Month: February 2018

Vespers of 1610

The performance by Voice of Ascension of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 was, simply, glorious. I felt so grateful at having the opportunity to hear it performed live, at last. Yes, the music is exquisite, from start to finish. But Monteverdi’s masterpiece is more than that. Listening to it, I kept thinking of how certain rare artists step so easily outside the boundaries of the practice of their times and create something entirely new. More contemporary examples that spring to mind (although there are many others) include Picasso shaking the world of art, or in music, perhaps Stravinsky. In literature, Dante comes to mind as an artist who very consciously set about to begin a ‘dolce stil nove’ that shaped everything that came after.

As I listened, the sounds of other music from around 1610 was also in my mind, and as great as that music is, the fantastic variety and freshness of every movement from the Vespers stands out. The way he knits a whole out of greatly contrasting parts, balancing masses of sound against the most intimate of settings, was groundbreaking. That I still feel the newness in his music, sitting in a church pew in New York City in 2018, was also a testament to a great performance by Dennis Keene and the wonderful singers and instrumentalists assembled for this extraordinary concert.

Parsifal

It has been many, many years since I last heard Parsifal. The music is as glorious as I remembered. However, as much as I reveled in the performance I attended at the Met last night, I am struggling to understand whether the faults I saw in it were the result of a weak production, or inherent in the work itself. The orchestra and singers were better than I’ve seen at the Met in years – so it wasn’t that. The staging, however, struck me as bizarre, and the way it shoved the Christian symbolism in your face, distracted rather than supported the message evident in the music by itself. The music is ecstatic, opening up a door to human redemption from our inherent failures and frailties. The staging was, to my mind, a rather confused mess.

The scenery and staging in this production constantly distracted from the glory of the music. That was particularly evident in the 2nd act, when the entire cast was wading through a pool of blood that filled the entire stage. All one could focus on, instead of the music, was how uncomfortable that must for the cast and chorus, as they became drenched in red. The 3rd act wasn’t much better. As the libretto spoke of spring and redemption, the cast looked like they were trapped on a lunar landscape or a lifeless destroyed landscape after the destruction of war. The culminating moment of the four hours of glorious music turned out to be Parsifal sticking the tip of his spear into an open cup. Oh, well. That made it all rather laughable, rather than profound.

That said, I don’t believe all of the blame belonged to a misguided production. To my mind, Wagner’s jumbled confusion of magic, Arthurian legend and Christian symbolism was an inherent weakness that was only exacerbated by the silliness of the production. The libretto is a philosophical mish-mash. The message of the music is clear, but his libretto is anything but. Ultimately, for future listening, I think it would be better to ignore the story and just listen to it as pure music. With the contrasts between the feeling conveyed by the music in the three acts, the music is all that is needed to tell the story of how we yearn for the innocence and glory that all humans lose from the moment we are born and hope, ever after, to regain.

Two schools

For many years, I wrote music regularly, but without having time to listen as much as I might have liked to the music of others. As I’m at the stage in life now where I’m close to retirement and only working part-time, I’ve been enjoying the luxury of listening a lot more to many different composers. As I do so, the experience has confirmed an old impression I have that music (at least contemporary classical music) falls roughly into two schools: one relies on pitch relationships as a primary organizing element and the other seeks to create coloristic effects and the interplay of different timbres. I realize what I’ve just written is a vast generalization and over-simplification, but in the interest of brevity, that about sums up a lot of what I’ve listened to recently. My own music is solidly in the former camp, but as a listener, both certainly have their appeal! As electronics has become an ever growing part of the composer’s toolkit, the latter seems to predominant, as it seems (at least to me) that what electronics brings is limitless possibilities of sound effects. In that sense, I’m definitely old school, writing notes for musicians playing orchestral instruments to play.