Kathleen has been feeling a bit run down in these groundhog days, and her back gave out on Friday. So, when I began to dress for Saturday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, and I gave her recumbency a pat and told her that she could stay home if she liked, I expected my reprieve to be met with a moan or two of gratitude.. Ordinarily, I am not so easygoing about ducking out of concert-going. Instead of which, the next thing I knew, Kathleen was up and dressed herself. Much as she wanted to stay in bed (a very, very great deal), she had no intention of missing Orpheus’ performance of one of her favorite works. (That would be Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.) For once, I didn’t have to remind Kathleen that she always likes, and not infrequently loves, Orpheus at Carnegie.

¶ Mozart and Tchaikovsky, with violinist Nikolaj Znaider.

Christian Zacharias

Last Saturday night, I was frankly sorry for every music-lover who wasn’t on hand to hear Orpheus and pianist Zacharias reinvent Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto. I doubt that any conductor could have led an orchestra through the minute shifts in tone and tempo that made the performance sound as though Schumann were improvising it on the spot — unless, that is, the orchestra already knew the work as well as Orpheus, in which case there would be no need for a conductor. As with the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Schumann’s own Second Symphony from last season, I’d really, really like to have a recording.

¶ Orpheus at Carnegie (Bach, Schumann, and Theofanidis, with Christian Zacharias).

Last Friday night, I was alone in town and in possession of a single ticket. What could be simpler? I considered staying home, though. The weather was awful (and became awfuller), and I had already been downtown to the movies. Why not take it easy? I got online for a look at the program. That was that. No way was I going to miss Beethoven’s Quintet in C.

Nevertheless, I was tired, and feeling a little decrepit. I was ready for the recital to be over the minute I got there. In order to pay attention, I had to dump any idea of relaxing comfortably. I do hate that, when my body lets me down at a concert. It hasn’t done so for a while, so the reminder that it could was unpleasant. After the interval, though, I found myself in somewhat better shape.

Interestingly, although I did not enjoy sitting through the event, I remember it quite fondly.

¶ Musicians from Marlboro, at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. 

My favorite New York luxury is really an Upper East Side luxury, although there are luxuries like it all over town. If you can walk to wherever you’re going for the evening, have your night out, and then walk home again, weather permitting, you’re enjoying a pleasure that is denied to most Americans – certainly to nearly all affluent ones. I consider myself lucky to live only a few subway stops from Midtown Manhattan, but not to have to board a bus or a train or slip into a taxi at all is my idea of dandy. That’s why I peruse the Metropolitan Museum’s music calendars long before I look at Carnegie Hall’s.*

The season got under way a weekend or so ago with the first of three recitals by the Itzhak Perlman Music Program, featuring the eminent violinist himself but not to the complete eclipse of brilliant young talent. You can whine about the decline of classical music all you like, but to my ear musicians have never sounded as good as they do today. I came away with the name of violist Wei-Yang Andy Lin hardwired onto my antennae: I certainly hope that he happens to like New York.

¶ The Itzhak Perlman Music Program, at the Met. 

* For ease of access, Lincoln Center might as well be in New Jersey.

Catching up with what’s going on over at kottke.org (and wondering just who Joel Turnipseed is), I came across a little list of the “50 essential classical music CDs.” Ted Libbey, whose NPR work I’ve discussed before, is still at it, hyping his bird’s nest of manly masterpieces (he begins with Beethoven’s Fifth), accessibilia (West Side Story), and tough nuts (the Goldberg Variations). Only the most sophisticated music lover could possibly be comfortable with this particular mix of music, and that’s possibly what Mr Libbey has in mind. In the nature of things, however, his prescription is far more likely to be taken for a shopping list by folks who don’t know much about serious music and are looking for a little direction. I expect that many of them will not make it past Entry Nº 3: Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, not because there’s anything wrong with the music per se, but because it does not belong in the third slot on a beginner’s list.

Outrageously – but not at all surprisingly – Mozart doesn’t appear until Nº 20, with The Magic Flute, of all things. And then not again until 44 (piano concertos) and 50 (symphonies). Although there are plenty of solo piano recordings (and a Dowland CD for the lute), the chamber music is for strings only: Schubert’s Quintet (15) and Beethoven’s Quartets (24) – all of ’em! Speaking of Schubert, Mr Libbey has included Winterreise (46). That’s very noble, but wouldn’t Die schöne Mülllerin been a sounder choice? And why, come to think of it, doesn’t Dvorak’s beloved “New World” Symphony figure at Nº 3, instead of at Nº 40?

I’d say, “Don’t get me started,” but it’s too late for that. I’ll be back for more.

