The Arts Fuse
Book Review: “Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World”
Edited by Lisa Kirchner ~ Verdant World Productions, xiv + 375 pages, $24.95
"Addictively Readable"
Book Review: “Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World”
Edited by Lisa Kirchner ~ Verdant World Productions, xiv + 375 pages, $24.95
"Addictively Readable"
NOVEMBER 4, 2022
By Ralph P. Locke
The thrill of the newest, the latest, has many downsides. One is that composers of real substance from a generation or two ago (Gottfried von Einem, for example) tend to get shoved out of our consciousness, and out of our concert halls and opera houses. Leon Kirchner (1919-2009) was one such: he taught at Harvard, and he won the Pulitzer Prize (in 1969) for his String Quartet No. 3. Music critics and record magazines have praised dozens of his recordings over the years — mainly instrumental works but also a cycle of six Emily Dickinson settings, “The Twilight Stood.”
Sometimes it takes a devoted disciple or family member to help keep a composer’s work available and his or her memory alive. Leon Kirchner was an intensely memorable person. (I was privileged to have him as advisor to my senior thesis when I was in college.) Fortunately, his daughter Lisa, a prominent singer-songwriter, has been taking up that task for her remarkable dad, releasing, over the years, Leon Kirchner CDs on Albany and on her own label, Verdant World Records.
Now she has come out with a beautifully produced yet remarkably inexpensive book containing interviews with Leon, essays by him, analyses by savvy commentators, and reminiscences by, or letters from, friends and former students. Several of the writers attest to the importance, for them, of Kirchner’s famous course (Music 180): a pathbreaking innovation at Harvard, in which students got course credit for performing chamber works to a quasi-audience consisting of Kirchner and the other course members and for participating in lively, often trenchantly analytical discussions of each piece and of the interpretive decisions that the performers had made. Kirchner was a powerhouse pianist himself, as can be heard in numerous recordings of his works. (He played piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic!) He also was an inspiring conductor at the Marlboro Music Festival and with the Harvard Chamber Orchestra (which he founded).
Among the notable contributors to the book: Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Allen Shawn, Joseph Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, Roger Sessions, Samuel Adler, comedian Carl Reiner, interviewers (and radio broadcasters) Janet Baker-Carr and Bruce Duffie, soprano Diana Hoagland, tenor George Shirley, and musicologist Robert Riggs, whose acclaimed biography of the composer is available from University of Rochester Press. The 105 photos, beautifully reproduced, capture the man’s energy, intensity, personal magnetism, and sometime tendency to brood.
Any composer would be lucky to have a book like this to help flesh out the portrait that posterity will receive. It’s addictively readable. Again and again, one encounters vivid glimpses of a man whose passion for music and music-making was immense, and who was gifted at conveying that passion to colleagues and students. Often he resorted, in conversation and in his teaching and chamber-music coaching, to images from the natural sciences. Indeed, there’s a letter in the book from a nuclear physicist at MIT insisting that what Kirchner had said about some musical matters was directly analogous to “isotopic doublets.” (I don’t claim to understand this, but Kirchner liked to read up on scientific matters, so perhaps he did.)
I also suggest listening to Kirchner’s intense, bristly Sonata Concertante (for violin and piano), or — for contrast — his hallucinatory Lily, a work for soprano and orchestra using material from his one opera, which was based on the renowned novel Henderson the Rain King by his friend Saul Bellow. Many of his works are easily found on streaming services, such as YouTube and Spotify.
Kirchner largely kept far from the day’s fads, though Lily includes altered taped recordings of sung and spoken passages and Quartet 3 incorporates electronic music and aleatoric techniques. Most basically, his music is always intensely expressive, and that’s why it remains vital a half-century later.
Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich).
