Wildest expectations soar at the Washington Cathedral

Sergei Rachmaninoff, age 10 or 12, St. Petersburg/Wikimedia Commons

The title of the program was To the Wild Sky and my favorites were all there:  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Washington National Cathedral with Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and the Cathedral Choral Society. 

Who knew about their links? 

Conductor Steven Fox leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Cathedral Choral Society at the Washington National Cathedral, Mar. 19, 2023/By Patricia Leslie

In the Cathedral's crossing, the musicians, soloists, and chorus hypnotized the audience throughout the afternoon with Rachmaninoff's unsettling response to a painting and his intrepretation of Poe's  "bells! bells!  bells!" ringing everywhere.  

The Isle of the Dead, 1880 - 1886, Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901)

Also on the program was Tennyson's text of his poem, In Memoriam: A.H.H., sung by soprano Andriana Chuchman, who later joined the Symphony, other soloists, and Chorus in Poe's The Bells.

Soprano Andriana Chuchman at the Washington National Cathedral, Mar. 19, 2023

After all, it is the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff's birth (April 1 or [O.S.] Mar. 20, 1873) and the DMV has gone plumb Rachy with three performances in a week and I am going to them all.    

Lucky me!*

To combine the literary immortals with music is an astonishing feat and one which most assuredly exceeded expectations at the Cathedral from the first note to the last.  

The audience was as captivated as I who had anticipated the sounds would echo in the Cathedral's great hall, diminishing the aural effects but that was not to be.

 

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's percussionists at the Washington National Cathedral, Mar. 19, 2023

 

Guest artists, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Cathedral Choral Society at the conclusion of the performance, To the Wild Sky, Mar. 19, 2023

The Washington National Cathedral, Mar. 19, 2023/By Patricia Leslie

First on the program was The Isle of the Dead, Rachmaninoff's response to a popular painting by Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901).  

The music filled one with a sense of dread. In the boat as we neared the island, foreboding and heavy anxiety filled my emotions as waves and strings deepened, cymbals crashed and threw me around the vessel as it neared shore. The landscape echoed with the coming climax. 

Upon landing, a single violin greeted us with a rainbow  and not such an unpleasant ending.

Death be not proud.

The next selection, Ring Out, Wild Bells, to the Wild Sky was composed by Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964 and a Pulitzer Prize finalist) in 2000 on commission to welcome the new millennium. 

For her base, the composer chose Tennyson's poem with its message of the "universal" drive for peace.  It begins with multiple voices singing like bells in tandem with Ms. Chuchman, chorus, and orchestra. 

Dare I write the best was saved for last?

"The bells!  The bells!  The bells!" so reads Poe's title he wrote in 1848-1849 and spoken confidently a cappella before the musical presentation by an unidentified man on video.

"Hear the sledges with bells" is Poe's first line, a sledge, coincidentally or not, was the vehicle used by Rachmaninoff and his family to escape Russia forever in 1917 as the nation's revolution took hold. 

Program notes said an adaptation of Poe's Bells by the Russian Konstanin Balmont (1867-1942) led a student at the Moscow Conservatory in 1912 to recommend to Rachmaninoff that he put the poem to music. 

After the composer read the verses, he "decided at once to use them for a choral symphony," an incredible performance at the Cathedral for the audience to hear that which became "the one I like best of all my works."

The movements included solos by John Ramseyer, tenor, Ms. Chuchman, and Aleksey Bogdanov, baritone, all exceeding quality demanded by Washington's attending classical perfectionists. 

With a 20 minute intermission, the concert lasted almost two hours, an unforgettable production which will be hard to outperform by this week's remaining Rachmaninoff concerts.

More about Rachmaninoff: 

Is it Rachmaninoff or Rachmaninov? Music for Everyone says the Rachmaninoffs changed their name from Rachmaninov when they fled Russia, likely because the family was pre-revolution Russian bourgeoisie.

