Monteverdi and Shostakovich

Last night we saw the production of Monteverdi's pioneering opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, performed by Students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. The singing was, at least to my ear, on a professional operatic level, and it was accompanied by an excellent baroque orchestra. Forget about singing the demanding music. Just learning the text in Italian was a formidable task,

It's a puzzling opera, because almost all the characters are despicable. The final duet, a sublime piece of music, is sung by Nero, the cruel tyrant, and Poppea, who is little more than a sexy slut (to use politically incorrect language). I would like to know why this unsavory story of murder, betrayal, and lust was chosen for the opera - a subject for inquiry.

I was impressed by how well the students sang, with strong operatic voices, and acted their parts. A fantastic amount of hard work had to be invested in this demanding production. It could well be that some of the performers will never have the chance to sing in an opera again. The memory of this performance will be a high point in their lives. That's okay, better than okay. I found myself envying the young people who took part in the opera, wondering whether I could have attended a music conservatory, with my limited reserves of talent and motivation.

A few weeks ago we heard a string quartet composed of high school students perform a movement of a Shostakovich quartet. They played with depth that it's hard, perhaps unfair to demand of musicians that age. They're part of a program for talented high school students, designed to produce a generation of professionals, an aim I'm somewhat suspicious of. It seems to me that it will only create a tiny cohort of the very best and a large number of frustrated people, who might be unable to enjoy playing the way competitive swimmers get sick of doing laps. Though the ambition built into the program gives the students a strong incentive to excel.

The other night we heard another Shostakovich quartet performed by the Jerusalem String Quartet, one of the finest in the world. The performance was almost too intense to bear. Those four brilliant musicians were once just high school students. In their case the program worked.

After a double dose of Shostakovich, I decided to hear (I can't claim that I'm listening properly) all fifteen of his quartets on YouTube, played by the Borodin Quartet. As the music flows by, I'm astonished by its variety. Shostakovich wrote entirely sweet music interspersed with challenging, dissonant passages, seven and a half hours of sublime and fascinating music.

Standards - Freedom of Interpretation

Recently I admitted to myself that I enjoy playing old standards most of all, though I enjoy listening to classical music just as much. I might as well enjoy myself when I'm practicing. 

Just now I was thinking about the catchy song of the late 1930s, "Comes Love," composed by Sam H. Stept (whom I've never heard of), with witty lyrics by Lew Brown and Charles Tobias (also unknown to me), featured in a long-forgotten Broadway musical called "Yokel Boy." I decided to share it with some friends and looked it up on Youtube. There I found a cover by Joni Mitchel. She sings it in the saddest way, as if love were a disaster. The great Artie Shaw recorded it, sung by Helen Forrest, in a serious but not tragic vein. But long ago I had heard it in a much cheerier mood sung by Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong, welcoming love. 

So what's the right way to play it? I'm aware that Glenn Gould made some controversial performances of well-known classical pieces, claiming the freedom of interpretation automatically awarded to popular songs like "Comes Love." But he was Glenn Gould. Not too many classical musicians would dare to alter canonical works with the freedom he arrogated to himself, but in the performance of standards, jazz musicians are expected to do whatever they want. They can change the tempo, reharmonize a tune, and take it so far away in their improvisation that listeners would be hard put to recognize it if they didn't hear it at the outset.

Some of the standards I've been playing are challenging, like the Jobim song, "Chega de Saudad."  If you didn't grow up on them it's hard to play bossa rhythms the way Brazilians sing them. If you listen to different recordings of that song, in Portuguese and in English, by various performers, you hear the freedom of interpretation I love so much and find so hard to emulate. 

If I play Bach or Telemann on the flute, I feel obliged to play as accurately as I can, and I carry that over, inappropriately, to the playing of standards. In fact, I doubt that musicians of the eighteenth century would have felt the need to be 100% accurate. The notation of the rhythms of bossa songs and jazz standards is merely a suggestion, because standard notation isn't designed to convey the subtleties of those rhythms. I imagine that it was equally inadequate to convey baroque rhythms. Certainly composers didn't bother to notate dynamics, articulation, and ornamentation.

Maybe I'll play baroque music better if I keep playing jazz standards.