Wytold

Here’s a followup to my last blog post, about music, excitement, and another frontier for classical performance .

The post was about an exciting performance the National Symphony did in a Washington, DC club, for an audience of around 2000 people who don’t normally go to classical concerts. Younger clubgoers, to judge from how they looked.

On the program were classical pieces, and also some marvelous things — which easily held their own with the classical works — aimed at the club audience. One of them was a take on the prelude to the first Bach cello suite, written by and featuring Wytold Lebing, an irresistible electric cellist.

And if you love the thought of an engaged audience, you’ll love what happened at one point in this piece, which was a rising passage taken straight out of Bach, performed exactly as Bach wrote it. It’s this one. (I’ve excerpted the classic old Casals performance, which — for its easy, compelling musicality — still stands for me as one of my touchstones for how music ought to go. I’m talking about all Casals’ cello suite recordings, not just this one.)

When Lebing got to this, the audience cried out in excitement, with a rising cry that mirrored the rise in the music. I loved this, and I think it’s a lesson for all of us. Because, if you walked around in the club, as I did, you might not think people were paying close attention. Some were talking, some were dancing, some were on their phones. But then came the exictement of the rising passage, and the excited shout. There are many kinds of listening.

And so here’s a challenge — a next frontier — for our normal classical performances. Can we make people shout like that? I know we value silent listening, etc, etc., etc. But that — in the long history of classical music — is a relatively recent development. Handel, Mozart, and Verdi would have found the shout from the club audience entirely familiar. And completely welcome. Because, in their world, people who didn’t make noise during a performance would be showing that they didn’t like the music.

I doubt our existing, older audience will shout when it’s excited. But when we get younger people in, shouts will show we’ve really hooked them, and entered their world. - Arts Journal Blog, Greg Sandow (Julliard School)

The National Symphony Orchestra went clubbing on Friday night. As in, played in one....

Friday, however, found the orchestra playing at Echostage, a big warehouse-like club space that holds 3,000 people, usually to hear electronic dance music or hip-hop rather than Shostakovich. And this time, the NSO got it right.

Fingers of blue-tinged black light strobed out across a dance floor filled to near capacity. Video projections pulsed up and down the back walls...

Therefore, it was savvy of the orchestra’s artistic administrator, Justin Ellis, to recruit the beatboxer and rapper Christylez Bacon, the electric cellist Wytold Lebing, and the DJ: incorporating some other virtuosic local talent with genuine connections to classical music to create a dialogue that made more sense, in this space, than a straight-ahead classical program. Lebing studied classical cello when he was growing up in northern Virginia, and he offered a remix of Bach’s first cello suite, while Bacon, a brilliant and charismatic performer, presented his take on Pachelbel’s Canon. (Both these works involved the other soloists and the orchestra.) For one piece, they were joined on stage by Glenn Donnellan, a second violinist who has become one of the NSO’s most notable ambassadors in outreach programs, playing, very well, his trademark violin he made out of a baseball bat...

But in terms of mission, and expanding the orchestra’s limits, and audience size and excitement, Friday’s program will be hard to top. It’s one of the best efforts I’ve seen from an orchestra at this kind of thing, and it shows a direction the NSO — “in your neighborhood,” or all year round — should continue to explore. - Washington Post

"…big things are expected of Wytold, an unusual musician who manages to make the cello sound cutting-edge cool…The result is something that often approaches jaw-dropping beauty, while also sounding like it could be part of the score to a David Lynch film… Wytold manages to infuse his all-instrumental compositions with plenty of bounce and light. This is an original, captivating album by a local musician who is bound for stages beyond Washington, DC."
- On Tap Magazine

"…American cellist Wytold…takes the cello and brings into the modern age…there is also a definite dialogue going on between the two cellos, tradition versus the future, and I don't think there is an easy winner. Wytold is a very deft musician, juggling the two sounds, mixing and merging them into something uniquely different…This is an album of sonic exploration as much as it is an album of music and it is encouraging to see someone with a vision of the cello in the future. Excellent album and highly recommended."
- The Borderland UK

Wytold's original song "American Dreams" merited a Runner-Up award in the VH-1 Song of the Year Competition, 2007 - VH-1 Song of the Year Contest