The Arts Fuse https://artsfuse.org/264045/book-review-leon-kirchner-and-his-verdant-world-addictively-readable/
Boston Musical Intelligencer
Book Review: Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World
Edited by Lisa Kirchner ~ Verdant World Productions, xiv + 375 pages, $24.95
Leon Kirchner: An Animate Account
NOVEMBER 3, 2022
by David Patterson
Arriving from the presses in August came just the second major publication on this eminent American composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher, in an account from his daughter Lisa. On first glance flipping through the 375 pages, readers will seize on how editor Lisa has carefully radiused the edges and corners of the professional life of her father in this handsome tribute.
No newcomer to what it takes to pull together such a volume, Lisa Kirchner begins her preface, “This anthology of writings by and about my father, Leon Kirchner, includes letters, analyses, interviews, and essays, interleaved with photographs, manuscripts, and art. While compiling the pre-existing materials, I wrote to many of my father’s colleagues expressing my hope that each might contribute an essay illuminating those elements of his aesthetic vision and credo that resonated in their encounters with him. My confidence was rewarded by their generosity and some 40 newly minted writings were rendered for inclusion in “Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World.”
It was several years ago in the early stages of the book’s making, that I heard Lisa’s voicemail on my office phone. What a surprise, how touching—if not humbling—to have received her invitation to contribute to this account. And to her surprise, it has always been “Mr. Kirchner”—never “Leon”—as Lisa thought of my teacher and me as being friends after so many years. Either way, it gives me great pleasure to review this enormous endeavor about Leon Kirchner with whom I studied both at Tanglewood and at Harvard. Memories stirred and revelations enlightened, if not amused me, reading Lisa’s account. The editor defines the nine chapters as broad categories. Several titles of Lisa’s interviews transcribed to text immediately thrust the reader into Leon’s world. One from Janet Baker-Carr, “I SOMETIMES THINK I DREAMED ALL OF THIS, AND PERHAPS I HAVE,” and another from Richard Trythall, TRYING TO FIND “A NEW WAY OF PRESENTING CONSCIOUSNESS.” From the chapter that includes essays by performers with whom Kirchner collaborated over a lifetime, Yo-Yo Ma “can still hear him—Rappappapapapa PEEEM, ba PEEEM, ba PEEEM, ba Peeem, ba Peeem….” These utterances presumably during a college coaching session. From accounts by former composition students, Stanley Silverman, studying at Mills College, muses: “Of great annoyance to him, but to the delight of the students, a resident peacock would appear at the window in full plumage and shriek in ecstasy whenever Leon played the piano.”
The book comprises essays and tributes from colleagues, letters to and from Kirchner including extensive correspondence with Roger Sessions, essays from students, musical and literary commentary on and analysis of his works, his published writings, and a rich topography of photos and other images.
These nine chapters bring to light an ever-widening range of perspectives on major themes with a good number of surprises along the way. The editor’s care and dedication evidence themselves everywhere. From her email about my copy, “it is a more rare printing from the press that blackens the blacks and lightens the white but blocks out some of the ‘passing tones’ while it also beautifully burnishes and polishes the images and provides a kind of glossy sheen.”
Lisa Kirchner, a singer/songwriter/actor, has appeared in productions off and on Broadway, on WNET’s “Great Performances,” Bravo Cable, NBC’s “Another World,” at The White House, Gracie Mansion, and in nightclubs. She has produced and released six solo vocal albums and six albums of works and performances by Leon Kirchner on Verdant World and Albany Records. As a freelance photo researcher, Lisa worked steadily for publishers producing images and clearing rights for their art, academic and trade books, including panoramic series and encyclopedias
David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chair of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of “20 Little Piano Pieces from Around the World” (G. Schirmer). www.notescape.net
Boston Musical Intelligencer: https://www.classical-scene.com/2022/11/03/kirchner-animate/
by David Patterson
Arriving from the presses in August came just the second major publication on this eminent American composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher, in an account from his daughter Lisa. On first glance flipping through the 375 pages, readers will seize on how editor Lisa has carefully radiused the edges and corners of the professional life of her father in this handsome tribute.
