Ernest Bloch

* Macbeth - Two Interludes
* Trois poemes juifs
* In Memoriam
* Symphony in Eb

Towse (violin), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Dalia Atlas Sternberg
Total Time: 67:54
ASV CD DCA 1019

Summary for the Busy Executive: Finds.

Today, one work keeps Ernest Bloch's name alive:  the Schelomo "hebraic
rhapsody" for cello and orchestra, recorded by just about every major and
not-so-major cellist of the twentieth century.  It was probably one of the
first pieces of "modern" music (less than fifty years old) I heard and
a piece that enlarged the way I listened to music, at least emotionally,
which at my very young age counted exclusively.  I picked up for a week a
copy of the Leonard Rose-Eugene Ormandy LP from the public library (the
first Saint-Saens cello concerto - the famous one - made up the other
side).  At the time, I listened to a work if its title interested me.  If
I liked the piece, I took a chance on more abstract titles like "symphony,"
"sonata," and "concerto" by the same composer.  Thus, I heard Bloch's
"Schelomo" and "Sacred Service" first and his first piano quintet and
Concerto Grosso No.  1 afterwards.  I heard great passion and power in
these scores.  I became a Bloch maniac, hearing in his music what others
hear in Bruckner, and began to spend my newspaper-route money on every
one of his LPs I could find.

To my great surprise, I found out, after a few years, that Bloch
apparently appealed only to a minority of the minority that comprises
the classical-music public.  The No-Real-Music-after-Mahler crowd
ignores him as part of a general dismissal of 20th-century music.  The
No-Real-Music-Before-Webern gang turns up its nose at just about every
composer without the proper bloodline or who fails to write a work as
Historically Significant as Le Sacre du printemps.  However, we can easily
sweep such superficial objections aside, since the work more or less "in
itself" counts above all.  Less easily countered, however, are legitimate
disagreements of taste.  Some people find Bloch's music corny and prolix.
I admit he has such work, usually due to an excess of artistic ambition.
His "epic rhapsody," America, attempts no less than to synthesize dozens of
American tunes into one great anthem, to show the musical connections from
Native American chants through Twenties jazz, and to encapsulate Whitman's
ideas of America and American vistas in a single score.  The program is
positively Mahlerian, and indeed, Bloch was an early admirer of Mahler,
having heard the second symphony under the composer's baton.  It blew
him away, and he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Mahler, who replied how
gratified he was that someone had understood his work so deeply.  Despite
the largeness of Mahler's aims, however, Mahler the formal craftsman
reined in his ambitions to the formal demands of his symphonies.  To put
it better, he could set formal demands he could meet.  Bloch at his weakest
sprawls.  The emotional peaks of his failures (although such work never
fails completely) lack the power to engage us and seem flat or cliched.  On
the positive side, however, Bloch's failures never stem from the routine or
the safe, but from a fiery sincerity.  He always gives the best of himself,
but result fails to meet ambition or intent.  Nevertheless, I contend these
works lie few and mostly far between.

Bloch's music sounds like nobody else's, and while individuality is not
everything, it's not a small thing, either.  It means, among other things,
that the music gives you something of its own, that it has staked out its
own artistic territory.  Artists with strongly individual voices rarely
shape the course of intellectual or cultural movements, but this argues
more strongly for their power rather than for their weakness.  Van Gogh,
for example, influenced fewer painters than Cezanne or Gaugin did.  An
artist influenced by van Gogh risks "doing van Gogh" not as well.  It's the
same with composers and Bloch.  Bloch, an influential teacher between the
two world wars, fostered the individuality of his students.  These students
included Roger Sessions and Quincy Porter, neither of whom sound like Bloch
or much like each other.  In fact, I can think of only one composer who
sounds close to Bloch - the wonderful Rebecca Clarke, who turns out Bloch
as well as the original did.

Bloch's career falls into four or five periods, depending on how you count.
Richard Strauss and Mussorgsky (an odd combination) count as his earliest
influences.  Mussorgsky (and Debussy) becomes stronger as Strauss wanes.
This early period culminates in the Mussorgskian opera Macbeth, considered
by several critics, including Andrew Porter, the finest opera on a major
Shakespearean tragedy (and I don't believe he's forgotten Otello).  I've
never heard the complete opera, merely the interludes featured here and a
pirate LP of excerpts in very bad performances.

