'24-'25: Performance #10

What glitters, what's gold, what might shimmer if not for the darkness...

Performers:

Ensemble: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Conductor: Klaus Mäkelä

Program:

Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht
* * * intermission * * *
Mahler - Symphony No. 1

Position: Front center of Stern (Carnegie main stage)

Purpose/Intent/Questions: In trying to complete a Carnegie subscription for the season, I’m always happy for more Mahler, but of even greater significance… “Verklärte Nacht” is one of my study pieces. I have a tolerance for listening to it time and again, not because I enjoy it, not because I agree with it, but because it comments on a matter I work on academically… in a way that feels perversely foreign to me. Every twist and turn promises to be informative of broader projects. Easy selection.

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How’d it go?

I’d like to say that it isn’t a harbinger of the show to come when someone is sitting in your seat and very “you’d better call an usher” adamant that your ticket is incorrect. These things happen. If you know me, you know that I tend to be pretty chill about them. I’ve sat my tush down in the wrong seat on occasion, so I can understand and empathize with these exceedingly small dramas of humanity. (In this case, the gentleman had clearly remembered that he was seated on the aisle seat of the center section in the first row. He just happened to forget that there were two seats that fit this description; he was needlessly apologetic when he quickly relocated himself to the other end of the row, having realized his mistake.)

For shows like this, it might be part and parcel. A portion of what agitates “hype” in the classical world is that hype doesn’t really happen. No matter how many people on SlippeDisc¹ try to make comparisons between phenomena in classical music and Taylor Swift—the world’s most famous pop star, and the only one who a substantial portion of classical devotees know the name of—art music is, by definition, not popular music and vice versa.²

So, the Beatles-level frenzy around figures like Klaus Mäkelä is at least as much about the will to be drunk on an implied personality as it is about anything the individual has actually done for the genre. That Carnegie Hall might feel like a Black Friday at Walmart is surely an offensive thought to many subscription holders—but that’s what it felt like. People were rushing and running amuck, seeking the most satisfying selfies, dressed in their best and strangest. For Mahler? For Schoenberg? No, my friends. For a well-publicized young Finn.

Granted, while I’m not as much of a curmudgeon as I once was—I did offer to help one gentleman take his “in the crowd at Carnegie” photo after witnessing someone step in front of his timed picture… twice—some part of the experience is spoiled for me by the hullaballoo. It wasn’t Shostakovich. It wasn’t Rite of Spring. There’s some unhealthy projection happening when people are expressing riotous energy over pieces that, while not lullabies, are squarely on the more subdued end of the spectrum.

Nonetheless, I’m not opposed to pockets of hype helping to keep the industry afloat. Maybe I have some concerns or preferences as relate to programming—I wouldn’t want Mäkelä’s Mahler being the one that the majority of listeners have imprinted upon them, a prospect both supported and potentially disrupted in the age of plentiful digital recordings. But if other people screaming their heads off over mediocre renditions of a symphony makes it financially viable for me to hear some juicy weird stuff, have at it!

Oh no, did I do a spoiler?

I know Verklärte Night quite well, both from scores and recordings. While saying that I know any of the Mahler symphonies well sounds hubristic, I am certainly well acquainted with the first—from scores, from recordings, and from lore and the larger culture around the work.

It’s an immense privilege that a few good notes justify the cost of a ticket to me, and I cherish my tastes enough to not try to convince myself that I enjoyed something as a way to self-soothe around the investment. Moreover, as I view my position, my relationship with classical performances as part of “thinking with the music,” rather than simple entertainment, and certainly not something with a load-bearing function within my self-concept, delighting in a performance is a bonus—developing a new question about a piece or the substance of life that it engages with… that’s the real victory. And that can come from interpretations I don’t particularly like, interpretations that stand unarmed before toweringly great and seemingly impenetrable traditions, and even flagrant misinterpretations.

There were some wonderful pieces to this evening, and I think that I will describe it as pieces because even though both of these works have strong arcs, a whole did not seem to register in the presentation of either.³

While I tend to be pretty good at creating a little divisi in my mind between what I want to pay attention to and what I’d rather not, I felt that I had to remove my glasses so as to ignore at least some of the Maestro’s… more interesting dance moves. I don’t know if it’s the natural consequence of decades of boys crying wolf, useless gesticulations increasing musicians’ tolerance, necessitating moonshine-level theatrics to get the slightest buzz on, but it remains incredibly hard for me to believe that professional musicians at the level of the RCO need—or want—such robust physical encouragement or direction. It seemed, at least in terms of the volume of the conductors motions, to have little to no meaningful effect on what was being played or how.