No newcomer to what it takes to pull together such a volume, Lisa Kirchner begins her preface, “This anthology of writings by and about my father, Leon Kirchner, includes letters, analyses, interviews, and essays, interleaved with photographs, manuscripts, and art. While compiling the pre-existing materials, I wrote to many of my father’s colleagues expressing my hope that each might contribute an essay illuminating those elements of his aesthetic vision and credo that resonated in their encounters with him. My confidence was rewarded by their generosity and some 40 newly minted writings were rendered for inclusion in “Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World.”
It was several years ago in the early stages of the book’s making, that I heard Lisa’s voicemail on my office phone. What a surprise, how touching—if not humbling—to have received her invitation to contribute to this account. And to her surprise, it has always been “Mr. Kirchner”—never “Leon”—as Lisa thought of my teacher and me as being friends after so many years. Either way, it gives me great pleasure to review this enormous endeavor about Leon Kirchner with whom I studied both at Tanglewood and at Harvard. Memories stirred and revelations enlightened, if not amused me, reading Lisa’s account. The editor defines the nine chapters as broad categories. Several titles of Lisa’s interviews transcribed to text immediately thrust the reader into Leon’s world. One from Janet Baker-Carr, “I SOMETIMES THINK I DREAMED ALL OF THIS, AND PERHAPS I HAVE,” and another from Richard Trythall, TRYING TO FIND “A NEW WAY OF PRESENTING CONSCIOUSNESS.” From the chapter that includes essays by performers with whom Kirchner collaborated over a lifetime, Yo-Yo Ma “can still hear him—Rappappapapapa PEEEM, ba PEEEM, ba PEEEM, ba Peeem, ba Peeem….” These utterances presumably during a college coaching session. From accounts by former composition students, Stanley Silverman, studying at Mills College, muses: “Of great annoyance to him, but to the delight of the students, a resident peacock would appear at the window in full plumage and shriek in ecstasy whenever Leon played the piano.”
The book comprises essays and tributes from colleagues, letters to and from Kirchner including extensive correspondence with Roger Sessions, essays from students, musical and literary commentary on and analysis of his works, his published writings, and a rich topography of photos and other images.
These nine chapters bring to light an ever-widening range of perspectives on major themes with a good number of surprises along the way. The editor’s care and dedication evidence themselves everywhere. From her email about my copy, “it is a more rare printing from the press that blackens the blacks and lightens the white but blocks out some of the ‘passing tones’ while it also beautifully burnishes and polishes the images and provides a kind of glossy sheen.”
Lisa Kirchner, a singer/songwriter/actor, has appeared in productions off and on Broadway, on WNET’s “Great Performances,” Bravo Cable, NBC’s “Another World,” at The White House, Gracie Mansion, and in nightclubs. She has produced and released six solo vocal albums and six albums of works and performances by Leon Kirchner on Verdant World and Albany Records. As a freelance photo researcher, Lisa worked steadily for publishers producing images and clearing rights for their art, academic and trade books, including panoramic series and encyclopedias
David Patterson, Professor of Music and former Chair of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author of “20 Little Piano Pieces from Around the World” (G. Schirmer). www.notescape.net
Boston Musical Intelligencer: https://www.classical-scene.com/2022/11/03/kirchner-animate/
CLASSICAL VOICE NORTH AMERICA. PERSPECTIVE
Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World
Edited by Lisa Kirchner. New York: Verdant World Productions, 2022. xiv +375 pages.
Kirchner Letters Paint Composer As Fierce, Inspiring Intellectual
March 6, 2023
Mark Evans
Leon Kirchner was a man of many talents: conductor, pianist, distinguished teacher, but especially a composer who made important contributions to 20th-century music. He was also an articulate writer who inspired his renowned colleagues, pupils, friends, and family to produce intriguing letters, articles, and comments to and about him. Now 69 of these documents have been collected in a fascinating new book, Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World. Edited by the late composer’s daughter, Lisa Kirchner, an accomplished actress, singer, and songwriter in her own right, the book is her loving tribute to her father and includes both Kirchner’s own writings as well as familiar and new essays and reminiscences reflecting upon his music, his character, and most definitely his personality.
