WTOL-TV: Catch one of the world's greatest musicians at the Toledo Museum of Art

WTOL-TV

Catch cellist Julian Schwarz, heralded as one of the finest musicians of the 21st century, at the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle on Friday and Saturday.

Watch the interview here!

Musical America: Yuga Cohler Nets Orchestra Prize at Toscanini Competition

Musical America
Taylor Grand

Boston-resident conductor Yuga Cohler, 28, has won the Paolo Vero Orchestra Prize at the Arturo Toscanini Conducting Competition, held at the Auditorium Paganini in Parma, Italy.

Read the full article here.

New York Classical Review: Schwarz, Juilliard Orchestra deliver stellar advocacy for neglected American composers

New York Classical Review
George Grella

Gerard Schwarz conducted the Juilliard Orchestra in works by David Diamond, William Schuman and Jacob Druckman Thursday night.

In the middle of the last century, there was a group of American composers who wrote symphonies. Their collected body of work carved out a specific, national sound—skyscrapers and sleek, powerful automobiles, urban sophistication expressed in clear and straightforward language—and did more than the work of John Cage or Steve Reich to make the 20th century an American one for classical music.

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were specifically not part of this cohort. William Schuman, David Diamond, Walter Piston, Peter Mennin, and others eschewed the self-conscious “American” sound of Ives and Copland, they were modernists working within the classical tradition but without ideology, whether populist or academic—they assumed the worth of the classical tradition and the open-minded intelligence of their audience. Their music reflects New York City in an era when everything seemed possible.

Yet without conductors like Gerard Schwarz this music would remain even more lost, as it incomprehensibly has been for almost sixty years, with the rare exceptions amounting to little more than dutiful condescension.

Thursday night in Alice Tully Hall, Schwarz led the Juilliard Orchestra in Schuman’s Symphony No. 6, David Diamond’s Symphony No. 4, and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra from Jacob Druckman. And for 90 minutes it again felt like all things were possible.

The last time the New York Philharmonic played these two symphonies was 1958. Their most recent Schuman performance was Andre Previn leading Symphony No. 3—his most prominent work—in 1997. Based on the parochialism of prestige in this city’s culture, that is beyond bizarre.

Nothing could be more fitting than Juilliard musicians bringing life to his substantial Sixth Symphony. Schuman—a native New Yorker who switched from business to start composing at age 20,managed to tear his attention away from baseball to compose around 70 pieces. He was president of Juilliard from 1945 to 1962, during which time he turned it into the modern institution it remains today.

He was also the first president of Lincoln Center and served until 1969. One would expect monuments to him. At least there was this energetic, passionate performance that completed the concert.

Schuman’s Symphony No. 6 is from 1948. Like most of the symphonies of his peers, it’s not about anything in particular except the art of making music. Yet his voice is immediately identifiable. Neoclassical in general, these pieces expressed the virtues of counterpoint, development, and formal structure. To this Schuman added a poly-harmonic language, stacking related triads on top of each other to produce a sound that is tonal but floats free of the usual expectations of harmonic motion.

The Juilliard Orchestra made a big, meaty sound with this, although there were times when the density of the writing turned muddy. There is a coiled physical and psychological energy in this symphony that the players expressed with a real poignancy. It is easy to hear the national exhaustion after WWII in the music, and Thursday night it was also easy to hear a fraught outlook toward the future.

Schoenberg told Diamond that the latter should avoid learning serial technique because he was “a new Bruckner.” That’s not too far off–his symphonies express, in the composer’s words, “strong melodic contours [and] good rhythmic variety and counterpoint.”

He called the Fourth, from 1945, “my smallest large symphony,” and it is indeed a compact, succinct three movements while still having Diamond’s sense of bigness; big, rich sound and a big expressive embrace.

The opening dozen bars, with their polyphony and cascading harmonies, are some of the most beautiful in all the symphonic literature. Opening the concert with the Fourth, Schwarz– a more dedicated advocate of these composers than even Bernstein–maintained smooth, loping tempos throughout, and the musicians produced a gorgeous sound. They didn’t have the professional level of blend, but the music unfolded in phrases that captured Diamond’s art, and the interplay between sections was excellent.

