Longtime readers will know that I regularly quote Ned Rorem on the split between performers and composers. In an interview, back in 2002, he pointed out to me that performers and composers were basically one and the same until the early twentieth century. There were exceptions, of course: singers would probably not have been expected to compose their own music. But think of Chopin and Paganini (to take easy examples). They played what they wrote, and wrote what they played. For the last hundred years, however, performers and composers have tended to stay in their separate “lanes.”
Rorem himself was a composer. (He died in 2022.) He depended on other people to play, and sing, his works—which they did (though not as often as he would have liked). Today, there are some important performers who “roll their own,” as I like to say: who compose their own music. I think of four pianists, immediately: Marc-André Hamelin, the Canadian; Stephen Hough, the Brit; Daniil Trifonov, the Russian; and Fasil Say, the Turk. This last is especially bold about programming his own music. Half of his recent recital in Carnegie Hall was devoted to it.
In the first half, however, he played Bach and Beethoven—or rather, Bach-Busoni and Beethoven. He led with Busoni’s arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach’s violin partita in D minor. He has an acute sense of rhythm, Say does, or of timing, if you like. I once heard Leon Fleisher (the late pianist) say something like this: “What does it mean to have good rhythm? Often it means coming in at the last possible second—the last possible millisecond—without being too late.” Fasil Say has that quality.
In his hands, the Chaconne was big, very big. Gargantuan, even. He was not playing Bach, I reminded myself, but Busoni, arranging Bach. Was Say too aggressive? No. But he walked right up to the line without crossing it—which is like coming in late without being too late.
Staying with the key of D minor, Say played Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17, Op. 31, No. 2, known as “The Tempest.” It was indeed tempestuous. (Never mind that Beethoven did not bestow the nickname himself.) Say was liberal in interpretation without being eccentric. The music was dramatic, not polite—I think Beethoven would have approved.
Regular readers will know that I often say, “No fair lookin’.” No fair holding a player’s physicality, or gestures, against him. Music is an aural art. Having said that, I must report that Fasil Say conducts himself. Not slightly, as other pianists do (Mitsuko Uchida, let’s say). Full out. When an arm is free, he extends it, conducting broadly. Sometimes two arms are free, when he is using the sustain pedal. We say that a pianist “play-conducts” when he is leading a concerto from the keyboard. Well, Fasil Say play-conducts when there is no orchestra.
Does he do it to show off? Is he bringing Vegas to the concert hall? I don’t think so. I think he’s doing what comes naturally. I suspect he does it in the privacy of his own home.
He began the second half of his recital with a recent sonata of his, Op. 99, which he subtitles “New Life.” It is typical of music from Say’s pen. He reaches within the piano to pluck the strings. The piano sometimes sounds like a zither. The music is improvisatory (though written down). It is classical music that is jazzy; it is sometimes more like outright jazz.
Say has a lively, restless mind. And a listener senses that the music means a lot to the composer, personally.
Say continued with Four Ballades. (You know who else wrote four ballades: Chopin.) The first of them is dreamy, and you could even call it “ballade-like.” It is also jazzy and pop-like. I thought of Burt Bacharach. This ballade is a song without words, and you almost feel that it ought to have words. The final ballade brings a touch of the Oriental, as we used to say in the bad old days. Turkey is where East and West meet. And they do so in Say’s music as well.
He ended the printed program with an early piece of his: Black Earth, Op. 8. It is a typical Say piece: with plucking, with improvisation (or the feel of it), with jazziness, with Turkishness. The end, soft, strikes me as a prayer.
The crowd wanted encores, and it was a joy to hear Say launch into “Summertime”—his treatment of it. (He honors Gershwin’s key, too: B minor.) The crowd whooped as he began his next encore: his famous arrangement of the Rondo alla turca which concludes Mozart’s Sonata in A, K. 331. (A Turk arranging a Turkish rondo, get it?) Another leading pianist of today, Arcadi Volodos, made his own arrangement of the Turkish Rondo. A third pianist, Yuja Wang, does something inspired: she plays a combination of the two.
Fasil Say is a valuable musician on the scene, playing the canon and rolling his own.
The Cleveland Orchestra announced that its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, will serve in that post through the 2026–27 season. It will have been a cool twenty-five years. That is a long tenure, in this day and age. Mengelberg served fifty years in Amsterdam; Mravinsky served fifty years in Leningrad. But shorter tenures are now the rule. And Welser-Möst seems Mengelbergian, or Mravinskyan, compared with the norm.
