THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
American composer William Bolcom has written a new piano concerto for Igor Levit and it is on YouTube:
It is remarkable how enduring the concerto genre remains. The basic idea of the dialogue and contrast between a solo instrument and an orchestra has captured the imagination of composers and the interest of audiences for the last three hundred years. I don't think any other musical form has had that consistent a success.
Alex Ross' article on Richard Taruskin is up at The New Yorker: The Monumental Musicology of Richard Taruskin.
The imperiously brilliant music historian Richard Taruskin, who died on July 1st, at the age of seventy-seven, combined several qualities that are seldom found together in one person. He was, first of all, staggeringly knowledgeable about his chosen field. His near-total command of the history and practice of classical music engendered “The Oxford History of Western Music,” a five-volume, forty-three-hundred-page behemoth, which Taruskin published in 2005. His ability to hold forth with equal bravura on Gregorian chant, polyphonic masses, Baroque concertos, and Russian opera was grounded not only in profound learning but also in deep-seated musicianship. A Queens native and a graduate of the High School of Music & Art, Taruskin played the viola da gamba for many years on New York’s early-music scene; as a choral conductor, he made fascinating recordings of Renaissance repertory with the New York group Cappella Nova. Later, ensconced on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, he stepped away from performance, but a fundamental musicality animated everything he wrote.
That in itself is a formidable introduction. The writers on music I have most respected and learned from over the years include Donald Francis Tovey, whose many analytical essays were originally written as program notes. Joseph Kerman was a brilliant writer whose purview included criticism of opera as well as a superb volume on Beethoven quartets and another on Bach fugues. Charles Rosen's work meant that our understanding of Classical style was forever transformed. But Taruskin loomed larger than all of these. I'm re-reading his Oxford History of Western Music and it is a narrative that one can derive endless pleasure and knowledge from. After this I may well re-read his two volume monograph on Stravinsky, very likely the finest book on a single composer ever written, rivaling the Philipp Spitta volumes on Bach and Thayer's life of Beethoven. Towards the end of the essay Alex says:
What I took most to heart was his edict that love should never devolve into worship. The intensity of his own passion for music compelled him to grapple with the darkness that dwells in all man-made things.
Yes, indeed.
* * *
Over at Slipped Disc Norman Lebrecht manages to dismiss the quality of all the music festivals in one fell swoop: THE SUMMER ENDS WITH A FESTIVAL WHIMPER
Salzburg has staged its last major premiere of the month and the feeling is the festival has been well below standard.
The Bayreuth Ring was booed off the stage.
Edinburgh has managed one secondhand opera and failed to put on a Beethoven 9th. Its classical content has seldom been duller.
The BBC Proms this week consist of an Aretha Franklin tribute, an Australian orchestra, Rattle conducts Mahler again, a BBC Brahms-Franck concert, a drop-in from Finnish Radio and music from the BBC’s natural history series. Nobody’s rushing to buy tickets.
The lack of managerial energy is palpable.
What can be done to restore it?
Well, there's always next year...
* * *
From the New York Times: It’s Alive! It’s With the Band! A Computer Soloist Holds Its Own
Two guest soloists, each skilled in the art of improvisation, appeared in New York City on Friday night with the cutting-edge chamber group Ensemble Signal.
One soloist was human: Nicole Mitchell, the veteran flutist, composer and bandleader whose albums and performances are regularly (and rightly) celebrated by jazz critics.
The other soloist was a computer program — called Voyager — that can listen to live performances in real time and offer improvised responses. Originally programmed in 1987 by George Lewis, the composer, performer and computer-music pioneer, Voyager’s discography is slighter than Mitchell’s, but likewise thrilling.
* * *
I think it will be years before we fully realize what the pandemic cost us: 'Singing is my life, but Covid took away my voice'
A young singer has described how her dreams are on hold after Covid damaged her voice.
Ani Goddard, who is studying at Manchester's Arden Theatre School, said she could no longer sing and sometimes struggled to speak.
The 21-year-old contracted Covid in December, but now believes she has Long Covid.
She is on the waiting list to see a vocal specialist, but said accessing treatment had been "frustrating".
"When I sing, just nothing will come out," she said.
* * *
Here are some creative performers: ‘The Rite of Spring’ by the Vesna Duo Review: Stravinsky Distilled.