Jordan Bak performed Jacob Druckman’s Viola Concerto Thursday night.

Jordan Bak was the soloist in Druckman’s Viola Concerto, from 1978. Another important New York composer, Druckman was the Philharmonic’s composer in residence from 1982 to 1986 (has son Daniel is a percussionist in the orchestra) and taught at Juilliard and Brooklyn College.

The concerto had a more abstract form than the symphonies, and included an identifiable 12-note row, but as in the others the language was clear and intelligent without being academic or solipsistic. The form is antiphonal, an agon, and Bak was dazzling. A graduate student at Juilliard, he played with a full-bodied sound and exacting intonation and articulation. He overshadowed the composition in that his playing was so constantly involving and impressive that one was drawn to each note and phrase, and often lost the forest for the tree. But what a tree.

This music and these composers, especially Schuman and Diamond, are crying out for performances from professional orchestras. One hopes that last night, someone across the street in David Geffen Hall was listening.

The New Yorker: The Return of Mid-Century American Symphonies

The New Yorker
Russell Platt

Gerard Schwarz, pictured here in 1982, conducts works by David Diamond, William Schuman, and Jacob Druckman, which recall an America that no longer exists. (Photograph by Jack Mitchell / Getty)

The conductor Gerard Schwarz’s upcoming concert with the Juilliard Orchestra, at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, highlights an essential but overlooked period of American composition: the great mid-twentieth-century symphonies.

There was a time—the late nineteen-eighties and nineties—when it seemed as if the American symphonic repertory was finally taking a definite shape. Neo-Romanticism was the rage among young composers, who were in search of a usable past, and among conductors, too, who were on the lookout for music of recent vintage that their audiences might embrace, or at least tolerate. I remember attending, around 1990, a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra at which the conductor Leonard Slatkin, a champion of American composers, tested his theory of the ideal program: it would contain a contemporary work, a twentieth-century classic, and a good old classical warhorse. The centerpiece of the concert was Symphony No. 3 by William Schuman (1910–1992), and it anchored the evening emotionally. (It was convincingly preceded by the music of Joan Tower, who is now an admired elder stateswoman, and followed by the music of Brahms.) Written just before America’s entry into the Second World War, the Schuman piece was a perfect balance of mid-century American qualities: lyrical but muscular, sensitive but optimistic, spikily chromatic but clearly tonal, learned in its craft but accessible in impact. The audience, especially revved up by the work’s wallop of a finale, went nuts. Surely, we thought, the finest works of Schuman—and of such contemporaries as Walter Piston, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein—were here to stay.

Well, three decades later, while Barber and Bernstein have become fixtures of the American repertory, both here and abroad, Schuman, Diamond, and Piston have not been so lucky. Why? You could say that most orchestral administrators would like two warhorses per program, thank you, along with a manageable and brief contemporary work that won’t get in the way. You could also say that the sheer melodic genius of Barber and Bernstein gave audiences a set of familiar musical objects that would greet them warmly at every recurrence. (Barber’s Adagio for Strings is the ultimate example.) But you could say, too, that the mid-century America in which these composers wrote their finest works—the optimistic New Deal consensus that gave us victory over the Depression and the Axis, which carried us into the first wave of the civil-rights era, with its benchmark achievements—no longer exists. The nineteen-nineties, the decade of Clintonian peace and prosperity, which welcomed these pieces back, was a sunset, not a dawn.

One person who never got the message is the distinguished conductor Gerard Schwarz, now a free agent after long stints as the music director of the Seattle Symphony and the Mostly Mozart Festival, who has spent a lifetime advocating for the American symphonic school. He comes to Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night to conduct the Juilliard Symphony in the Fourth Symphony of Diamond, the Sixth Symphony of Schuman, and the Viola Concerto of Jacob Druckman, a younger contemporary of theirs who was Schuman’s successor as the most brilliant orchestral thinker of American composition, as well as its most powerful potentate.

