This year we get: Pictures at an Exhibition, The Grand Canyon Suite, a “New Year’s Style Night in Vienna,” “A Symphonic Tribute to Great American Pops Composers,” a tango concert and five evenings of “world music.”

Peter Serkin

In the middle, there’s a “Brahms Festival.” Over eight days you can hear all four symphonies, two of the serenades and all of the concertos, including the Double Concerto.

The soloist in the D-minor concerto will be Peter Serkin, a major international artist — absolutely worth hearing, although we did just have an outstanding performance of the work by Christopher Taylor with the Boulder Philharmonic. Valentina Listisa is playing the B-flat concerto, and she seems to be a rising star.

On July 29 and 30, Jane Eaglen will sing the Liebestod followed by Loren Maazel’s Wagner arrangement, “The Ring Without Words.” Jane Eaglen has had vocal problems lately, but hopefully she’s doing well now. If so, why fly her out to sing for 10 minutes?

On August 1, we can hear Golijov’s klezmer-flavored Dreams of Issac the Blind and the Bruckner D minor Requiem — which might not be as incongruous as it sounds.

It all winds up on August 5 and 6 with Mahler’s Fifth, prefaced by something involving didgeridoo and electric guitar. (I would have programmed the klezmer with the Mahler, naturally.)

So it’s another strange season for the CMF: ADHD programming, probably 50 percent pops or straight-out pop. Apparently this works for them in terms of ticket sales.

2008’s Beethoven festival drew well, although the performances were inconsistent and inconsistently prepared. So this year, we get five all Brahms concerts in a row.

This is of course the bicentenary for both Schumann and Chopin. Schumann is represented on the Vienna New Year’s program with the Konzertstuck for Four Horns and Orchestra, but that’s because it was Michael Christie’s premier piece with the CMF. Otherwise, nothing from either. Given the close relationship between Brahms and Schumann, perhaps an evening representing both of them would have been in order.

In the early days of the CMF, Tuesday nights were given over to chamber performances featuring members of the orchestra and occasional guest artists. This has been completely eliminated, although there are two Wednesday “Chamber Music at the Yard” programs. No details available.

You can view schedule of this puzzling season here.

Larry Graham

In any case Chopin is pretty much all solo piano, and Graham’s polished technique and splendid sound more than made the case for him. The program was ambitious and perhaps unreasonably long. The first half consisted of 10 short works: five Mazurkas, a Waltz, the A-flat Polonaise, two Etudes and a Nocturne, seven being dance forms. The second half was the four Ballades.

Graham was suffering from some sort of injury to his left hand and had problems with a band-aid. This probably accounted for some small technical lapses. Interestingly, the most demanding passages – e.g., the coda from the 4th Ballade – were handled with great security. The second Ballade was especially fine.

Graham’s sound is remarkably integrated across all the registers. A student of Rosina Lhevinne (she who won the Gold Medal in piano when she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1898), Larry Graham is an exponent of the finest traditions of what some call the golden age of pianism.

Christopher Taylor at sold-out Macky

A week earlier, Christopher Taylor, an actual Boulder native, had returned to play the Brahms D-Minor Concerto with the Boulder Philharmonic. Taylor is, I think, more active on the concert stage than Graham. They’re very different, although it’s hard to explain how. One might think of Graham as a tenor and Taylor as a baritone, if that makes any sense.

Christopher Taylor

This is the third time I’ve heard him and I’m more impressed each time.

The rest of the program consisted of a dispiritingly bad performance of the 3rd Brandenburg which cruelly exposed the intonation problems of the strings. Perhaps music director Michael Butterman thought the extra rehearsal time for the section warranted the pain. Next came a tortured reading of Beethoven’s Fifth.

If marketing really required a “Three Bs” evening, we, and the musicians, would have been better served with one of the smaller Beethoven symphonies. Still, Macky was completely sold out.

It should be said that the woodwinds acquitted themselves very well all evening, at no time better than during the beautiful slow movement of the concerto.

Martin Fritter blogs about music at Sounds Past and Future, where this article also appeared.

On the set for Avatar

Second, Wagner. Really, Wagner really can’t be staged. If only someone would give Cameron or Jackson or Guillermo del Toro $200 million to produce The Ring, I’d be very happy.

