The Music Season

There has been a movement afoot for quite a while to de-classicize classical music. Orchestras and chamber groups are naturally concerned that their audience is aging; concert-goers find it difficult to attend evening events, have already heard Mozart's Jupiter Symphony and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" quite a few times, and will soon enough be dead. Meanwhile, younger enthusiasts aren't keen on spending a bundle at such events while also saving up for those $200 tickets to Hamilton and Guns N' Roses.

In response, organizations like the Schubert Club and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra have worked hard to make their programming more diverse, their ticket prices more reasonable, and their venues more casual and widely scattered. In recent weeks Hilary and I have attended concerts at Ted Mann Concert Hall, Saint Paul Academy, and Aria, a warehouse in downtown Minneapolis, at an average ticket price of $10. We're not in the targeted age group, but we're benefitting just the same.    

As far as creative programming, it seems to be bearing fruit. The most memorable piece I heard at the first SPCO concert we attended was a lush, early-twentieth-century piece by Franz Schreker, a composer I'd never heard of. The hit of the next concert was Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano by Max Bruch, about whom I knew nothing except the name. 

In contrast, though the musicians obviously relish getting the dynamics in Haydn's symphonies just right, these works contain little genuine musical interest. Their chief merit is that there are so many of them, it isn't hard to find a new one to add to a program. The SPCO's recent performance of Haydn's 102nd was a snooze. It didn't help that it had been preceded by Mozart's brilliant Linz symphony.

The most rewarding of the concerts we heard recently was given by violinist Nicola Benedetti at Aria, a gutted brick warehouse in the North Loop that served for many years as the home base of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The last time I visited the place was in 1993 to see the Jeune Lune's performance of Carlo Gozzi's The Green Bird. 

The Schubert Club had brought in Nicola, a dazzling young Scottish/Italian violinist, as part of their casual "Mix" program. There was a trivia context before the performance, free pretzels, and a cash bar in the back. The program was described as an exploration of Johannes Brahms's personal life through his three violin sonatas. Or maybe it was the other way around: a study of Brahms's violin sonatas through the lens of his personal life. The approach sounded interesting to me, and I was curious to hear a concert in that cavernous venue.

Not surprisingly, the musical performance was top-flight. But I was prepared for neither the deep, almost giddy, enthusiasm nor the level of detail which Nicola brought to her analysis of the various details of Brahms's personal life and his complex and conflicted relations with Clara and Robert Schumann. She went on for quite a while from the podium, with the help of an iPad, ingenuously apologizing more than once for the length of her peroration. It brought me back to my college years, when that classic tome, Harold Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers, was a frequent reference resource, and the love lives of Wagner and Liszt seemed as relevant to musical study as their compositions.

I was a big fan of Brahms in those days, though in time I began to find him slightly overbearing and even strangely turgid in comparison with his younger French contemporary Gabriel Faure, for example. In recent years I've gotten interested in his work again, but I was entirely unfamiliar with these complex, emotional pieces.

They differ quite a bit in temperament. Nicola and her long-time accompanist Alexei Grynyuk performed all three with intensity and élan. The performance was more than satisfying ...  though I must confess that not once during the musical sections of the evening did my wandering thoughts take me in the direction of the specifics of Brahms's personal life.

That's not to say that Nicola's forays into biography were beside the point. Her talk gave us a chance to get to know her better—not only her unaffected zest for every aspect of the music, but also her character. And the stories Nicola told us about how she came to a love of classical music—her parents preferred ABBA and the Bee Gees—were an added delight. "My parents don't like me to tell that story, but it's true," she told us. "When I heard one of the Brahms sonatas at age 12, it changed my life."

Sure, Nicola is talented, vivacious, and articulate. But she's also personable. During her recital at Aria, the diva in her lost out time and again to Brahms, and the girl next door.

***

Postscript. I'm sure you're wondering, and the answer is no. I didn't win the trivia contest. How could I, when David Grothe was in the audience? The first time I went over to his house (for an editorial klatch with his wife, Margaret, as I recall), I noticed that the wall in the living room alongside the front door was filled, floor to ceiling, with CDs—entirely classical, as far as I could see.

"You have quite a collection," I said.

"Well—um—yes," Dave replied, a little sheepishly. "It's alphabetical. These are the As and Bs...."