Of Romeo and Radiohead

The concert held on Friday, April 24th at the Strathmore was an excellent program which led the audience through an exploration of the boundaries of music. It isn’t too often that you will get a concert featuring a Mozart piece coupled with a piano transcription of a contemporary British rock band and a piano concerto to be played exclusively with the left hand.

The interactive and nontraditional tone of the concert was kicked off by an aside from Conductor James Gaffigan. I always love to hear a little bit of commentary from the conductor - I think it makes the peace more readable for the audience. If nothing else, it breaks up the somewhat severe atmosphere that can come to exist at a concert. Mr. Gaffigan introduced the first piece, ballet music from Mozart’s Idomeneo, with some comments about how much variety was packed into the piece, as well as some jabs at the character of Mozart. (I think this is a running joke in the musical community - I have a distinct memory of sitting in high school band class trudging through a Mozart piece and hearing somebody play a line completely wrong. The director cut us off, looked at the offending musician and said “Mozart would have slapped you for that… and then he would have slept with your wife.” Hearing a teacher say something like that in high school provides enough fuel to get you through the day). Mr. Gaffigan was right, this was a very interesting piece with lots of different musical moods. I also have to acknowledge the energy with which he conducted the piece, although I feared that if this was how he treated Mozart, a heart attack or a baton impaled violinist was awaiting him when he got to the Prokofiev piece at the end of the program.

As if jumping forward in time a hundred and forty years wasn’t enough, we were then treated to a piano concerto written for one hand. Christopher O’Riley, of NPR’s “From the Top” fame, played Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major with all the rapture that the composer surely intended. Listening to a piece like this, which was so obviously composed for showmanship, you can’t help but think that you are supposed to be watching keenly as well. Seeing a piano virtuoso work with one hand is an odd visual sensation, which is only augmented by the dramatic effects of the strings’ bowing and the conductor’s gigantic conducting.

And this brings us to the highlight of the program, Mr. O’Riley’s transcriptions of music by Radiohead. I can not claim to be too familiar with the work of this contemporary rock band, but I have heard some of their songs and I know that it isn’t the sort of thing that many symphony orchestras go around putting on their programs. After a brief spoken introduction, Mr. O’Riley played his three transcriptions brilliantly, followed by some Debussy as an encore. Whether you liked the pieces or not, what you were seeing here was an artist pushing the boundaries of music. Moving a subject from one medium of art to another is not uncommon - how many times have poems or pieces of literature informed symphonic works? However, moving a subject from the domain of popular music to that of artistic music always raises a few more eyebrows. Even in the Royal Court of Austria, Mozart’s opera’s, which are now thought to be so conservative, were accused of containing subject matter of a base nature. The lady sitting behind me at the concert did not seem too pleased that Rock and Roll was on the evening’s program – she let out an audible sigh of relief when we moved on to the Debussy. Interestingly, when something moves the other way, from high art to popular, the alarm is not as severe. I don’t remember people taking to the streets when Puccini’s Madame Butterfly became Miss Saigon.

The second half of the concert was equally filled with diversity and contrast. The fun and jazzy sounds of Bernstein’s Dances from On the Town (I’ve had that darn tune stuck in my head all weekend) were a very noticeable foil to the intensely dark and dramatic tones of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I laughed at the thought of putting Bernstein’s West Side Story Dances up against Prokofiev’s treatment of the same subject matter, but that might have just been too ironic for an already intellectually dynamic night. Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is one of those pieces that you can really get into – it’s deep and dark, and at times, just really loud. The audience responded to this energy. There was even a yell of “yeah!” from the balcony right before the movement for the death of Juliet. After you’ve heard bits from a classical ballet, a one-handed French Impressionistic concerto, a 20th century American Jazz-Dance piece, British hard rock on a piano, and Soviet-Social Realism - anything goes.

The Global Crisis and Art

The economic crisis we are currently in has the entire world shaken to its core. Obviously, this is a terrible thing for everybody – the arts very much included. News of budget cuts is everywhere, and you don’t have to look very far to see something about cut backs that are specifically targeting the arts or cultural programming. As terrible as this all is, I have to wonder if there is a silver lining to it.

It seems that crises have always been excellent catalysts of artistic creation. Just to look back at the 20th century, a period that seems particularly characterized with instability, one can find enough examples to fill unlimited pages. First, and perhaps most importantly, the First World War shattered the paradigm of western culture. The effects of that conflict engulfed the whole of society, but were particularly felt in the arts. In the field of painting, look at Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Francis Bacon (one of his works seen at the right) for visceral evidence of this. In literature, Hemingway is a prime example. In music, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, and atonalism in general had their roots in this period. Although Stravinsky was said to have famously broken the romantic tradition in western music with his Rite of Spring (which debuted in 1913, before the First World War) you don’t have to listen to too much music from that period to know that the upheaval created by the Great War is what really pushed things over the edge. Similarly, the Second World War brought out excellent art in the most terrible ways. My favorite example is Shostakovich’s devastating 7th Symphony, titled Leningrad, which was inspired by the German siege of that city in 1941. In addition to these calamities, there was the Great Depression, the conformity of the 1950’s, McCarthyism, the Cold War, etc. All of these things, however terrible, provided a great degree of horrific inspiration to artists in every field and region of earth.

What is it about times of tension that create such good art? There is no answer to that. Obviously, emotions run high in times like these, and there is definitely no lack of subject matter. I think there is also something to be said for the way that these crises mandate the reformation of the national character and consciousness. The art of WWI exposed the failings of the radical nationalism that had paralyzed Europe at the beginning of the century, and the art of the 1950’s definitely did what it could to poke holes in the blind conformity that was sweeping the country. As cliché as it is, I love The Great Gatsby because I appreciate Fitzgerald’s critique of the warping of the American Dream during the 1920’s. This might not have been an economic crisis, but he definitely argued that it was a moral one.

How will the current global crisis play out in the art world? Like the 1920’s the materialism and greed which crept into the American Dream forced us to painfully reevaluate our personal and cultural positions. Although I can not say I enjoy the situation that we are in, I will say that I am interested in, and have high hopes for, the music and art it will inspire. I guess it’s a little something to look forward to.