Leon Fleisher is regarded as one of the greatest teachers in the world—and the public got a chance to see this when Fleisher held a master class at the Juilliard School. It was an unusual kind of master class: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat, the “Emperor,” was performed, by two pianists, two conductors, and the Juilliard Lab Orchestra. One pianist and conductor handled the first movement; the others took care of the second two movements. Fleisher coached pianists, conductors, and orchestra alike.
His story is well enough known, but I will recap it. This was one of the starriest pianists in the world, in the 1960s, when he developed a neural condition that made his right hand useless. He would not really play—not with two hands—for another thirty years. A combination of treatments gave him some relief. Indeed, he recently recorded a CD with the simple title Two Hands.
During his “time off,” Fleisher played a lot of lefthand music—after some initial resistance—and did some conducting. He did a lot of teaching, as well. His own teacher had been Artur Schnabel, about whom I asked in an interview two years ago. Could this great pianist teach? Could he communicate what he knew? Fleisher answered, “He was an unbelievably good teacher. Not only was he able to communicate what he knew, he did so at a level of inspiration that was just staggering.”
About his own teaching, Fleisher said that his inability to play was not without a positive effect. “I became a better teacher—I couldn’t push a student off the chair and say, ‘This is what I need.’ I had to start to use words, to convey what is essentially unconveyable in words, because of what music is.” Later in that conversation, Fleisher observed, “I have tried to put this whole experience to the best use possible.” Nobody familiar with Fleisher’s life could dispute this striking statement.
Longtime readers of this journal know my thoughts on master classes, and I will not belabor them now. In brief, I believe that a master class is, indeed, a class, and not a performance. I think the students should do as little performing as possible. I think the teacher should do as much teaching as possible—and teach to the audience. What I mean is, these are not private lessons. The students are mere springboards for public teaching. They are barely relevant, stooges, in a way. What matters is what the teacher—the “master”—has to say to us all.
So my heart sank a little bit, at the Juilliard School, when I learned that Fleisher would let the (first) pianist and the (first) conductor do the opening movement of the “Emperor” all the way through. My heart further sank when the pianist, a young lady, came out in an evening gown. This would be a performance, indeed. As I sat there and listened to this very long stretch of Beethoven, I thought it was a waste of Fleisher’s time, and a waste of the audience’s. Besides, Fleisher was taking no notes. How could he remember what to say, when his turn came to teach?
He began with a compliment: “You leave me very little to say.” My heart sank almost to the bottom. Fortunately, Fleisher was just being polite—there was a lot to say, and he said it, and more. He also remembered everything, certainly everything necessary.
Fleisher asked a question, not rhetorical: When people say, “Play more rhythmically,” what do they mean? They mean, answered Fleisher, that you should play a note as late as possible—not late, but lateish. This was a curious concept, worth chewing over (and trying out in one’s own head).
Then he noted that music is a “horizontal activity”—it passes in time, from A to Z. This could last a minute, like that Chopin waltz (although that’s about two minutes, in truth); or it could last four-and-a-half hours, like Parsifal (and that’s not counting intermissions). “What are accents?” continued Fleisher. They are “vertical events,” in the midst of this horizontal activity. They “chop up what we’re doing.” And remember, said Fleisher: “A vertical event doesn’t have to be a downward event”—verticality goes both ways. His point to the pianist, and to the rest of them, was, “I want a springier quality. Get rid of that thumping, that Gestapo-heel kind of tread.”
That is good teaching, indeed.
Everything out of Fleisher’s mouth was valuable, and often unusual. He talked to the pianist about the marking “espressivo”—“That doesn’t necessarily mean ‘I love you,’ you know.” It is not a Valentine’s Day card. This music is grand, noble, gallant—that’s the kind of expressiveness we, and Beethoven, are after. Later—and relatedly— Fleisher said, “Why are you getting all soupy on me? ‘Dolce’ is not soupy. You have to retain a sense of grandeur.”
