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Steve Metcalf has been writing about the musical life of this region, and the wider world, for more than 30 years. For 21 of those years, he was the full-time staff music critic of The Hartford Courant. During that period, via the L.A. Times/Washington Post news service, his reviews, profiles and feature stories appeared in 400 newspapers worldwide.He is also the former assistant dean and director of instrumental music at The Hartt School, where he founded and curated the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series. He is currently Director of the Presidents' College at the University of Hartford. Steve is also keyboardist emeritus of the needlessly loud rock band Duke and the Esoterics.Reach him at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

JACK Quartet: If It's New, They'll Play it

Justin Bernhaut
JACK Quartet.
JACK Quartet has been drawing the kind of reviews that publicists generally don’t even dare dream about.

With apologies to Roger Moore's backgammon ploy in “Octopussy,” let’s call this “blogger’s privilege”: I am herewith calling attention to the new season of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School.

To get it out of the way quickly, I am the curator of the series. My involvement is unimportant, but the four-concert series, on the other hand, is important, now in its sixth season.

In the first five seasons, the chamber music series has brought to town some of the most celebrated, and many of the most innovative and forward-looking, chamber music artists and ensembles of our time: violinist Regina Carter, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, eighth blackbird, Cantus, Imani Winds, William Bolcolm and Joan Morris, Andy Narell, the Emerson, Brentano, and Miro String Quartets, among many others.

The new season -- as always, made possible by the generosity of the Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving -- kicks off Thursday, October 16 with the New York-based JACK Quartet, a group that has been drawing the kind of reviews that publicists generally don’t even dare dream about. “Electrifying,” “Mind-blowing,” Unbelievable,” are some of the key descriptors being thrown around.

Credit Henrik Olund
JACK Quartet.

For their performance at Hartt, JACK will play a typically out-there program of all contemporary music, including a piece by the remarkable and under-appreciated Ruth Crawford Seeger, stepmother of Pete. As with all the Garmany concerts, you can greet and mix with the artists, and enjoy some unhealthy baked goods, at the post-concert reception in the lobby.

The other concerts in the 2014-15  Garmany series are the L.A.-based Calder Quartet on November 20; the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth on February 5; and the International Contemporary Ensemble on April 23.

Attend the Tale

Until recently, there were two ways of presenting a live performance of an opera or musical. You had your conventional, fully-staged production, with sets and costumes, etc., and then you had your “concert version,” with the orchestra seated onstage, and the singers standing downstage, pretty much stock still, and often with music stands in front of them.

Over the past decade or so, stage directors have been exploring a new, flexible, hybrid format. I’m not sure this format has a name, but we’ll call it the semi-staged concert version. The performers get to be in character and move around, sometimes among and around the musicians. There are often props and even hints of scenery. In addition to other benefits, it’s a nice way to do big-orchestra shows with actual big orchestras.

A performance of "Sweeney Todd" starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson.
Credit PBS
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PBS
A performance of "Sweeney Todd" starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson.

One of the most brilliantly inventive examples was the New York Philharmonic presentation, last March, of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” Conceived by the ridiculously talented Lonny Price, the production starred Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson, and was conducted by New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert.

It was finally broadcast by PBS on Friday, September 26. Given PBS’s strange and unpredictable history with respect to making available its archived music and theater broadcasts, I was afraid this landmark performance might disappear after the lone televised appearance. But I was wrong: it’s available to view (and embed) online via the PBS website.

There are a lot of “Sweeney” video versions floating around, including bootlegs, but this really is a knockout piece of theater. If you can watch the opening sequence and not be drawn in, you need to seriously consider your potential as a performing arts consumer. And who knew that Emma Thompson had such impressive vocal chops? Is there anything this woman can’t do?

Beethoven. Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven's name in the proscenium at Boston Symphony Hall.
Credit BSO/WGBH
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BSO/WGBH
Beethoven's name in the proscenium at Boston Symphony Hall.

His name, and his alone, stands carved into the proscenium above the stage at Boston’s Symphony Hall.

This fact is pointed out early in Jan Swafford’s entertaining, occasionally overstuffed new biography, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). As the Symphony Hall gesture illustrates, the mythologizing of Beethoven has been a reliable industry for more than a century and a half, beginning almost at the moment of his death in 1827.

Indeed, analyzing and evaluating the dozens of Beethoven biographies is as recognized a scholarly activity as poring over the man’s musical output itself. 

Swafford, who has previously given us solid and readable bios of Brahms and Charles Ives, veers here slightly in the direction of writing for a more musically trained audience. (I like to think it was a fretting Houghton editor, not the author, who dreamed up the book’s flashy subtitle, with its echoes of Irving Stone’s heavy-breathing novelization of Michelangelo’s life, The Agony and the Ecstasy.)

Jan Swafford.
Credit janswafford.com
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janswafford.com
Jan Swafford.
Ludwig van Beethoven in an 1815 portrait by Joseph Willibrord Mahler.
Credit Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
Ludwig van Beethoven in an 1815 portrait by Joseph Willibrord Mahler.

Still, Swafford’s 1,100-page tome is well within the grasp of anyone who listens, with simple pleasure, to the still-revelatory music of the man whose life it so meticulously chronicles. For added insight, read the New York Times reviewby pianist Jeremy Denk, or the USA Today review by the ever-astute journalist (and former Hartford Courant arts writer) Matt Damsker.

Everything New is Old Again

Back in the 1970s, when I first became aware of the “original instrument,” (later to be called the “historically informed”) movement in music, I found it irritating and pretentious. Weirdly fast tempos, thin string sounds, shaky intonation – what was the attraction, again? Of course, I was in my 20s, and I found a lot of things irritating and pretentious.

A friend of mine started lending me records by an English guy who had formed an ensemble called the Academy of Ancient Music. Slowly, the records won me over. The performances, mostly of Baroque and Classical-era music, were bright, full of life, the opposite of pretentious. The guy was Christopher Hogwood.

Christopher Hogwood.
Credit hogwood.org
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hogwood.org
Christopher Hogwood.

Hogwood died last week at the age of 73. After establishing himself as the monarch of early music, he had gone on later in his life to conduct opera, standard Romantic orchestral fare, and even a fair amount of contemporary music. All in all, a career not quite like any other in our time.

I am still not an automatic fan of the historically informed approach to music-making. I'm afraid the movement has its charlatans. And if I read another program note that says the period instrument boom “instantly stripped away all the accumulated varnish of decades of…blah, blah, blah,” I will -- I don’t know -- drink a large cannister of varnish.

But let us recall that Hogwood was a true visionary, and he undoubtedly helped a lot of people, including a know-it-all 20-something, listen to and think about music in a fresh and open-minded way. RIP, Maestro.

Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

Steve Metcalf is an administrator, critic, journalist, arts consultant and composer. He writes the weekly Metcalf on Music blog for WNPR.org, and is the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School.

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