One of the enjoyable aspects of traveling is people-watching. I don't try and take photos of people when I travel as it seems to be an invasion of privacy, but I certainly wish I had taken a few. One day when I was waiting at the bus stop a tall couple in their early 30s strode by. Tall and very good-looking by the way. What really stood out was that she was wearing a tiny beige bikini, just walking down the street in a Salzburg suburb.
Walking through the Mozartplatz on the way to a concert another couple, also tall and slim. She had short hair and he had long, flowing locks well past his shoulders. They looked like modern nobility.
Many older Salzburg men look surprisingly like Leslie Nielsen--I think it is the hairstyle.
An astonishing number of Austrians of all ages ride bicycles. There are bike lanes everywhere but at every intersection, the cyclists have to follow the same rules as pedestrians. Which resolves a lot of issues, I'm sure. And yes, they cycle when wearing skirts.
The audience for the Mozart matinee were the most conservative and almost exclusively residents I believe. Over 90% of the men were dressed in suits and ties, often with the traditional Austrian jacket:
Maybe next trip I will try and take a few people photos--unobtrusively!
Let's have an envoi! Here is a fun little video by pianist Tiffany Poon documenting her first visit to Salzburg. The first few minutes are furniture assembly, but from around the 3 minute mark she takes us on a little tour of the town.
I spent a bit more time in Salzburg this year than I did in 2019 and saw a few more concerts, but I'm not sure it was a more fulfilling experience. There was a lot more rain this year and it is not a lot of fun slogging to an evening concert in the rain from a suburb! Still, there were some really memorable concerts. Let's take them in genres:
I saw three operas, one by Morton Feldman in a concert version and two staged ones by Luigi Nono and Richard Strauss. In order I would put the Strauss first, the Nono next and the Feldman a distant third. I think the problem with the Feldman is that his unique approach works well with small chamber groups of contrasting timbres and does not work well with larger groups where everything turns into a dreary sameness. Intolleranza 1960 by Nono was surprisingly interesting and that was perhaps because the director/choreographer transformed it into a kind of ballet in which it was quite successful. Elektra was well done and the rich timbre of the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit really made it a fulfilling experience.
There were two piano recitals, by Arkady Volodos, which was lyrical, elegiac and expressive, and by Daniil Trifonov which was more kinetic and volatile. Both were very successful in different ways. I couldn't rank them.
There were four orchestral concerts, the Beethoven Missa Solemnis with Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic, Rameau with musicAeterna Choir and Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis, the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Jörg Widmann and Wagner and Beethoven with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck. Surprisingly I found the Rameau concert to be head and shoulders the most creative, expressive and enjoyable. The other three fell short in different ways. The Beethoven Missa Solemnis for me just is a problematic piece, though very well-performed. I would much rather have heard the 9th Symphony which was scheduled for last year before the pandemic upset the applecart. The Mozart concert was a mixed bag: excellent overture and clarinet concerto, but an uneven performance of the Jupiter Symphony. Last would be the Mahler Youth Orchestra for odd reasons: the program change dropping a Shostakovich symphony in favor of a Beethoven one left me a bit cold and I found myself falling asleep in the Beethoven Seven because, sorry to say, Manfred Honeck is, in my view, a boring conductor. Mind you, he brings out some lovely timbres, but still...
This leaves three chamber concerts. The first was music by Morton Feldman for voices and instruments and I found it a profound and calm experience. Next was Patricia Kopatchinskaja's delightful performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which I enjoyed thoroughly. Finally there was the lieder afternoon concert of music by Ernest Chausson and others which was well done, but not the repertoire I was expecting, which was Dichterliebe.
Wonderful festival, of course! The next time I go, I would perhaps focus a bit more on the core repertoire operas--it would have been great to have attended Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni this year.
I didn't talk about the food as much this year because I did more cooking in the apartment and less eating out, but I had a really excellent wienerschnitzel at the Imlauer Pitter Sky Restaurant with a nice glass of grüner veltliner.
You might think you know what Spanish guitar music sounds like, and you might think it an unexpectedly middle-of-the-road choice for Sean Shibe, who has always appeared more at home in programmes that set your ears slightly off-kilter ... But there’s nothing hackneyed about Camino. It’s a beautifully intimate recording, full of playing that is as far from classical-guitar cliche as a real flamenco dancer is from a postcard of a donkey in a sombrero.
I guess that's just journalism for you. Here is a sample from the album: Pavana triste from the Sonata by Antonio José:
Alex Ross headed up to Tanglewood this summer and writes an article on Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt: The Most Vital Conductor of Beethoven Is Ninety-four. I don't know that this is actually true, but it could be and it certainly makes a great headline.
The assumption that conductors of great age radiate incalculable wisdom is a dubious one, smacking of musty personality worship. Then again, the classical-music world makes an equally dubious cult of fresh-faced youth. The esteem in which orchestras and audiences now hold Blomstedt is a belated reward for a resolutely unshowy musician who has gone about his business decade after decade. What he offers, above all, is a kind of preternatural rightness: no gesture feels out of place, no gesture feels routine.
Excellent piece, read the whole thing.
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Economist Tyler Cohen asks, who died too soon that we should give extra years to? The cultural life extension query. And the very plausible answer is: Schubert.
Schubert was just starting to peak, but we already have a significant amount of top-tier Mozart. And I take Mozart to be the number one contender for the designation. Schubert composed nine symphonies, and number seven still wasn’t that great. Some people think number eight was unfinished. Number nine is incredible. Furthermore, I believe the nature of his genius would have aged well with the man.
The quartet, which began as a student group at the Juilliard School before turning professional in 1976, is one of best-known in the world. Its members have made more than 30 recordings together and have won nine Grammy Awards.
In addition to Setzer, the ensemble includes Eugene Drucker, 69, a violinist who is another founding member; the violist Lawrence Dutton, 67, joined in 1977, and the cellist Paul Watkins, 51, in 2013.
