Iosif Andriasov-Dissident, Philosopher, Composer

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The recent death of Kim Il-Sung has reminded many  us of the the crudeness of old style Communist propaganda. The duckspeak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words)practiced by politicians and hired political flacks in America, which is comically ludicrous and inane, seems like subtle and reasoned analysis next to the blabbering idiocy that passed for official statements in the Communist world. One interesting consequence of this overt idiocy was that no one really believed the content that was fed to them-they assumed everything said from official sources was a lie. I once asked a person who had fled the Soviet Union what he believed, if he assumed that all official information was nonsense. He said, without a moment's hesitation " I believed rumors!"

Part of the gymnastics of living in such a society was that you had to behave as though you actually believed what was said, or at least acquiesced in words to the official line.  You knew that the price of dissent would be too high, and that your life could be ruined, or, during Stalin's day, ended. People like Shostakovich led a "coded" existence, where official compliance lived side by side with mockery and subtle sabotage. It was the only way to stay sane.

However, there were some who simply could not play the game. The composer Iosif Andriasov was one. He refused the "Lenin Prize" offered to him for his Second Symphony saying "when you accept an award from criminals, you become an accomplice to their crimes." Such a position-and such insolence-was almost  unheard of. The consequence was his marginalization as a composer, despite a very promising start to his career, and eventual exile in the United States.

Andriasov moved to the United States in 1979 (a time in which a number of dissidents were allowed to leave). He died in 2000, and since his death his widow Marta Andriasova and son Arshak have worked to restore his music to the repertoire. I knew nothing of his background when I first heard his music, but I was struck by the directness and immediacy of its appeal, and wanted to perform it based on quality alone  . A striking feature of his music is that although he dabbled in a number of styles, including 12 tone music, his personal voice was so strong and immediately appealing that he was able to write  in any style and still sound like the same composer.  The First Symphony is fascinating because although there are gestures throughout that, taken in isolation, sound like Shostakovich, but unlike a composer like Weinberg, there is never a moment that actually sounds like Shostakovich. I suspect it was this ability to assimilate familiar musical gestures to a totally new voice that impressed Shostakovich so much.

There is a recording available of his First Symphony and you can hear it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWIOSn2N8iA. This version was the original version, but the composer revised the work a number of times, and the final revision was made in the year of his death.  We are presenting the American premiere of this new version. The differences in orchestration are numerous, but often subtle, while the structure of the piece has remained pretty similar. I feel that all the changes are improvements-much of what he has done clarifies the structure of the piece, and it seems to effectively underline the programmatic aspect of the score,  but I will not really know how effective it is until I hear the work in rehearsal.  I find the work melodically beautiful, very dramatic and deeply satisfying, and given the directness of its appeal I suspect many of you will as well. One wonderful feature of Andraisov's music is that he never overstays his welcome. He judges the length of his music perfectly. He seems to know exactly how much time he needs to use for the material he has. This Symphony is in one movement and is only 17 minutes long, and there is never a wasted gesture. Come hear this wonderful work in the next MusicaNova program-on Sunday January 15 at 4PM at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts .

Improving on a Masterpiece

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Two of the works in the next MusicaNova program-on Sunday January 15 at 4PM at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts are works that underwent significant changes after the initial performance. The Andriasov Symphony, which I will discuss in a separate entry, was revised in a relatively straightforward way that changed little of the impact or structure of the piece. In contrast, the story of the revisions of the Sibelius Symphony no.5 is one of radical surgery on a work that most people would assume did not need it. But then, most people are not Jean Sibelius.


In 1915, Sibelius unveiled his Fifth Symphony, performed at a concert honoring his Fiftieth birthday, an event that was practically a national holiday in Finland. The performance was a huge success, and subsequent performances were also very well received. For a concert about a year later, however, Sibelius made some significant changes, including linking the first two movements into a continuous musical fabric that has vexed musicologists and critics ever since-is this continuous music one movement or two? Unfortunately, the only surviving relic of this 1916 version is a bass part, so we do not know too much about it.



By 1919, he had done further revisions that significantly altered the structure of the piece. He cut about 400 bars of music; the relative importance of certain ideas and themes changed, and the relationship between ideas were altered, sometimes radically. One can get some of the important details of these changes from a DMA thesis by John Norine at the University of Texas. Google "Norine, Sibelius Symphony no. 5"-it is a pdf file and for some reason I cannot link to it from the blog.