The second period, his most famous - the "Jewish cycle" - includes the
Trois poemes juifs, the "Israel" Symphony, settings for tenor and orchestra
of three psalms, and Schelomo, his most popular work.  This has led the
public to think of Bloch as an exclusively "Jewish" composer, but specific
musical expressions of Judaism amount to only a very small part of his
output.  Indeed, some works considered "Jewish" actually evoke an imaginary
Bali, a landscape that held the same fascination for Bloch as Paris did for
Wallace Stevens.  Incidentally, neither man ever visited the real thing.
Bloch had an extremely wide culture and reading.  He's bigger than any one
box.  Bloch became increasingly influenced by Bach and the contrapuntal
masters of the Renaissance, I suspect through his work as a teacher.  In
fact, already a well-established composer, he began to undergo a rigorous
study of counterpoint.  He moved closer to the neo-classicists without
losing his own identity:  Bloch still speaks as Bloch rather than in a
dialect of Stravinsky's.  The major works here include the first piano
quintet, the first concerto grosso, the Avodath Hakodesh, the piano sonata,
the two violin sonatas, Voice in the Wilderness, Visions and Prophecies,
and the violin concerto.  Due to events in Europe, Bloch grew ever more
deeply depressed, to the point where he could no longer compose - roughly
a five-year period of silence.  The end of World War II freed him up.  He
began to write more abstractly and concentrated on chamber music and works
for small ensembles.  Major works include the second through fifth string
quartets, the second piano quintet, the Sinfonia breve, the Concerto
symphonique for piano and orchestra, suites for solo violin, viola, and
cello, the second concerto grosso, and the Suite hebraique.

In 1959, when he died, Bloch's work was pretty much a fifth wheel in the
wider classical-music world.  He continued to receive commissions up to
his death, but almost nobody influential talked about it or played it up.
True, Roger Sessions spoke of the string quartets as among the century's
finest.  For reasons that mystify me, since I can't imagine why people
don't bang down the doors to demand this music, he always appealed
to a cult.  Ernest Bloch Societies have sprung up in England, Italy,
Switzerland, and the U.S., with such distinguished members as Ernest
Newman, Donald Tovey, and Ernest Chapman.  Recordings fitfully surface,
and not always of the same works.  Nevertheless, in my opinion, the music
addresses the widest possible group.  I imagine that the reduction of his
audience to a niche market would have dismayed him.  Perhaps his time will
come.

The two interludes from Macbeth represent the culmination of Bloch's early
style.  I'm certain that they are meant to get listeners in the proper
frame of mind for the act to follow.  However, they are, according to
Winton Dean ("Shakespeare and Opera"), constructed according to Wagnerian
principles.

   Here Bloch, unlike so many composers, has absorbed the true lesson
   of Wagner.  [The leitmotivs] are often linked and combined and assume
   a Protean power of changing into each other, thus lending themselves
   to constant development by distortion or variation and the expression
   of a wide range of emotions and ideas, direct, oblique or symbolical.
   [For example,] Macduff's theme with its syncopated rising fifth serves
   with equal aptness for the idyllic calm of his family life (a passage
   of great lyrical beauty) and his fiery revolt against tyranny.

Unfortunately, without a score, it's impossible to say exactly what basic
group of notes represents which dramatic idea, so I'm sure many fine points
flew over my head.  In short, we're forced by circumstance to take the
piece for itself, rather than for its Shakespearean connections.  The music
by itself doesn't call up Macbeth to me, at any rate, probably because it
has no bagpipe drones.  Despite Bloch's debts to Wagner and Mussorgsky,
he never winds up sounding like those two, although at one point you
hear a startling, obviously Richard-Strauss cadence.  Nevertheless, both
interludes come across as dark, stormy, passionate, and profoundly sad.
Bloch has certainly caught the fury and nihilism of the play.