* * *
And that brings us to our envois. First is Herbert Blomstedt conducting the Beethoven Symphony No. 7 with the NDR Symphony:
Next, here he is conducting the Bamberg Symphony in the Unfinished Symphony by Schubert:
Finally, here is one of my favorite clips of the Emerson Quartet playing one of the composers they specialized in, Shostakovich.
Today is a travel day so I don't have time to do a review of last night's concert. I might not get to it for a couple of days. But there will be a Friday Miscellanea. I will just say that I got caught by another program change. I pick which concerts I want to attend based largely on the works being played--I suspect this is not the norm for most concert goers. So when my local chamber music organization advertises a concert including a "String Quartet by Joseph Haydn" I want to say, "hey, he wrote 80 string quartets, which one is on the program?" I will say something rather similar even if they say "String Quartet in C major by Joseph Haydn." But what has caught me twice in concerts at this festival is a change in repertoire that I was unaware of until I got to the concert. Sometime between when I originally requested tickets back in December 2020 and when they issued my my tickets in May 2021, the repertoire for last night's concert was changed from Wagner and Shostakovich (as I recall, it was the Symphony No. 10) to Wagner and Beethoven. The Wagner was the Sigfried Idyll and the Wesendonck lieder and the Beethoven Symphony No. 7. Yes, a perfectly decent program and one I largely enjoyed, but it is not one I would have particularly sought out. I would have chosen a different one instead. I just didn't get any notice that they were changing programs. My own fault for not checking, I suppose. There are lots of tricks to attending a big music festival!
So, for an envoi, here is the Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre conducted by Valery Gergiev:
Last night was Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov in an all-Bach program at the Grosses Festspielhaus. For me, these kinds of programs, entirely devoted to one composer and avoiding the fashionable and transitory are an important part of concert going and last night filled the bill very well. I was very much looking forward to hearing Trifonov in the festival last year where he was scheduled to do a survey of contemporary piano music, but this was equally attractive.
The program last night, which started at the very late hour of 9 pm, consisted of only three pieces: the Chaconne from the D minor Partita for solo violin, arranged for the piano left hand by Brahms, the Art of Fugue (or most of it) and the chorale Jesus bleibet meine Freude ("Jesus, joy of man's desiring"). There was a solitary encore, the Musette from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, used as a theme for a set of variations--by whom I don't know. Trifonov himself?
Listening to the program I am convinced once more that the Chaconne, the longest single instrumental movement from the entire Baroque, is also the finest piece of non-vocal music by Bach. The version for the left hand alone by Brahms works very well. Trifonov launched into the Art of Fugue directly without a pause and played the first eleven Contrapunctus to complete the first half. Yes, we got an intermission this time. The second half was the two pairs of fugues in which one is the inversion of the other--a contrapuntal feat unmatched to my knowledge. Then the final fugue which incorporates Bach's name in musical notation. I didn't have the score handy, but Trifonov played a version that completes the fugue, which Bach left unfinished.
I said the program was "most of" the Art of Fugue because there are also four canons, not played last night, of which the first is my favorite piece from the Art of Fugue, the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu in which the comes or following voice is a fifth lower, inverted, and in double note values. For the second half, the two voices invert! Students of counterpoint courses will know how remarkable this feat is.
So how was the performance? Excellent, of course. Very famous pianists who venture on a program like this tend to do a very good job. I enjoyed the evening heartily (but, just between you and me, I prefer the transcendent performance by Grigory Sokolov from decades ago).
The Grosses Festspielhaus was not quite sold out--at 2,200 seats it is the largest venue of the festival. The intermittent drizzle might have kept some at home.
This 2016 performance will give you an idea of the concert last night:
Tonight is Daniil Trifonov with an all-Bach program, but I wanted to do another general post about Austria--and Europe. It is always interesting cooking in Europe which I can do on this trip as I have an apartment with a small but nice kitchen. The neighborhood restaurant is Italian and while they do pretty good pizza, their pasta is, in my opinion, inedible. My idea of Italian food is quality ingredients prepared in simple, effective ways and every pasta dish I have had here has been over-elaborated and over-cooked. Yesterday I made a simple dish of olive oil, garlic and tomatoes that was excellent. The secret, and the reason I made the dish, was the tomatoes. Mexico has very good tomatoes year-round, but whenever I go to Europe I am impressed with their amazing tomatoes (and garlic). Here is a photo.
I don't know why, but I never see tomatoes of this quality in North America. The garlic is also more flavorful. And of course, every supermarket has an excellent selection of wines. Mind you, they all close on Sundays, so bear that in mind!
Let's see, some tafelmusik by Telemann would seem to be appropriate:
Weekend mornings at 11am the Festival has Mozart Matinees in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum. The orchestra is the Mozarteum Orchestra and there are guest soloists and conductors. This morning those two roles were embodied in the person of Jörg Widmann, clarinetist, conductor and composer. The program was the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, the Clarinet Concerto Kv 622 and the Symphony No. 41 in C major, "Jupiter." Let's have a listen to that overture, perhaps the best one ever:
They did a terrific job, by the way, and the magnificent setting of the gold and white Grosser Saal certainly didn't hurt. Maestro Widman also did a wonderful job with the clarinet concerto and one had the feeling that rarely had one ever hear the clarinet played as well. After intermission was the "Jupiter" Symphony of which the last movement is my candidate for best symphonic finale ever.
Unfortunately, for me, unease set in from the very opening when the first phrase was followed by a giant luftpause (where everything just hangs in the air for a moment before continuing). So already the momentum was broken and this movement should have a lot of momentum. As things unfolded there were gratuitous and exaggerated rallentandos and capricious phrasing. Also, from where I was sitting, in the right side balcony, the balance was off. The principal bassoon was too loud and I could barely hear the trumpets. The second and third movements were all right, but the momentum problems returned in the last movement. Altogether a somewhat disappointing concert. I suppose that with very familiar repertoire like this I am more fussy than with music I know less well.
