Emily Haines, the front person of Toronto/NYC-band Metric, is a very lucky front person. She’s gifted with a distinctive voice and knows how to use its dramatic range and timbre like a carpenter knows which tools for what creation. She’s got gifted band mates who create striking aural backdrops to her melodious passion plays. She hit song-writing pay dirt teaming up with James Shaw, coming to forge an old-school understanding of how to perfect the three-minute power pop song: catchy singable melodies and killer hooks. Any luckier than this would have to be Ms.Haines’ call for the band to hit the casinos. Whether she realizes it or not many jaded over-40 music lovers wondering where the next Chrissie Hynde would emerge have only Metric to thanks. Those listeners would surely recount that particular day they first encounter Tattooed Love Boy on the progressive FM station, or got high in the dorm room while blasting side 2 of The Pretenders’ first album. In retrospect that release bridged the gap between punk and pop at the end of a wild decade for president setting music, plus it put an exclamation mark on the ‘70s with a woman-fronted rock band. This was no fluke, and The Pretenders were contenders for years to come. To have been ambushed by Metric’s 2005 Live It Out was a truly revelatory experience, feeling that same gust of excitement felt back in 1979; every tune emitting a certain raw passion beneath the expertly crafted songs, each having a momentous driving occasion to them, never at a loss for the perfect hook. Whenever the iPod shuffles back to it there is still an amazement factor, the same feeling when returning to that first Pretenders disc after a period. Metric’s newest Fantasies meets and exceeds the anticipation quotient of hoping for the next big passionate music event, although the influences of the musical world around them have seeped into the new project. That’s no issue for the musical tastes of open-minded souls cognizant of new commercial beats, trends and gimmicks. How Ms.Haines and Mr. Shaw come to find their distinct voice and sound will always be the question raised to any team or group creating in a smorgasbord of musical choices, but lucky for us, they know what they like.

Where's the Honegger?

I used to look forward to the summer mailing's pamphlets and brochures from the local concert halls. Each year a new glossy presentation trumpeting the upcoming season from both the home town orchestra, and visiting artists and symphonies making their yearly appearances. Ah, anticipation! It has been said the greatest moments one can experience in this life are the moments of anticipation. Agreed. One look at the new baseball schedule conjures up feelings of anxiety when those dreaded Red Sox/Yankees games are viewed for the first time. It's what us inhabitants of 'Red Sox Nation' always find first, and we wonder what state of exhilaration or despair we will find ourselves in May or September. That feeling soon passes, and the mind becomes warmed by the promise of baseball climate, particularly since the new schedule arrives in January. Whether the climate or competition is the focus, the end result is the mind's piqued euphoria for the future. Anticipation.


Why a baseball schedule would be compared to the latest Carnegie Hall line-up seems illogical, but in so many ways they mirror each other. The local major league team can always count on frequent visits from their division rivals, but all teams in their league will stop in for a series. At Carnegie Hall one can count on the top tier orchestras to appear twice or three times during the season, the remaining calendar filled with many significant groups from the states and abroad. Baseball's new scheduling now allows competition between the two leagues (American and National) so the fan can watch their home town team play the cross-town rivals or cross-country competition not normally seen at their ballpark. Lincoln Center will schedule an event uniquely created for a specific hall and region, Berlin or Tokyo, say, and import the event to the states. This latter example can break up any sense of "same-old" and bring a newness previously only seen on TV or read about.

What then Honegger? Why drag this respectable under-appreciated French composer into this argument? He did nothing to find his reputation dragged through the bog of this observation. Let’s return to the previously mentioned schedule, and that feeling of anticipation. With the preview of the upcoming baseball season spring training begins. Hope conspires with analysis that a few new prospects might deliver one’s faithful nine to the Promised Land (i.e., post-season). New blood, fresh untested talent, ready to prove themselves, youngsters trying to make the team alongside skilled and wary veterans. A manager trying to come up with the right combination of youth and experience. It might be the same strategy year after year, but the faces never remain the same, and the fan is saddled with the responsibility, the obligation of getting to know and (hopefully) cheer for the new guy wearing the favorite colors.

