The Symphony no. 5 by Shostakovich, written to restore his fortunes after severe criticism from Stalin and his close associates who had unfavorably viewed a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was premiered in November 1937. His Symphony no. 4 had been in rehearsal when the crisis unfolded so he quickly withdrew it and composed the 5th instead. I say "crisis" because in the totalitarian Soviet Union under Stalin, falling into disfavor meant more than just having your performances banned, though that was certainly a consequence, it also could mean banishment to a labor camp in Siberia or even execution as happened to more than one person in Shostakovich's circle. So we could certainly expect that Shostakovich would attempt to compose something that would not only be acceptable to Stalin and his cronies, but that would also touch the hearts of the listening public as both these results would help him past this crisis (he would experience another criticism and banning in 1948). He very much succeeded in this goal and I recommend reading Richard Taruskin's paper "Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" for a discussion of the context and reception. Regarding the climax of the first movement he writes:
While thematic or motivic recurrences are in themselves defined as syntactic, their interpretation often depends on semantic codes. The climactic unisons in the first movement of Shostakovich's Fifth, for example, derive their significance equally from both perceptual spheres. Their loudness speaks--or rather shouts--for itself. At the same time they remind us of the famous passages all'unisono in Beethoven's Ninth, with which Shostakovich's symphony shares its key. [Shostakovich Studies, p. 29]
He goes on, but I don't want Taruskin stealing my thunder, so I won't quote the rest discussing the structural function of this passage, which you can seek out yourself. Instead, I want to dive right into the first movement. Oh, and much as I appreciate the interpretive work that Taruskin has done here and in other places, I am not interested in pursuing that kind of meaning in this analysis. A big climactic unison for me in this piece is an aesthetic and musical event, not a sociological and historic event because I am writing about the music as I (and we) are experiencing it sui generis.
The symphony is of moderate length for Shostakovich, well under an hour, and the first movement is about fifteen minutes long, so it is more easily absorbed than many other of his symphonies. There are a lot of references to previous music not only in the kinds of themes, but also in the formal structure. This is in first movement sonata allegro form in its overall layout of exposition--development--recapitulation. Shostakovich manages to re-envision all this in his own stylistic terms--he may use well-established forms, but he realizes them in his own unmistakable style. So while I am going to be talking about these structural divisions and about first theme and second theme and so on, I am going to be showing how he handles these elements differently from other composers.
Just to reiterate, I take my starting point for this analysis from Yuriy Kholopov's paper on form in Shostakovich's instrumental works in Shostakovich Studies. Here is how he outlines the basic structure of a sonata form exposition in Shostakovich:
Let me explain the diagram. The MT stands for "main theme" and ST for "secondary theme." They are connected by a transitional section that modulates ("Mod"). Between the secondary theme and the conclusion is a "passage" which is a loose, flowing section typically with modulations. At the bottom of the diagram the harmonic scheme is outlined: tonic, modulation, dominant, passage and dominant.
He also has a more complex diagram outlining the exposition of the Fifth Symphony but I can't quite make sense of it as he doesn't connect the elements of the diagram to specific themes. So I will just proceed on my own. Here is the opening motif which acts as a kind of introductory theme. It is presented in stretto. I'm going to label this motif 'A':
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This is extended with another dotted-note motif which I am going to label motif 'B':
(Notice the end of that theme, with the repeated note 'A's? The last of them, the two eighth-notes followed by the eighth-note plus rest form an anapest, the poetic foot consisting of two short syllables followed by a longer one. Later on, the Secondary Theme will be accompanied by the reverse, a dactyl, one long and two short notes.)
A clever transformation of the initial motif from a minor sixth to a fourth becomes the accompaniment to the next theme, which I am going to call motif 'C'.
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Let's call these three motifs collectively the Main Theme or MT.
A couple of comments on tonality. Shostakovich designates this symphony as being in D minor, but he shows no key signature. Also, in motif C, he moves into D Phrygian. From here until rehearsal number 9, when the dactyl accompaniment in divisi strings begins at a new, faster, tempo, this initial group of motifs are presented and developed in different ways. In the Gergiev Mariinsky recording, this new section begins at 5'07. So everything up to this point has been one complex theme group consisting of three separate ideas, the first two of which have a distinctly Baroque feel to them. Now we have a new theme which I will label the Secondary Theme or ST.
The new theme, ST, provides the greatest possible contrast with the first group of motifs forming the MT. First of all, he has modulated to E flat minor, the Neapolitan. As well, this new theme is one long, long melody extending for twenty-three measures. These are the first violins:
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That theme certainly plumbs the stratosphere! As soon as that theme is stated, however, a new motif appears, like motif 'A' in stretto, in the violas and cellos:
This motif, which I am going to call motif 'D', seems strangely familiar. It is actually closely related to motif 'B', three notes spanning a minor third. He then takes this motif and uses it to build a lovely flute solo:
This technique, of transforming melodies into accompaniments and vice versa, actually dates back to the Beethoven quartets. The flute solo, accompanied by sustained chords in the bassoons and horns, is in F# minor and is followed by a clarinet solo on the same theme that leads into a restatement of the ST but this time in B minor modulating back to E flat minor. This ends the Exposition. At the 8 minute mark (in the Gergiev Mariinsky recording) the Development begins with the piano and double basses returning to motif 'D' and in a faster tempo:
And that is where I am going to stop as this post is already very long. Let's listen to the piece to end:
I used to work with a business person who liked to say that "perception is reality." I guess he meant something having to do with marketing or promotion or reputation or something. But of course those two words refer to things that are often opposed. We perceive one thing, but the reality is something else. Rather like political polls, come to think of it.
The perception and reality that I want to talk about is that of the difference between musicians or composers who are perceived to be at the very top of their profession as opposed to the ones who really are. I have talked a lot about Grigory Sokolov on this blog, a pianist that I consider to be at the very peak of his profession, concert pianist. The perception in the wider music world, outside of Europe at least, is that some other pianist, Yuja Wang or Evgeny Kissin or Lang Lang, is at the pinnacle of the profession. However they are just better known, more widely promoted or more visible in the media. This same phenomenon applies to other instruments and areas as well.
For example, there are a number of violinists who might claim the position of being at the very peak of their profession. I would usually give that spot to Hilary Hahn for quite a few reasons, not least because of her success in commissioning new works and also promoting neglected works like the Schoenberg Violin Concerto. But I am right now listening to someone that makes me think that perhaps she has a serious competitor. Kristóf Baráti is a Hungarian violinist who plays the Bach solo sonatas and partitas as well as I have ever heard them played--and that includes performances by Hilary Hahn. Here, have a listen:
That is spectacular. And musical. And, well, magnificent.
The same likely applies to guitarists. My vote right now would go to Marcin Dylla of Poland:
Actually, that's a twofer: a guitarist at the top of his profession playing music by a composer who might be at the top of hers.
Van Morrison has denounced the supposed “pseudoscience” around coronavirus and is attempting to rally musicians in a campaign to restore live music concerts with full capacity audiences.
The 74-year-old Northern Irish singer launched a campaign to “save live music” on his website, saying socially distanced gigs were not economically viable. “I call on my fellow singers, musicians, writers, producers, promoters and others in the industry to fight with me on this. Come forward, stand up, fight the pseudo-science and speak up,” he said.
There is no doubt that the current situation is impossible for musicians.
The person who worked over the Oliver Room stole nearly everything of significant monetary value, sparing no country or century or subject. He took the oldest book in the collection, a collection of sermons printed in 1473, and also the most recognizable book, a first edition of Isaac Newton’s 98. He stole a first edition of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, a letter written by William Jennings Bryan and a rare copy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1898 memoir, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897. He stole a first edition of a book written by the nation’s second president, John Adams, as well as a book signed by the third, Thomas Jefferson. He stole the first English edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed in London in 1620, and the first edition of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, printed in the same city 241 years later. From John James Audubon’s 1851-54 Quadrupeds of North America, he stole 108 of the 155 hand-colored lithographs.
In short, he took nearly everything he could get his hands on. And he did it with impunity for close to 25 years.
Read the whole thing for the solution to the mystery.
Dave Brubeck, in his lifetime, was the litmus paper of jazz, and most listeners turned red at the sight of him – either from rage at what they called his swingless, thumping pianistics, or out of embarrassment at having to admit that they rather liked what he did. Before Miles Davis went electric and Ornette Coleman bloomed, Brubeck was the surest name to start an argument. A cynical section of the jazz audience perceived his experimental nature as a search for a catchy idiom that might eventually bring him the triumph of a hit. And of course, this line of argument claimed a win when “Take Five” propelled the world onto the dance floor in 5/4 time.
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is to resume live performances with audience from October 1.
Each concert will be one hour with no interval. Seating is limited to 240 people, with two-metre social distancing. The orchestra, also be socially distanced on stage, will be limited to 30 players.
On average musicians have lost £11,300 in cancelled bookings as a result of the pandemic
50% have no bookings in the diary for the remainder of 2020 (average for same period last year was 27 bookings)
64% say they are thinking about leaving the music profession
40% have applied for a non-music job since March
This is in the UK, but it is likely even worse in North America. And if musicians are looking for work outside music, just where are they going to find it?
Why won’t big American orchestras improvise? The answer might have something to do with a tough night for Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic back in 1964.
The great conductor wanted his audience to give serious consideration to John Cage’s chance-based music. But Bernstein couldn’t even get his musicians to put on straight faces. Some played scales instead of the material in Cage’s notated (yet flexible) “Atlas Eclipticalis.” To Cage’s chagrin, Bernstein also led the orchestra in improvisations — which Cage considered a different tradition altogether.
Most of the crowd audibly hated the results. Ever since, American orchestral life has pretty much insisted on fully fixed scores. Improvisation has largely been left to the very occasional special guest, like the pianist Aaron Diehl — who, after studying both classical and jazz traditions, sometimes improvises during a Gershwin concerto.
Why yes!
The improvising composer-performers Henry Threadgill and Anthony Davis have been among the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for music in the last five years. The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2013. All three have collaborated with Mr. Braxton — as have Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Lewis. And all six of these composers have written large-ensemble or orchestral music, most of which has rarely if ever been played by major American orchestras. (Some of these orchestral works are fully notated.)
And all of these musicians are Black. Beginning to program their orchestral music — including works that stretch the orchestral sound into improvisation — would be one way to address larger patterns of racial exclusion in classical music.
Lots of composers use various forms of indeterminate notation to give freedom to the performers, myself included. Moment form is one example, where the motifs are written, but can be played in various orders. Lutosławski has passages in many orchestral works where the players have freedom to improvise within certain limits. John Cage is an example of many different kinds of performer freedom as are Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen. And all of these musicians are white. So what?
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Over at The New Yorker Alex Ross continues his never-ending quest to let us know that this is Wagner's world, we just live in it: How Wagner Shaped Hollywood.
“The Birth of a Nation” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian aggression on film. More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature the composer on their soundtracks, yoking him to all manner of rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers. The “Ride” turns up in a particularly dizzying variety of scenarios. In “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Elmer Fudd chants “Kill da wabbit” while pursuing Bugs Bunny. In John Landis’s “The Blues Brothers” (1980), the “Ride” plays while buffoonish neo-Nazis chase the heroes down a highway and fly off an overpass. Most indelibly, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979) upends Griffith’s racial duality, making white Americans the heralds of destruction: a helicopter squadron blares the “Ride” as it lays waste to a Vietnamese village.
Typically, the end of August through Labor Day is an ideal time for me to take a two-week vacation. Classical music tends to take that time off, too. After a jam-packed concert season and a slew of summer festivals, everything seems to stop for a bit before the ramp-up to fall.
The shutdowns have been devastating for American classical music, given its dependence on patronage — which has been eroding of late — and the lack of meaningful government support, which still props up institutions in Europe. It’s depressing to read all the social media posts by accomplished freelance artists who have been without work for months and can have a bleak view of the future.
Were it not for the virus, I would be posting this from Salzburg.
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We need a nice couple of envois today, do we not? We haven't had any John Cage in a long time, so here is a clip of the actual 1964 performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis by Leonard Bernstein. There is a long introduction by Bernstein and the Cage piece actually starts at the 11:34 mark:
You know, it might have gone better without the lengthy and pompous introduction. "Standard 12-tone technique"? Let's have something quite different. Here is the Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner from the opera Die Walkure with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
I didn't realize this existed! The violinist is David Oistrakh, the cellist is Milos Sadlo and the pianist is some guy named Dmitri Shostakovich. I especially treasure composer performances for their tempi which can tell us more than a mere metronome marking. This recording was made in Prague in 1946, two years after the piece was composed.
I haven't come up with any conspiracy theories lately, have I? No, I didn't think so. But I'm leaning in that direction. Here is the situation: from many discussions we have had here it seems clear that the best solution to the problems of classical music in terms of widening the prospective audience, comes down to improved music education. So why is it so difficult to improve music education, not for the gifted elite who are pretty well-served, but for the ordinary amateur player or listener?
Some things that we have observed is that the use of music examples in music notation have been nearly completely banned from all materials in general circulation. You find them in professional music journals and books for music professionals and in little niches like this blog, but in general publications they simply never appear. Music education programs in public schools have been a target for a long time as music has consistently been classified as inessential.
But I just found a new phenomenon: what is preventing the expansion of high quality music education online? Well Rich Beato has a rant that points out one of the major problems: you can't use any copyright material as an example without losing two thirds of your revenue or being simply banned. Let's let him explain:
That's pretty dire. In music courses at university we are constantly using musical examples to illustrate all manner of musical ideas. In a music course, if you were talking about the mixolydian mode you would hand out a sheet illustrating it, maybe write out the scale on the blackboard and possibly play a musical example--maybe even from a pop song like "She Said She Said." And you would never get into trouble with the copyright holder. Professors often assemble whole anthologies of materials with excerpts from books, papers and copyright scores--all approved by the copyright holders--to use in teaching. This has been the long-standing practice. But the situation now is that, on YouTube at least, copyrights are enforced with a vicious intensity as Rick illustrates.
So you are not going to be able to do any educating it that way. But how about what I do? I use embedded YouTube clips all the time, don't I? Yes, and with the exception of my own compositions and recordings, they are all posted by others so there is no revenue involved. Also, most of my own clips are not actually on YouTube at all. I have avoided setting up my own YouTube channel because, frankly, the revenues seem so miniscule as to be not worth the trouble.
Is there some kind of conspiracy to prevent the education of the populace in music? Maybe not, but there are certainly a nasty set of situations and incentives that seem to serve the same purpose. And one of the key ones is simple greed. As Rick says, I have no problem either with the pop stars making a lot of money. That's their thing. But I don't see why exceptions cannot be carved out, as they were traditionally done in academia, to at least allow people to teach this stuff using musical examples without the "bogus" consequences Rick mentions.
Here is where I would put a musical example. But not today!
The minimalist movement in home decor led by Marie Kondo certainly has its benefits. You should clear out all the detritus, debris and old crap from time to time. I just have a really hard time discarding a book. I have a bunch I have been trying to throw out or give away for a while now, but I just can't seem to do it.
By the way, the most glaring error in the above photoshop (and it seems to be a rule that in every photoshop meme there has to be at least one grammatical error) is in the quote. It should read "Ideally, keep fewer than 30 books." Not less. Less refers to unquantifiable amounts: less water in the glass, less sand on the beach. But fewer swimmers in the water and dollars in the bank. Quantifiable amounts are fewer, not less. It's a common mistake.
I have more than thirty books just on music theory. I think I have around thirty books just by thriller writer Dick Francis. A house with fewer than thirty books I would regard as an intellectual wasteland.
And now, here is a piece by Japanese composer Jō Kondo.
I promise to offer some less-technical posts in the very near future, but right now I want to do something a bit more demanding, both on myself and you, gentle reader. My viewing of the series of filmed performances of the Shostakovich symphonies by Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra has renewed my long time interest in Shostakovich and just how he achieves the results he does.
I'm starting with the short article in Shostakovich Studies by Yuriy Kholopov titled "Form in Shostakovich's instrumental works" which offers a nice entry point. He mentions that in the Soviet Union the form functional approach of German 19th century theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx was taught to young composers including Dmitri Shostakovich. This kind of approach to classical forms has been long-neglected among Western European theorists but I was lucky enough to have the theorist who revived this approach, William Caplin, as my main theory teacher in graduate school. His book Classical Form (Oxford University Press) is an excellent introduction to the concepts though it only deals with the Classical era.
I want to try to do an analysis of at least part of the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich. There has been quite a lot written about this work, though much of it deals with the context and social meaning of the work such as Richard Taruskin's excellent article "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" which was reprinted in that same volume, Shostakovich Studies. What I want to do is pry into the mechanics of it: just how is the symphony written? What sorts of compositional techniques is Shostakovich using?
Kholopov begins by mentioning that there is certainly a neoclassical or neobaroque influence in Shostakovich's music and we can see this in his quotations of idioms such as the Viennese waltz, Baroque fugue and passacaglia and even a stylized Baroque cadential formula. But he also uses classical forms. After an early experimental phase that we see in his absurdist opera The Nose and in the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies, he turned towards the traditional classical forms such as the symphony and string quartet.
These classical forms are ultimately based on folk song and folk dance with the addition of dialectical development. The basic structural opposition is between song and passage, the structural equivalent to the opposition of consonance and dissonance in harmony. Song or Lied form is typically based on an 8-bar cell with no modulation. A passage (Gang in German) is the opposite of song: it has a loose, flowing character with modulation.
There are three main types of form: song forms, rondo and sonata allegro. In song forms there are no passages or modulations. These often appear as the theme of a larger form. There are three types of rondo which typically has modulatory transitions from one theme to another. In the small rondo there is one secondary theme (ex: Beethoven, op. 31 no. 2/ii). The large rondo has two or more secondary themes (ex: Beethoven op. 2 nos 2 and 3 finales). Finally, the sonata rondo has a development instead of a second secondary theme (ex: Beethoven finale of op. 90).
The most characteristic element of sonata form is the development of a single idea with lots of passages and modulation.
Kholopov uses the following abbreviations which I will also adopt in my analysis:
MT = main theme
TR = transition
ST = secondary theme
Retr = retransition
T = tonic
Mod = modulation
D = dominant
Int = introduction
Con = conclusion or coda
Dev = development
Within a theme he uses these abbreviations:
Sen = sentence
Per = period
Mid = middle of theme
Int = introduction
The sentence was actually proposed by Arnold Schoenberg to describe a certain type of theme that contrasts with the period. A sentence is typically an eight-measure structure beginning with a two measure basic idea which may contain more than one motive. This basic idea is repeated. The second half is the continuation which has 2 measures of fragmentation and harmonic acceleration followed by two measures which may involve liquidation ending in a half or full cadence. The period, on the other hand, was recognized much earlier. It consists of a 2 measure basic idea followed by a two measure contrasting idea ending in a half cadence. This is the antecedent. The consequent has the return of the 2 measure basic idea followed by another contrasting idea ending in a full cadence. Caplin adds to these fundamental theme types a third, the small ternary consisting of an exposition, a contrasting middle and a recapitulation.
That is enough introductory discussion, I think? Let's listen to the Symphony No. 5 and in the next post I will begin my analysis.
Deutsche Grammophon are really making an effort to establish an online presence. Just today they posted on YouTube a live performance of a large excerpt from a new piano concerto by John Adams written for Yuja Wang and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This was premiered last year. The excerpt, about twelve minutes long, is most of (?) the first movement.
First off, I have to say, I love, love the dress. I see that Yuja is reading her part from an iPad, which people are doing more and more. I can't figure out how she is turning pages though, as I don't see a foot-switch? If I were to give one of my one sentence catty reviews of the piece I would say it sounds like Bartók spent about a week listening to be-bop and then wrote this concerto. It's a fun, driving piece without a lot of emotional depth or distinctive character. But that's after just one listen of a part of it, so I could be all wet.
The Guardian may no longer have the big series of articles on things like contemporary music and the symphony that it did a few years ago, but you can still find the occasional informative article like this one on Chopin: Chopin: where to start with his music.
And though Chopin did not invent the nocturne – the form was inherited from the Irish composer John Field – his 21 examples took it to unprecedented expressive heights, with weightless, floating melodic lines modelled on the vocal style of bel canto opera composers such as Bellini. But his works never relied upon extra-musical associations to intensify their effect; even the Ballades, a form that Chopin invented as a purely instrumental genre, generate their dramatic power through their musical architecture.
Piano music was never the same again after Chopin, and in the 50 years after his death, few composers who wrote for the instrument were immune to his influence, while it was carried into the next century by composers such as Scriabin and Rachmaninov in Russia, and Debussy and Fauré in France.
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Perhaps the two greatest music stores I visited way back in the day were Foyles bookshop in London, which was a general bookstore of formidable size, and Patelson's in New York, smaller, but specialized in music. These were places where you could browse through scores for hours on end: individual works, pocket or study scores and books on music and composers. For someone who did not grow up in a major metropolis, these places were like magical lands that contained everything one ever wanted to read. Here is a memoir about Patelson's, which is no longer with us:
In addition to helping me gain my position at Patelson's, while I was working there Leonard Altman asked Steve Reich to become a mentor for my compositional aspirations. This proved to be extremely helpful, Steve advising me on centrally important practical matters involved with composition. Reich preferred to communicate through the mail, and we never actually met or even spoke on the phone. But that may have been for the best because it was the images of NYC on the postcards that Steve sent that somehow persuaded me to move into the city, that by itself becoming a transformative event. One day Steve was in the store purchasing a large stack of expensive books about orchestration. He noticed me, too, and am rather certain he knew who I was, but I rightly or wrongly chose to play it cool, and didn't take the opportunity to introduce myself, influenced by how he didn't appear very friendly or approachable.
With fewer or no opportunities to perform live at school, can music degrees live up to their mandate to prepare students for a career? In other words, what is the value of a socially distanced degree in music performance? And if the value is significantly reduced, and given the extraordinary financial stress on young music students and their families, what is the best course of action?
...despite increased financial hardship among students, colleges have mostly held the line on tuition. Some are charging students for services they won’t receive, “including face-to-face interaction with professors, access to campus facilities, and hands-on learning.”
Before COVID, job opportunities for music graduates were scarce, with a focus on local and regional opportunities. Among singers, the lucky, talented, and privileged landed performance-based apprenticeships with opera companies and summer festivals, which paid, on average about $12 an hour. One elite program, Opera Saratoga, for example, received over 1,000 applicants in 2018 for 32 spots, a more stringent acceptance rate than Harvard undergrad, and offered their singers a fee of only $125 a week.
The story of Western music in Mexico begins with the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521. On 13 August the great city of Tenochtitlan fell to the army of Hernán Cortés, and five days later the Kingdom of New Spain was established. Along with the colonists came a large number of priests and clerics aiming to teach the word of God to the Amerindian people, and one of the integral methods used for this ‘spiritual conquest’ was music. The indigenous people proved to have great sensitivity and ability in playing the musical instruments of the Europeans, who took it upon themselves to instruct them in arts and crafts to be used in the service of church and state.
The first school teaching European subjects in Mexico – and indeed the American continent – came into being just two years after the conquest. It was founded by the Franciscan missionary Pedro de Gante, a cousin of Charles V of Spain, who learnt the Nahuatl language and used it to teach singing for religious services. He discovered that this was a very effective way to evangelise.
Charming piece! My viola player and I ran out of good repertoire so fast that I started writing pieces for the combination myself.
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I think we need some Chopin today. Here is Arthur Rubinstein with the first ballade:
I have a weakness for elegance and charm, I admit it, so let's listen to some. These are some late symphonies by Sammartini. Giovanni Battista Sammartini was of the generation just before Haydn and Mozart and is rather overshadowed by them. But he is actually quite a good composer.
I was uncomplimentary to Rick Beato the other day because I ran across a YouTube clip he did about jazz that was annoying because it was disorganized and avoided the topic. But, you know, he has a gazillion clips up and some of them are pretty ok, like the one on why Bach is great, and some are actually interesting like the one he did about imagination and pitch:
I liked that because it was succinct, exploratory and evidence-based. I'm not sure that it is such a great thing to be putting your young children into your videos, but hey. I don't have perfect pitch myself, but here is something really cool: when he mentioned the Third Brandenburg, because of the context I immediately tried to imagine, and sing, the opening notes. And you know what? I was right on.
But don't put on an early music group doing it, because they are at A = 415, not A = 440.
The music of Shostakovich does not readily respond to the technical tools that we have at our disposal so we will have to wait until a couple of brilliant theorists figure out what he was doing as happened with Stravinsky--but that was not until sixty and more years after the pieces were written. We are likely on schedule to have a good understanding of how Shostakovich worked by, oh, the 2030s or so.
But this is only partly true. Shostakovich himself said on more than one occasion that "I know nothing about theory," but this is only true in a limited sense. Shostakovich did the full course at the conservatory on theory, composition, performance and, yes, Marxist-Leninism, but what he may have meant by saying he knew nothing about theory was that he did not use theoretical models to compose.
Also, there are some interesting theoretical discussions of Shostakovich in the literature and I am thinking particularly of an article on form in his instrumental music by Yuriy Kholopov in Shostakovich Studies which I am about to review in detail as I previously just skimmed through it. The Internet tends to give us extremely bad reading habits!
I was listening to the Symphony No. 15 the other day and had the thought that some of Shostakovich's music could be read as a satire of Mahler. In Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9, one of those terribly profound milestones laid down by Beethoven and Mahler, he writes a frothy romp in the style of Prokofiev's Classic Symphony. And in the 15th, his last symphony, the end of the first movement is like a sardonic comment on the Mahler 9th, whose last movement is an unending mournful adagio. So Shostakovich ends the first movement of his last symphony with an insanely frenetic piccolo solo that turns into a rhythmic fugue for the winds.
Rick Beato has done a lot of videos on various topics--I think the last one I looked at was a rant about Macs--but I am not usually tempted to watch them. He did one, nearly an hour long, on why people hate jazz, at least that was the title. Here it is:
I listened to the first five minutes and my answer is: people hate jazz because a lot of it is just as badly structured and carelessly thrown together as your talk, Rick. If you had the slightest respect for your listeners you would try wasting less of their time on pointless meanderings that have nothing to do with the topic.
One thing I find very interesting is the blanket approach to the question: why do people hate or love jazz as if "jazz" were one monolithic activity all at the same level of quality and creativity. Oh, please! If you ask me about classical music--or any music--the first thing to say is that there are all kinds of classical music, some good, some bad. Maybe you hate the bad, boring, pretentious classical music, and if so, more power to you. If you hate the good stuff, maybe it is because it is too challenging, too long, or too unfamiliar and we can talk about that. What is annoying about the way people like Rick talk about jazz is that they seem to ignore all qualitative distinctions. All jazz is good because it is jazz.
Of the nine platinum jazz records he mentions, and by the way, how does this list explain why people hate jazz? Why is it even there? But of that list, I am familiar with three records: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, also Miles Davis, and Take Five, Dave Brubeck. They are all very fine recordings and it would be interesting to talk about why they are fine recordings. Another approach would be to find some examples of bad jazz recordings and talk about why they are bad. Maybe Rick does this later on, but his blatant waste of my time in the first five minutes makes me doubt it and I lost the will to listen to the rest.
We usually avoid politics quite successfully here at the Music Salon, but occasionally we need to defend music against political inroads. Today is not one of those days, though. Whew! I just wanted to share a piece defending the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC against--what, a mob of barbarians? No, an even more dangerous adversary: its own director, Michael Whitmore. Here is a good discussion piece: Much Ado About Nothing, The Folger Library pledges allegiance to identity politics.
One might have supposed that the world’s largest library devoted to the works and life of Shakespeare would be spared the tsunami of humbug that has overwhelmed so many other institutions and organized activities, from police forces and motor racing to film academies and football. No one would have considered the Folger a racist institution before Floyd’s death or held it responsible for the undoubted injustices in America’s past or present. It was an institution dedicated to pure and disinterested scholarship. Now it is transforming itself into the equivalent of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, with race instead of class as the master-key to the understanding of history and the world. And just as in Marxist historiography, no one can be a disinterested searcher after truth; in the new racist historiography adopted by the Folger, no one can stand outside his race. He must view everything through its lens.
The Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, issued a statement that proves, if nothing else, that lifetime study of the greatest writer in English does not necessarily conduce to the composition of good prose.
You should read the whole thing, which is not very long. The inescapable conclusion is:
It is clear, then, that the Folger is set fair to become institutionally racist. It intends to hold a series of “critical race conversations,” meaning in all probability uncritical race monologues. “The Folger Institute encourages everyone to engage conscientiously the work of Black and indigenous scholars, and scholars of color, by reading their scholarship, productively incorporating it into syllabi, and using it to frame generative lessons.” In other words, what counts in scholarship is the race of whoever produces it.
Yes, that is the real irony: a previously racially neutral institution is forced by political pressure to become institutionally racist! One wonders why classical music has not had more occurrences like this. Is it just that we are a bit behind, still dealing with the fallout of "metoo"? Are the great classical music schools going to be delivering "critical race conversations" about Beethoven and Chopin? I can't quite see it, but then I would not have expected this kind of drivel from the director of the Folger Library either.
We are dealing with two different pandemics right now: the Covid-19 one and an intellectual one that leading figures in culture, academia and the media seem especially vulnerable to. Signs of infection are mushy thinking entirely devoid of evidence and viewing everything through the lenses of race and sex. We may not have a vaccine for Covid-19 yet, but luckily we have one for the intellectual virus: Thomas Sowell.
I'm still listening to the Shostakovich symphonies filmed by Valery Gergiev with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater six or seven years ago. I continue to be deeply impressed. You can tell so much just by the demeanor of the performers. Watch how Gergiev walks on stage, bows and turns to the orchestra. This is a deeply committed conductor and orchestra. There is a good blend of ages in the personnel with a few seasoned performers and quite a few younger musicians. This is the kind of diversity that actually makes sense. And yes, there are lots of women of all ages. I notice a lot of criticism of performances that focuses on one or two details. While this may make the critic look good, it usually fails to capture what is really going on. The Mariinsky Orchestra is certainly not the tidiest I have ever heard, but they really know this music and play it with total commitment. By that I mean they dig into every phrase, every dynamic and don't take the safest path. With Shostakovich, why would you?
I have been listening with close attention to the Shostakovich symphonies for over twenty years now, ever since I took a graduate seminar that covered them. Back then there was little secondary literature apart from a series of brief articles in the Musical Times covering their premieres in Western Europe. There wasn't yet a good biography of Shostakovich but there was the very unreliable one by Solomon Volkov titled Testimony, which I don't recommend. This has now been addressed with several books on Shostakovich's life and works. What we still don't have is an in-depth understanding of his style and practice. The music of Shostakovich does not readily respond to the technical tools that we have at our disposal so we will have to wait until a couple of brilliant theorists figure out what he was doing as happened with Stravinsky--but that was not until sixty and more years after the pieces were written. We are likely on schedule to have a good understanding of how Shostakovich worked by, oh, the 2030s or so.
But after listening to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eleventh and Thirteenth Symphonies in this recent recording there are a couple of things I am sure of: it is certainly a help watching a good film of the performances as it enables you to sort out certain things about the orchestration. For example, when I saw a live performance of the Fourteenth Symphony last summer in Salzburg, I saw how he was getting certain kinds of dry sounds from the strings: he had them divisi with half the players playing col legno and the other half pizzicato. Not a sound I have ever heard before!
The other thing I am sure of is that Shostakovich is a really great symphonist right up there on a level with anyone you could name: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler or Sibelius, all of whom are great symphonists. From his Fourth Symphony on, Shostakovich is really spectacular with an incredibly wide range of texture, style and emotion. Sometimes he sounds like a French farce, as in the second scherzo of the Symphony No. 6. Sometimes he evokes the depths of hell as in places in the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. Many places he creates new kinds of beauty we have never heard before. And always, lurking in the background, is his uniquely sardonic sense of humor.
In these turbulent and difficult times, I find it a great consolation that someone like Shostakovich could write music such as this as he lived through times even more challenging. For years he kept a packed suitcase by the door of his apartment in case the secret police came for him in the middle of the night. He had friends and in-laws that were sent to Siberia or simply executed without trial. It is also heartening that a fine conductor and ensemble such as these can devote so much time and energy to giving us very fine performances.
The great British guitarist Julian Bream passed away on Friday, aged 87. Slipped Disc has a brief memorial:
Battersea born, he dazzled teachers at the Royal College of Music and, after army service, set up his own consort. He was hugely influential in reviving composers of the Tudor age and his virtuosity attracted new works from Britten, Walton, Tippett, Henze and others. He made copious recordings on both guitar and lute.
The BBC has a far more comprehensive article, with a few errors:
The virtuoso musician performed globally during his heyday, and was renowned for his recordings of new compositions and masterclasses.
He won four Grammy Awards and received 20 nominations between 1960 and 85.
A self-taught musician, Bream learned playing to radio dance bands with the lute his father bought from a sailor on London's Charing Cross Road in 1947.
As a child prodigy, his early recitals led to him being "acknowledged as one of the most remarkable artists of the post-war era", according to the Royal Academy of Music.
Of course, it wasn't a lute that his father purchased from a sailor in 1947, it was a guitar. And while he was indeed renowned for commissioning and performing new music, he was not known for giving master classes.
It was on hearing a recording of Andrés Segovia that Julian’s love affair with the classical guitar began. Though his father recognised Julian’s musical potential, he visualised his future as being with the piano, on which Julian was by then taking lessons. However, Henry bought a “finger-style” guitar (as it was then commonly known) for Julian on his 11th birthday. In the same year he was given a junior exhibition award to study the piano at the Royal College of Music, with the cello as his second instrument.
Although he gave a groundbreaking demonstration recital there, he was asked not to bring his guitar in by the front door. There was no question of his studying the guitar at the RCM – there was no one capable of teaching him. His first lessons were with Boris Perott, a polymath Russian émigré who founded the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists in London. “They were of cursory value and didn’t do any harm, but I had to unlearn the right-hand technique he taught me,” Bream said. “They may have given me some measure of discipline at a time when I needed it.”
As an important factor in securing the future of the guitar, he commissioned new works from, among others, Benjamin Britten (Nocturnal After John Dowland, which Bream described as “very nearly beyond me”), William Walton (Five Bagatelles), Malcolm Arnold (Guitar Concerto, Fantasy), Michael Tippett (The Blue Guitar), Hans Werner Henze (Royal Winter Music), Lennox Berkeley (Guitar Concerto, Sonatina, Theme and Variations), Alan Rawsthorne (Elegy), Richard Rodney Bennett (Guitar Concerto, Impromptus, Sonata) and Toru Takemitsu (All in Twilight); many of these have become standard repertory. In this respect he made a greater contribution than any other guitarist of his generation.
Very true, that last. The other great guitarist of the second half of the 20th century was John Williams of both England and Australia, but his commissions were few and of little significance. He was more interested in pop/classical crossover.
It could be argued, in fact, that Mr. Bream, even more than Segovia, established the guitar’s credibility as a serious solo instrument. He updated the technical standard of classical guitar playing and replaced the Romantic, rubato-heavy phrasing that Segovia preferred with a more modern style. And he undertook a significant renovation of the repertory.
While Segovia, a Spaniard, devoted himself largely to music that naturally emphasized the guitar’s Spanish and Latin American roots, Mr. Bream showed that the instrument was equally suited to German, French and English works and to some of the thorny contemporary styles that the more conservative Segovia avoided.
Julian Bream’s epitaph will not be hard to write: He ranks alongside Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz as the classical musician who more than any other defined the musical horizons for his instrument, and his name will always be recalled with warmth whenever a younger guitarist has occasion to perform one of the pieces that he commissioned. There can be no finer monument.
I heard Julian Bream in concert on four occasions and met him personally after one of those concerts. He was so highly regarded that in 1975, when I was an undergraduate at McGill in Montreal, myself and three other guitar students rented a car and drove all the way to New York just to hear him give a concert at Town Hall. After the concert we just drove all the way back--eight hours. But we considered it well worth it because in those years Montreal wasn't on his tour list. I remember the concert quite well. The first half was on the lute and for some pieces he had the score out and lying on the floor in front of him. He made the joke that as he got older, his memory was poorer, but his eyesight was getting better. The last piece in the first half was rather a train wreck and you might say he abandoned it, rather than brought it to a conclusion. Yes, the thing about Bream recitals was that his technique was a bit unpredictable. One night he would be as good as it gets, but another night and he was pretty shaky. This was one of the latter. But the musicianship was always of the highest quality.
One of the recitals I saw him play in Montreal in the 90s was sheer perfection in every aspect. I particularly recall one of his encores, El Mestre, a Catalan folksong arrangement by Miguel Llobet, that was simply transcendent. I cannot imagine it better played. In contrast, the last time I saw him, also in Montreal in the early 90s and I think his final tour, was again rather shaky with some Bach that was both tense and jittery.
I met him backstage after a concert in Victoria, BC, in the 80s, another fine performance. We talked about the availability of his recent recordings. I have met many of the guitar greats, either in master classes or after performances: these include Narciso Yepes, John Williams, Pepe Romero, Manuel Barrueco and quite a few others. With few exceptions I am always struck by noticing that the great guitarists are all about two or three inches shorter than I am. I think that helps!
Julian Bream, along with John Williams, was my great influence as a young guitarist. I awaited every recording with breathless anticipation. With Bream, it was often the new pieces he commissioned, but also his revival of great works by Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. The breadth of repertoire he made his own, for the lute as well as the guitar, was impressive. But in some ways, John Williams was the more important influence for me. His Bach was better than anyone else's on guitar and his integral recording of all the lute suites was an absolute revelation. His concerto performances, with the exception of Pepe Romero's of the Aranjuez, were also beyond compare. Julian Bream was really not a strong concerto player. The other area where I give the edge, though just barely, to John Williams, was in Spanish repertoire. Julian Bream recorded more of it and did so very well, but there was just something magical about Williams' performances.
I think what it ultimately came down to was that Williams, from an early age, had excellent instrumental instruction, first from his father, an amateur guitarist, and then from Segovia. The self-taught background of Bream shows itself, in my opinion, in the stress and strain that seems to underly his performances. Mind you, in contemporary repertoire this works to his advantage as Williams sounds rather too relaxed sometimes!
I studied for a few years with a student of Julian Bream's--he had very, very few private students. From what I was told, studying with Bream was rather like Marine boot camp: first he tore you down and then he built you up again, but it seemed to me that the second part of that process was less successful than the first part.
A final thought: the great successes that Bream achieved, entirely well-earned, are likely no longer possible for a classical guitarist. That is how much the business has changed. A superb performer like Marcin Dylla will likely never win or even be nominated for a Grammy. The wages of commercialization...
For an envoi, one of Bream's great performances, the Passacaglia from Britten's Nocturnal:
Let me "curate" a really odd bunch of music videos for you (together with brief, pithy comments):
Ok, just two questions: Why? and, It's subdivided 4+4+5, right?
That, including especially every little head-toss and flirty glance, was the most horrific thing I have seen and heard in months--and that's including the dreadful André Rieu Christmas version of the Aranjuez.
You show 'em guys. I understand they do weddings.
This is what happens when your eye liner and mascara get completely out of control.
This is a niche genre that I think we might label "Musical Performances Delivered When You Are Unable To Find Actual Human Beings Willing To Listen To You." And did you know that cows are actually quite dangerous? There is only, on average, one human a year killed by sharks, but dozens are killed by cows. And now we see why.
My Friday Miscellanea began with a photo of a flowering shrub that I took this week. I wanted to show you a closeup of this unusual flower which is like a tiny explosion of threads. So here it is. I can't find the name of this plant, but you can see both the unopened buds and the open flowers:
In the same theme, there are signs of the re-awaking of musical performances. One example is a series of concerts at Victoria, British Columbia's Christ Church Cathedral (where I played concerts years ago). Yesterday's concert was French Baroque music for two violins with Tyson Doknjas, Chloe Kim, and Kathryn Wiebe on baroque violins.
To a large extent, students have become customers. And professors should acknowledge their own role in getting us to that point, because the commodification of higher education is a direct byproduct of the transformation of college into the entrance examination for America’s middle class, something the professoriate has cheered on.
Sure, students are buying a complex bundle that’s rarely described as a “product.” But if you doubt colleges are selling, you need look only at the glossy marketing campaigns. And if you think they’re mostly selling learning, consider this thought experiment from economist Bryan Caplan: If you had to choose, would you rather have four years of Princeton University classes but no diploma, or the diploma, but no classes?
I have the answer to that: all of the highest levels of education that I received were diploma-free. These include ten months of intensive private instruction with José Tomás in Alicante, Spain, possibly the finest teacher anywhere in the world at that time. One month of master classes also with Tomás at the Instituto "Oscar Espla" in Alicante. Two one-month master classes in The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta with Oscar Ghiglia, another great teacher whose full time job was at the Conservatory in Basle, Switzerland. One month master class with Pepe Romero at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria, probably the most respected music school in the world. The last one at least offered a diploma, but I never bothered going by the office to pick it up. And to the best of my knowledge, the others didn't even offer any kind of certification. You learned stuff, that was your one and only reward.
Another side effect of the coronavirus is that all that has been swept away, temporarily at least. Will it all come back? Perhaps. But the bigger question is, are the credentials offered by universities and colleges still worth the ever-increasing cost? The "customers" seem to be questioning that. Perhaps next they might question the actual value of what they are being offered other than the credential: by that I mean the actual content of what they are learning. I spent eight years in university classes, but that is certainly not where I learned to play guitar. That was about equal parts learned from private lessons and master classes and for the other half, my practice studio.
Perhaps history and economics are different. But how much history and economics are college students actually learning? As opposed to blinkered ideology, that is.
Let's have a little music. This is my recording of Las Abejas (The Bees) by Barrios:
This morning I finished volume one of Proust's immense novel, In Search of Lost Time (yes, I am reading it in English). This means I am 465 pages into the over 3,000 pages or about one-sixth of the way. This is going a lot faster than I anticipated. When I moved to Mexico over twenty years ago, one of the projects I thought I would have time for was finally reading this book in its entirety. But alas, life intervened and I kept setting it aside. Reading it now I realize that it helps to be older. When I first started reading it I was in my early thirties and just too young to appreciate it.
