Tuesday
Sunday
Danish String Quartet, With Haydn and Brahms
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
HAYDN: STRING QUARTET IN D (OP. 64, NO. 5);
BRAHMS STRING QUARTET IN A MINOR (OP. 51, NO. 2)
Danish String Quartet. Avi Music 8553264; CD.
In 2004 the Young Danish String Quartet, as it was then called, made an impressive New York debut at Scandinavia House. The players, who had met at the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen, were certainly young: all under 21. They were also clearly accomplished and ambitious.
Since then the quartet has wisely dropped “young” from its name and, as the Danish String Quartet, has secured a position as a significant ensemble. In 2008 a Norwegian cellist, Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, became part of the group, joining the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen and the violist Asbjorn Norgaard. The players are still young: all under 30.
A new recording, which pairs Haydn’s Quartet in D (Op. 64, No. 5, “Lark”) and Brahms’s Quartet in A minor (Op. 51, No. 2), makes clear why this fast-rising ensemble has been having such international success in recent seasons. This is one of the most stylish and spirited accounts of a Haydn quartet to come along in a while.
All the benchmarks of superior quartet playing are here: integrated sound, impeccable intonation, judicious balances. Scurrying passagework, especially in the perpetual-motion finale, is dispatched with fleetness and clarity.
But what makes the performance special is the maturity and calm of the playing, even during virtuosic passages that whisk by. This is music making of wonderful ease and naturalness.
Brahms’s Quartet in A minor is a hard piece to bring off, with its curious blend of noble sentiment and restless impetuosity. The Danish String Quartet conveys both the work’s arching structure and its moment-to-moment inventiveness. The players bring deep, rich Brahmsian sound to the passages with thick harmonic textures. Yet the playing is never weighty or dense.
A very fine recording.
Friday
Code Found on Pigeon Baffles British Cryptographers
By ALAN COWELL
They have eavesdropped on the enemy for decades, tracking messages from Hitler’s high command and the Soviet K.G.B. and on to the murky, modern world of satellites and cyberspace. But a lowly and yet mysterious carrier pigeon may have them baffled.
Britain’s code-breakers acknowledged on Friday that an encrypted handwritten message from World War II, found on the leg of a long-dead carrier pigeon in a household chimney in southern England, has thwarted all their efforts to decode it since it was sent to them last month.
As the bird’s story made headlines, pigeon specialists said they believed it may have been flying home from British units in France at around the time of the D-Day Normandy landings in 1944 when it somehow expired in the chimney at the 17th-century home where it was found in the village of Bletchingley, south of London.
After sustained pressure from pigeon-fanciers, the Britain’s GCHQ code-breaking and communications interception unit in Gloucestershire agreed to try to crack the code. But on Friday the secretive organization, whose initials stand for Government Communications Headquarters, acknowledged that it had been unable to do so.
“The sorts of code that were constructed during operations were designed only to be able to be read by the senders and the recipients,” a historian at GCHQ told the British Broadcasting Corporation.
“Unless we get rather more idea than we have about who sent this message and who it was sent to, we are not going to be able to find out what the underlying code was,” said the historian, who was identified only as Tony under GCHQ’s secrecy protocols.
Code-breakers, he said, believed that there could be two possibilities about the encryption of the message, both of them requiring greater knowledge about the identity of those who devised or used the code.
One possibility, he said, was that it was based on a so-called onetime pad that uses a random set of letters, known only to the sender and the recipient, to convert plain text into code and is then destroyed.
“If it’s only used once and it’s properly random, and it’s properly guarded by the sender and the recipient, it’s unbreakable,” the historian said.
Alternatively, if the message was based on a code book designed specifically for a single operation or mission, GCHQ code-breakers were “unlikely” to crack it, Tony said. “These codes are not designed to be casually or easily broken,” he said.
The pigeon’s skeleton was initially found by David Martin, a now-retired probation officer at his home in Bletchingley, when he was cleaning out a chimney as part of a renovation. The message, identifying the pigeon by the code name 40TW194, had been folded into a small scarlet capsule attached to its leg.
“Without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” GCHQ said in a news release. “Although it is disappointing that we cannot yet read the message brought back by a brave carrier pigeon, it is a tribute to the skills of the wartime code-makers that, despite working under severe pressure, they devised a code that was undecipherable both then and now.”
Mr. Martin said he was skeptical of the idea that GCHQ had been unable to crack the code. “I think there’s something about that message that is either sensitive or does not reflect well” on British special forces operating behind enemy lines in wartime France, he said in a telephone interview. “I’m convinced that it’s an important message and a secret message.”
There was some indication on Friday, though, that GCHQ was not taking 40TW194’s code as seriously as, say, tracking satellite phone communications between militants in the Hindu Kush.
One of the most “helpful” ideas about the code, according to Tony, the GCHQ historian, had come from an unidentified member of the public who suggested that, with Christmas looming and thoughts turning, in the West at least, to a red-robed, white-bearded, reindeer-drawn bearer of gifts skilled at accessing homes through their chimneys, the first two words of the message might be “Dear Santa.”
Tuesday
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Monday
In London, a Music Critic Takes in the Sights and Suds
By ANTHONY TOMMASINILONDON — Even for a music critic eager to hear as much as possible while here, a day off is a good idea. Mine came on Sunday, a lovely day, with mild temperatures and only intermittent showers.
In the afternoon I walked to Buckingham Palace to see a special exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, “Leonardo da Vinci, Anatomist: Inside His Mind, Inside the Body.” It is the largest showing of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings ever, from the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Among his staggering accomplishments, Leonardo was a pioneering scientist, one of the most important of all time. He produced thousands of pages of detailed drawings and extensive notes (written in his distinctive left-hand reverse script), and planned to collect them all into a major anatomical treatise. But he died in 1519, at 67, before organizing his work, and the papers were left unpublished and essentially unexamined for nearly 400 years.
The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 7, has drawings and notes from the two main periods during which he did these studies. As an artist who depicted the human body, Leonardo wanted to understand exactly how it worked, though sheer scientific curiosity drove him as well.
The first set of studies was made starting in the late 1480s, after he had moved from his native Tuscany to Milan. The drawings were mostly based on close examinations of the body, including a human skull, which he cut apart and analyzed.
But in 1507, Leonardo resumed his work with the cooperation of a professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia, just outside Milan. Over the next few years he was able to dissect corpses, perhaps as many as 30, including, it would appear, a miscarried fetus. For scientists today, the fascination is not with what Leonardo got wrong but how much he got uncannily right. During my visit I came upon a couple of awestruck medical students.
The exhibit is also a collection of staggering artworks. The drawings are obviously encased for safety. But if you get nose-to-the-glass close to them, you can see every stroke, most of them made in reddish-brown ink on faded white paper.
Leonardo could not help being swayed by some of the anatomical misunderstandings of his day, especially regarding the female reproductive system. And like all scientists of that era, he never understood the system of blood circulation. How could he? There were no microscopic ways to detect capillaries, no understanding of blood cells. But according to the commentaries posted at the exhibit, Leonardo was close to fathoming the way circulation worked when he died.
By 9 at night, after a bit of writing (well, almost a day off), I was ready for dinner and headed to an inviting pub near my hotel, the Barley Mow on Horseferry Road, a quaint street in Westminster, not far from the abbey. With England facing off against Italy in the quarterfinals of Euro 2012 soccer, the European soccer (er, football) championship, the street was almost deserted, but the pub was packed with sports fans, mostly men, desperate for an English victory.
When I walked in and made my way to the bar, someone muttered, “Go back to America.” More than being hurt by the rudeness I was miffed at being so easily pegged. Anyway, most of the men were gregarious and friendly, and consumed by the game, which, as the world knows by now, England lost in crushing fashion, in a tie-breaking round of penalty kicks.
Alas, there was no food to be had. The pub had stopped serving dinner at 7:30. This was a time for serious beer-drinking, so I did my part.
The Monday morning headline in The Sun said it all: “Anyone for Tennis?,” referring to the start of Wimbledon. As a passionate tennis fan, I can’t believe that I am in London for the start of Wimbledon but otherwise engaged. Not that I could have gotten into the tournament if I were free.
And I can console myself on Monday night with a new production of Berlioz’s epic opera “Les Troyens” at Covent Garden. I do have a great job.
Musical Moments: Part II, A New Video on Mahler
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
This is the second in a series of short videos I have made discussing some of my favorite magical moments in music.
To recap, in a series of videos and blog posts, and in an essay I wrote for the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, I am looking at fleeting moments in pieces that have always gotten to me. Not the big climactic blasts or soaring themes, not the overtly complex or most dramatic passages. I am talking about brief bits of music, often subtle, even stealthy. What is going on musically in these moments to give them such oversized emotional impact?
