Tone Prose 54: Baton Wars

New Lenny Tunes Come to Light; A Reflection on Competitive Conducting

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Your hint is that I, like Joey, have given in to the populist uprising among the Tone Prose commentariat. But don’t get used to it!

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 toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 53
Schubert, Piano Sonata in B-flat D960: 3. Scherzo

As hoped for, last week’s NTT led to great success and much rejoicing by the people. Listeners Chris and Eric nailed the exact work. Special congrats to Listener Eric for two correct NTT identifications in a row!

I was able to guess the composer without filling up my bucket, and Listener Christopher (aka Listener-Statistician Christopher) offered an analysis similar to my own, though he didn’t hazard a guess.

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.

New Bernstein Tracks Drop

2023 is turning out to be a big year for Leonard Bernstein in spite of his ongoing and presumably eternal  stint in post-existence. Not only is Lenny’s likeness set to hit the big screen in December, but a newly discovered bit of his compositional juvenalia has just come to light in a recording on the Navona label:

The work in question is Bernstein’s “Music for String Quartet” from 1936. As recorded, the work exists in two movements, but it seems likely to me that when he wrote this music as an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, he probably intended to flesh it out into a full three- or four-movement quartet. Let’s just say that the second movement doesn’t sound very conclusive.

According to the program notes, the first movement of this piece was played through by friends of Lenny back in the ‘30s, after which he bestowed the score upon one of these friends, who then passed it down through their family. The second movement, however, was only recently located in the Library of Congress.

The first movement especially is a really impressive piece of work for an 18-year-old composer. It’s energetic and original, but I’ll admit that it doesn’t have the distinctive Bernstein fingerprint that he’d go on to develop. If it were an NTT, I’d probably have guessed someone like Henry Cowell or David Diamond.

Clash of the Maestros

I (Will) spent a few minutes every day for the past week or so tuning in to the livestreams of a new conducting competition that took place in the town of Szeged, Hungary, which sits at the three-way border between Hungary, Serbia, and Romania. The International Ferenc Fricsay Conducting Competition was named for the great Hungarian maestro who was apparently the music director of the Szeged Philharmonic early in his career, and whose name—as best I have it—is pronounced something like “freak-showy.”

If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can go watch the whole back catalog of preliminary, semi-final, and final livestream rounds on the competition’s YouTube page, but I can’t say I recommend it. Instead, sit back and enjoy this little list of three stray thoughts I had while observing it.

1. The Slog

It’s only in the past 5-10 years that the average internet bumbler has been able to watch the entirety of all the rounds of the big classical music competitions, and it really gives you an appreciation for the sheer number of highly qualified musicians on the scene all competing for the same narrow slice of the pie.

I’ll be frank: in my view, very few of these hundred conductors distinguished themselves in this competition, but I think it’s very much a function of the context. I’m sure that they’re all probably beloved members of their communities and that their talents and personalities are greatly appreciated. But when you get onto a podium and have to strut your stuff for 20 minutes, it flattens everything about you as an individual. This is why Horowitz rejected music competitions as a concept.

The fact that so many of these contestants chose the same repertoire didn’t help matters. The Szeged Philharmonic is not a particularly distinguished orchestra, but when five conductors in a row all get up and rehearse Beethoven’s Egmont overture, what will the last one possibly have to show for it?

2. Age

The Fricsay competition had no age limit. This is smart from a commercial point of view. Don’t forget that conducting competitions are fundraisers for the orchestras that run them, and this is why they’ve become popular for mid-tier Central- and Eastern-European philharmonics where state funding is no longer what it once was. Without an age cap, people from up and down the generational spectrum will pony up their entry fees just to be considered.

If you traverse the music internet as I do, you’ll see a fair amount of pushback against age limitations in competitions from people who are getting long in the tooth, and there’s certainly a philosophical argument to be had that age limits are ageist and inegalitarian, especially in a field like conducting where people often come to the discipline later in life.

But when you actually watch some of these old people up on the podium in a competitive situation, it just seems kind of sad. The older people were, by and large, much more comfortable and effective on the podium. But to me, that just shows that they have found a niche for themselves where they get to practice their craft on a regular basis. So why shoot for the moon in some dumb competition? At some point, one must become a man and put away childish things.

3. Clothes

Almost to a person, not one of these conductors had appropriate clothing; they either wore formal concert attire (invariably all-black) or garments that, in my view, were far too casual for a conductor working with an orchestra—what might be called “street wear.”

Of course, the knife’s edge between formal and casual has gotten thinner and thinner in the past fifty years, but this is really where a conductor needs to reside, attire-wise. You want to avoid the “business casual” look of the orchestra administrators, but you can’t look like the 22-year-old cellist fresh out of conservatory either. Bernstein, of course, was the master in this regard:

Tone Praise

Franz Liszt, “Les Cloches de Genève” from Book I of Années de pèlerinage

 I (Joey) was recently shown this piece by a fellow pianist, and found it to be an example of Liszt’s best side - reflective and harmonically lush, flashy without getting trashy, and just nice. It’s also not too long! Really, I don’t find there to be anything “too” about it, and that’s exactly what’s surprising and lovely about it, as a work of Liszt’s.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)