Stephen Sondheim: It's the music, not the lyrics that elevate a song to the level of poetry

My moment of illumination this morning came from Paul Simon's review of Finishing the Hat, the first volume of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and miscellaneous musings up to 1981, in today's New York Times Book Review. (It came with this morning's Star, in case you didn't know about the papers' new Sunday partnership.)

Sondheim admits that he hates the lyrics he wrote for Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. Simon then writes: "Sondheim's rule, taught to him by his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, is that the book and composer are better served by lyrics that are 'plainer and flatter.' It is the music that is meant to lift words to the level of poetry."

I started thinking about opera and how the "plainer and flatter" rule applies equally well in that artform.

Unfortunately, Simon and Sondheim avoid mentioning the final ingredient in the magic: a great singer and actor.

Here's a clip from Act I of the amazing 2006 production of Company, directed by John Doyle, where all the characters except for Bobby also play an instrument (for details on that performance, click here).

It is followed by two clips from the making of the original cast album, starting with "The Little Things You Do Together," followed by Elaine Stritch trying desperately to get  "Ladies Who Lunch" right. In the middle of that muddle, Sondheim does give due credit to his actors:

Listen to the fabulous young ensemble of the Paris Opera singing at the Louvre Auditorium

Photo: Opéra national de Paris

So far this fall, chaos has ruled the concert calendar in Paris, as a variety of strikes and demonstrations have closed down venues -- or made them inaccessible -- with little warning. One concert that did make it was Wednesday night's presentation of the Atelier lyrique of the Opéra national de Paris at the Louvre Auditorium.

The dozen-member ensemble of operatic apprentices (plus four répétiteurs) has a season-long lineup of concerts separate from the work of the opera company. For some reason, this concert included a mix of current and past members, including 2007-2009 alumna, Calgary-born mezzo Andrea Hill.

The concert is available for free streaming on medici.tv right now.

Of the current Atelier members, I was particularly taken with Australian-born, Yale School of Music grad, bass-baritone Damien Pass, who sings four of Aaron Copland's arrangements of Old American Songs to perfection. Spanish mezzo Carole Garcia is a real powerhouse (singing songs by Frédéric Mompou).

The two-year Atelier lyrique programme was inaugurated by the previous Paris Opera general director, Gérard Mortier, in 2005. The programme's director is Christian Schirm.

Glenn Gould School soprano Jennifer Taverner has a very busy musical weekend

Wilfrid Laurier University grad and current Royal Conservatory Glenn Gould Professional School student Jennifer Taverner must have thousands of notes swimming before her eyes.

Tonight at 8 p.m., she's singing one of my very favourite pieces of music ever: Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with the Royal Conservatory Orchestra, led by Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus. (Full details here.)

On Saturday at 4 p.m., she joins the Larkin Singers for a piano-accompanied performance of Brahms' A German Requiem, where she gets to sing the sublime "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit" (You Now Have Sorrow) movement, at Christ Church, Deer Park. (Full details here.)

Both concerts are full of great music, but I can't vouch for the quality of the performances. The last time I heard Taverner, in the Royal Conservatory's opera production of Massenet's Cendrillon last season, I thought she had a lot of potential. At that same performance the Conservatory Orchestra, led by Uri Meyer, sounded excellent. Johannes Debus is a great conductor.

This is probably not fair to Taverner, but here is Jesse Norman, at the height of her art, singing "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit" in 1985, with the London Philhramonic Orchestra and Chorus, under Klaus Tennstedt:

Chinese audiences discover wonders of Baroque music thanks to Tafelmusik and other masters at Beijing Music Festival

There might have been an explosion of interest in Western classical music in China over the past 20 years, but, so far, it's been for a very limited repertoire of Great Works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The 13th annual Beijing Music Festival, curated by broad-thinking Chinese conductor Long Yu, tried to change that.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, currently on its second visit to Asia, is among a gang of high-powered missionaries who were invited to introduce audiences there to Western music from the 17th and 18th centuries.

As an article in yesterday's New York Times points out, there is currently no Western period-instrument orchestra in China, and next to no period-instrument training in the country's conservatories and music schools.

The article follows Christopher Hogwood, rehearsing Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto. It also talks about how Tafelmusik, pictured above, presented its fantastic Galileo Project multimedia show in Beijing last weekend. (The show was translated into Mandarin but the official programme -- identical to what was presented in Toronto last season -- makes no mention of the Chinese music that Ian Johnson mentions in the Times article.)

Like many musicians and listeners in the West, some of the young Chinese musicians have been pleasantly surprised by period-performance practice. As the article states:

“I feel that Baroque is more flowing, more natural,” said Xie Haoming, a 20-year-old violinist who played lead on one of Vivaldi’s violin concertos that Mr. Hogwood critiqued. “It’s like Chinese tea — a more delicate flavor.”

Christopher Hogwood works with students at Beijing Central Conservatory. Photo: Beijing Music Festival

The festival included a production of Handel's opera Semele, which was censored by local authorities, who had traveled to the production's premiere in Belgium last year, and found some of the material to be objectionable. You can check out an article from the NY Times from earlier this week, for details.