I love this repertory, and Schwarz’s program led me to dive back into some favorite recordings. Let’s start with the Diamond Fourth (1945), as does Schwarz. Diamond was a complicated man but a straightforward composer, and his best work combines a rock-solid technique based in the music of Bach and Stravinsky with a direct and openhearted American mood. The Fourth’s divertimento-like first movement is affable and airy but driven and intense:

Schuman’s Sixth Symphony, a one-movement work of tragic breadth, was written in 1948, for the Dallas Symphony, just after the war that the Third Symphony’s appearance had heralded. But in the midst of the war he composed what, to me, is his finest symphony, and perhaps the most perfect one of the American canon, the Fifth (Symphony for Strings). Its slow second movement, which combines genuine elegy with angered vigor, is of shattering lyrical power; the vanishing of this piece from the stages of America’s major orchestras is truly bizarre. The classic recording is Leonard Bernstein’s, with the New York Philharmonic:

The entirely postwar career of Druckman (1928–96) marks the era when Americana composers had to face up to the challenge of international modernism, and the more cerebral worlds of Webern, Boulez, and late Stravinsky. Druckman, who trained at Juilliard and in Paris, and who spent the final decades of his prestigious academic career at the Yale School of Music, became a master of the new aesthetic but was never completely absorbed by it. Druckman’s great gift was his ability to infuse his modernist impulses with the gamut of sensuality, from the most delicate refinement to the utmost crudeness, in startlingly vivid instrumental hues. An album by the Philadelphia Orchestra, in glorious full gleam, on the New World Records label, features not only Druckman’s Viola Concerto (1978), a gripping and dramatic piece, but also “Counterpoise” (1994), a lovely orchestral song cycle that was his last major work. The extreme contrast between the texts that Druckman chose for the piece—two poems in English, by Emily Dickinson, and two more in French, by Guillaume Apollinaire—symbolize not only Druckman’s creative conflict but also the struggle of intellect and instinct that remains essential in American culture.

The New York Times: Hear the Martha Argerich Recording That Inspired Yekwon Sunwoo

The New York Times
By Joshua Barone

Martha Argerich, one of the greatest pianists in the world, rarely plays in New York. But on Oct. 20, she will return to Carnegie Hall after a decade away to perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. For her younger fans, this may be the first opportunity to hear her in person.

Being a devotee of the elusive Ms. Argerich, 76, most often means being a follower of her diverse and much-adored catalog of recordings. Her albums, which have been in circulation since the 1960s, have been formative for many musicians who have come after her.

“A young pianist has to know her work,” Vikingur Olafsson, 33, said in an interview. “She has influenced my generation in ways that cannot be overestimated.”

We asked some of the most talented younger pianists (and one harpsichordist) to share and discuss their favorite Argerich recordings. Their answers — and the music — are below.

Yekwon Sunwoo
Ravel: ‘Scarbo’ from ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’

Yekwon Sunwoo, the 28-year-old South Korean pianist who won this year’s Cliburn Competition, loved Ms. Argerich’s recording of “Gaspard de la Nuit,” but then he found a video of her playing the piece.

The first movement, “Ondine,” had a “wonderful sense of singing melody while the waves never stopped with such grace — effortless,” he said. And the finale, “Scarbo,” both “evaporated into the atmosphere” and “sparkled with so many different layers of sounds.”

Mr. Sunwoo looked to Ms. Argerich’s “Scarbo” for inspiration when he learned the piece. “I particularly admired her incredible velocity over the keyboard, but with musical intentions,” he said. “I tried to create more drama and sweeping gestures like she does.”

Miroirs CA: Anne Akiko Meyers with Philharmonia Orchestra

Mirroirs CA
By Leonne Lewis

Anne Akiko Meyers gives transcendent and breathtaking performances in this new release of works by Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016), Karol Szymanowski and Maurice Ravel – using her Ex-Vieuxtemps 1741 Guarneri del Gesu - with beautifully crafted support from the Philharmonia Orchestra under Kristjan Jarvi.

