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      Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ Doesn’t Deserve Your Eye Rolls

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeethoven at 250Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ Doesn’t Deserve Your Eye RollsIt is overplayed all over pop culture. But the pianist Igor Levit says it is “one of the most beautiful pieces I know.”Credit…Eleanor DavisJan. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEven if you don’t know “Für Elise,” you know “Für Elise.”A bagatelle the length of a pop song, Beethoven’s trifle is recognizable from the start: a wobble between E and D sharp that gives way to a tune you’ve heard virtually everywhere. Ringing from cellphones and children’s toys; sampled in rap and featured on Baby Einstein albums; as likely to appear in a serious drama as in a Peanuts cartoon, “Für Elise” is shorthand for classical music itself. In “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” it’s used to identify Beethoven without even saying his name.But you probably haven’t heard “Für Elise” in a concert hall. More likely to inspire eye rolls than awe among the cognoscenti, it’s rarely programmed — unlike, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with its famous dun-dun-dun-DUN fate motif, or his Ninth, which ends with the omnipresent “Ode to Joy.”I’ve been thinking about the puzzling absence of “Für Elise” from professional recitals since I first met the pianist Igor Levit for a concert and interview we conducted over Facebook Live in 2017. He offered the piece as a surprise at the end of the broadcast, withholding the title but saying, “I will play one of the most beautiful pieces I know.”Hearing the opening bars, I was caught so off guard I nearly laughed. “Für Elise” occasionally pops up in mainstream recordings; Paul Lewis released an aching account on an album of Beethoven bagatelles last summer. But it’s so rarely heard live — outside student concerts, at least — that for a moment I didn’t know how to respond.Nearly four years later, and using the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth a few weeks ago as an excuse, I asked Mr. Levit whether he could explain the beauty of “Für Elise” in more detail, and make a case for why it warrants deep attention rather than reflexive exasperation.“It’s not a piece you actually hear,” he said in a video call from his home in Berlin. “It became in a way unperformable, which I think is a shame.”Mr. Levit added that when he plays it as an encore, people tend to giggle or look visibly confused. Serious musicians aren’t expected to build their careers on this piece, and audiences don’t rush to concert halls for it.The ubiquity of “Für Elise” — like Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” — doesn’t void its masterly craft, nor does it preclude the possibility of performances on the level of Mr. Levit’s. Yet the eye rolls continue. In his biography “Beethoven: A Life,” which was recently translated into English, Jan Caeyers writes that the work “has assumed a significance in Beethoven’s oeuvre that is utterly disproportionate to its musical import.”That may be true, but it’s a severe judgment nevertheless. For the outsize reputation, we can thank the catchy title, an abbreviation of the dedication: “For Elise on 27 April as a remembrance of L. v. Bthvn.” If the piece had come down in history merely as Bagatelle in A minor (WoO 59, from the “Werke ohne Opuszahl” catalog of Beethoven works without official opus numbers), it likely would have remained a lovely obscurity.Beethoven drafted and dedicated it in 1810, though it remained unpublished in his lifetime. He is thought to have revisited it in the early 1820s, most likely with an eye toward including it in his Op. 119 Bagatelles, but he ultimately left it out. The scholar Ludwig Nohl eventually discovered and published it in the mid-1860s, igniting a debate over the identity of “Elise” that continues to this day.Becoming a fixture of music lessons, spreading with the rise of mass media, finding new audiences as the line between high and low culture blurred: All led to the ultra-ubiquity of “Für Elise.” By the time I was a toddler, in the early 1990s, all I had to do was push a piano-shaped button on a toy to hear the opening theme. It was so entrenched in my memory that I could play it, crudely, before I could read a note of music.Mr. Levit recalled similar experiences; he too learned “Für Elise” by ear. Then he became fascinated by, for example, a fleeting dissonance or a passage of enveloping tenderness. “This piece is an absolute jewel,” he said.I asked him to expand on that, using his copy of the score from G. Henle Verlag. Mr. Levit has remained busy during the pandemic: He streamed a long series of daily concerts from his apartment, put on a marathon performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” and appeared around Europe. But like everyone, he has also been unusually homebound, lately baking challah and playing guitar. So he had time to dive deeply into the three pages of “Für Elise.” (All audio clips are excerpted from Mr. Levit’s Sony recording.)Opening with uncertaintyCredit…G. Henle Verlag“Für Elise” is in A minor, but it doesn’t declare its key right away. The first five notes remind Mr. Levit of a later piece, Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe,” which begins dissonantly with a C sharp quickly followed by a D two octaves lower.In the Beethoven, the notes are an E and a D sharp, a half-step lower. Toggling between them, with an improvisatory feel and the extreme softness of pianissimo, creates a sense of mystery. For a moment, “Für Elise” could go anywhere.Once upon a timeCredit…G. Henle VerlagA more solid sense of the piece’s direction comes once the left hand enters, trading notes with the right hand in upward arpeggios. It has the lure of a fairy tale, Mr. Levit said — or at least that’s how it sounded to him when he once found himself “fooling around” and doubling the tempo of these measures, rendering them flowing and dreamlike.“You have this almost nondirectional beginning,” he said, “but then this feeling of ‘A long, long time ago. …’”A musical hugCredit…G. Henle VerlagAfter the opening repeats, the piece continues with phrases that gently rise and fall, like breathing. Mr. Levit also sees them as a musical hug: “When it goes up you open the arms, and when it goes down you close them.”The chord progression here, he added, is practically guaranteed to make you melt. “It’s very beautiful,” Mr. Levit said, “but in the simplest way.” It’s the stuff of the Beatles and Elton John — and reminiscent of Pachelbel, whose Baroque-era Canon in D also echoes through pop music today, one of the few challengers to “Für Elise” among overplayed chestnuts.A glimpse of late styleCredit…G. Henle VerlagThe opening theme returns by way of a transition of shocking economy: the note E, played repeatedly but given the illusion of variety by jumping octaves. It’s a flash of late Beethoven, his music at its most elemental. And it’s the kind of moment that appears in subsequent piano repertoire: Mr. Levit pointed to the opening of Liszt’s “La Campanella” and the Marc-André Hamelin étude Liszt inspired.One of Beethoven’s feats here, Mr. Levit added, is how simplicity is made theatrical by passing those E’s back and forth between the left and right hands. “It’s just emptiness,” he said. “How great must a composer be to allow himself to write about nothing?”Melody, at lastCredit…G. Henle VerlagMr. Levit argues there is no true melody in “Für Elise” until about a minute into the piece. The opening, he said, is not something that could be easily mimicked by the human voice; it’s more about Beethoven creating space. Then comes a more traditionally constructed passage, with a lyrical right-hand line above left-hand accompaniment.“I don’t think the beginning is espressivo,” he said. “So when the F major comes in, this allows you to really sing it out. It’s in a way easier to play.”Easier, that is, until an étude-like dash of notes — perhaps the most difficult four measures of the score — leading abruptly back into the opening theme. The transition, or lack thereof, is characteristic of Beethoven; Mr. Levit described it as “a car crash moment.”A dramatic interludeCredit…G. Henle VerlagAfter revisiting the opening theme, Beethoven suddenly changes the temperature of the piece with a tempestuous interlude of right-hand chords over a rumbling floor of repeated low notes. Mr. Levit often uses the word “tender” to describe “Für Elise,” but not here.“It’s quite dramatic,” he said. “And it’s automatically loud because if you use the pedal, just because of the way the piano is built, it gets louder. It’s intense.”The wind machineCredit…G. Henle VerlagBut the drama comes to a quick end with another “car crash” transition: two measures of barely held chords, then a run of triplet 16th notes rising and falling over a span of more than three octaves. It can be easy to read this as a climax — either to the stormy middle section, or the piece as a whole — but Beethoven marks these notes as pianissimo, exactly as soft as the opening. “It’s ghostlike,” Mr. Levit said, “a pianissimo wind machine.”Closing the bookCredit…G. Henle VerlagThe opening theme returns one last time, quietly, with no changes in tempo or dynamics that would have given it the grandeur of an ending. The only addition is a single note — a low A — in the brief final chord. If “Für Elise” is a fairy tale, this is its tidy conclusion.“It’s very touching,” Mr. Levit said. “This is what happened, that’s how it was. The story was told, and now the end. The book is closed.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyI Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His MusicGabriela Lena Frank, a composer born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, describes her creative experience.“Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic?”Credit…Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDec. 27, 2020Gabriela Lena Frank, a composer and pianist and the founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which aims to foster diverse compositional voices and artist-citizens, was born with a neurosensory high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss. In an interview with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, she described her creative practice and her exploration of the music of Beethoven, who gradually lost his hearing and by his 40s was almost totally deaf. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.The progression over the course of the sonatas — a musical document of his hearing loss in transition — is not perfectly linear by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s undeniable. By the time of the “Waldstein” Sonata, not only are the hands far apart, but they are doing very different things: that left hand pounding in thick chords against the right hand’s spare little descending line, for instance.Well, I recall from my therapy classes for hearing-impaired children that I was taught to recognize thick from thin. My therapist had me close my eyes and indicate from which direction a rumbly drum was coming, as opposed to a high-pitched whistle. I couldn’t really hear them, but I could certainly feel them and their contrasting energies.I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too.That said, if I don’t wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy. And I think these are also hallmarks of Beethoven’s later music, and not just for piano.Yet more from my own experience: When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music, as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite: I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.The composer Gabriela Lena Frank in Boonville, Calif. “When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music,” she said. “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream.”Credit…Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesI wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic? And that the modern-day piano wouldn’t be with us if a deaf person hadn’t demanded its existence? This is beyond my expertise, but I’ve also wondered about sign language. Are there certain spatial gestures in the language that appear in the choreographic execution of certain kinds of music? And if so, does this imply yet more levels in which a deaf sensibility infuses the music-making of a hearing world?I often wonder how Beethoven would react to modern-day hearing aids considering his great frustration with the ear trumpets of his day. Personally, I miss the old analogs of my girlhood, for their simplicity. Nowadays it’s an effort not to roll my eyes as a technician fits me with