Anthony
Newman is “the high priest of Bach,” proclaims nearly everyone
discussing the keyboardist’s fifty-year career as a forefront
interpreter of Bach’s organ, harpsichord and orchestral works. The
appellation has been with Newman since the late 1960s, when a Time
Magazine article dubbed him “the high priest of the harpsichord”, a
riff transformed later by Wynton Marsalis into the one by which he is
so ubiquitously known today. It was through Newman’s Bach that I first
came to hear and admire his music-making, renderings of these
well-thumbed and oft-executed scores that blew the proverbial cobwebs
far enough away to be forgotten. The 2013 release of two Bach box sets
on Newman’s own 903 Records, one containing the majority of Bach’s
organ works and one dedicated to his harpsichord pieces, demonstrate a
player of extraordinary virtuosity in the service of an equally
penetrating intellect and open spirit (
details).
His is a reasoning mind coming to terms with music of awe-inspiring
construction and the highest emotional import.
Newman
and I began to correspond, by email and phone, and the vibrancy and
introspection that comprise his personality became abundantly clear. It
also turned out that another 20-cd set was in the immediate offing,
containing all of Newman’s important compositions since the middle
1980s (
details).
Far from someone trapped in the baroque era or unwilling to engage with
anything approaching modernity, what emerged in our conversations and
from my listening is what I’ll call the picture of a complete musician.
Here is a performer, a conductor and a composer whose total grasp of
music’s history, and of much that has been written concerning the
multifarious relationships governing that history’s progression is
formidable. It’s a surprise in all manner of expression lurking around
every corner.
“I upset a lot of people in those early days.”
Newman’s delivery is almost nonchalant, a grin lurking just beneath
each word. “When I came up with the ideas concerning tempo and
ornamentation, as well as playing much more quickly than is usual on
the organ, ideas that I use to this day, a lot of the traditionalists
were up in arms.” The oft-cited example is Newman’s realization of
Bach’s B-Minor organ prelude, BWV 544, in which his dotted rhythmic
approach is augmented by liberal use of ornamentation. Newman
demonstrates the contrast on an electric keyboard that happens to be at
hand during our conversation. The spring and vibrancy of his
realization more than palpably comes through the tiny phone speaker
over miles of cable and circuitry. “Composers always wrote less than
they played at that time”, he begins, referencing copies made by Bach
students in which ornamentation is plentiful. “So what happened”, he
muses, “The students ornamented only when Bach was out of town? That’s
ridiculous! The only other logical explanation is that Bach played this
way, and convention dictated that it wasn’t necessary to write it all
down.” Newman points out that many of the ornaments found in late
baroque and classical period sources, including those in Mozart’s hand
obviously meant for teaching purposes, are much more adventurous than
anyone today would dare to attempt. “If you ornamented like that on
your own, a teacher would reject them, it’s that simple.” Newman’s
rhythmic presentation gave the prelude an entirely different feel. In
an email, he explains that the practice “cathects to an old French
tradition seen in Couperin of restarting the dotted notes after
cadences, when the dotting stops for a brief moment. It's discussed in
my book' Bach and the Baroque.' It has always got me in trouble with
the traditional Organ crowd.” In fact, Newman’s approach to Bach organ
works is unlike that of anyone else. A mixture of Peter Hurford’s quick
tempi and Koopman’s flare for ornamentation might begin to approximate
the soundworld he evokes, but even these comparisons fall far short of
the mark.
The road to such a vital and engaging performance
style was long but full of extraordinary moments of discovery, and it
leads far beyond Bach. When listening to Newman’s breathtaking pedal
harpsichord recordings, such as his take on the C-Minor Passacaglia and
Fugue (BWV565) or delving into his energetic interpretation of the
Goldberg’s, the third of several in his recorded output, it is easy to
imagine that Bach is his specialty. That would explain the emotional
import of the 15
th variation, despite its
comparatively
rapid tempo and a recording whose ambience leaves relatively little
room in which to breathe. While Bach is certainly at the heart of
Newman’s musical life, a fearless reading of Beethoven’s piano
concertos, replete with extras like Mozart’s oft-played C-minor Fantasy
and Beethoven’s own similarly whimsical fantasy for chorus and
orchestra, speaks to a much broader vision of period practice and of
the history guiding it. Like much of his Bach, faster movements in his
Beethoven and Mozart are on the quick side without ever being
breathless, sprightly without letting speed and energy supplant
imagination and gestural clarity. Nonetheless, through it all comes a
sense of playful spontaneity as he ornaments, not just in the
conventional ways and at repeats, about which he can be cavalier; for
Newman, improvisation is an aesthetic - a phrase unexpectedly
elongated, a rhythm expanded, the first note of a measure delayed to
startling effect.