My vision being less focused than usual, I enjoyed watching the light hopping off the metallic frogs and polished bodies of violins. And because the music was taken and given so piecemeal, I found myself focusing on particular players. As if it were a series of individual recitals, rather than an orchestral performance. I enjoyed, in particular, Mirelys Morgan Verdecia, first violin, Santa Vizine, first solo viola—one of the most musically charming parts of VN is the space it gives to viola, and Tatjana Vassiljeva-Monnier, first solo cello.

I have never heard Mahler’s first started at such a breakneck tempo. I’d venture to say that it might even qualify as a poor or incorrect interpretation. The work is supposed to open in a way that feels perhaps painfully slow to an adult. God takes God’s sweet time in creation. The Eternal, even if acting instantaneously, is unrushed in a world beyond human inhales and exhales, sunrises and sunsets. For me, it’s one of the more beautiful parts of the repertoire because it asks us—perhaps forces us, a little bit—to contemplate the ways in which the biblical Divine is like the human child. “Five minutes” is easily wasted throughout the course of a day, loose change that falls into the cracks between couch cushions, not missed save for the moments when we are asked to scrape it all together and consider the total sum. To the young, the ones who have not yet been curated into schedules and taught to rush between one non-event and the next, “five minutes” is a veritable fortune, is time enough to create and destroy multiple worlds, to become absorbed—utterly lost, utterly found—in the wiles and whimsy of this one.

I’d prefer that we don’t prematurely truncate childhood, particularly not its warm wonder.

In what felt to be an odd contrast, Transfigured Night was, for much of the performance, too slow. I’ve heard versions that were probably similar in length, but the question is about whether or not all of the texture from the page is coming through, unfolding in that time, or if the curls have been ironed out.

As one of Schoenberg’s final works of romanticism, it’s understandable to hear a sort of operatic quality to the voices of the strings. When they represent human voices, are they speaking quickly, with nervous hearts, or are they struggling to get the words out? When they are ambient voices, of moonlight and forest shadows, are they catching the light breezes of the evening, the subtleties of walking through the woods, or have they flattened the scenery into something cartoonish?

VN is one of the most stereotypically, perhaps absurdly, “moviesque” works of romanticism. In most renditions, you can hear the hairstyle of the woman protagonist. You can watch the drama unfold in black and white, the film jumping on and off the reel. It’s actually quite easy to turn it into kitschy melodrama, and quite difficult to elevate it into something that works in the language of genuine human emotion, that is part of the same conversation as the Sotah Ritual and the Virgin Birth. Even its own music history, beginning as a piece for a string sextet—three doubled voices—inflated into an orchestral work, is reflective of its role in that conversation that starts between a man, a woman, and God, but suddenly becomes a matter of public, or even universal, existential, importance.

I don’t feel that the orchestra succeeded in this piece. Much of it is likely a matter of opinion, and most of it was about tempi and dynamics. But much of music is. Additionally, portions towards the end of Transfigured Night can turn into a bit of a clusterfuck⁴, which one could interpret as either deliberately chaotic or simply an overwhelming number of layers—I think both options meaningfully reflect the emotional experience being suggested. There’s a fine line between complexity and chaos, which comes down to a likely fragile sense of control. And it didn’t feel, in this performance, that there was commitment to one or the other. I’d imagine that the Dutch would favor steering away from chaos, but that fine line will descend whether you want it to or not if order is not held perfectly. They are by and large a very neat band, so for them to sound so far off the same page from one another during these passages was unpleasantly jarring.

Within the Mahler, I found myself needing to force active listening for the most part. There were almost no moments that felt spellbinding. If one was to be found, it would be in the voice of an exceedingly perfect cuckoo. I caught myself wondering, were a real cuckoo to be released in Carnegie Hall, where he might station himself—he might not articulate his song so beautifully as a competent classical musician, and he might shriek something terrible beneath the strangely lowered sky. But other than that moment—which I would have been happy to bathe in for days—the interpretation was not terribly profound.

While I won’t say this was the worst part, I will say that it personally doesn’t work for me whatsoever for an ensemble to smooth out the klezmer segments of the symphony to the extent that people not knowing any better might mistake it for civilized Christian music.⁵ Maybe I was feeling a little sensitive, given how soon after the anti-Jewish riots in Amsterdam this concert took place. But I think that in reality, I’m sensitive to such a gross misunderstanding of Mahler and the complex relationship he had with the Jewish traditions he grew up in. Composers are at their leisure to mock, but it’s more common for their work to be the result of love. Mahler’s quoting of the local klezmer musicians was done so lovingly.⁶ If you can’t also find love for that tradition—in all its folksy glory—I’d hazard that you might do better to elect a different symphony to perform.

If this program did nothing else for me, it at least convinced me to finally give in and purchase a ticket to The Hester.

Another note on cultural simpatico: those who know me and tend to think that I find the Finns flawless, might register this as an overcorrection for the a-Finn-ity I’m schlepping about. No. There are Finnish conductors whose work I am excited about, whose strong suits I acknowledge and admire, who I am downright befuddled by, who aren’t my hay, and who I am sure evidence some sort of breech in the time-space continuum. If ever I am more minutely critical of Klaus Mäkelä, it is due to the fact that he is the maestro-in-waiting for one of the ensembles I hold a subscription with. I clearly don’t suffer for other options, and would not suffer even if I felt the need to avoid the sixty weeks over a five-season term that his baton is slated to be raised up above the heads of the Chicago band.

Having missed the train by all of two minutes—that’s how the cookie crumbles, is it not—I took some time to check in on friends in Amsterdam, having last touched base during the peak of the anti-Jewish riots. Most of my Dutch friends have at least cursory interest in classical music, so I mentioned that I’d just seen their hometown ensemble and asked if they had any thoughts on the future of the orchestra. Conversation quickly turned to government cuts, a plague on all our houses. Fine arts finance is markedly different in the United States than in much of Europe, but we’re all headed in the same dismal direction. If the terrifying and questionable enthusiasm folks have for Klaus Mäkelä helps keep more niche music programs afloat, then I won’t be the one to scuttle his ship. Especially not when Carnegie has three halls, Manhattan has several performance venues geared towards art music, and I have the ability to get in and out of town at my leisure.

Will travel for good music.

Even to Brooklyn.

1. The industry drama clearinghouse for the world of classical, anonymous commenters provide all variety of discourse on matters of orchestral, operatic, and adjacent life, ranging from the obscurely deranged to the nigh oracular.

2. Are there areas of convolution and overlap, deliberate or otherwise? Of course. They’re often intriguing, delicious, challenging. If anything, I want to see more flirtation along the borders. I’m a fairly avid consumer of both folk, pop music, and of classical. Classical has historically integrated folk themes of the time and place of its birth. Pop occasionally samples classical. Some of the artists I listen to definitely push up against expectations of what one or the other category should be. But the fact remains that, at the end of the year, when AppleMusic tallies up my “top listens,” three hours listening to a particular Finnish pop song means that I had it on repeat while exercising, while three hours listening to an oratorio means that I sat and heard it out in full all of once. They are distinct endeavors.

3. This is always fascinating for me in music. When I entered my first graduate program, a number of folks were… well, they had opinions. Even working with some of the faculty who were supposed to be guiding me towards improvement was difficult because people confused my being an excellent writer with being a competent storyteller. I could make the words do pretty things. A point, on the other hand, was anathema to me. Learning to understand narrative development, making peace with the necessity of plot, turning my work from a series of details and vignettes into actual tales was real work. Music is much like biblical literature in that the presence of interpretations “outside” of the text are pervasive and color our understanding of what musicians mean to say to an extent that we often arrive to the concert hall with half of the performance complete in our minds. But if we stay in the music that is actually present, we might find that focusing on the wrong details can break the story’s wrist. To deconstruct narrative work to the point where it seems unaware of its own story is strange to me, to say the least of it.

4. You won’t find an apology for this language, here, as this is the term used in musicology for the phenomenon I am referencing.

5. Friends who chatted with me that same night might have heard a more dramatic critique of the matter, but I stand by the wording published here. Enjoy the alternate version in the privacy of your own mind.

6. There’s a famous story about young Mahler standing up during a prayer service in the synagogue and shouting for people to stop it because it was so terrible. It’s meant to be. Many traditional prayers are supposed to elicit an emotional response that feels uncomfortable—sometimes it’s what we call yirat Hashem, sometimes it’s a more vague sense of our animal smallness—but this is deliberate and separate from the klezmer tradition, which is focused largely around celebration, albeit that perfectly Jewish sort of imperfect celebration that refuses to set down the last crumb of tragedy during its most elated dancing. Even as a grown woman who perhaps lacks some of the requisite beliefs to be adequately “afraid” of any number of theological potentialities, there are prayers that make every hair on the back of my neck stand up straight. None of them involve the clarinet. None of them would have found it onto the set list at the Mahlers’ tavern. I’m sure that as he grew, Mahler came to understand that to the extent that God is anywhere, God is present in both the terrible prayer and the cheeky fiddling.