Good news! José Serebrier conducts an all-Gershwin progremme at the Cadogan Hall tonight. Bad news, it's sold out! (returns only). This should be exciting. South American youth orchestras? Serebrier created the first, aged 14, playing before the President of Uruguay, who was a musican. What's more, they did a Festival of American Music, playing Edgard Varèse and Charles Ruggles who even now are pretty avant garde. Serebrier was too young to know kids weren't "supposed" to be safe. He was carried away by enthusiasm and his love for interesting music. He's still as adventurous and dynamic today.
Tonight's Gershwin concert will includeRhapsody in Blue(Pianist Shelly Berg), An American in Paris and Variations on I Got Rhythm. But what makes this programme special is that it includes Serebrier's own adaptations for orchestra of Gershwin's Lullaby and Three Preludes.
The Guinness Book of Records should award something to Serebrier for having conducted more recordings than anyone else. He works well with orchestras, and his preparation is meticulous. Get the basics right, and from that flows energy and verve. Serebrier's recordings of Russian masters are superb. His wonderful complete series of symphonies by Alexander Glazunov (essential listening) has now expanded to include the Glazunov Concertos. When Serebrier approaches things, he does so thoroughly and with great enthusiasm. I've often watched him conduct live to study the way he interacts with his players. He's a born motivator, who gets the best out of those he works with. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be having a good time, as Serebrier's commitment to Gershwin goes back a long way. Serebrier worked with Copland and Stokowski, with whom he conducted Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony, then considered unperformable because it was so difficult. Now it's standard repertoire. Serebrier knows Gershwin well, and has recorded him before. Hopefully, this concert will herald a new series, making Gershwin part of the classical mainstream as he deserves.
Listen to BBC Radio 3 for an interesting conversation between Serebrier and Susanna Mälkki. They have a lot in common! Serebrier knew Boulez in Cleveland and recounts how George Szell listened in stunned admiration when Boulez conducted Mahler 5, a work Szell loved dearly.
Youth orchestras from South America get huge publicity but even more remarkable is the story of the very first of all, before the term "youth orchestra" became current. It was the Uruguay Orchestra, organized by José Serebrier. "When I was still in short pants,” Serebrier says, “I took it into my head that I would create a Festival of American Music”. He'd started the orchestra when he was 11 and three years later they performed in front of the President and were photographed in the newspapers. In their repertoire they even had Charles Ruggles, Edgard Varèse and one of Serebrier's own works. Ambitious enough by any standards, but in Uruguay in 1949 this was truly remarkable.
Serebrier's whole life has been a series of amazing, remarkable adventures, but the story behind his own First Symphony is so wonderful that it's worth telling again, especially now that it's been released on a new Naxos CD. Serebrier is one of the most prolific conductors in the world, with over 200 recordings, including the celebrated Glazunov series and the famous recording of Charles Ives Fourth Symphony, generally considered "unplayable" at the time. Yet Serebrier is a composer, too. The Naxos release is a collection of his own major works.
At sixteen, Serebrier went to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute. One day, while crossing a busy street, he bumped into a man and dropped the manuscript of the composition. "The stranger was a cellist, rushing to the airport to join the Houston Symphony. He instinctively asked if he could carry the score along to show to Leopold Stokowski,.... I had another copy, so I agreed, not expecting anything from this gesture. Few conductors would take such an idea seriously. A couple of days later, the Curtis telephone operator started giving me messages to call Mr Stokowski. I was sure it was a joke, as I used to leave messages for other students to call Bernstein or Rubinstein. Eventually, the Institute’s Director, Efrem Zimbalist Sr, called me to his office. “What are you doing? Maestro Stokowski called me to say he’s been trying to reach you urgently for two days!” We called from his office. There was this highly accented voice telling me: “We tried doing the première of the Charles Ives Fourth Symphony but it proved impossible. Orchestra can’t get past first bars. Need a première. Press invited: Time magazine, Life, UP, AP. We do your symphony première instead of Ives. Please bring music. Rehearsals start in two days.”
And so by a sheer stroke of luck, Serebrier's career was launched. He became Stowkowski's close associate. There are historic clips of the two of them conducting Ives's Fourth on Serebrier's website. which is worth looking at because it's lively, packed with information and down to earth - like the man himself! Not long ago., Serebrier recorded Stokowski's Bach transcriptions. We're so used to purist Bach now that the CD was a reminder of the freedom with which music was once made.
