Yakov Kreizberg (1959-2011) - an appreciation Evan Dickerson http://www.musicwebinternational.com/classrev/2011/Mar11/kreizberg_obit.htm
Amongst my circle of friends, it is typical that over dinner conversation should turn to matters musical. After a substantial debate around the merits or lack thereof in György Kurtág's music, I found myself faced with the question, “Which conductor do you want to hear more often?” My immediate reply: “Yakov Kreizberg”. My dinner companions nodded thoughtfully or looked perplexed, but my questioner refused to let it rest at that and pressed me for further elaboration. I heard Yakov Kreizberg conduct on two occasions: Der Rosenkavalier at English National Opera and in concert at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra in Schumann's second symphony and Brahms' violin concerto. The soloist was his long-time collaborator Julia Fischer. Der Rosenkavalier, I recall, was conducted rather at arm's length. I did not feel that Kreizberg was fully connected with the drama and passion that is - for me at least - so much part of the opera's fabric. The playing was perfectly correct, everything was in its appropriate place, yet whilst listening to it I remained unmoved. My thoughts on the 2006 Schumann and Brahms concert were published at the time. Re-reading the review, I am conscious of the fact that my attention is more on Julia Fischer's solo contribution than Yakov Kreizberg's conducting in the concerto. Schumann, however, allowed Kreizberg to really grab my attention. Going back to the notes I made in the concert programme, I commented on the 'definite sense of purpose' and 'clear technique and astute ear for layering the orchestral sections […] building sonorities from the bass range upwards'. It is a shame that Kreizberg never made it into the recording studio with Schumann. Afterwards, I headed to the Concertgebouw café to bide my time before heading back upstairs to hear Radu Lupu play Beethoven. Much to my surprise, Yakov Kreizberg took a seat opposite me shortly afterwards. Evidently still feeling the afterglow of Schumann's great passions - as was I - he sat and we conversed fulsomely whilst he consumed first a soup then chocolate cake at an alarming rate. The lasting impression was one of courtesy, utter professionalism of course, but that he treated my remarks with respect, even though it was momentarily obvious that our views differed regarding the dynamic impetus required for the first movement. He laughed upon seeing my comment “too laboured ???”, thought a moment, and nodded slightly with a broad smile. It was easy for me to see that if he took this kind of approach with orchestras and soloists just why his colleagues have been so quick to offer fulsome praise in the wake of his untimely death following illness at the age of 51. A varied legacy is left on CD and DVD, with several of the orchestras Kreizberg headed as chief conductor or music director represented. Early encounters on CD for Decca included two recordings of Berthold Goldschmidt's music, including the clarinet concerto. Not surprisingly his collaboration with Julia Fischer and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra features strongly on the Pentatone
label. Practically every release - including of the Brahms solo and double concertos - received favourable reviews upon release. Their Mozart concertos and notable for their scale, cleanliness and unassuming style. Dvořák symphonies impress for their pliant sensitivity as much as his Shostakovich reflects the ability he had to bring out inevitability of form in the composer's writing. His only recording of a Bruckner symphony (no. 7 with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra) was deservedly a contender for the 2006 Grammy Best Orchestral Performance award. Kreizberg's most recent artistic relationship was with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. They released in January this year a 3 CD set of the Stravinsky ballets on the orchestra’s own label, featuring the rising star mezzosoprano Renata Pokupic. The latest recording with Julia Fischer is due out on Decca next month, featuring Suk, Respighi, Chausson and Vaughan Williams. One wonders what else might have been forthcoming in time from Monte-Carlo under Kreizberg's baton. Only his opera repertoire is significantly under-represented, with a Don Giovanni filmed at Glyndebourne. Returning to Yakov's interpretation of Der Rosenkavalier once more I am tempted to think that actually he got it right. Richard Strauss's music can be played coolly and largely free of traditional Viennese excess, even when it is at its most overtly romantic. Surely a key defining characteristic in any musician of stature is their ability to persuade that another interpretation is not only technically possible, but that it also makes musical sense. For that reason alone Yakov Kreizberg surely still had much to offer orchestras, soloists and audiences, making his loss all the harder to bear. Incidentally, were I to be asked the question again as to which conductor I want to hear more of, I would go for Yakov’s older brother, Semyon Bychkov.
*** P.S. My account of hearing Kreizberg live (as above) is inaccurate. I omitted to mention that I reviewed his conducting of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden on 24 February 2006, noting the following in my review: “Yakov Kreizberg led a generally brisk account of the score, but it brought out the dramatic impetus in the orchestral writing to significant extent.” E.D.