Boosey & Hawkes, "the" classical music publisher, says about Rachmaninoff: "The years up to the Russian Revolution were spent in an exhausting whirl of playing and conducting, with the family’s country estate at Ivanovka, in the countryside south-east of Moscow, offering a haven of peace where he could concentrate on composition. The works that emerged during this period include the Third Piano Concerto, the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, the choral symphony The Bells, and two a cappella choral works, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and the Vespers."

Rachmaninoff was born into a musical family and began piano lessons at age 4. After fleeing Russia with his family and settling in the U.S. about four decades later, he made a living by giving many performances but, like many artists, finding little time to compose.  

On Feb. 17, 1943, already "gravely ill" and almost 70 years old, Rachmaninoff played his last recital at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where a statue to the composer was dedicated in 2003, the 130th anniversary of his birth, at the site of the 1982 World's Fair.

He became an American citizen shortly before he died of melanoma that year.

Conducting Sunday was Steven Fox, assisted by Joy Schreier, pianist.

*More Rachmaninoff:

The National Symphony Orchestra, 7 p.m., Mar. 23, 2023 at the Kennedy Center.

BSO, 8 p.m., Mar. 25, 2023, Music Center at Strathmore, Angel Blue and Rachmaninoff II; tickets starting at $35.

BSO, 8 p.m., Apr. 13, 2023, Music Center at Strathmore, Marin Conducts Rach 3; tickets starting at $35. 

In Baltimore BSO Rachmaninoff performances, Mar. 24, Mar. 26, and Apr. 15, 2023.

Of note, Poe and Tennyson were born in the same year, 1809, as was President Abraham Lincoln.

Why are most of the great composers Russian?  I am guessing many Ph.D. students have written their dissertations on this topic, at least one I would like to read!  Does their nation's turbulent past play a role?

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Rachmaninoff and Edgar Allan Poe star with the National Symphony Orchestra

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)/Wikipedia

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)/Wikipedia

 

My favorite composers were on the National Symphony Orchestra program Thursday night, and if you rush today, you can hear them tonight.

It was practically an all Russian evening, from the guest conductor, Vassily Sinaisky (who never used a baton), to composers Sergei  Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) and Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), to the vocalists, guest soprano, Dina Kuznetsova, and tenor, Sergey Semishkur.

Other nations represented on the platform, besides Americans who are members of the Choral Arts Society of Washington, the NSO, and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), were guest tenor, Elchin Azizov from Azerbaijan, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) of Austria. 

Beginning the program was NSO's first performance of Borodin's Overture to Prince Igor, which began solemnly enough but soon gave way to vigorous double bass, building to a climax in a piece whose authorship is uncertain, according to the program.  (By day, Borodin was a professor of chemistry who had little time for composition, but around-the-clock he was an advocate of women's rights, founding the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg.)

A NSO star, Loren Kitt, splendidly played the familiar but always welcome, Mozart's Concerto in A major for Clarinet and Orchestra, K. 622, in an almost nonchalant fashion, totally unruffled by the audience in front of him, and cleaning his instrument before he began, while the orchestra played on behind him.

The best composition of the night belonged to the second half of the program and Rachmaninoff's interpretation of Poe's The Bells: sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, and mournful bells, following life's trajectory, from childhood to adulthood to the grave, Poe's words augmented by those of Russian poet, Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) as in "The Silver Sleigh Bells":

And their dreaming is a gleaming that a perfumed air exhales,
And their thoughts are but a shining,
And a luminous divining
Of the singing and the ringing, that a dreamless peace foretells.

From "The Mellow Wedding Bells":

Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of tender passion their melodious voice foretells!

From "The Loud Alarum Bells":

Yet we know
By the booming and the clanging,
By the roaring and the twanging,
How the danger falls and rises like the tides that ebb and flow

From "The Mournful Iron Bells":

What a world of desolation in their iron utterance dwells!
And we tremble at our doom,
As we think upon the tomb,
Glad endeavour quenched for ever in the silence and the gloom.

