Wagner, Brahms and sad decline of classical audience
/By Truman C. Wang
4/18/2023
Conductor Rafael Payare, soprano Dorothea Röschmann
In the program notes of the April 15 concert, we learn that William Grant Still, born in 1895, was acclaimed as "the dean of African American composers", until he was effectively silenced and cancelled by the black community and the liberal whites during the McCarthy era for denouncing his communist colleagues. History repeats itself in 2023; Communism again rears its ugly head. Still’s Darker America, scored for strings, winds, brass and piano, paints a somber road to triumph in a hostile world. Like Shostakovich’s Eighth symphony, the work ends with a question mark rather than overt optimism. Conductor Rafael Payare gave a quietly eloquent reading, with fine balance between the winds and the brass.
In his unusually stimulating pre-concert talk, Russell Steinberg drew a parallel between Wagner and Brahms – the two historically opposing camps of musical thoughts in the late nineteenth century – by demonstrating on the piano how Wagner’s Tristan motif appears in various guises throughout the First Symphony of Brahms. Suddenly, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder did not seem such an odd bedfellow next to Brahms First Symphony on the same program. Payare’s highly animated conducting – crouching down, jumping up and sideways, waving wildly as if in a trance – made a big exciting splash in the Brahms (the winds and brass again blending beautifully), helped also by the rich sounds of the divided violins emanating from the left and right of the podium. In the Wagner, Payare proved he could be a subtle and sensitive interpreter. Soprano Dorothea Röschmann sang the words vividly and powerfully, but vocally she sounded overparted on the top and hollow on the bottom.
The quality of concert audiences continues to decline season after season. The decline seemed to be accelerating prestissimo con brio on this night; they applauded after each song and after each movement of the symphony. I sat next to a large contingent of college kids who ordinarily would not be caught dead at a classical music concert on a Saturday night. One was texting the whole time until I stopped him, after which he slept through the remainder of the concert. So much for El Sistema music education in our schools.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.