Rodion Shchedrin at Lincoln Center, plus Koji Attwood at Mannes
Early in its season, the Lincoln Center Festival highlighted the music of Rodion Shchedrin. Rather, the festival gave a taste of Shchedrin’s music—there’s a lot of it. He has become one of the most popular classical composers of today. Why’s that? For one thing, he’s gifted, and deserves his popularity. For another, he has been championed by some important musicians.
These include the conductors Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Lorin Maazel. Readers may remember when Maazel and the New York Philharmonic premiered Shchedrin’s opera, or semi-opera, The Enchanted Wanderer. That was in 2002. Since then, Gergiev has spread the work’s fame.
Shchedrin is a Russian, born in 1932. His name is pronounced “Shed-REEN.” He has written music in many forms—piano sonatas, liturgies, ditties, what have you—and in many styles. Shchedrin can be twelve-tone, and he can be unblushingly Romantic. You never quite know. In his corpus are five ballets, and he has a particular knack for this form. This has almost surely contributed to marital harmony: Shchedrin’s wife is Maya Plisetskaya, prima ballerina assoluta.
Mariinsky Ballet’s production of Anna Karenina, part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
Consider this: Shchedrin is one of the finest composers of our time; Plisetskaya is one of the finest dancers of all time. Are they the most talented couple on the planet? There’s Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf to consider, too.
Appearing at the Lincoln Center Festival were the Mariinsky Ballet and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, led by Gergiev. These forces are from St. Petersburg, as you know (and not Florida). They performed three Shchedrin ballets—well, two and a half, in a way. The first was Anna Karenina, from 1971, and the second was The Little Humpbacked Horse, from 1955-56. The next ballet was the Carmen Suite—Shchedrin’s 1967 arrangement of Bizet’s miraculous score. That arrangement is for strings and percussion, only. An interesting effect.
The opening night of Anna Karenina, in the Metropolitan Opera House, was a rather glam affair. I spotted some members of our own American Ballet Theatre in attendance. There was a member of the ABT onstage, too: Diana Vishneva, who danced the title role. She is a principal for both the ABT and the Mariinsky.
Shchedrin’s score, like Shchedrin’s output in general, is varied. It is spiky and atonal; it is also tender and tonal. At one point, out of nowhere, we hear a piano piece, Chopinesque. The score is, above all, danceable—danceable in its every measure. And it expresses the drama that Tolstoy wrote, long ago.
When Gergiev entered the pit, there was huge applause: The audience figured it was in for some good music-making. And it was. How refreshing, to hear good music-making from a ballet pit! The ABT is not distinguished by its music-making, to put it as gently as possible. Often, the conducting and playing are pedestrian; sometimes they are leaden. A recent Sleeping Beauty was amazingly flatfooted, musically.
At Anna Karenina, a senior ballet critic sitting next to me said, “It’s so unusual to hear a good orchestra.” I cringed on hearing this remark, while acknowledging the truth of it. Ballet critics should hear good orchestras routinely. The music is not an unimportant ingredient of a ballet; it should not be an afterthought.
After Anna came the little horse—The Little Humpbacked Horse, based on a fairytale by Yershov, a fairytale known to all Russians, I’m given to understand. Shchedrin’s score here is very different from the other one. You might not know the two were written by the same composer.
The score, appropriately enough, is like Yershov’s tale itself: fizzy, quirky and delightsome. It is also very funny. Indeed, Shchedrin’s score is, to a certain extent, a scherzo. We hear elements of jazz. And we also hear traditional Russian music, which Shchedrin loves. Speaking of love: He writes some love music, which is a bit on the sappy side, but nice all the same.
Ballet music is, to a degree, program music—music that sounds like something, or tries to sound like something. Thus, the fireflies in this ballet have “firefly music.” And an underwater scene has watery, woozy music—Wagner, in The Ring, is pretty good at this too.
Overall, Shchedrin’s Horse music is exultant and life-loving. You had to sit in your seat and grin. And Gergiev was positively electric, lending his abundant musicality to the proceedings. The Mariinsky orchestra followed his every move. The entire house seemed to tingle.
By the way, you could hardly get a seat for these ballets—which indicates, or may indicate, that the public is hungry for good stuff. For good pieces, well performed. People can do without the trendy, the pretentious, the avant-garde, the academic. Give them something substantive and inspired, and they will respond.
Finally, I’m tempted to ask, Can the Mariinsky orchestra and Gergiev come back and accompany the ABT in some Tchaikovsky ballets?
Music Old Yet New
One of the ABT’s offerings last season was The Lady of the Camellias, which uses piano music of Chopin. (There is scarcely any other music by Chopin, true.) The company employed three pianists, all of whom played for each performance, and the outstanding one of whom was Koji Attwood, a young American. He played the slow movement of Chopin’s B-minor sonata in arresting, affecting fashion.
Some weeks later, he played a recital at the Mannes school, on the Upper West Side. This was a recital in the International Keyboard Institute & Festival, that excellent enterprise run by Jerome Rose, the pianist and teacher, and his partner Julie Kedersha.
On the first half of his program, Attwood played music of Schumann, Chopin, Scriabin and Bortkiewicz. Who? Sergei Bortkiewicz, a Polish-Ukrainian-Russian pianist and composer who lived from 1877 to 1952. Attwood has championed Bortkiewicz, who deserves championing: The man was a smart, gifted Romantic. He would not be in the least out of place in the mainstream.
Attwood played everything with maturity, sobriety and command. He combined strength and subtlety, heft and lyricism. He always obeyed—which is to say, followed—the musical line. And he always showed respect for the music. There was uncommonly little ego in this music-making. At the same time, it was far from retiring.
The second half of the program was dominated by a transcription that Attwood himself made, of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Do we need a transcription of a Schubert quartet, given that there are many Schubert piano sonatas, some of which are underplayed? It is not a question of need. Attwood has made a fine transcription, one that sounds like a big Schubertian—or Beethovenian—piano sonata. My guess is, Schubert himself would approve.
For an encore, Attwood gave us a guitar piece, another of his transcriptions: Tárrega’s famous Recuerdos de la Alhambra. It expressed what I can only describe as a happy melancholy.