The beauty of The Bells was magnified by the voices of Choral Arts Society (under the direction of Scott Tucker and composed of 130 members, a few more women than men, my count) and the guests performers named above, so eloquent and professional in their deliveries, one could think of no better singers to be hired for such an occasion.

(Have you ever heard of the "celesta," one of three keyboards played in Bells?  Neither has Dorling-Kindersley, Limited, which published the Complete Classical Music Guide (2012) or David Pogue and Scott Speck, authors of Classical Music for Dummies (1997), who all omit the instrument defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as "a keyboard and metal plates struck by hammers (! (editor's addition)) that produce bell-like tones."  To the untrained, it makes sounds like one might imagine a grownup's toy piano would.  Delightful!  What a nice girl's name to bestow. Akin to "celestial.")

Who would have thought the night would become so glorious, and to think I just picked the performance for my #1 love, Rachmaninoff!

(Update:  At a later event I met a Russian scholar who told me if Poe were any other nationality besides American, he thought Poe would have been Russian, based on Poe's temperament. This was a man who said he read Poe's complete works every summer when he visited his grandmother.)

(Questions: Where were the floral arrangements usually found at the end of the aisles at the stage, and why were the first two rows of seats kept empty of concertgoers?)


What:  Borodin, Mozart, Poe, and Rachmaninoff

When:  Tonight, 8 p.m.

Where:  John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.

Admission:  Tickets start at $10.

Duration:  About two hours with one 15 minute intermission

For more information: 202-467-4600

patricialesli@gmail.com

 

Munch extended through Sunday at the National Gallery of Art

Edvard Munch, The Vampire, 1895 (printed 1896/1902) lithograph and color woodcut with watercolor on thick china paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund and Gift of Lionel C. Epstein

© Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2013

 

 

A few precious days remain to see 20 of Edvard Munch’s prints and drawings in a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Art which commemorates the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth (December 12, 1863).

Probably the most celebrated artist from Norway who drew one of the world's most recognizable works, if not the most recognizable, The Scream (1895), Munch said he used art to interpret the world and "explain life and its meaning to myself."

 

If you don't know anything about Edvard Munch, the etchings in the one-gallery show reveal his turmoil, depression, sadness, and anger at women who dominate the display. (They are in 18 of the pieces.)

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm, 1895, lithograph sheet: 45.6 x 31.5 cm (17 15/16 x 12 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

© Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2013

 

He was born in a farmhouse in Norway, the son of a doctor and a woman half his father's age.

When Munch was only five, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his four siblings were raised by their conservatively religious father (whose father was a minister) and aunt. It was an oppressive environment where the father often admonished his children about their behavior, saying their mother was watching them from heaven, upset by what she saw. (“She knows when you are sleeping, she knows if you’ve been bad or good…”) He told his children tales of horror, including some by Edgar Allan Poe.

 

Said Munch: “I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.”

Contributing to his lifelong angst was the death, when he was 13, of his beloved sister, Sophie, at 15, another victim of tuberculosis, who had become somewhat of a substitute mother for Munch.

His first major work, The Sick Child (1894) represents his break from impressionism and naturalism, and captures the pain and his immense sadness over his sister's death. The label quotes Munch: "Scarcely any painter has ever experienced the full grief of their subject as I did."

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1894 (printed 1895), drypoint on thick cream paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

© Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2013

His love life was often in shambles.  Two married women drew Munch's ardor (because they were unavailable?), an obsession he experienced for several years, and, later, he spurned marriage with a long-term lover who finally gave him up after a shooting incident and married a younger man. 

Bitter and angry, Munch took to the drawing board.

Could he have been a misogynist? Carrying anger remaining from the death of his mother who "abandoned" him, grief which engulfed him at the time of his adored sister's death, and lovers who wouldn't love? They all "left" Munch.

