Newsday [large NYC daily]
Friday, February 28, 1997
Page A12

by Justin Davidson
STAFF WRITER

The Vienna Philharmonic elected its first female member ever yesterday, but the announcement, which came on the eve of a U.S. tour, was not enough to halt protests palnned at concerts next week in Manhattan and California.

The orchestra, founded in 1842, announced that "effective immediately, musicians of both sexes will have equal chances for becoming members." Harpist Anna Lelkes, who has played with the 150-member orchestra for years, was elected the first full female member.

It's a welcome gesture, but it's just a gesture," said Anne Conners, president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. "They said ten years ago [that women would be admitted] and they never did anything about it. They need to show that they're serious." Conners said NOW and the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) still planned to protest the Philharmonic's Carnegie Hall concerts next weekend.

"I think this is absolutely a step in the right direction, and I congratuate them," said Catherine Pickar, an IAWM Board member. But, she said, "the protests are to educate the public about the depraved ideology that has existed with this organization for so long."

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Wednesday, March 5, 1997
Los Angeles Times

Philharmonic's Pride Comes Into Play

Music: Daniel Barenboim notes that the Vienna orchestra, in O.C. tonight, works from different historical perspective than U.S. musicians.

By CHRIS PASLES, Times Staff Writer

NEWPORT BEACH--"America is a pluralistic society," says conductor Daniel Barenboim. "The Vienna Philharmonic is exactly the opposite."

Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony and guest conductor of the philharmonic's concerts in Costa Mesa and New York this week, was commenting Monday on the controversy about the Vienna musicians' refusing until last week to admit women into its ranks as full-fledged members.

"Americans are proud of the pluralistic society they live in, and justly so," said Barenboim, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 and now holds Israeli citizenship.

During an interview at his hotel, he continued: "When you have not only blacks and whites, you have Hispanics and Asians, you have to integrate them, and it is a wonderful pride that I feel in America about this."

During his own career as a conductor, Barenboim said, "I have engaged I don't know how many women in Paris and in Chicago and other orchestras I have been involved with in the last 25 years, and the level of the orchestras would have been considerably less good if we had not taken women."

In the United States, Barenboim finds "a respect for everything that is different, a mutual respect from one individual to another, which is so important and absolutely necessary, and that also goes therefore to the mentalities of the orchestras. The orchestra is very much a society in microcosm.

"The Vienna Philharmonic is exactly the opposite. There's no pluralism. It is [maybe] the only orchestra where the new members are very often pupils of present members. And it goes from one generation to another, and it is precisely--as is the pride in a pluralistic America--the pride of it going from generation to generation that is so important to them.

"I don't justify it. It's not for me either to endorse or to criticize. But it is part of the story which people outside aren't knowledgeable enough or sensitive enough about. These issues are usually more complex than they appear. It's very easy to take something out of context and make headlines."

The Viennese, he said, feel "a sense of duty to transmit their way of playing and their way of producing sound from generation to generation. That should not change. Whether women sit in it or whether foreigners, whatever it is, this should not change. The criterion has to be that to be eligible for the Vienna Philharmonic, a player has to fit in the sound world that they have.

"Yes, that sound is unique. There are very few orchestras that have a sound world of their own. The Vienna Philharmonic is one of them, and this is treasurable. Otherwise, all the orchestras will sound the same in the world, and they shouldn't.

"In some music, their sound is absolutely unique," Barenboim continued. "The way they play Mozart symphonies, there's no orchestra in the world that [can duplicate it]. I'm not saying, of course, that other orchestras can't play Mozart symphonies on a very high level. But this level of homogeneity comes to them naturally, not from discipline from either the conductor or the concertmaster, but because that's the way they play.

"They all come from the same school. They all hold the violin in the same way. They hold the bow the same way, and they produce a very homogeneous sound, but of course a good and lively sound, no question."

Still, he said, "Where do you draw the line? This is the whole problem of Germany before the Nazis and during the Nazis. The fact that they had a culture of their own and that they took it so seriously and that they thought they were the only ones that had the key to depths of knowledge and depths of feeling, I can live with all of that. It's arrogant, but I can live with that.

"Where I stop, because it becomes fascistic, is when they say only Germans are able to do that, and this is where, of course, it is wrong. But this is the difference, and it's very difficult to separate the things, but in fact they must be separated. Otherwise you become a fascistic society." (In fact there are two Americans in the orchestra: trombonist William McElheney and tuba player Ronald Pisarkiewicz.)

"The question of women in the orchestra is a subject that has occupied the Vienna Philharmonic members for many years. It is a very complex subject.

"The social benefits in Austria are totally different than in America. As a pregnant woman, you have so many rights, which you don't have in America, and these rights go in many ways against the basic rules of this orchestra."