György Ligeti (1923-2006): an obituary Evan Dickerson http://www.musicwebinternational.com/classrev/2006/Jun06/ligeti_obit.htm With the passing of György Ligeti on 12 June 2006 at the age of 83 in Vienna following a lengthy illness, the musical world has lost a true maverick. An independent thinker, Ligeti charted a singular route in his music with the evolution of a voice that is hard to ignore. In this respect one is tempted to put him alongside figures such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis when considering the major shapers of late twentieth century composition. Ligeti was born in Romanian Transylvania in 1923 to Hungarian parents. Musical studies began in 1941 with his attending Cluj conservatoire in Romania, which led to further study at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he was later appointed Professor. Following his arrest in 1943, as a result of being Jewish, Ligeti was sentenced to forced labour for the remainder of World War Two. Survival, however, was not without its cost: the war claimed his brother and father amongst other members of his family. The end of the war might have brought physical release but musically he continued to be heavily constrained by the Stalinist censorship in Hungary. For this reason much of his early work draws heavily on the use of Hungarian and Romanian folksong, reflecting the influence of Bartók and Kodály. “I am an enemy of ideologies in the arts. Totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances”, he commented ruefully. The Concerto Romaneşc (1951) is composed on the very limit of Stalinist dictates. One can pick up the folk music influences: Kodály in the dour Andantino, Bartók in the scherzo and distant shades of Enescu in the breathless finale. After the 1956 Hungarian revolution Ligeti fled to Vienna, and to his first real contact with avantgarde composers of the day, becoming an Austrian citizen in 1967. The orchestral work Apparitions established his reputation and secured the important endorsement of Stockhausen amongst others. From that point on Ligeti rarely, if ever, looked back as a creative force. Works such as Atmosphères and Volumina expounded a personal alternative to the serialism of Webern and his followers. However, if there was a single concern that dominated his music it was change. No other contemporary composer’s work is filled with so many turning points. Some view these changes as organic growth, taking its cue from his research into chaos theory, fractal geometry and biochemistry. The 1960s saw his music consumed by the use of super-dense polyphony he called "micropolyphony". Poème symphonique, written for 100 metronomes which run down at different speeds, is but a single example of this, and in extreme. Parallels of a kind were found in his use of speech sounds and nonsense syllables, which – perhaps unwittingly – can bring to mind the Dadaist conception of language-music-construction found in Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonata. At the core of his artistic personality is the quality of fun, and that in no small measure has helped to make works accessible to a wide public. Extracts from Lux aeterna, Atmosphères and Requiem found their way into the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was not one
to choose his music lightly, noting that Ligeti’s work had “an extremely urgent visuality” about it. As if to consciously exploit populist appeal (though I am sure he would not have agreed with this view) his works of the 1970s moved back to a whole-hearted use of tonality. By way of justification he stated unapologetically, “ I no longer listen to rules on what is to be regarded as modern and what as old-fashioned.” This ran in parallel with several important explorations of the concerto territory. Musical “forms with history”, including the étude (his proved to be the most important recent contributions to the genre) were now back on the agenda. The Piano Concerto blends more than other works elements of polyphony and folk music. The Hamburg Concerto, a horn concerto in all but name, sets the soloist against instrumental groupings including four natural horns to make possible the exploitation of overtones. The Violin Concerto recalls with more than a little nostalgia his roots and the style of folk fiddling with intentionally varied tuning of the solo instrument, to an unreservedly polyrhythmical accompaniment. This reflects the growing influence that African drumming was having upon his music in the 1990s. Surrealist juxtaposition and the theatre of the absurd came to bear in equal measure upon the inception of his stage work Le Grand Macabre, an effortless mix of operetta and the darkest of black humour: “Stage action and music should be dangerous and bizarre, absolutely exaggerated, absolutely crazy.” This, he felt, was the most direct way he could reach an audience. Among the many awards and prizes his work attracted a couple stand out. The 2004Polar Music prize recognised his ability to "stretch the boundaries of the musically conceivable from mind-expanding sounds to new astounding processes, in a thoroughly personal style that embodies both inquisitiveness and imagination ", as the judges put it. The same year also brought the ECHO KLASSIK Award given by the Deutsch Phono-Akademie for Lifetime Achievement. There can be little doubt that Ligeti was fortunate in having musicians with searching interpretive abilities perform his music in recent years with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Isabelle Faust, Charlotte Hellekant, Jonathan Nott, George Benjamin and the Arditti Quartet amongst them. Without the determination of such artists the Ligeti Edition on record might never have been achieved. Requiring several labels that were willing to get involved at various stages throughout the project, more than once it seemed as if the end might never be reached. How close Ligeti came to being a major victim of the recording industry’s collective implosion. Ligeti is survived by his wife and a son, Lukas, a New York-based