We occasionally show our scorn here for various classical programs, so fair is fair. We came across not one but two summer concerts this week that we admired for their ingenuity and accessibility. Both the connoisseur and novice could potentially enjoy them. Both feature well known composers (one of them good box office), yet both avoid warhorses. Without further ado, here they are:
Ruggiero Ricci, one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, died a week ago Sunday in his home in Palm Springs. He was 94.
Ricci had an incredibly long career, beginning in the 1920s as a child prodigy. His given name was Woodrow Wilson Rich, which was changed to Ruggiero Ricci because it sounded better as a prodigy. He seems to have been bitter about his early years as a star, according to as his obituary in the New York Times.
But he overcame them and turned himself into a musician of historical talent. During World War II he played solo repertoire for troops and, wanting to impress and entertain, mastered the 24 Caprices of Paganini. His subsequent recording of these pieces, in 1950, was the first of the complete series, and groundbreaking. It is unsurpassed to this day, as any violinist will tell you.
The place to start with Ricci, or at least a good place to start, is with the recording shown above, which contains that phenomenal recording of the Paganini Caprices as well as many other works. (Ricci didn’t want to be known as a specialist; he made more than 500 recordings. Of special interest in the collection mentioned are his recordings of the Hindemith sonatas for solo violin, the Prokofiev Sonata for solo violin and the Khachaturian Violin Concerto. The recording of Ravel’s “Tzigane,” with Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, included here, is jaw dropping.)
I met Ricci once, briefly. My girlfriend (at the time) studied with him at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and I was introduced before one of her lessons. If memory serves, he seemed rather brusque.
And I have to say, that quality is one I like best about his recordings. There is a palpable impatience to the playing, a denial of interpretive nonsense in favor of a gun-ho forwardness. He was a pistol when he played. Some call it “naturalness,” and I suppose it is — natural to Ricci. At any rate, it makes his recording of the Paganini Caprices sound thoroughly Modern, milked not for Romantic excesses but taken for what they are — astonishing technical challenges (like the Sequenzas of Luciano Berio) that need no emotive juice to make them work. And he dispatches them with an almost frightening virtuosity.
I’m back from a short vacation and hope to get back to posting some this week.
Meanwhile, the Register published a more extensive article on the new owner while I was gone. It may not be of interest to some of you, but as for me … my future as a music critic hangs in the balance. (I’m getting conflicting messages at the moment.) I will add that the newspaper industry will be watching the Register to see what happens, so radical are the new owner’s plans. I think they just might work, though.
The trombone solo in the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony is one of the best there is for the instrument in the symphonic repertoire. It’s lonely and fierce, sad and exposed. It’s also pretty difficult to play. It may sound simple, but you have to get the maximum sound out out of the horn while still maintaining a rich tone, which is one of the hardest things to do. As a trombonist myself, I feel chills whenever I hear the solo. The fellow in the video above does a dandy job of it.
I wasn’t always so lucky. I never had the good fortune of playing this solo with a full orchestra in performance, but back when I was at USC, we trombonists practiced it incessantly as an orchestral excerpt. These excerpts are played by every instrument — violinists practice the first movement of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, for instance, or the opening of “Don Juan” — in preparation for orchestral auditions, where you are invariably called upon to play them.
Trombonists play things like the storm sequence in the Overture to “William Tell,” the fourth movement of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, the “Bolero” solo (the most difficult of any solo in the piece, by the way) and the solo in Mahler’s Third. At USC, the members of the trombone class would practice them and our teacher, Terry Cravens, would set up “mock auditions,” during which we’d each play through them in turn. Cravens and a couple of other volunteer musicians would serve as jury, with their backs turned toward us, just as in the blind auditions for orchestras. They’d score each trombonist’s performance and at the end we’d find out our ranking. Needless to say, competitive feelings ran high.
Most of us got nervous during these mock auditions; I certainly did. But then that was the idea. You have to learn to play when you’re nervous, or you’ll never win an audition. You have to learn to control your nerves, if you can.
The interesting thing about nerves is that they affect the muscles or body parts that you intend to use in whatever you’re trying to do. A cellist doesn’t suffer from dry mouth, a singer does. I don’t imagine a harmonica player worries much about wobbly knees. My problem was with my lips, or embouchure. They (or it) quivered, making it difficult to hold a steady tone. The challenge was to remain calm, to fool yourself into thinking it didn’t matter that much, so the lips wouldn’t shake.
The trombone solo in Mahler’s Third begins with two long tones on A, played loudly, with a breath in between. In the mock audition in question, probably in my junior year, I nailed the first one. On the second one, however, my lips shook and I couldn’t focus my embouchure on the tone and I ended up blasting a huge splat. Really ugly and blatant. With all the other trombonists sitting around, and the jury with their backs to me, it was embarrassing. My immediate response was anger, hot, livid and adrenaline-pumping anger. “Shit!” I said to myself, or something like it, and I lost all composure, or what little of it I had had.
What happened afterward I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I laid into that solo in pure rage — not meaning to, but tapping into my volcanic anger to the utmost. I didn’t care what happened, I didn’t think I was even playing well. I blasted my way through the solo with what I felt at the time was an inappropriate vehemence, expending my rage into the music. I knew I had already failed, so it didn’t matter.
The jury loved it. The splatted second A didn’t bother them, given what followed, which fairly blew the roof off the joint. I was surprised. The exact outcome is foggy in my memory, but I think I received the highest score of all the trombonists on the Mahler excerpt and came in second overall to an awesome, older trombonist we all envied and admired. It was, for me, a moment of arrival.