* * * Until Austrian labor laws were amended recently to be more equal, he noted, a woman could take upward of two years' maternity leave and be guaranteed her job would be secure. A man who had been sick and hadn't played for a year had to either leave the orchestra or audition again.

"I'm sure there are people who would rather not have women in the orchestra, but I'm sure that happens in the States too; only the climate is different. And don't forget the physiognomy of American orchestras is changing constantly."

* * *

Where female players in the top U.S. orchestras are still in the minority, Barenboim said, "I think in 20 years from now the great majority of the members of many American orchestras will be female, and probably of Asian extraction."

Barenboim said he has "no reservations about working with the orchestra. No. No. No. I've worked in Germany so long. No, absolutely not.

"So there's no question for me about it. That is part of the whole process of development, which will come, and obviously they have accepted that."

As far as ethnic and racial minorities also being excluded from the orchestra, Barenboim said, "If that is so, I haven't been aware of it."

* * *

Similarly, he said he hasn't noticed any musical fallout from the recent controversy. "I must say I have found them always extremely open and attentive. Of course, it helps very much that we speak the same musical language. In other words, I have a great admiration for their tradition and their way of playing, and they know that and feel that. I don't know how they would react with somebody else who had a totally different aesthetic.

"There are certain things that are very important to them, which is not just sound. It's a sense of phrasing, a sense of musical structure. If a conductor takes them in directions which go against the structure of the music to do exaggerations, or whatever it might be, there is something inside them which would rebel.

"It is my duty as a conductor to try first of all to understand what comes out of the [score]. It is my duty as a conductor to have as much knowledge as I can acquire about sound and putting together sound, and it is my duty as a conductor to make a difference between playing notes and making music. And making music means when all those different sounds are in constant relationship to each other and help bring about an organic whole."

* * *

You don't, he said, "open a drawer and the sound is there. The sound of a Bruckner symphony or any other piece does not really live in our physical world. The Bruckner Ninth existed in Bruckner's brain when he imagined it and was subject only to whatever physical or metaphysical laws that he imagined since it was in his own brain.

"And then what happened? Then there was a system of notation invented with black spots on white paper, and this is what we call the 'Bruckner Ninth.' But this is not the Bruckner Ninth. This is a notation system that gives us an idea of what he might have wanted.

"Every time an orchestra somewhere around the world plays the Bruckner Ninth, conducted by whoever is conducting, the sounds of the Bruckner Ninth are literally brought into our physical world. . . . When you have an orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, whose language is that music, that gives you a very wonderful ground to start from.

"But I don't think one can really, musically speaking, say is it my Bruckner or somebody else's. If I go against the indications of the printed page in a haphazard or in a capricious way, then obviously it will be my Bruckner Ninth--but it can only be in a derogative sense."

* Daniel Barenboim will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in music by Beethoven and Strauss tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. The concert, sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, is sold out. (714) 553-2422.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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Los Angeles Time Orange County Edition
Wednesday, March 5, 1997

[Front page]

Only Discord Is Outside the Hall

Performance: First O.C. concert proves ensemble to be everything it says it is and everything its enemies fear.

By MARK SWED, Times Music Critic

COSTA MESA--It was an entirely unfair fight last night. The protesters, with simple fiddle and flute, petitioning the Vienna Philharmonic to hire women, were a small and motley crew. And they were kept far enough away from patrons entering the Orange County Performing Arts Center for the most prestigious concert engagement in its 10-year history that few would even have noticed them were there not the lights of television cameras.

Then onto the Segerstrom Hall stage a horde of white men entered en masse. The harpist, recently given full membership to mollify the American protesters, wasn't needed for the first of the orchestra's programs of the music of dead white Austrian men--Mozart's Symphony No. 29 and Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. And since the orchestra tunes offstage, lest any offending disunity be projected to the audience, it made clear from the very first notes it played--the American and Austrian national anthems--that it was to be an evening in which prisoners would not be taken.

The orchestra is everything it says it is and everything its enemies fear. It plays as if invincible and like no collection of humans should be expected to play. The strings have a unity that is uncanny. The orchestra does proudly breathe as one. The brass are full of breathtaking color. And such unity of tone is, indeed, so fragile that it is easy to believe that the orchestra must have just the right players. These are men who think very much alike.

But the big question last night is, what in the world were they thinking? Certainly Daniel Barenboim conducted with supreme confidence and elegance. He understands the way the players phrase. He is comfortable with a big, deep, rich sound and they seemed happy with his direct and unfussy ways. Tradition--tradition as seen as preserving the sound and the way of performing music from generation to generation--was served.

And yet what an unreal concert this proved. Mozart's early symphony was so polished as to seem like the most precious of fine alabaster, not the work of a feisty young man dazzling Vienna with the newness of his inventions.