I was shocked to see that the matinee concert was the most expensive ticket of all and I had the worst seat with bad sight lines. Both the Vienna Philharmonic Beethoven concert and the musicAeterna Rameau concert were actually less expensive and I had better seats.
No concert tomorrow. By the way, I said earlier that I requested a ticket to Berlioz' Damnation of Faust but I thought it had been cancelled. Not so, it is being performed tomorrow, but I just wasn't allotted a ticket. Every concert, except the lieder one, by the way, has been sold out or nearly so. It seems that Salzburg has successfully rescued its festival from COVID hell! And good for them.
Let's have a listen to a performance of the Mozart 41 finale with lots of momentum. This is Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert:
I have done a few posts on Luigi Nono (1924 - 1990) here on the blog, but I was far from doing a complete survey of his life and works. Intolleranza 1960 is the first of his three stage works and the most overtly political. The message is a fairly simple one: fascism is bad, oppression is bad, torture is bad and so on. What saves the work and makes it not seem so tied to the political events of the day such as the colonial war in Algeria (one of the characters is Algerian) is the surprisingly lyrical musical elements and poetical elements from Paul Eluard and Bertholt Brecht in the libretto.
The stage is full of characters: five solo singers, one of whom has to do a surprising amount of acrobatic dancing as well as a challenging vocal part, sixty chorus members who do a great deal of physical movement as well, and twenty or so dancers who are in constant frenetic motion throughout. Apart from the eighty or so orchestra players in the pit, fifteen percussionists are divided between a balcony at the back of the stage on the left and another small balcony in front of the stage on the right.
Click to enlarge
As you can see, there were no stage sets, instead, the whole of the large Felsenreitschule stage is occupied by the large cast of singers, chorus and dancers. The director/choreographer Jan Lauwers was instrumental in the creation of this production which had more dance than actual singing. He also contributed an additional character, the Blind Poet.
Nono was, of course, a man of the left, in his early years a committed communist. But he was also, first and foremost, an artist and this is undoubtedly why the performance was successful. As well as being a condemnation of the persistent violence done to the innocent every day--today's examples come from Afghanistan--it is a celebration of life and the beauty of nature, something that keeps peeking through.
I expected the evening to be interesting, but it was surprisingly more enjoyable than I anticipated. The audience reacted with long, long applause.
I like to do at least one post with just some general reflections on Austria as I find it an interesting place--certainly a great contrast with where I live in climate, geography and history. Last weekend when some German friends were visiting we did a characteristically Austrian thing: we took a cable car up to the top of an alp. Just four miles south of Salzburg lies the Untersberg, a 2,000 meter peak. The cable car, the Untersbergbahn, is actually on the city bus lines. Here are some photos from our excursion.
Everyone has a BMW or Audi or...
The cable car supposedly holds 50 persons
Yep, that's where we're going
Here is a better perspective looking from Salzburg. Click to enlarge
On the way up.
That's the small Salzburg airport.
Feeling on top of the world.
This was the second time I've been up this alp--the first was when I was a student here many years ago. The cable car goes right up to the very top and there are even two restaurants there. Great day trip.
I didn't attend a concert yesterday, but tonight is the opera by Luigi Nono, Intolleranza, which should be interesting. So let's have a miscellanea. The Guardian relates how one music educator's work is likely to be imperiled: Afghan orchestras in peril: ‘I cannot imagine a society without music’
For more than a decade, Ahmad Sarmast has taken impoverished children from the streets of Afghanistan and filled their lives with music. One, an orphan girl who hawked chewing gum in one of the most conservative areas of the country, became a conductor of Afghanistan’s first all-female orchestra.
All that is now at risk as the Taliban tighten their grip on power.
“Right now, my biggest concern is for the safety and security of my students and what their future might be. Given the visibility of the school, we are very worried about everyone’s safety,” Sarmast told the Guardian. “Whether the Taliban will allow us to continue, that seems problematic.”
If you fall ill during the Salzburg Festival, whether as a performer, stagehand or anyone else, the likelihood is that the next face you’ll see belongs to the house doctor, Josef Schlömicher-Thier.
An ear, nose and throat specialist in Neumarkt am Wallersee, he has been the official festival doctor for three decades. One of his first emergencies was to save Placido Domingo’s voice in 1992. Others have been more life threatening.
Through the two summer months, he maintains his own morning clinic in Neumarkt and an afternoon surgery at the festival. He reckons only five percent of his patients are artists.
I always think that a recording engineer is a bit like the aural equivalent of a photographer, or possibly a painter, in that you are trying to represent as clearly as possible what the artist is doing. To present musicians to the listener with the sense that there's no barrier between the performer and the listener. And you try and present the sound in a way which is going to be convincing over headphones, earbuds and loud speakers. It’s always difficult. Just as with a photograph, what you think of as a good photograph of you might not actually be the truth in how it presents you – that can also be the case with sound. And that's more of an issue these days because artists seems to have a lot more say in the sound rather than letting the engineer, who should know what he or she is doing, decide. But in essence it’s about presenting the musician, or musicians, or orchestra or whatever, in somebody's home in as convincing a manner as possible – given that listening to Mahler’s Eighth out of two wooden boxes with holes cut in them is the most ridiculous idea! But that’s what you're trying to do.
At the exhibition’s opening last month, Austria’s federal minister, Karoline Edtstadler, said that the Salzburg Festival’s Jewish origins were “long swept under the carpet — as so much about Austria’s Nazi past.” In a news release, she called the exhibit, which was supported by the Salzburg Festival and its longtime president, Helga Rabl-Stadler, a valuable step in showing “how profoundly Jewish life influenced Austrian history and our identity.”
