[Above: Boston’s Symphony Hall, built by Henry Higginson and opened in 1900.]
Last week I heard the Boston Symphony perform Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth at Carnegie Hall. The conductor was their music director since 2014: Andris Nelsons. I had planned to write a blog but instead emailed my impressions to a dozen friends in the music business. The emails that came back – some from people long familiar with the BSO or Nelsons or both – more than suggested that this is an orchestra in trouble. So I’ve decided to turn my private email into a public blog. I’m willing to risk seeming presumptuous and gratuitous. I have a constructive agenda.
My wife Agnes and I left at intermission. We were climbing the walls.
We were seated opposite the first violins, about 15 rows back. I would not even call this section a section. It was an eclectic group of violinists, disengaged to varying degrees. At the rear were two ladies who liked to chat. They did so in between scenes. At times they barely moved their bows. At the end of the first half, when the orchestra rose to bow, it took them a long time to leave their seats and they did so chatting.
The conductor is a mystery to me. When he asked his violins for a big response, the reaction was sluggish. I see that he conducts in Leipzig, Vienna, Berlin, that his Shostakovich CDs win awards. I encountered him once before, leading Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Met. I was with a distinguished pianist; we both found it slack.
My first experience of Lady Macbeth was at the City Opera back when it performed at City Center. I was in high school. The conductor was Julius Rudel. The orchestral interludes raised the roof. The show was hot and fierce.
A year ago, I participated in a memorable Shostakovich 7 in South Dakota – I write about it often. Some time afterward, I spot-checked a few recorded performances of the soul-stirring ending of that symphony. The Nelsons/BSO version compared unfavorably, I thought, with Delta David Gier/South Dakota Symphony. In fact, the same South Dakota performance included, on the first half, one of those Lady Macbeth interludes – wittier than Nelsons’ BSO rendition.
The BSO’s Lady Macbeth was sung in Russian by a non-Russian cast — my wife, fluent in Russian, was unimpressed. They next record it for DG.
The house was practically full and everyone seemed prepared to enjoy the second half.
The BSO has a new executive director: Chad Smith, coming over from LA. He will make a difference. Already, he’s announced the creation of a humanities arm – something the LA Phil has, something every major American orchestra needs. And he’s increased the presence of his music director at Tanglewood – in principle, the right move.
I imagine that he will rethink the programing. What will happen with the humanities component remains to be seen. In LA, so far as I can tell, it emphasizes the contemporary arts. Nothing wrong with that. But it bears reckoning that Boston is not LA – no other American musical institution had nearly so impressive a beginning. The orchestra’s inventor, owner, and operator, in 1881, was Henry Higginson, a visionary genius insufficiently recalled and not least by the BSO itself. The conductors of those early seasons included Arthur Nikisch – later the pre-eminent symphonic conductor in Germany. Nikisch’s 400 BSO concerts are today wholly unremembered. At the time, their impact was cataclysmic. This is a story that bears retelling.
The orchestra’s most impactful music director was Serge Koussevitzky (1924–1949); it is he who created the Tanglewood Festival as an American music laboratory. Koussevitzky was a man who thought nothing of telling Bela Bartok, terminally ill in a New York hospital bed, that we was to compose a major work for the Boston Symphony. The result was the Concerto for Orchestra, which Koussevitzky premiered in 1944. A few weeks later, he scheduled further performances of the same music so it could be nationally broadcast. That radio performance (Dec. 30, 1944) remains the most vivid, most virtuosic version I have ever heard (or will ever hear); the galvanizing string choir is a Koussevitzky signature.
Koussevitzky’s many causes included pieces by his countryman Igor Stravinsky then little played by others in the US. It was also in Boston that Stravinsky delivered his seminal Norton lectures at Harvard University. This is a story that the BSO and Harvard could remember together.
We are today witnessing an ever riper crisis in the American symphonic community. Our orchestras, once civic bastions, need to figure out what they’re for. In my experience, the South Dakota Symphony is one orchestra ahead of the pack. Its example should be studied. (For my 7,000 word American Scholar manifesto on “Shostakovich and South Dakota,” click here.)
The larger crisis is an erasure of the arts from the American experience. The crucial loss is of cultural memory. We live in the present moment. Our attention spans are short. But the arts, historically, build on past achievement. History, lineage, tradition: ballast.
I cannot think of an American cultural institution with a more glorious history than the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
To hear a “More than Music” NPR feature on the South Dakota Symphony, with live excerpts from Lady Macbeth (at 29:56) and (at 00:10 and 8:45) Shostakovich’s Seventh, click here.
For a long look at Henry Higginson, see my Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012) [with a jacket blurb from former BSO CEO Mark Volpe].
For much more on Nikisch and Koussevitzky in Boston, see my Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (2005)
No other art form functions like a symphony orchestra. An orchestra is expected to create a brand new program each week, perform it a couple of times, then throw it away and start fresh with a new one the next week. A theatre company does one play, eight time per week for “x” number of weeks. An opera company has a season of “x” number of operas each of which which it performs multiple times in rotation. The same with a ballet company, also performing a finite number of dances multiple times over the season.