In the National Basketball Association, some teams have two head coaches per season. Gregg Popovich has been the head coach in San Antonio since . . . 1996. He may hit thirty years. Popovich and Welser-Möst stand out as exceptions.
Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra came to Carnegie Hall for two concerts. The maestro looks the same as he always has, really (if with grayer hair). My friend Fred Kirshnit, the late critic, said that Welser-Möst resembles Gustav Mahler, in concert tails and round, wire-rimmed glasses. True. And the Clevelanders’ first concert had a Mahler theme, of a sort.
It began with a work by Ernst Krenek. In 1924, Krenek was married, very briefly, to Gustav and Alma’s daughter Anna. In 1928, Krenek wrote his Little Symphony—which is what the Clevelanders played. Writing this piece, Krenek was in a “popular” mode: music of the people, by the people, and for the people. It has, among other things, two mandolins and two banjos. It is a little corny, but it is also nifty. Puckish, rude, clever.
From Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders, it was oddly sober, overly polite. The piece sounded as though the players were merely reading through it (competently, of course).
In 1922, Alma asked Krenek to see whether he could complete an unfinished manuscript of her late husband: that of his Symphony No. 10. Krenek saw that this was not possible. The only movement we have from the symphony—in proper Mahlerian shape—is the opening Adagio. This is what the Cleveland Orchestra next played.
It should tear your heart out. On this night, however, I doubt there was a wet eye in the house. (This is a line I borrow from my above-mentioned friend Fred.) To add insult to injury, the pizzicato at the end was poor. Welser-Möst then kept his hands in the air, to ward off applause. He did not want the moment to be spoiled. But if an audience is truly moved—is truly transported—there is no need for raised hands.
The second half of the concert was all-Bartók, beginning with the String Quartet No. 3. Huh? Stanley Konopka is a veteran violist with the orchestra, and he made an arrangement of this quartet for string orchestra—for double string orchestra. Was this necessary? No. Is it necessary to do only the necessary? No. Konopka’s is a fine arrangement, working well, and the orchestra played it sensitively and beautifully.
Last on the program was a showpiece, a zany piece: The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartók’s pantomime ballet. This reading was, again—a little sober. Overly polite. Rough edges were cushioned, and shock value was absent. Do I want flat-out nuts? No, but—well, listen to Huckleberry Finn: “Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Be careful about adopting and sivilizing a score such as The Miraculous Mandarin.
There was much excellent playing in the orchestra, naturally, and some of it came from the principal clarinet, Afendi Yusuf, who was born in Ethiopia. He holds the Robert Marcellus Chair. Marcellus was the principal clarinet in Cleveland from 1953 to 1973. He was one of the most admired orchestral musicians of the twentieth century. I imagine that to hold his chair is both an honor and a burden.
Visiting orchestras often play an encore, but the Clevelanders gave us none. In feeling a little sore about this, I remind myself of an old joke. Two ladies are leaving the club after lunch. One says, “The food has gotten so lousy.” The other says, “Yeah, and such small portions.”
Over the years, I have heard Franz Welser-Möst give tepid performances. I have heard him give superb and exciting ones. I think of three operas, all by Strauss: Salome, Der Rosenkavalier, and Elektra. Let me throw in a fourth opera, Beethoven’s: Fidelio. That was unforgettably wonderful. Welser-Möst may have been somewhat uninspired on that night in Carnegie Hall, but I knew I would hear him inspired again soon—and it happened the very next day, when he started Cleveland’s second concert with a Prokofiev symphony: the Second (a rarity). To borrow a phrase from the American founding, there was “energy in the executive.”
Five days later, a pianist came to Carnegie Hall for a recital. He was Behzod Abduraimov, the Uzbekistani, born in 1990. Glancing at the program, I saw that he was to begin with Franck’s Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue. (Or I thought I saw that.) “Good for him,” I said to myself. “I’m glad the young man is playing such ‘old-fashioned’ pieces.” When he began playing, I was puzzled. This was not the Franck piece. I looked at the program again. I had read too fast. Abduraimov was playing Franck, all right, but the piece was the Prelude, Fugue, and Variation in B minor, for organ, arranged for the piano by Harold Bauer.
Harold Bauer! There is a name from the past. Bauer (1873–1951) was a renowned pianist, teacher, and author. When I was a kid, I had a book by him which I believe was called The Literature of the Piano. I can’t find it on the internet (which is suspicious). I can picture my copy’s black, tattered cover. At any rate, Bauer played his arrangement of the Franck organ piece in Carnegie Hall in April 1912. And here was a young man from Central Asia playing it, more than a century later. Bauer would surely have been pleased.