The festival granted the museum access to its archives and lent most of the objects on view, which suggests a new willingness to explore the dark corners of its history. The endorsement is a far cry from the outrage that Tony Palmer’s documentary about the festival, which included Nazi-era footage, provoked 15 years ago.
“You pay, I sing and dance out your gossip via WhatsApp,” Chitsama said. “I package your slander, anger, congratulations and turn a client’s emotions into shareable songs and beats to dance to.” In many ways, Chitsama acts as not just a songwriter and singer but also a song publisher and a record label, by using WhatsApp to distribute the finished songs.
* * *
Leaving out a few sensational items such as Daniel Barenboim's fit of temper after a concert at the Salzburg Festival, that brings us to our envoi. No obvious choices, it seems. Young and upcoming soprano Regula Mühlemann is a soloist in the staged performance of Handel's IL TRIONFO DEL TEMPO E DEL DISINGANNO at the Festival. Here she is with "He shall feed his flock" from the Messiah.
And for something with a bit more sparkle here is Exsultate Jubilate from Mozart:
Last night I attended a performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss, to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The production was directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. The performance space was the second of the festival's large halls the Felsenreitschule also known as the "Haus für Mozart." The Felsenreitschule was the old Winter Riding Academy, converted to a concert hall from the 1960s.
The program for the concert is a hefty 175 page book, roughly half in German, half in English. I should have spent yesterday studying it! I am largely a newcomer to opera and wanted to see this performance largely because I am not familiar with the Strauss operas, excellent examples of early 20th century modernism. The director points out the historical context of the work, noting that only thirty years before the opera was first produced, in 1909, Heinrich Schliemann made his considerable archeological discoveries: the city of Troy actually existed! The world of Homer was real. Only a few years later Schliemann turned his attention to Mycenae, the setting of this opera, where he excavated the ruined city of Agamemnon. At the same time, Freud was uncovering the buried worlds of the unconscious. This is the context of the opera.
At the same time, the story is one of high Classical Greek tragedy. The recognition scene between Electra and Orestes recalls similar ones in Homer when Odysseus returns home. The central characters are the three women: Clytemnestra, unfaithful wife of Agamemnon whose lover Aegisthus kills him when he returns from Troy, Electra, tortured by her need for vengeance on her mother Clytemnestra, and her younger sister, Chrysothemis, who longs for a normal life with children away from this crazed world of murder and revenge. The two main male characters, Orestes and Aegisthus, are relatively secondary roles. Agamemnon, who does not appear in the opera, is nonetheless present in the orchestra in the form of a characteristic leitmotif.
The stage set was simple, but unusual with a single glass-boxed room (that late in the opera traverses the stage left to right), a shallow lap pool and that's it. The setting was enriched with video projections on the back wall. Much of the set was the simple, rustic walls of the riding school, which provided a suitable environment.
The rich orchestral score was one of the great pleasures of the evening: a marvel of orchestration it spanned the gamut between tender, lyrical beauty, as in when Electra and Orestes recognize one another, and the raging climax at the end when she dances herself to death, ending the opera.
After a few cool, rainy days, yesterday was pleasant and I got a photo of the entrance to the hall:
UPDATE: Oh, and here is a photo of the large lobby in which you can obtain beverages and snacks before the performance and at intermission if there is one.
Yesterday I had a day off from concerts so I took the train to Vienna to see a friend. We had lunch at the Cafe Hummel which is one of a zillion Viennese cafes. My friend, Czech violinist Paul Kling who studied in Vienna when he was young, told me an interesting story from when he was a student. One day he had a very productive lesson with his teacher in which was revealed one of the deepest secrets of violin lore. Exhilarated at what he had learned, Paul spent the afternoon in several cafes enjoying not only their fine coffee, but also the various pastries and cakes Vienna is renowned for. Many hours later he returned home and as he walked in the door he suddenly realized that he had forgotten that very important bit of violin lore. Oh no!!
Just across the street from where I am staying in Salzburg is a lovely example of Austrian architecture. This is just an ordinary house in a suburb, but with an particularly nice example of, what is it, Biedermeier?
I'm off to Vienna this morning, a two and a half hour train ride, to have lunch with a friend. It will be my first visit to Vienna. But I have a few minutes before I have to get to the train station so I wanted to leave a few impressions of last night's concert. Riccardo Muti, whose 80th birthday it is this year, has been conducting concerts at the Salzburg Festival for fifty years! Last night he led the Vienna Philharmonic and the State Opera Choir in a performance of the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven.
By this point in music history, the late 1820s, composers had pretty much stopped doing mass settings. Haydn's six for his patron and the few by Mozart are the last previous significant contributions. As Muti notes in the program, Beethoven struggled with the religious and aesthetic questions and devoted over three years to the composition, for which he made many, many sketches in one of which he even analyzed portions of Mozart's Requiem.
Years and years ago I owned a multi-LP recording of the work conducted, I think, by Otto Klemperer. I never really took to it as it seemed to me then a massive, shaggy, indigestible lump of a work. I much preferred the large religious works of Bach such as the B minor Mass, the Passions and the Magnificat. I was rather hoping that the performance last night would change my mind! Alas, it did not. My feeling still is that the music is overlong, lacking characteristic themes, with belaboured counterpoint and a lugubrious texture. And, I'm sorry, but I just don't think Beethoven writes well for voices. Both solo and choral they sound awkward and strained.
But let me hasten to say that I may be alone in my folly as the audience last night seemed to love the performance and called back the artists many times for bows. There was calling out and foot-stamping as well, so they really enjoyed it.
I guess it's just me.
The performance was in the Grosses Festspielhaus and it was sold out.
