“Music at the tonal crossroads”

On an impulse, the day before a major blizzard, I bought a ticket to hear the great soprano Dawn Upshaw and the pianist Richard Goode at Zankel Hall (classical/jazz/world music venue underneath Carnegie Hall). The program was ingenious: First Goode played three “Prelude and Fugue”s from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, including the stunning C# minor from Book I; then the 14-piece vocal group Pomerium offered seven works (both sacred and secular) from the 16th-century composer Gesualdo. Following intermission, Goode returned to play Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1, before Upshaw joined him in Schoenberg’s not-to-be-believed The Book of the Hanging Gardens, a 15-part song cycle with German text by Stefan George.

The music and the musicianship were breathtaking, as was the reach across centuries. Knitting the diverse works together was the fabric of harmony. Benjamin Folkman began his notes as follows:

This program might well bear the title “music at the tonal crossroads.” Tonight’s Gesualdo, Berg, and Schoenberg works each show their composers grappling with a harmonic chromaticism so extreme that it undermines tonal and expressive norms that had previously seemed destined to endure forever. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, by contrast, represents a somewhat different search for new tonal norms: a tuning system that accommodates the full range of chromatic harmony, to replace an older system that restricted the greatest euphony to a small group of keys.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. My balcony seat stage left offered great sound and sightlines. The music was emotive and forceful and ceaselessly strange, including the Bach. A perfect end to a day spent listening to Nels Cline, Agent K, Deerhoof and Satoko Fujii.

The fifth Gesualdo piece, called “Tenebræ factæ sunt (It Was Dark),” begins with this line: “It was dark when the Jews crucified Jesus.” Hey, if early music is all about authenticity, then the line has to stay. It’s in Latin, anyway. The meaning is dead on the page — it’s the music that matters. But what a fascinating example of anti-Semitism as artifact.