My first choice came from a piano piece, the opening of Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor.
My second choice is a song from Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). The moment, as I explain, comes toward the end of the second song in this work, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld.” I first came to know it as a song for voice and orchestra. I examine it here in Mahler’s version for voice and piano. Please keep sending in your choices of favorite moments in music here. I will respond and, eventually, report back with another article and video, discussing some of the choices submitted.
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
This is the second in a series of short videos I have made discussing some of my favorite magical moments in music.
To recap, in a series of videos and blog posts, and in an essay I wrote for the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, I am looking at fleeting moments in pieces that have always gotten to me. Not the big climactic blasts or soaring themes, not the overtly complex or most dramatic passages. I am talking about brief bits of music, often subtle, even stealthy. What is going on musically in these moments to give them such oversized emotional impact?
My first choice came from a piano piece, the opening of Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor.
My second choice is a song from Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). The moment, as I explain, comes toward the end of the second song in this work, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld.” I first came to know it as a song for voice and orchestra. I examine it here in Mahler’s version for voice and piano. Please keep sending in your choices of favorite moments in music here. I will respond and, eventually, report back with another article and video, discussing some of the choices submitted.
Sunday
MUSIC REVIEW
Time Travel With Einstein: Glass’s Opera Returns to the Stage
‘Einstein on the Beach,’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
By ANTHONY TOMMASINIAs the audience milled into the Brooklyn Academy of Music for Saturday night’s performance of “Einstein on the Beach,” an exhilarating revival of the pathbreaking 1976 opera by the composerPhilip Glass and the director Robert Wilson, the piece seemed already to have started.
The electric keyboards and synthesizers of the Philip Glass Ensemble quietly played the low three-note organ drone that runs through the opening “knee play,” as the creators call the five episodes that punctuate the major scenes of the opera’s four acts. Two compelling lead performers, Helga Davis and Kate Moran, dressed in baggy gray pants and white shirts with black suspenders, having moved incrementally toward seats onstage, began muttering together. One spoke numbers randomly; the other recited a nonsensical yet alluring text by Christopher Knowles. (“Would it get some wind for the sailboat.”)
Before long, from risers in the pit, a dozen choristers dressed like Ms. Davis and Ms. Moran, their faces pasty looking, stood up and began singing Mr. Glass’s ritualistic music, some counting off various groups of numbers, others intoning the recurring drone bass on solfège syllables (la, sol, do).
“Einstein on the Beach” is more known about than known. This rare revival, part of a nine-stop, three-continent tour, with choreography by Lucinda Childs, is the work’s first presentation in New York since the 1992 performances at the Brooklyn academy. Though the piece, with sets and lighting by Mr. Wilson, is a landmark of avant-garde opera, it has a reputation for being incomprehensible and endless (at nearly four and half hours without intermission).
But as performed here, the opening knee play could not have been more calming and sweetly mystical. That it was already happening when the audience arrived made clear that we were all invited to enter and leave the theater at will. “Einstein” was not going away.
During the riveting first scene of Act I, “Train,” the mood changes completely. The music is suddenly exuberant and crazed, with spiraling riffs and cyclic instrumental figures, and manic bursts of syllables and sputtering from the chorus. Caitlin Scranton exuded eerie calm in the “Diagonal Dance,” in which she moved forward and backward over and over, looking statuesque and wonderfully strange. The scene is filled with curious characters, including a wide-eyed man in a red shirt doing mathematical calculations (Tomás Cruz).
As a boy, Einstein loved model trains. He later used trains as analogies to explain his theories. The dominant figure in this train scene is a young boy (Jasper Newell), who stands on an elevated bridge over tracks. He examines a luminous geometric shape in his hands and now and then tosses paper airplanes to the smoke-covered stage floor. Is he a scientist-to-be? Or young Einstein himself? Or just a boy in a mindless moment? With the chorus and instrumental music making this scene so frenetic and momentous, it seemed to encapsulate a larger message of this plotless opera: that scientific calculation, spiritual perceptions and a boy’s daydreaming involve not such different mental states as we may think.
In advance of this tour many critics and devotees of the Glass operas wondered whether “Einstein” would by now come across as dated or pretentious. But the piece seems particularly suited to current musical politics and social culture. In 1976 “Einstein” was seen as a combative declaration from the booming downtown scene directed against the established uptown culture, especially the complex, intellectual styles of contemporary music sanctioned within academia. Actually, at the time, Mr. Glass and Mr. Wilson were more interested in fulfillingtheir personal vision than engaging in polemics.