As the young lady continued to work, I realized he was making her sound like him. And that was to the good. I had a similar thought, years ago—I reported it in these pages—when Marilyn Horne was teaching a master class: “Oh, my goodness, she’s having her sing like Marilyn Horne!” That was very much to the good, too.
Fleisher was not a nicey-nice figure on that stage. He kept saying to the pianist, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” or that. I wish he hadn’t. The young lady was not deliberately undermining Beethoven; she just didn’t know, and needed to be told. But Fleisher was wonderfully effective. The pianist, the conductor, and the orchestra became much more incisive, much more alive, much more musical. He turned black-and-white into color. At one point, he said, “Music is like physics: You deal in forces,” and Leon Fleisher was dealing precisely with these forces, in masterly fashion.
His reputation as a teacher is obviously justified. Fleisher went on, of course, with the Adagio and the Rondo. But this is enough of a lesson for one day.
At Carnegie Hall, the Collegiate Chorale presented an interesting night of Puccini. With an array of soloists and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, they performed Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi, and his last, Turandot. Puccini, in fact, died before completing Turandot; since that year—1924—opera companies have generally used a version of the ending by Franco Alfano. But the Collegiate Chorale used a different, newer ending, by another Italian composer, the late Luciano Berio. He composed his ending in 2001. More about all this in a moment.
The Collegiate Chorale, you may recall, was founded by Robert Shaw in 1941 (when he was only twenty-five). (Shaw died in 1999.) Since 1980, it has been led by Robert Bass, who was the conductor of the Puccini operas. Bass proved a capable leader: workaday at worst; inspired and inspiring at best.
On the last day of 1883, Puccini—twenty-five years old (as it happened)—entered Le Villi in a contest. It lost. But this little two-acter did not die, and it was conducted by Mahler, no less. We see it just about never now. But we know the soprano aria from it, “Se come voi piccina,” memorably recorded by Leontyne Price. Le Villi is not a great work—but it is recognizably Puccini, and it is an impressive maiden effort. It includes one of those lilting, transporting choruses, which we can only describe as Puccini-esque.
And the story? Well, very briefly, a man and a woman become engaged, but the man, lured by a siren, abandons her. The jilted woman dies. Her ghost, and the furious fairies of the forest—le villi, or the Wilis—get their revenge. More than a few of us said, in the aisles that night, “This opera gives me the willies.”
In the role of Anna—the affianced, the abandoned, the avenging—was Aprile Millo, the American soprano. It was remarkable that she showed: She is one of the great cancelers in music. In fact, she has been bedeviled with problems, throughout her career, and it would be lovely if she could solve them, so that she could make fuller use of her talent (which is great). In Le Villi, she laid on her gorgeous, wet voice, and if she was a bit histrionic at times—well, that is La Millo, and some opera can bear it. In fact, the last act of Le Villi could.
The role of Roberto—the jilting fiancé—is for tenor, and it’s high-lying, not easy. The American Franco Farina handled it well, employing a rich yet focused sound. He did not strain as he got louder. And, in Roberto’s big, extended aria from Act II, Farina supplied a serious example of Puccini singing.
In my mini-synopsis of the opera, I left out an actor: Guglielmo, Anna’s faithful father. This role was taken by Carlo Guelfi, who has distinguished himself in recent seasons at the Metropolitan Opera as Iago and Rigoletto. Guelfi is the real McCoy, an Italian—and Italianate—baritone. In Le Villi, he stood like a linebacker, immovable, ready to sing. When he had his mouth open, I found myself listening to the music more carefully, sitting slightly straighter in my chair—he’s that sort of singer. His alertness to rhythm was outstanding.
The opera also happens to have a narrator, who in an interlude between acts explains to us about the Wilis. This narration was done by a beautiful actress, Antoinette LaVecchia, whose speaking was as exquisite as her looks.
And the Collegiate Chorale, which brought this affair about? They sang superbly, with cohesion, sensitivity, and vigor. They seemed really to relish their work. And if you don’t enjoy it, you probably shouldn’t sing.