Whether you are discovering Kirchner (1919-2009) and his music for the first time or are among his lifelong aficionados, this book is an invaluable cornucopia of information and proves to be delightful reading. The volume also contains a treasure trove of rare photographs, many not seen before, covering Kirchner’s entire life and illustrating his musical encounters with everyone from Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland to Frank Sinatra!
What makes this book special is that it provides a window into the often complex and nuanced personality of a composer behind the notes on paper. While it offers an abundance of musical analysis for those who seek it (by scholars including Allen Shawn, Alexander L. Ringer, and Kirchner’s biographer, Robert Riggs), there are also anecdotes, interviews, letters, and art, introducing the reader to Kirchner the man, the teacher, the friend, and the parent.
Initially, Kirchner was a piano prodigy studying with such prominent pianists as Richard Buhlig and John Crown. Composer Ernst Toch encouraged him to explore his talents in composition. Kirchner’s musical outlook could be intensely emotional. Photographer Gordon Parks told Kirchner that his music was so hot he wanted smoke appearing in a photograph he took of the young composer that appeared in Life magazine.
While a pre-med student at Los Angeles City College, Kirchner was so affected by a piano performance that he literally jumped through a window to meet the pianist, Leonard Stein, then the assistant to the venerable composer and pedagogue Arnold Schoenberg. After Kirchner studied with Schoenberg, thoughts of becoming a doctor were left behind. Decades later, on the occasion of Kirchner’s 80th birthday, Stein would praise his “unsurpassed integrity, honesty, and vitality,” and declare that the spirit of Schoenberg lived on in Kirchner’s music and teaching.
Kirchner went on to also study with Ernest Bloch and with one of Bloch’s most renowned pupils, the man who became his mentor, Roger Sessions. The Kirchner-Sessions correspondence, published here for the first time, provides a unique insight into not only the private lifetime friendship of teacher and pupil but also the musical outlook of two major American composers throughout their careers.
We meet Kirchner the teacher, going from Mills College, hired on the recommendation of his friend Igor Stravinsky, to Harvard, where he and his wife Gertrude hosted an annual New Year’s Eve party that was clearly the place to be to welcome the New Year. With a remarkable assortment of musical and non-musical guests, including literary and scientific figures, the party provided a rarefied atmosphere indeed. Where else could Kirchner’s friend Saul Bellow, whose novel Henderson the Rain King was the basis for Kirchner’s opera Lily, offer a compelling excuse for missing an important Kirchner premiere? He explained apologetically that he had been in Europe accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. We meet Kirchner’s talented family, his accomplished wife, his son Paul, a mathematician and artist, and daughter Lisa, asking her father to write a jazz song for her, later inserted into both the opera Lily and a concert work based upon it.
Kirchner taught with distinction at Harvard for 28 years, but we shouldn’t forget that composers and performers weren’t always welcome in Cambridge. At Harvard, students were expected to analyze music, but actually playing it didn’t dominate faculty goals. Kirchner changed all that with “Music 180,” a legendary performance and analysis course he created, inspiring students like cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who recalls Kirchner’s intense gaze while exhorting him to deliver a performance that would be “positively galactic.” He also founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. At Marlboro, the chamber music festival for virtuosos, he was able to conduct and inspire generations of musicians who have made their mark around the world.