the ubiquitous digital aids that, in addition to all manner of dazzling bionic-lady bells and whistles, default to the type of correction desired by late-deafened people — namely, high frequencies and spatial reorientation to help with speech recognition. That’s completely understandable as losing the ability to communicate with loved ones is an awful and dispiriting experience.Yet those of us born with hearing loss are often champion lip-readers (as I am) or use sign language. And whether or not we are musical, we join musicians with hearing loss (at any stage) in desiring hearing aids that prioritize beauty of sound, unchanged pitch, unchanged timber and naturalness — restoring proper weight to middle and low frequencies, and spatialization. We don’t want hearing aids that ply our sound world with obvious artifice, like a supposedly “acoustic” album that’s been overworked by a manic sound engineer.In this vein, I don’t think Beethoven would like how so many modern-day digital hearing aids massage all kinds of processes into what the wearer hears. It helps to have an imaginative and sensitive technician, preferably one with experience with performers and composers. A good fitting is an art so the music can just breathe.At the piano, I usually start practicing without my hearing aids, entering a world of profound silence familiar from my earliest years, when I wasn’t yet fitted. At first, I’m still hearing the music in my head, but after a while, I’m more aware of the choreography, how it feels like a dance in my hands. Focusing on a physical experience that feels good and healthy can counteract bad habits which appear when you are only listening to the sound.For instance, if one plays a large chord of, say, eight notes, the tendency will be to bring out the lowest note and the highest note — the bass and the melody — to give them more audibility and importance. Because of the structure of the hands, this means the weakest pinkie fingers are bringing out the most important notes. To help the poor fingers out, the hands may be tempted to angle out, left hand pointing to the bass, right hand to the melody.This is a very unnatural position for your hands to be in, and in fact it mimics the wrist-breaking karate locks taught in dojos, inviting injury. Imagine a series of these chords up and down the keyboard, in such an unnatural position. But because you are chasing a full-bodied sound from this eight-note chord, and not paying attention to its physicality, you start to do dangerous things. With the ability to take the sound out of the equation, I focus on the feel. I solidify a good technique first, and know it. Knowing it, I can hang onto it once I do put my hearing aids back in, and then work on the sound.So, ironically, even though we are talking about a sonic art form, sound can be a distraction. Sound can take your attention away from the many other factors that go into making music. Music, after all, is about so much more than volume. For my own loss, I’m just missing volume. I’m not missing everything else one needs to make or enjoy music. And I even have perfect pitch, so in some ways, I hear better than hearing people.And I think that had to have happened to Beethoven. He learned to create music without sound, however reluctantly. While he increasingly withdrew from society and disliked talking about his disability, he left us a living document of his hearing loss in transition likely starting with music written in his mid to late 20s, when his hearing began to fade. In other words, I think he encoded his deafness in music. And as I say, the progression in his music is not a perfectly linear one, just as his progression through deafness was likely not perfectly linear, but the journey is there. Unmistakably.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Swapping Songs With Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySwapping Songs With Chess Grandmaster Garry KasparovMusic brought a critic and a guest together, in a conversation about Bach, Beethoven, chess and politics.Garry Kasparov, shown here in 1997, picked Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) to share; our critic chose Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.Credit…Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesDec. 18, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ETMusic, we all know, can bring people together. To stimulate a conversation between a music critic and a guest — in this case, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov — about listening and life, there was one ground rule: Each participant suggests a single piece for the other to listen to ahead of the chat.I chose Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. Mr. Kasparov picked Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.”Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mr. Kasparov comes from a musical family: His paternal grandfather and uncle were composers, his grandmother was a pianist and his father studied the violin before becoming an engineer. A former World Chess Champion, Mr. Kasparov is now a political activist, a prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He spoke by phone from his home in Croatia, where he has spent the pandemic with his wife, Daria, and their two children. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.[embedded content]The two pieces we picked are interesting in the context of the pandemic. The Beethoven symphony has the social dimension of the full orchestra and the Bach is a solitary puzzle.The “Goldbergs” are not just one piece! It’s like an encyclopedia of music.I like that. There is that sense of trying out a problem according to different possibilities. I picked Bach for you, with all his fugues, because I think of chess as having similar qualities. The elegance of algorithms and the beauty that comes out of processes that actually obey very strict rules.For me it was a new experience. I don’t listen to much music before Mozart. It was quite a discovery to understand that Bach introduced many future themes. From the chess or computer world, I would use the term founding father. I am amazed by people who are ahead of their time.Listening to the “Goldbergs” I was struck by what I see as parallels with the way pieces move in chess. Even in the opening Aria, there is this very methodical movement in the left hand, while the right hand has