Here is a long but interesting promotional video of Zhang Huan's production -- the first time a Baroque opera has been presented in China with a Chinese director. The video, prepared over the summer, highlights the cross-cultural pollination and development of talent in China:

 

Opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli grants candid at-home interview to author Jasper Rees

This past weekend, the London Sunday Times ran a wonderful profile by Jasper Rees of opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli "visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923."

Zeffirelli is a classic combination of fruitful creator and not-so-nice human being. He is magnetic and repulsive, awe-inspiring and frustrating. In other words, he is absolutely compelling.

It's a great read.

If you don't have an online subscription to the London Times, you can find the article republished today in The Australian.

Is it murder or nurture? Free access to music may not be as simple as giving power to the people

Anyone who has been following this blog would know that I'm a big fan of free access to quality music. I regularly point readers to no-cost webcasts and free-admission live concerts. I think of these things as free samples that may seduce the otherwise timid listener into a passionate affair with a composer or performer or, even, an entire genre of music. I also think of them as a way for people with limited means to access concerts and operas that they would otherwise not be able to afford.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to the members of an association of Toronto music presenters. Afterward, one member suggested I read a book: You Are Not a Gadget, by one of the American founders of the Internet (to oversimplify), Jaron Lanier. It was published earlier this year by Knopf (here is the link to the paperback edition, which is due out in February).

Unlike the rest of us, who are caught in the middle of it, Lanier has been around the Web long enough to get some perspective on it. And what he sees isn't pretty, especially in how it devalues news and music through people's demand that as much of it as possible be free.

Yes, new models of making music and news pay for themselves are supposed to arise from this new way of disseminating it. But, as Lanier points out, the average freelance musician and freelance writer still cannot pay for food or shelter from supplying content to the Internet.

I haven't finished the book (which I'm going through in little bedtime chunks in between required-for-work reading) and I don't know what to make of it yet. But Lanier is great at provoking thought.

Here's a sidebar passage to consider from Chapter 5: The City is Built to Music:

If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum. In fact, online culture increasingly resembles a slum in disturbing ways. Slums have more advertising than wealthy neighborhoods, for instance. People are meaner in slums; mob rule and vigilantism are commonplace. If there is a trace of 'slumming' in the way that many privileged young people embrace current online culture, it is perhaps an echo of 1960s counterculture.

Here, to play us home, is classical guitarist Ronny Cameron, in the tunnel that connects the two Spadina subway stations:

Tonight's concert pick: Vivaldi meets Glass in a four-season string spectacular at Roy Thomson Hall

American violinist Robert McDuffie returns to Roy Thomson Hall tonight to perform Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 2, "The American Four Seasons," which he commissioned. Rather than playing with a modern symphony orchestra, McDuffie is performing with the Venice Baroque Orchestra in a programme that also includes Antonio Vivaldi's inextinguishable "Four Seasons" concertos.

It should make for a fantastic evening of music. For all the concert and ticket details, click here.

I heard McDuffie's Canadian premiere of the Glass concerto last December, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. This was my verdict in the next day's Star:

It's not every day that one gets to hear the live premiere of a major new work by one of the world's most influential composers, 72-year-old American composer Philip Glass.

The first performance of the work - Violin Concerto No. 2, "The American Four Seasons" - was so spectacularly played by the new piece's muse, American violinist Robert McDuffie, at Roy Thomson Hall Wednesday night, that the event turned into one of the most exciting musical evenings of the year.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, led by its music director Peter Oundjian, was also in top form, helping McDuffie carve and shape Glass's collection of repeated and layered short musical motifs into an expressive work of art.

McDuffie deserves a medal for his stamina. Glass gives the soloist little respite as he alternates between joining with and separating away from the rest of the all-string orchestra (augmented by a synthesizer keyboard). The four movements vacillate between a dark-undertoned mechanistic frenzy and slow, mesmerizing meditation. Each section is joined together by a violin solo that really gave McDuffie a chance to shine.

Both composer and players showed off their very best work, although one would be hard-pressed to find many allusions to Vivaldi's familiar Four Seasons in the piece.

To give you an idea of the sort of sounds that are waiting for the audience tonight, here is an Arte promotional clip of the Venice Baroque Orchestra playing Vivaldi's "La Tempesta di Mare" violin concerto in E-flat major at the 2010 Schwetzingen festival, followed by a promotional clip made last spring by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop for a performance of Glass's concerto:

The rich biographical soil of Glenn Gould's life and art is quickly being depleted by over-farming

There's a book launch tomorrow night at the Royal Ontario Museum for Partita for Glenn Gould, by Montrealer Georges Leroux. (Click on the title for publication details.)

In its original French, the book won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Given that the work is by a veteran University de Québec à Montreal philosophy professor with a lifelong love of Glenn Gould's playing, this should be a welcome addition to the huge-and-growing catalogue of biographies, meditations and appreciations of an artist who touched the lives of millions of listeners around the world.