We also encounter a composer who thought, wrote, and spoke seriously about art, a hazardous row to hoe for anyone immersed in creativity. Kirchner had strong musical and personal values. He stuck to them through thick and thin. Kirchner could have followed the example of his friends, New York composers Alex North and Leonard Rosenman, and settled in Hollywood to write film scores. Certainly, he had the opportunity. But Kirchner regarded writing music to underscore a play or film by someone else as not truly expressive of a composer’s real personality. Considering Kirchner’s desire to control his own artistic destiny, he clearly made the right choice to decline offers to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. One can imagine the explosion from Kirchner if a Hollywood director struck a note on the piano and told him to feature it in his score, something that actually happened to Ernst Toch.
Kirchner had a talent for friendship, numbering among his prominent and sometimes improbable friends musicians of all kinds, scientists, physicians, economists, and even Hollywood stars. (He once gave up a date with Marilyn Monroe to attend a Stravinsky concert.) Director and comedy writer Carl Reiner, Kirchner’s Army buddy, recalled their days in the service. Under orders from his commanding officer (and future game show host) Captain Allen Ludden, a reluctant Kirchner wrote the music for a production of Dracula. But Kirchner being Kirchner, he managed to shock his copyists with musical time signatures in five instead of three or four and to scare the wits out of his audience with a piercing F above high C to make this a performance of Dracula no one could forget.
He also formed an unlikely friendship with world-renowned cellist Pablo Casals when the two bonded at Marlboro. Violinist Jaime Laredo recalls that Rudolf Serkin would intentionally steer Casals, famously conservative in his disapproval of the dissonances in modern music, away from concerts at which such works were likely to be performed. But Casals was impressed with Kirchner’s broad range of intellectual interests and his personality; out of curiosity, he attended a concert featuring a Kirchner premiere and told the surprised composer he was impressed with his music as well.
Kirchner not only won countless honors, including the Naumburg Award for his First Piano Concerto and the Pulitzer Prize for his Third String Quartet, but the respect of composers and colleagues throughout his lifetime. As for his extensive catalog of symphonic, chamber, and piano works, David Amram declares that “Leon set a standard for us all.” Samuel Adler says, “He is one of the composers who because of the great musical integrity in every one of his works will inspire so many of us for as long as music is performed.” Kirchner himself explained, “Music is a science, but a science that must make people laugh and dance and sing.” He viewed with skepticism what he called the “superficiality of current style and fad worship” and composers lost in “the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks, and cold stylistic minutiae.” He summed up his view by declaring, “An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man’s ‘awareness,’ his ‘degree of consciousness,’ and bringing new subtilization, vision, and beauty to the elements of experience.”
If you never had the pleasure of meeting Leon Kirchner, after reading Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World, you’ll feel as if you truly did meet him after all. It’s an extraordinary book in a unique format that provides insight into the musical outlook and private personality of a major figure in contemporary American music. - Mark Evans / Classical Voice North America
Mark Evans is a composer, conductor, and pianist with a multifaceted background in words and music. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School. He hosts the popular “Mark! My Words” television program and is founder of Cultural Conservation, a foundation dedicated to the principle that society should preserve its cultural resources with the same care a nation devotes to natural resources. His most recent books include Mark! My Words: How to Discover the Joy of Music, the Delight of Language, and the Pride of Achievement in the Age of Trash Talk and Cultural Chaos; Our Musical Heritage: From Yankee Doodle to Carnegie Hall, Broadway, and the Hollywood Sound Stage; and Playboy at the Piano: Profiles and Reflections from a Life in Music, Books, and Broadcasting
Mark Evans
Leon Kirchner was a man of many talents: conductor, pianist, distinguished teacher, but especially a composer who made important contributions to 20th-century music. He was also an articulate writer who inspired his renowned colleagues, pupils, friends, and family to produce intriguing letters, articles, and comments to and about him. Now 69 of these documents have been collected in a fascinating new book, Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World. Edited by the late composer’s daughter, Lisa Kirchner, an accomplished actress, singer, and songwriter in her own right, the book is her loving tribute to her father and includes both Kirchner’s own writings as well as familiar and new essays and reminiscences reflecting upon his music, his character, and most definitely his personality.