The trouble with the planning for this trip is that it extended over many months and saw a few detours on the way. For much of the past year the whole festival was up in the air. There were also some changes made in the programming. The major one was the cancellation of a production of a Berlioz opera, The Damnation of Faust as I recall. I requested a ticket to the August 22nd performance. But it seems the whole production was canceled. Another change in program turned up yesterday. I thought I had ordered a ticket to a performance of the lieder cycle Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann for yesterday, but when I arrived, I discovered that while it was indeed a lieder recital, it was not the program I expected but instead consisted of songs by Ernest Chausson, Clara Schumann, Brahms and others. Entirely my fault, I am sure. When they sent me the list of tickets I was being allotted, a lot of information was not included: sometimes names of artists, often composers and repertoire. Just the way they do things, I guess. For soloist concerts they merely say "Solistenkonzert" on the ticket with no indication of who the soloist actually is. This can be discovered by reference to the whole festival schedule. Normally this isn't much of a problem, but it seems that somewhere along the line the Robert Schumann Dichterliebe program got changed to the Ernest Chausson program and I didn't notice.
The performers, Benjamin Bernheim and Mathieu Pordoy, were quite fine, but I'm really not much of a fan of French chanson. However I did get a photo of this nifty fountain in the Herbert von Karajanplatz:
Tonight, I am really sure, is Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.
This was the most unusual orchestra concert I have ever seen--and one of the best. By the end of the evening the usually staid Salzburg audience members were not only giving a standing ovation, but about half the audience refused to leave and seemed content to keep clapping in unison until the orchestra came back for another encore (which they did not)!
Where I come from, every performer gets a standing ovation which is partly out of enthusiasm, partly because of uncomfortable wooden pews and partly because the audience are getting ready to leave. This is not the case in Salzburg where a standing ovation is so rare that I don't think I recall one in the many concerts I have attended here. So what magic did Greek, but resident in Russia, conductor Teodor Currentzis wield?
The concert began in darkness with the only light coming from the stand lights of the harpsichord, flute, violin and viola da gamba as they played one of the intimate chamber pieces from Pièces de clavecin en concerts. This was followed by an overture to a Rameau opera as the lights came up. The orchestra, Currentzis' own musicAeterna now based in St. Petersburg, is a full-sized orchestra with ten first and ten second violins with winds in proper proportion. Last night the band also included harpsichord, theorbo and three percussionists with all the wind players on historic instruments.
Last night I witnessed one of those things that cause me to have such deep respect for orchestral musicians. I was in the second row, very close to the first violins and one of the fourth desk violinists had a string break early in the first set. I heard the snap and, as I am a guitarist, immediately recognized the sound. It looked like the 4th, G string to me. All he had time to do was flip it out of the way and he continued to play the whole of the set without missing a note!! Don't ask me how. Between sets of pieces he slapped on a new string and retuned. Wow.
But what was really remarkable last night was the basic conception of the music, what I have characterized as Currentzis rocks Rameau. Currentzis is of the wiggly-finger school of conducting (à la Gergiev) and one of the delights was watching him wiggle his fingers as he conducted his soprano in extended trills. He leaps in the air, stamps his feet and occasionally wanders among the orchestra, sometimes with a drum. Oh, and so does the orchestra: leap in the air, stamp their feet and occasionally wander around. Everything is done to de-formalize and re-energize the approach to the music and while I am usually skeptical of this kind of thing, last night it was done superbly well.
A lot of the performance was done in semi-darkness with just stand lights and the first half ended with the whole orchestra trooping offstage in darkness as they continued to play the last refrain of a contredanse from Les Boréades.
The second half was as good as the first with excerpts from Rameau operas including arias brilliantly sung by soprano Nadezhda Pavlova. Towards the end of the evening the minimal formality seemed to break down even further as conductor Currentzis said they were going to do three encores--oh, by this time of the night the audience was clapping after every piece! I'm not sure what the first two were, but for the last, a famous rondeau from Les Indes Galantes that I have posted here a couple of times, the choir, missing up to this point, came out and stood just in front of the stage. So the only time they appeared was for the final encore. But they brought the house down. And Salzburg applauded as I have rarely heard them. Here is a photo from just before the choir came out--sorry, missed getting a shot of them.
And here, just to give you a taste of the evening is a performance of that rondeau from Les Indes Galantes that I have posted here before:
Now you are going to have that stuck in your head for the next day! There is a clip of this same piece conducted by Correntzis in a 2016 performance in Vienna, but there is no video and the sound isn't great. But have a listen to the Currentzis performance as it certainly will show you how he uses the percussion:
Last night was the last of the four concerts focussing on the music of Morton Feldman and, for me at least, it was the first concert here at the festival that was a bit of a disappointment. There was a full house, as always. Here are the audience members lining up to enter the church:
The performers were soprano Sarah Aristidou with the Vienna Radio Symphony conducted by Ilan Volkov. I don't know why the two works last night--in addition to the opera Neither, we heard String Quartet and Orchestra, written in 1973--did not create the magical atmosphere the works for chorus and orchestra did a few nights ago, but that was my impression. Very competently played and sung, yes, but the result was dreary sameness instead of delightful continuing on and on. I sensed the audience might be in agreement as there was not nearly the enthusiasm as in the other concert and people started filing out quite quickly.
The notes don't provide many clues as to how the opera might be staged even though there have been a number of staged performances. This was a concert presentation. At the end, my feeling was that Morton Feldman is perhaps the least dramatic composer ever and, if opera requires some drama, he is unlikely to provide it!
Here are the performers acknowledging applause at the end:
To give you a bit of an idea, here is a clip of the first ten minutes of the opera in a performance by soprano Sarah Leonard with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra conducted by Zoltan Pesko.
I suppose the comparable work might be Schoenberg's Erwartung.
The concert last night was centered around the 1912 composition by Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire. The creative intelligence behind this performance was Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the virtuoso violinist, born in Moldova. Her parents moved to Vienna when she was twelve and she now lives in Switzerland, but performs all over the world. I had previously heard her in an excellent performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Last night she was the singer/speaker leading the ensemble. The setting is for violin doubling on viola, flute, clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, cello and piano.