Even when “Einstein” was here in 1992, the scars from that contemporary music battle were still sore. Now those bad times seem long gone. Composers do whatever they want to. Audiences are open to everything. Performers champion all styles.
It was wonderful to see the brilliant violinist Jennifer Koh, whose repertory ranges from Bach to flinty contemporary pieces, throw herself into the bewigged role of the violin-playing Einstein. In a couple of scenes, especially “Knee Play 2,” the music is essentially a daunting violin solo with endless spiraling figures. Both Ms. Koh’s playing and her acting were gripping. Her participation seemed a testimony to the new openness. (Antoine Silverman takes over the role starting Wednesday.)
Today, maybe more than ever, “Einstein” comes across as an original, visionary and generous work, anything but polemical. There are certainly moments of ominous intensity, especially the apocalyptic final scene of Act IV, “Spaceship,” in which we are taken inside the vehicle that has cruised above the action in earlier scenes.
The music evokes the inevitable consequences of Einstein’s work: a nuclear blast. Cast members with their backs to the audience fiddle with blinking lights on a three-tiered control board as the accumulated sound becomes a hard-driving, breathless blur of indistinct, rapid-fire numbers backed up by threatening blasts from the swelling electric keyboards and frenetic woodwinds, all under the sure conducting of Michael Riesman.
Yet there is no anger in “Einstein.” In the “Night Train” scene, where we see (or so it seems) the young Einstein and his wife in a romantic moment on a train trip, the breathless vocal duet ends with the woman (Ms. Davis) pulling a gun on her mate (Gregory R. Purnhagen). But in the way she smiles and gloats the move seems just a play in a continuing gender battle.
The two trial scenes are highlights of the piece. Mr. Wilson blurs images of a laboratory experiment and a courtroom, with judges in wigs and witnesses watching with brown-bag lunches. On the floor before the judge is a huge, luminous bed. Many metaphors and questions come together here. A lab experiment is a kind of trial. Did Einstein dream up his theories at night? Did fears of the implications of his work give him nightmares?
In the second trial, Ms. Moran, playing a witness, lounges on the bed reciting over and over some incantatory words written by Ms. Childs, a riff about finding herself in a “prematurely air-conditioned supermarket” and seeing colored bathing caps. And, she explains, daftly, “I wasn’t tempted to buy one, but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.” Sometimes, such wandering thoughts are subjected to intense scrutiny in a trial. Eventually, her character turns into a weapon-wielding Patty Hearst, whose real-life trial was going when “Einstein” was created.
It is hard to know how to categorize this production. Since the sets of the 1992 revival were destroyed, this production meticulously reconstructs the original, with up-to-date lighting and technology. It includes the dazzling choreography for the opera’s two extended ballet sequences that Ms. Childs created for the 1984 revival and have been used since.
I am still not convinced that “Einstein on the Beach” would lose any of its mystical allure, vitality and wonderment if it were trimmed a bit. Maybe more than a bit. For musical richness, I prefer Mr. Glass’s “Satyagraha.” Yet “Einstein” invites you to let your mind wander. Plenty of operas have that effect without intending it.
Before long, from risers in the pit, a dozen choristers dressed like Ms. Davis and Ms. Moran, their faces pasty looking, stood up and began singing Mr. Glass’s ritualistic music, some counting off various groups of numbers, others intoning the recurring drone bass on solfège syllables (la, sol, do).
“Einstein on the Beach” is more known about than known. This rare revival, part of a nine-stop, three-continent tour, with choreography by Lucinda Childs, is the work’s first presentation in New York since the 1992 performances at the Brooklyn academy. Though the piece, with sets and lighting by Mr. Wilson, is a landmark of avant-garde opera, it has a reputation for being incomprehensible and endless (at nearly four and half hours without intermission).
But as performed here, the opening knee play could not have been more calming and sweetly mystical. That it was already happening when the audience arrived made clear that we were all invited to enter and leave the theater at will. “Einstein” was not going away.
During the riveting first scene of Act I, “Train,” the mood changes completely. The music is suddenly exuberant and crazed, with spiraling riffs and cyclic instrumental figures, and manic bursts of syllables and sputtering from the chorus. Caitlin Scranton exuded eerie calm in the “Diagonal Dance,” in which she moved forward and backward over and over, looking statuesque and wonderfully strange. The scene is filled with curious characters, including a wide-eyed man in a red shirt doing mathematical calculations (Tomás Cruz).