Whether you are discovering Kirchner (1919-2009) and his music for the first time or are among his lifelong aficionados, this book is an invaluable cornucopia of information and proves to be delightful reading. The volume also contains a treasure trove of rare photographs, many not seen before, covering Kirchner’s entire life and illustrating his musical encounters with everyone from Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland to Frank Sinatra!
What makes this book special is that it provides a window into the often complex and nuanced personality of a composer behind the notes on paper. While it offers an abundance of musical analysis for those who seek it (by scholars including Allen Shawn, Alexander L. Ringer, and Kirchner’s biographer, Robert Riggs), there are also anecdotes, interviews, letters, and art, introducing the reader to Kirchner the man, the teacher, the friend, and the parent.
Initially, Kirchner was a piano prodigy studying with such prominent pianists as Richard Buhlig and John Crown. Composer Ernst Toch encouraged him to explore his talents in composition. Kirchner’s musical outlook could be intensely emotional. Photographer Gordon Parks told Kirchner that his music was so hot he wanted smoke appearing in a photograph he took of the young composer that appeared in Life magazine.
While a pre-med student at Los Angeles City College, Kirchner was so affected by a piano performance that he literally jumped through a window to meet the pianist, Leonard Stein, then the assistant to the venerable composer and pedagogue Arnold Schoenberg. After Kirchner studied with Schoenberg, thoughts of becoming a doctor were left behind. Decades later, on the occasion of Kirchner’s 80th birthday, Stein would praise his “unsurpassed integrity, honesty, and vitality,” and declare that the spirit of Schoenberg lived on in Kirchner’s music and teaching.
Kirchner went on to also study with Ernest Bloch and with one of Bloch’s most renowned pupils, the man who became his mentor, Roger Sessions. The Kirchner-Sessions correspondence, published here for the first time, provides a unique insight into not only the private lifetime friendship of teacher and pupil but also the musical outlook of two major American composers throughout their careers.
We meet Kirchner the teacher, going from Mills College, hired on the recommendation of his friend Igor Stravinsky, to Harvard, where he and his wife Gertrude hosted an annual New Year’s Eve party that was clearly the place to be to welcome the New Year. With a remarkable assortment of musical and non-musical guests, including literary and scientific figures, the party provided a rarefied atmosphere indeed. Where else could Kirchner’s friend Saul Bellow, whose novel Henderson the Rain King was the basis for Kirchner’s opera Lily, offer a compelling excuse for missing an important Kirchner premiere? He explained apologetically that he had been in Europe accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. We meet Kirchner’s talented family, his accomplished wife, his son Paul, a mathematician and artist, and daughter Lisa, asking her father to write a jazz song for her, later inserted into both the opera Lily and a concert work based upon it.
Kirchner taught with distinction at Harvard for 28 years, but we shouldn’t forget that composers and performers weren’t always welcome in Cambridge. At Harvard, students were expected to analyze music, but actually playing it didn’t dominate faculty goals. Kirchner changed all that with “Music 180,” a legendary performance and analysis course he created, inspiring students like cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who recalls Kirchner’s intense gaze while exhorting him to deliver a performance that would be “positively galactic.” He also founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. At Marlboro, the chamber music festival for virtuosos, he was able to conduct and inspire generations of musicians who have made their mark around the world.
We also encounter a composer who thought, wrote, and spoke seriously about art, a hazardous row to hoe for anyone immersed in creativity. Kirchner had strong musical and personal values. He stuck to them through thick and thin. Kirchner could have followed the example of his friends, New York composers Alex North and Leonard Rosenman, and settled in Hollywood to write film scores. Certainly, he had the opportunity. But Kirchner regarded writing music to underscore a play or film by someone else as not truly expressive of a composer’s real personality. Considering Kirchner’s desire to control his own artistic destiny, he clearly made the right choice to decline offers to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. One can imagine the explosion from Kirchner if a Hollywood director struck a note on the piano and told him to feature it in his score, something that actually happened to Ernst Toch.
