by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I began last night’s movie
watching with an interesting download of a 2009 concert from Munich, called the
“International Musikwettbewerb” — I don’t know what the word “Musikwettbewerb”
means (I took a semester of German in college but I’ve forgotten most of it and
just about the only German words that have stuck are the ones that recur in
Wagner’s libretti!) but the show itself was a showcase for first-prize winners
in some sort of musical contest. I can’t help but wonder if this is a sort of German
Idol with better (or at least
more “serious”) music than the U.K. and U.S. versions (indeed, I’m dreading
that some day someone will do a modern-dress production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser with the title character as a drug addict going
through cycles of recovery and relapse, and the second-act song contest staged
under a huge neon sign reading “German Idol”!).
The orchestra was the Bavarian
Radio Symphony (though so few musicians were visible on screen I suspect the
show was done with reduced forces), the conductor was Lawrence Renes (who
looked on-screen like an efficient bureaucrat, the sort of person you meet at
the bank who tells you your stack of document is about 10 to 15 papers short of
what you need to apply for relief from foreclosure) and the prize-winning
soloists were bassist Gunars Upatnieks, soprano Anita Watson (she’s from an
English-speaking country but not the one you’d think: Australia), harpist
Emmanuel Ceysson (he was introduced as a French contestant but he was
interviewed in English, , and it was frustrating to hear a voice-over person
drowning out his English to give the original TV audience the German
translation), and Korean-born violinist Hyeyoon Park (a woman, but a rather
hefty one — not really stout but hardly the little slip of a thing, dressed in
Chinese-doll costume, that’s the stereotype of a young Asian female classical
musician). Physically, Gunars Upatnieks was hot; though he’s suffering from premature male-pattern
baldness, otherwise he looks like the image of a blond Aryan Nazi superman —
and Emmanuel Ceysson came across as such a nellie twink one could easily
imagine him and Upatnieks heading home for a hot night of fun after the show
was over.
Watson was a bit on the zaftig side, clearly taking after a previous Australian diva, Joan Sutherland,
both musically and physically — she sang two arias, one from Handel’s Julius
Caesar and one (Micaëla’s aria
rather than either of Carmen’s big solos) from Bizet’s Carmen — which were, ironically, the only pieces on the
program not composed during the 20th
century. Ceysson played Glière’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra (there’ve been
surprisingly few harp concerti — the most famous harp-and-orchestra works with
at least a toehold in the repertory are brief pieces, Debussy’s Danses
Sacrée et Profane and Ravel’s Introduction
and Allegro) and the other two pieces featured were both by composers best
known for their film scores. Park’s feature was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s
violin concerto (or at least the last two of its three movements), which not
only is from a composer best known for his film scores but is actually based
directly on themes Korngold wrote for films: Another Dawn (an almost forgotten 1937 tear-jerker with Kay
Francis and Errol Flynn) and Juárez in the first movement, Anthony Adverse (the powerful early theme that dramatized the
title character’s childhood as an orphan) in the second and The Prince and
the Pauper in the third. (Korngold
let his Warner Bros. contract expire in 1947 because he was concerned that
working for films had damaged his credibility as a “serious” classical
musician; the violin concerto was commissioned by Jascha Heifetz and was his
first work after he left Warners.)
Renes’ feature was a bass concerto in three
short movements by Nino Rota, best known for Fellini’s films and The
Godfather — and in the fast
movements there’s a bit of the raffishness of the music Rota wrote for Fellini
(I once heard an LP of Rota’s music for Fellini’s films and it was almost
unlistenable out of context, proof once again that film music doesn’t
necessarily have to be “good” in itself to work as part of its film!), while
the slow movement begins with a pizzicato jazz-style “walking bass” line (but
then the slow movement of one of Beethoven’s “Rasoumovsky” Quartets begins with
the cello playing what sounds a lot like a walking-bass line nearly 100 years
before jazz came into existence!). The Rota piece was fun — obviously nobody,
including Rota himself, was expecting any of us to take it seriously — and so
was the Glière (it’s good enough to make one wonder why there aren’t more harp
concerti; the instrument is expansive enough in range and power that it works
as well as a foil to the orchestra as the piano or violin do), but the Korngold
was the best piece of the night by a pretty wide margin and it also got the
best performance: Hyeyoon Park, dressed in a red gown that projected a
no-nonsense image, played the hell out of a rather dowdy-looking violin and
brought power and drama to the music (and given that anyone who plays the Korngold concerto is under the long
shadow of Heifetz, who premiered it in 1947 and made an incandescent recording
of it for RCA Victor six years later, her performance is all the more striking:
far more experienced and famous players have made less out of this music than
she did!), and for once conductor Renes responded to his soloist and himself
brought more sensitivity and eloquence to his phrasing than he had in his
relatively perfunctory work earlier in the evening.
The existence of this
program is a testament to the relative cultural riches on offer to European TV
and radio consumers compared to the pittances we get here — as with so much
about American vs. European capitalism, it’s largely a hangover of the noblesse
oblige of the feudal tradition
which has given Europeans the idea that the masses ought to have access to
musical and theatrical culture that will elevate them instead of broadcast
companies and private sponsors relentlessly pandering to the lowest common
denominator — and since a lot of the fun in programs like this is wondering
what will happen to the young participants as they age and their careers
develop (or don’t), as physically attractive as I found both Upatnieks and
Ceysson, it’s Park who clearly (at least to me) has the best shot at the brass
ring. It used to be fashionable to patronize women musicians by saying things
like, “She plays well … for a girl,” but Park plays well … period, and unlike a
lot of musicians today she’s not only well-trained she clearly has an attitude towards the music that should take her far, a
willingness to show us not only that she knows her way around her instrument
but that she knows how to use the music to bare her soul. (Admittedly, she was playing a
hyper-Romantic piece that invites soul-baring and it’ll be interesting to see
how she copes with more restrained composers like Bach.)
