Why I Say No to Nagano

Kent Nagano is a smart man, with bold ideas about repertoire and how music relates to our society, so listeners should take him seriously when he shares those. In 2002, he led the premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Lesen der Schrift (The Reading of the Scripts), which he had commissioned from the composer with the intention that its movements would serve as brief oases between the seven movements of Brahms’s German Requiem. (Michael Gielen has done something similar on recordings on the Haenssler label.) The Scripts would afford audiences a chance to reflect on the texts they had just heard sung and the music they had just heard, as well as to gather their strength for the journey ahead.

Nagano discussed this idea, which I heard him lead with the Chicago Symphony on Thursday night, in a 10-minute talk from the stage, explaining that the German Requiem is familiar ground for us today, and we need new ways to hear it anew. Is it, really, and do we, really? In my concert-going life, it has been performed three times in the cities I was living in. The only performance in Chicago I know of was with the Chicago Chorale, who sang it in a South Side church in Brahms’s transcription for two pianos. The CSO last performed it in 1999. This is not music that we have to work to avoid, like we do with Carmina Burana, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Sixth. Far from needing to find new ways of listening to it and appreciating it, most listeners, especially younger ones, haven’t had their first exposure to it.

 
Nagano’s larger thesis is that the Requiem is so broad that giving an audience a chance to collect its thoughts as the work progresses will assist in understanding the work, as well as helping them come to a more personal appreciation of it. This shows, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding of the Requiem itself, which is filled with transitions and other moments that lend themselves to reflection. Each of its movements have various islands and climaxes inside them which then spin off into different moods before concluding. In the sixth movement, Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt, the chorus erupts at the phrase “For the trumpet shall sound” in an earth-shattering statement led by the basses. Before Brahms finishes the passage of Scripture, they’ve already moved into gentler material. Had Brahms stayed in a single style or mood, Nagano’s decision to interleave another piece of music could be defensible. As it is, it simply shows a lack of knowledge of the piece.

The four Scripts for their part, stay within a single idea, usually pensively and quietly expressed, and last about five minutes each. Their cloudy chords allude to the music that preceded without quoting it, yet they still set up a stark contrast to Brahms which takes us out of Brahms’ world and drops us in outer space. To be fair, Nagano did pair the Requiem with two works that placed it in context, Schuetz's Psalm 100 and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's late work Stillness and Return, a pensive study in orchestral quietude.

Still, Nagano's conception of the Requiem isn't built on a deep understanding of it. He also doesn’t build to any sort of climax. Ignoring the harmonic tension, he simply takes two steps forward on the podium, shakes his fist, and we’re at the climax, by force of his will. It doesn’t matter if the bass instruments could get us there more convincingly if Nagano built the sound from them, or if he could forge a greater sense of urgency from the thrumming measure before “For the trumpet shall sound.” The music is loud, the chorus is at full voice, so, therefore, this is the climax, and forget everything that came before it.

At the opposite end of the programming spectrum are musicians who prefer to investigate deeply a single style, era, or nationality, like the JACK Quartet did at Northwestern Wednesday night, and Steven Isserlis did Friday at the University of Chicago. JACK specializes in the Neo-Complexity types and those who work at that edge of music and noise. Isserlis devised a program entirely of Russian composers stretching from Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky’s teacher, up to Shostakovich (and Prokofiev, if we include the encore).

JACK’s fearless performance of Xenakis’ Tetras is something I won’t forget soon, given that they played with a great deal of energy and, even, expressivity. The boing-boing glissandos Xenakis strews the score with had a jokey quality, and an episode with all four musicians playing pizzicato had the easy glee of a percolator. They also brought grace to Helmut Lachenmann’s String Quartet, “Grido,” bowing on every available surface of their instruments. Passages when they bowed the practice mutes had a soft glow.

Along with these works were scores by two young Northwestern composition profs, Aaron Travers and Aaron Cassidy. Travers’s brief trilogy of Eclats was a charmingly dissonant collection of miniatures, while Cassidy’s String Quartet takes itself extraordinarily seriously. As an exercise into what a string quartet means as a string quartet, it succeeded. As for his further goal of deriving musical material from the players’ physical motions, it looked as if they were needlessly conducting with their bows as their comrades played, and had I not read that their movements were part of the score, I would have guessed that violinist Ari Streisfeld was having a seizure as he almost fell off his chair near the Quartet’s conclusion.

At the same time, by presenting a single strand of contemporary music, they showed off the variety and vitality of that rich vein. Comparisons between and across works could be made that would have been lost had three of the works been tossed out for Bartok, Haydn, and Mozart, say.

Isserlis, pianist Kirill Gerstein, and Isserlis’s mad mop of hair came together in Mandel Hall for Russian Romanticism. Yet by concentrating the audience on a, again, rich vein of music, Isserlis drew everyone into the music far more than by slicing up the program into sharp stylistic divides. The slight nature of several of the works may have reduced that impression, but admiring his and Gerstein’s passionate reading of the Largo and scherzo-like Allegro in Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata, it hardly matters.

Very few cellists have Isserlis’s bow control, but what sets him apart even further are the multiple colors and sounds he can draw from his instrument. He builds up a conversation among characters in a novel as he progresses through a work. It’s more complex than a single color for first and second themes, for his shadings change even inside them. The dinner-table conversations of an entire family take place inside a movement he plays. Not to be forgotten is Gerstein, who played with a richness far beyond what most pianists are able to achieve on the less-than-ideal instrument of Mandel Hall.

This doesn’t mean that every last program should be constructed of similar works. It does mean that by thinking critically about those works and what connects them will pay off more for the audience than forcing connections to arise by the force of will (or, less charitably, fiat). Variety is the spice of life, but those spices should be organically grown whenever possible.

The variety inside a work is its argument to stand on its own, and for listeners to organize their thoughts inside it. A musician like Isserlis can communicate that, a quartet like the JACK Quartet is still learning how, but well on its way, and Nagano (and any administrators) should take note. Brahms knew what he was doing, and understood how best to share his ideas. As much as I respect the idea that composers speak to each other across the centuries, it still seems obvious that they shouldn't interrupt.