The thing I liked most, in a way, was seeing Sigourney Weaver in her Avatar body looking like a 19-year-old college student with dreads and a little red “Stanford” t-shirt. The promise of art is deathlessness and this giant popcorn entertainment delivers a strange jolt of remembrance.

It’s sexy too.

(This article also appeared on Martin Fritter’s blog, Sounds Past and Future.)

Stephen Nachmanovitch

I went and looked as some of Nachmanovitch’s writings on his web site and started thinking about free play. I was reminded of Kant’s bird of reason, that, he says, flies so well in the air of experience that it imagines it would fly even better in a vacuum.

So what is the air that resists the free play of the improviser? What, for the player is the spirit of gravity? What, in other words, is the matter? The most common body of freely improvised music is from the so-called “free jazz” school: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler: a movement that started in the ’60s when the notion of freedom had as great a political significance as an a artistic one. Perhaps in those days, the political and artistic were not that different.

Now if you ask me, these people were using their artistic freedom to dig rather than to soar. The most successful were the most obsessive and the most long-winded and the most demanding. Ornette is a great musician, but he’s been playing the same solo for 40 years.

Of course, all musicians are obsessive — it’s required to master an instrument. But improvisation can be a journey into the known — or the unknown known — a return to roots and memory and darkness as much as an Icarus flight to the Sun.

Keith Jarrett is probably the most celebrated and commercially successful free improviser. Yet when he sits down with nothing planned, he carries in his head, hands and heart the entire history of keyboard music going back at least to Bach. So he picks up the entire problematic of Western music and is vexed by those things that have vexed his predecessors.

Here’s the Wayne Shorter Quartet. Their obsession is the blues, the memory of Miles and the urgency of listening.

They are embarking on a Beethoven cycle at the Southbank Centre in London this year. I suppose that even for an ensemble as well regarded as the Takacs, box office matters and, in these times, nothing is better box office than Beethoven.

Members of the Takacs Quartet
(Photo by Ellen Appel)

The program on November 1st consisted on the Op. 18, No. 1, the Op. 95 and the Op. 131.

The Opus 18 quartets are a little problematic. There is an unhappy tension between the formal, symmetrical elements, e.g., the sonata expositions, and the development sections which are too big and intense in comparison. Balance is sought by repetition, which makes the works seem static. Beethoven didn’t work out this technique until the Eroica.

The Op 95 is from the fallow period when Beethoven was obsessed with his nephew. It is seems somehow troubled and a little unsure of itself. And therefore charming.

Op. 131, we are told, was Beethoven’s favorite quartet. It is, Maynard Solomon says:

in seven movements to be performed virtually without pause…A contunity of rythmic design adds to the feeling that this is one of the most completely integrated of Beethoven’s works. But there are many presures toward discoutinuity at work…six distince main keys, thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than Op. 130), a variety of textures, and a diversity of forms within the movements — fugue, suite, recitative, variation, scherzo, aria and sonata form — which makes the achievement of unity all the more miraculous.” Maynard Solomon, Beethoven

The notions that the late quartets were the work of someone who had turned his back on the world, of some sort of renunciate mystic who didn’t care about his audience, that the works are rebarbative and obscure are nonsense. All five have brilliant endings. The writing for each instrument is generous in its opportunity for virtuoso display. Nor is it the case that they were not performed during Beethoven’s lifetime (regardless of what the program notes say). Solomon again:

There were private performances of the quartets in 1826 and 1827. And we know that Schubert was given a private reading of the Quartet, Op. 131 in November 1828, five days before Schubert’s death. (”He fell into such a state of excitement and enthusiasm,” Holz reported, “that we were all frightened for him.”)

Performances of works that as thoughtful and sober a musicologist and critic as Maynard Solomon would describe as “miraculous” almost always disappoint — like Marcel seeing Berma, the reality is never as good as the expectation.

In this case the Takacs was up to the challenges – mental, physical and emotional, with a performance of extraordinary bravery, refinement, nuance, color and power. Everything was in place, accurate and precise yet felt completely spontaneous, as though the music were coming into existence for the first time.

Almost two hundred yeas later, we can understand exactly how Schubert reacted. Revolutionary art, and late Beethoven is the eternal avant guard, is always new. At least in the hands of the extraordinary members of the Takacs Quartet.

(NOTE: This review also appeared on Martin Fritter’s blog, Piano Bar.)