Yes, i still love all of you. I’m not posting much because I’m feeling flu-ish.
While browsing New Music Box, a web site for contemporary American music — classical isn’t quite the right word — I came across their Quicktime presentation of John Cage’s Complete Music for Carillon, which we were lucky enough to hear on October 26 as part of the “When Morty Met John” festival. James wrote about it here.
Two weeks ago we went to see the Berlin Philharmonic with Simon Rattle at Carnegie Hall. This is the first time they have appeared with him as Music Director in New York. It was dazzling. They started with a commissioned work by Heiner Goebbels, followed by Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Schubert’s Ninth Symphony (“The Great”). I like the idea of performing a contemporary work first. It makes one listen to the “classic” works as if they were new again, and the Berlin under Rattle certainly plays them that way.
They are an immensely talented and surprisingly young orchestra who could probably play these works in their sleep, but the point is that they do not play them that way. We could see the players smiling at each other with enthusiasm or even joy as they played. Performances like this remind me why we go to hear works performed live, even when we have almost anything one could hear in a concert on a CD at home.
I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about Simon Rattle. One of things it makes me think about, which is hard to express, is that I’m such a Euro-phile because it is a place where people consider culture an integral part of life, not a luxury for an effete elite. It’s one of the reasons why I’m thinking of leaving the USA for a while at some point. I want to live in a city like Berlin that can mix a vital contemporary arts scene with a respect for classical culture that is part of the social fabric, not just something for a small group of people. Our President thinks he’s talking about culture when he tells people he saw “Cats” on a previous visit to London.
Simon Rattle says it’s not unusual for him to be strolling along one of the bustling streets of ethnically diverse Berlin and have a bunch of kids — just the other week it was three Turkish teenagers — greet him with a high-five and a cheery “Hi, Simon!”
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“The thing that is different is that in Central Europe you don’t have to argue that classical music is important or valid — that is taken for granted,” Rattle said recently from New York. “It’s extraordinary how classical music survives when it isn’t marginalized in people’s consciousness. Over there, politicians believe it’s important. They come to hear concerts and operas. They wouldn’t consider themselves civilized unless they did.”
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And because the Berlin players have no collective fealty to the great classics, he has discovered they are more open to the challenge of performing some of the most difficult contemporary scores. He has already transformed the BPO’s repertory by making his passion for the music of our time his players’ passion too. “What is new for them they have accepted with open arms,” Rattle observes, adding that the orchestra’s new-music programs usually play to sold-out houses of younger listeners.
