MUSIC: Culture Club

 

According to Yehuda Hanani, internationally renowned cellist and founder and artistic director of the Close Encounters With Music series, based at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, music is simply too accessible these days. (No, you didn’t read that wrong.)

 

Less than twenty-four hours after returning to his Columbia County, New York, home following a concert appearance at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Maine, a barefoot Hanani, wearing jeans and a black Dolce & Gabbana polo shirt, relaxes on a leather couch in his music room, opposite his petite, dark-haired wife, Hannah, and explains why too much music is not a good thing.

 

“The fact that music is readily available is a mixed blessing,” says Hanani, whose lilting voice, colored by his native Israel, makes its own kind of melody. “Music today is taken for granted so much. You get it in elevators, you get it in restaurants, you get it when you go shopping. So there is a very strong need to counter this by reminding people that music has meaning, because it becomes a meaningless sound in the background of other activities. You would never consider having a dinner party and listening to a Shakespeare monologue in the background. For me, music is the same thing.”

 

As delightful and diverting as classical music can be, Hanani says it’s also about “the big questions that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and the great American writers were grappling with.… [My students] are very eager to produce beautiful sounds just for the sake of a beautiful sound, and I ask them, what’s the meaning of this phrase, what does this piece mean to you, where are you taking it, what is this composer trying to convey? This aspect of musical appreciation is very, very lacking.”
That’s where Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) comes in. Celebrating nineteen years in the Berkshires, the series opens its 2010-2011 season with an October 16 concert presenting Russia’s Chamber Orchestra Kremlin in its Berkshire debut, and concludes in June 2011 with “Fiesta! A Latin Splash of Music and Dance,” which will serve as the official kickoff of the CEWM twentieth-anniversary-season celebration. (“We’re not fair-weather friends,” Hannah says. “We’re there for people in the dreary time of year.”) The series is designed not only to entertain but also to educate, enhancing listeners’ experience of the music via accessible themes, layman-friendly analysis, and behind-the-scenes details and anecdotes that add color and context to the work.

 

“This is really what people need—not abstract presentation of music, but some kind of context, so they don’t feel intimidated,” Hanani says. “If people are not educated in music, and you start talking about musicological and theoretical terms, people will just be turned off. This was what struck me—let’s not talk about music, let’s talk about topics people are comfortable with and show how all this is reflected in music.”

 

That’s also the way Hanani teaches, according to cellist Sarah Paul, a longtime student. (Hanani is a professor at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, has been on the faculty of Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Bowdoin International Music Festival, among others, and teaches master classes internationally.) Paul was inspired by his master classes to form the nonprofit Nova Musical Trust, a collection of videotaped classes and lectures by exceptional teachers.

 

“Yehuda teaches technique as a means to an end rather than an end in itself,” Paul says. “You rarely hear Yehuda Hanani talk about technique in a master class, or in a Close Encounters concert either, for that matter. He might talk about the Bible, Greek mythology, art, painting, historical landmarks, architecture.… He’s very knowledgeable about not only music, but also literature, visual arts, theater, dance—and he incorporates this into his teaching. He gives people specific things they can think about that will hopefully help them connect with the music.”

 

“His scholarship is extraordinary,” seconds CEWM board member Purcell Palmer of Catskill, New York. “His grasp of the history of music is really exceptional, and he’s extraordinarily generous with his intelligence. He has a passion for the music, but his greater calling seems to be in education and sharing this with others.” Hanani also shares his passion for music in a weekly segment on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, “Classical Music According to Yehuda.”

 

As intentional as it sounds, the seed for Close Encounters was actually planted by accident. Hanani was in Aspen, Colorado, in the mid-1980s, to perform a winter concert that was to be televised. He had arrived safely in a small plane with his cello beside him (it always gets its own seat), but the programs for the concert were en route in another aircraft that was still in transit.

 

“As often happens in Aspen, the fog descended on the valley, and the second plane couldn’t [land],” Hanani recalls. “So the manager of the hall came to me and said, ‘Please, save the situation—just talk. Tell the audience how you chose these pieces, why this menu, what’s the meaning of “rondo,” et cetera, because people need some instruction, some context to what they’re listening to.’”

 

Hanani improvised an introduction and, when the Aspen event was broadcast to rave reviews, he was recruited to produce a series of Miami-area concerts in the same style. The approach also benefits him, he says. “You are on the stage and the spotlights are shining on you, so you’re blinded. You just see darkness, you don’t see people, so it’s a very wonderful feeling to be able to break that wall, to get some chuckles from the audience, and to feel like you’re playing in a salon concert.”