percussionist. *** Personal recollections: My first extended contact with Ligeti’s music came in 1989 with the ‘Clocks and Clouds’ Festival given on London’s South Bank by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the committed baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. To say that each concert bemused me would be an understatement. What was valuable though was the context of contrasts Ligeti was set in: Debussy rang strongly at the time. Each concert ended with a still sprightly Ligeti jumping onto the platform with armfuls of sunflowers, which he then distributed to the performers… meeting with some bemused looks in the process! That ‘Clocks and Clouds’ helped announce some key works in the Ligeti oeuvre to London was important in itself. For me, it sparked an ongoing interest in his music (not that I always get his point first on first hearing, but that says far more about me than Ligeti). Diary notes made following Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s 2005 Wigmore Hall recital that featured a selection of Ligeti’s etudes record that I found:
Across the Études many long shadows are cast, not least by Chopin's and Debussy's compositions in the genre with the techniques of Scarlatti and Schumann. Satie, Liszt, Nancarrow or Hungarian and Balinese flavours (even the sculptures of Constantin Brancuşi) infuse and form the basis of individual studies. Indeed, it was interesting for me to note how it took such a refined pianist as Aimard to show that the Études could "grow from simplicity to great complexity, behaving like growing organisms […] displaying high virtuosity as a response to my own inadequate piano technique", as Ligeti himself outlined they should. And tradition? “There is only one tradition. Our music either stands up to it or not.” His certainly did. Evan Dickerson
The complete Ligeti discography: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgiperl/music/muze/index.pl?site=music&action=discography&artist_id=830324 Further reading: György Ligeti by Richard Toop (Pub: Phaidon Press, 1999) Based on interviews with Ligeti, this book surveys his life and music. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination by Richard Steinitz (Pub: Northeastern University Press, 2003) A scholarly traversal of Ligeti’s compositions. Image credit © Schott Music
Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915-2006): an obituary Evan Dickerson http://www.musicwebinternational.com/classrev/2006/Aug06/schwarzkopf_obit_ED.htm
Try for a moment to imagine the landscape of singing in the twentieth century without the presence of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. It is almost impossible to do so; such was her impact upon the development of vocal art. There are those whose impact is beyond dispute when considering specific musical forms or composers, but there are very few artists whose mark has been left with equal care across opera, operetta, orchestral song and lieder in the German, French, Italian and English repertoires. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died peacefully in her sleep on 2 August 2006 at her home in Schruns on the Austrian-Swiss border. She was 90. Her legacy is one of transformation in terms of a listener’s experience, a rich and varied body of recordings and several carefully selected pupils. Olga Maria Elisabeth Frederike Schwarzkopf was born on 9 December 1915, in Jarotschin, Germany, now in west-central Poland, to Prussian parents. Her father Friedrich Schwarzkopf was a school teacher whose work necessitated much travelling in the years of Elisabeth’s childhood. Her mother took principal charge of the home and the guiding of her young daughter’s musical talents. In 1928 the family settled in Magdeburg, Germany, where Schwarzkopf pursued studies in piano, guitar, viola and organ and developed a naturally high, light voice. 1933 saw a move to Berlin and enrolment at the Berlin Royal Augusta School before admission to the Hochschule für Musik. In The following year saw her first contact with England – by taking part in a cycling and camping trip funded by the League of National Socialist Students. It was on this trip that she learned English. Her teacher at the Hochschule für Musik, Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, somewhat inexplicably thought that Schwarzkopf would become a contralto. In 1938 she began singing with the Berlin State Opera. Her first recordings, from 1939 and 1940, are of highlights from Lehár’s Paganini and Das Land des Lächelns with tenor Rupert Glawisch. Schwarzkopf recalled being "totally nervous, totally awestruck" by the experience of recording and that it was largely the support of Glawisch that got her through it. What is striking about these early recordings is the assurance of the high lyric voice, a complete absence of any suggestion of contralto tendencies and how unlike her later self Schwarzkopf sounds. There is almost no dissection of the text in evidence. Over the past twenty years or so much – perhaps too much – has been made by biographers and academic researchers of Schwarzkopf’s allegiance with the Nazi Party between 1935 and 1945. The facts are these: under the Nazi regime all students attended daily ideological lectures; in 1935 Schwarzkopf joined the student association of the National Socialist Party; on 26 January 1940 she applied for full Party membership; was accepted on 1 March, and assigned membership number 7548960. In the years since her retirement such matters have diverted attention away from her artistic achievements. But Schwarzkopf, like Herbert von Karajan, only made things worse by evading the questions when they were first asked. Three separate Allied questionnaires from 1945 deny Party membership or association. When explanations were offered, she claimed that she ‘thought nothing of it’, that it was ‘like joining a union, in order to have a job’ and, later she took to quoting from Tosca: ‘Vissi d’arte’ – ‘I lived for art’. The years 1940 to 1947 mark the establishment of Schwarzkopf’s career on an international level.
