Robin’s Weekend Review

Spring threatens to return to Upstate New York. A barrel-chested robin sits in a bare Cornelian cherry dogwood. Mid-morning, he (the bird sports the more vibrant hue of the male of the species) is not in the mood to sing just now, even though the late-February sun is shining and the ice is melting. Strange happenings, the robin must be thinking, as it was sometimes colder and snowier Down South where he had been wintering before the seasonal migration brought him to my backyard.

The bird is thankful that Ithaca is “centrally isolated” according to the canard uttered ironically by self-styled cosmopolitans in this liberal blue bastion in a sea of Republican robin red. For these progressives, “provincial” is a putdown. Not for the Musical Patriot, and not for my mid-morning visitor as he turns his gaze west across the valley to the still-brown woods stretching west out into Trump country.

Home to Cornell University and Ithaca College spread across adjacent hills, the city is rich in human culture, and not just because of the presence of these institutions of “higher learning.” Local music, arts, literature and theatre flourish. Ithaca’s human population of just over 30,000 matches that of Leipzig in the 18th century, when J. S. Bach lived and worked there. Leipzig had no malls and multiplexes, no Home Depot and Lowe’s, not even the internet. Perhaps partly because of all that, the Saxon city has not been surpassed for musical wealth by American cities a hundred times bigger. The notion that cultural richness corresponds directly to population size is a myth.

My feathered guest—actually, I’m the guest and he the host—seems to have arrived too late to take in any of last weekend’s abundant musical fare. If he had been in town, the robin could have flown up to the Cornell campus spread out on bluffs that command a long view of Cayuga Lake stretching out of sight to the north.

In the colonnaded concert hall on Friday evening, pianist Jonathan Biss presented a program of two monumental Schubert sonatas on either side of the young American composer Tyson Gholston Davis’s three-movement … Expansions of Light. A brilliant player and engaging writer, Biss presents an ascetic, yet ardent figure when hunched at the big black box of Nature modified, his wings flapping.

From his perch atop the dome, the robin might have taken the exuberant contrapuntal lines of Davis’s central “Caprice,” especially that heard in Biss’s fleet and flighty right hand, as an evocation of the songs of our bird’s more virtuosic thrush cousins. Dropping round to the eaves so he could eavesdrop more closely, our avian critic, who writes under the nom de plumage of Turdus Migratorius (T.M.), might have shaken his beak at the way Biss covets, even over-curates, Schubert’s charmed melodies, rather than letting them sing as if from Nature that is, ultimately, their source. Such forthright ease would make the turbulent winds and dark portents of these last sonatas of Schubert’s short life all the more buffeting when they rip through. Real gusts have felled a university Gothic spire or two across Cornell’s 150 years, but a songful Schubertian melody rendered freely rather than forced into the big Romantic phrase has far more power to move.

On Saturday night, T.M. could have winged over to Ithaca College to hear the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra in a program entitled “Flight of Fancy.” This was music of the birds, not for them, though T. M. would have found a way to penetrate the stark, 1970s exterior of the music building and into Ford Hall. I’ve been to this place dozens of times and still haven’t figured out its relation to the rest of the structure, never mind the outside world. The excellent ensemble is now under the brilliant baton of the Belgian conductor, Guillaume Pirard, who has been living and working in Ithaca for a couple of years now. He has a centuries-spanning repertoire, but is also an expert in the performance practice of 18^th-century music. The concert began with Haydn’s Symphony no. 83, nicknamed La Poule (The Hen), and in it Pirard, in his first year as the group’s director, cleansed the Cayuga strings of the vibrato that in Haydn’s day was a carefully deployed ornament rather than the cloying default setting that it has long since become. Pirard is poised and meticulous on the podium, the occasional sweeping step, the martial closing of the heels, the proud puff of the chest and noble lift of the chin reserved for moments of grandeur and resistance. Crisp gestures demanded and got precision from his players. But his detailed direction also drew wit as well as pathos, not just Sturm, but also Drang from his ensemble. Pirard doesn’t do the Funky Chicken, but the pecking of the first movement’s second theme in the oboe and the clucking of the strings conjured the requisite barnyard image and its rustic-refined humor.

For Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Lark Ascending, composed on either side of the Great War that cost millions of men and tens of thousands of carrier pigeons their lives, the quavering shimmer was back, but in its proper setting and significance on soloist Christina Bouey’s violin. At the piece’s close, the tuneful bird and its song recede into the silence of the concert hall, sonically and spiritually transformed into the English countryside—the haunted and haunting melody emblem of a world gone forever.

After intermission, Solace by Jocelyn Morlock from 2001 fled Olde English fields to take up another mode of elegy—darker, threatened. Now the solo violin surged up from a fatefully suspended backdrop, renouncing nostalgia for mournful dread.

The closer was Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the successor to Jean Sibelius as the leading Finnish composer, and like Sibelius a musician fascinated by living things in their environment. Birdsongs of the bog and of migration were voiced from speakers above the stage; these musicians sometimes sang in canons more beautiful the Bach’s. None of it was natural, nor did it purport to be. Recording technology slowed the shore lark’s song down so that it became a subterranean ghost two octaves lower than its higher self. These soloists were sometimes obedient, dutifully halting their marshy hootings on cue at the conclusion of the first movement. Later they reasserted their superior beauty and aesthetic primacy. Yet only their songs, sometimes in altered form, were present. Do they even exist still or will they for long?

On Sunday afternoon T. M. would have booked a return flight to Cornell to hear Canadian organist Isabelle Demers’s organ concert in Sage Chapel. The doors of the church are often flung open by students short-cutting their way through the building, so the bird would have easily entered, perhaps finding cover in the elaborate forest of branches and leaves painstakingly painted in the vaults of the wooden ceiling. Demers’s program was bookended by two rollicking sets of variations, the first on a 17^th-century dance tune set by the Dutch Golden Age organist J. P. Sweelinck but dragged across much more harmonically and technically varied terrain by Demers’s late countrywoman, the composer Rachel Laurin. These were pleasantly bracing adventures that never phased or ruffled the recitalist. Her small frame houses a colossal virtuosa. Among the challenges unmanageable by others came her note-perfect rendition of the harrowing Variations on a Theme of Paganini for pedal solo by the English organist, George Thalben-Ball, whose life spanned most of the 20^th century. The theme is taken from Paganini’s wickedly difficulty 24^th caprice for solo violin. How to match, or even surpass, the feats demanded by the Italian string superstar of yore? Make these variations for the feet only, except with a few chords at the climax, as if to draw attention to the hand-free wonders that preceded the last-minute deployment of the fingers.

Thalben-Ball attained a stolid portliness during his later decades such that it is hard to imagine him clearing his own work’s continuous obstacles: chords, trills, glissandi, sprints and leaps. So easy appeared even this tour-de-force for Demers that T.M. wouldn’t have been surprise to see her reach into her backpack to drink from her canteen then slice some cheese onto rye crisps, have her snack while carrying on with the pedal heroics, then straightaway scale the concert’s final peak—Laurin’s transcription of Brahms’s Variations on a theme of Handel. This piano showpiece’s twenty-five kaleidoscopic, knuckle-busting demonstrations of diversity of mood and manner, equity between the hands, and ingenuity unlimited, concludes with a rollicking fugue, spurred on that afternoon by Demers jaw-dropping pedaling feet .

Turdus Migratorius is proud of his august name and also knows that fuga means flight in Latin. If he chooses not to take one out of town— a flight, I mean — this weekend, there’s plenty more Ithacan culture to catch.

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