 

The illustrator and cartoonist R.O. Blechman, a loyal audience member for many years, says he looks forward to hearing Yehuda on the microphone as much as on the cello. “I find his introductory talks marvelous—so enlightening, so entertaining, so informative. He goes beyond music and puts music in a larger cultural context.”

 

Close Encounters With Music moved north to the Berkshires when Yehuda and Hannah settled in Columbia County full-time in 1990 (not counting frequent performing tours). Working with a prize student of architect Louis Kahn, the couple designed a unique home that reflects their cosmopolitan interests and lifestyle. Encircled by metal paneling, curving glass windows, and twenty-four terra-cotta columns, the perfectly round house resembles a nautilus shell, with each of its half-dozen interior spaces at a different level from the next. To create a stage for occasional house concerts, they need only open the double glass doors at one end of the music room; the audience sits a few feet lower in the living room next door.

 

Thick plaster walls and window apertures inspired by Middle Eastern architecture and Egyptian iconography reflect Hannah’s field of study; the two met in 1970 in New York City when she was working toward her master’s degree at New York University, focusing on ancient Near East texts and literature. Their initial meeting was the stuff of romantic comedy: Yehuda was in a taxi, heading home from the airport after a performance out of town, when he spotted Hannah walking down the street with a mutual friend; when the taxi stopped at a red light, he rolled down the window and invited them to his apartment for tea. A year later, she accompanied him on his first European tour, stopping in ten capital cities.

 

The couple’s broad range of interests and knowledge and their large circle of friends in the arts coalesce into concerts that offer intriguing entry points into music, including historical, sociological, and theological themes, unexpected collaborations, commissioned works, and new discoveries. Hannah’s involvement ten years ago in the campaign to prevent St. Lawrence Cement from building a plant in Hudson, New York, inspired a Close Encounters concert dedicated to political protest in music and to the preservation of the Hudson Valley; the program included works by Beethoven satirizing absolute power; music by Shostakovich, who composed under the terror of Stalin’s regime; and songs by Kurt Weill written during the Third Reich, as well as poetry written and read by Sharon Olds, a former New York State poet laureate and close friend of Hanani’s. The June 2011 event, “Fiesta!,” will feature work by another good friend, choreographer David Parsons; his dance set to Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango will be part of a program, performed at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall, that features music from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, and a piece by CEWM’s composer-in-residence, Cuban-born Jorge Martín. Hanani is set to record a CD of Martín’s work this fall.

 

 

“We’re putting more stress on commissioning new works, on discovering neglected works, and on recording projects,” says Hannah, who serves as vice president and secretary of the series. “Yehuda has never said to a composer, ‘Just write me a piece that’s ten minutes long.’ There’s always an agenda, a mission, something to accomplish.” (These commissioned works, she adds, often go on to have a fruitful life being performed and recorded nationally and internationally.)

 

For example, composer Paul Schoenfield was commissioned to write Refractions, a work for the 2006 series that commemorated both the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Mozart’s birth and the life of Rollin Hotchkiss, a biochemist who lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, and counted Mozart among his favorite composers. To mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn, CEWM’s 2008-2009 season featured newly discovered works by the long-neglected composer Eduard Franck, a student of Mendelssohn. One concert focused on the Islamic influence on Western music, another on the Oscar-winning composer Leonard Rosenman, who scored dozens of classic films. For many years, the Norman Rockwell Museum hosted an annual Thanksgiving show.

 

This year, the series includes a concert structured around German Romanticism; a holiday engagement of Baroque music; an evening of viola quintets by Mendelssohn and Dvor˘ák; and a performance of the Avalon Quartet playing music by Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov, and Schubert. The season also features two entries in CEWM’s Conversations With … series: Martín will speak at the Hudson [N.Y.] Opera House on November 21, and art conservator David Bull discusses the overlap between art conservation and music performance on May 15, 2011, at The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The series will also expand geographically, with two concerts—one featuring readings by actor Richard Chamberlain—set at the Frick Collection in New York City. (Hannah, a former journalist and editor who wrote for the Los Angeles Times and served as editor of the now-defunct Music Journal, sleuthed out some previously unremarked details of the Frick family’s investment—personally and financially—in music as an art form.)

