-lah-na “Ah do declayuh,” from Bastn “Pack the Ka” and of course to Minnesoooota “Oofdah!!!”; I’ve usually managed to communicate with the natives.

But a recent engagement in Korea had me scrambling. How do I rehearse an orchestra when we have no language in common? Now there IS a lingua franca of classical music, to a limited extent: basic tempo and dynamic indications are all conveyed in Italian. So for “softer” (più piano) and “slower” (meno mosso) I was covered. But how to let the musicians know to what passage I was referring, or where in the piece they should start up playing again?

Easy….just learn Korean numbers. Hana, dul, set, net, deosot….hana, dul, set, net, deosot…one, two, three, four, five….and on up to ten. Got it. And then ten to twenty. And even up to 100. No problem.

Problem. There are two sets of numbers in Korean. No kidding. I learned one. And wouldn’t you know it, for bar numbers they use the other set: il, i, sam, sa, o. After a valiant last-minute crash course on the new numbers I moved on to the niceties: hello, goodbye, thank you, please. Ah, but there’s that nasty cultural context thing. My “thank you” (goMAwayo) uttered proudly to the orchestra manager and others would usually elicit a laugh, or at least a genial smile. I chalked it up to delight that an American guest would learn a Korean word. I learned several days later that in fact it signifies “Thanks, inferior one.” Gulp!

As the week moved on, so did my Korean, to the point of maximal pride — a joke in Korean! At a rehearsal, to better balance the soloist I reduced the size of the orchestra, releasing a handful of string players from the back of the sections. As they were packing up I bowed, and said, most solemnly: Annyonghi Kaseyo…“Farewell, Honored ones.” It’s difficult to imagine a warmer human connection than from a joke in a language that everyone knows you don’t speak.

But there IS an even warmer connection: the non-language of music. Language uses sounds to represent things: numbers, objects, or feelings, for example. Music uses sounds to bring us to a most profound, pure self-knowledge…a kind of personal exaltation. A person who experiences the sounds in this way can have the ultimate individual experience; people who experience it at the same time, from the same sounds, share an ultimate human experience.

As a conductor, to be able to guide the sounds in a way that exalts a group of musicians from an entirely different culture, and to share this experience with an audience…this is an indescribably profound encounter with the essence of what it means to be alive in the world.
Until next month, then: Annyonghi Kaseyo.

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera; co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.

Maestro’s Musings: A Career In Music

robertl — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:20:49 +0000

Remember when TV used to have shows? Really good shows, like Hogan’s Heroes, and McHale’s Navy? (Ah, that’s evidence of a misspent youth.)

Well, you can’t turn on the tube nowadays without finding sports. I don’t mean just basketball and hockey and baseball. I’m talking competition…winners and losers. Millionaire, Amazing Race, The Apprentice, Biggest Loser, Cash Cab. Are you in? Do you want to play? PBS, for Pete’s sake, has the Antiques Road Show with its winners and losers. Aunt Martha’s credenza is worth $20,000; your “Ming” vase? Sorry, fourteen bucks…you lose. And then there are the cooking competitions: Chopped, Iron Chef, Top Chef, and on and on. Pack your knives and go. (Now there’s evidence of a misspent middle age.)

Classical music loves competitions too. A cornucopia of concert opportunities awaits the freshly minted competition winner, who is both cheap and certified. You’re a phenomenally talented musician, so entering competitions is the way to make your career. The 1972 Leeds competition launched the career of the extraordinary pianist Murray Perahia; winning it in 1969 did the same for Radu Lupu. Top prize in the Queen Elisabeth competition in 1937 catapulted violinist David Oistrakh’s career, the 1970 Chopin Competition gave Garrick Ohlsson his shot. Ashkenazy and Ax, Perlman and Zuckerman, Neveu and Cliburn….major careers left and right have been built on competition wins.
But are competitions really so great for the winners? Countless competitions are held annually. For every major career that results, there are dozens and dozens of top prize winners who disappear from view. You win your big prize, you get a passel of engagements for the next three years. You’re young and immature, having spent eight hours a day in a practice room from the age of ten. With a pile of cash, a big ego boost, and twenty concerts a year on the road, it’s a veritable gauntlet of trouble waiting to happen. But the real trouble comes when your three years are up. Now you’re old hat, now you’re yesterday’s news, now there’s a new generation of young and cheap prize-winners to engage. Now not only do you have to earn a living, but you’re faced with the reality that (a.) earning a living ain’t easy, and (b.) you ain’t the hot stuff you thought you were.

