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Tag: Ma Vlast

Sawallisch’s Quiet Genius Remembered

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when classical music was very nerdy and very Teutonic.

Here are four renowned conductors – Wolfgang Sawallisch, Fritz Rieger, Rudolf Kempe, and Rafael Kubelik (okay, so Kubelik was Czech) – rehearsing Bach at their respective keyboards, with members of Kubelik’s Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. You get a sense that this is about as informal as these guys ever got! Anyway, it’s a pleasant diversion for a Sunday morning.

Sawallisch, later music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, would have been 100 yesterday. I had my eye on the centenary for the past week, and had meant to post about it, but then I got busy and it just passed me by.

My first exposure to Sawallisch’s musicmaking was in my 20s, during my days in community radio, when I stumbled across his recording of Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” which I’m happy to say I’ve always retained an affection for. I’ve got it on CD now, but I kind of miss the original overheated cover, when it was issued on vinyl: with its harpist perched atop a jutting reef, assailed by crashing waves, against the backdrop of a diurnal supermoon; its diaphanous, sword-bearing fairy; and its naked women cavorting in a mountain lake, rendered with all the marvelous vulgarity of 1970s airbrushed van-art.

I couldn’t believe it when a friend of mine broke the news over coffee one afternoon that Sawallisch was coming to Philadelphia. This was a more leisurely time, before we were all lashed to the internet.

Sawallisch?!!

That “Ma Vlast” album cover aside, his was a name I had come to associated with Old World integrity and classic (mono) recordings of Richard Strauss. Had he ever even been to the United States? How old was he? I guess at the time he must have been around 70.

His tenure as music director in Philadelphia would prove to be a high-profile capstone to a very respectable, indeed enviable – if not exactly glamorous – career. There was always something akin to this Bach video about Sawallisch – earnest and all about the music. But there’s something kind of reassuring about returning it now, when seemingly everything is all about flash and dazzle.

Sawallisch was music director in Philadelphia from 1993 to 2003. In addition to his directorship of L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, he also held posts with the Vienna Symphony (allegedly turning down offers from the Vienna Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera), the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Bavarian State Opera. He died in 2013, six months shy of his 90th birthday.

Memorably, his abilities as a pianist came in handy during a ferocious snowstorm in 1994, when Philadelphia Orchestra musicians couldn’t make it in for a scheduled concert of scenes from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Die Walküre” (including all of Act I). He made the impromptu decision to throw open the doors of the Academy of Music and play the accompaniment himself at the keyboard, supporting Deborah Voigt, Heikki Suikola, and chorus, free for the enjoyment of anyone who cared to brave the elements.

Say want you want about stolid Sawallisch, his generous spirit will not soon be forgotten. If only there were more of the spirit of that “Ma Vlast” van art in his musicmaking.

Sawallisch conducts “Šárka” from “Má Vlast” in Japan in 1990

August 27, 2023
Smetana’s Heroic Life & Music on WWFM

In the latter half of the 19th century, music became a focal point for nations struggling to assert their own identity following centuries of imperial control. Bedřich Smetana mined the history, landscape, and lore of the Czech people for the raw materials from which he would forge a distinctive national sound.

Unfortunately, Smetana’s life was also marred by tragedy. Political upheavals, professional intrigue, and the deaths of three children and a wife all weighed heavily up him. A second marriage was unhappy. Syphilis robbed him of his hearing, his sanity, and eventually his life.

Yet he completed some of his greatest works under what should have been cripplingly dispiriting circumstances. By the time he composed “Má vlast” – including the ubiquitous “Vltava” (or “The Moldau”) – he was stone deaf and living in domestic purgatory. (He believed that his second wife hated him, as she was always hounding him about money.) This period also yielded another of his most enduring works, the String Quartet No. 2 “From My Life.”

Further vindication came when his opera “Libuše” received its belated premiere and was rapturously received. In all, Smetana composed eight operas, but of these only “The Bartered Bride” is still performed regularly outside the Czech Republic.

Smetana is everlasting in the hearts of the Czech people. We’ll celebrate his independent spirit this afternoon on The Classical Network, on his birthday, alongside composers Marc Blitzstein, John Gardner, George Alexander Macfarren, and Robert Simpson, violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe, guitarist and composer Celedonio Romero, and conductor and composer Leif Segerstam.

The music-making will be positively heroic, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

To tide you over, here’s Smetana’s Sonata for Two Pianos, Eight Hands:

The chicks dig Czech: “Bedřich Smetana and His Friends in 1865,” by Franz Dvořák (no relation to the composer)

March 2, 2020
Rafael Kubelik A Centennial Remembrance

Yesterday would have been the 100th birthday of the Czech conductor, Rafael Kubelik, a fact I overlooked in yet another self-serving post about one of my shows.

Over the course of his career, Kubelik held positions as principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, music director of the Chicago and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras, and musical director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.

He weathered the Nazi occupation, although his standing was often a precarious one. When the Communists took over, he packed his bags and headed for Britain. He had been engaged to conduct “Don Giovanni” at the Edinburgh Festival in 1948. His wife learned of his decision to defect only when they were already on the plane. In 1953, the couple was convicted in absentia of “taking illicit leave.”

In 1956, Kubelik was invited back with a promise of freedom to do whatever he liked, but he declined in an open letter to The Times, stating he would only consider returning once all political prisoners were freed and all émigrés were granted the same rights he was promised. Likewise, he declined further invitations.

In 1946, he had helped found the Prague Spring Festival and conducted its opening concert. He returned only in 1990, after the fall of Communism, and well after he had formally retired from the podium. The emotional reunion, in which he conducted the Czech Philharmonic in Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” was preserved on Supraphon Records. It was Kubelik’s fifth recording of the piece.

I remember when Rafael Kubelik died. I was vacationing with my family at the Jersey shore in 1996. It was the one week a year when I did heavy newspaper reading, and I remember when coming across the coverage in the New York Times, remarking to my mother what a big deal his death was. Now my mother is gone, as well.

Here’s Rafael Kubelik with the complete “Ma Vlast” from the 1990 Prague Spring Festival:

Also from 1990, an outdoor “Vltava” (a.k.a. “The Moldau”):

June 30, 2014

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