The first night of Turandot is legendary: Maestro Toscanini halted the performance at some point in the third act, saying, “Here the master [Puccini] laid down his pen. Death was stronger than art.” Toscanini never liked the Alfano ending—which he himself commissioned—and he mangled that ending, in a severe truncation. Only relatively rarely is the complete, original Alfano ending heard and seen.
Alfano’s efforts have been much maligned as “Hollywood,” “Disney-esque,” and so on, giving Turandot too happy and pat a conclusion. Specifically, it’s said that the death of the slave girl Liù is glossed over, rendering the story absurd. My only response to that is, “Since when do we complain about dramatic absurdity in opera?” Besides which, Alfano’s ending is plausible, as a completion of Turandot. We don’t have two pieces, Puccini’s and Alfano’s—more like a piece and a half.
In the Berio version, we clearly have two separate pieces: You can tell the instant that Berio begins. It’s all Berio, his voice—his orchestration, his percussion, his atonality, and so on. For me, this is too sharp a departure, too abrupt a break. I believe that Puccini would roll over, at the sound of it. Berio made no evident attempt to get inside the skin of Puccini, or of Turandot, and simply went his own way.
It may well be, however, that the Berio version will become the standard—because, right now, it’s cool to like it, among the opinion-makers (such as critics and arts administrators).
Franco Farina, unfortunately, had a much worse time of it in Turandot than he’d had in Le Villi. His “Nessun dorma”—he was Calaf—was flat (in pitch) and awkward (in interpretation). The Liù of Hei-Kyung Hong, the Korean-American soprano, was as expected: touching, lyrically powerful. The American baritone Lester Lynch made an enjoyable Ping (leader of the trio of Ping, Pang, and Pong). And La Millo? Well, she gave the formidable role of Turandot all her operatic juice.
To my eyes, Peter Serkin looks more like his father with every passing year. Serkin, of course, is a pianist, as was his father, Rudolf (1903–1991). Peter has that carriage, that fabulous posture, that wiry intensity—and, speaking of wires, the same distinctive glasses. He plays rather like his father, too: precisely, emphatically, boldly. You could describe that playing in more disparaging terms, if you wanted: tight, pinched, poking. Whatever the case, I often think, as Peter plays, “You can tell what filled his ears as he was growing up.”
Unlike his father, Peter plays a lot of contemporary music, as he did when he appeared in Carnegie Hall with the aforementioned Orchestra of St. Luke’s. On the podium was Roberto Abbado (nephew of the conductor Claudio). Leading this program was Flying to Kahani, a semi-piano concerto by Charles Wuorinen, written last year for Serkin. Wuorinen is the composer of, among many other works, the opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on a novella by Salman Rushdie. Kahani, in the novella, is an undiscovered moon of Earth. And Wuorinen draws on his opera for his piano-and-orchestra piece.
It is typical Wuorinen, full of clangorous dissonances, all of which are undoubtedly perfectly logical in the composer’s mind. Despite the “Flying” of the title, there seems to be a lot of standing around in this piece, as the pianist and orchestra noodle. I, for one, must take Wuorinen’s genius on faith—I am assured of it by others. And yet how long can one’s faith endure without some clear glimpses of one’s own?
What was absolutely clear was the suitability of the piece to Peter Serkin’s basic style, and vice versa. He can be as percussive as he wants in it—poking, jabbing, and clanging to his heart’s content.
Afterward, he played a Mozart piano concerto, as people have been doing lately, in this 250th-birthday year. Serkin and Abbado programmed the Concerto No. 24, in C minor, K. 491. In the course of this work, Serkin socked a lot of notes, à la Rudi. One waited in vain for a singing line, for a little beauty. And yet—as with Serkin père—there is no denying the pianist’s intensity, which can be effective. It’s as though every finger is coiled, each of them a weapon. Also, Serkin (either of them) often gives the impression of effort: Even easy passages tend to contain struggle.
Serkin supplied his own cadenza, which was excellent—beautiful, in fact, as well as mysterious and inventive. It was inventive without being intrusive. Mozart, I believe, would have commended it.