Kirchner had a talent for friendship, numbering among his prominent and sometimes improbable friends musicians of all kinds, scientists, physicians, economists, and even Hollywood stars. (He once gave up a date with Marilyn Monroe to attend a Stravinsky concert.) Director and comedy writer Carl Reiner, Kirchner’s Army buddy, recalled their days in the service. Under orders from his commanding officer (and future game show host) Captain Allen Ludden, a reluctant Kirchner wrote the music for a production of Dracula. But Kirchner being Kirchner, he managed to shock his copyists with musical time signatures in five instead of three or four and to scare the wits out of his audience with a piercing F above high C to make this a performance of Dracula no one could forget.
He also formed an unlikely friendship with world-renowned cellist Pablo Casals when the two bonded at Marlboro. Violinist Jaime Laredo recalls that Rudolf Serkin would intentionally steer Casals, famously conservative in his disapproval of the dissonances in modern music, away from concerts at which such works were likely to be performed. But Casals was impressed with Kirchner’s broad range of intellectual interests and his personality; out of curiosity, he attended a concert featuring a Kirchner premiere and told the surprised composer he was impressed with his music as well.
Kirchner not only won countless honors, including the Naumburg Award for his First Piano Concerto and the Pulitzer Prize for his Third String Quartet, but the respect of composers and colleagues throughout his lifetime. As for his extensive catalog of symphonic, chamber, and piano works, David Amram declares that “Leon set a standard for us all.” Samuel Adler says, “He is one of the composers who because of the great musical integrity in every one of his works will inspire so many of us for as long as music is performed.” Kirchner himself explained, “Music is a science, but a science that must make people laugh and dance and sing.” He viewed with skepticism what he called the “superficiality of current style and fad worship” and composers lost in “the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks, and cold stylistic minutiae.” He summed up his view by declaring, “An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man’s ‘awareness,’ his ‘degree of consciousness,’ and bringing new subtilization, vision, and beauty to the elements of experience.”
If you never had the pleasure of meeting Leon Kirchner, after reading Leon Kirchner and His Verdant World, you’ll feel as if you truly did meet him after all. It’s an extraordinary book in a unique format that provides insight into the musical outlook and private personality of a major figure in contemporary American music. - Mark Evans / Classical Voice North America
Mark Evans is a composer, conductor, and pianist with a multifaceted background in words and music. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School. He hosts the popular “Mark! My Words” television program and is founder of Cultural Conservation, a foundation dedicated to the principle that society should preserve its cultural resources with the same care a nation devotes to natural resources. His most recent books include Mark! My Words: How to Discover the Joy of Music, the Delight of Language, and the Pride of Achievement in the Age of Trash Talk and Cultural Chaos; Our Musical Heritage: From Yankee Doodle to Carnegie Hall, Broadway, and the Hollywood Sound Stage; and Playboy at the Piano: Profiles and Reflections from a Life in Music, Books, and Broadcasting
BERG: Chamber Concerto; BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto 4; Peter Serkin, p; Pina Carmirelli, v; Harvard Chamber Orchestra, Marlboro Festival Players/ Leon Kirchner—Verdant World 4—71 minutes. Review by Ralph P. Locke/American Record Guide:
The multitalented and long-lived Leon Kirchner (1919-2009) was, at various times, a solo pianist (with the New York Philharmonic), a beloved teacher at Mills College and Harvard, a frequent participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, a respected composer (Pulitzer Prize 1967), and an inspiring conductor. Here are two recordings made in concert of major masterworks, with Kirchner conducting and Peter Serkin as piano soloist. The recordings have been brought together through the efforts of Lisa Kirchner, the composer's daughter, who is also a noted singer-songwriter. (See Jack Sullivan's appreciative review of one of her own CDs, "Something to Sing About” Nov/Dec 2011.) Lisa K. has also put together a major book about her father (see Book Reviews in this issue).