As a boy, Einstein loved model trains. He later used trains as analogies to explain his theories. The dominant figure in this train scene is a young boy (Jasper Newell), who stands on an elevated bridge over tracks. He examines a luminous geometric shape in his hands and now and then tosses paper airplanes to the smoke-covered stage floor. Is he a scientist-to-be? Or young Einstein himself? Or just a boy in a mindless moment? With the chorus and instrumental music making this scene so frenetic and momentous, it seemed to encapsulate a larger message of this plotless opera: that scientific calculation, spiritual perceptions and a boy’s daydreaming involve not such different mental states as we may think.
In advance of this tour many critics and devotees of the Glass operas wondered whether “Einstein” would by now come across as dated or pretentious. But the piece seems particularly suited to current musical politics and social culture. In 1976 “Einstein” was seen as a combative declaration from the booming downtown scene directed against the established uptown culture, especially the complex, intellectual styles of contemporary music sanctioned within academia. Actually, at the time, Mr. Glass and Mr. Wilson were more interested in fulfillingtheir personal vision than engaging in polemics.
Even when “Einstein” was here in 1992, the scars from that contemporary music battle were still sore. Now those bad times seem long gone. Composers do whatever they want to. Audiences are open to everything. Performers champion all styles.
Saturday
Friday
Fleeting In the Ear, Forever In the Heart
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
WHEN I was 12 or so and a serious piano student, I bought an LP recording of Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin’s four ballades. Though at the time I didn’t know much about these works, I already loved Chopin and had had a recent triumph as a sixth grader performing his “Grande Valse Brillante” in E flat (with lots of clinkers) at a school assembly.
I remember going into the basement den of my family’s house on Long Island to listen to the record. From the start of Rubinstein’s account of theBallade No. 1 in G minor I was hooked.
The ballade opened with a forceful line that began in the low register of the piano and rose up the keyboard in octaves, as if making some grim declaration. At the peak of the ascent the line twisted into a soft plaintive turn, delivered in two halting phrases.
Then something stunning happened, just for a moment: a short gesture, a softly sighing three-note melodic fragment landing on a dissonant-seeming chord that at first sounded as if it were wrong. Yet the harmony lingered, and the pungency of the clashing notes was strangely beautiful, almost comforting. This led into what seemed the saddest melody I had ever heard. The main business of the ballade had started.
I remember how powerfully I reacted to that moment with the sighing phrase. I still get shivers when I hear it or play it.
There are comparable moments in many pieces we love — a fleeting passage, a short series of chords, some unexpected shift in a melodic line — when something occurs that just grabs us. I’m not talking about the obvious ones, those climactic blasts that pound you into submission, or those soaring lyrical lines that sweep you along. I’m thinking of subtle, almost stealthy musical moments that we might or might not notice at first hearing. And these can stand out all the more because classical pieces, unlike many other types of music, tend to be long. Even a relatively short classical song is often part of a sizable cycle.
Why do these moments hook us? What happens musically to make a brief passage have such an oversized emotional impact?
I’m not sure why this has been on my mind lately. Maybe because during the run of Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Metropolitan Opera last season one of my all-time favorite musical moments failed to work its usual magic. It occurs in the final scene when Brünnhilde, having been awakened from her sleeping spell by Siegfried’s kiss, sees her horse, Grane, grazing and realizes that everything in her life has changed. Was it the clear, cool way Fabio Luisi conducted the passage? Or was I distracted by the imposing images of Robert Lepage’s machine-dominated new production?
Almost every time I mention some favorite moment in the company of other music lovers, everyone jumps in to tell me about their own. So I want to share a few of mine and try to account for why these passages get to me. And for good measure, working with Gabe Johnson and Mayeta Clark, video journalists at The New York Times, I have made a video, playing some of those moments on the piano and discussing them.
In addition I invite you to share your favorite moments. I will report back in another article and make another video showcasing some of the suggestions.
In thinking about them, I realize that the moments, however subtle, even simple, have one thing in common: In every instance the composer seems intent on using strategic musical means to bring about some acute sensory and emotional reaction, even if the listener is not consciously aware of what is happening.