much more freedom.I’m not sure. I see the Aria as something godly, heavenly — but then it goes back to earth. It’s this combination.What do you make of the fugues in strict counterpoint? These lines that interlock in a way that is both a beautiful mechanism and has this creative freedom to it.Well, it’s about variety. I read the legend that Bach wrote it for his patron to fight insomnia. But it doesn’t strike me as something that helps people go to sleep. The first 10 variations, he’s basically demonstrating his power as a composer. But then he shifts to something that is more interesting. In many of the variations we can hear the herald of new music. I have one favorite: Variation 25. It’s Chopin. It’s the first Ballade. And I love Chopin.What is it that attracts you to that? I hear a lot of melancholy in that variation.It’s not sadness. It’s a kind of realism. The world is as it is, and we have to accept it. It makes me feel comfortable. I also like Variation 13. It draws you into this water of music. And for energy and style I would pick number 16. In Variations 14 and 29, Bach is a virtuoso à la Liszt.I get the sense that the connections I made to chess don’t feel true to you at all. Did you find anything that you could relate to the game?It’s more how the music relates to me, Garry Kasparov, the person. I left the professional game years ago. Sure, the “Goldbergs” are an encyclopedia. It’s a demonstration of what could be done. It was prescient.I was also curious to ask you about artificial intelligence, and to what extent beauty can come out of a closed system with its own rules. Can a machine make moves that are elegant or is the human spark required? There are efforts that try to teach machines to write music, even in the style of Bach.A machine can learn rules, whether it’s chess or music. Offered a variety of options, it can eventually come up with something. But creativity has a human quality: It accepts the notion of failure.The way machines approach a problem is always about the bottom line: “This move is good because it offers the best return.” But creative beauty is not to go against the rules, but beyond the known pattern.You’re setting up a nice transition to the Beethoven symphony you picked. So much of that is about changing received patterns and disrupting expectations. He has accents in the wrong place that take you off guard and build drama. A machine would never see the advantage of breaking those rules.In a closed space a machine will beat humans. But when we are talking about art, the lines are blurry. We enjoy the journey into the unknown.In Beethoven’s period, music was structured around the development of a theme. It encounters an opposing theme and out of that a story unfolds. I was curious if you could connect that to a chess game. In the sense that the opening determines a lot, but that it’s in the encounter with your opponent that the game develops.Sorry to disappoint you again. I view this from a different angle. They wrote the music because they heard it in their heads. It’s pure genius. They can make very complicated constructions. But it’s flow. It’s intuition. That’s also my playing style. That’s the only time I can make a parallel to my playing. I know when a move is right.With Beethoven I see it as heroic. But it’s different from Wagner. That’s mythology. It comes from another world. With Beethoven it’s human.At a granular level the “Eroica” has this energetic play with the idea of disruption — creating crises and then rushing forward again. Are there parallels you can draw to your political activism, with how to effect change?Now you hit the right button. It’s more about my political engagement. You have to pretend to be heroic. But our fight is not for some mythological object or carving our name in the history books; it’s about other humans and improving the world we live in. And that’s a shift. The “Eroica” is very rich with this shift.I appreciate you being honest and rejecting my high-flung theories about counterpoint and chess. It shows that what one person reads into music is not necessarily what’s there at all. It was fun to try out these ideas with you.Thank you for forcing me to listen to the “Goldberg” Variations. Now I have a greater appreciation of Bach. I was very surprised by how modern it feels.It might have something to do with transparency. Because in Bach’s keyboard music the structure is visible, the same way in really good modern architecture form just follows function.I could use another analogy. These days I’m doing a lot of Lego with my five-year-old. You have a plan and then you have the Legos. And you can always see the structure.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020Listen to our critics’ favorites from a year in which much of the energy in music came from recordings.Credit…The New York TimesAnthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe, Joshua Barone, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, David Allen and Dec. 17, 2020Thomas Adès: Berceuse from ‘The Exterminating Angel’“In Seven Days”; Kirill Gerstein, piano (Myrios)The composer Thomas Adès and the pianist Kirill Gerstein’s artistically fruitful friendship has given us two essential albums this year: the premiere recording of Mr. Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Mr. Gerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon); and this one, which includes a solo arrangement of the harrowing and slippery Berceuse from Mr. Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” JOSHUA BARONEBerceuse from “The Exterminating Angel”Myrios◆ ◆ ◆Bach: Cello Suite No. 4, GigueBach: Complete Cello Suites (Transcribed for Violin); Johnny Gandelsman, violin (In a Circle)From the beginning of this movement, ornamented with the insouciance of folk music, it’s difficult to resist tapping along with your foot. That urge doesn’t really leave throughout the rest of the six cello suites, lithely rendered here on solo violin by Johnny Gandelsman. This is Bach in zero gravity: feather-light and freely dancing. JOSHUA BARONESuite No. 4, GigueIn a Circle◆ ◆ ◆Beethoven: Symphony No. 2, Allegro moltoBeethoven: Symphonies and Overtures; Vienna State Opera Orchestra and others; Hermann Scherchen, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The few new Beethoven symphonies released in this, his 250th birthday year, have largely offered more evidence for the drab state of interpretive tastes today. Not so the rereleases — above all this remastered and exceptionally bracing cycle that was eons ahead of its time when it first came out in the 1950s. Scherchen’s Beethoven — like this Second Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — is fast, sleek and astonishing detailed, as exciting as anything set down since. DAVID ALLENSymphony No. 2, Allegro moltoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Nadia Boulanger: ‘Soir d’hiver’“Clairières: Songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger”; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Myra Huang, piano (Avie)After Lili Boulanger, the gifted French composer, died in 1918 at just 24, her devoted older sister Nadia suffered doubts about her own composing and turned to teaching. On this lovely recording, the tenor Nicholas Phan performs elegant songs by both sisters, ending with Nadia’s misty, rapturous “Soir d’hiver,” a 1915 setting of her poem about a young mother abandoned by her lover. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Soir d’hiver”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, RomanceChopin: Piano Concertos; Benjamin Grosvenor, piano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Elim Chan, conductor (Decca)There’s pianism of historic caliber on this release, and another mark of Mr. Grosvenor’s breathtaking maturity, even though he is still in his 20s. Summoning playing of pure poetry, he lavishes on these concertos all his lauded sensitivity, innate sense of pace and effortless way with phrasing. He’s matched bar for bar by Ms. Chan, an impressive young conductor who makes an occasion of orchestral writing that in other hands sounds routine. DAVID ALLENPiano Concerto No. 1, RomanceDecca◆ ◆ ◆Duke Ellington: ‘Light’“Black, Brown and Beige”; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (Blue Engine)If Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall performance of his “Black, Brown and Beige” remains matchless, its radio broadcast sound has dated, making the crispness of this faithful recent rendition worth savoring. Sterling interpretation and production values permit a fresh look at “Light,” including the elegant way Ellington weaves together motifs heard earlier in “Black,” just before a rousing finish. SETH COLTER WALLS“Light”Blue Engine◆ ◆ ◆Eriks Esenvalds: ‘Earth Teach Me Quiet’“Rising w/ the Crossing”; the Crossing (New Focus)Earlier this year, when singing together became just about the most dangerous thing you could do, Donald Nally, the magus behind the Crossing, our finest contemporary-music choir, began posting daily recordings from their archives. He called it “Rising w/ the Crossing,” also the title of an album of a dozen highlights. There’s David Lang’s eerily prescient reflection on the 1918 flu pandemic, performed last year, and Alex Berko’s stirring “Lincoln.” But I keep returning to Eriks Esenvalds’s dreamily unfolding appeal to the Earth, its text a prayer of the Ute people of the American Southwest: a work of true radiance, fired by the precision and passion of this spectacular group. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Earth Teach Me Quiet”New Focus◆ ◆ ◆Antoine Forqueray: ‘Jupiter’“Barricades”; Thomas Dunford, lute; Jean Rondeau, harpsichord (Erato)This is Baroque music as hard-rock jam: driving, intense, dizzying, two musicians facing off in a brash battle that raises both their levels. It is the raucous climax of an album that creates a new little repertory for lute and harpsichord duo, with arrangements of favorites and relative obscurities that highlight Thomas Dunford and Jean Rondeau’s sly, exuberant artistic chemistry. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Jupiter”Warner Classics◆ ◆ ◆Ash Fure: ‘Shiver Lung’“Something to Hunt”; International Contemporary Ensemble; Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier, vocalists (Sound American)I try not to be fussy with audio quality. But if anything calls for an exception, it’s this long-awaited collection of music by Ash Fure — works that experiment with how sounds are made and felt. So before hitting play, gather your focus, along with your best headphones or speakers, for an intensely visceral listening experience. JOSHUA BARONE“Shiver Lung”Sound American◆ ◆ ◆Handel: ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’“Agrippina”; Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano; Il Pomo d’Oro; Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor (Erato)A shot of venom, boring its way into the brain: There are some arias that aim to soothe anxiety, but for pure cathartic transference of all the anger, fear and impotence that 2020 has sparked, this aria — “Thoughts, you torment me” — by the title character of Handel’s “Agrippina” is the ticket. The fiercely dramatic Joyce DiDonato brings her multihued mezzo and over-the-top embellishments to the music, while the period-instrument orchestra pushes things along with raw-edged insistence. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Pensieri, voi mi tormentate”Erato◆ ◆ ◆Handel: Harpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeHandel: Suites for Harpsichord; Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord (Mirare)Handel’s eight suites for harpsichord, published in 1720, haven’t always gotten as much attention or respect among performers as the keyboard works of Couperin, Rameau or, especially, Bach. Sometimes they’ve been viewed more or less as training exercises: good for technique but not quite sublime. Pierre Hantaï, known for his vivid Scarlatti, dispels the slightly derogatory preconceptions with suave danciness and lucid touch. ZACHARY WOOLFEHarpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeMirare◆ ◆ ◆David Hertzberg: ‘Is that you, my love?’“The Wake World”; Maeve Hoglund, soprano; Samantha Hankey, mezzo-soprano; Elizabeth Braden, conductor (Tzadik)With his playfully convoluted 2017 fairy tale opera “The Wake World,” David Hertzberg demonstrated that voluptuous, sweeping elements of grand opera could be reimagined for today. In the work’s swelling, shimmering climactic duet between a young seeker and her fairy prince, Ravel meets Messiaen, and Wagner meets Scriabin; the music is spiky, original and wondrous strange. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Is that you, my love?”Tzadik◆ ◆ ◆Nathalie Joachim: ‘Dam mwen yo’“Forward Music Project 1.0”; Amanda Gookin, cello (Bright Shiny Things)Even when brief and minimalist, Nathalie Joachim’s compositions cross complex ranges of emotion. Here, in a piece for cello (and vocals recorded by its composer), the somber cast of mood at the opening is complicated by a change in gait. The effect is akin to what you might feel inventing a new dance on the spot, while trudging through otherwise grim surroundings. SETH COLTER WALLS“Dam mwen yo”Bright Shiny Things◆ ◆ ◆George Lewis: ‘As We May Feel’“Breaking News”; Studio Dan (Hat Hut)Boisterous riffs and counter-riffs seem to suggest improvisatory practices; after all, this veteran artist has explored those practices. Yet George Lewis’s 25-minute joy ride is fully notated. And it was written for an Austrian ensemble which appreciates the chug and wail of Duke Ellington’s train-imitation music, as well as the rigors of extended-technique modernism. SETH COLTER WALLS“As We May Feel”Hat Hut◆ ◆ ◆Meredith Monk: ‘Downfall’“Memory Game”; Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble; Bang on a Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music)For almost 60 years, the composer and performer Meredith Monk has created works mainly for herself and her close circle, so it’s been an open question what will happen to those intricate, idiosyncratic pieces when she’s gone. This album of sympathetic but not slavish new arrangements — collaborations with the Bang on a Can collective — offers tantalizing experiments. The clarinetist Ken Thomson gives the hawing vocals of “Downfall,” part of Ms. Monk’s post-apocalyptic 1983 evening “The Games,” seductively sinister instrumental surroundings. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Downfall”Cantaloupe Music◆ ◆ ◆Tristan Perich: ‘Drift Multiply,’ Section 6“Drift Multiply” (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)Music emerges out of snowdrifts of white noise on this mesmerizing track. Tristan Perich is one of the most innovative tinkerers in electronic music, creating works of vibrant mystery. In “Drift Multiply,” 50 violins interact with 50 loudspeakers connected to as many custom-built circuit boards that channel the sound into one-bit audio. The result is a constantly evolving landscape where sounds coalesce and prism, where the violins both pull into focus and blur into a soothing ether. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Drift Multiply,” Section 6New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: ‘Ferguson: Summer of 2014’“The Grey Land”; Numinous (New Amsterdam)Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s “The Grey Land” is a stirring, stylistically varied mono-opera that draws on its composer’s reflections on being Black in contemporary America. The longest movement on the premiere recording makes an early textual reference to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” while dramatizing an expectant couple’s unease in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. SETH COLTER WALLS“Ferguson: Summer of 2014”New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2, Andantino“Silver Age”; Daniil Trifonov, piano; Mariinsky Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The thoughtful pianist Daniil Trifonov explores the music of Russia’s so-called “silver age” of the early 20th century on a fascinating album that offers various solo works and concertos by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The spacious yet fiendishly difficult first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto is especially exciting. ANTHONY TOMMASINIPiano Concerto No. 2, AndantinoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Rameau: ‘The Arts and the Hours’“Debussy Rameau”; Vikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Few musicians craft their albums with as much care as Vikingur Olafsson, whose “Debussy Rameau” is a brilliantly conceived, nearly 30-track conversation across centuries between two French masters. There is one modern intervention: Mr. Olafsson’s solo arrangement of an interlude from Rameau’s “Les Boréades” — tender and reverential, a wellspring of grace. JOSHUA BARONE“The Arts and the Hours”Deutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Jean-Féry Rebel: ‘Le Chaos’“Labyrinth”; David Greilsammer, piano (Naïve)In his riveting, aptly titled album “Labyrinth,” the formidable pianist David Greilsammer daringly juxtaposes pieces spanning centuries, from Lully to Ofer Pelz. The theme of the album is captured in Jonathan Keren’s arrangement of Rebel’s “Le Chaos,” which comes across like an early-18th-century venture into mind-spinning modernism. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Le Chaos”Naïve◆ ◆ ◆Rebecca Saunders: ‘Still’“Musica Viva, Vol. 35”; Carolin Widmann, violin; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ilan Volkov, conductor (BR-Klassik)A renowned figure on Europe’s experimental music scene, Rebecca Saunders builds teeming systems of shimmying severity from the sparest melodic materials. In this live recording of her violin concerto, Carolin Widmann excels in fulfilling the score’s contrasting requirements of delicacy and power. Helping judge the balance is the conductor Ilan Volkov, an artist American orchestras might consider working with. SETH COLTER WALLS“Still”BR-Klassik◆ ◆ ◆Schubert: ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’“Where Only Stars Can Hear Us: Schubert Songs”; Karim Sulayman, tenor; Yi-heng Yang, fortepiano (Avie)Intimate, sweet-toned and more easily given to dry humor than its powerful keyboard successors, the fortepiano should be a natural choice for Schubert lieder. Yet recordings such as this exquisitely personal recital — with the clear-voiced tenor Karim Sulayman and the sensitive pianist Yi-heng Yang — are still rare. Listen to them weave a storyteller’s spell in this song about a nighttime tryst in a fishing boat, and marvel at the emotional arc they weave with the simplest of gestures. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Des Fischers Liebesglück”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Ethel Smyth: ‘The Prisoner Awakes’“The Prison”; Experiential Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor (Chandos)Ethel Smyth, suffragist and composer, is among several female composers receiving fresh, deserved attention as the classical music industry tackles its diversity problem. If they all receive recordings as perfect as this account of her last major work, we will all benefit. Half symphony, half oratorio, “The Prison” includes this striking chorale prelude, with dark and light in the same bars, at its heart. DAVID ALLEN“The Prisoner Awakes”Chandos◆ ◆ ◆Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ‘Mikros’“Epicycle II”; Gyda Valtysdottir (Sono Luminus)A subterranean hall of mirrors lures in the listener in this deeply affecting three-minute track. Gyda Valtysdottir’s cello takes on the guise of a modern-day Orpheus and the spectral sounds of the underworld as she layers her performance on top of two prerecorded tracks. As this protagonist cello line sighs, heaves and slackens, the taped parts add fragmented scratch tones, whispers and tremors, evoking terrain both alluring and treacherous. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Mikros”Sono Luminus◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Wölfl: Piano Sonata in E, Allegro“The Beethoven Connection”; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano (Chandos)No finer recording has emerged from the Beethoven celebration than this, and it has not a single work by Beethoven on it. Mr. Bavouzet’s inquisitive look at the musicians who were composing at the same time as their colleague and competitor features Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Jan Ladislav Dussek — but it’s the forgotten Joseph Wölfl, who once battled Beethoven in a duel of keyboard skills, who comes out best, in this immaculate, charming sonata. DAVID ALLENPiano Sonata in E, AllegroChandos◆ ◆ ◆[embedded content]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Beethoven's Greatness Is in the Details

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: His Greatness Is in the DetailsBrahms, Wagner, even Sondheim: All have followed the great master in building their works from small bits of music.Credit…Eleni KalorkotiDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETThe classical music industry had planned to go all out commemorating Beethoven’s 250th anniversary this year, culminating in his birthday this week. As it happens, the precise date of his birth is uncertain. Records indicate that he was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 17, 1770. Since it was customary then to carry out that ritual within 24 hours of a birth, it’s been assumed he was born on Dec. 16 — but we don’t know for sure.Performances were scheduled throughout the year and around the world. The Boston Symphony Orchestra planned to open its season this fall with a cycle of the nine symphonies. The Barbican Center in London was presenting a yearlong festival. Carnegie Hall said it would devote roughly a fifth of its 2019-20 season to his music.But when the pandemic hit, Beethoven’s birthday party was largely canceled, along with the rest of the global performing arts calendar.Have no fear, though: He’s doing just fine. As Carnegie’s promotional materials put it, Beethoven “rouses our spirits, moves us to tears, and inspires our most profound thoughts”; he is “without challenge the face of Western classical music.” Whew. Indeed, I was impressed that the New York Philharmonic chose mostly to ignore the anniversary. Instead, this February the orchestra began Project 19, commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment by commissioning works by 19 female composers. Here was an important venture that would honor the heritage that Beethoven epitomizes by bringing it into the present and empowering fresh voices.Beethoven’s dominance of classical programming is a little crazy. Yet he was indisputably amazing. He cultivated the mystique of the composer as colossus, as a seer and hero striding the earth, channeling messages from on high and revealing them to us mere mortals.In person, he may not have advanced this image. Unkempt and ornery, he had delusions about having royal blood, kept falling for women of the upper ranks in Vienna who were unattainable matches, and, in a pathetic attempt at having a family, spent years in court fighting to gain custody of his nephew from the boy’s widowed mother, whom he considered morally unfit. (He succeeded, with predictably fraught results.)Yet perhaps his odd appearance and manner, as well as his valiant struggle with deafness, actually contributed to the spell he cast. And whatever his personality, his music does seem to define grandeur and heroism.What do we hear in the film “The King’s Speech” when George VI of England addresses his subjects at the start of World War II? The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — music that sounds like a solemn, steadily determined march.Still, there is a long tradition of debunking the heroic trappings of Beethoven’s works. In a 1945 review of George Szell conducting the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Virgil Thomson acknowledges the history of hearing the piece as expressing victory, fate, the hope of conquered nations to resist tyranny, and the like. Sure enough, he writes, Szell conducted a “thoroughly demagogic and militarized version of it.” But not to worry: “The piece will recover from its present military service just as easily as it has from its past metaphysical and political associations.”Yes, Beethoven wrote heroic pieces. But those scores are often filled out with audacious flights. And he wrote just as many brazenly humorous, even hilarious works, like the Presto finale of his early Piano Sonata No. 6 in F, which could be the score for a slapstick silent film.Even the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony, for all its Promethean energy, is boisterous and full of musical jokes. Beethoven takes a kind of comic tune and puts it through a series of improbable yet triumphant variations. Yet all these works, whether riotous, near-crazed, strangely mystical or sublime, somehow embody greatness and come across as inevitable, as if the music simply must be the way it is. Why?It’s all in the details. Beethoven was a master — maybe the ultimate master — of the technique of using small motifs (a few notes, a melodic fragment, a rhythmic gesture) to generate an entire movement, even an entire composition. This is something he learned in part from Haydn during the time he spent with the older master in Vienna, as well as from studying and copying out Haydn’s scores, which he continued to do for years.But