I don’t doubt for a minute your keen observations Joe, but comparing the BSO with the South Dakota Symphony in the same breath doesn’t hold water. South Dakota performs, I believe, 8 classical concerts, one time each. This much less frenetic pace gives it the kind of “freedom” the BSO can never have. Alas.
Hi Larry! I would point out that a group like the BSO will have at least as much rehearsal time per program as a regional orchestra like SD, probably the same as elite orchestras like Berlin, and probably twice as much as the Philharmonia or LSO. At the BSO’s level, I think it’s only reasonable to expect every concert to be an event.
Your wife Agnes was my first employee at Robert Levin Associates, Inc. in New York City in 1979. You can tell her that I am still married to Laurie and that I have two grown children, a son and a daughter, and three adorable grandchildren, ages three and one, and two months. Although I am now officially retired, I am assisting in and guiding the career of a twelve year old violinist, the greatest violin talent I have come across in all of my seventy-two years. You will be hearing great things about her. Fritz Kreisler once opined, “a violinist like Jascha Heifetz comes along once every one hundred years; a violinist like Josef Hassid comes along once every two hundred years.” This young girl falls into the latter category.
Yes, Mr. Horowitz, you hit the nail on the head. It’s the violin section. They play with no passion. They project just enough sound to avoid being called out on it. They evidently have so much contempt for the audience that they don’t think anyone will know what they’re doing. True, most people won’t know what is missing from the performance, but everyone will leave feeling nothing. For new audience members who want to give classical music a chance, the violins will reinforce the stereotype that classical music is stilted and boring. Also, the violin section is so far outmatched by the brass section that it causes a major imbalance. I went to hear Rachmaninoff’s second symphony last year and I was so angry at the violins that I almost ran back stage to confront someone. They have a major attitude problem. They either don’t realize or don’t care that they cause performances to be absolutely joyless and flat, which means that audiences will not come back… so they’re going to be hurting their own livelihoods at some point, or more likely the next generation, which is even worse. After being disappointed by the last three BSO concerts I’ve attended, I have decided not to go back. You will get much more joy from a free performance by one the NEC student orchestras. Those are musicians who care about what they’re doing, and they’re not paid six figure salaries to do it.
The Baltimore Symphony is trying to attract new audiences. They may discourage their older audiences.
“BSO Fusion: Notorious B.I.G. X Tupac X Mahler
A transformative exploration of life, death, legacy, struggle, and triumph, The Resurrection Mixtape fuses the classic music of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur with Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. Included in the performance are “Hypnotize,” “Dear Mama,” “California Love,” “Juicy,” “Keep Ya Head Up,” “Everyday Struggle,” and more.”
Artist
Steve Hackman, conductor
I won’t be in town to hear it, but I am really curious about this. It could either be brilliant and inspired, or entirely lame and pandering. Baltimore actually does very intelligent programming in its mainstream series, so I’m hopeful for the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awX08ahc56I
Nelsons is such a disappointment. When he first came on the scene he seemed like he could be a new Furtwangler, now he’d be lucky to be a Mehta. He immediately took gigs for every week of the year, learned the entire repertoire in the spotlight in front of the world’s greatest musicians, clammed up and never took a risk ever again. The stress clearly took its toll on him and now he’s twice the size he was when he first came up. He’s now listed as the world’s busiest conductor on the international scene and one can only wonder why.
Joe,
Long time (last time sadly, was at your apartment for a party after one of Earl Wild’s Carnegie recitals……maybe in the late 80s –most probably 86 the after the Liszt recitals). Regardless, I do think you are spot on regarding so much of what is happening in classical music today. In the rush to ‘save’ classical music programs in the US, we have ‘homogenized’ so much of the critical elements of music making to cater to celebrity, political fashion and all manner of fads. While personalities have always been a huge draw and also sometime liabilities in terms of great performances, the driving force currently seems to be revenue in the short term rather than the long term investment in both the institutions and the audience.
Education, or lack thereof, is one of the greatest contributors to the current situation as an educated audience is also generally a more musical and more open one — willing to be challenged by new musical expression even if it is not always the most successful. We have always witnessed pieces that did not go well in their premieres and then, over time, the public warms up to the concepts, harmonic language and ideas presented and the piece finds its true audience and place in the repertoire.
I applaud you for a lifetime of thoughtful musical criticism and writing and for your learned take on all things musical. You are a true treasure in the fabric of our musical world.
With all due respect , your claim that the Boston symphony is “in trouble ” based on this isolated concert performance of. the Shostakovich opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District ” is more than a little bit unfair
and is contrary to everything. I have heard by this orchestra and its current music director Andris Nelsons ..
I have heard parts of their recent cycle of the Shostakovich. symphonies and found them first rate as well as. PBS telecasts , and whether one likes this conductor’s interpretations or not , I have never heard the B.S..O..play better or sound and have frequently heard it play far worse under other conductors in the past . .
Having followed your writings for some years , I have noticed your constant longing for the “golden age ” of classical music in America and tendency to dismiss performances by today’s leading orchestras , opera conductors out of hand far too often . But this is true of so many other music critics and commentators today ; I am not singling you out ..