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    At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

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    This year’s Bard Music Festival explores the work and context of a composer who strove to make art “an expression of the whole life of the community.”Perhaps more music festivals should open with a singalong.At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a thronging audience was, shall we say, encouraged to join the Bard Festival Chorale in a rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is simple, elegant and, as it turns out, satisfying to warble your way through.That was, largely, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be of use, who saw his search for beauty through music as a collective and communal act, who wrote not only for himself, but also for his time, his place, his countrymen.“The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,” he wrote in 1912. “He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”But does this music have anything to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s staunchest advocates feared for the future of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its nearer relation to contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it more quickly, the New York Times critic Olin Downes critic predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.Some of Vaughan Williams’s works do still speak today, above all the remarkable triptych of symphonies through which he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to encase the carnage of his era in sound: the biting, terrifying Fourth, a sour reminder of the Great War that had its premiere in 1935; the uneasy, bleak Sixth, finished in 1948 and an immediate sensation; the desperate yearning of the wartime Fifth, his insistent declaration that a better world was still possible. While others may think of the Fifth as naïve, I find it almost Brahmsian in its consolation and sincerity.But as Vaughan Williams’s supporters often point out, he composed in such a range of forms and styles that even if one of his scores falters at the ear, there is a decent chance that another will break through. Don’t like the Vaughan Williams of “The Lark Ascending”? Try Vaughan Williams the urbane Neo-Classicist, or Vaughan Williams the mordant modernist — or so the argument goes.Danny Driver, left, and Piers Lane were the soloists in Vaughan Williams’s two-piano revision of his Piano Concerto in C.Matt DineFor the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.If anything, Vaughan Williams got a little lost in the bravura breadth of the programming on the first weekend, though he is less likely to after the second, which will feature an exceedingly rare production of his Falstaff opera, “Sir John in Love,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” and the Symphony No. 8, as well as a smattering of works for smaller ensembles. Of the six concerts I heard, one surveyed the popular music of Vaughan Williams’s time, with which he appeared to have barely a tenuous connection, while two were dedicated to his scores alone.Three other performances roamed the contexts in which he worked, and they were outstanding, an ideal fusion of intellectual insight and musical integrity. The first, introduced by the musicologist Eric Saylor, sketched out the dominance of Brahms in turn-of-the-century British composition, through Parry, Stanford, Bruch and the like; another, with winking commentary from Adams, looked at art songs. The third investigated the fraught relationship between Britain and France at either side of World War I, focusing on the influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams during their lessons in 1907 and ’08. As the tenor Nicholas Phan, the pianist Piers Lane and the Ariel Quartet showed with a cutting “On Wenlock Edge,” a cycle of Housman poems that Vaughan Williams completed in 1909, the Englishman was no copycat, but he learned much from Ravel about how to refine a mood.Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece. The players of The Orchestra Now, a training ensemble at Bard, played creditably in the two concerts that they contributed to as well.But in those, alas, the old Botstein dilemma came to the fore. The conductor bows to nobody in his zeal for neglected art, nor in the taste for intellectual provocation that was amply on show in remarks here, but he can lack the insight and technique that would allow the overlooked truly to shine.Such was most detrimentally the case in a program that tried to present Vaughan Williams as an experimentalist, through three works from the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Job,” the terse “masque for dancing” (that is, ballet) that was inspired by the illustrations of William Blake; the unwieldy, postwar revision for two pianos of the awkward Piano Concerto in C, valiantly tackled by Lane and Danny Driver; and the Fourth Symphony. The readings were competent, to be sure, but not specific enough in their details, especially in the Fourth, which plodded along rather than piercing the air. The edge that makes these works so bold was blunted, the intellectual argument softened.But Vaughan Williams, at least, still had something to say. More

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      Review: Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now Unearth Rarities