Szymanowski’s first violin concerto, Op. 35, Ravel’s Tzigane and Rautavaara’s Fantasia all have the element of fantasy and rhapsodic sweep, particularly Fantasia which Meyers commissioned and premiered in March of this year with the Kansas City Symphony. While this celebrated Finnish composer’s works may not be well known to American audiences, Rautavaara’s early studies did include The Juilliard School with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions.

One may detect in his writing hints of countryman Sibelius with overtones of The Swan of Tuonela, for example, but Rautavaara’s compositional style seems to contain a unique, lush and brooding landscape of intertwining melodies and imitative sequences between violin and orchestra.

From the opening chord, the listener enters a sound world that is absolutely mesmerizing for its dark, overlapping textures where demure to red-hot melodic waves of sonority from brass and strings provide a backdrop of atmospheric tension for Meyer’s flowing passagework. Her tone takes on an ethereal quality that goes right to the heart and core of the work’s veil of mystery.

She also displays an affinity for Szymanowski’s violin concerto (1916), an impressive piece of orchestrated splashes, clashes, interludes of harp, winds, especially flutes and an opening Vivace Assai that conjures up the opening temperament of Ravel’s piano concerto in G major. This composer’s Mazurkas for piano, among other compositions are worth a listen.

Meyer’s account contains a kinda introspective elusivity that includes lingering slides AND a display of turbocharged fingerwork in the Cadenza that has the characteristics of a Paganini Caprice gone avant-garde – of which we might also thank Polish violinist Paul Kochanski for input to this work, to whom it is dedicated.

Meyer’s declamatory bow strokes in the opening of Tzigane combined with rhythmic punch and rich harmonics brought this gypsy inspired work to a frenzied conclusion. It’s not often that collaboration between orchestra and soloist is so perfectly matched but supernova violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Kristjan Jarvi have hit a home run, even a grand slam with this recording!

Newstalk 1620 WTAW: Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra

Newstalk 1620 WTAW

Yekwon Sunwoo speaks with Zach Taylor at Bryan Broadcasting in College Station, Texas ahead of his performance with the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra this weekend, October 22, playing Rachmaninoff's third concerto. See more of Yekwon's schedule here.

TimeOut Beijing: The best of Beijing Music Festival 2017

TimeOut Beijing

Beijing's premier music festival turns 20 this year.

The very definition of a Beijing institution, this year the Beijing Music Festival (BMF) celebrates two decades and counting. Beijingers have grown accustomed to top music talent trolling through the city, but it was the BMF that first catapulted China onto the world stage. This year, the creative programming continues apace with an evening of Welsh music, a celebration of Chinese contemporary composers, Beijing’s first Beethoven symphonic cycle, a 12-hour musical marathon and opera events ranging from a single cast member to full-stage Wagner. With opening and closing concerts featuring Frank Peter and Serge Zimmerman (pictured top right), and Maxim Vengerov respectively, Beijing is where you want to be this month.

Orchestral marathon

Wear comfy clothes, bring energy bars and settle in for a long but exhilarating day – even buying one half-day ticket gets you into five concerts. The marathon’s part one (10am-3pm) is a collection of lighter global favourites, such as the always popular Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No 5, Elgar’s Liebesgruss, Bizet’s Carmen Prelude, Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, Lu and Mao’s Dance of the Yao People, Hua and Wu’s The Moon Over a Fountain, Wang Xilin’s (known as China’s Shostakovich) triumphant Torch Festival, and the like. Part two (5pm-10pm) takes on some weight in the form of composer, conductor and China favourite Krzysztof Penderecki’s Chinese Songs, featuring baritone Yuan Chenye (the 'B' cast for Placido Domingo’s 'A' when in China). We’ll also see China’s cello luminary Wang Jian playing Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, and He Ziyu perform the rarely-heard Glazunov’s Violin Concerto in A minor. Other pieces include Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1919 Version) and Smetana’s Die Moldau. Something for everyone – especially those with stamina.