Nothing sums up Newman’s years of dedication and
study as succinctly as a conversation with him, and speaking at length
about literature, musicology and matters of the spirit is an
enlightening experience. Perhaps halfway through our talk came the
offhanded comment, “You know, there’s about to be a twenty-disc set of
my own compositions, basically things I’ve written since 1985 with a
few earlier works included …” A composer? It was then that a whole
other aspect of Newman’s musical journey began to be revealed, from his
late-teenage studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, assistantship to
Luciano Berio as a Harvard student, his appreciation of Stravinsky and
serious issues with twelve-tone composition, and his fascinating and
very complex views on tonality vs. atonality, which can be read in his
newsletter. Newman’s trajectory as a musician is one that cannot really
be understood without immersion in his piano sonatas, organ symphonies,
his opera concerning the O.J. Simpson trial and so many other pieces of
remarkable originality.
In a 2011 episode of Pipedreams, Newman describes
his compositional language as a mixture of baroque rhetoric with
harmonies out of Stravinsky. In the notes accompanying his new
twenty-disc set, he writes: “None of my music really crosses the border
of tonality but sometimes flirts with it. I believe that new music must
have some kind of memorable melody and some kind of harmonic background
to be truly worthy.” While there is truth in Newman’s own assessment of
his music, it fails to account for the wit, rhythmic and textural
imagination and deep feeling imbuing these works by turn.
Newman’s concerto for flute and orchestra is a
case in point, combining some of the oldest contrapuntal devices with
surprisingly modern narrative structures. Presented in a live recording
with Gergely Ittzes expertly handling the solo part, the opening
movement might first appear as a study in Mozartian elegance. Below the
surface though, the canonic opening coexists with a neo-classical
language with which Poulenc would have been quite at home, possibly a
reflection of Newman’s studies in France. Harmonic changes abound,
rhythmic accents are subtle but poignant, and deeper listening reveals
something of a Russian flavor, returning a listener’s thoughts to
aspects of Stravinsky’s long neoclassical period. The recording - which
appears twice in my set, though I’m told this oversight will be
corrected - is atmospheric without loss of perspective, a very nice
live taping of music that thrives on the subtlety of exposure to every
detail.
A fascinating comparison is to be made between a
relatively recent work such as the flute concerto and “Jonah and the
Wale,” composed in the middle 1960s for piano and violin. “I’ve never
thought that serialism could achieve any lasting emotional impact.”
Newman muses as we discuss his musical language of that time. “It was
necessary for me to create my own version of atonality without using
the twelve-tone method.” Newman disavows most of the music he wrote in
what he seems to view as a darkly tyrannical point in modern music’s
history, but hearing the beautifully melodic yet pantonal writing in
“Jonah”, it’s difficult to understand why. Its sound-world is somewhat
akin to Berg, or perhaps to very early Webern, and the performance by
Newman and violinist Bruce Berg is nuanced and obviously emotionally
committed. Occasionally, as in the opening movement of the sonata
titled “My Country ’Tis”, Newman still pushes at the boundaries of
tonality, but it would be fair to say that his compositional language
is more user-friendly these days without ever becoming trite.
Three large sets in a single year seemed quite a
lot to digest at once. “Yes”, Newman laughs, “but it was important to
me that it happen this way. I’d reached an important point of
completion in my spiritual studies, and now seemed like the perfect
time for summing up.” When taken as a whole, these thirty-nine discs do
indeed present a unified picture of a questing musician, one for whom,
as with Edgard Varèse, the past is always present, but not as a burden;
it is something to be re-examined and celebrated. At 72, Newman shows
no signs of resting on his considerable accomplishments. These sets
appear as a moment of reflection, but the speed and precision with
which he speaks, so similar to those qualities in his playing, remain
unimpeded, each answer leading to deeper questions, the answers to
come, no doubt, in what promises to be an equally rich
future.
Marc Medwin
