{"id":43,"date":"2012-05-31T09:55:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T16:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=43"},"modified":"2014-01-06T13:47:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T21:47:54","slug":"la-phil-tonight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"LA Phil Tonight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I have tickets to the LA Phil<\/a> tonight, Gustavo Dudamel conducting a world premiere of John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary<\/a><\/em>. \u00a0Pam doesn’t want to go, so I may take Nathan.<\/p>\n

Last week I received a call from the LA Phil’s development office. \u00a0I was forced to tell them why I don’t give them money anymore. \u00a0Next year will be the 11th consecutive season without a regular subscription concert with a work by Schoenberg.<\/p>\n

Of course, there have been some Schoenberg performances since the big Schoenberg Prism<\/a> series in 2001-2002. \u00a0In February 2005<\/a>, Esa-Pekka Salonen led the orchestra in Gurrelieder<\/a><\/em>, but three of the four concerts were completely bought out by Chorus America<\/a>\u00a0for their conference, so that doesn’t really count. \u00a0And Simon Rattle performed the Brahms\/Schoenberg Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, op. 25<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and Chamber Symphony No. 1, op. 9<\/a><\/em>\u00a0with the Berliner Philharmoniker in November 2009<\/a>. \u00a0There have been some non-orchestra performances, including Pierrot Lunaire<\/em>\u00a0on a Green Umbrella program in February 2010<\/a>. \u00a0And this year, my friend Mitch Newman<\/a> gave an excellent performance of the String Quartet #3<\/a><\/em> (which did not get reviewed, unfortunately).<\/p>\n

But eleven straight seasons without a regular subscription orchestral performance by the LA Phil of a work by Schoenberg is just not right. \u00a0And so I told the development office that I felt there must be some ban on Schoenberg at the LA Phil, or else how do you explain it? Every other major orchestra in the world regularly performs Schoenberg, so how is it possible that in the city he called home for his last seventeen years, they play not a note? \u00a0 And how could they ask me to give money to support an organization that has banned my grandfather’s music?<\/p>\n

The development people were very nice, and sympathetic. \u00a0They even suggested that President Deborah Borda<\/a> or Chairman David Bohnett<\/a> would love to hear from me about it. I told them that I’d be happy to speak with anyone, but I didn’t think that Borda or Bohnett would want to hear what I had to say. \u00a0The development person said he would send me an e-mail and introduce me to Bohnett. \u00a0And that was the last I heard. \u00a0No e-mail, of course.<\/p>\n

One more anecdote on this subject. \u00a0I remember meeting Deborah Borda for the first time at the LA Phil’s concert during the Schoenberg Prism series where they performed A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46<\/a><\/em>\u00a0with Leonard Nimoy as the narrator. (Incidentally, George Takai<\/a> recently performed the same role. \u00a0So when will William Shatner do it?) I was sitting up in the Founders section (this was before the move to Disney Hall) in tickets that the LA Phil had provided to Belmont<\/a>\u00a0(as publisher). \u00a0So I saw Ernest Fleishman<\/a> and went over to thank him for the tickets (and the whole Schoenberg Prism series, which I believe he had planned with Esa-Pekka prior to Deborah’s arrival in January 2000). \u00a0He introduced me to Deborah. \u00a0I said to Ernest that this was the first time I had heard Survivor<\/em>\u00a0in a live performance. \u00a0Deborah was surprised and asked how that could be true. \u00a0Well, I answered, this was the first performance by the LA Phil of that work in my lifetime (I was 35 years old). \u00a0Of course, Ernest had been executive director of the LA Phil for 30 of those years. \u00a0I suppose that is how Deborah learned that it was going to be okay not to program any more Schoenberg.<\/p>\n

And a final thought, the LA Phil has yet to perform the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, op. 36<\/a><\/em>. [My mistake: the work was premiered by the LA Phil in 1974 with James Levine conducting and Zvi Zeitlin on violin.] <\/em>The work was composed in Los Angeles in 1936. \u00a0Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was the LA Phil’s conductor for 25 years, and who has recorded a ton of Schoenberg, even won a Grammy<\/a> for his recording<\/a> of the concerto with Hilary Hahn and the Swedish Radio Symphony. \u00a0And yet he never performed the piece in Los Angeles. \u00a0In fairness, the work was programmed during the Schoenberg prism series in 2001-2002, but Viktoria Mullova cancelled in the last minute. \u00a0On her website<\/a>, it says<\/p>\n

Mullova recalls learning the violin concerto of another Austrian, Arnold Schoenberg, in the late 1980s \u201cand wanting to die, I was struggling so much\u201d. Asked to take it back into her repertoire for the 2001 Schoenberg festival in Los Angeles, she refused. \u201cDespite the perfect circumstances, it wasn\u2019t worth it. The music wasn\u2019t good enough for me to put up with the pain.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It must be false, because she was in the program and only cancelled the week of the performance. \u00a0On Norman Lebrecht’s old posting from 2001<\/a>, it says<\/p>\n

As the Looking Glass tour packs her diary, she is busily relearning the Schoenberg concerto, the most refractory piece in the repertoire, which she will play in Los Angeles this year on the 50th anniversary of the great scale-breaker’s death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My understanding was that she had some sort of nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

In any case, the LA Phil could easily program the work again, with Hilary Hahn or Christian Tetzlaff (who recently performed it at Carnegie Hall<\/a>) or Ilya Gringolts (most recently in\u00a0Glasgow<\/a>) or Nikolaj Znaider<\/a>. \u00a0I’d like to hear Midori perform it, since she did a great job with the Phantasy, op. 47<\/a>. \u00a0But does the LA Phil really need me to tell them? \u00a0Shouldn’t they be able to figure this out on their own?<\/p>\n

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I have tickets to the LA Phil tonight, Gustavo Dudamel conducting a world premiere of John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary. \u00a0Pam doesn’t want to go, so I may take Nathan. Last week I received a call … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}