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      Leon Botstein brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall for a sparsely attended program of neglected works written in the 1930s.At orchestral concerts, it’s unusual for conductors to make an appearance before the players have even had a chance to tune their instruments. But at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, Leon Botstein took a moment to thank the audience.“Practically no one knows these pieces,” he said — referring to the program of 1930s rarities performed that evening by The Orchestra Now, his ensemble of conservatory all-stars — “and the fact that anybody came out on a nice May day is a miracle.”A miracle, yes, but a modest one.That night, the New York Philharmonic had “limited availability” for its concert of extremely standard fare — Mozart’s “Turkish” violin concerto, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. And, across the street from Carnegie’s stage door, the line for a starry, sold-out run of “Into the Woods” snaked hundreds of feet from the entrance to New York City Center.At Carnegie, though, there was a good deal of red throughout the cream-and-gold auditorium: patches and entire rows of empty seats. Botstein has made a career of unearthing the ignored treasures of classical music — a noble, essential effort. But Thursday’s concert was a dispiriting reminder of how difficult that work really is; programming gets you only so far in a culture where Mozart and Beethoven, in any weather, continue to have the upper hand.Of course not everything Botstein selects can be on par with familiar classics. Some are more curiosity than masterpiece, but regardless, he and The Orchestra Now give them high-level readings — as good an argument for them as you can imagine. And on Thursday, he presented four works that are not likely to become repertory staples any time soon, but that are nevertheless worthy of performance.All were written in the second half of the 1930s, a period that gave us music as varied as Berg’s Violin Concerto and “Lulu,” Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Varèse’s “Density 21.5” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Botstein’s programming was similarly wide-ranging, with the first half sampling composers of the Americas — William Grant Still and Carlos Chávez — and the second shifting to Europe, with Witold Lutoslawski and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.Still was prolific but remains best known for his “Afro-American Symphony,” from 1931. Here he was represented by the later, smaller “Dismal Swamp,” a tone poem for piano and orchestra based on text by Verna Arvey (his wife and collaborator, including on the opera “Highway 1, U.S.A.”). A portrait of an escape from slavery to freedom, it is atmospheric yet taut; at the start, both static and dramatic.Frank Corliss, as the soloist, was skillfully cautious, evoking the scene’s tension with quiet, trudging phrases, at one point amid an eerie fog of harmonics in the surrounding strings. Anachronistic blues passages — in wind solos and muted brass — felt like a glimpse of a future that seemed within reach by the ending, a lush climax that finds beauty, and a kind of joyous promise, in an otherwise dreary landscape.The revelation of the night may have been Chávez’s Piano Concerto, a three-movement work that functions more like one in two parts: a long first section of mercurial episodes, and another that grows from virtually nothing to a finale of brassy, enormous sound. Excitingly unpredictable — in its development, but also in its rhythms and sonorities — it provided a restless workout for the soloist, Gilles Vonsattel, who was coolly capable throughout, including as a sensitive partner during a long duet with the harpist Taylor Ann Fleshman in the second movement.After intermission came Lutoslawski’s early “Symphonic Variations,” which are set off by a brief, simple theme stated by a flute over pizzicato strings. Between dizzying runs in the winds, and intrusive dark textures in the cellos and basses, it can be difficult to tell where one variation ends and another begins — so difficult, there isn’t consensus on how many there are. Easier to track, and more enjoyable to take in, is the short work’s journey from Neo-Classical austerity to unruly grandeur.The joy, though, didn’t last for long. To close the program, Botstein offered Hartmann’s First Symphony, “Versuch eines Requiems” (translated in the program as “Essay for a Requiem,” though more powerful might be something like “Attempt at a Requiem”). A five-movement collection of Walt Whitman settings — sung by the mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel between performances in “Lucia di Lammermoor” at the Metropolitan Opera — it is a pained denunciation of war whose premiere in 1948 was long delayed by Hartmann’s status as a degenerate artist in Nazi Germany.Beginning with martial percussion and dissonance, the symphony’s baseline is horror. Working from a low tessitura, Nansteel was often a rich-bodied but chilling presence, hardly melodic and, by the finale, delivering Whitman’s “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” with heightened, ghostly speech. That movement ends with a crescendo conjuring gunfire but stops abruptly, leaving behind a suspended chord like tinnitus.Conceived on the cusp of one oppressive regime invading its neighbor, and played now as a similar act of war unfolds, Hartmann’s symphony is a cry against conflict, a warning from the past — but, on Thursday, one that could reach only the few who were there to hear it.The Orchestra NowPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: An Orchestra Offers a Novel View of Music History