As a viewer moves from print to woodcut in the show, one cannot escape the obvious:  Edvard Munch was extremely troubled by women and their desertion of him.

The entrance to the tribute show for Edvard Munch at the National Gallery of Art/Patricia Leslie

 

Nothing affirms this in the show quite as well as Love and Pain, later titled Vampire which is as the name suggests:

A woman engulfs a man in a haunting embrace with her arms and bloody red hair, the major color in the woodcut. Both anonymously faced subjects look down.

Is the man a child seeking comfort in his mother's lap? Or sympathy from a lover who seems to suck blood from his neck? Every man? Every woman? Is this a perpetual trap by women with their fangs out? (I am here to tell you it doesn’t work.) Munch was unsettled by the women’s “revolution” of the late 19th century and their growing independence.

 

In 1889 he moved to Paris where art by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec excited and influenced him. Three years later, his one-man show in Berlin closed abruptly due to controversy.  Even then, "bad press was good press," and Munch relished the talk.

From time to time his father had helped him with living expenses but frowned upon the nudes his son drew and was known to have destroyed at least one of Munch's impressions, but, like many artists, Munch's works became "his children,” and he resisted letting them go.  Or selling them sometimes.

During his later years Munch drew many nudes from the models who visited him at his home near Oslo where he lived in solitude and feared the creeping Nazis and what they would do to his art which filled the second floor of his home.  Munch died in the house January 23, 1944, four years after the Nazis invaded Norway. 

Last year the most colorful of his Screams sold for almost $120 million.  Munch's works are the first by a Western artist to be exhibited at the National Gallery in Beijing.

The Nazis called works by him, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Gauguin, and others, "degenerate,” and they removed 82 of Munch's pictures from German museums.  Munch illustrated life's sorrows and their emotions and pain.

Wikipedia quotes Adolph Hitler: "[These] prehistoric Stone Age culture barbarians and art-stutterers can return to the caves of their ancestors and there can apply their primitive international scratching."

Enjoy “scratchings” in “the cave” at the National Gallery of Art!

The exhibition curator was Andrew Robison, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art.

What: Edvard Munch: A 150th anniversary Tribute

Admission: No charge

When: Now through Sunday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., and from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., all other days

 

Where: Ground Floor at the West Building, the National Gallery of Art, between Fourth and Seventh streets at Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.

Metro stations: Smithsonian, L'Enfant Plaza, Archives-Navy Memorial, or Judiciary Square

For more information: 202-737-4215

patricialesli@gmail.com

 

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The music premiere of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven'

Gustave Dore, The Raven, 1884. "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted--nevermore!" Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress

It was all we expected and much more.

That being the world premiere of a cantata for Edgar Allan Poe's (1809-1849) poem, The Raven, created by Nicholas White (b. 1967) and commissioned by Angelo G. Cicolani, a board member and chairman emeritus of Dumbarton Concerts where Mr. White conducted four vocalists and a string quartet Saturday night and played the piano.

All this magnificence took place at the Historic Dumbarton Church in Georgetown which, enthusiasts will know, takes some dedication via private car, given the rarity of parking spots in Georgetown. However, it did not deter the determined.

'Bravo!' the packed house shouted repeatedly while standing at the show's conclusion.

Historic Dumbarton Church on the night of Nicholas White's premiere, The Raven/Patricia Leslie

 
Accompanied by two violins, a viola, and a cello, the vocalists flawlessly sang the words to one of the world's favorite poems:

T     Then into the church turning, all my soul within me burning,

S      Soon I heard again the music somewhat louder than before.

Beginning with a few mournful bars from the piano which became the ticking of a clock, the piece quickly accelerated with baritone Steven Combs's entry, which was, initially at least, almost overcome by the strings (June Huang and Christof Richter, violins, Marta Soderberg Howard, viola, and Benjamin Wensel, cello).

