Recently I attended the first concert of my season ticket to the National
SO at the Kennedy Center.  On the program was the Siegfried Idyll, the
Corigliano Piano Concerto, and Dvorak 7.  An NSO season ticket, while
expensive, does give you the flexibility to switch in and out of concerts
you want to see or avoid.  I bought my particular plan because of the
presence of Mahler 1 and 9; I swapped into another Mahler (the Wunderhorns
with Goerne) and a couple of others.  To give my long-suffering wife a
break, I kept last night's, thinking that even if the Corigliano was too
"out there," at least the Dvorak would be acceptable.  As for the Wagner,
which she usually loathes, I told her that if you didn't know it was
Wagner, you'd never guess it.

And what do you know, the highlight of this excellent concert was the
Corigliano. Composed in 1967, it is everything you would expect from
modern American music: angular, percussive, suddenly shifting in meter,
key, and dynamics, yet tonal enough so that you can follow along for the
most part.  Pianist James Tocco, who studied the piece for ten years
before playing it in public, did a great job, as far as I could tell.
The NSO looked to be true believers in the music, and the crowd gave
the piece a much more enthusiastic reception than I would have thought.
My wife?  She loved it, as did I.

Leonard Slatkin, accompanied by Corigliano and Tocco, hosted a post-concert
discussion as part of his Afterwords series.  Before the concert he had
mentioned that the reason these three pieces had been programmed --
"Sometimes there *is* a reason," he said, to general hilarity -- was
because each composer expressed himself unmistakeably in the voice of
his country of origin: "There is no more Czech-sounding composer than
Dvorak, and nobody more German than Wagner.  Corigliano speaks in an
American voice just as Dvorak and Wagner speak in theirs." In Afterwords,
the three discussed American music, architecture in music, and similar
things.

Corigliano was excellent, thoroughly engaging, speaking in an intelligent
way to an interested audience without being condescending.  Someone asked
him about his process of composition.  He said that before putting down
even a single note, he maps out the entire piece: ebb and flow, dynamics,
first theme, second theme, recapitulation, that sort of thing.  This
helps him get a better sense of the architecture -- a word he used often.
You can't just decide to put a dab of something here, some other thing
there, or the whole house falls down.  After all, he continued, an
architect doesn't start with a window and then builds a house around it.
Corigliano noted how his concerto had elements of classical sonata form,
"but with a twist."

Corigliano, composer of the score for Altered States and The Red Violin,
was asked about his film music and how its composition differs from that
of his concert works.  As you might expect from his comments on architecture,
he was not as enthusiastic about this kind of music as he is about a
30-minute concert-hall piece.  You have to take too many cues from the
movie director, he continued, and talked about his Red Violin orchestral
suite, "Which I don't like so much."

In discussing what makes American music American, the three speakers
mentioned Copland and Bernstein several times.  I think it was Tocco
who quoted Bernstein: "Copland's most interesting writing in jazz themes
comes not in his overtly jazz pieces, but in his more serious music.
The jazz influence is always there; he can't avoid it any more than he
can avoid the music or the language he hears daily." That was a huge
paraphrase, possibly of the remarks of all three speakers, but you get
the point.  To me, that raised a contradiction or at least a contrast.
Corigliano had said he was not much influenced by things that were
happening around him at the time of composition, that his main influences
were things that had been developing twenty years before.  For an American
to be conducting in 1967 without taking Vietnam or San Francisco into
consideration surprised me, especially in light of another Corigliano
foray into popular music: He has deconstructed the poetry of Bob Dylan,
setting some of Dylan's words to his own music.  Corigliano said he found
the poetry compelling, but was not as taken with Dylan's music as he was
with the Beatles', which he found "much more interesting."

Here is the Washington Post's review of the concert (registration
required):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34347-2004Oct15.html

Evidently the Washington Post headline writers can't be bothered with
spelling the composer's name correctly (Coriligano, for those of you who
don't want to register).  Sad.

Going into the season, this concert was the one I was looking forward
to the least.  But it was an unqualified success.  Next in my series:
Mahler 1 and Beethoven PC4, Roberto Abbado conducting; soloist Garrick
Ohlsson.  If the rest of the concerts are up to the quality of this one,
it will have been money well spent.

Mitch Friedfeld