I’m not sure what lesson there is here. Perhaps that calm and poise are overrated when it comes to performing music, though I admire those attributes in a musician. For that brief span, though, when I was playing that Mahler Third excerpt, I lacked those qualities utterly, and it came across to the audience vividly. Give it your all, don’t be careful, might be the moral. I’m suspicious of morals, though. Might not it have been better had I hit that second A? Well, I wouldn’t have a story.
I spent the summer of 1979 practicing. At this time of year my thoughts often go back to those months. Other summers run together in my memory, but I always know what I was doing that summer.
I had just finished my freshman year as a music major at the University of Southern California. It hadn’t gone as well as I had hoped it would. I aimed to do something about it.
As a trombone player in high school I had been pretty hot stuff. I had moved up in the ranks to become section leader of our large, award-winning school band, as well as in our orchestra and jazz ensemble. I was first trombone in the All Southern California High School Honor Band, then first trombone in the All Southern California High School Honor Orchestra. I was taking lessons from a teacher at Long Beach State. I auditioned for and made a small, elite high school jazz group headed by Art Bartner, the longtime leader of USC’s marching band, and, one thing leading to another, ended up with a full scholarship to study music at USC.
You know where this is going. Arriving at USC in the late summer of 1978, I immediately found myself at the bottom of the heap of some 12 to 14 other trombone majors, most of them older than me. It didn’t help that during the rigorous marching band boot camp run by Bartner — outdoors, in heat, dust and smog, prior to the official start of the school year — I suffered a severe asthma attack. I had had asthma since I was child, and you don’t get over such attacks right away. This one stayed with me with me through the first auditions of the semester, during which we were placed in various performing groups. Not wanting to make excuses, I arrived and played for the first time for my new teacher, Terry Cravens, without telling him of my affliction. I remember he had me play “The Ride of the Valkyries,” a piece I had shockingly never so much as seen before and in five sharps to boot. I couldn’t play it. I couldn’t breathe.
Cravens subsequently found out what was going on and things sorted themselves out, but I ended up near the bottom of the trombone class, with the consequent performing assignments in the bottom-rung ensembles, playing second or third trombone parts. It wasn’t what I had envisioned.
Jump ahead to the end of my freshman year. I believe it was Cravens who gave me the idea of practicing eight hours a day. I don’t think he prescribed it; he told me about someone who had done it. At any rate, I decided to do it. I didn’t have a job during the summer of ’79. And as chance would have it, someone asked me to house sit that summer. So I lived by myself and practiced eight hours a day — I think six days a week, and I think for three months. I even blew off the “Tusk” recording session the USC Marching Band had with Fleetwood Mac that summer in Dodger Stadium. I felt it was beneath me, I’m sorry to say.
I would begin each day with an hour or more of warm-ups and flexibility exercises, long tones and arpeggios quickly flipping between registers. Sometimes I went in for extended periods of long tones alone, which became like meditation. Cravens had told me that if you just played long tones long enough, focusing your embouchure just right, you would actually be able to hear sympathetic overtones ringing high above your note. So, if you played an E flat, say, in the middle of the bass clef, for 10 minutes, you could hear a high G glowing like a halo above. Then you might move onto the E natural. Anyway, I did it.
I practiced etudes, orchestral excerpts (including “Ride of the Valkyries,” “Bolero,” “William Tell,” Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, etc.), Bach cello suites and bel canto singing exercises (Rochut’s famous, or infamous, “Melodious Etudes for Trombone”). I watched the clock. Took breaks. Ate lunch and got back to it. Occasionally, during periods of pure rote practicing, I might flip on a baseball game with the sound off, and watch as I played (I had heard Itzhak Perlman did this.) But I put in my eight hours faithfully. Afterwards, friends came over for cards. We played Hearts and drank beer.
The upshot of my summer of practicing is that when I got back to school in the fall of ’79 I was vastly ahead of where I had been. I was no longer at the bottom of the trombone heap. I was someone who could compete, someone to pay attention to. Most importantly to me, my performing assignments improved. Chalk it all up to lots of practice. And you know what? It was kind of fun.
Photo: The author with beer in 1979. Photo by Mark Osborn.
I just listened to this piece for the first time in a few years, sitting down in front of my stereo after dinner. It was very civilized, especially with a Guinness Stout in hand. I have the recording with Richter and the Borodin Quartet (I should put it in Recommended Recordings). But here’s Glenn Gould and an uncredited string quartet (probably the Symphonia Quartet) playing the finale. Note that Gould is playing from memory, an unusual and unorthodox thing to do in chamber music.
I ran across this photo the other day and just thought I’d share it: Enrico Caruso boards the good ship “Giuseppe Verdi” con gusto. Click on the image for a larger view.
The “Giuseppe Verdi” was built in Italy in 1914, and it did passenger service between Italy and New York. In 1928, it was sold to Japanese owners and renamed the “Yamato Maru.” It was sunk by a U.S. submarine in the Philippines in 1943.
Below, Caruso sings ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Pagliacci. Have a hanky ready.
I’ve added Emphasis Dance — a new blog from my good friend and former colleague at the Register, dance critic Laura Bleiberg — to the blogroll. You see Laura’s name in the L.A. Times often these days. Go over to Emphasis Dance and welcome her to the blogosphere.