The coloratura role of Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos attracted attention of Maria Ivogün in 1940, where after Ivogün took on Schwarzkopf as a private pupil. Their work together focussed on the high soprano repertory and lieder singing. Engagements with the Vienna State Opera soon followed and at the first post-war Salzburg Festival in 1947, where she worked with the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Vienna State Opera toured to London in 1947 and Schwarzkopf performed at Covent Garden in Don Giovanni and Fidelio. The success of these performances led to an invitation to join the Covent Garden company. She sang with them for the next five years, performing in English a wide range of German repertory and other roles including Violetta, Mimi, Gilda, and Massenet’s Manon. Her period in London though was but a prelude to the 1950s, 60s, and 70s – throughout which she was a dominant force. It is no coincidence that these decades saw the forming and deepening of musical relationships that bore artistic results that it is not easy to dismiss. Often her chosen musical partners were forceful personalities, like Schwarzkopf herself, and she must have seen this in them: conductors Karajan, Böhm and Szell and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau certainly shared her probing approach to music and text. Wilhelm Furtwängler and Gerald Moore might not have been such dominating personalities but they did demand the highest performance standards. The other person it is impossible to separate from Schwarzkopf’s achievements is Walter Legge. Astute in his musical judgements Legge brought the talents of Schwarzkopf and her collaborators before the public in a great sequence of recordings for the EMI label that traversed the change from mono to stereo technology and captured her voice at its finest. Favouring the process of recording after a series of live performances, Legge hoped to maintain the improvisatory live feeling in the studio. One example of this approach was the 1968 recording of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with Fischer-Dieskau and Szell. Public success though often hid no so private recriminations between Legge and Schwarzkopf even though they married in 1953. Once during a joint filmed interview Legge said, perhaps slightly jokingly, "Without me you’d be nothing, you know?" "Yes dear, I know", came the meek reply, but behind the eyes daggers were barely concealed. Whatever the situation of her private life Schwarzkopf’s career went from strength to strength, admired in a diverse repertoire that included over 70 roles from 50 operas. Mozart (Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira and Countess Almaviva), Richard Strauss (Ariadne and the Capriccio Countess) and Wagner (Eva and Elsa) formed the backbone of her stage appearances. Some measure of her willingness to move outside the standard repertoire is provided by her portrayal of Anne Trulove in the world premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rakes Progress in Venice, 1951. Thankfully many of these and other roles were captured either live and / or in the studio. In comparing available live and studio versions one becomes aware of her vocal consistency. For operagoers at the time her beautiful looks and assuredness in acting – she starred in several films when younger – must have added to her attraction. Operetta remained in her repertoire, recording and later appearing on stage in works such as Die Lustige Witwe and Die Fledermaus. Her recordings of both works are references, even though the 1955 Fledermaus with Karajan can sound too echtViennese for modern taste. "To perform operetta is much more difficult than opera. The rules are not so strict […] you have seemingly a lot of freedom, but you have to know which freedom to take and which not", she once said. There can be little doubt she consciously took the right choices for her and the music. Arguably though her greatest contribution was in the area of lieder. With Fischer-Dieskau, Schwarzkopf succeeded in redefining how lieder was sung. Their starting point, taken as given, was