Abduraimov next played something from the home front: The Walls of Ancient Bukhara, an eight-movement suite by Dilorom Saidaminova, an Uzbekistani born in 1943. These movements are postcards, or impressions—I think we are even entitled to describe them as “Impressionistic.” One of the movements, mysterious, reminded me of a Debussy prelude: The Sunken Cathedral. Other movements are assertive or playful. Ms. Saidaminova is a composer with something to say. And Behzod Abduraimov did well by her, playing deftly (and pedaling the same way, I might add). Unless I miss my mark, he played with affection, too—maybe some national or cultural pride.
The young man moved on to Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit. His playing of it astounded me. This is a famously—infamously—difficult piece. Abduraimov played it with ease. Everything was clear, intricate, fleet, accurate. Abduraimov was almost matter-of-fact, not sweating. He might as well have been playing a two-part invention. I thought of the word “facility”—which relates to “easiness.” I thought of a phrase, a cliché: “unseemly ease.” Honestly, Abduraimov’s handling of Gaspard was stupefying.
Was there anything wrong with it? Yes. The last movement, “Scarbo,” ought to be more electric, more diabolical. For Abduraimov, it was kind of a walk in the park (not at night, with goblins about). Regardless, I stood as soon as he was finished. I would have held myself cheap if I hadn’t.
To begin the second half of the program, Abduraimov played a piece by Florence Price, whose works are suddenly everywhere. She was an American, whose dates are similar to Harold Bauer’s: 1887 to 1953. Abduraimov played her Fantaisie nègre No. 1 (there are four of them), which is a Lisztian treatment of a spiritual: “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” Mr. Abduraimov was virtuosic, of course, and touching—touching in this offering to an American audience (I thought of Marian Anderson singing “Sinner, Please,” and Leontyne Price, and others).
He concluded his printed program with Romeo and Juliet—the ten pieces that Prokofiev plucked from his ballet and arranged for the piano. In these pieces, Abduraimov tended to be spiky, crunchy, percussive. The music did not much sound like the ballet. It sounded like a Prokofiev piano sonata. “And that is correct,” I thought. Abduraimov was not trying to copy an orchestra; arranged for the piano, this music is something different.
By the way, Abduraimov had some technical difficulties in the Prokofiev. I mention this in the spirit of “man bites dog.” I did not think Abduraimov capable of technical difficulties.
His first encore was Rachmaninoff—the Prelude in G major. This was a favorite encore of Horowitz, who played it ineffably. It was ineffable from Abduraimov, too. He demonstrated a singing line. And he executed the lightest trill you could ever hope to hear. I thought he should then play the G-minor prelude and call it a night. But he next played a little Tchaikovsky piece: the “Neapolitan Song” from the Children’s Album. (He did not articulate it very well, strangely.)
Abduraimov came out once more—and there was the Prelude in G minor. I believe he had a memory slip in it. But—pardon me if this is cute—he played a genuinely memorable recital.
Like the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra came to town for two concerts at Carnegie. In between came the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra opened the hall’s season. The New York Philharmonic plays nearby, at Lincoln Center. So, there’s your “Big Five.” But it is unwise to speak of a “Big Five” these days, I think. For one thing, you would not want to exclude the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Manfred Honeck.
On their second night, the Bostonians presented an opera in concert: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Shostakovich. The performance was led by the bso’s music director, Andris Nelsons. He is a protégé of his fellow Latvian Mariss Jansons, the late, great conductor. The last piece I ever heard Jansons conduct was Lady Macbeth. I believe he would have been proud of Nelsons at Carnegie Hall—would have saluted him.
Nelsons had the Bostonians sounding like a Russian orchestra, with growling low strings, impudent woodwinds, brash brass. Lady Macbeth is an “orchestral” opera in any case. With the orchestra on the stage, rather than in a pit, it comes across that way all the more.
Singing the title role was Kristine Opolais, the Latvian soprano. She did justice to this role, both daunting and rewarding. She was once married to Maestro Nelsons. Can you think of another divorced couple who still worked together? At the moment, I can think only of Charles Dutoit (the conductor) and Martha Argerich (the pianist).
As we were leaving the hall, a veteran musician said to me, “I feel privileged to have been here.” That spoke for me, too.