BMF opera

For a while, the BMF was Beijing’s only opera game in town, and even today its programming stands out. This year offers three vastly different performances, from the minimalist to the complex, from the mundane to the fantastic. Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (Thu 19-Sat 21) (the human voice) is a heart-wrenching and deeply personal look at a solitary woman whose former boyfriend is getting married the following day. In the days before drunk texting, an ill-advised phone call was a spurned lover’s only option, and this lonely soprano makes that final call. (Although most versions are sung in monologue, this one incorporates a dancer for mood – a risky call, since this story stands on its own). Continuing its experiments with digital opera, the BMF also presents the Immersive Opera Vixen (Mon 9-Wed 11). This is a 360-degree take on Leos Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen, his unusual work drawn from a serialised novel that traces the lifecycles of a wily fox, her animal counterparts, and some hapless humans. In this case, the vixen (Rosie Lomas) is a street urchin, and the live singers mix with pre-recorded music audiences hear on headphones as they immerse themselves by promenading through various rooms. As for Wagner, we’re immersed whether we like it or not. This year, BMF delivers part two of the famous (or infamous, in terms of length) Ring Cycle. Die Walkure (Tue 24, Fri 27) continues where Das Rheingold left off, and sees the warrior Siegmund falling in love with his estranged sister Sieglinde – the result is Siegfried, which takes us to part three. Another time. This is a co-production with Salzburg Easter Festival and makes its Asian premiere at the BMF. If you see one Ring Cycle work, see the one with the Ride of Valkyries, and channel your inner helicopter.

Beethoven cycle

Speaking of massive works, the BMF hosts Paavo Jarvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in the city’s first Beethoven symphonic cycle. Beethoven’s symphonies literally changed music forever; they were so intimidating to his contemporaries – not to mention his musical descendants –that the number nine became a curse. Now you can see why, in four easy concerts. Eroica (Sun 22) takes on the first, second and third symphonies; Destiny (Mon 23) covers the fourth and the fifth, Pastoral (Wed 25) is for numbers six and seven, and Choral (Thu 26) concludes brilliantly with symphonies eight and nine.

Traditional meets contemporary

These back-to-back concerts combine BMF’s love of folk music with its championing of modern composers. Thriving Artistry of Contemporary China (Mon 16) features Zhang Qianyi’s Yunnan Capriccio Orchestral Suite, Guo Wenjing’s Lotus (Lianhua) Overture for Symphony Orchestra and Zhou Long’s Beijing Rhyme: Symphonic Suite For Orchestra. Zhou and Guo were part of the now legendary 'first class' of Central Conservatory of Music composition students after the schools were reopened in 1977, a group that also included Tan Dun, Ye Xiaogang and Chen Yi. But if the contemporary proves to be too much, relax with some trad music in Walking Around The World (Tue 17). Breathing fire into earthy tradition is the Welsh group Calan, which includes the multi-talented Bethan Williams-Jones, a singer-dancer-pianist- accordion player, as well as harpist Alice French, guitarist Sam Humphreys and fiddlers Patrick Rimes and Angharad Jenkins. Expect to tap your toes.

Strings: Cellist Julian Schwarz on the Whimsical Passion of Lalo’s Concerto in D Minor

Strings
By Julian Schwarz

The Lalo Concerto in D minor for Cello and Orchestra is both a passionate rhapsody and a whimsical character piece. Though popular among students, its history tells a story of prominence on the concert stage, which I am attempting to restore as I open the Charleston Symphony’s season with it in September, as well as make my Buffalo Philharmonic debut with it in November. Édouard Lalo has been marginalized as a composer wed to Spanish influence (he was of Spanish descent), yet his idolization of Beethoven and Schumann lends a peek into his more Germanic compositional style.

At the time of the work’s composition (1876), there was, other than Schumann, Saint-Saens, and the D major Haydn, very little serious music for solo cellists to perform with orchestra. (The Rococo Variations of Tchaikovsky were premiered the same year as the Lalo, 1877.) The Lalo became a staple for cellists early on—the great maestro Pablo Casals made his debut with it in Paris in 1899. It is a serious work, meant to be performed with great pathos, depth, and richness of tone. The opening recitatives in the cello are of Beethovenian influence, and the first theme is reminiscent of the Schumann A minor Concerto. There is much opportunity for wit and playfulness in the second and third movements, with Spanish rhythms and swing, but these moments are only contrasting to the more poignant sections. The audience should be left feeling emotionally touched more than entertained.

