by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At noon, organist Jonathan W. Moyer will play the final Tuesday noon concert of the season at the Church of the Covenant in University Circle. His program begins with Arnold Schoenberg’s thorny Variations on a Recitative, continues with J.S. Bach’s hyper-contrapuntal Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her” & ends with Czech composer Petr Eben’s A Festive Voluntary (Variations on “Good King Wenceslas”), a witty take on a popular carol about the Czech monarch. Click here for the live stream.
CONCERTGEBOUW VIDEO:
The Amsterdam Concertgebouw has made a video available of the May 18 concert by the Jerusalem Quartet, an event that was reinstated after the ensemble’s first performance last month was canceled for security reasons. The program includes Paul Ben-Haim’s First String Quartet and Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in g. Watch it here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Russian-born double bassist and conductor Serge Koussevitzky died on this date in 1951 in Boston, where he had led the Boston Symphony for 25 eventful years.
It’s difficult to imagine 20th century music without the long list of works that Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered, or the young musicians he mentored at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts beginning in 1940, two years after the BSO had established its summer home there. Watch The Tanglewood Story, a 1949 movie about Tanglewood’s early years produced by the U.S. Information Service that features rare footage of Koussevitzky and Aaron Copland, pictured above with “Koussey’s” star pupil Leonard Bernstein.
Those commissioned works include Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (listen here to a recording made in Symphony Hall in October 1930), Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, as well as occasional works like Randall Thompson’s Alleluia (ordered for the opening of the school at Tanglewood) and The Last Words of David (watch a rare video of Koussevitzky conducting at Tanglewood in 1950).
Self-taught as a conductor, Koussevitzky spawned many stories about his baton technique and grasp of scores. Flummoxed about when to come in during a soft passage (the conductor unhelpfully said “Ven my stick touch de air, you play”), some of his players determined that the proper moment was when the baton passed the third button on his vest.
And Nicholas Slonimsky reported on his attempts to help Koussevitzky master the complex rhythms in The Rite of Spring in his autobiography, Perfect Pitch. “To my dismay, I realized Koussevitzky was incapable of coping with these complications.” Slonimsky’s solution was to work out an alternate score that simplified changes of meter but preserved the composer’s rhythms.
