Posts Tagged: LA Phil

T is for Turangalîla

My recent wanderings have come to an end (for now at least).  I went to Berlin, then to DC, then to LA.  In D.C. I saw the National Opera’s production of “Salome”, which was at a very high level musically, but dramatically vapid (see that previous link to my Berlin trip for more about that).  In LA, I went to see the Philharmonic’s performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie with Dudamel at the helm.

This was, in many ways, a surprising program choice for the Dudz.  In fact, going into the concert, I couldn’t help but thinking that the Turangalîla was much more an Esa-Pekka piece.  Indeed, not but a day after the concert was I reading Listen to This and my suspicion was confirmed: Maestro Salonen first encountered the Messiaen score when he was a Finnish tot of ten years old. (Interestingly, I learned from a different chapter that Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood became similarly obsessed with this score at the age of 15.)

I’m guessing that the Salonen connection may have had something to do with Dudamel’s choosing this piece: during his tenure as Music Director in LA, Salonen assiduously incorporated modern masterworks of the Turangalîla variety into the orchestra’s repertoire.  The audience there [which, by the way, was easily the youngest and most diverse audience I have ever seen at an orchestra concert] is, by all accounts, accustomed to hearing works of this magnitude and amplitude, so Dudamel has to show that he’s more than just flash. Which he definitely is, and his reading of this pieces was thorough and committed from start to finish.  And it’s not like conducting Mahler symphonies is a piece of cake anyway.

But what in the world is this Turangalila?  It’s some amazing music for one; and perhaps 30-40 minutes too long, for another.  The symphony is presented in ten movements, with the main material cycling through the whole piece.  As with many of Messiaen’s compositions, there’s an inherent mathematical logic to the way that these musical cells appear and reappear that is extremely interesting, but doesn’t make for the most satisfying listening experience when your butt’s planted in a seat for 90 minutes.

Listening to the symphony, I was immediately struck by one of the main themes which comes back about 30 or 40 times:

because it bears a striking resemblance to Bernard Herrmann’s score for Cape Fear:

which, of course, went through the transmogrifier several times to become Alf Clausen‘s much beloved theme music for Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons.  If you’re not adverse to watching illegal Russian-dubbed versions of TV on the internet, you can see the Cape Feare episode (for which Mr. Clausen picked up an Emmy) below:

Oh, and the other funny thing about the Turangalîla is that it uses the wood block like like it’s going out of style, and it sounds like Messiaen outsourced the final movement to Aaron Copland:

[P.S. I promise you that the LA Phil sounded about 100 times better than the above recording.]

A Book of Orchestrators

(and orchestrations)

pit-picture

I just finished reading Steve Suskin’s The Sound of Broadway Music, not five days after Terry Teachout did the same.  What a book!  What a HUGE gap this fills in for anybody interested in how Broadway Melodies get transformed from a tune with words to a what you hear in the theater.

I’ve been conducting musicals since I was 16 years old, and this book for the first time demystified Broadway scores in a major way.  I can remember conducting Kiss Me, Kate when I was a senior in high school and wondering where in Creation the dance music came from – reading the music (specifically, the “Tarantella”), it just seemed impossible that it was written by Cole Porter.  It turns out that a lady named Genevieve Pitot basically improvised it over a period of several days working with choreographer Hanya Holm.  This is what’s known as “dance arranging”, and the dance arranger might improvise something that has nothing to do with the score and then go home and arrange themes from the show to correspond to the dance patterns.

From there, Ms. Pitot’s scores went to Russell Bennett (who was the credited orchestrator on the show) and Don Walker (who did about a third of the total orchestrations – uncredited, as was so often the case).  These two gentlemen, along with very minor contributions from Walter Paul and Hans Spialek, orchestrated the entire score a mere 10 days before the opening.

This book is so tremendously informative, I would recommend it to anybody interested in Broadway musicals.  Suskin did a HUGE amount of research to put this whole thing together, and he is kind enough to share the great stories that he dug up in the process.  For example, a story from Stephen Sondheim that I had never encountered anywhere else, about how a strong-willed director/choreographer can actually trump a composer on his own orchestrations:

Jerry [Robbins] took over the orchestra during the dress rehearsal for “Somewhere,” and proceeded to circle the instruments.  “Now I want those out of there…”  He thought that Lenny had made it too lush.  I remember, I was sitting next to Lenny in the back o f the house.  Jerry hadn’t objected at the two orchestra readings.  But hearing it in the theatre with his dancers onstage, Jerry went running down the aisle, changing the orchestration.  I went, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to write home about this.”  Then I looked over, and Lenny is gone.  Where is he?  Not in the house.  I went out in the lobby of the teatre.  He wasn’t there.  Then I had a hunch.  I went down the street, to the nearest bar.  There he was, in a double booth, with five shots of scotch lined up in front of him.  Nobody could face Jerry Robbins down, so he went to the bar.

And that’s the version that is played to this very day.

lenny-and-jerry-2


On an unrelated note, I found a new young composer that I’m just wild about: Timothy Andres.  He has a big premiere coming up by the LA Phil “Green Umbrella” series; clearly this kid is a major contender of the Muhlian variety.  Dude’s music and the presentation thereof is hot.  I do so hate it when anybody else has talent.