The Virtues of Youth

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

New York’s statue of Simon Bolivar is only three blocks from Carnegie Hall, where the orchestra that bears his name is currently performing. This youthful ensemble began its sojourn here with outreach concerts in the neighborhoods, and the first such event was held Saturday morning at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

The orchestra is possibly the most overhyped ensemble on the planet, so it is vital to remember that its individual members are just students. They are talented students, to be sure, but empirical evidence suggests that they are by and large still several steps below the performing standards set at the Juilliard or Manhattan Schools of Music. Judged at their own level of performance, rather than some Olympian public relations fantasy, they performed reasonably well at their chamber recital.

A string quartet, known as Quadrivium, opened the program in a professional manner, but with a caveat. Carl Maria von Weber composed his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings as a de facto wind concerto, the four strings relegated for much of the piece to background color. This foursome (Eddy Cordero and Alexander Gonzalez, violins, Alessandro D’Amico, viola, and Cristan Jimenez, cello) produced a satisfyingly blended sound, and impressed with their ability to play consistently quietly so as to not upstage their soloist. Clarinetist Jesus Anton was suitably nimble and agile, especially pleasing in his many extended runs, although he seemed to be pushing the upper limit of youth orchestra eligibility by quite a few years. Rather inexplicably, the group first offered the slow second movement and then reverted to the opening Allegro. The remaining two movements were apparently left back home in Caracas.

The balance of the morning was devoted to a septet of flutists. I attended the rehearsal for this part of the program and thus observed progress in the Scherzo from Felix Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from a rather muddy run-through to a precise and polished final version. This was the bright iteration presented in concert, remarkable for its individual note definition within the context of seven similarly pitched instruments. Stylistically, though, this rendition was clunky and extremely heavy — hardly evocative of sylphs and fairies.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this concert was a demonstration of the different types of flutes, as the group presented a standard instrument with a snippet of a Bach sonata and then delved into the lower alto and bass varieties that are so rarely utilized but are so splendidly colorful. This was followed by a rather clever fugue by the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, in what was the best performance of the day. Also in the mix were “Divertimento-Jazz” by Raymond Guiot, the one work where these aspirants seemed to perfectly capture the phrasing and general idiomatic language, and “El Diablo Suelto” by Heraclio Fernandez, an adaptation of a folk dance with an oddly Bartokian feel.

Unfortunately, the Museum set aside for this event an empty space right between its noisy cafeteria and a thin wall with no ceiling. On the other side of the wall was what sounded like a guided tour and, as a result, the ambient noise and foot traffic through the performing space were nightmarish. It is a testament to the musicianship of these fine young players that none of this seemed to rattle them at any time. Those in the audience who could concentrate at an auditory level equivalent to tunnel vision were richly rewarded.

* * *

HK Gruber is a difficult performer to define. He is the clown that parents fervently hope the agency does not send to their child’s birthday party. When presenting an evening of his own compositions, Mr. Gruber is the avatar of Weimar perversity; he would seem a natural to introduce the music of 1920s Germany to a receptive crowd at Zankel Hall as part of Carnegie’s Berlin in Lights festival. Sadly, on Thursday evening he disappointed.

Mr. Gruber violated at least three cardinal rules of performance. First, he churned out the same material over and over again. Second, he talked too much. Third — and this was the deadly mistake — he talked almost exclusively about himself.

The program booklet indicated that Mr. Gruber is a recent convert to the music of Hanns Eisler, a Communist composer of limited abilities who spun out hundreds of agitprop pieces before the Nazi rise to power, fled to America, and then returned to East Germany as its de facto national composer. Presenting a few of his “hit you over the head” ditties was certainly a legitimate way to introduce elements of Weimar musical life but, by the seventh number, a palpable boredom had set in.

Making the experience even less attractive was Mr. Gruber’s insistence on telling long stories between each pair of short songs. In addition to these monologues being egocentric, they were of suspect veracity. He told of how Germans have tried to appropriate Eisler as if he were one of their own, when he was instead Viennese. An interesting point but for the fact that Eisler was actually born in Leipzig. As a lecturer, Mr. Gruber was less a Leon Botstein and more a PDQ Bach.

With his gravelly voice — his pop equivalent would be Tom Waits — Mr. Gruber shouted and snorted his way through such proletarian anthems as “Ballade von der Krueppelgarde” and the “Mahlerian Das Lied von SA-Mann,” accompanied by a pickup group, christened for the occasion the Zankel Band. These musicians certainly played well as individuals, but the ensemble as a whole had a rather under-rehearsed feel to it. Several of these sidemen seemed rather irritated as they stared out at the audience when not performing for extended periods, which made me wonder what the faces of the audience members looked like to them by the end of this disproportionately long event.

Pierre Boulez is correct when he says that music is not the Olympics, but it was difficult not to recognize how much more sophisticated, colorful, and thoughtful was the music of Kurt Weill than that of Eisler. The program opened, quite naturally, with “Berlin im Licht,” a pocket masterpiece of kaleidoscopic tone painting, featuring a particularly memorable duet between alto saxophone and violin. Also on view was a piece that Weill composed for the unusual combination of two piccolos and one bassoon.

But when Mr. Gruber tried his hand at serious conducting, the result was only moderately satisfying. He concluded with “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik fuer Orchester,” the suite that Weill excerpted from his “Threepenny Opera.” Rather oddly for an older Central European, maestro slipped into American pop clichés, the ballad of Mackie Messer closer to Bobby Darin than to the original Brechtian street singer. Gone was the grounding of strict martial rhythm that makes Weill’s flights of creatively jazzy fancy so effective.

When David Robertson conducted this suite upstairs at Carnegie Hall in 2000 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he was remarkably precise, and yet tantalizingly down and dirty. The audience that evening greeted his effort with tepid applause. When HK Gruber hardly scratched the surface of this complex music at Zankel, he was rewarded with a substantial ovation. Go figure.


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