American Masterpiece May

This May, we were able to hear two American masterpieces for our first time in person, and one of them twice:Porgy and Bess, then Bernstein's Mass, then Porgy and Bess again!

As I watch the Virginia Opera's production of Gershwin, I was struck by the fact that the opera is about a community, and a community of faith in particular, as it grapples with its own demons and those of the greater world.

I was also excited by the tremendous spectrum of musical styles that Gershwin combines into a sensible whole and by the many ways of sounding American in the realm of concert music that it seems like he established with this opera.

Glenn Winters, the superb outreach lecturer who works for Virginia Opera, made a connection for those of us who heard his lecture that I had never considered. When Gershwin is going for a sweeping lyrical romantic moment, his melodic style resonates with that of Tchaikowsky and other Russian greats as he reaches back into his own family's heritage (his parents having come to the U.S. from Russia).

Bernstein's work was technically exciting and had many moving moments for me, as well. After a while, though, there was a certain unconvincing whiny-ness about it that seemed to belabor the point for me. But maybe that's the real point. Maybe Bernstein was trying to provide a big group therapy session for America about our relationship with God. The work makes good sense when viewed in relationship to the progression of his symphonies, each of which can be viewed as dealing with conflicts of modern religion on at least the national scale.

A great thing about the work for me is the return of the priest, of God, when the people realize they want him. The fact that it is the child that reaches out to him and brings him back makes it even more poignant.

This pivotal role of a child at the end, as well as the priest's breakdown and troubled relationship with the people makes me think of similar aspects in Mendelssohn's Elijah.

Gottschalk and Gershwin

This week I had the fun of performing excerpts from several Gottschalk works for a documentary on Cuban jazz that should be completed in November. Gottschalk travelled in Cuba and wrote some works that contain quintessential rhythms that have come to be associated with jazz and permeate much of the music we hear today.

In addition to practicing the excerpts, my preparation also included finding shoes and cuff links that looked like something Gottschalk might have worn.

I coached the excerpts with Dr. Mike Davison, one of my colleagues at UR who is an expert regarding Cuban jazz. He suggested that I play more percussively as Cuban music is very percussion-oriented. At the same time, Gottschalk was a 19th century parlor pianist known for his polish and charm. It's interesting to conjecture what type of performance would have amounted to flamboyance , exoticism, and visceral appeal in that world of poetry and highly melodic music.

Sometimes we classical musicians assume that a jazz influence is somehow a sign of primal and raw expression. But I think the composers who incorporated touches of jazz into their concert music were viewing jazz as modern, sophisticated, and suave as often as they were viewing it as being expressively primal or raw. I wonder if some unexamined, inherited prejudice may be at play that robs us of recognizing a wider range of expressiveness in this music.

Last night we went to Richmond Ballet's performance of George Balanchine's Who Cares? based on the music of George Gershwin and premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1970 . The ballet injects the rhetoric and forms of a traditional ballet with the jazzy flirtatiousness and glitz of a 1920's Broadway show -
a prime example of the neoclassical impulse.