 

Other bold-faced names who have appeared on the Close Encounters stage include Jane Alexander and Sigourney Weaver; Weaver performed at a concert featuring music written to Shakespeare’s texts and bestowed an in-character kiss on Hanani onstage. Her famous face is one among a discreet gallery of celebrity visages tucked into one corner of Hanani’s music room. Here also is a seventeen-year-old Yehuda with Leonard Bernstein, who first heard him play in 1964 and, along with Isaac Stern (who’s also on the wall), arranged a scholarship to Juilliard for him. There are dozens more: composers, including Miriam Gideon, a personal friend; musicians he has worked with or admires (Yehuda discovered an autographed photo of violinist Fritz Kreisler in a frame shop in Maine and bought it for four dollars); and recent collaborators.

 

“At a certain point you don’t have teachers anymore, so your only chance to learn, to develop, is by being with inspiring colleagues,” Hanani says. “Being involved with many other musicians makes you rethink things or try different possibilities.… This is what makes me so fond of Close Encounters.”

 

Audiences also appreciate the variety. The series attracts listeners from all over New England, New York City, the Hudson Valley, and the Albany, New York, area.

 

“Yehuda has developed a very loyal audience that has come to exemplify what any presenter would want to see—full houses, very engaged and knowledgeable, and they love him,” says Stephen Dankner, a Williamstown-based composer who has written several works for the series. “He has a real magnetism, and they know that what they’re going to see will be well presented, well thought out, enjoyable, and engaging. They’re expecting a good time and they’re not afraid to give a standing ovation and show enthusiasm. He’s a real master at building and holding audiences, and his [talks] are engaging without losing the light touch that’s necessary to make audiences feel at home.”

 

In explaining what Close Encounters means to him, Hanani, characteristically, turns to another art form to weave his metaphor. “When I read poets, like Rilke, who I admire greatly, I have the feeling this man is speaking for me in a way that I would never have been able to express myself—he’s saying it for me in a way I never would have been able to,” he reflects. “You see it in a great concert, when great performers play great music, that’s the way it should feel. And you see it, it happens—sometimes there’s no applause because people are crying. I don’t need critics to write anything, this is my reward.… Add to that the communal effect—by now it’s a beautiful club of culture-loving people who come together, and it’s like a big family. It gives us a sense of community, a sense of belonging, especially because I travel so much. It’s a wonderful anchor to feel that this is home and that we share this wonderful cultural heritage.” [OCT 2010]

A frequent contributor to Berkshire Living, Tresca Weinstein also writes about dance, visual art, yoga, and wellness for regional and national publications.

 

THE GOODS

Close Encounters With Music
Great Barrington, Mass.

Close Encounters With Music 2010-2011 Season

Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center
Great Barrington, Mass.
Chamber Orchestra Kremlin
with Yehuda Hanani, cello
Works of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Max Bruch
• Oct 16 at 6

Baroque Pantheon
The Camerata San Marco
Works of Vivaldi, Geminiani, Valentini, Biber, C.P.E. Bach
• Dec 4 at 6

Thus Spake German Romanticism
Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera; Walter Ponce, piano; Yehuda Hanani, cello
Works by Mahler, Strauss, Jorge Martín
• Mar 12 at 6

Viola Quintets: Dvořák and Mendelssohn
Yehonatan Berick and Renee Jolles, violins;
Toby Appel and Tony DeVroye, viola; Yehuda Hanani, cello
• Apr 16 at 6

The Avalon String Quartet
Works by Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov, Schubert
• May 7 at 6

Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall
Lenox, Mass.
FIESTA! A Latin Splash of Music and Dance
Michael Chertock, piano; Bill Schimmel, accordion; Arti Dixson, percussion; Yehuda Hanani, cello; David Parsons Dance soloists
David Parsons choreography of Astor
Piazzolla’s Grand Tango
Jorge Martín’s Ropa Vieja
Works by Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, and Granados
• Jun 4 at 6

The Lenox Athenaeum
Lenox, Mass.
Midwinter Fireside Concert
Pavel Gintov, piano; Artur Kaganovsky, violin
Works by Chopin, Scriabin, César Franck
• Feb 26 at 6

CEWM Conversations with … series
Hudson Opera House
Hudson, N.Y.
Before Night Falls
CEWM composer-in-residence Jorge Martín gives a presentation on his first full-length opera
• Nov 21 at 3

The Clark
Williamstown, Mass.
“The Conundrum of Restoration and Interpretation”
A talk by David Bull, senior consultant in the Painting Conservation Department at the National Gallery of Art
• May 15 at 3