Bruckner's last symphony, left incomplete and only in first draft, is the work of a composer both ridiculed by the orchestra that now worships him and the work of a composer losing faith and, to a degree, his sanity. Here is seemed monumental. Great, great thunder in the big moments. A scherzo that pounded like a tremendous army on the move. And the final adagio (Bruckner didn't live to complete the finale) played with a tone that one will not hear anywhere else.

But Robert Simpson calls this movement the most tortuous music Bruckner ever wrote, and torturous this very careful and well-thought-out performance was not. Five years ago, just before he died, Leonard Bernstein conducted this same symphony with the same orchestra at Carnegie Hall. It was a slow and genuinely tortuous performance in which Bernstein seemed to take the listener to the abyss and then push. Barenboim, big though his climax at the end was, seemed there to admire the view.

Bernstein's performance did prove, however, that the Vienna Philharmonic can be driven a lot harder than most conductors care to. It can even lose its fabled tone, and be the more human and affecting for it. And that is a lesson for the protesters who so want to be part of this awesome machine. The best they have to offer it is diversity, not more of the same.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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Letter to the Editor, The New York Times
Friday, March 7, 1997

To the Editor:

Delighted as I am that the Vienna Philharmonic has bowed to international pressure by including the harpist Anna Lelkes as a full member (front page, Feb. 28), it remains to be seen if this is an empty gesture or a down payment on change in the orchestra's discriminatory policies against women and nonwhite men.

The Vienna Philharmonic is leaving intact its race and gender screens of requiring photographs of applicants and full-view auditions of finalists. Unless this changes, integration of the orchestra will cease when Ms. Lelkes takes mandatory retirement in three years. Only continued protests will keep this inclusive process on course.

Anne Conners New York March 3, 1997

The writer is president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.

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A Symbolic Appearance With Vienna

Music review: Harpist Anna Lelkes debuts in Costa Mesa as first female member of the orchestra.

By MARK SWED, Times Music Critic

COSTA MESA--It was a small step for a woman. Anna Lelkes walked but a foot or two on stage Wednesday night, since the harps were placed at the extreme stage right of Segerstrom Hall. But this second of the Vienna Philharmonic's two programs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was her first appearance after becoming the first woman allowed full membership in the prestigious orchestra.

She was greeted with loud cheers and foot-stomping from some of the audience. And it was clearly the fervent hope of those whose protesting had accomplished the event that Lelkes had just taken a giant leap, breaking down the last major barrier in music for women.

But Lelkes was hardly the hero of Richard Strauss' tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life), the second piece on a program that opened with Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. As second harp, she had an extremely minor role in the evening. Thanks to Strauss' banal harp writing, his thick and messy orchestration, an aggressive interpretation by conductor Daniel Barenboim and all the testosterone that the orchestra in full blaze so proudly displays, she was heard very little.

* * *

Buried though she was, Lelkes did make a difference. We knew that she was there, and we knew how hard the orchestra had fought over the years to keep her out in the name of preserving its sound. So Wednesday night, with some of the orchestra's favorite composers on the agenda, became a perfect occasion to test that fabled sound and to see just how well it served those composers.

The Beethoven concerto performance, in which Barenboim was the soloist and conducted from keyboard, was another of the orchestra's picture-postcard renditions of old Vienna. A musically rabble-rousing young Beethoven was breaking down convention in this early concerto, but Barenboim and the orchestra delivered a perfectly manicured performance. Barenboim has a rounded and deep tone that suits the orchestra perfectly and a familiarity with the score that puts a listener at ease. Beethoven, of course, knew a different era of instruments that didn't blend, and he was after discomfort.

Barenboim changed gears radically for his high-octane reading of "Heldenleben," attempting to get from the Strauss showpiece as much dynamic power as possible. He screeched and swerved, sped up and slowed down, and the orchestra started to lose some of its confidence in the thicker and faster passages. Ironically, this, too, has nothing to do with the sound that Strauss sought--he was a much more even-handed (and sometimes even casual) conductor on his recordings with the orchestra.

* * *

In fact, the Vienna Philharmonic seems to have locked itself into a sound that has more to do with nostalgia than authentic musical tradition. (Composers have historically always been in favor of continually finding new sounds.) And even the sheer, velvety smoothness, delicious as any Sacher torte, that it brought to "The Emperor Waltz" of Johann Strauss Jr. for Wednesday's encore was mostly Viennese myth-- Strauss' own pop bands couldn't possibly have played with such lordly assurance.

Lelkes is now formally part of all this "tradition," and other women hope to be as well. But it pays to remember that the Vienna Philharmonic still intends to build high walls to keep modern society out. It is threatening its own boycott, that of the Salzburg Festival, because the likes of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars and the radical feminist composer Pauline Oliveros are now invited.

Popular American culture had its own say: the marquee of the movie theater next door advertised "Fools Rush In" and "The Empire Strikes Back."

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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