kisch

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

ARTS A Semi Lament - Classical Music Today by Eric Kisch As one who spends much time listening to performances of dead white male conductors in preference to live ones, in part because mostly what I have heard has been less than inspiring - on the podium as well as on CD - I am nevertheless grateful to Charles Ives, who once exhorted an audience to "open your ears, for God's sake."

I do keep looking for new inspiration from today's musical generation, tending to find it more in the soloists category than in the conductorial ranks. And I do keep my ears open to new music, a fair bit of which does come by the Cleveland Orchestra, thanks to strong advocacy by its former conductor and music-director Christoph von Dohnanyi and from his successor, the much younger Franz Welser-Möst. Alas, so few of these premiered works stick in the mind or make one want to hear them again, if only to get better acquainted.

I've never been an avant-gardist, and I suspect that most music lovers aren't either. But that doesn't mean we won't try the new. If it doesn't stick and doesn't draw our enthusiasm is it always our fault? The real great voices will emerge from the tumult; it may just take some time - pace Mahler, Bartok, Shostakovitch, all of whom are finding much wider audiences as their works speak to their generation's consciousness.

Somewhere along the line, today's teenagers will grow up and begin to yearn for something more in musical and spiritual nourishment than the current pop dreck, and then they will slowly begin to explore our classical repertoire. I have been heartened in the last few years by the number of young people at concerts. When I first saw the Cleveland Orchestra audience a decade ago, I wondered how many would still be alive by 2000. Numbers today are smaller to be sure, but the younger contingent is growing in a heartening way. Bringing them in requires more than civic duty - they have to want to be there. I once suggested to a local chamber music group that it would be a good idea to have the artists address the audience, having seen the quickening of interest in and obvious enjoyment of those who did so - only to be told "Many of our old guard don't want this - they just want the music." Well, the not-so-old guard wants more and if the old guard holds sway, there will be little in the way of descendents interested in the field.

There are grounds for optimism. Superb young artists, instrumental, vocal and conductors, are attracting contemporaries. Hillary Hahn, a brilliant and very personable young violinist, clearly enjoys playing and meeting her audience; performances I’ve attended are filled with young people. Many young performers are banding together in chamber music and achieving notable success in this once “only for the oldies” arena. Recently I heard a concert by the Jerusalem String Quartet – four musicians still in their twenties who have been performing together for a decade! They played a Shostakovich quartet with all the emotional power of prisoners released from the gulag. I’ve also been very impressed by a young Russian-Israeli conductor, Ilan Volkov who, still in his twenties, has been entrusted with the directorship of the BBC Scottish Orchestra which he has showed off to great effect at the London Proms Concerts last year. I saw him direct the Columbus (OH) Symphony in a very credible Brahms First Symphony that brought out some of the best playing I’ve heard from this excellent regional orchestra.

I think the classical recording industry as we used to know it may be dying, but frankly these days that is no great loss. The smaller independents are taking up the slack with new artists and some of the major orchestras and soloists are already learning to do it on their own – the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony and Boston Symphony have issued multi-CD retrospective albums on their label and the London Philharmonic, London Symphony and San Francisco Symphony are offering current performances, often live ones, on their own label with, it appears, some success. Do we want to be heard and make some money, or do we hold out for huge sums that companies will never recoup and get nothing at all? Many are clearly opting for the first option, with the name of the game being to be heard. And Naxos, which went from a not-to-be-taken-seriously budget label to the world’s largest classical label in a decade, is showing that there is money in classical music – if you play the game the right way. I believe this is still a lump sum payment to the artists with no residual royalties. Naxos clearly has the long haul in mind and keeps its back catalog fully supplied. None of this “if it doesn’t make a profit in three months, can it” bean counter mode of thinking and operating.

The preservation of present day performances is found in broadcast performances of concerts, recitals and operas in pristine digital format, many in video form. The Europeans are doing a much better job than the Americans, though there is already a large collection of “Live at the Met” and “In Performance Today” DVDs available on the commercial market. And thanks to the ease of home recording of both audio and video, and the ease of duplication of these recordings, there is a lively underground of performance swapping and unofficial reissues. These will keep the sound of music as it is being made today available for this and future generations.

Eric Kisch is the host of the classical music radio program “Musical Passions”, which airs each Sunday at 3:00PM on WCLV-AM, Cleveland, and is available on streaming audio from the WCLV website, www.wclv.com