Given the mission of MusicaNova, I was deeply attracted to the idea of  doing the 1915 version (which has been performed in the United States only once in recent years, by the American Symphony Orchestra).  But in the final analysis, I could not justify it. The 1915 version is fantastic-a masterpiece-but the 1919 version is one of the greatest creations of the human imagination, and unless one is dealing with an audience intimately familiar with the 1919 version, it makes no sense to deprive people of that experience. Perhaps someday I could put together a program where we play both versions side by side-now, that would be interesting!

Looking at the genesis of the Symphony gives us insight into the plight of the creative genius. Sibelius was able to listen to a work as thoroughly satisfying and successful as the 1915 version of this Symphony (beautifully performed in its only recording by the Lahti Symphony conducted by Osmo Vänskä) and he understood that it could be significantly better. This required both staggering insight, integrity and self-discipline. Furthermore, Sibelius had to cut some beautiful music to make this happen, illustrating that genius requires one to be not only inspired but absolutely ruthless.

Two moments stand out: at the very end of the second movement in the 1915 version, as the work rushes to its thrilling conclusion, there is a jaunty woodwind line with brilliant brass interjections. It is a wonderful moment but the 1919 conclusion is more effective, even without this great music. The weakness of the earlier version-insofar as there is one-is that the material is new, and does not connect as well with the rest of the movement, and so it psychologically  functions as a distraction from the onward thrust of  the thrilling coda.


The other moment is in the last movement. At two points the 1915 version Sibelius introduces a extraordinarily unexpected dissonance  against a tonic major chord during the famous "Swan Theme".  The first appearance of this clash occurs in C major during the initial presentation of the theme and is in the trumpet. I was shocked and delighted on hearing it. for the first time. The second of these moments, in E flat major, occurs at 9:51- and that little E natural  took my breath away.  I mean this literally-I gasped in astonishment and tears rolled down my face. My first thought was that I could not believe that anyone could discard music of such beauty. I listened on to the end of the movement and there were several other moments that astonished me. I immediately listened to the familiar 1919 score to see if there was any justification for the radical surgery he had performed.  And I decided that somehow,  by ruthlessly cutting some of the most beautiful music ever written, Sibelius had created an  ending that was not merely beautiful,  but was  music of unparalleled power and majesty. That he could even think of this, and bring himself to do it, was a miracle.


The process of creating the 1919 version was slow; one of the most distinctive feature of the whole Symphony-after the "Swan Theme", the thing that people remember about the work-is the ending. Six  irregularly spaced  hammer blow chords are separated by silences. I have seen people who do not know the piece shiver in astonishment the first time they hear it. And yet this feature was not present in the 1915 version, or even the 1916 version. It took three more years to come up with the perfect ending. 

Hearing the torturous process of revision of music that was already incredible gives me both insight into and sympathy for the famous "Silence of Jarvenpää"-the fact that Sibelius allowed the world to hear almost none of the music he composed in the last thirty years of his life. Sometime in 1943 he burned his Eighth Symphony, unable to be satisfied with a work that had consumed him for fifteen years. On the other hand,  he said of Fourth Symphony  that he "would not change a single note of it!" As hard as he was on himself, he knew what it felt like to be happy with what he composed.  But satisfaction did not come easily, as illustrated in the two extant versions of the Fifth Symphony.. One can understand how eventually he would rather destroy music than give us less than what he considered his best. We all mourn the loss of the Eighth Symphony, but we must be grateful for the self-criticism that gave us the extraordinary masterpieces that  did survive the fires of his old age.

Traveling the World Through Music

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In the next MusicaNova program-on Sunday October 23rd at 4PM at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts-we are indulging in a little musical tourism. Traveling through music is not only fun, it is a great way to evoke memories, or create false memories, of places you have been or you have imagined being. As a child, I wanted nothing more than to visit Britain, and this desire was fueled by the evocation of a highly romanticized fantasy created by repeated listening to the Second and Third Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Hearing the opening of the London Symphony, I imagined, with absolute clarity, the awakening of the city. It was a tremendously vivid experience, one that came rushing back to me many years later, when, on my first, jet-lagged morning in London, I awoke at dawn and walked through South Kensington and Chelsea with a feeling of wonder and joy that was directly related to my love of that music.

 This idea that the music itself can preceed the experience of the place and enliven the idea of the place is one that I find especially wonderful, and one that is directly related to the musical tourism implied in the evocation of Siberia and Spain that we will have in our concert. Ravel's first visit to Spain was several years in the future when he wrote the Spanish Rhapsody. For the composers, this was traveling through the music, and for the audience the experience can be much the same. The Wind of Siberia manages to create, within its apparently fragmented structure, a feeling of wide open space, of cold, and of mystery. He also suggests, in the extraordinary, relentless motion that leads to the overwhelming climax near the end, the notion of Siberia as the land of no return, where prisoners went and were never heard from again. It is music of a strange, simple beauty, and tremendous power, unlike the work of any other composer. To me, Tchaikovsky is one of the great neglected geniuses of the 20th century, and no more so than in this masterpiece.

 The Rapsodie Espagnole, in contrast, is a very well known piece; it represented, to Ravel, an imagined Spain, a place of vivd colors and sultry women, of passion and chaos-a world that, because it was so different from his controlled and regulated personality, was extremely attractive. I am sure the Spain of his imagination made the experience he had of the real Spain some years later more vivid, and more enjoyable, just as my imagined London awaking made my experience of the real early morning of the city magical. But what could be more magical than the Spain of the Rapsodie? The Prelude suggests the heat of a summer night, the Habanera and Malagueña have all the suggestiveness of Spanish Dance and the Celebration of the spectacular Feria that ends the work could only be created by a composer in love with his subject-and true to that, when Ravel finally saw Spain, he said "it is all I imagined!"

 Come and hear these works; they will inspire your imagination, and you will feel that you are there. And going to a concert is a lot easier than traveling thousands of miles!

Is an arrangement a new piece of music?

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In my last blog I talked about some of the thinking that went into the creation of my arrangement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata as a Concerto. Now I want to ask the salient question-is this arrangement a new piece of music?

The first point that needs to be addressed is that the notes are mostly but far from precisely the same. Quite apart from the changes I made to the cello part, adapting some of the piano filigree and turning it into cello lines, in any orchestration of a piano piece you have to consider that the piano and the orchestra are different creatures, and what works for one does not work for the other.

Let me mention an interesting example, one that gave me enormous trouble. The third movement starts with a piano solo. The melody is played mostly by the right hand pinky finger, with a sixteenth note (semiquaver) pattern in both hands below it. It is very effective, and it sounds great. When I tried to score this literally it sounded awful. The left hand sixteenths could not translate to another instrument and sound anything except overly thick. That register-the octave below middle C-is very treacherous territory for an orchestra and needs to be handled extremely carefully. Busy writing in this octave can easily mess up everything else you are trying to do. I realized that when I played this passage on the piano I severely suppressed the lower octave sixteenth notes to the point that they were barely audible. At this volume, they had a wonderful acoustical effect, freeing up piano strings and giving the upper parts more resonance,helping both the right hand sixteenths and the melody above them to sing.

In order to make an arrangement that sounded good, I had the right hand sixteenths played by a harp, and the left hand sixteenths, transposed up an octave, played as a rolled chord on each beat. To simulate the attack of the piano, I had the lowest note played on a bass pizzicato; to simulate the effect of the pedal, I had the orchestral cellos play the low note sustained; and to simulate the resonance of the melody that was created by the way Rachmaninoff scored it, I had it doubled up an octave-an effect similar to an eight foot stop on an organ. Thus, every parameter of the original was altered in some way. But now it worked!

If I had been literal in my approach to the notes, I could never have made an arrangement that would have had anything like the effect of the original piano part.

Or, at least, the piano part as I hear it. And this is where things get very tricky.

As the above example makes clear, my orchestration of this work is based on the way I hear it, and the way I play it. It is not neutral. Beyond the notes themselves, beyond the spirit of the piece, arrangers imposes-of necessity-something of themselves on the music. In fact, I deliberately use the orchestration to underline structural details that I hear in the score, and sometimes I make points that I doubt were in Rachmaninoff's mind. One example: I use the clarinets to play the rippling piano line that accompanies the first theme of the first movement. At the end of the last movement Rachmaninoff has one of his patented "big tunes" come back for one last appearance, accompanied by a rippling piano line. Although in this instance I could have orchestrated the passage successfully many different ways, I chose to use the clarinets on this part, and the effect is that it creates-by the very use of that same instrument in a similar passage, separated by over twenty minutes of music-a structural unity to the piece, that would be unlikely to occur to someone listening to the piano/cello version. The passages are different enough that their similarity is only clear when you hear the clarinets play both passages.

So I change notes, give the cello some of the piano part (and the orchestra some of the cello part), I impose my own structural imperatives on the music, I change tempos (to accommodate the difference in the acoustical situation) but I do not change harmonies or melodies, and I do not add any of my own material or cut out anything that Rachmaninof wrote. I am certainly truer to the original than Schoenberg was in his bizarre "Cello Concerto In D major by Matthias Georg Monn" and yet I am also certainly further from the original than Wallfisch and Horovitz in their "Grieg Cello Concerto" . How do I characterize this?

What I have done is come up with a title that I think accurately reflects the situation: "Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra: arranged from the Sonata for Cello and Piano of Sergei Rachmaninoff by Warren Cohen".
Awkward, evasive, and yet the most accurate picture of the relationship of the original to the arrangement I can think of!

Come hear this oddly named work on October 23 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of our season opening concert of the MusicaNova Orchestra.

A Rachmaninoff Cello Concerto?

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Back in 2001, the cellist Rafael Wallfisch recorded the Grieg Sonata as the Grieg "Cello Concerto" in a version orchestrated by Benjamin Wallfisch and Joseph Horovitz. In Gramophone, the reviewer suggested that he would love to hear an orchestral arrangement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. I was kind of shocked, but could not resist the challenge of looking at the piece and seeing if this was remotely possible. What became clear is that if you were to simply orchestrate the piano part and keep the cello part intact that it would not work at all. For the music to be effective, you would have to swamp the cello part repeatedly, and in many passages where the cello carries the melody,the busy piano part would convert to a busy orchestral part that would be even harder to suppress than the piano. Further, I thought that in the Grieg arrangement the non-virtuoso cello part against the full orchestral writing sounded odd. Unlike at least one reviewer, I thought it was way too clear that I was listening to an arrangement of a piece of chamber music.

So the verdict was generally against the idea. But then I asked myself, what would happen if we took some of those virtuoso lines and transferred them-mutatis mutandis-to the cello? Could you achieve something that would have that Rachmaninoff virtuoso flair but written for the cello?

Over time, this idea evolved into the idea of transforming the music of Rachmaninoff into a Cello Concerto by making the relationship between the Cello part and the orchestra different than that between the cello and the piano in the Sonata. I rewrote a number of the piano licks as cello lines, getting advice from cellists on how to make that work. At the climaxes, where the cello part is, of necessity, swamped by the other notes, I took the cello line and doubled it in other parts of the orchestra and marked the solo part ad lib.

I came up with a version that we did with soloist Zoran Stillin and the Southern Arizona Symphony in 2003. The audience responded really well. I thought the idea worked, but the actual arrangement needed serious revision. I did not go far enough in rethinking the work for Cello and Orchestra. The orchestral scoring was too thick, and there were times when the big tunes were swamped as badly-or even worse- than they were in the original. In a number of places the cello should have been brought up an octave to cut through the orchestra better, and I should have been bolder in giving piano lines to the cello.

The revision I did this summer is pretty radical, so much so that I thought of changing the title from "Symphony-Concerto" to "Concerto", as the cello part is significantly more prominent in this version, and the scoring is much lighter. I did not try to make the orchestration sound like Rachmaninoff's, although it often does, simply because the music demands it. But Rachmaninoff never dealt with the specific problems of this type of scoring. He never tried to orchestrate any of his overtly pianistic works, and even when he agreed to let Resphigi orchestrate five of the Etudes-Tableaux, the works he chose for orchestration were admirably suited to the task.

We will see how well it works in rehearsal, but I am pretty excited about the possibility of this being taken up by other cellists. At least in my head, it really works now. I am very grateful to Peter Eom for being the guinea pig on this new version of the score. We will perform it on October 23 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of our season opening concert of the MusicaNova Orchestra.

I will blog again on another interesting aspect of the process of creating this score, which is the extent to which it is still 'the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata".

Learning Through Adversity

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On April 17 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts violinist Adrian Anantawan will perform the Shostakovich Second Violin Concerto with the MusicaNova Orchestra. As you may know, Adrian was born without a right hand, and yet he plays the violin at the highest level. In fact, among the interesting things about his music making is that his playing is exceptionally musical and he has an absolutely gorgeous, enormous tone. To someone who knows something about standard violin technique, this would seem impossible, as he cannot draw the bow across the string in anything like a traditional way,as you can see here. This is actually wonderful news. For it tells us that by thinking outside the box, one can come up with remarkable solutions to what would seem to be insoluble problems. And that people like Adrian, who are forced to approach things in a new and different way, have a great deal to teach all of us.

I am reminded of a rather amusing (but ultimately sad) memory from my childhood. There was a television broadcast of a concert by Vladimir Horowitz. The following morning there was a letter to the editor in the Montreal Star (this was a while ago!)and the writer, a local piano teacher, was outraged that the CBC would broadcast this, because Horowitz was, in her mind, a "dangerous model" for students because he played the piano with flat, rather than curved fingers. What would she think of this ? Admittedly, the girl with no fingers on one hand is not playing at the level of a virtuoso pianist, but she certainly plays like a good student-the very people that this piano teacher would "protect" from the evil model of Vladimir Horowitz's flat fingered technique. Ironically, Horowitz learned his flat fingered technique from his teacher, Felix Blumenfeld, who developed it because he had to adjust his way of playing after having a stroke. I have tried to find videos of other Blumenfeld students, but have not found any. Apparently there are none of the incomparable Simon Barere, although I have read that his technique was "unorthodox"; I hoped to find some of Maria Grinburg, Maria Yudina, or Grigory Ginzburg, but no luck. I think it is wonderful that a so-called "disabled" pianist was so influential in developing the Russian Piano School, and that aspects of his insight as a pianist and teacher came directly from his experience as pianist living with a disability. I think it is also curious-and here I am reminded of Adrian-that the Blumenfeld students I listed above all have one thing in common- the ability to produce a very distinctive and, with the exception of Yudina, very beautiful sound.

In the same spirit, I think all string players should watch how Adrian plays, to open their minds to the possibilities that are created when someone has to work with a different set of tools. Come here the concert; and come to the fundraising event on Friday night April 15th, where Adrian will talk about his journey and you can watch his playing up close. You will be amazed and inspired.

Why Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony?

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Come hear this concert April 17 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.

Recently, some people (including some MusicaNova's Board members) have wondered how the orchestra would do with standard repertoire, and so I agreed to do the Tchaikovsky Symphony no.5 with the group, a work that is the very epitome of standard repertoire. But as usual, I had other reasons for choosing the piece, and some of them might be interesting.

In this case, one reason I chose the work is that conductors have taken such radically different approaches to the piece. Given that Tchaikovsky has provided metronome markings, detailed articulations and numerous indications for tempo modifications, this may seem odd. But there are performance traditions, and the music itself demands interpretation in the transitions between the tempo modifications, which are handled in many different ways, and conductors also selectively ignore what the composer asks for.

I find it interesting that the work was not a success at the premiere, and that it only became popular when Arthur Nikisch took it on tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. He never recorded the work, but the existing Nikisch recordings give us a pretty good idea of what he would likely do in a piece like that, and I think it is fair to say that there would be a lot of tempo modifications, and that there would be very intense accelerandos through various repetitive sections of the score. There would also reliably be lots of string portamento, and a great deal of drive and power. People who heard the premiere (with Tchaikovsky conducting) and then later heard Nikisch commented that the composer was softer grained and less extreme in his interpretation of the score. A curious point-two bars before the Presto section near the end, Nikisch added a cymbal crash-which was approved by the composer!(no, I will not do that!)

I tend to think that some of the performance traditions we often hear in the score go back to Nikisch. The steady acceleration of the first Allegro theme in the first movement, several unwritten ritards in the slow movement and the faster general tempo in the Finale all sound like Nikisch, and may have become part of tradition because of him. There are regional differences as well, which can be heard easily by listening to a Russian Orchestra and a German Orchestra play the piece back to back.

It is worth listening to old recordings to hear how people who may have played the work when the composer was alive interpret it. The early Chicago Symphony recording with Frederick Stock is a revelation in its way, seeming quite unpredictable by modern standards but very interesting and very good. Mengelberg was a very idiosyncratic conductor, and his interpretation from 1928 shows that, while Stokowski's 1923 version of the slow movement is actually the least odd of the early recordings I have heard. (there is also a recording of this movement with Albert Coates and the London Symphony from 1922 that is rather straightforward, but the playing level is poor, which gets in the way).

But this is one piece where even modern performances differ radically from one another, so whenever you go to a concert that features the work it can be like hearing a totally new piece. The differences seem most radical in the last movement, probably because it is somewhat tricky to pull off successfully. On the other hand, there are many possible solutions to the problems here. Some take a faster tempo for the main fast theme, some slow down more than Tchaikovsky indicated when the first movement theme comes back late in the movement (others speed it up more than he indicated), and many of these approaches, when well integrated into the overall conception, can work well. On Youtube you can see both Mravinsky and Bernstein do the finale, and both versions work, although they could not be more different.

Perhaps this is one thing that attracts me to the piece-it can be both new and familiar at the same time, a contradiction I am more than happy to exploit!