With the Three Jewish Poems, we find ourselves on familiar Blochian ground.
The opulent, yet bright orchestration and the chromatic melismata around
the tritone and the melodic minor scale all point toward the composer of
Schelomo.  The first movement is Bloch's version of orientalism.  Yet it's
not merely exotic.  Unlike the orientalism of, say, Bantock or Szymanowski,
the underlying movement is not languor, but a nervous restlessness.  In
short, Bloch's rhythm is sharper, and his musical argument is always moving
and transforming into something new and vital.  The second movement,
"Rite," supposedly depicts a priestly procession, but to take it as
only that short-changes the composer.  To me, it meditates profoundly on
emotions too deep for words.  Bloch hit this vein several times throughout
his career - something rapturous and mystical, as in the second violin
sonata ("Poeme mystique"), roughly a decade later.  Bloch wrote the final
movement, "Cortege funebre," on the death of his father.  It certainly
doesn't sound like conventional grief or elegy.  The music rages more
than it mourns or consoles.  The quieter sections, peeping through here
and there, have a family look to the "Kaddish" passage of Bloch's Avodath
Hakodesh - a movement from darkness to radiance - but are usually
overwhelmed by the anguish of the main themes.  The remarkable ending,
however, tells a complex story.  The prayer music interacts with the
martial, "raging" fanfares and transforms them in a thrilling moment to
blazing affirmation.  Yet it's only a moment.  The rhythms of the cortege
creep back in, as does the nervous main theme of the first movement.  We
are left, neither with an ascent into heaven nor with resignation, but with
something ambiguous and ongoing.

The last two works on the disc are absolutely new to me (I had never even
heard of either one), despite my assiduous forty-year collecting obsession
with Bloch.  He wrote both in the last stages of his career.  In Memoriam
is a fugitive piece - something you would expect to miss - but the symphony
is major work.  It angers me a bit that this is probably the first
recording.  Still, I'm glad someone has recorded it.

Bloch wrote In Memoriam on the death of his friend, pianist Ada Clements.
Forty years after the Three Jewish Poems, Bloch seems to have found his
way into acceptance.  The music has the nobility and serenity of, say,
Beethoven's Elegischer Gesang or parts of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No.
5.  The orchestration may have lost its early opulence, but such
orchestration wouldn't suit the character of these musical ideas or Bloch's
mature concern for counterpoint.  As for the piece, acceptance doesn't mean
smugness.  It's hard to write something like this without inadvertently
pouring treacle over everything.  The emotion in this work is earned,
several times over, despite its four-and-a-half-minute length.

The symphony is undoubtedly the most complex work of the program.  Bloch
wrote the last three movements first, got to a certain point in the finale,
and stopped.  He felt not only that he needed to recall themes from the
first movement, but that the themes of the second and third had to come
from the first movement as well.  He had, of course, not yet written the
first movement or, indeed, until that point, seen the need for one.  But
the formal demands he made upon himself seemed to dictate the emotional
character of the movement:  an exploration of intervals and small groups
of notes from which to mine themes.  The main thematic generator resembles
the well-known BACH (B-flat A C B) motive.  Unlike the Vaughan Williams
Symphony No.  4, which also uses similar notes and intervals, this is a
real exploration, rather than something as finished.  The first movement
has the rhetorical function of a prologue, leading immediately to a
scherzo.  Bloch had a fondness for grotesquerie, which usually shows up in
his scherzo movements, as it does here.  The slow movement broods.  The
finale assumes the characters of the previous two movements.  However, the
real "story" of the symphony lies in how the small set of "cells" generate
the extraordinarily various thematic content of the entire work.  Bloch
does this throughout his musical maturity.  It becomes more pronounced as
a procedure as he goes along.  If you can't bring out this musical spine,
you have little business performing Bloch.  Unfortunately, Sternberg tends
to take each movement as an isolated character piece.  She drops the
threads.  A very rich piece becomes fragmented and clunky.

Sternberg does well enough on the others.  No surprise - she does best with
the best-known work, the Three Jewish Poems.  But she offers no remarkable
interpretive insights, either.  I admit the symphony's a tough work to
bring off, and I'm certainly grateful that it's finally recorded (after a
mere half-century).  However, we need first-rate people on this repertoire.
I don't think it a coincidence that when major interpreters tackle Bloch
(Bernstein and the Avodath Hakodesh, for example), neglected works suddenly
transform into masterpieces.  Nevertheless, if you don't know Bloch's work
or have stuck at Schelomo, you might have a go at this disc.

Steve Schwartz