You’re Nai-Yuan Hu. Ten years after winning the Queen Elisabeth you’re playing in a Broadway show pit. You’re Ronald Braunstein; you won the Karajan International Conducting Competition in 1979 at the age of 24. After initial concerts with major orchestras including Berlin and San Francisco your career has steadily dried up. Out of work until recently, your latest hope is to win a youth orchestra job in Vermont. Pack your batons and go. Worse, you’re violin prodigy and National Federation of Music Clubs winner Michael Rabin who died likely as a result of his drug use; or you’re Eugene Fodor facing a dwindling career after winning the Paganini and Tchaikovsky Competitions, turning to heroin; or you’re two-time Gina Bachauer Competition winner Tzimon Barto, recently arrested for crack cocaine. I’m sorry, you’ve been chopped.

So, do you really want to enter that competition? Deal or No Deal? Open the case.

Markand Thakar is the Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera; co-director of graduate conducting, Peabody Conservatory.

Maestro’s Musings: Save the Rainforest, and The Music

robertl — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:20:36 +0000

Those of you expecting the customary uproarious humor from this column [rimshot!] click to another story now. Otherwise you’ll have to settle for a sad but perhaps interesting story, a matter of great concern, but one with a hopeful ending. No, not Mauer…the way I see it he’s already in pinstripes.
This is the story of a serious problem facing the vast international string-playing community, and thus all those who appreciate music. It begins late in the 18th century, when a French watchmaker took a walk along a pier near Paris.
What he saw was a load of Pernambuco (per-nam-BU-co) wood, imported from Brazil for the beautiful red dye extracted from it. Initially brought to Europe in the 15th century from Asia in powdered form, the trade in Pernambuco exploded with the Portuguese discovery of Brazil in 1600. Vast quantities of the tree grew in Brazil; vast quantities were needed by the European garment makers to extract even a small amount of dye; so vast quantities of Pernambuco logs were shipped across the Atlantic.
Our strolling watchmaker was in fact no longer making timepieces; he had since apprenticed in his father’s bow making shop, and he was in search of a wood that could make a better bow. Like Edison trying light-bulb filaments, like Diogenes searching for an honest man, like Tiger Woods pursuing…..oh never mind. But young François Tourte tried every kind of wood he could find. The bows of the past — what we now call Baroque bows—were ideally suited for the music of the past and the small rooms in which it was played. These were convex bows, arced away from the hair; they were light, played by pushing gently into the string. What they couldn’t do was pull the big sound required by more spacious halls and larger ensembles, they couldn’t sustain a sound well, and they were difficult to control.
Tourte’s father had experimented with carving the stick into a more concave shape, arcing the stick slightly toward the hair. But a carved curve requires cutting the individual fibers, resulting in a weak stick. You could steam the bend in, but steamed wood doesn’t hold its shape.
And that’s where Pernambuco comes in: what Tourte discovered was a beautiful wood, exceptionally resilient, that kept its shape when heated. Additionally, Tourte optimized the length and balance of the stick. The modern Tourte bow allowed the pyrotechnics of Paganini, and the sustained beauty of sound of Perlman. And despite the miracles of modern science, no natural or manmade substitute has been found to equal it. Without Pernambuco, none of the extraordinary beauty, clarity and power of music that we’ve known for the past two centuries would be possible.
And the situation has turned grave. The widespread deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest has led to the near extinction of the Pernambuco tree. Bow makers from around the world have gathered in force to work with the Brazilian government in an attempt to save it. Despite the continuing logging and agricultural interests that result in deforestation, there has been progress in protecting the tree, and there is some hope for the future.
So save the rainforest, because when the last Pernambuco tree goes, music goes with it.
For more information, or to contribute, see www.ipci-comurnat.org.

Maestro’s Musings: Composer, Heal Thyself!

robertl — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:05:51 +0000

In last month’s column, your intrepid ruminator chronicled the demise of French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Herewith follows a refresher; while leading an ensemble by pounding a wooden staff on the ground he brought about his own end. He missed the floor, smashed his foot, the resultant wound turned gangrenous, and his soul passed from the earth. Serving to bring into question the wisdom of carrying a big stick.