The way the program was laid out showed considerable aesthetic ingenuity. The three parts of Pierrot, which consists of twenty-one poems by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben, each contain seven poems. Kopatchinskaya inserted waltzes by Johann Strauss in arrangements by Schoenberg and Webern, between the sections and preceded the program with her own arrangement of a Presto by C. P. E. Bach in a very hocketized texture. The whole worked extraordinarily well. The second waltz, Schatzwalzer op. 418, brought the house down. At the end of the performance the artists were called back on stage numerous times. A brilliant evening for a unique and uniquely challenging piece of music.
The poems are set in the form known as rondels bergamasques where each poem has thirteen lines in three stanzas of four lines, four lines and five lines. The first two lines are repeated as lines seven and eight and the first line is repeated again at the end. Schoenberg sets the poetry in a freely atonal style--the work comes at the peak of his expressionist phase--but uses a variety of historic musical forms including canon, fugue, rondo and passacaglia. The whole work ultimately derives from the seven-note motif we hear in the piano at the very beginning.
To get a taste of the poetry, here is a translation of the first poem:
The wine that one drinks with one's eyes
Is poured down in waves by the moon at night,
And a spring tide overflows
The silent horizon.
Lusts, thrilling and sweet
Float numberless through the waters!
The wine that one drinks with one's eyes
Is poured down in waves by the moon at night.
The poet, urged on by his devotions,
Becomes intoxicated with the sacred beverage;
Enraptured, he turns toward heaven
His head, and, staggering, sucks and sips
The wine that one drinks with one's eyes.
Here is a recording of Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing this same piece:
Here is the Webern arrangement of the Strauss waltz:
That should give you a pretty good sense of the performance.
I am rather a fan of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which I know is not very common. But I very early on encountered his Verklärte Nacht and have found nearly everything he has done to be expressively powerful. This is music with real individual character and that is a rare quality these days. So yes, I quite enjoyed the concert. It was held in the Mozarteum Grosser Saal, which is a really resplendent environment:
I just missed getting a good shot of the performers acknowledging applause. Patricia, in Pierrot costume is just exiting to the right.
And finally, next to the Grosser Saal, is one of the older buildings belonging to the Mozart Stifftung (Foundation):
I like Ted Gioia's writing because he often finds unique takes on things, such as this one on the lullaby: Ten Observations on Lullabies.
Is any music genre more disrespected than the lullaby? It may be the oldest music genre, and almost certainly the most widely performed. Every one of us has benefited from the lullaby at some point in our life—if not as a singer, at least as a listener during our infancy. But show me a single musicologist who specializes in this genre. Who has written its history? What music writer has celebrated its power?
The Salzburg Festival commissioned a report on the logo’s origins for its centennial last year, a jubilee that has stretched into this summer because of the pandemic. The research revealed new information about the life of its creator, the artist Leopoldine Wojtek, who began as a modernist but whose work took a conservative, Nazi-sympathetic turn in the 1930s, and who was married to one of the party’s most prolific art looters and schemers.
Though all the logs look identical—same length, straight and hearty—for Fabio Ognibeni, not all the spruce trees of Val di Fiemme, in the Alpine region of Trentino Alto Adige in Italy, are the same. Ognibeni estimates that just two to three out of 1,000—trees that he can recognize by sight—will make beautiful music. He can see how this wood will resonate in prestigious auditoriums and concert halls, in schools and homes around the world, in the form of grand pianos, violins, harpsichords, and harps. Ognibeni is the owner of Ciresa, a company that supplies “resonance wood” to luthiers and piano-makers, including globally known brands such as Fazioli, C. Bechstein, and Blüthner.
John Corigliano’s Dracula-infused opera, “The Lord of Cries,” which had its première last month at the Santa Fe Opera, thus has the field mostly to itself. The libretto is by Mark Adamo, Corigliano’s husband, who is himself an opera composer of considerable accomplishment. Adamo had been mulling over Stoker’s tale for years, seeking to fuse Dracula with the figure of Dionysus in Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” and in his rendition the vampire turns out to be a guise assumed by the pagan god as he seeks to unleash on Victorian England the same vengeful chaos that he once dealt out to Thebes. In the early scenes, Harker has returned from Transylvania, his mind in tatters. Dionysus arrives in England and recruits modern bacchantes from the inmates of an asylum; the doctor in charge, John Seward, becomes convinced that he can defeat the fiend only by becoming fiendish himself. Like Agave in “The Bacchae,” he ends up cutting off the wrong head. The core message of Adamo’s libretto, delivered in the final chorus, is that repression breeds madness and violence: “You may assuage the priest without, but not the beast within.”
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Slim pickings this week, but most of my attention is on the Festival concerts, so... We pretty much have to have the Brahms lullaby:
And here are John Corigliano's caprices for violin from The Red Violin:
Two years ago I had the pleasure of hearing three great pianists at the Festival: Grigory Sokolov, Evgeny Kissin and Igor Levit, all Russians, though Levit grew up in Germany. This year I am hearing another two great Russians, Arcadi Volodos and Daniil Trifonov. I suspect that these five Russians pretty much exhaust the first rank of pianists in the world these days.
Volodos' program last night focussed on late works by Brahms and Schubert. Let me take a moment to compare this to the last piano recital I attended. The performer and the program in that instance were designed to appeal to, I guess, the typical listener. The program was a grab bag of diversity and had an admixture of styles from Baroque to ragtime. The performance was fast, glittery, insensitive and sloppy. For me it left an unpleasant aftertaste. The Volodos repertoire and performance was the diametric opposite: two composers and only late works by both, instead of a superficial "variety," a profound aesthetic range and, at the end of the evening, a deep satisfaction.
The program, played without intermission, consisted of the Six Piano Pieces op. 118 by Brahms, composed at Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut (i.e. not far from Salzburg) in 1893, followed by the late Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 by Schubert, composed in September 1828, in Vienna, the third month before his death in November of that year.
