I’m sitting here drying off from the rain, recalling the most memorable orchestral works/performances I’ve heard in San Diego over the past five years or so. Off the top of my head, I’d include Inner Voices by Chinary Ung; Dark Waves by John Luther Adams; William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience; Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite; Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms; the Berlioz Requiem; and Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. The San Diego Symphony was involved in only two of those works (the last two noted). Everything else was performed by the La Jolla Symphony.
Inner Voices and Bolcom’s Songs rank among the most important works for orchestra composed during the last quarter of the 20th century. Dark Waves is the single most mind-blowing orchestral work of this century I’ve heard so far. What recently composed music has the San Diego Symphony given residents and tourists? Bright Sheng. Jennifer Higdon. Sorry, no comparison.
To the above list of memorable orchestral works performed in San Diego, I need to add Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England, which received an earthy, sincere performance by the La Jolla Symphony on Saturday night.
Chances are if you hear Ives in a symphony hall, it will probably be The Unanswered Question—a beautiful, profound work, yes, but just the tip of the iceberg in Ives’s orchestral output: Four symphonies (not including the “Holidays Symphony”), many suites, and the barbaric yawp of the Robert Browning Overture. All the more reason to treasure this weekend’s offering by the LJS and their intrepid director, Steven Schick.
Pipa Player Wu Man.
Courtesy photo
I won’t waste space describing/reviewing the composition. It’s a classic piece, not just in the history of American music, but in the history of music everywhere, period. Written (as near as scholars can determine—never any easy task with Ives) in 1912, with portions of the last movement composed in 1914, Three Places ranks as one of the most extraordinary works of its time. Consider if you will that at roughly the same time, Webern was working on his aphoristic orchestra pieces op. 6 and 10, Stravinsky was wrapping up the Rite of Spring, Schoenberg composing Pierrot Lunaire, Debussy Jeux, and Berg finished his Altenberg Lieder. Ives had no knowledge of the musical revolutions taking place in Vienna and Paris, which makes the innovations of Three Places—harmonic, rhythmic, and perhaps, most striking of all, the idea of not just multiple lines happening simultaneously but multiple musics playing against each other—even more startling. If you listen to classical music (and if you don’t, why are you reading this?) and have never heard this masterpiece, there is a measurable void in your life which needs to be filled immediately.
Bless Schick and his dedicated musicians for giving local audiences a chance to hear this wonderful music. If the performance was a little raw, well, that’s the way Ives liked his music to be performed. He’d rather have some wrong notes hit and have the right attitude (Ives—the proto-punk composer!), than have a safe, accurate reading (listen to him playing his own piano pieces). Schick and the orchestra conveyed the mysterious impressionism of the outer movements, and the raucous whimsy of the inner one.
One thing that live performances of Ives reveal is the falsehood of the recording studio. In that sterile, controlled environment, engineers can close mike a flute solo, bring up the strings, project something in an inner part, which would be tough to hear in a live concert hall performance. (Stravinsky detested the performance practice which arose in the 1950s of making the guiro part in Rite of Spring more prominent, something that happened as a result of engineers twisting potentiometers in the studio to achieve unnatural balances).
The second of the Three Places in New England—Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut—is perhaps the most famous example of Ives’s mashup technique where he carves up the orchestra into three or four distinct groups, and has them play in different keys and different tempos at once. The listener is at times engulfed in a mass of sound, and within this mass, bits and pieces of melodies and rhythms drift out. Recordings tend to focus your ears on one group or the other within the mass, but heard live, you are forced to find your own way through this delightful musical thicket.
Next on the program was Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Pipa and Orchestra. Wu Man, who lives in San Diego these days, played the pipa part (the pipa is a type of Chinese lute played with plectra worn on the fingers). She is clearly a virtuoso on her instrument, an earnest musician with a captivating stage presence, and she won the audience over enough to come back after the concerto ended and play a traditional Chinese tune (after wishing everyone an early “Happy Chinese New Year.”). Steve Schick sat beside Wu Man, reclining back against the podium as she played, and then he unexpectedly produced a hand drum, upon which he joyfully accompanied her. A conductor whipping out a drum and jamming with a pipa player—that’s something you don’t see very often! The audience was enchanted.