Finally, I might note that Serkin has developed the habit of singing and groaning loudly, in the manner of Glenn Gould. (Would that Serkin would do more singing on the keyboard.) This is not necessarily attractive. Oh, and I might mention, too, that the pianist held his final chord—Mozart’s final chord—for about a second after the orchestra. This may be acceptable in opera, where singers obey no rules. I mean, Aprile Millo would do it—but Peter Serkin, in a Mozart concerto, should not.
Roberto Abbado had the Orchestra of St. Luke’s playing exceptionally well, in elegant though unafraid lines. Mozartean ones. He concluded the concert with Beethoven’s Second Symphony, which I was unable to stay to hear, but which I would wager was good.
Great Performers at Lincoln Center did something extraordinary: They staged a monthlong festival in honor of Osvaldo Golijov, a composer born in 1960. Golijov grew up in Argentina, the son of Eastern European Jews. He has been living in the United States since the mid-1980s. He is hailed for his eclecticism, his tendency to range far and wide, musically: Golijov goes Latin American, he goes klezmer, he goes pop. Interestingly, composers used to be knocked for eclecticism. Poor William Bolcom was said to be unable to make up his mind. But maybe critical fashions have changed.
In any event, Osvaldo Golijov has won just about every award conceivable, including the MacArthur “genius grant.” The arts establishment has clutched him to its bosom.
Lincoln Center’s festival kicked off with Golijov’s sole opera (to date), Ainadamar, or Fountain of Tears. The story concerns the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca; his friendship with the actress Margarita Xirgu; and the depredations of Spanish fascism. (Recall that García Lorca was killed by the fascists in 1936.) In the opera, Margarita looks back on her time with García Lorca, and sings about “the beautiful dream of the Spanish Republic,” lost in that fearful period. Of course, “the beautiful dream of the Spanish Republic” was a nightmare for others, in places like Russia. That nightmare continues today in places like Cuba.
Wouldn’t it be something if someone made an opera on the depredations of Castroism? But then, that would be a different world—they don’t give MacArthur grants for such work.
Lincoln Center’s program notes contained the following sentence, about early-1930s Spain: “Socialist rebels established a fleeting republican democracy rather in the style of the United States (at least at that time).” What could the author possibly mean? He means, perhaps, that the United States has gone undemocratic, in this age of Ashcroftian darkness. If that is, indeed, what he means, he may wish to consider that millions of Americans in the period he likes had few rights at all.
And the music? I thought of Golijov’s score as Latin American Broadway, with doses of Middle Eastern exoticism and other things. Often, it has a relentless beat, as in a discotheque: No matter what is happening above the beat, that beat goes on. And although the opera is short—an hour and twenty minutes—it felt long to me, suffering from musical and dramatic repetitiveness. A good Meistersinger can go by like a minuet; but even a short opera can seem interminable.
Worse about Ainadamar is that it smells of agitprop. The opera is crude, and crudely manipulative, with its guns, loudspeakers, dogs, and so on. It would be more effective with a touch more subtlety, and fewer jackhammer blows. It would be more effective with characters, too, instead of cardboard political cutouts.
On the stage lurk fascist henchmen and executioners—and what are they wearing? Everyone else is in appropriate Spanish costume. But the fascists are wearing U.S. Army uniforms. This is a natural, on the Upper West Side, and in similar precincts.
Oh, how they adore him, Osvaldo Golijov. In those program notes, a Lincoln Center official wrote, “In presenting a festival around the music of a single composer, one is frequently asked the questions ‘Why this composer?’ and ‘Why now?’ The answer to the questions of why Osvaldo Golijov and why now is quite simple: he is the future.”
I was reminded of a story about a politician whom Golijov and his team may not care much for—Ronald Reagan. When he was governor of California, he visited some campus, for a tense regents’ meeting. As he tried to leave, a student mob surrounded his car. They chanted, “We are the future! We are the future!” Reagan retrieved a notebook from his briefcase, scribbled something, and held it up to the window: “I’ll sell my bonds.”
Golijov is talented, as he has proven in other works. Ainadamar isn’t worthy of a festival, not a musical or an artistic one.