Naxos has released quite a lot of Serebrier's own music but the new CD is a good introduction. It includes Nueve, a concerto for Double Bass and orchestra (1971, two pieces inspired by tango, the "Winter" Violin Concerto and the new They Rode into the Sunset,- Music for an Imaginary Film (2009) Simon Callow narrates! Read more about the pieces HERE.
Poulenc's La voix humaine is a rarity, because it''s exceptionally demanding. The singer is almost unsupported, carrying the entire opera on her own. It's a 45 minute psychodrama, where the singer has to go through a wide range of extreme emotions until she finally disintegrates mentally. No surprise few sopranos have it in their repertoire. But it has been Carole Farley's speciality, almost the trademark of her career. She's always been courageous, singing Lulu before she turned 20 and pioneering South American art song. Indeed, she put Carlos Lecuona on the map, literally, when she found a cache of the composer's manuscripts in cases stored by his family, and prepared them for performance. Since then lots of singers have discovered Lecuona, and other Cuban and Latin American art song composers because their music is so good, but Farley's recording remains the classic. It's lovely.
Tomorrow 4th October Carole Farley brings La voix humaine to London's Cadogan Hall. She's so closely connected to this piece that her DVD of it really is the one to get. There is also a DVD where Denise Duval sings with Poulenc at the piano, but it comes from a mixed concert where only a few short extracts are included, out of context, and it's not staged, which is part of its impact. Click on the video above for the last minutes of Carole Farley's recording. But you do need the whole DVD because it's so atmospheric it needs to be heard as a whole. Plus, it's paired with a wonderfully witty performance of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Telephone. Unmissable and intelligent contrast.
La voix humaine isn’t easy listening, nor is it meant to be. We’re eavesdropping, literally, on an intimate, private moment, as the protagonist disintegrates emotionally. We’re intruding, yet compelled to follow the drama because we care about the woman as a human being. The text, by Jean Cocteau, is natural and understated, and for that very reason, we connect. Surprisingly, seeing it on film actually helps, because it provides a kind of buffer to the raw emotion, and helps you focus more fully on the music.
In this performance, the quality of orchestral playing is very good, very sensitively attuned to the voice part, and quite fascinating on its own terms. José Serebrier captures the underlying structure of the music well, which matters because the piece unfolds gradually in a series of stages which mirror the development of the narrative, as it gradually dawns on the protagonist that she can’t escape from reality. The tense, stabbing strings sound like an overture to a classic film noir, which is rather appropriate. The woman explicitly calls the telephone “a weapon that leaves no trace”. She may physically die by her own hand, but she’s been pushed to it in a peculiarly sinister, impersonal way. In the film, the introduction is expressed visually as the camera pans from outside the woman’s window into her private hell. We’re voyeurs at a crime scene.
The relationship between playing and singing here is particularly impressive. Even though the music has to accentuate the tension of the scene through sharp, metallic outbursts, it also seems to cradle the voice part. The cymbals crash, but their lingering resonance softens around the voice. Part of the reason this performance works well is that the conducting really brings out the chamber-like restraint in the orchestration. The playing is deft, but refined and supports, rather than competes against the voice. At one point, Farley sings with steely, suppressed tension, while the orchestra builds up to a big crescendo. Then she cries “I feel I can’t go on”, and you know the steely control cannot hold. Farley and Serebrier of course, are an artistic partnership, so the close rapport in this performance springs from very deep roots indeed.
La voix is a tour de force for any singer because it involves so many sudden changes of mood. Moreover, the character of the protagonist is difficult and quirky. This role is a challenge because it involves very intuitive understanding of character before it can be interpreted fully. Farley seems to have developed the character “from within”, understanding how she’s built up her delusions as a kind of armour around her essential fragility. Even before the woman was dumped, she had problems : she even lies about what she’s wearing, as if pretence is second nature. She’s inscrutable because she veils her feelings with many layers, all of which are valid, though contradictory. She’s certainly not stupid, for she immediately picks up she’s being dumped, even though she can’t bring herself to face it. Farley captures the multiple layers of feeling well. When she sings “Oui, oui, je te promêtte”, she infuses the line each time with a different nuance. She pretends to be the “good little girl” her lover used to care for, but she can’t conceal the edge of wariness and anxiety that sharpens her delivery. Similarly, her “tu es gentil” works on two levels: it’s meant to placate the lover, yet it is, at the same time an accusation of quite the opposite. The protagonist keeps finding excuses for her lover’s cruelty. Of course she’s staving off reality, but she’s also motivated by genuine love. When Farley sings “I swear nothing’s wrong”, she sings with grave dignity and tenderness, as if even in extremis, she wants to protect and forgive someone she loves so dearly.