Unlike Ives, Lou Harrison’s place in the history of music is the subject of debate. Modernists won’t recognize his music after the percussion ensemble works he composed for John Cage’s group, and the reason for that is Harrison explored just intonation and committed the sin of writing beautiful melodies at a time when every serious composer was writing serial music (even those conservatives Britten and Shostakovich used tone rows! For the record, Harrison wrote 12-tone music as well, but it’s rarely performed these days). However, for those who cherish beauty and simplicity in music, there will always be a place for Lou Harrison on concert programs.
Younger composers these days celebrate Harrison’s merger of Asian and European music, common enough now, but quite rare in the 60s and 70s. Most of Harrison’s concertos are for western instruments and gamelan ensemble, but the pipa concerto is one of his rare forays into showcasing an eastern instrument against a classical ensemble, in this case a string orchestra.
In Harrison’s concerto, the pipa is always front and center, although sometimes it plays countermelodies instead of the main theme. “Melody,” Harrison often said, “is the audience’s take-home pay,” and there is plenty of graceful melody spun out in the concerto. Like Harrison’s other melodies, though, you can’t really call them tunes, any more than you could call a Bach aria from a cantata a tune. Both Bach and Harrison write long, evolving and changing melodies which don’t lend themselves so readily to humming on the way back home, but they are ravishing to the ear.
Years ago I had the honor (I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I consider myself fortunate indeed) to have played for Lou Harrison. I remember someone saying, “He’s like a big gay Santa Claus,” and sure enough he was. I would go further than that definition, though; Harrison is one of the very few people I have ever met that I could sincerely describe as “beatific.” The man just radiated serenity and benevolence, and that good will and happiness and straightforwardedness are all present in his Concerto for Pipa.
Perhaps the best illustration of this occurs in the second movement, which itself is a suite in 4 parts. The second part is titled “Three Sharing,” and consists only of the pipa performer rapping the body of her instrument with her fingers, while the principal cellist and the principal bassist beat the strings below the bridge of their instruments with a wooden rod in a percussive manner. By 1997, when Harrison composed it, playing pitched instruments like percussion was old hat, but what makes the movement so unusual is that the rhythms played are relatively simple. Adorno-quoting modernists may sniff, but this movement is enchanting, and if I may go into academic mode for a moment, it also suggests a bridging of East and West, finding a common ground where the different instruments can all make the same kinds of sound together (in contrast to the rest of the concerto which pits the sharp plucked and struck sounds of the pipa against the lush string orchestra).
The string section of the La Jolla Symphony has improved this year, which could be a good sign of Schick’s rehearsal techniques. In particular, the upper strings were much more in tune than I’ve heard for this group in the past. I wonder how much better they’d sound in a decent hall (how about at the California Center for the Arts?) instead of that much maligned music mangler, Mandeville Auditorium.
This concert was titled “American Accents,” and after intermission the great granddaddy of U.S. classical music, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, op. 95 was performed. The La Jolla Symphony is what it is, a community orchestra, and that’s just how they sounded performing this glorious chestnut. There was actually a bit of excitement comparable to a parent listening to a child perform in a middle school orchestra: you know what you’re hearing isn’t anywhere near a perfect rendition, but you’re rooting for them anyway to do the best they can. Well, you dropped a note, too bad, but you can make it to the end of your solo, I know you can, go team, go!
Professional symphony musicians can just go through the motions playing something like the New World Symphony; they’ve played it dozens of times before, and this is just another gig, ho-hum. One thing you always get from the performers in the La Jolla Symphony is enthusiasm and sincerity, even if their technical standards are not up to the level of their bigger but boring brother at Copley Symphony Hall.
To Maestro Schick and his earnest musicians, I say, “Bravo! Keep up the good work, and keep playing great music!” To Maestro Ling and the San Diego Symphony, I say, “Okay, now that you folks have proven that you can really play, why don’t you grow a pair and give us something a little more exciting?”
For a copy of the program, click here.
For a pair, click here.