Take that moment in Act III of “Siegfried.” Siegfried wakes Brünnhilde atop the fire-surrounded mountain where she has for years been under a spell imposed by her father, Wotan, a penalty for her insubordination. At first Brünnhilde is just stunned to be conscious and transfixed by the radiant sun, which she hails. Slowly she and Siegfried are overcome with confusing but overpowering mutual desire. But as part of the punishment meted out by Wotan, Brünnhilde has lost her godhood.
At one point in the scene she turns her thoughts inward. She sees Grane, who had also been under a sleeping spell, then notices her spear, helmet and shield on the ground. As she gazes away from Siegfried, the orchestra plays a stern two-note bass figure (a rising fourth) that leads to a curiously grim melodic turn. But an inner voice in the orchestra softly plays a fragment of a minor mode fanfare. It’s the “Ride of the Valkyries” theme from “Die Walküre,” the preceding opera in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle: the motif that has been associated with Brünnhilde every time she has mentioned flying about on Grane. Yet now the motif is weakened and halting, and it leads to quizzical, unresolved harmonies.
This moment, such beautiful music, is even more meaningful because it illustrates what has happened to Brünnhilde. Her godhood gone, she is now a mortal woman falling for a young man. The motif is trying to get off the ground, in a way, to restore Brünnhilde to her glory days as Valkyrie warrior. This can no longer be. A lot of musical and dramatic richness is conveyed by this moment, though, true to Wagner’s prolonged way of doing things, this music is repeated a few times, coming at you in different keys.
This is a good example of how a composer can invest a fleeting moment with resonance by giving a motif heard many times earlier a new musical and emotional cast. Puccini does something similar in another of my favorite moments, in Act III of “Turandot.”
One of the best-known tunes from this fairy-tale opera is a theme associated with Turandot, an icy, man-hating princess in a Beijing of legendary times. The theme is a stately, gentle melody that Puccini adapted from a Chinese folk tune. During the opera we hear it many ways: sung by an angelic children’s choir, blasting forth from the full orchestra, proclaimed by throngs of choristers in the courtyard of the palace.
But at this juncture in Act III, Turandot has been summoned to the scene. Imperial guards are holding Liu, the slave girl, who knows the name of the secretive Prince Calaf, Turandot’s mysterious and determined suitor. When Turandot appears, we hear that “Chinese” theme again in the full-throttled orchestra, with trumpets and trombones blaring. But the sound of the orchestra deflates in just seconds, and the first phrase of the theme is repeated, this time in warm, subdued and glowing orchestral sound, rich with throbbing strings. The melodic line is harmonized in sensuous, impressionistic chords seemingly right out of Debussy, turning it into something yearning, romantic and poignant.
In presenting this now-familiar melody in such a harmonically startling and seductive way, Puccini is signaling the audience not only that Turandot is going to melt, that she is about to fall in love with Calaf, but that she already has. Turandot may not know this. But Puccini knows it, and, hearing this musical moment, the audience does too.
One more. This one comes at the opening of the third and final movement of Stravinsky’s“Symphony of Psalms,” in which he sets three psalms of praise. The piece, composed in 1930, is an austerely beautiful neo-Classical work, scored for chorus and an unconventional orchestra that has low strings but no violins or violas; varied brass and woodwinds; a harp, two pianos and percussion.
The first words of Psalm 150, the text for the final movement, as set here in Latin by Stravinsky, are: “Alleluia. Laudate, Dominum.” After a short gesture of rising harmonies in the orchestra, the chorus sings “alleluia” in soft block chords. But the chords are wistful and pleading, as if the timid choristers, feeling unworthy, are asking the Lord permission to praise him. The implied question would seem: “Have we earned the right to sing an alleluia to you?” This moment extends into a somber chantlike setting of the words “Laudate Dominum.”
What so moves me is that Stravinsky takes the word “alleluia,” which has led so many composers to clichéd expressions of praise, and sets it to such aching harmonies. Yet those chords represent such ingenious use of the tonal language that your ear and intellect perk up, while your emotions melt. The third movement eventually takes off and becomes almost aggressive in the act of praise. That sad “alleluia” comes back just two more times: once at a strategic moment that temporarily halts the assertive music of praise; and then at the end, just before the final, calming, harmonically holistic statement of “Laudate Dominum.”
I had the privilege of hearing Stravinsky conduct the piece with the New York Philharmonic in 1966, which fixed that moment in my memory forever.
What are some of your moments?
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