Another reason why La Voix works so well on film is that an infinite amount can be conveyed by body language. Farley is a natural stage person. She moves like a cat, stretching and moving alertly, as if she were “on the prowl”, tense and alert. On film, you can see her face in close-ups, mobile and expressive. When she looks into the mirror and imagines herself old, she seems to shatter, as if we’re seeing her inner image, not the relatively youthful one on the outside. Best of all, she wraps herself around the telephone, crouching and cradling it lovingly, then, wrapping its cord around her body. “I have the cord around my neck” she sings, “your voice is around my neck”. The double meaning is sinister. She screams “Je t’aime! Je t’aime!” with rising desperation, and suddenly the image is cut off, like the phone line and the set is plunged into darkness. The film seems to have been shot in half-light, and there’s a rationale for that, but it’s not easy on the eye, and looks dated. It’s a pity as this is a performance to watch as well as listen to.
In complete contrast, then is the blinding brightness of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Telephone. The set is a spotless apartment stuffed with unbelievably naff kitsch. It’s hilarious, a parody of the dumbest TV sitcoms. But that’s the point! A lady named Lucy lives here, an air-head bimbette in a fantasy world where everything is in the right place but nothing means anything. Her boyfriend tries to propose but she won’t get off the phone to her friends, so he has to call her. It’s the ultimate in safe sex, perhaps. The brightness of the set is matched by the perkiness of the orchestration. Hence, Farley’s characterization of the heroine is particularly trenchant. Her diction is clear, crisp and pert, capturing Lucy’s wide-eyed vacuity. There’s a lovely lyrical perkiness in her voice, too. Farley is a born comedienne, who manages to create mindless Lucy convincingly, yet comment on her shallowness at the same time. This is light-hearted material, but extremely well paced and performed.
When I was young, Glazunov and early Russians were often played by leaden Soviet era orchestras, dutifully earnest and plodding. So I was completely taken by surprise when I started listening to the series of Glazunov symphonies recorded over the last few years by José Serebrier and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Not my thing, I thought, but listened, and discovered how much fun they could be. Serebrier thinks the symphonies anew. It’s like scrubbing stale varnish off a piece of furniture, to find the rich wood beneath.
This Glazunov is vivacious, fluid and witty!Currently I’m listening to Symphony No 6, a recording which has been nominated for the 2009 Grammy awards, and raved about by lots of different people, some of whom don’t usually agree. It isn’t easy for me to write about repertoire I don’t know well, but this is great fun. These recordings prove yet again how important thoughtful performance can be, not "going through the motions" but expressing genuine enthusiasm for the music. I love listening to these recordings because they fill my heart. Which is as good a recommendation as any in these difficult times.
On Tuesday, José Serebrier made one of his sadly too rare London concerts. He has made over 200 recordings, some of which are "best in class", superb. Currently I'm enjoying the latest in his Glazunov series. Highly recommended ! Serebrier's life is absolutely amazing. He started conducting aged 11 in Uruguay, organizing his own orchestra, the first of its kind in South America. They were so innocent they thought they "had" to play by ear and memorized everything ! At 17 he wrote his First Symphony and by a stroke of quite miraculous coincidence it came to the attention of Leopold Stokowski, who hired Serebrier on the spot and premiered the piece in place of Charles Ives's Fourth, then considered too difficult to perform. Of course, Stokowski and Serebrier eventually cracked it, and Serebrier's 1974 recording is a wonder. Serebrier was close to Stokowski for many years, but also worked with Monteux and with Georges Szell. He's also a composer of some note. What I like about his work is that it's so intelligently organized and constructed. Get the fundamentals right, then add flair and sparkling vivacity. His finest work, like his Shostakovich, Dvorak and Janacek is inspired. There is so much in his fascinating life that I couldn't possibly do it justice in a short blog like this. So please look at his website and at the interview below. Look especially for the video clips on the website - amazing !!!! http://www.joseserebrier.com/index.html http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2007/Jan-Jun07/serebrier.htm