Before I weigh in on the book, you should know that my predecessor as Star classical music critic, William Littler, is going to moderate a chat with Leroux as well as Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont (the makers of the film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould) tomorrow, starting at 7 p.m., at the ROM's Signy and Cléophée Eaton Theatre (level 1B). The evening includes the screening of the film. Tickets are $25 ($20 for ROM members), and can be reserved here.

As for my impressions of the book, the first thing you should know is that I repeatedly wanted to fling it across the room in frustration.

Early in his book, Leroux quotes from "Let's Ban Applause," something Gould wrote in 1962. Leroux writes that, in this passage, "we find the strongest expression of what will become (Gould's) artistic ethic. I regard it as a declaration of principle that underlies his entire aesthetic, and I will return to it often:"

I am disposed toward this view because I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Through the ministrations of radio and the phonograph, we are rapidly and quite properly learning to appreciate the elements of aesthetic narcissism -- and I use that word in the best sense -- and are awakening to the challenge that each man contemplatively create his own divinity.

Leroux responds to Gould like so:

In this book I want to reflect on the meaning of this sense of wonder and this sovereignty of the artistic life, and also on the factors that limit the experience. I also want to look at the transcendence of a work of art and the sway it exercises over a life, even in its persistent elusiveness. My assumption is that these limits are pushed outward day by day, and I am tempted to see there a parallel with holiness. I would not recoil from speaking of the holiness of art, if by that one means the absolute, uncompromising commitment to a style of life. We would not revere a saint who did not give of himself freely; not would we admire an artist who took no risks. The demands of art are such that it claims life in its entirety, and that is the price of authenticity...

And so on (and on). And on.

It is such a Romantic view of the Artist, with a capital A. It also has all the elements of the Facebook world's preoccupation with All Things Me. And it all comes wrapped in the florid circumlocution of a seasoned lecturer on Philosophy.

Leroux gazes adoringly at his subject, returning obsessively to Gould's eccentric solitude as a source of fascination, from childhood through to the final recording of the Goldberg Variations. All of his biographical material is borrowed from those who came before, so what we get is an appreciation. There are no freshly unsealed letters, no secret trysts, no hatchets unearthed. Here is a man who loves music and adores Gould, and seems to have a fondness for the Artist as hero, building the sound studio as his Temple to Art.

This rubs me the wrong way, because I (currently) believe that it is this kind of unnatural fixation on the artist as icon that scares away many young people from the world of classical music. If we didn't have eccentrics, we wouldn't have any art. Musicians are human beings whose music will or won't connect with a listeners for purely human reasons. 

For me, the ideal book about Gould that was not about Gould is Mark Kingwell's contribution to Penguin's Great Canadians series from last year. Kingwell looks beyond the self of the listener and the artist to look at a broader cultural and philosophical context for what made Glenn Gould so very special.

Kingwell used his philosophical background to help me see and understand how our society makes icons of artists. Kevin Bazzana's biography, Wondrous Strange, explained Gould the man and the artist in a straightforward, meticulously researched and elegantly laid out narrative.

For this pair of eyes, Leroux's extended meditation achieves neither.

Perhaps we should simply let the music speak to us directly, and stop trying to explain its mysterious attraction. The soil of Glenn Gould's life and work can only net so much fruit before it runs out of nutrients.

Here's Gould, playing the Fugue in E-flat, from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, in 1963:

Here, for Scott, is a montage of Toronto streets, roads and alleyways, with a soundtrack of Gould playing Sellinger's Round, by William Byrd:

Career-boosting Young Concert Artists organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary

Canadian violinist Scott St. John and the St. Lawrence String Quartet have more than each other in common: they are also alumni -- from different years -- of the annual Young Concert Artists Inc. competition.

The New York City-based organization, which is dedicated to giving promising young talents a practical career boost, is celebrating its 50th anniversary as it prepares for its next round of competitors,arriving in just over a week.

Guelph-based freelancer writer Marcia Adair wrote an excellent feature on Young Concert Artists for today's Los Angeles Times. It's an inspirational read.

Here is a promotional trailer the organization prepared for its anniversary:

On TV tonight: Why Canada Council Instrument Bank competition is like no other

Cellist Denis Brott puts everything in perspective about halfway through the film, when he says: "A great instrument is when the limitations are always yours." That is what makes Old Master violins and cellos so valuable musically, and why so many string players dream of getting one in their hands.

Last year, Montrealer Ari Cohen followed a pan-Canadian competition for young, talented string players that awards the use, for three years, of one of 14 stringed instruments from the Canada Council's Instrument Bank.

We meet many of the competitors and several past winners, and discover what a close relationship these people have with their instruments. We find out how the enterprising Brott hooked up with William Taylor, a prominent business CEO, to raise some money for this project three decades ago. We also see how this competition is not just about musicality, but having a serious career plan.

The Instrument Bank competition is about the total artist and, satisfyingly, Cohen also manages to connect the viewer with the total person. It's a fine way to spend some time in front of the TV this evening -- on Bravo! at 8 p.m. (Eastern), with a repeat broadcast on Oct. 30 at 7 p.m.

Here's the official trailer: