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The Three Davids |
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By David Gregson
Yet if I were asked to name living heroes from the world of classical music, my only difficulty would be knowing when to stop. Conductors Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Valery Gergiev, Michael Tilson Thomas; pianists Jean Yves Thibaudet, Ivo Pogorelich, Martha Argerich. And that’s merely a shallow inhalation before I really get started.
Many musical heroes are also champions. That is to say, they champion the works of others. Three such heroes have a strong San Diego connection. And by odd coincidence, all share the same first name: David. Two of these Davids are accustomed to hearing their praises sung, but one is in need of wider recognition.
The first hero is Mozart champion David Atherton, the brilliantly gifted British conductor who, from 1980 to 1987, turned the San Diego Symphony into a really important orchestra. Various non-artistic controversies eventually led to his departure. Later, another great musician, Israeli conductor Yoav Talmi, would bring the symphony to nearly world-class status just before its catastrophic financial collapse. Sometimes we lose our heroes. Great artists mix awkwardly with politics and economics.
Atherton, however, maintains a residence here and is intimately involved in the planning of the now year-round concert presentations of the Mainly Mozart Festival. During the ninth annual main event, May 30 through June 14, Atherton conducts nine orchestral concerts: six in San Diego, one in Escondido and two in Tijuana. While this artistically superlative festival offers many other concerts—including a piano recital with Jeffrey Kahane, a performance by the Los Angeles String Quartet and a violin-piano duo with Kahane and William Preucil—the hot tickets are the Atherton-led concerts.
When not in San Diego, Atherton appears at least once annually in the pit of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. He can be spotted most frequently as the music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic and as the principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
In championing Mozart, a composer who hardly needs defenders, Atherton has aimed for—and achieved brilliantly—a successful San Diego concert series that people actually buy tickets for. This is enough to make him a hero in my book. Atherton’s own interests and conducting abilities go way beyond Mozart to ancient music and the work of contemporary composers. But even Mozart needs championing in these days of shrinking audiences for classical music.
The second hero is cellist David Finckel, the anchor for the Emerson String Quartet, among the finest chamber ensembles in existence. Widely in demand, the foursome plays up to 140 engagements throughout the world every year and records disk after disk for the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label. The quartet’s new DG seven-CD set of the Complete String Quartets of Beethoven most assuredly ranks among the great recordings of the century.
But with his spouse, pianist Wu Han, Finckel has a separate identity as half of a husband-wife cello-piano duo that concretizes and produces and markets private label recordings. In the process, Finckel has found himself championing a relatively obscure work by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. This January, the Finckels’ electrifying disk of Grieg’s Sonata in A Minor, Opus 36 was featured by BBC Music Magazine, an internationally distributed periodical that packaged the CD with a rave review and cover story. In April the duo played the Sonata in Sherwood Auditorium to an ecstatic audience reception.
Though Finckel and Wu live with their 3yearold daughter in New York, Finckel has taken part in every La Jolla Chamber Music Society SummerFest program for the past five seasons. SummerFest patrons have grown to regard both artists as their own, and the Finckels warmly reciprocate.
The Finckels’ private label, ArtistLed (with an Internet home page at www.artistled.com), features superbly played and engineered performances. I would recommend the Tchaikovsky Trio in A Minor, without hesitation, and the Richard Strauss Sonata in F Major.
But it’s the Emerson Quartet’s new Beethoven set on DG—a project that took three years—that truly belongs in every music library. "We worked hard enough on it, that’s for sure," Finckel tells me. "Originally we were going to try to record it in a year, and it sort of stretched into a year and a half, then two years of recording time. After that, another year or so of editing, fixing up.
"The work of other string quartet ensembles has usually been released in batches —the early, middle and late Beethoven quartets in different sets. We wanted to avoid the phenomenon of getting to the end of the cycle, say in five years, and then wanting to start all over again. Our feelings would have changed. We decided to compress it as much as we could." Before the recording was made, the quartet had been playing the Beethoven works for 17 years.
My third hero is American music champion David Amos, director of our local Jewish Community Orchestra. Most are unaware that Amos has dozens of CD recordings to his credit, many on major labels with some of the world’s finest ensembles, including the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic and the Philharmonia. All of these recordings reflect a smooth professionalism of which a community orchestra is simply not capable.
Yet it is working with local amateurs and semi-amateurs that has honed many of Amos’ skills and helped give him an intimate knowledge of standard and offbeat scores. "I can learn slowly, along with the orchestra," Amos explains. "And I have a chance to experiment and learn better than when working with professionals.
"I can also experiment with the fringes of the repertory. I’ve always been interested in the lesser known music; maybe it’s because it’s the underdog—music that deserves to be heard but usually isn’t." Through his non profit foundation, the International Musicians’ Recording Fund, Amos commissions new works and creates projects to promote the largely neglected work of mid20thcentury American composers such as Morton Gould, Norman DelloJoio, Arnold Rosner, Vincent Persichetti, Alan Hovhaness, Paul Creston, Walter Piston and many others.
A longtime resident of San Diego, Amos received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in music from SDSU and then taught music in local high schools. He began his work with the Jewish Community Center in 1964. In the late 1970s, Amos established a friendship with Meir Rimon, principal horn player of the Israel Philharmonic. "He liked what I was able to do," says Amos, "and arranged for me to conduct a re cording of the Israel Philharmonic in which he was the soloist. So in 1980, that [Dances, Moods and Romances, Crystal CD 513] was my first recording. Somehow Rimon found the funding, and I was squeezed in between performances by Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. That was my baptism.
"Then I got the bug. I felt my calling was to do as much as I can for American contemporary music. Most of my recordings are world premieres. I have directed 125 compositions by 50 composers on 25 CDs. Only three of those pieces are standard repertoire."
Amos’ Harmonia Mundi disk of Persichetti’s Divertimenti for Winds is a gem; his Miklos Rozsa Tripartita for Orchestra (on the same label) is a revelation. In fact, his entire discography is consistently impressive. As one who has long advocated the performance of 20thcentury music before this century is over, I can only regard David Amos as the boldest of our local musical champions.
Visit David Gregson’s Classical Music and Dance forum (http://www.sandiego-online. com/forums/dance/dance.htm).
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