Orpheus launched its new Carnegie Hall season last week with one of the strangest concerts that, in my experience, it has ever offered. The idea, I can see, was chaste enough: Brahms and Schoenberg. Vienna, in other words, Central. (Never forget that Schoenberg not only orchestrated Brahms’s first piano quartet – brilliantly, but with bold strokes that would have caused Brahms to burn the MS of the original in a vain attempt at prophylaxis – but that he also authored an important essay, “Brahms the Progressive,” in which he sniffed out all sorts of “modern” irregularities” in the older composer’s harmonies.) Unfortunately, the works scheduled for the first half of the concert were the wrong Brahms and the wrong Schoenberg. The latter’s Chamber Symphony should not appear anywhere near Brahms (who would undoubtedly burn Schoenberg’s MS as well), and, as for the Hungarian Dances that started thing off, they were Unearned Rewards. I love the Hungarian Dances – who does not – but, as with fine chocolates, I can’t swallow more than three at once at the absolute maximum. At least Orpheus got that right: there were only three dances.

As for the second half, let me just say that Allan Kozinn’s review in the Times, although entitled “One Pianist, One Orchestra, No Conductor,” never touched on what made the performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto different from all the ones that we’ve sat through with conductors. I think that a word or two on that subject just might have been order. As you’ll be able to tell from the new page at Portico.

¶ Brahms and Schoenberg, with pianist Yefim Bronfman.

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Anthony Newman’s organ recital at Holy Trinity Church, which is practically next door, was a lovely way to begin the season, and at some point today there will appear at the end of this entry a link to more substantive remarks than I’m prepared to make at the moment (having just put the Book Review review “to bed”). If I tell you that the surprise hit of the program for me was one of Mozart’s Epistle Sonatas, you’ll quite rightly think me daft – at least until I explain.

Not that my attention to the music ever flagged, but as has happened at other recitals at Holy Trinity, I couldn’t help being charmed by the interior, which is more reminiscent of a large parish in a small town than of a grand Gothic cathedral in its aspirations, into fantasies of joining the congregation. I could sit in the back, wearing the attitude of a staunch catachumen. And I could sing the hymns. (During a trio of French baroque characteristic pieces – including Rameau’s very famous Poule – I copied out the words to a hymn that I’m sure was an Abolitionist favorite: “In Christ there is no East or West.”) But I’d be coming at Episcopalianism from a pole opposite that of Eric Patton’s starting point, having been brought up Roman Catholic and not Unitarian. (I’d link to Eric’s blog, but it’s too depressing: he’s discontinuing it.) I’d be sure to show up only very sporadically, and never for vestigial services such as the Blessing of the Animals, if indeed they have such an event at Holy Trinity.

Kathleen says that it will be all right, though, to give $25 or so to the organ fund. I keep thinking of the organ as new, but in fact Anthony Newman – that’s right, last night’s organist – inaurgurated it twenty years ago, and it’s in need of serious maintenance. Not that it sounds it.

¶ Anthony Newman at Holy Trinity.

Putting off the aforementioned clerical work, I thought I’d compile a show-off list of operas of which I have more than three recordings. The figures in parenthesis represent independent DVDs productions.

Mozart

   Le Nozze di Figaro – 5 (2)

   Don Giovanni – 5 (1)

   Così fan tutte – 11 (1)

Wagner

   Tannhaüser – 3

   Lohengrin – 5 (1)

   Tristan und Isolde – 4 (1)

   Parsifal – 3 (1)

Verdi

   Un ballo in maschera – 5

   Don Carlo – 5 (1)

   Aida – 5 (1)

   Otello – 5 (1)

Strauss:

   Der Rosenkavalier – 4 (2)

   Ariadne auf Naxos – 3

   Die Frau ohne Schatten – 3

   Capriccio – 3.

Puccini

   Turandot – 3 (2)

I’m shocked that Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg doesn’t make this list. (I did give a recording away.) I’m totally not surprised that I have oodles more of Così than anything else.

I love each of these operas. There’s only one less-than-canonical work (Capriccio). I couldn’t possibly be more bourgeois. 

There’s a big pile of books to be written up, but I’ve decided to take the rest of the afternoon “half off,” and do clerical stuff that allows me to have a little music going in the background. The little music that I’ve chosen is the once-singleton recording of Der Rosenkavalier made by Herbert von Karajan in the late Fifties – the recording that the production’s Marschallin, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, devoted her last years to reissuing in monaural sound. I’ve never heard that version, and I don’t want to.

The birds are twittering…

Every now and then, I just have to listen to Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore. “Solemn Vespers of the Confessor” – sounds like a laff riot, no? But Austrian Catholicism isn’t what I grew up with. It’s a blast. If I thought I’d hear music like this every Sunday, you wouldn’t be able to keep me away.

Not that this is music for every Sunday. But feasts of the Confessors are not all that rare, and these prayers – psalms, mostly, but with the evangelical “Magnificat” – could be performed anywhere capable of mustering the forces. Manuscripts have been found in churches and monasteries within one hundred miles of Salzburg.

My favorite has always been Confitebor tibi Domine, but everybody agrees that the Laudate Dominum – a soprano aria with choral accompaniment – is absolutely ravishing. How interesting it is that Mozart backs up the solo with violins scaling the same huge intervals that make the Lacrimosa of the Requiem so moving. It’s very hard to listen to this music without feeling that the ecclesiastical and the erotic were reconciled in a certain corner of Germany.

¶ Laudate Dominum.