The Beethoven is full of fresh details and interpretive decisions, including shifts in tempo. Peter Serkin is not always perfectly in control of certain quick passages, though he's breathtakingly at ease in others. (We have become spoiled by the consistency of studio recordings.) His reading of II, ably assisted by Kirchner and his freelance players from the Boston area, is immensely poetic, taken a bit slowly. One can almost hear Kirchner and Serkin thinking, measure by measure. And the finale really cooks, with marvelously delicate playing and subtle use of the right pedal by the pianist.
For the Berg Chamber Concerto, the two Americans are joined by the renowned Italian violinist Pina Carmirelli, renowned as Concertmistress of I Musici and as founder of the Boccherini Quintet and the Carmirelli Quartet. The chamber group accompanying them is itself a constellation of masters, including flutist Paula Robison and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. A violist is erroneously listed; Berg's orchestra here consists entirely of wind and brass, with one player per part. The work, carefully structured by Berg according to numerical and traditionally musical principles—remains a challenge to the ear even today. It uses some 12-tone principles but is not strictly serial. The performance is marvelously secure, the sound vividly captured. I enjoyed the work more than in any recording I've encountered before.
There are excellent, informative notes by musicologist Robert Riggs, whose acclaimed biography of Kirchner is available from University of Rochester Press. The three movements of the Berg are played without pause, as indicated by the composer. Still, I'd have liked separate track numbers to help me navigate. The recording can be purchased at verdantworldrecords.com or by phoning 917-338-6057. - Ralph P. Locke/American Record Guide
The multitalented and long-lived Leon Kirchner (1919-2009) was, at various times, a solo pianist (with the New York Philharmonic), a beloved teacher at Mills College and Harvard, a frequent participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, a respected composer (Pulitzer Prize 1967), and an inspiring conductor. Here are two recordings made in concert of major masterworks, with Kirchner conducting and Peter Serkin as piano soloist. The recordings have been brought together through the efforts of Lisa Kirchner, the composer's daughter, who is also a noted singer-songwriter. (See Jack Sullivan's appreciative review of one of her own CDs, "Something to Sing About” Nov/Dec 2011.) Lisa K. has also put together a major book about her father (see Book Reviews in this issue).
The Beethoven is full of fresh details and interpretive decisions, including shifts in tempo. Peter Serkin is not always perfectly in control of certain quick passages, though he's breathtakingly at ease in others. (We have become spoiled by the consistency of studio recordings.) His reading of II, ably assisted by Kirchner and his freelance players from the Boston area, is immensely poetic, taken a bit slowly. One can almost hear Kirchner and Serkin thinking, measure by measure. And the finale really cooks, with marvelously delicate playing and subtle use of the right pedal by the pianist.
For the Berg Chamber Concerto, the two Americans are joined by the renowned Italian violinist Pina Carmirelli, renowned as Concertmistress of I Musici and as founder of the Boccherini Quintet and the Carmirelli Quartet. The chamber group accompanying them is itself a constellation of masters, including flutist Paula Robison and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. A violist is erroneously listed; Berg's orchestra here consists entirely of wind and brass, with one player per part. The work, carefully structured by Berg according to numerical and traditionally musical principles—remains a challenge to the ear even today. It uses some 12-tone principles but is not strictly serial. The performance is marvelously secure, the sound vividly captured. I enjoyed the work more than in any recording I've encountered before.
There are excellent, informative notes by musicologist Robert Riggs, whose acclaimed biography of Kirchner is available from University of Rochester Press. The three movements of the Berg are played without pause, as indicated by the composer. Still, I'd have liked separate track numbers to help me navigate. The recording can be purchased at verdantworldrecords.com or by phoning 917-338-6057. - Ralph P. Locke/American Record Guide