The Winograds

When I was a student at Juilliard, I had the good fortune to attend the premiere performances by the Juilliard Quartet at Town Hall of the six Bartok quartets. As you can imagine, that was a landmark musical event in this country – in fact, in the world. At that time, Bobby Mann, Robert Koff, and Raphael Hillyer were members of the Quartet. Their cellist was Arthur Winograd. Interestingly, as their lives developed, Arthur began a conducting career, and I had the pleasure of playing oboe for him, both in recordings and in concerts in New York. I don’t know how many of you reading this will remember Arthur Winograd, but of course he was a great cellist, and it is particularly pleasurable to me to have represented the American String Quartet for the past fifteen years, whose first violinist is Arthur’s son, Peter. In a way, it’s not unusual in the music world, which is a very small world, to have that kind of interconnection between families and friends, and I hope that any of you reading this have the opportunity to hear the wonderful violin playing of Peter with his American String Quartet.

On the Road

Unless you’ve ever been part of a touring company of musicians or actors, it’s hard to understand how extraordinary it is for people to travel from many different places, meet, exchange pleasantries, and perform.  In the best of circumstances, the people involved have known each other for years and have performed together for many of those years all over the world.  Still, it is something of a miracle that these disparate people meet and manage to produce music that requires mutual intercommunication and emotional complexity.

You can imagine what pleasure that gives the performers, and as a result, what pleasure is transmitted to the audience.

Spotlight on Performance Today

I was surprised and gratified to hear the following segment on American Public Media’s Performance Today this morning: http://tinyurl.com/3fp2up3.

Young Beethoven

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of once again hearing the extraordinary Ariel Quartet from Israel.  They played the Mozart D minor quartet in a truly exceptional fashion, as well as movements from Schubert and Brahms – equally well-played – to  complete the program.  It’s fascinating as to what makes for an exceptional string quartet performance, but it certainly has a lot to do with the interaction between the four artists, and how their individual as well as composite personality gets across from the stage.  At the end of the concert, they told me that they had as a goal (which I thought was fascinating and totally unique in my experience) to perform for a number of venues the complete Beethoven string quartets before they are 30 years old.  That means that this has to happen before the end of the 2012-13 season.  Any takers?

Intact

When I was in Zurich, after returning from the Borciani Competition, as hard as it is for me to believe, my briefcase, which had my oboe inside, was stolen out from under a bench that I was sitting on.  I had to leave the next morning for the United States, but amazingly, within four hours of it being stolen, the police left me a message at my hotel that they had found the bag, and it was returned to me with oboe, reeds, papers, etc. all intact.

Don’t Warm Up!

Last Friday, the New York Chamber Soloists Orchestra performed in New York City together with Richard Stoltzman.  The program included the great Mozart Clarinet Concerto, which we also performed with him in the fall in Tucson and Los Angeles.  In addition, the program includes a set of variations for clarinet and orchestra by Rossini and Mozart’s Symphony No. 33.

At rehearsal on Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we were taking pictures as well as rehearsing, and Dick arrived in time to dress for the pictures.  He thought we were going to take them as still pictures, but we were taking them in performance, and wanted to begin with the Rossini.

He said, “Gee, I haven’t had a chance to warm up.”  We said, “Don’t worry, we understand,” and he proceeded to play both the Rossini and the Mozart incredibly.

Of course, my comment to him after that was, “Obviously, you should never warm up before a performance!”

All’s Well That Ends Well

I’ve had the immeasurable pleasure of representing the Ying Quartet since its inception nearly twenty years ago.  The group’s wonderful imagination and impeccable taste is reflected in their programming ability, incorporating and combining traditional repertoire and commissioning at least two new works each year as part of the LifeMusic project.  Last night at Carnegie Hall, I experienced not just the best performance I’ve ever heard by the Ying Quartet, but also a real musical transformation.

