On the substitution problem and having correct opinions
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Happy 2023, everyone! Hope you all had a lovely, restful holiday season and start to the new year.
Today’s newsletter will be in a slightly different format than usual since I’ve stored up updates and longer-form thoughts over the past couple of weeks.
Some news
After two months of Secret Behind the Scenes Workings, I can finally announce that I am a 2023 Fellow with Turn the Spotlight!
I am still flummoxed to find myself named as one of seven “creators and change-makers” in classical music; as part of this year’s fellowship, I’ll be working on a large-scale project with the help of my mentor, the wonderful Kathleen Kelly.
Full disclosure that I actually have no idea what my project will be yet—I’m kind of hoping that some marvelous idea will just hit me out of the blue one day. The year is still young, right?
In other news, we’re nearing the finish line on the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel piano concerto I’d previously announced; the premiere is scheduled for March 9 in Boston, Massachusetts. I’ll have more information later, but for now, I’ll just be furiously practicing some freshly written music and wondering what possessed me to have this idea in the first place.
A common problem
This is purely anecdata, but I’ve noticed lately that Fanny Mendelssohn seems to be getting more airtime; when I was talking to the music director and conductor of one symphony, he mentioned that they’d performed Fanny’s Overture in a recent season. Next week Jeremy Denk and the Takács Quartet will be performing Fanny’s String Quintet here in LA, and this weekend the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was scheduled to perform Fanny’s Overture. (I’d originally called LACO out for using a portrait of a completely different woman to represent Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel on their program page.)
I say “LACO was scheduled” because…things happened. I got an email this week from LACO with the subject line “Change of Plans” (bolding is mine):
Unfortunately, our Music Director Jaime Martín has tested positive for COVID-19 and is unable to travel to Los Angeles to conduct this weekend’s concerts. In his stead, we’re thrilled to announce Lina González-Granados has agreed to lead LACO in this exciting program of Classical-era gems.
One of the most exciting young conductors working today, Lina was recently appointed Resident Conductor of the LA Opera. She is also a Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony, a Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner, and has guest conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, and many others. Also, please note that the program will now begin with Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides. The rest of the program will be performed as published.
In short, because of a last minute conductor swap, the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel piece has been replaced with a standard piece by Felix Mendelssohn.
Before I go on: this was, imho, absolutely the right call. I am not mad at the decision, and I have no desire to call anyone out over it. It would have been incredibly unfair to everyone involved to have a last-minute substitute conductor perform a piece she’s not familiar with, and I am a strong proponent of the idea that we need strong showings of underrepresented works, for reasons I went into in this post:
[F]or the vast majority of my audience members, this is going to be their first ever exposure to these composers. They are going to make value judgments (“This composer is good and I like their music”) on a composer’s entire oeuvre based on this one singular impression.
[…]
The art of performing is an art fraught with anxiety, and that anxiety is compounded when you feel like you alone bear the weighty responsibility of validating the existence and toil of an artist who can no longer speak for themselves.
A similar substitution happened in 2021—I had tickets to see Isata Kanneh-Mason perform Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl on this program:
But due to an issue preventing Kanneh-Mason from traveling (I wasn’t able to confirm the exact reason, but this was during a point when the pandemic had complicated UK-US travel), the Clara Schumann concerto was replaced by Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, performed by Behzod Abduraimov.
Which brings me to my point: it is good that more individual performers are championing works by marginalized composers! However, until more equitable representation is standardized in studio and academic curriculums everywhere, the onus will rest solely on these individuals, which is simply not sustainable.
Typically, when a performer can’t make a performance, someone else who knows the work is called in last-minute to substitute; it’s not unheard of for local conservatory students studying a concerto to get dropped last-minute into a major orchestra’s program (which is why one of my teachers exhorted everyone in his studio to practice as if they would be called up by the SF Symphony any minute), and substitutions are how many A-list performers from Yuja Wang to Josh Groban got their big breaks.
However, if the only person in town who knows a certain work gets sick (or wasn’t in town to begin with and is stranded), the piece itself will get scrapped and a standard canonic work will get substituted, as we keep seeing over and over again. Which is why, despite my optimism, I remain insistent that a few visible people doing the work is not enough. As I said to Sarah Fritz for this article in VAN Magazine, “You can’t get just one or two performers championing music, you need a full scale buy-in.”
I love when my opinions are correct
Last year I wrote about the full-body shock that Xian Zhang delivered, to me personally, when I saw her conduct Beethoven’s 7th with the LA Phil:
Last season at the LA Phil I found myself at a concert conducted by Xian Zhang, and the last piece on the program was my least favorite Beethoven symphony: the 7th. (This, I know, is sacrilege to many people.) I resigned myself to making it through, dreading the clichéd second movement. To my utter shock, Zhang’s performance of the symphony was one of my favorite things I heard all season and it just blew my mind: it all felt so incredibly fresh and vibrant and full of life. I honestly couldn’t believe what she’d done.
I am very comfortable thinking and feeling the things I think and feel. I was fully okay with being the only person in the world to think that Zhang’s performance of Beethoven 7 was utter black magic.
Then, I read this piece in The New Yorker by THEE Alex Ross:
Diminutive but dynamic, Zhang is an immaculate podium technician who incites playing of uncommon vitality. Last season, at the L.A. Phil, she facilitated the most flat-out electrifying account of Beethoven’s Seventh I’ve ever heard.
HELLO THE SOUND YOU ARE HEARING IS ME FIST-PUMPING SO HARD I JUST BROKE THE SOUND BARRIER BECAUSE ALEX ROSS AGREES WITH ME.
I AM, ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS WILL BE EXTREMELY CORRECT IN MY OPINIONS, BECAUSE OPINIONS ARE FAMOUSLY THINGS THAT CAN BE OBJECTIVELY CORRECT.
Goodbye, P-22
Last month beloved mountain lion P-22—of whom I, along with everyone else in LA, was a big fan—passed away after an iconic residency on the Eastside.
I visited the Natural History Museum about a week after P-22’s passing and found that, in the “wildlife of LA” exhibit (which has a dedicated section to our mountain lions), the museum staff had put up an updated plaque about the end of P-22’s life and turned one wall into a communal memorial to the big cat.
Those of you in the Snail Mail Club—that is, subscribers to this newsletter at the $20/month level—will be getting P-22 postcards this month.
Cleaning my ears
Something about the post-holiday hangover leaves me craving stripped-down music; listening to holiday music for more than a month makes me feel like I’ve subsisted on nothing but junk food, and even my favorite pop music makes me feel weary at the start of the year. Earlier this month, insufferably deep in a “new year, new me” state, I couldn’t stand to listen to most things and felt like I badly needed an aural cleanse of sorts. (I absolutely do not actually believe in things like cleanses or “detoxes”—to speak of “detoxing” is to wade into the realm of pseudoscientific quackery and dubious claims—so just picture me saying “aural cleanse” in a voice dripping with irony.)
I cannot recommend French group L.E.J.’s new album, Volume II, enough for a psychological ear-cleaning. Three-part harmony + cello + French = a winning combination, somehow??
My favorite track on the album is “Céline,” which has big “folk song that escalates quickly” vibes.
Substack informs me that I am nearing my email-length limit, so, like a long-winded professor caught off guard by the bell, I will wrap things up here. I’m glad to see you here on this side of the new year, and thanks for reading! 🎹