the flexibility of the voice and its ability to do whatever was asked of it. Beauty of tone, evenness of production across the range and at whatever required dynamic were put to the service of the music and text. One can imagine Fischer-Dieskau and Schwarzkopf as surgeons over an operating table as they dissected their lied subject of the moment, laying its entrails bare to with a depth of interpretation that had rarely been heard before. Some call theirs a ‘psychological’ approach to singing because it so succeeded in getting under the skin of the material they interpreted. She became for many a priestess of lieder in much the same way Maria Callas was in the operatic sphere. The two even recorded together once – in Turandot – with Schwarzkopf singing Liu alongside Callas’ hauty ice maiden. As ever, Walter Legge influenced the choice of repertoire: her Mozart song disc with Walter Gieseking (1952) and Schubert partnered by Edwin Fischer (1957) stand out, as do both recordings of Strauss’ Vier letzte lieder. But for me the really distinctive contribution was made in songs of Hugo Wolf. One only has to compare the live recording of Wolf lieder accompanied by Furtwängler (1953) with those made by Erna Berger and Michael Raucheisen around a decade earlier to hear the difference in approach to two singers had. Berger, for all her beauty, sounds bland alongside Schwarzkopf’s unerring knowledge of just what it is she wanted from each song. But listen more closely still and you’ll hear Furtwängler’s piano playing as the true advocate in their recital, with Schwarzkopf often taking her cue from it for her interpretations. By the 1960s and ‘70s critical opposition to her style of performance was becoming more widely voiced in the press. It was not uncommon for critics to use words such as ‘arch’, even ‘vocal fetishism’ to describe what they heard. She became for one critic ‘the Prussian perfectionist’, whose extreme vocal nuances are an end in themselves, getting in the way of the music without adding much to the text. Some of the Strauss lieder she recorded in 1966 with Szell and the Berlin RSO are compromised in this way. Another critic wrote in 1981 that ‘intelligence and willpower triumphed over what was basically an unremarkable voice’. Ultimately though such remarks can say more about their authors than they do about their subject. Gerald Moore presented his impressions by calling her "the most cruelly self-critical person imaginable, [capable of] impaling her scores with arrows, stabs, slashes and digs." His farewell recital from 1967 shows again how merciless she could be with Wolf and Schumann, but equally how disarmingly humorous she could be in Rossini’s ‘Cats duet’ with Victoria de los Angeles. A recital tour in 1977-78 marked her retirement, accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons, who later partnered her farewell recital, held in Zurich, March 1979. The years since retirement were occupied with largely with teaching. Even in later years she was uncompromisingly tough on her pupils, once dismissing a singer from a London master class for breathing that was ‘inappropriate for Mozart’. Pupils were not the only object of attack when teaching: colleagues past and present also came under fire for perceived deficiencies. The hard reputation did little to stop sufficiently talented singers viewing Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau master classes as the vocal finishing schools of choice in recent years. Among those artists to progress their careers this way is Matthias Goerne, every inch the heir of both singers. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, a British citizen through her marriage to Legge, was made a Dame of the British Empire on New Year’s Day in 1992. Controversially, when asked to appear on Desert Island Discs she chose eight of her own recordings to accompany her: "memories of great moments in my creative life", she called them. She leaves no immediate survivors, though she is rumoured to be a great aunt to US General ‘Stormin’’ Norman Schwarzkopf. Asked whether she held regrets that she had no children she replied, ‘I have 500 children, they are the songs I sing’.
Essential listening - a personal selection: Dvorak, Monteverdi, Carissimi, Humperdinck and R Strauss: Soprano duets with Irmgard Seefried; Gerald Moore (piano); Philharmonia / Josef Krips; Vienna PO / Herbert von Karajan. Recorded 1955 (Moore) and 1947 (orchestral). Mono. EMI Lehár: Die Lustige Witwe (Hanna Glawari): Philharmonia / Otto Ackermann. Recorded 1953. Mono. EMI Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / LSO / Szell. Recorded 1968. EMI Mozart: Don Giovanni: (Donna Elvira): Vienna PO / Wilhelm Furtwängler. Various live recordings 1953. Mozart: Don Giovanni: (Donna Elvira): Philharmonia / Giulini. Recorded 1961. EMI Mozart: Cosí fan tutte: (Fiordiligi): Philharmonia / Karl Böhm. Recorded 1955. EMI J Strauss II: Die Fledermaus (Rosalinde): Philharmonia / Herbert von Karajan. Recorded 1955. EMI R Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier (Die Feldmarschallin): Philharmonia / Herbert von Karajan. Recorded 1956. EMI R Strauss: Capriccio (Grafin Madeleine): Philharmonia / Sawallisch. Recorded 1959. EMI Wolf: 22 lieder with Wilhelm Furtwängler (piano). Live recording 18 August 1953 EMI Gerald Moore – a tribute: Recorded 1967. EMI