Arcadi Volodos is a native of St. Petersburg, born in 1972, and studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory.
This is the first time I have heard Volodos and he does not disappoint. I have read raves of his ability and they were substantiated. He is a magician at the keyboard, with astounding command of the finest shades of dynamic and color. He often creates mystic atmospheres of texture with finely delineated pianissimi and is a master of the pregnant pause. He rarely resorts to fortissimo and it is more effective for that very reason. He played five encores and, at the risk of provoking the commentators who know the piano repertoire better than I, I will admit that I was unfamiliar with all of them. I am only able to identify guitar recital encores with any accuracy as that is where I spent most of my performing years!
The Haus für Mozart, next to the Grosses Festspielhaus, was 90% full, a testament to the Festival's efforts to make this year a return to normalcy.
Here is Volodos acknowledging the applause at the end of the concert.
And here is the Ballade, op 118 no 3 from a recording by Volodos.
I meant to post a couple of clips of music from the concert on Sunday, but it just slipped my mind! Here, to give you an idea of how this music sounds are two examples. The first is De Kooning (1963) for horn, percussion, piano, violin and cello:
And this is Chorus and Instruments I, also from 1963:
You have to purchase the programs at the Salzburg Festival and they are not cheap. The one for the Feldman cost €10, but is well worth it as it is a hefty 100 page book. Part of the reason is that it contains the program notes for not one, but four concerts devoted to the music of Morton Feldman. Two took place before my arrival and the last is on Friday so last night was the third concert. The Kollegienkirche, the church of the University of Salzburg, was the venue for all the Feldman concerts. Here is a photo I took before the concert:
It is a substantial church and last night it was nearly full--perhaps a thousand in the audience? The program book contains ten essays on the music of Morton Feldmam, five in German by Volker Rülke and five in English by Paul Griffiths and Yannick Mayaud. There are also examples from the scores to the pieces and reproductions of paintings by Barnett Newman. Feldman's approach to notation varied widely from his early graphic scores to later, fully-notated ones.
I don't really want to discuss all the material in the English essays--let alone the German ones--but I would like to quote some excerpts from the essay by Yannick Mayaud as he offers a number of interesting quotations from the writings of Morton Feldman.
My compositions are really not "compositions" at all. One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music.
The discovery that sound in itself can be a totally plastic phenomenon, suggesting its own shape, design and poetic metaphor, led me to devise a new system of graphic notation.
What we did was not in protest against the past. To rebel against history is still to be part of it. We were simply not concerned with historical processes.
A painter will perhaps agree that a color insists on being a certain size, regardless of his wishes. [...] In recent years we realize that sound too has a predilection for suggesting its own proportions.
My impressions of the concert? From the very first notes, a feeling of immense peace descended on the space. Like Shostakovich, Feldman seems to have the ability to seize the listener from the first moment, though, of course, his music does not lead from event to climax in the way earlier music does. Feldman's music is about the surface of time and space, not about structure. There is always something happening, though it is not so much going somewhere. The sound simply is.
By the way, the performances, conducted by Emilio Pomàrico, were very fine. All the instrumental parts, especially the solo viola part in Rothko Chapel were beautifully played, but the laurels have to go to Cantando Admont who were magnificent in the choral parts. How can they possibly find their notes, you ask? Through the judicious and discrete use of tuning forks, is the answer.
The sound of this music was both quiet and luscious, enhanced by the resonance of the church. Except for the very hard wooden seats, an entirely enjoyable evening. The artists repeated a portion of Rothko Chapel as an encore.
Sorry for the quality of the photo! Shooting over the heads of the audience in fairly low light. I was about in the middle, in the 14th row.
According to Wikipedia there are actually five mountains in the municipality of Salzburg. The Hohensalzburg castle, which I have been misspelling, is on the Mönchsberg. The other one I can see from my window is the Kapuzinerberg, the location of a Capuchin cloister dating from around 1600. In this photo, taken from my window, the Mönchsberg is on the left and the Kapuzinerberg on the right;
Before getting to that, here is a photo of the Boeing 747 that Lufthansa uses for the long flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt.
I took that just after we landed. Lufthansa is a good airline in my opinion: efficient and courteous and they did not lose my suitcase.
Ok, the concert tomorrow is a program of chamber music by Morton Feldman with chorus and instruments. The performers are Cantando Admont and Klangforum Wien. Here is the program:
De Kooning for horn, percussion, piano, violin and cello
Chorus and Instruments II for mixed chorus, tubular bells and tuba
Chorus and Instruments I for mixed chorus and instrumental ensemble
Rothko Chapel for soprano, alto, mixed chorus, percussion, celesta and viola
The last piece I know fairly well as I did an analysis of it for a 20th Century Theory and Analysis seminar. But the others I haven't heard. Really looking forward to this concert! It takes place in the Kollegienkirche which is the church of the University of Salzburg, built around 1700.
I've found the location of the church and it is fairly close to the other venues so I just have to sort out the bus route! No Uber in Salzburg, alas. Consulting my iPhone map, apparently I can walk there in only 21 minutes, so maybe I will do that.
I finally got here to Salzburg. I had two flights on two separate days which made it a long trip. I had to stay the night in the Frankfurt Hilton at the airport. It's a ten hour flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt, but just an hour from there to Salzburg. The apartment is a pleasant surprise. Very large and comfortable and it seems brand new. Here is the view from one window:
Yes, that's the HochSalzburg fortress. It's not everywhere that you can see a fortress, most of which was built in the 11th century, from your window.
What I need now is a decent meal and a good night's sleep!
For an envoi, one of Mozart's "Salzburg" Symphonies, the first one in D major, K. 136 with the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra.
It's some ungodly hour in the morning, I'm jetlagged and in an airport hotel in Frankfurt, but it's Friday, so I guess it's time for the Friday Miscellanea. Don't expect too much! Usually I would have worked something up a couple of days ago, but just too many little errands before my trip.