Where the symphony/baseball comparisons end and the critiques begin is after a quick glance at the programs from those high-powered orchestras steeped in tradition and painfully stuck the same old repertoire. How many seasons the greatest ensembles of the world coming to town with the same tried & true (and tired) standards before someone says, “You know, composers other than Bruckner, Beethoven and Brahms wrote for the orchestra.” With few exceptions (a nod to Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Sym.) there seems to be a misguided attempt to retain an audience rather than grow one. Why would I subscribe to a 5-concert series, only to hear the same works performed next season by different orchestras? Yes, Berlin playing Brahms (or Ravel or Stravinsky) is like pressing the gas pedal on a Ferrari: the results will be immediate and powerful. Yet that same machine forced to perform on unfamiliar terrain would undoubtedly be a challenge, if not a thrilling adventure.

Arthur Honegger wrote five symphonies, and not surprisingly they were frequently recorded. His style is sturdy, traditional. His sound can be rugged and relentless, but also melancholy and poignant. He shook off the Debussy/Ravel tradition of French impressionist color, retreating more to a German straightforward harmonic approach, but cannot be mistaken for anything but a French nationalist. Who knows this? Music collectors, many who’ve never heard a Honegger work performed live. These same collectors, lovers of a diverse group of symphonic composers, pine for the day when a far-sighted music director might program Vaughn Williams’ powerful Forth Symphony and Roussel’s post-Debussian First, or Prokofiev’s profound Sixth, and those from Sessions and Schmitt and Milhaud and Arnold and Schuman (William) and Gerhard and Dukas and Nielsen…heck, Elgar’s symphonies aren’t even programmed by visiting British orchestras.

How I would love to see the upcoming schedule and be transported by anticipation to the thrill of the concert hall, looking forward to that special night I commune with the gods of symphonic sound. More to the point, I want a group to take a chance on a worthy yet unknown work, invite their faithful audience to have a little faith in the newcomer, and play it like it’s a life-or-death proposition. Just like a day at the ball park, a trip to the Symphony is one of life’s more enduring pleasures, made all the more vital when the players give their all, regardless who they’re playing that day.

Stanley Drucker’s Last Stand

Fortune smiled upon the unsuspecting audience attending the New York Philharmonic’s annual visit to the NJPAC. Whether the majority of patrons sensed the occasion it seemed not to matter once the proceedings got under way. Until seeing the program being presented you could count this writer as one of the happily unaware symphony goers, and only because of a friend’s inconvenient illness did a ticket to the event become available.

The orchestra would be saying a fond farewell to the current music director Lorin Maazel at the conclusion of the ’08-‘09 season, which produced no anguished cries from any circle in NYC’s artistic community. His reign as Music Director was stable if uneventful. As if to confirm this evaluation of his tenure the evening’s program was the stuff which relegates the mission of a great performing organization to dutiful rather than exploratory. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel), a Bach Brandenburg Concerto (the second-chair violinists and principal flautist on display), and Ravel’s Bolero concluding the evening. Hopeful that Mazzel would bring new insights to these orchestral mainstays was wishful thinking, but the occasional New Jersey concert-goers were entertained by the affair.

But another more significant farewell would also take place this evening. The longtime first chair clarinetist Stanley Drucker, veteran for 60 years playing under eight different music directors in that span, would be performing his final duties with the concert being presented. His appearance would raise the profile of this event from ordinary to extraordinary. The work chosen as his swan song was one closely associated with both Drucker and the NY Phil, Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto. Mr. Drucker turned in his 61st performance of this provocative piece, performing the technically challenging runs and difficult syncopated rhythms as if he, not Benny Goodman, were the original performer the work was written for.

Of course we are indebted to the forward-thinking King of Swing for commissioning Copland to write Goodman a show piece. Copland labored over a two-year period, grasping to find that most important upbeat jazzy middle movement theme that propels the music from the languid opening and into a breathtaking second movement, filled with the rhythmic influences from Copland’s South American retreats. Always on display from the composer are his keen sense of orchestral contrast (not an easy task with the forces at hand: strings, harp and piano) and his instinct for driving home the thematic materials while never engaging in exact repetition. How a work so full of engaging solo and orchestral materials seemingly never duplicated from one measure to next can come in at 16 minutes means one thing: Copland vigorously explored his ideas with precision and tact. That’s what makes the composer a great composer, the fact that his music can withstand constant scrutiny and still begs for more exploration.

Some of Mr. Drucker’s many performances took place on one particular tour through Japan in 1970, when Leonard Bernstein chose the work as the sole representative of American music on the program. Now, twenty-nine years later, same orchestra being lead by his eighth music director (and, roughly estimated, the 600th conductor he played under), the 80-year-old clarinetist was performing feats of instrumental acrobatics. Having the technical challenges firmly under his fingers after 60 performances isn’t surprising, but still it was impossible not to marvel at the big tone given to the plaintive melodies, the volume which amply rose over the orchestra, and the ease which the fiendishly difficult cadenza was tackled. It was wonderful to hear this piece in concert for the first time (yes, that can still happen, regardless how many concerts one attends), and it was an historical event: placing the greatest of American composers, orchestras and one tireless performer together on a night when “dutiful” was simply not going to do.

Maiden Voyage

September 22, 2009--This day in music history:
--1869 - First production of Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, in Munich, with Franz Wullner conducting.
--1962 - Bob Dylan performs at Carnegie Hall.

The introduction of such undisputed musical forces, both on the big stage and on the same day...how adventageous! I too have added to this day's list of celebrated premieres of the famous and infamous, known as Object Appear Closer (or OAC if it achieves 'hip' status). But let's forget the boasting and focus on the real monumental events....
It seems Wagner was annoyed his Rheingold (written between 1853-1854, Part 1 of the mammoth Ring cycle) couldn't wait for presentation in its entirty with the other operas, but his meal ticket King Ludwig II insisted that Wagner show some of his work before the next check was cut.  Wagner had gotten back into the swing of the project after a 12-year "break" spend composing Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger. He picked up where he left off in 1869, completing Sigfrieg and Gotterdammerung in the following 5 years. All told: eleven years of composing over a 20-year period to create Der Ring des Nibelungen, with the sneak peak of Rheingold in 1869. The complete Ring's first production would come in 1876, and was likely that generation's Woodstock...minus the mud and bad acid, of course. If you like opera or Wagner, or detest both equally (there are some out there, counting me at one point), my experience has been this: boy, what an amazing feat of compositional brain and brawn. Also, one can always learn something about the present by investigating the past IF one's ears are sharpened with constant use and inquiry. Listen to the music composed for the sonically scenic opening, writing akin to a cinematographer capturing the opening shot from above of a massive inland river. The music is the depiction of that river, the Rhine, and masterfully sets the tone for Rheingold, and the rest of the Ring story to follow. Listen again, and if you think it sounds reminiscent of some recent stylistic phenomenon, then you've been paying attention. You might ask why the minimalist movement became the rage with its return to musical civility (re: tonality) and it's seeming innate ability to provide drama while remaining relatively static, save for a few parlor tricks using logical mathmatical formulas to predetermine the course of changing rhythms and harmonies. Well when I returned to Rheingold to hear what I might be missing I thought I'd heard music like this before, and then it occured to me: Philip Glass is just a "1st-136-measures-of-Wagner's-Rheingold" disciple, and has gotten a lot of mileage out of those bars.
Bob Dylan's Carnegie Hall debut means as much to music history as any of history's storied geniuses' debuts at that venue...but oh, to have been there, when Dylan was still in his creative gestation, not yet misunderstood as being anything but what he was: a surprisingly young but gifted minstrel of conscience. Listening to live performances from that period (and I'm sure this concert's available too) the clarity and subtle power which his astounding poetry is delivered reminds me it's good to always keep an eye out for those occational comets that sometimes circle this earth at dangerously low altitudes. Will the next generation be so blessed as we were to experience such a force at it's absolute zenith? And to have been there at the beginning, on the eve when the world would experience sudden and painful transformation...but would I have appreciated it? Or sitting in the opera house hearing the opening strains of Wagner? Let that thought remind me to keep my ears and mind open tomorrow.