TAKE NOTE - Classical Music
by Neylan McBaine
As a Metropolitan Opera soloist and an obsessive classical music audience member, my mom and dad organically created a bubble in which I – as their only child – grew up breathing their favorite art form. Music was the olive branch in their otherwise tumultuous relationship, and with our apartment situated right across the street from Lincoln Center where I danced at the School of American Ballet, sang in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus and studied piano at the Juilliard Pre-College, it was easy for me to be totally immersed too.
While in college at Yale, I studied solo piano, piano accompanying, vocal coaching, co-founded the Yale College Opera Company, wrote about music for the Yale Daily News and toured the country accompanying my mother’s vocal performances. Summers took me to Italy where I studied piano in Rome while living in a rectory. I was of such a romantic nature that I thought I would spend my days writing about opera on a hillside in Tuscany, so this course of events perfectly suited me.
Alas, the real world called. I finished school, moved to San Francisco where my new husband had a job, and ended up working at a tech company when my efforts to work in arts administration proved fruitless. Fortunately, I had enough other interests and talents to craft a fulfilling career in marketing and management, but the dream of working with musicians never fully died.
Here’s a confession. Since leaving the world of art music, I am endlessly baffled how people maneuver through the endurance test that is life without its sustaining power. I couldn’t survive without it. Sometimes I’ll go a while without turning on the radio or a playlist in the car or pulling up a YouTube video of a concert, and when I return to those sounds, it feels like I am taking my first full breath in days. Listening is the only surefire way I have for witnessing the world’s transcendent beauty, for rising above myself as a fallen being and stretching for something beyond our clay baseness.
These days, I’ve managed my career so that I can now work with music teachers to help them run their music studios as efficient small businesses. It’s only taken me 25 years to get back to the community that I love, and I feel very fortunate to be able to do something to raise the profile of and respect for professionals who put 10,000 hours into their craft before they even officially attend school! I have the credentials to hold my own among the music teachers I meet, but they truly are my heroes as they prepare the next generation of musicians.
I’ve been asked to share several of my favorite pieces. While there are endless musical works that are striking for their beauty or interest or fun or emotive energy, I have selected works that are personally meaningful to me, that are grounded in specific memories. This is, I find, the only way I can parse through the vast landscape that is my “favorites”.
It’s a very traditional list. I do love new works – Andrew Norman’s works are a recent new discovery – and I have been deliberate about championing the works of women like Ethyl Smyth and Amy Beach. But I find that we often deem the historical favorites uncool, like we always need to find the new and exciting to prove our authority. I find comfort in knowing that generations before me and hopefully generations after me have experienced the same audible moments in time. These sounds are like a time machine taking me backwards and forwards to people who appreciate them as I do.
1. Enigma Variations – Edward Elgar – One of the most recognizable melodies in the classical repertoire is famous for a reason. With its simple short-short-long-long rhythm and stepping major thirds, the Nimrod Variation is heard in movie scores and celebrations of the British monarchy, among other places. For Christmas a few years ago, I gifted my husband organ lessons. Now, with an organ in our home, the organ arrangement of Nimrod reverberates on repeat, and I love it. The Utah Symphony recently programmed the whole piece and hearing it live – with Nimrod in context of the other harmonically imaginative variations – solidified the whole piece as sublime.
2. Don Giovanni – Mozart - Sextet from Act II – In 1996, I had met my husband Elliot at Yale in Connecticut and introduced him to opera. He was a quick study, and we took the train into New York to hear Cecilia Bartoli sing Don Giovanni at the Met Opera. Seated high in the Dress Circle, the tight harmonies in the sextet made me feel like I was in heaven. Amidst the silliness of the opera’s story, everything stopped, as it does for Salieri in the movie Amadeus. The perfect ensemble coming out of the context of so much buffoonery is part of its magic.
3. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 – Arizona was a special place for my dad, who had grown up going to the Biltmore Hotel with his grandparents. In the maroon Cadillac Sedan de Ville my parents rented each summer driving through the barren desert landscape, I nestled into the footwell of the backseat (pre seat belt) with my Walkman and a blanket. I had three tapes: the soundtrack from Annie, an album of Cabbage Patch Kids songs, and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 played by Van Cliburn. I later got to meet Van Cliburn when accompanying my mom at President Clinton’s National Prayer Breakfast where he also performed, and all I could think of when I met him was those huge hands playing those audacious opening chords that span the length of the piano. Being alone with that piece in the back of the car was sheer joy.
4. Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 3 – As an amateur pianist, this was “my piece.” I won a competition with it, played it for an encore after my senior college recital, played it at my grandfather’s funeral, and whipped it out for many a sacrament meeting or church talent show. It has a spectacular melody with a showy technical part in the middle. It is perfect. The night my mother died, I sat down at the dining room table with my step-father for the first quiet moment of the day after she had died in my arms. The coroners had just removed her body from the apartment, and it dawned on us that we were hungry. Life was moving on. At that moment, the radio station my step-father always listened to started playing this piece. It was my final goodbye to my mom.
5. Bist du bei Mir – Bach after Stolzel– As my mother’s “accompanist in residence,” I was mostly engaged to play for her in church settings. She had the real pros for vocal coaching and operatic concertizing. But some of her staple repertoire made it into our own collaborations: the Segudilla and Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen, Ombra Mai Fu from Handel’s Orpheus and Euridice. But my very favorite piece to play for my mom was a simple arrangement by Bach of a melody originally composed by Gottfried Heinrich Stolzel for his opera Diomedes. “If you are with me, I go with joy,” the song says. I love pulling out the music, all these years later, and just playing it when I’m alone at the piano with her memory.
6. Mendelssohn Octet – It always drives me nuts when people refer to classical music as “calming” or “relaxing”. Admittedly, there are few Adagio second movements where I may doze off, but for the most part I find it exhilarating and the ultimate expression of vitality. The Mendelssohn Octet leaves me breathless at the end. And considering I’ve only heard student groups do it live (with my kids performing), I can imagine someone would have to pick me up from off the floor if I was in the audience for a professional group.
7. Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia – One of the great joys of mothering for me has been introducing my children to art music. They’ve been compliant to my tiger mothering for the most part: I have an accomplished violinist, an accomplished cellist and an accomplished… equestrian, who is also a wonderful choral singer! During my violinist’s senior year of high school, her cellist sister was in 8th grade and the school music director arranged for the two of them to perform the Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia at several school concerts. Aside from being a spectacular piece, the duet offered my girls the opportunity to make music together at the highest level. And to allow their mom to beam with pride from the audience.
8. Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata – In 2015, with three school aged children at home and a full-time job, I escaped to New York to hear Evgeny Kissin perform a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. There was some Bach and some Schumann and one or two of his own compositions, but the Beethoven was a revelation, as if I was hearing the Hammerklavier for the first time. He played the last movement of the sonata faster than I’d ever heard it, and even from my seat in the balcony, the solitary piano created an entire world of sound. The harmonic progression of the percussive chords at the end of the third movement feels utopian. The piece puts the world into order. Plus, I waited at the stage door for his autograph so it was a perfect night.