Soon, the voices of Emily Noel, soprano, Roger Isaacs, countertenor, and Matthew Loyal Smith, tenor, joined the production, adding depth to the composition which Followed fast and followed faster.

Each of the voices was exquisite in its own delivery, but it was stunning sound put forth by Mr. Isaacs, reaching unbelievably high notes, that the music became, like the poem, almost surreal, matching the content of the night and providing a splendid choir to hear.
 
Most spectacular were his solos, and the harmonies of the memorable combinations of duets, trios, and quartets.

 Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.

T      The work complemented the poem in elegant fashion and came visually to life by closing eyes and spying the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned in my mind...Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore.

The performance Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

        So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I

        sat repeating

'Tis beautiful music I am hearing, coming from the stage room floor.

We shall remember upon the morrow the sounds of the rapping, tapping upon our minds and the sorrow for the lost Lenore.

We were visitors entreating entrance upon the church's chamber doors. That we were and nothing more. Mr. White opened wide the door.

We sat there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming could the music be more than more? The silence at last was broken and soon we heard the notes take soar.

But the music still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling

While we sat in cushioned seats and heard lamenting for the lost Lenore.

To endure for ever more.

 The first part of the program featured the music of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) in Stabat Mater which Mr. Isaacs and Ms. Noel sang in solos and duets, a selection which enriched anticipation of the coming attraction.

The Saturday performance coincided with the 35th anniversary of Dumbarton Concerts and concluded with a presentation of an appreciation plaque to Mr. Cicolani, who was called up on stage to receive recognition and thanks from the adoring audience. 

Mr. White, a Grammy nominee, is director of chapel music and organist at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. Ten years ago he founded Tiffany Consort, an ensemble of eight singers whose first production, O Magnum Mysterium, earned a Grammy nomination.  Mr. White has earned many commissions, including presentations for Martin Luther King Day at the Kennedy Center, and for the National Cathedral.

For those familiar with Gustave Dore's eerie and unforgettable drawings of The Raven which Poe never saw and which were published the year after Dore died in 1883, four original Dore drawings may be seen in the new exhibition, Color, Light, Line: French Drawings, Watercolors and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac in the West Building at the National Gallery of Art through May 13.

Some years ago, for my sister at the closed (but soon to re-open?) Edgar Allan Poe House in Baltimore, I purchased the Dore book of Raven illustrations, but I was never able to part with it, and there it sits still upon my table ever more.

Future Dumbarton Concerts are:

February 23: This Man is Magic! Ken Peplowski & Chuck Redd Trio

March 16: Beyond Beethoven Carpe Diem String Quartet

April 6: The Criers and A Far Cry

Where: Historic Dumbarton Church, 3133 Dumbarton Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20007

For more information: 202-965-2000

Free parking at The Hyde School, 3219 O Street

Metro station:  Are you kidding?  This is Georgetown.

2013 TOP DEAL_Mexico_Save 40% at the Grand Oasis Palm The All Inclusive Family Resort Mexican Style

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Four Bicentennial Birthdays

What is the significance of the bicentennial birthdays of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Darwin , Felix Mendelssohn, and Abraham Lincoln in 2009?

Darwin and Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809; Mendelssohn, on February 3, 1809, and Poe, on January 19, 1809.

From the Classics Literature Library comes this:

Edgar Allan Poe's ancestry on his father's side has been traced to Samuel Lincoln, a weaver who emigrated from Hingham, England, to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637. The president's forebears were pioneers who moved west with the expanding frontier from Massachusetts to Berks County, Pennsylvania, and then to Virginia. Abraham Lincoln's father, Thomas Lincoln, was born in Rockingham County in backcountry Virginia in 1778. In 1781 Thomas Lincoln's father, who was also named Abraham, took his family to Hughes Station on the Green River, 32 km (20 mi) east of Louisville, Kentucky. In 1786 a Native American killed the first Edgar Allan Poe while he was at work clearing land for a farm in the forest.