Ironically the concert was in celebration of the return to health of the King. Through the centuries composers have found creative ways of expressing in music the vicissitudes of their own well being. For example, students of the 18th-century French composer François Couperin will encounter his Allemande titled La Convalescente, in celebration of….surely well-being. Or well-getting.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s vivid and exquisitely beautiful depiction of his health-driven state of mind is considerably more compelling. Physically, the man was a mess. He suffered from lifelong, severely debilitating ailments of numerous kinds. These include (put down the sandwich) smallpox and either typhus or typhoid fever, recurring bouts of abdominal pain accompanied by alternating diarrhea and constipation, anorexia, intermittent attacks of asthma, a 6-week episode of jaundice, a 9-month-long eye pain, bleeding from the nose, as well as the periodic coughing up of and vomiting of blood. Oh, and by the way he was deaf.
In the midst of composing his 15th string quartet, Op. 132, he was stricken with that severe case of jaundice along with pus-filled bacterial infections of his feet. His recovery spawned an entirely new third movement, titled Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity. The movement alternates morbidly slow chorale-like sections with livelier sections titled “Feeling of new strength.”

Surely the most lurid (put the sandwich back down) health-related musical expression was French composer Marin Marais’ piece for viola da gamba entitled Description of the Cystotomy. Now keep in mind that in the 17th century, before drugs and laparoscopy, before antiseptic surgery, and before anesthesia (!), bladder stone removal was a harrowing ordeal. The (male) patient was strapped to a wooden structure, his legs forcibly held in the air revealing the scrotum. The “surgeon” (a.k.a itinerant barber) brought to bear the catheter, some snipping ensued, the offending stones were removed, and the patient was sewn up. Not surprisingly, the operation had but a 40 percent survival rate. The composer provided the following narration for his musical depiction (thanks to Peter Perret for the translation):

The appearance of the apparatus. Trembling upon seeing it. Resolve to mount it. Having reached the top; Descent from said apparatus. Serious thoughts. Tying the silken sashes between arms and legs. Here, the incision is made. Introduction of the clamp. Here, the stone is pulled. Here, one almost loses one’s voice. Flowing of blood. Here the silken sashes are removed. Here you are transported to bed.

Gives whole new meaning to the musical concept of being transported!

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra.

Maestro’s Musings: Speak Forcibly and Carry a Little Stick

robertl — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:20:11 +0000

Back in 709 BC when Zeus’ thunderbolt ruled the heavens, Pherekydes of Patrae, Giver of Rhythm, picked up a golden staff to lead some 800 performers. Little did he know he had given birth to the ultimate symbol of authority: the conductor’s baton.
A couple of millennia went by until the next historical reference to the little stick that could: in 1594 a group of nuns at the convent of St. Vito were led by a colleague holding a wooden implement.
In Renaissance France, the head musician kept the ensemble together by pounding the floor with a thick staff. Besides adding a curious percussive element to otherwise delicate music, and annoying the downstairs neighbors, the practice could be rather dangerous. In 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lully was using the staff thumping method to lead a concert in honor of the recovery from illness of his king, Louis XIV. Unfortunately his aim failed him while his enthusiasm did not; he smashed his toe, which sustained an abscess, which became gangrenous. The gangrene spread, and he died. No cheering from the sackbut section, please.
As the job of the conductor morphed in the 19th century from simple timekeeping to comprehensive responsibility for the performance, the baton became a more subtle implement. Hand gestures took over from floor pounding, so the baton became thinner and shorter…in other words, alternatively weaponized. To wit, in a fit of passion Arturo Toscanini’s baton struck his concertmaster’s bow, which snapped in two and took out the poor violinist’s eye. Notoriously in the grand tradition of self-inflicted baton wounds, the Uruguayan conductor José Serebrier bayoneted his own left hand mid-performance. Unruffled and still conducting, he removed the offending article, stanched the bleeding with a handkerchief, and finished the concert.
Flying batons have been a regular feature of symphony concerts for decades. Toscanini was prone to losing his temper as well as his baton, on more than one occasion hurling it into the audience before storming off. The ease of losing hold accidentally, along with gotta-have-the-best-of-everything spirit of recent times (remember that?), have given rise to a cottage industry of baton making. These craftsmen—many of them wannabe conductors with no orchestra but nice woodworking tools—produce extraordinarily beautiful batons from a wide range of exotic woods. Grips come in a variety of shapes and sizes to fit every hand. Prices come in a variety of amounts to fit every ego…up to $100! Never underestimate how much we are willing to spend on the symbols of our own authority!
My own baton? The $3.95 Maestro TR model 8B, which, despite the minimal cost, I have rarely hurled at an audience.

Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra.

Maestro’s Musings: What’s In A Name?

robertl — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:20:04 +0000

When my wife and I named our son, our first priority was mellifluousness. With a last name like Thakar (pronounced THA-kr), the first name just has to have three syllables, accent on the first. DA-da-da DA-da. Harrison would have worked. Beauregard too. Not being plantation folk, we settled on Oliver. The worst possible name might be, oh, something like Markand.
MAR-KAND THA-kr, full stop after the “D” before the “TH.” Abandon all hope, ye who attempt to enunciate this name in a rhythmically pleasing manner.
Then there’s the unfamiliarity factor.
“Hi, I’m Markand Thakar.”
“Nice to meet you, Mark Anthraxer.”
“Actually it’s Markand. Markand Thakar”
“Mark Hand?”
“Markand! EM-AY-AR-KAY-AY-EN-DEE. Markand!”
“Markland? Markham? Mark-anne? Mark and who?”
Like parents, composers also give names to their offspring. Some of these are just spot on: Aaron Copland’s uplifting music titled Fanfare for the Common Man, Edgard Varese’s futuristic Ionisation, Manuel de Falla’s aromatic Nights in the Gardens of Spain, or John Adams’ exuberant Short Ride in a Fast Machine. (And kudos to Duluth’s own Brad Bombardier for his Short Ride in a Fast Machine With a Crazy Mennonite on the Freeway As We Know It.) Copland proved the old adage that excellence is elusive by christening his greatest masterwork….Third Symphony. [Thud.] I’m not sure that’s on old adage. But for sure he did prove the old adage that it’s better to be lucky than good, when Martha Graham suggested he change the title of his Ballet for Martha [clank] to the memorable Appalachian Spring.
In fact, though, most familiar composition descriptors were not given by the composer. Gustav Mahler’s so-called Symphony of a Thousand was so-called by his agent. (Mahler hated the title, and blasted the “Barnum and Bailey” marketing effort. This was patently unfair to Mr. Barnum, who would surely at least have gone for Symphony of a Million.”) Joseph Haydn’s La Poule (The Hen) symphony was so named by the French audience who found it reminiscent of a chicken clucking. Nice, really nice. Freedom fries, anyone?
But surely there can be no greater ignominy than that suffered by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, whose profoundly beautiful Piano Concerto no. 21 has been named for a MOVIE! The 1967 New York Times review of Elvira Madigan reads gushingly: “[It is] filled with sentiment of the sort that is aptly expressed in the eloquence of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, which is used as the major musical theme.” Granted, we’re not talking Porky’s here. But still, considering the lasting value of the two works, shouldn’t we know the flick as the Piano Concerto no. 21 Movie? No, I guess not. Therefore, without apology, I bring to your attention the January 23, 2010 performance by the DSSO, with Van Cliburn competition laureate Joyce Yang, of Mozart’s “Elvira Madigan” Piano Concerto.
On a final note, an unwieldy name can present some additional challenges, such as how to use it in a limerick. I leave you with the ingenious solution offered some many years ago by a violinist friend, Ralph Morrison:
There once was a lad named Markand,
Who went for a walk in the park, and
He met a cute girl,
Who said, “How ‘bout a whirl?”
So off they went into the dark, and…
Markand Thakar is the Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra.

