Friday Miscellanea

Here is a pretty funny piece about the trials and tribulations of attending a concert. I admire the author's obstreperousness:

From the time the geriatric-but-nimble Brendel began tickling the ivories, the three tourists seated in front of me started running their mouths. In German. That was bad enough. Worse was when one of them lifted his right arm and began playing air piano right along with the virtuoso on stage. He did this straight through the Haydn and straight through the Mozart. He did it in languorous, theatrical, ostentatious fashion. At intermission, I leaned forward and asked the woman if she and her friends were from the House of Annoyingness. 

“No,” she said. “Does such a thing exist?”

When the second half of the concert began, she and one of the men were gone, but Herr Air Piano was back. Worse still, he was now seated directly in front of me. The first time he lifted his arm to simulate a luxuriant glissando I tapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop. The second time he did it, I grabbed him by the forearm, forcefully yanked it down and said, “If you do that one more time, I’ll break your arm off at the shoulder. I swear to God.”

He sounds like a character from David Mamet's TV series "The Unit".

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Alex Ross shows what a good writer about music he is in a piece in the New Yorker on a production of Mieczysław Weinberg’s 1968 opera “The Passenger”. He manages to describe the piece, its importance and some of its character without using any technical terms.

When the orchestra in “The Passenger,” heavily influenced by Shostakovich, presents an ironclad, destructive edge, one senses that Weinberg is working from firsthand impressions. At the same time, the libretto, which Alexander Medvedev adapted from a story by Zofia Posmysz, is not so much a direct dramatization of the Holocaust as a study in trauma and memory: on an ocean liner, a former Auschwitz overseer thinks she sees a survivor from the camp, and experiences a series of flashbacks. Finally, the question of music’s own role in the catastrophe is incorporated into the action. A wrenching scene toward the end, depicting a concert at the camp, pits Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, for solo violin, against an overpowering orchestral mass. The lonely, lamenting notes of the Bach are snuffed out one by one.

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Here is a somewhat clumsy tribute to the double LP cover: the "gatefold". They missed my favorite cover, though, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. This is pretty cool:

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The very prolific Tom Service has a piece up at the Guardian about musical rarities, by which he means unusual pieces by great composers. He starts with a scatological canon by Mozart and ends with an odd recomposition of Handel by Schoenberg. He misses a hilarious canon Beethoven wrote to a patron demanding payment for a score. Fun article, though.

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Via Norman Lebrecht comes a story about a pianist who was hounded through the courts for years for simply practicing her piano. The Spanish supreme court has ruled in her favor.

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Another crusade has been waged in recent years by Norman Lebrecht against the Vienna Philharmonic for being insufficiently diverse, like every other orchestra in the world. Now the New York Times has a piece up talking about the unique sound and musicianship of the Vienna Philharmonic and how its history and stubborn adherence to its traditions have preserved that sound: warm, rich and sumptuous. One detail is that the Vienna Phillies are the only orchestra in the world to use rotary-valve horns instead of the French-style horns everyone else uses. When I was studying in Salzburg I roomed with a Japanese horn player who had come all that way to study how to play the rotary-valve horn. His verdict, with a Japanese accent: "very difficult!"

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There is really only one way to end this miscellanea. Here are the horns of the Vienna Philharmonic with the opening of the Great C Major Symphony of Franz Schubert, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. What a lovely sound it is: