CGF Newsletter 15: Yours, Mine, and Hours

Rouse is a louse; the best worst opera that ever could have happened; hope for a good opera to come

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. No hint!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results

CGF Newsletter 14
Kodály, Duo for Violin and Cello, op. 7

Brava to Listener Kevin, who emailed in almost immediately with the correct answer. 

I was close, but no cigar, having guessed Bartók’s String Quartet #1. (“Close” in that Kodály and Bartók were near-exact contemporaries, Hungarians, and folk-influenced modernists.) Listener Jeremy bandwagoned with me (in spite of the fact that he preceded his guess with “not to bandwagon”) but chose a different random number, 3.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Trouble at Juilliard

When Sammy Sussman writes an article about your music school, you know it can’t be good. In VAN Magazine this week (later picked up by NPR), he detailed allegations against three current and former Juilliard composition faculty members:

In the spring of 2001, Suzanne Farrin auditioned for the Juilliard School’s prestigious composition program. The night after her audition, she says that Christopher Rouse, a faculty member at the time, tried to kiss her. “I sort of twirled out of his arms and ran away,” Farrin said.

[...] Farrin knew that her pedagogical relationship with Rouse was ruined after she rejected his advances. Farrin had agreed to join Rouse for dinner to discuss her audition. But after he tried to kiss her, she questioned why Rouse had previously expressed interest in her music. 

[...] Farrin’s application to Juilliard was rejected the day after her dinner with Rouse. She still does not know if this decision was based on her music or her response to Rouse’s advances.

Robert Beaser, the longtime chair of Juilliard’s comp department, is accused of less specific sexual impropriety, and John Corigliano — the biggest name of the bunch — is called out for almost never accepting female composition students in his studio.

Opera Review: Kevin Puts’ The Hours

 At the behest of a longtime Gabfest Listener, I attended the Met in HD performance of Kevin Puts’ new opera The Hours (which we discussed quite a bit on the podcast). I had followed the development of this opera closely because of its connection to the Classical Gabfest through Kensho Watanabe (who will make his Met Opera debut conducting a performance in the current run.) 

Here are my priors on Kevin Puts: I knew his piece Millennium Canons from having performed / heard it a couple times. Commissioned by the Boston Pops, it’s a short, overture-length work built around fanfares, and it had a real “moment” in the world of new large-ensemble music (I use that descriptor because there are versions for both band and orchestra.) It’s easy to hear why it got popular: it’s easy, breezy, cheesy, and goes down nice and smooth. Tonal, unchallenging, and brilliantly orchestrated in the John Williams manner.

My next encounter with Puts’ music was seeing his opera Silent Night c. 2014. This opera got a lot of play and a lot of press; it’s about Christmas eve 1914, when opposing French and German soldiers called a truce amidst a battle in WWI in order to celebrate Christmas together. I think that’s a promising setting for an opera, but in my view, the piece was a dud. I just didn’t think the music was distinctive enough to carry a 2-hour long opera. But who cares what I think — it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

So going into The Hours, I had low expectations, in spite of the stunt casting of three — really four — major league divas, Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara. (Those are the billed starlets, but it boggles my mind that no less a luminary than Denyce Graves has a major supporting role — she and Renée Fleming kiss within the first five minutes of the thing — and has gotten almost no mention in the press for this piece. I’d say that’s quite problematic!!)

And yet, I quite enjoyed this opera. It combined a number of trends in contemporary opera into an integrated whole that actually made for a dramatically satisfying evening. Now mind you, none of these trends are in any way my conception of what an opera should be, quite to the contrary:

• Non-melodic melodies; they look like melodies, they sound like melodies, but they ain’t melodies

• Inoffensive orchestral accompaniment that functions at the level of film score rather than dramatic impetus

• John Adams-style orchestration

• Polystylistic musical techniques to evoke setting

• Narrative craft that blends and overlaps contrasting scenes

To those musical elements, I would add two more contemporary operatic trends, namely an English-language libretto that at once sounds too contemporary to be opera and too stilted to be natural; and a staging in which dancers & chorus members are used as human set-dressing to evoke ghostliness / inner voices / split consciousness.

Strangely, I find myself agreeing with Alex Ross’s review, whom I’ve long since abandoned reading because he seems only to care about things that I find incredibly boring and his opinions are stultifyingly predictable, always downstream of contemporary New Yorker politics. Here’s what he said:

The Hours is a finely crafted, smartly paced opera, one that maintains and even deepens the intricate narrative structure it inherits from the novel and the film. ... What the opera lacks, however, is a compositional identity distinct enough to hold its own against the jumpy genius of Woolf’s prose—or, for that matter, against the indelible musical signature of Philip Glass, who scored the film. Puts takes cues from the American neo-Romantic tradition, particularly the lush nostalgia of Samuel Barber. He fashions sumptuous orchestrations and writes singable, soaring vocal lines. But he does not generate memorable melodies, and he leans too often on sombrely swelling textures, which bring to mind the consolatory end-credits music for a Hollywood war epic. In the prologue, he tries for something more experimental, echoing Kaija Saariaho and John Adams. The net effect is glib and insubstantial—sleek professionalism in place of raw imagination.

I agree with every bit of that excerpt, but I guess I just thought that the result worked better than Ross did. In a way, I was impressed that so many elements that I dislike could be made into something that wasn’t dislikeable. 

Now, don’t get me wrong — The Hours is in no way my idea of what an opera should be, and I would go to the worst Sondheim musical* before The Hours any day of the week. But I would recommend catching The Hours if you’re in New York, and by all means go to Kensho’s performance.

*Road Show

Opera Preview: Ran’s Anne Frank

From Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, a press release:

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Opera Theater will present the world premiere of the first full-scale production of an opera based on The Diary of a Young Girl — also known as “The Diary of Anne Frank”— when Anne Frank, by Shulamit Ran on a libretto by Charles Kondek, opens March 3, 2023, at Bloomington’s Musical Arts Center.

Professor Arthur Fagen, who was essential in obtaining the rights to the production for the Jacobs School, will conduct.

I know Arthur Fagen well (he was one of my conducting teachers at IU) and I know that he will take this project extremely seriously, to the point that he may well consider it the apogee of his career. (As detailed in the press release, his parents were both Holocaust survivors, escaping death as part of Schindler’s list.)

I know Shulamit Ran less well. She was the head of the composition faculty at the University of Chicago during my student years. Now mind you, that doesn’t mean I ever had a lesson with her or was even allowed to look her directly in the eyes. It was widely known that she would have nothing to do with undergraduate students.

At that time, I didn’t really like her music all that much, but, I always respected it, and I have found that I like an awful lot of what she’s written in the past 15 years, particularly her third string quartet. (Again, who cares what I think — she won the Pulitzer in 1990.) I predict that this will be a major and majorly-affecting new opera and a huge success for everyone involved. Since IU doesn’t exactly have the HD in Cinema capabilities of The Met, I’m tempted to return to Bloomington to attend the premiere.

Classical Mixtape

George Frederick Handel, Passacaille in G minor

This isn’t so much a recommendation of a piece of music as of this specific video. The uploader has created a score-scrolling comparison of six different renditions of the same work by Handel.

What some folks may not realize is that keyboard music written prior to the Classical Era invites all sorts of interpretation, improvisation, and general messing-around with. I’m currently in rehearsals for a pair of Messiah performances this weekend in which I will conduct from the harpsichord. I read from a figured bass part, which means that it’s entirely up to me what to play; it’s basically the exact same thing as a jazz chart where I’m given the chords, and I get to decide exactly how to realize them.

Anyway, this video does a phenomenal job of showing just how much freedom Baroque keyboardists have to work with. I find it utterly transfixing.