Maestro’s Musings: Not Flowers or Chocolate

robertl — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:20:36 +0000

On the morning of her 33rd birthday, Cosima Wagner was awakened by soft music. Nothing too unusual, except that it was 1870, decades before the advent of those electric-powered plastic bedside boxes that serve so cheerfully throughout the night: 1:43 AM and you better get to sleep if you want to nail that presentation in the morning; 3:06 AM and you NEED to get some sleep; 4:37 AM…Buddy, you’re screwed.
No, the music was live outside her bedroom door. Now this woman was no humble waitress or hairdresser: she was musical nobility, the daughter (albeit illegitimate) of the legendary pianist and composer Franz Liszt, and wife of the renowned conductor Hans von Bülow. (“But I thought her name was Wagn…” Hold on, we’re getting there.) At the age of 20 she married the prickly von Bülow, whose brilliant international career was hampered by a singular lack of tact, even for 19th-century German conductors (To a trombonist: “Your tone sounds like roast-beef gravy running through a sewer.”). In her marriage to von Bülow, Cosima had two daughters, as well as a fling with the renowned composer Richard Wagner (REE-card VOG-ner) whose work her husband championed.
Now Richard was not exactly a prince in the arena of romantic rectitude. For example, he had accepted the use of a cottage offered by a fan, Otto Wesendonck, to compose Tristan and Isolde. The cottage also conveniently served as a setting for an affair with Mrs. Wesendonck. (The composer’s subsequent Wesendonck Songs were surely a show of appreciation, and since they are settings of poems by Mathilde. It’s fairly clear which contribution of the Wesendoncks was being acknowledged.) The affair ended when Wagner’s wife—yes, he too was married at the time—discovered it.
A few years later, on a trip to a resort with another mistress, the 48-year-old composer met the lovely 24-year-old wife of his ardent supporter von Bülow. The ensuing affair resulted in not one, not two, but three children. In fairness to Wagner, he had the decency to father only one of those children while his wife Minna was still alive. Cosima also had the decency to divorce Hans (conveniently converting from Catholicism) and marry Richard; unfortunately though it wasn’t until after their third child.
The remarkably contemptible behavior continued, and ultimately led to Wagner’s untimely passing: Cosima’s discovery of yet another affair resulted in a stormy scene, precipitating his fatal heart attack some hours later. And Cosima followed Richard’s virulent anti-Semitism (consider for a moment his article “Jews in Music”) with an even more virulent strain herself.
All hope for human decency is not lost, however. In what must rank among the most romantic birthday gifts in recorded history, Richard Wagner arranged themes from his opera-in-progress, Siegfried (named for his and Cosima’s infant son), into a beautiful miniature tone poem, known as the Siegfried Idyll. He then had parts produced, hired and rehearsed the musicians, and had them arranged on the staircase outside his young wife’s bedroom on Christmas morning, 1870, her 33rd birthday.
The moral of the story is this: you can screw up repeatedly and get away with it if you’re a truly great composer and you occasionally make an outsized gift to your spouse (and we’re not talking flowers or chocolate).

Maestro’s Musings: Arf!

robertl — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:20:19 +0000

Nipper was a Jack Russell Terrier. Or perhaps a Fox Terrier, a Dalmatian, or an American Pit Bull. Don’t remember Nipper? Sure you do. Nipper was the dog staring into a gramophone bell, confused at hearing “his master’s voice”… the corporate identity of RCA, and HMV (His Master’s Voice) record stores. Ah yes!

Nipper, named for his penchant for nipping at people’s legs, died in 1895. Three years later, his owner Francis Barraud, an accomplished artist, produced the famous painting. Barraud shopped it around to phonograph makers in the hopes of scoring some advertising cash. He found a couple of takers, and in time the dog rode the explosive growth of the recording industry to worldwide fame.
And the growth was truly explosive. Up until the 1920’s, music was an activity, not a spectator sport. Sheet music was the leading profit producer for the industry. Pianos were not just elegant furniture pieces, but sources of entertainment: folks played them, and gathered ‘round them. And bought sheet music. Phonographs, sold commercially since the 1870’s, were originally considered “talking machines,” and were used almost exclusively for recording the human voice, much like Dictaphones. Then came a seismic shift. Around the turn of the century, as recording media grew in quality and capacity, the technology found a new use: playing back previously recorded music. Eureka, a trend was born! Sales of phonograph records and players soared, and in a mere twenty years records replaced sheet music as the entertainment vehicle of choice.
Of course you know the end of the story: recordings became a multi-billion dollar industry. From vinyl 33’s to LP’s (that’s long-playing records, for the young among us) to 8-track tapes (for the nerds among us) to cassettes to CD’s, musics of all sorts saw vast distribution to all corners of the world. Recorded music made possible radio, and TV, and the Ray Coniff Singers (we didn’t say this was all good). And the artists, the record companies, the electronics companies, and the record stores made money hand over fist.
But, unfortunately, that’s not quite the end of the story. Classical music recording as a money-making enterprise has virtually died. The standard repertoire has been recorded and re-recorded dozens of times, by the likes of Toscanini, Walter, Furtwängler, Haitink, Bernstein, Karajan, and countless others. With the public preference for familiar old names, the exorbitant recording rates set by the musicians’ union (a residue of an outdated fear of lost work for live musicians), and the ease of transferring old recordings to new media, there is no need to make expensive new recordings.
And in fact CD sales of all types-classical as well as pop-have seen a precipitous decline year after year over the past decade, done in by the new technology of the Internet. Record stores are closing by the thousands (anybody remember the Virgin megastore? Tower Records?), and some popular bands now make the bulk of their money from Guitar Hero and Rock Band software. Where does the industry go from here? Nobody knows, but the days of retail sales of $18 CD’s have gone the way of the cold war and nickel beer.
Unfortunately our friend Nipper has seen his second sad end: he is now but a useless relic of a bygone era, residing only in our memories, and in a large statue now resting atop the Maryland Historical Society building in Baltimore. Arf!

Markand Thakar is the director of the DSSO.

Maestro’s Musings: Flawed Man, Musical Genius

robertl — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:36:44 +0000

He was a talented child, whose music became beloved around the world. An odd duck, he was a passionate person who roamed the world seeking affirmation. He entered into a loveless marriage of convenience to cover up questionable contact with young men, and he passed from the world after consuming a known dangerous substance in what was surely a death wish. His funeral service was packed beyond capacity, with tens of thousands turned away.

This is the story of one of the greatest of all composers. Of course not Michael Jackson, (didn’t you know this is the Maestro’s Musings?): it’s Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky.

Like Jacko, Tchaikovsky was a deeply sensitive man attempting to straddle multiple worlds. Unlike Michael, his parents didn’t encourage their son’s musical talent. Instead they sent him to learn clerking at the School for Jurisprudence, a veritable den of adolescent homosexual activity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, contrary to what one might assume, 19th-century Russia had a relatively relaxed view toward sexual peccadilloes of all sorts (relative, to…say…Victorian England, or Jacksonian America…no not that Jackson…Andrew Jackson whose pre-wedding relationship to his then-wife Rachel nearly killed his electability). And Tchaikovsky, whose brother Modeste was also homosexual, comported himself rather openly with a coterie of gay friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Caligula’s Rome, however, it wasn’t, and when a student came to profess her love for him he did the right thing and married her. (huh?) The realization of what he’d done drove him to a near breakdown, and a convalescence in Switzerland. (Ladies, the easiest catches are not necessarily the best.) In 11 days there he sketched a monumental violin concerto, one of the most beloved works of its genre.

Personal difficulties aside, Tchaikovsky also straddled two worlds of music. He came along at a time when the Russian ethos was rejecting centuries of Western inferiority complex. Classical musicians were taking up Russian peasant songs, rough Russian rhythms, uneven Russian phrase structures, and Tchaikovsky’s inherent predisposition toward Germanic structure and orderliness cost him dearly among his compatriots.

This story does get pulled together. Nearing 50, Tchaikovsky fell in love with a man. No problem. It was a young man. O..K…? It was his nephew Bob. Ouch! And Bob returned the affection. Yikes! Likely sexually. Oh dear…

That’s just plain wrong, no matter how you slice it, and Tchaikovsky knew it. In a fury of passion, he poured his heart and soul into his final, most highly structured, and likely his finest composition, the searingly passionate Symphony no. 6 “Pathetique,” dedicated —’fraid so—to Bob. And then he died, after knowingly drinking a glass of unboiled water during the height of a cholera epidemic.

But there is good news: on September 26 you can hear the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra at the DECC in an all-Tchaikovsky program. With our sensational concertmaster Erin Aldridge we perform Tchaikovsky’s immortal Violin Concerto written in devastating throes of that destructive marriage. And we close the concert with the Symphony no. 6, “Pathétique.” The guy couldn’t moonwalk, but what a composer!

Markand Thakar is Charles A. & Carolyn M. Russell Music Director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; music director, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra; principal conductor, Duluth Festival Opera and co-director of the graduate conducting program, Peabody Conservatory.