Beethoven took the technique to a new level of sophistication. Concertgoers may not consciously pick up all the recurrences and manipulations of motifs in a Beethoven piece. Still, those interrelated elements come through subliminally, even for those not trained in music. That’s why a wild romp, like the frenetic, dancing final movement of the Seventh Symphony, also seems a cohesive, coherent entity, a truly great piece.Achieving motivic coherence in his scores was not easy for Beethoven to pull off. Leonard Bernstein made a few attempts to explain this in his televised lectures, including once in a famous 1954 Omnibus program on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when he examined how the opening four notes — the so-called “fate” motif — are used like a “springboard for the symphonic continuity to come.”Then, at the piano and with an orchestra, Bernstein performed passages reconstructed from sketches Beethoven had discarded; he wanted to show how ineffective some of these rejects were — until Beethoven got it right. Bernstein dug deeper into Beethoven’s procedures during one of his 1973 Norton Lectures (broadcast in 1976), when he took apart the first movement of the “Pastoral” Symphony. He asked the audience to get rid of all its notions that the piece is about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures,” and proceeded to reveal how the whole movement is constructed out of materials contained in just the first four measures.Composers after Beethoven were powerfully influenced by this technique, and not just Brahms and Mahler in their symphonies. Wagner adapted Beethoven’s approach in his operas, using “leitmotifs” to organize works that lasted hours. Puccini had his own version of the procedure.Stephen Sondheim, fresh from college, studied the scores of Beethoven quartets, among other works, during private lessons with the 12-tone composer Milton Babbitt. The most important thing he learned from these lessons, Mr. Sondheim told me in an interview many years ago, was the principle of “long-lined composition.”“How do you organize materials to last for three minutes, 15 minutes, 33 minutes?” he said. “This turned out to be very useful when I started writing long songs and scenes, like ‘Someone in a Tree’ [in ‘Pacific Overtures’] and the opening of Act II in ‘Sweeney Todd.’”In “Merrily We Roll Along,” the songs are “interconnected through chunks of melody, rhythm and accompaniment,” Mr. Sondheim wrote in the liner notes for the original cast recording. Surely that’s the way Beethoven would have written a score for a Broadway musical.Even today I’ll often read, for example, a composer’s program note explaining that a new chamber music piece written in a single 15-minute movement and an essentially atonal language is based on a five-note motif. Beethoven would approve.In his late period, Beethoven entered a sphere that seemed almost mystical, and considered himself not just a composer but also a “Tondichter” (“tone poet”). Yet even when exploring new realms of structure and sound, Beethoven generated these late scores from small motifs. Wagner studied the seven-movement Op. 131 String Quartet obsessively, seeing in it a model for ways to structure a music drama.It is telling that the last concert I heard before the pandemic closed theaters worldwide was at Carnegie Hall on March 8, when the violinist Leonidas Kavakos, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Emanuel Ax played, yes, Beethoven, ending with the majestic and awesome, searching and impetuous “Archduke” Trio. Even if Beethoven’s big birthday has not been what we expected, that superb performance of his trio, just before everything stopped, has kept coming back to me, a lasting party.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Beethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to KnowExplore the music, life and times of the composer who changed culture.Credit…Gabriel AlcalaDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETNo composer left a mark on music quite like Ludwig van Beethoven. He took the popular forms of his time — symphony, string quartet, piano sonata, opera — and stretched them to their breaking points. He embodied the then-new ideal of the musician as passionate, politically engaged Romantic hero.In honor of the 250th anniversary of his birth — he was baptized Dec. 17, 1770, and probably born a day or two earlier — writers and critics for The New York Times have spent the year choosing their favorite recordings; delving into his life and times; traveling from the house where he was born in Bonn, Germany, to his grave in Vienna, Austria; speaking with some of his best interpreters; and exploring his vast, influential body of work. It is, if not everything you need to know about Beethoven, then a pretty good start.Listen to the Best of His MusicWe asked some of our favorite artists which five minutes of his music they would play to make their friends fall in love with Beethoven. We created our dream cycle of his nine symphonies, picking a favorite recording of each. And our chief classical critic describes how his works are built from tiny bits of material.Following in His Footsteps“The time seemed ripe for a pilgrimage in search of Beethoven, the man,” our reporter wrote early this year. We also published profiles of people who surrounded him, prodded and inspired him.A Bold Way to Perform His Symphonies“He was not somebody who was content to write elegant music for easy listening,” said the conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who uses rough, fresh instruments like those played in Beethoven’s time. Our critic wrote that this was “exactly what we needed in this year of Beethoven saturation.”Confronting His Piano SonatasOur chief critic, who took on the daunting Op. 110 Sonata in college, explores the “extraordinary achievement” of Igor Levit’s new recording of the full set, while cherishing Artur Schnabel’s classic cycle. And the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard talks about why he thinks of Beethoven as avant-garde — still.A Nine-Hour Marathon: His QuartetsWhat is it like listening to all 17 of his works for string quartet? It gave one writer “an acute awareness of the extraordinary range of sensations Beethoven depicts. Joy. Rage. Slyness. Gravitas. Grief. Snickering. Despair. Holiness.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More