The work is brilliantly written from a cellistic perspective, as it showcases the deepest register as well as the brightest. It is idiomatic, and fits well in the hand—most likely due to the fact that Lalo was himself both a cellist and violinist. One might notice that there is a dearth of double-stops (zero in total) throughout the piece. Lalo must have known that by adding another string of vibration, he would cut the instrument’s resonance in half. Given this deliberate absence, cellists might think twice about adding the blocked fifth at the beginning of the first theme. 

With respect to editions, edits were frequent in the early performances of the work. Therefore there is much opportunity to choose between varied virtuosic passages (or create your own!). There is a relatively new critical edition by Bärenreiter, which is quite useful to consult, along with Kalmus, and the International Edition edited by Leonard Rose. That said, the orchestral parts I use are from Kalmus, as the new Bärenreiter edition’s parts omit a few powerful orchestral contributions that are vital to the work’s intensity.

San Francisco Classical Voice: Yekwon Sunwoo Woos Audience With a Champion’s Technique and Expression

San Francisco Classical Voice
By Ken Iisaka

The Steinway Society has been presenting piano recitals for over 20 years in the South Bay. Over the years, it has engaged major piano competition winners particularly those from the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The 2017–2018 season is no exception, with all three medalists from the most recent competition in Fort Worth. On Sunday, this year’s gold medalist, Yekwon Sunwoo of South Korea filled the McAfee Center in Saratoga.

With so many highly capable pianists churned out by conservatories around the world, winning a major competition is no guarantee of a successful career, and winners must still win the hearts of audiences after a victory. The years following a competition victory present the real competition, and the audience is the real jury.

Yekwon Sunwoo (center) with bronze medalist Daniel Hsu (left) and silver medalist Kenny Broberg (right); Photo credit: Ralph Lauer

Sunwoo made a strong case for himself with a stunning, introspective reading of the solemn Schubert Sonata in C Minor, D.958, composed months before the composer’s death. Along with two other sonatas written at the same time, the work is heavily infused with Schubert’s desperate search for peace and reconciliation. Beginning with a dramatic, rhythmically taut opening, the first movement evolved with hopeful lyricism, though darkness always beckoned. Sunwoo was particularly evocative in the prayer-like second movement, perhaps alluding to the composer transcending into the other world. The final tarantella movement unfolded cinematically, with volatile and sudden changes of colors adding life.

Sunwoo’s special quality became self-evident quickly: He possesses the uncanny ability to maintain soaring lyricism, holding counterpoint and accompaniment in an exquisite balance, laying them out clearly using well-differentiated tones and colors. Such a natural inclination turned the Rachmaninoff Sonata No. 2 in the second half of the program into something out of the ordinary. Rather than attacking the work with fistfuls of notes that could easily meld into a wall of sound, he laid out the layers buried in the score into clear compartments. While losing none of the rich, voluptuous Russian romanticism, his delivery was carefully calculated and measured with discipline. It was a refreshing perspective on an overly played, and often overly-indulgent warhorse.

Sunwoo ended the concert program with a macabre reading of Ravel’s La Valse. Rather than evoking romantic nostalgia for 19th-century Vienna, the emerging picture was grim and perhaps even grotesque at times — perhaps reminiscent of World War I — with a terrifying, rumbling roar in the opening. With his characteristic clarity and sparse, judicious use of the sustain pedal, Sunwoo again preserved the intricate details in the score, adding oft-neglected dimensions. Long crescendos came in waves, making subsequent torrents more frightening and the narrative vivid and life-like, but the performance never ran out of breath or strength.

Percy Grainger’s arrangement of “Ramble on the last Love-duet” from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was a kaleidoscopic interlude after the intermission, with a wide gamut of colors, brought out with a deft use of the seldom-used sostenuto pedal, as demanded by Grainger. A brazen reading of Liszt’s La Campanella was a nice ribbon for a well-packaged gift to the audience.