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      At Carnegie Hall, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now took an always-needed step in uncovering overlooked American classical music.Pity the 19th-century American composer, toiling away in the shadow of Beethoven in search of a homegrown sound, only to be overshadowed by yet another European: Antonin Dvorak, whose “New World” Symphony is played far more often than anything from the New World that preceded it.Visiting the United States in the 1890s, Dvorak prophesied a future of American classical music founded on Black and Indigenous melodies. To an extent, that came true in the 20th century, but orchestras tended to overlook composers of color in favor of white, male ones — some of whom would come to be seen as national heroes, while their lesser-known compatriots would rely (and continue to rely) on passionate champions.And Europeans still haunted concert programming — a product, the historian Joseph Horowitz has asserted, of a cultural shift in American classical music from a focus on composers to performers that, fueled by the rise of radio broadcasts and recordings, calcified the repertoire of our largest cultural institutions.I’m being reductive, but the broad truth of this is that the myopic approach of much orchestral programming today — Eurocentric, with living composers rarely given the same pride of place as a Beethoven or Mahler — is nothing new.Then there are artists like Leon Botstein, an indispensable advocate of the unfairly ignored, who brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall on Thursday for an evening of works that, despite covering a range of nearly 150 years, felt as fresh as a batch of premieres.Botstein belongs to a class of conductors and artistic directors — including Horowitz, as well as Gil Rose of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ashleigh Gordon and Anthony R. Green of Castle of Our Skins, and more — who bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to their programming. They operate on such a small scale, they can hardly reverse the course of American classical music history; but each concert, each recording, is an essential step in a better direction.Leon Botstein, left, led the program, which included a new concerto by Scott Wheeler for the violinist Gil Shaham.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOn Thursday, Botstein and The Orchestra Now, a capable and game group of young musicians, took the latest of those steps with Julia Perry’s “Stabat Mater,” written in 1951, early in that composer’s short life; Scott Wheeler’s new violin concerto, “Birds of America,” featuring Gil Shaham; and George Frederick Bristow’s Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” from 1872.Perry’s work, an episodic setting of the classic Latin text that has inspired composers for centuries, seems to rise from the depths, awakening slowly with the sounds of gravelly cellos that eventually give away to the brightness of a solo violin and the entrance of the vocalist: here, the mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, who navigated her part’s surprising turns and plunges with smooth and characterful ease.The score, like many American works from the mid-20th century, strikes a balance of dissonance and tonality. With a brief running time and modest scale, it is nonetheless dense, with thick textures emerging from its all-string ensemble and an affecting ambivalence in the final section of instrumental darkness and vocal ecstasy.Wheeler’s likable concerto, which the orchestra premiered last weekend at the Fisher Center at Bard College, has elements of timelessness — its lyricism akin to that of Barber and Korngold’s famous violin concertos — but also postmodernism, with snippets of classics like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”Despite the avian title, Wheeler doesn’t emulate birdsong as Messiaen famously did, but he does take inspiration from the calls of distinct voices, with brief, repeated phrases attached to specific instruments — such as the whistling runs from a piccolo and flute that open the piece.Shaham, one of our sunniest violinists, entered accordingly with a singing melody on his highest string, and brought abundant warmth throughout. But he was also grippingly virtuosic in tricky, Sarasate-like passages of lyrical double-stops and left-hand pizzicato. In the finale, he engaged in a musical Simon Says, knocking on the back of his instrument and cuing the second violins to do the same, then setting up col legno tapping in the violas and high-pitched bird calls in the first violins. By the end, the winds joined in to evoke a wondrously bustling aviary.The evening ended with a rare reading of George Frederick Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWithout an intermission, Botstein continued with Bristow’s burly symphony, one of those works that is more heard about than actually heard. But when it premiered, in the midst of 19th-century debates about the direction of American classical music — documented, with an analysis of the “Arcadian,” in the musicologist Douglas W. Shadle’s revelatory 2015 book “Orchestrating the Nation” — it enjoyed the rare success of repeated programming.And on Thursday, you could hear why. With late-Romantic grandeur and American inspiration, the “Arcadian,” played at Carnegie in a new edition by Kyle Gann, charts an imagined journey westward with a changing musical landscape; a serene pause that conjures communal entertainment with a quote from Tallis’s “Evening Hymn”; a troublingly naïve and chauvinistic “Indian War Dance” that’s more of a European danse macabre; and a festive celebration upon arrival.As a document of history, it is an embodiment, ripe for interrogation, of Manifest Destiny’s sins. But as music, Bristow’s score holds its own alongside European Romanticism while transparently aiming for a new, more distinct path. He was hardly alone in this effort. There was a moment when New York’s concert halls resounded with 19th-century American symphonies. It’s time they did again.The Orchestra NowPerformed Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More