Too facile? Too prolific? Too tasteful? Whatever the objections to Camille Saint-Saëns’s music, the French composer is shamefully neglected and overlooked. This year marks the centenary of his death, and is a good moment to plead the case for someone who, while he may not be quite in the Premier League of composers, is certainly top of the Championship and may well be worthy of promotion. Brentford, if not quite Beethoven.
This summer’s Proms are giving him what might be called a modest push, programming his great Organ Symphony, the much-loved Carnival of the Animals, his first cello concerto, his engagingly sunny late oboe sonata (composed in the year of his death) and the Fantaisie in E Flat Major for organ.
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This article over at City Journal is hard to ignore: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1), In this lengthy article Heather MacDonald attempts an overview of the situation of black classical musicians. She lists the numerous recent complaints, offers a compendium of contrasting views and attempts an objective analysis:
If institutional support and encouragement of black musicians have been unequivocal for decades, why has their percentage in orchestras barely budged? Because over the last 60 years, two of the three main sources for exposing a child to classical music—circumambient culture and music education—have dried up. Violinist Joseph Striplin had a “classic inner-city mother,” he says, but he had the good fortune to come of age in the 1940s and 1950s, when “music was vibrant in the country and at school.” Classical music themes were ubiquitous on television shows and in the movies. Every junior high and high school in Detroit had its own orchestra; students were taken to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Young People’s concerts at the Masonic Temple and the Ford Auditorium. “We heard and we saw; the orchestra was massive to my young eyes,” he says. Striplin attended the prestigious Cass Technical High School and played in its orchestra with students who had had lessons since they were young. “I loved this music and knew I needed to find out how to play like that,” he says.
Since then, music education has been decimated, and classical music has disappeared from the public sphere. From 1962 to 1989, the percentage of high schools with orchestras fell from 67 percent to 17 percent, according to Billboard. Seventy-seven percent of schools polled in a University of Illinois study dropped piano instruction; 40 percent dropped string instruction. If a child’s home is not exposing him to classical music, he is likely not being exposed at all.
This is the kind of article that will inspire a lot of pushback simply because it questions the prevailing narrative. Does it do so successfully?
Jake Heggie: I’m drawn to big human themes. Big, transformative events that we can all connect with in some way. Things that feel very much of our time and yet are timeless. Things that feel—because I was born and raised in this country—very American, and yet are universal. I can’t write a piece about the death penalty. I can’t write a piece about domestic violence. But I can write a piece about people who are experiencing that. That’s the line for me: big transformative events, intimate stories with large forces at work that are beyond our control. I find those very, very inspiring and certainly operatic. Also, when I’m writing—especially because I write a lot for singers—I want things that would make sense to be sung, and where the emotion is big enough to fill an opera house, or to fill a concert hall.
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Here is a review of The World According to Colour: A Cultural History which makes the interesting point that there are far more colors than we actually have words for. The situation is even worse in music. One of the most powerful aspects of music is timbre and we hardly have two words for it: nasal and dull?
Never mind the physics and the biology and the chemistry. Forget all about the rods and cones and the mysterious workings of the cerebral cortex. Colour, says James Fox, is primarily a cultural construct, ‘a pigment of our imaginations that we paint all over the world’. The Tiv people of West Africa get by perfectly happily with just three basic colour terms: black, white and red. Mursi cattle farmers in Ethiopia have eleven colour terms for cows, but they have none for anything else. At the other end of the spectrum, the Optical Society of America lists 2,755 primary colours, while paint manufacturers now offer more than 40,000 dyes and pigments, so many, says Fox, that they have run out of sensible names for them. ‘Dead Salmon’ and ‘Churlish Green’ are two of the more outlandish mentioned in his entertaining new book.
There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.
As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point).
I think this is true. I certainly tend to work in fairly short bursts of activity.
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We obviously need some Saint-Saëns. This is his famous Organ Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons:
Here is something I haven't heard before: the D minor harpsichord concerto by Bach played on organ by Iveta Apkalna. The Frankfurt Radio Symphony is conducted by Riccardo Minasi.
Since we seem to be doing the organ today, here is Olivier Messiaen improvising on the angel singing "Glory to God in Excelsis."
You won't get much posting from me for a couple of days. Yes, it actually takes two days to get to Salzburg from Mexico due to greatly curtailed flight schedules. I'm on a Lufthansa flight from Mexico City this evening that gets to Frankfurt tomorrow afternoon--that includes a seven-hour time zone change. I have to stay overnight in Frankfurt as there is no matching flight that day. Next morning is a short hop to Salzburg, landing at the W. A. Mozart airport.
Two years ago the festival sent my tickets to me via priority mail and I was anxious that they would even arrive. But they did. The new system is they send you the tickets in pdf format and you just print them out at home--a much better system! I have Friday and Saturday to settle into the apartment I rented for the duration and to figure out the best route to the concert halls. I also have to figure out where the various halls are. Last time I nearly missed a concert by confusing the Grosser Saal in the Mozarteum, which is used for student concerts with the Mozarteum Grosser Saal which is where the Salzburg Camerata plays. I know where the Grosses Festspielhaus is and the Haus für Mozart is right next to it, but I have to figure out where the Kollegienkirche is as that is where the first concert is on Sunday--devoted to chamber music by Morton Feldman. Other concerts are in the Felsenreitschule and I have no idea where that is. Lots of concert halls in Salzburg!
Also in the first week is a solo recital by Arkady Volodos who is rumored to be a terrific pianist, a Schoenberg chamber music concert featuring Pierrot Lunaire, Neither, Feldman's opera with text by Samuel Becket and Theodor Currentzis conducting Rameau. Where else would you find such rich diversity?
Here is Currentzis conducting Mozart with piano soloist Alexander Melnikov.
