Hooked on sheet music...

In June I wrote an essay for a new catalogue of Ostinato. Ostinato is a sheet music shop in Helsinki founded by the music students in 1978 and which is now mostly owned by the Student Union of the Sibelius Academy. When I was studying at the Academy I was a board member of Ostinato and It´s still a dear place to me. We are very lucky in Helsinki: we can still buy our music from a real shop. I´ll publish this short column as a translation by Susan Sinisalo. Something to digest for you in the beginning of a new season.


Hooked on sheet music

While in New York in April 2009, I deliberately set aside time to visit the Patelson Music House next door to Carnegie Hall on East 54th Street. Apart from showing a friend my favourite place in that city, I wanted to buy a specific edition of Mahler 1 and the orchestral parts of some Haydn symphonies.

The moment I entered the store, I realised something was wrong. There were yawning gaps on the shelves, bewildered customers wandering aimlessly around, and the staff looked as if they’d been in tears for a week. It turned out that the store established in 1954 was closing down. A major icon in American musical life was about to disappear. Apart from its phenomenal selection, Patelson’s was renowned for its expert personnel and its almost devout atmosphere. Adding to the store’s prestige were the artists visiting Carnegie Hall next door, all of whom seemed to have some business to conduct at this Manhattan mecca.

I’ve always been hooked on music shops. I remember how, as a student, it was always a thrill to be able to visit, say, Boosey’s in London or Doblinger’s in Vienna. As an Interrailer, defying the forces of gravity, I lugged around scores and sheet music you could only get by ordering them in Finland, if then. And ordering was not much fun; you need to be able to finger music and take a look at it before you buy. It’s your first introduction to a work, and hence a very solemn, sacred moment.

Nowadays ordering on the Internet is part of everyday life. I have tried to avoid this prosaic state of affairs by strolling along to Ostinato and ordering my scores from them. While I’m there, I can browse through the music they have in stock, even if I don’t really intend to buy any.

The budding pianist is already aware even at music-school age that music books differ. In one edition the same minuet will be served up with cute little bunnies, whereas in another the wig-framed face of Papa Bach may grace the page alongside the notes. But whatever you choose, the illustrations and even the quality of the paper will be indelibly engraved on your mind.

The slightly older music-college student will admire his teacher’s old, dog-eared copies of the Bach Inventions or the Mozart Sonatas. At some stage he will learn the important word “edition”. The first G. Henle Verlag edition with its blue covers seems a costly treasure, and the teacher’s notes scribbled in the margin are almost sacrilege: “make RH sing!”, “remember middle notes!”, “rhythm!”. Why this mania for spoiling the page? As if there were something wrong with the pupil’s memory.

Later, the conservatory and academy student will be simply deluged with editions. In libraries, cafés and smoking rooms he will compare Peters with Henle and Bärenreiter. “Urtext” will become a buzzword. He may seriously begin to imagine that the sheet free from all markings suggesting interpretation, infuriating illogicalities and ambiguities is somehow the greatest achievement of Western musicology and printing. The present era, intent on giving an authentic performance, tends to forget the tremendous historical and musically instructive insights afforded by, say, the Czerny or Schnabel editions of the Beethoven Sonatas.

Comparing editions and the supremacy of critical editions results in some comic behaviour. I recently performed Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto with a leading North American pianist. He had covered his ancient Schirmer copy with brown paper so that no one would notice he was not working from a critical edition. For the same reason I have torn the covers off my own, superb Dover score of “The Complete Piano Concertos by Beethoven”. We got on extremely well.

I myself find that, more and more often, my choice of edition is dictated by practical considerations. I seem to be guided more by extra-musical criteria: the quality of the paper, the binding, and especially the font. The fact that I can, in a fit of frustration, hurl the score at the wall without the binding falling apart is sometimes more important than whether the staccatos are marked with dots or wedges.

The composer’s intention is of course expressed graphically on the page, but the inner worlds of the composer, performer and listener ultimately encounter one another intuitively, in a state apart from the printed score, in the performance. Printed copies are nevertheless needed. Each generation of musicians has to buy its own copies. The fact that leading music stores are closing down is a consequence not of a crisis in the printing industry but of consumers’ changing buying habits and shops’ inability to respond to them. We may well speculate on the future of the newspaper or book, but it is unlikely that any reading device will ever replace the printed sheet of music. Otherwise, where will teachers write their instructions, violinists mark their bowings and conductors their peculiar hieroglyphics?

Travels

Usually conductors try to plan their concert programs so that they don´t have to use all their free time for studying scores. This is done by some kind of a musical recycling: playing only a limited amount of pieces during the season. I´ve never been good in this. There seems to be constantly piles of new scores around to study. This is certainly interesting and fascinating but has its downsides: again I had to buy a new, bigger suitcase. A couple of weeks ago a taxi driver in Tampere asked if I was carrying stones for a sauna.

In addition to this, I recently discovered that conducting Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms or Haydn without a score brings lots of joy, freedom and new perspective to my work. This means however that I have to spend hours memorizing these scores which I studied already years ago, I´m practically learning them all over again.

Don´t get me wrong, I´m not complaining. I enjoy my profession more than ever but also realize that I have to learn some time management. This is also one of the reasons why I haven´t been blogging for five weeks.

Since the beginning of March there have been three weeks in the U.S. In Indianapolis I played with Corey Cerovsek who´s got the perfect mind and sense of humor for the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Unlike most American orchestras, the ISO has a very dark and broad sound which seemed to suit well for the Schostakovich´s 11th Symphony. But again I was troubled by the difficulties of this powerful music. Technically it´s easy and emotionally it´s obvious but sometimes the absence of inner layers in the score makes me feel slightly useless. On the other hand the lack of textual complexity leaves the perfomers lots of energy for creating sound and form. No matter what the problems are, I think Boulez was wrong when he said that Schostakovich is "second or even third pressing of Mahler". There´s no point in comparing these composers at all. Mahler´s starting point was personal and Schostakovich´s universal. Certain similarities in musical language only emphasize this difference.

Indianapolis was followed by a week with the Houston Symphony and Alban Gerhardt. It was such a pleasure to play with Alban again. His reading of the Sinfonia Concertante by Prokofiev is something very special, bold and delicate at the same time. The Houston Symphony has sensitivity and ear for Sibelius and we had many happy moments with the 2nd Symphony. I can hardly wait for the "Eroica" with them in October. During my stay in Houston I heard Brinton Smith, the principal cello of the HSO to play a magnificent tour de force solo recital, spent a relaxing and funny afternoon with Alban and my colleagues Brett Mitchell and Ken-David Masur and went to see the Rothko Chappel (I didn´t even know it is in Houston. This information was kindly revealed to me by Angela Hewitt).

Before Easter I spent four jet lagged days in Leeds where I played with the Orchestra of Opera North. The reputation of this opera company is widespread but before my visit I didn´t know much about the orchestra.I have to say they were really good and the Leeds Town Hall is a magnificent concert venue, for the first time the finale of the "Titan" didn´t sound too tumultuous. Amanda Roocroft was a perfect soloist in a set of songs by Richard Strauss. My favorite, Die Heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland was included.

I´m writing this while traveling from Baltimore to Kuala Lumpur. The last concert with the Baltimore Symphony was on Saturday at the Strathmore Music Center near Washington DC. Percussionist Colin Currie played the U.S. premiere of the "Incantations" by Einojuhani Rautavaara, a new work which Colin premiered in London and which has since October been played in Rotterdam and Tampere. After three concerts in Baltimore we felt that the piece has finally found its shape. Colin is always an admirable soloist, concentrated and reliable. Also the BSO was a new orchestra for me. I´ve always been told that they are exceptional and it was great to notice that they really are equal to their reputation. It was easy to connect with this fine ensemble and it´s enthusiastic audience. Beethoven´s 7th with them was one of the highlights of my season.

Funny thing... the Baltimore concerts opened with Sibelius´s Finlandia. This was suggested by the orchestra (probably to eliminate a possible box office catastrophe caused by a contemporary percussion concerto) and I realized that I´ve never conducted this piece as a part of a symphonic program! I´ve played it dozens of times but never as what it really is: a symphonic poem with enormous musical gravity, not a national monument or a flamboyant encore.

Knowing that American orchestras have had difficult and depressing times economically, I´m always surprised to find these groups full of enthusiasm and joy of music making. Quite remarkable really.

In Easter, squeezed between all these trips we made a brave and acceptable performance of Beethoven´s Missa Solemnis in Tampere. I have been waiting for an opportunity to perform it since I borrowed the miniature score from the Sibelius Academy library in the mid 90´s (I can still remember the librarian looking at me, amazed. "What do you need this for? It´s not a very good piece, you know", she said). Knowing that it´s not an easy piece to approach I was moved by the supportive observance and warm enthusiasm of our audience.

I´ve been reading quite a lot about Beethoven and his life but his religiousness has always been an enigma to me. As an offspring of the enlightenment he was probably a deist: he accepted the concept of God as a creator but thought that the universe is in the hands of the human beings only, especially in the hands of the great minds like himself. I think he considered himself as a supreme being in a deistic sense. He must have been absolutely sure that like universe, his own works would live their own life after he had created them. He was convinced that they were to become the essential part of the Western canon.

There is a clear sigh of this in the Missa: the turning point of the whole piece is the coda of Credo, the glorious Grave which ends the long fugato "et vitam venturi saeculi". In that moment Beethoven seems to be finally convinced that his work will live for centuries after his death. This joyful moment changes the character of the remaining movements. Sanctus and Agnus Dei seem to be filled with gratitude and peace.