Three and a half years ago, Timothy Ying decided to leave the Quartet for a different kind of life with his family in Toronto.  The Quartet found an excellent violinist to join the ensemble, who just a year later, was stolen away as concertmaster for a major orchestra.

Despair would be a mild expression of how the Quartet felt.  However, a year ago, they found an absolutely exceptional first violinist, Ayano Ninomiya, and, together with her yesterday, they presented great string quartet playing aurally, musically, and collaboratively – a result that left the full house delighted and thrilled.  As I said to the Quartet after the performance, isn’t it interesting how what was seemingly a low point has turned into an ultimate triumph?

Beethoven Septet

This past weekend, I accompanied my New York Chamber Soloists to an extraordinary theater near Los Angeles to hear a program which I devised a year and a half ago and which we first played at the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico last March.  It’s called “Three Septets,” and includes Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Saint-Saëns’ Septet for trumpet, piano, and strings, and Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 for clarinet, french horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and bass.

The Brandenburg No. 5 and the Saint-Saëns Septet are real crowd-pleasers, but best of all was sitting and listening to the extraordinary Beethoven Septet.  Written early in his life, it’s almost like an extra symphony, having all of the wonderful melodic and orchestral genius that pervades his music.  I started thinking about other possible programs, and think it would be fascinating for an audience to hear an all-Beethoven program that would include, together with the Septet, one of his Op. 9 string trios and the Quintet, Op. 16, for piano and four winds.

Listening to the Beethoven reminded me of a concert that we gave about 25 years ago at an art museum in Massachusetts, for which the sponsor wanted a rather bizarre combination of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” and the Beethoven Septet, which I reluctantly agreed to.  The program began with the Stravinsky, and, at intermission, the sponsor came backstage extraordinarily concerned and told us that the museum’s gates automatically close at a certain hour and could not be changed, and that the Beethoven would exceed that amount of time.  We hurriedly found a way to shorten the very long slow movement by playing just the first four and the last four bars of the movement.  The show must go on, and there’s always a way!

The Most Musical City

Prague has always struck me as the most musical city in the Western world. I think that the Czechs have a natural predisposition for feeling, expressing, and performing classical music, more so than any other people. Twenty years ago, we had the good fortune to arrange to bring Prague’s Talich Quartet, one of the most renowned quartets in Europe, to the United States, and we have continued to bring this extraordinary ensemble to audiences here over these many years.

The Talich Quartet was formed initially by Jan Talich senior, who was the son of a famous conductor in Prague. He was a violinist who got three of his friends and colleagues to form this quartet with him. When I met them, he had changed his position from first violin to viola, and the first violinist was Pitr Messiereur. As of five years ago, with a variety of other changes, the first violinist of the Quartet is now Jan Talich junior, and they are performing as sensationally as they ever did.

Having the opportunity to hear a great Czech quartet play Dvorak, Smetana, and Janacek is a rare experience, let alone how wonderfully they play Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Webern, and everything else.

They will next be in the United States from October 28 to November 20, 2011.

“Cuénod still too young for the part”

I had the pleasure and privilege of getting to know Hugues Cuénod in 1960, when I was involved in bringing him to the United States to perform in one of the opening years of the Washington Opera Society in Washington, D.C.  He sang in a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo.  He was so extraordinary as a singer, musician, and had such an amazing character that I subsequently had the pleasure of bringing him to the United States to sing in any number of projects over the next twenty years.  He just passed away a week ago at 108.  I last saw him in Switzerland when he was 103.  He still remembered everything, and took great pleasure in telling off-color stories about everyone in the world.

One of his more remarkable achievements, and typical of his extraordinary career, was that at 84 he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in New York in the role of the Emperor in Puccini’s Turandot, a part that was written for an old tenor.  He did the same thing in London a few years before that, but the London public and press knew of him because he had sung at Glyndebourne for fifty years, and was involved, for example, in almost every Stravinsky premiere that included a tenor voice.  After his appearance in Turandot, the critics for the London Times wrote “Cuénod still too young for the part.”