So what has happened in the first four hundred and sixty-five pages? Well, we have heard a lot about going to bed early and not going to sleep, about different bedrooms. About different walks in Combray. About M. Swann and his obsessive love for Odette, a person of questionable character. About different places and different seasons and how they seem to reflect our obsessive loves. The unnamed narrator himself develops an obsessive love for Gilberte, the daughter of M. Swann and Odette. And that's about it. Mind you, we learn a great deal about how people act and think about themselves and the world around them. It's all about Time and Space. And obsessive love.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the novel is that the political content is just about zero. As opposed to our world where, as Scott Adams averred the other day, if you look at CNN and Fox Cable news there is actually no news at all--it is entirely politics.
What a strange world we have stumbled into. And did we really choose this world? Is democracy as is sometimes said, a situation where the people vote for what they want and then they get it--good and hard?
I continue to watch/listen to the new set of recordings of the Shostakovich symphonies with Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater as filmed by a French crew and continue to be impressed. Yes, these are not the tidiest recordings and there are occasional odd balances and other flaws. But honestly, these are deeply passionate performances and well worth your time. Here is the Symphony No. 5:
I took this photo in the country yesterday. Flowers in this semi-arid climate have evolved to save water and are either papery like cactus flowers, or gossamer like this shrub. Don't know the name, sorry!
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Another busy week for me, but not too busy to assemble a suite of links for your Friday amusement. The record store has largely disappeared and along with it the second-hand record shop. Now it seems the bookshop as well: The demise of the second-hand bookshop.
Decades, even centuries, of history and tradition are disappearing because of market forces, and the pandemic that we are all suffering through has sped matters up. So, although I would offer two hearty cheers for the Oxfam bookshops, please try and visit your local book dealer, if you’re still lucky enough to have one. Otherwise, this most eccentric and likeable of trades shows every sign of being annihilated forever, save for the most rarefied of dealers, and this would be a great pity, especially if it were to take place more or less through carelessness, rather than design.
Sometimes the music was bundled with social awareness. In Nagano’s first season, we heard The General, an oratorio interweaving theatrical music by Beethoven with words based on the Rwanda memoirs of Roméo Dallaire. Later came post-tragedy outreach concerts in Montreal North and Lac-Mégantic.
An unapologetic exponent of the classical canon — just read his memoir/manifesto Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected — Nagano was aware of the need to spread the word. In 2008 he took a subset of the OSM on tour to Nunavut.
Ten years later, to open what would be his last full season, Nagano chose Chaakapesh, the Trickster’s Quest, an opera on a First Nations subject by Tomson Highway (words) and Matthew Ricketts (music). This also went to the Far North. With, of course, a camera crew.
Not that media trimmings are needed to produce a worthwhile experience. All the hype would be worthless in the absence of something musical to say.
As recently as January, Nagano surprised me with a magical performance of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Emperor Waltz. “The beauties of the orchestration were captured to perfection,” I reported. Clapping between movements in Schubert’s Symphony No. 1 suggested that the conductor, at 68, had not lost his recruiting power.
That magnetism was particularly strong in the first years and manifested itself in programming that few other North American orchestras would hazard. A good example in 2008 was Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise as performed for only the second time in North America.
Sadly, the one time I was in Montreal in recent years, the OSM was not offering a concert, so I have not had the opportunity to hear Nagano live.
Speaking about Covid responses on Scala Radio, the enterprising Scottish violinist said:
‘I just don’t believe that the route we’ve taken is the best we could have done. I think incompetency, vested interests in the wrong areas, I think just a lack of care, a lack of leadership, disorganisation, just bad management I think has gone on left, right and centre and it’s costing people their livelihoods.’
She went on to say: ‘Our prospects do not look good any time soon. We can’t see a clear end in sight that provides any sort of working business model. It’s not just musicians, it’s everybody involved in that ecosystem.’
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has written to the president of the University of North Texas, warning him that his inquiry into the Schenker furore violates the First Amendment of the US constitution. This may end up in court.
The First Amendment Bars UNT from Penalizing Scholarly Writing Others Find
Offensive
While the content of JSS’s series of responses to Ewell’s SMT address may be deeply offensive to some readers, it does not fall into any exception to the expressive rights shielded by the First Amendment and academic freedom. It is well-established that the First Amendment does not make a categorical exception for expression that some may find hateful, and equally well-established that it constrains public universities in penalizing students for exercising their right to free expression and faculty members for exercising their right to academic freedom.
Frankly, I have been waiting for a real confrontation between the woke progressives and some actual adults.
More than halfway through Denver’s bizarre, unprecedented Summer of No Music, an increasing amount of people — artists and fans alike — are wondering: Without live music, who are we?
We can already see what’s slipping away: Between April 1 and July 31, Colorado’s music industry lost 8,327 jobs and $344.6 million in sales revenue, according to a report released this week by Denver Arts & Venues. This represents 51% of total employment in the industry statewide and 24% of its annual sales revenue, wrote Colorado State University researcher Michael Seman.
Denver took the hardest hit, with losses in the metro region estimated at 4,525 jobs and $213.7 million in sales revenue — or more than half of all jobs in the region’s music industry and 25% of its annual sales revenue. The majority of these losses at both the state and regional level are in the “musicians, managers and agents” and “live events” sectors of the industry, the report said.
I’ve been holed up in Poulenc’s world on account of two absorbing new books: Roger Nichols’s “Poulenc: A Biography” (Yale) and Graham Johnson’s “Poulenc: The Life in the Songs” (Liveright). Both do justice to a composer who has often been overshadowed by the giants with whom he shared the early and mid-twentieth century. He was no originator, like Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor did he possess Britten’s or Shostakovich’s command of manifold genres. He was, however, a composer of rare gifts, particularly in the setting of sacred and secular texts. As the decades pass, he grows in stature, and his aloofness from musical party politics matters less.
This is the kind of thing that Ross does well, so the whole piece is worth reading.
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This week's miscellanea demands two envois. First, here is a performance from September 2019 of the Symphony No. 5 by Mahler. Kent Nagano conducting the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal:
And second, Banalités by Poulenc with Véronique Gens, soprano and Roger Vignoles, piano:
