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Music Academy Opens with Masterly Instruction
Besides sun-and-sea worshipers, each summer brings to us flocks of migrating music lovers, who come to a very soft landing at Miraflores, the campus of the Music Academy of the West, for its spectacular Summer Festival.
Eschewing opening fanfare, this year’s festival begins at 1 p.m. Monday in Hahn Hall, with a Solo Piano Masterclass lead by one of the academy’s irreplaceable maestros, Jerome Lowenthal — followed by a full five-day week of student-centered events, such as master classes by Paul Merkelo (trumpet), Zvi Zeitlin (violin), Dennis Michel (bassoon), Jean Barr (collaborative piano), Nico Abondolo (double bass), David Jolley (French horn), Richie Hawley (clarinet), David Weiss (oboe), Marilyn Horne and John Churchwell (Introduction of the 2009 Voice and Vocal Piano Fellows), Alan Stepansky (cello), Mark Lawrence (trombone & tuba), Lowenthal (piano chamber), Ted Atkatz (percussion), Donald McInnes (viola), Timothy Day (flute) and Fred Carama (vocal).
Joseph Haydn and Felix Mendelssohn are having bicentennials this year — Haydn died in 1809; Mendelssohn was born then — and they are both well represented on this summer’s programs. (I do not ordinarily approve of celebrating an artist’s death, but I can scarcely think of a rule I have made to which Haydn has not proved an exception — I will, in fact, listen to Haydn on the flimsiest of pretexts, including no pretext at all.) Some major works by Dmitri Shostakovich will also be played, and there will be a full-scale production of Ambroise Thomas’ beloved opera, Mignon (1866). Click here for more information and a complete schedule of events, or call 805.969.4726. Click here to purchase tickets or call 805.969.8787.
There is, once again, a Gustav Mahler symphony on the festival program this year: the “Symphony No. 7 in e minor” (1905), sometimes called, although not by the composer, “The Song of the Night.” The persistence of Mahler here is fitting. From its inception, the academy has been imbued with the spirit of this mahatma (great soul). Since we cannot have him on the faculty — he died in 1911 — teaching future generations his lofty standards of conducting, let us always have him on the program, so that these brilliant young musicians will have the joy of performing his symphonies as living works.
The Music Academy of the West was founded in 1947, largely on the inspiration and the considerable energy of the soprano Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976), who had settled in Santa Barbara after leaving Vienna in 1938. Lehmann’s original vision of a year-round music school, à la the Juilliard School in Manhattan or the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, never was realized, but the school she founded has always operated according to the highest moral and pedagogical standards of German Idealism. So it began, and so it remains.
When the Music Academy was in the planning stages, and Lehmann was preoccupied with it, she had staying with her the conductor Otto Klemperer — austere, controversial, yet certainly a great master, almost a deity, of music — who was an old friend of the great soprano, had conducted many of her performances, and was now coming down off a decade of bipolar episodes, brought on by an incorrect diagnosis of a brain tumor — shades of “The Magic Mountain”! — and the surgery based on it, which left him partially paralyzed. Through it all, however, his musical judgment remained unimpaired.
He was then in a period of transition. He had met Mahler in the fateful year of 1905, became a disciple, and helped him prepare to conduct the premiere of his “Symphony No. 8,” the “Symphony of a Thousand.” From then through the 1930s, Klemperer was primarily known as a champion of modernism — especially the Viennese brand, but others as well. He conducted Janáček, Schönberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith at a time when these titans were hardly household words.
Gradually, he shifted the focus of his scheduling to the classics, especially Beethoven, Brahms ... and Mahler, who remained his musical Pole Star. Starting in the 1950s, after Walter Legge of EMI tapped him to lead his Philharmonia Orchestra, Klemperer made a series of recordings of Beethoven and Brahms that were definitive of a certain ideal of interpretation. It was the Mahlerian ideal, for until Leonard Bernstein celebrated the Mahler centennial by putting Mahler’s music squarely in the center of our concert life, it was his fame as a conductor that kept his name alive. When asked to describe what made Mahler’s reading of a score so decisive, Klemperer replied, “You felt it couldn’t be otherwise.”
Lehmann also consulted the violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr., who was then director of the Curtis Institute (where he taught, among many luminaries, the violinist and conductor, Felix Slatkin, father of the great Leonard Slatkin, who will conduct the festival’s final concert on Aug. 15). Schönberg, a Mahler disciple if ever there was one, visited the Academy early on and bestowed his blessing. Ernest Bloch, the academy’s first composer-in residence, states in his autobiography that it was attending a memorial concert in Switzerland of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony that decided him on a career as a composer.
The Music Academy of the West thus became, and is to this day, a Southern California outpost of German musical culture at its loftiest. Long may it thrive.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.
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