Another Activity of My Life

[2] Classical Music

   I discovered music around the time I was thirteen.  I listened to WQXR (“the classical music station”) while doing my homework; this was facilitated by the fact many of my homework tasks were mechanical drawings required by Brooklyn Tech classes. But early on, I went to live musical events, notably a Ring des Nibelungen at the Met with Melchior, Traubel, and Lotte Lehmann in her last Sieglinde. I persuaded my father to buy a war bond from WQXR to gain admission to a quartet concert at their studio, I got into a Bruno Walter Mozart rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic and still remember his staying, in a voice that seemed very sad, “Let’s go again from letter F, Frederick.”

   I also recall going to concerts at Town Hall, for which discount coupons were available in school. Two come to mind. One was an all-Schumann piano recital; but I can’t come up with the name of the pianist. But I do remember two things about the concert. A little boy (maybe ten) sitting with his mother near me beaming when selections from the Kinderszenen were being  played and Vladimir Horowitz sitting by himself in a kind of box at the front of the balcony. The second was a concert of Jewish music in which a well known cantor from Brooklyn participated. That was the tenor, Richard Tucker of whom I then said, “he ought to be at the Met,” which is where he was a year or so later.

   If I went on giving an account of all the concerts I attended—and remember!—this piece would be very long and surely boring. But I cannot resist telling about a selection of them. I heard Schnabel play Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto which he had rescued from obscurity; I went as regularly as I was able to get a ticket to hear chamber music at the Frick museum. A memorable one was the Budapest Quartet, with my sitting close enough to be able to follow the music, sort of, over the shoulder of Mischa Schneider, its cellist.

   When I was at Vassar, I subscribed to the Philharmonic, driving down to New York on Thursdays, killing two birds with one stone by first having dinner with my parents. That subscription was prompted by a concert I heard Boulez conduct with the BBC Symphony, including an uncannily transparent Petrushka. When Boulez was then appointed in New York, I subscribed, writing to them that I was subscribing because of the Boulez appointment, unlike many of their subscribers who gave that as the reason for bailing out. Boulez was famous for doing contemporary music, while the NY Phil audience, like that of most orchestras, preferred hearing what they had already heard before. (See, on this blog, my post of June 28, 2014, “Art that is Heard is Not like Art that is Seen.”)

   When we lived in Evanston, we subscribed to the Chicago Symphony, where before every Thursday concert the two of us had dinner at the Berghoff with the Garry Willses and the Larry Lipkings. Many splendid concerts during those Solti years, though the concert everyone who attended will never forget was Abbado conducting a semi-staged Wozzeck. He stood in front of the orchestra and conducted without a score, giving cues with elegant gestures, evoking an outstanding performance of that masterpiece. More generally, the Chicago programming was fairly interesting if not exactly adventurous. Their playing was consistently superb.

  Before I turn to the last orchestra to which we subscribed, a paragraph about my attendance at various operas. I never became a Feinschmecker of voices, so bel canto was not my thing. When asked, I would say that I was not an opera-lover, but a  I music-lover, with Mozart, the later Wagner, and such “contemporary” operas as Moses and Aron (of which I saw two splendid performances) at the center.  Two more Rings (one of them in Bayreuth) and lots of Mozart, but never a Magic Flute quite like my earliest record purchase, the Beecham Berlin recording of the early thirties.

   That brings me to the last orchestra with which I was involved: the Pittsburgh Symphony. There I was not only a subscriber, but a member or the board of directors and a member of the chorus that sang at its concerts. I’ll take these associations in order. As a subscriber, I always enjoyed their playing—which was truly first class. At the same time, I was disappointed by their conservative—stodgy, “safe” programming. They remained a provincial outfit. That was driven home to me during my decade on its board. I went to an endless number of meetings of the board and, more importantly, of a variety of board committees. I made many suggestions, I wrote a large number of memos (it was a big pile that I threw out when I “dissolved” our house.) But nothing that I ever put forward, mostly mild stuff, was ever adopted. I was not at all bitter, just—big sigh—disappointed.

    My other relationship to the orchestra was vastly more gratifying. As a member of the Mendelssohn Choir, I sang in many of PSO concerts of a variety of choral works, mostly when Mariss Jansons was its conductor. He took our Mozart Requiem to Carnegie Hall. I was placed in the top row smack in the center. When Mariss and I ran into each other in the hotel lobby after the afternoon rehearsal, he came over to me, grinning, “I heard you, I heard you.” All I could say was “I hope not.” The hardest piece—for me—that I sang in was the wonderful Symphony of Psalms. No intuitive intervals, at least for the basses, or at least this one. I “engaged” a pianist friend to help pound it into my head. The cost: a large bottle of gin.

   Briefly, how did I get to sing in the Mendelssohn choir? It started with my membership in the chorus at Brooklyn Tech, while I also sang in (and actually conducted) the Friday night choir of the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights. The singing continued in the chorus of a zillion at Great Lakes while in boot camp. After an hiatus of some years, I became the only administrator in the Northwestern and then Pittsburgh choruses. A lot of rehearsals and a lot of concerts. When Frank Miller conducted us in the Verdi Requiem with the so-so Evanston Symphony, he made a very short speech at our first rehearsal together. “I’m sure that you are well prepared; I will not call for anything special. We’ll just do it the way we did it under Toscanini. Sure. Before becoming principal cellist in Chicago Miller had been principal cellist of the NBC Symphony (conducted alternately by Stokowski and Toscanini). You see that singing in a chorus was how my unschooled musicality would find active expression.

   Now I go to concerts in Mexico City, especially to those of the Sinfonica Nacional of which my daughter Eleanor has been principal clarinet for more than two decades. It’s a very decent orchestra with programs more interesting than most to be found in the US. I know of no other orchestra that would program all fifteen Shostakovich symphonies in a single season!