The New Normal at the Howland
Everyone talks about the new normal in the era of COVID-19, and many business organizations like bars, restaurants, and sports teams have adjusted their operations to retain their audiences and stay in business.
The performing arts are businesses, too. Many arts companies have shuttered their doors for the duration, perhaps forever. Some, like the Metropolitan Opera company, are shut for a specified time, palliating their patrons with reruns of past glories while leaving their performers in the financial lurch.
A few companies chose to ride out the storm, maintaining a high standard of quality performances to hold onto their current clientele while trying new distribution techniques to reach out and attract new patrons. One of these is the Howland Chamber Music Circle which held the fourth in its series of fall concerts at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY Sunday evening (November 15th). And if Sunday’s performance is any indication, their AliveMusica streaming series may change forever the way musical performances are attended and enjoyed.
The evening’s performers were Jesse Mills (violin) and Rieko Aizawa (piano) who have played previously at the Howland as two of the founding members of the Horszowski Trio. As Duo Prism, Sunday’s presentation marked the first time they played together as husband and wife. Separately, each is an award-winning interpretive artist, Mills for his Grammy-nominated performances of Schoenberg’s music and Aizawa for her interpretations of Messiaen's and Faure's preludes. And each is celebrated for their technical virtuosity as well as the sensitive interpretation of the music they perform.
Together as Duo Prism, their web site states their desire to be “a dynamic ensemble committed to the full spectrum of works composed for this instrumentation, [with] the metaphor of a three-sided prism [representing] the perfectly balanced relationship which these two artists together make with the composers of the works that they present.” In accord with this ambition, they play and promote works from a wide variety of musical genres ranging from lesser-know]n traditional compositions to those of contemporary composers.
Sunday’s recital fulfilled these expectations. The program consisted of works by Olivier Messiaen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul Chihara, and Maurice Ravel. With little fanfare, Mills and Aizawa mounted the stage, bowed, and adopted their ready-to-play positions. Serious as a concert-master, Mills briefly tuned his violin while providing a brief and unexpected thematic overview of their selections: the underlying turmoil and isolation within the Beethoven sonata served as the emotional lynchpin which unified his work with Messiaen’s and Chihara’s and separated it from the impressionistically precise and thus somewhat dated work by Ravel.
Then they played, first, Messiaen’s “Theme and Variation for Violin and Piano,” then the Beethoven, his “Sonata #10 in G Major.” Messiaen’s piece contained a lot of visionary chords of the kind heard in a church mass or communion celebrating the divine mystery of the sharing of Christ’s body and blood. Their interpretation of the Beethoven piece was similarly ecstatic yet despondent, reaching, despite the “sturm und drang” of human existence, for that purity of thought and emotion which can never be attained.
After the Beethoven, Mills left the stage, and Aizawa played a short composition by one of their neighbors, Paul Chiara, “’Storm’ after the Tempest Sonata for Solo Piano.” Part of Chiara’s “Four Reveries on Beethoven,” the piece combines modern atonality with Beethoven’s passionate turmoil to create an incisive musical reflection of contemporary culture.
Mills returned after this brief interlude and he and Aizawa finished the program with Ravel’s “Sonata No. 2 in G Major for Violin and Piano.” Mills’ comment that Ravel considered this one of his jazz pieces despite its not having any blues chords within it became apparent after a while with several flourishes in the style of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Equally apparent was how much of its time (the 1920s) Ravel’s piece seemed to be compared to the emotional conflicts inherent in the other three selections.
As performers and interpreters, Aizawa and Mills did not disappoint. Mills glowered at the score and leaned back again with every line of the notation, particularly in the Messiaen piece which, using a Washington Post critic’s observation, seemed “as if he'd just received it from some distant, vast and magnificent reach of the cosmos.” Aizawa was equally adroit, glancing at Mills every now and then before sailing off into her own rhapsody of interpretation with what the New Times described as her “impressive musicality, a crisp touch and expressive phrasing.”
Jesse Mills performing during the live stream.
Despite the performers’ virtuosity, the broadcast did have some drawbacks. The vantage point of the camera seemed anchored in the balcony, high above the stage. This location provided fine overhead shots of the duet which allowed for close-up shots of each performer. Yet their positioning was such that Mills blocked out Aizawa whenever the camera zoomed out to long shot, leaving Mills accompanied by a disembodied pair of hands. This alignment left the actions of the female page-turner seated behind Aizawa even more distracting whenever she stood up and reached to turn a page of Aizawa’s copy of the score.
These distractions proved minor, however, particularly considered against the stormy cold front which raged outside our house during the performance, later on drenching the Patriots-Ravens game in Boston during the third and fourth quarters. Safe inside in the warmth and shelter of our home heightened the enjoyment of Mills and Aizawa’s performance, knowing that when it ended we didn’t have to go outside and find our car in the howling darkness of the storm.
Such an arrangement may become the “new normal” in the performing arts, particularly for smaller musical events like chamber music performances. Like professional sports teams which have a variety of revenue streams beyond in-person attendance, classical music organizations like the Howland Chamber Music Circle, Newburgh Chamber Music, Pawling Concert Series, and others have banded together to stream the performances they sponsor to their patrons. The benefits seem obvious: they retain their patrons, gain an additional revenue stream, and reach out to new patrons who for one reason or another cannot attend a live performance in person. Patrons have an additional option at their fingertips which allows them to witness a performance at their convenience. And performers have the wherewithal to practice and hone their craft.
The common denominators in all this—AliveMusica and talented, innovative artists like Jesse Mills and Rieko Aizawa who through their combined foresight, dedication, and perseverance make such changes happen.