Concerto thoughts, performance prep, and Romanticism
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Sorry there wasn’t a post last week! While I’m in “just make it through the week” mode, I had managed to set aside some time to write my weekly newsletter, and then on Friday I ended up spending hours combing through an orchestral score at the piano and that pretty much destroyed my ability to do any other productive work.
Score-reading is really not my strong suit and has a way of making me feel really resentful toward certain members of the brass family, and also violas. Trumpets and French horns, why can’t YOU just play the notes the way they’re written instead of making ME transpose on the fly??? Violas, what makes you so special that you need your own special clef??? God, get over yourselves.
(I honestly have no idea how conductors and those special breeds of pianist who can just sight-read orchestral scores at the keyboard do it. I realize now that this is exactly how the vocalists and treble-staff-only instrumentalists felt when we all had to write four-part chorales in Theory I, and I wasn’t terribly sympathetic then. Look ma, character growth.)
Anyway, onward!
For those of you who haven’t seen, or are new to this newsletter, or whatever: I’m performing a new piano concerto by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel! Yes, Hensel died in 1847; this concerto is “new” because it’s an arrangement (a brilliant one by Patricia Wallinga) of her G Minor Piano Sonata, which I have a theory was meant to be a concerto for piano and orchestra.
Here’s the page with info where you can buy tickets; the first performance is on June 15 in Boston, and now that we’re into June (what) I am in hardcore performance-prep mode.
“Performance-prep mode” involves, of course, lots and lots of practicing, but it also involves being extra extra cautious. I swear there’s some variant of Murphy’s Law that the closer you are to a performance, the higher the likelihood that you’ll hurt yourself in a weird way; one time, a few days out from a chamber music performance, I sliced my hand open cutting potatoes for curry. Nothing makes you realize how fragile we all are like having a scheduled obligation to have your body in full working order—it’s very humbling to realize that the dexterity of my wrists could be totally thrown off by one stubborn jar lid, or my own tendency to get way too into Nintendo Tennis.
(This is not remotely an actual complaint, but: I really genuinely love Rollerblading on the beach, because hell, when you live in LA you can do things like Rollerblade on the beach, only I have a strict “no Rollerblading within several months of an important piano-playing obligation” policy because even with wrist guards one bad fall can really screw up your wrists. Because of this policy I haven’t Rollerbladed in more than a year, and I miss being an irl Barbie. Again, not a real complaint.)
The real tricky thing is that in the COVID era (which, despite the emergency order being lifted, we are still very much in) is that I really truly cannot get sick before the concert, and I’m now in that 2-week period where I have to be super careful. Normally if a soloist gets sick and a concerto has to be played, another musician who knows the concerto will get subbed in, but in the case of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto, I’m literally the only person in the world who can play the piano part.
😬😬😬
Look, concert tickets are still cheaper than another music degree
I may have set some kind of personal record for myself; in May I went to the LA Phil three times, and just this morning went again, which means that I went to Disney Concert Hall four times in less than 30 days.
Two of the concerts were programs with piano concerti. The thing I do miss about music school is having teachers giving you guidance, feedback, and instructions on the process of playing with orchestra; these past couple of days, I’ve been constantly flashing back to all the things all my teachers ever said about playing concerti, and wishing I could get immediate feedback on this concerto. So I’ve been doing the next best thing and seeing as many piano concerto performances as I can and studying them like my life depends on it.
(Because everything reminds me of something about Clara Schumann—I am basically a single-topic Wishbone—my “go to performances and study them” approach reminds me of one of the most crucial elements of Clara Schumann’s upbringing. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, brought tiny Clara to almost every musical performance in Leipzig, often after having her study the scores at home, so that she could learn from observing the professionals. So if it worked for Clara, it should work for me, right?)
This morning I went to see Mitsuko Uchida—one of those “big names” whose recordings I studied for years—playing Mozart with the Phil. Her playing was so clear and intimate, and I watched the way she communicated directly with the wind players when she was accompanying their lines. It was a good reminder that playing a concerto with orchestra isn’t just about being big and loud and fighting the orchestra (even though I love being big and loud and fighting the orchestra)—it’s also about finding those pockets where you’re basically being a chamber player and locking with individual players in the ensemble.
Bless the Romantics
I’m still so stuck on Adès’ Dante. (But really just the Hell section; I’ve listened to “Paradiso” a grand total of…once. I’m sorry, Hell is just way more fun.)
On one of my many, many re-listens, I realized that I actually have no idea what “Paolo and Francesca,” one of the movements, is actually about, so I looked it up, and was delighted to find that Romantics gonna Romantic.
Basically, Paolo and Francesca were a Romeo-and-Juliet-style tragic couple from real life, whose feature in Dante’s The Divine Comedy was intended to be a cautionary morality tale about the danger of lust and the weakness of women in particular. (Sigh.)
As this Smithsonian article puts it:
Dante placed Paolo and Francesca in hell because they allowed the power of their passions, their most animal-like quality, to overcome their rationality, the thing that made them human. For the Romantics, however, subsuming reason to the passions was the goal of a life well lived. Paolo and Francesca deserved paradise, and “the fact that Dante had condemned Francesca to hell for adultery was beside the point,” says Cachey.
CLASSIC ROMANTICS.
I have a real love-hate (mostly love, honestly) relationship with the Romantic Era, in that I adore so much of the art and music that came out of it (barring Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and everything by Wagner), but also am not a fan of how so many problematic ways of thinking about genius, artmaking, etc. were birthed in the 19th century and still have an absolute chokehold on us today.
But I love that those Romantic goobers were so, well, Romantic about every damn thing. The craze around The Sorrows of Young Werther, the Twilight of its time, is a classic example.
If it ain’t Baroque
I enjoyed A.Z. Madonna’s playlist of Baroque works that aren’t by Bach, which was a nice reminder that no, ol’ Johann Sebastian did not singlehandedly invent classical music.
My favorite new discovery from the playlist was the fact that, in 2019, the Paris Opera mounted a staging of Rameau’s (very problematic) Les Indes Galante with modern hip-hop choreography. I was mesmerized by this clip:
It’s so cool! Something about the combination of Peak Baroque music with hip-hop dancing just works.