The Vesna Duo—named for a Slavic goddess of youth and springtime—consists of the pianist Liana Pailodze Harron and the percussionist Ksenija Komljenović, from the Republic of Georgia and Serbia respectively. Now based mostly in the U.S., the two had planned to present a concert together at Carnegie Hall right before the Covid-19 virus shut down New York and then much of the world.
Ms. Komljenović made the arrangement. She had played in a Belgrade Philharmonic performance of “Rite” many years earlier and had always wanted to explore the music further. “I was not sure whether I was capable of producing anything worthy,” she wrote in notes for the recording. “The only thing I was certain of was that I loved this music dearly and that I had plenty of time on my hands. Several months, emails, phone calls, recordings, and travels-to-rehearse later, our version of the ‘Rite of Spring’ for marimba and piano was born on stage—fully memorized and blister-causing for both of us.”
And here is a performance:
* * *
As an homage to Richard Taruskin, here is one of the most unusual works by Stravinsky, Les Noces, based on folk traditions of Russian weddings:
And because I was just reading the chapter discussing Puccini in the Oxford History, here is "Un bel di" from Madame Butterfly:
And finally here is Hélène Grimaud playing the adagio from the Piano Concerto No. 23 by Mozart:
And if that doesn't make you feel better, I don't know what would!
Making up a bit for not personally attending the Salzburg Festival this year is this ample New York Times Review: At the Salzburg Festival, Riches, Retreads and Notes of Caution
The premiere of a new production of Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova” had just ended at the Salzburg Festival here last week. When the lights went up, Kristina Hammer, the festival’s new president, was wiping tears off her cheeks.
It was hard to blame her for crying. “Kat’a” is a breathless tragedy about a small-town woman trapped in a loveless marriage and driven to suicide after having a brief affair. Janacek’s music stamps out her ethereal fantasies with the brutal fist of reality.
Barrie Kosky’s staging was the highlight of a week at Salzburg, classical music’s pre-eminent annual event, which runs through Aug. 31. Kosky has pared down this pared-down work even further, to its core of quivering human beings.
Yes, this is the kind of performance that one goes to Salzburg for.
The other opera in the relatively intimate Haus für Mozart this summer also takes a hint from the movies: Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” framed by the director Lydia Steier like “The Princess Bride,” with a grandfather telling the story to a young child — here, three boys. As when this staging was new, in 2018, this is a clever way of super-compressing the work’s extensive spoken dialogue.
Four years ago, the production sprawled in the festival’s largest theater; now it’s been smushed into its smallest. Steier has wisely jettisoned a whole strand of steampunk circus imagery and concentrated more on the plot as a parable of the start of World War I, with “Little Nemo” touches. It’s subtle work as the boys gradually become participants in the action, not merely observers. The Philharmonic played under Joana Mallwitz with an ideal mixture of crispness and roundedness.
Salzburg has not one, but two opera houses, side by side. The large Felsenreitschule and the smaller Haus für Mozart. These are right next to the Big Festival Concert Hall. But there are other venues as well such as the Grosses Saal at the Mozarteum where every weekend the Mozarteum Orchestra performs and the Kollegienkirche where several concerts devoted to the music of Morton Feldman were held.
More memorable was a less exalted, less widely publicized concert: one of the festival’s 11 a.m. weekend Mozart Matinees featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra. These mornings often have the most joyful, vibrant playing of the festival, and last week’s program was no exception, led with verve by Adam Fischer.
The Mozart Matinees are well attended and happily received. But they still feel like a Salzburg secret.
* * *
FREE OPERA OF THE WEEK – ORIGINAL AND EXCLUSIVE FROM ENGLAND’S BAYREUTH
Slippedisc courtesy of OperaVision streams live from the Longborough Festival Opera, known as the British Bayreuth. This is the bucolic backdrop for this new production by Amy Lane which celebrates the natural world. Renowned Wagnerian Anthony Negus conducts a cast of the UK’s leading Wagnerian singers.
* * *
From The Guardian: Bring that beat back: why are people in their 30s giving up on music?
There are many things you notice as you plow deeper into your 30s. It’s a transitional period with incredibly visible milestones: babies, weddings, houses, more babies. What gets added to people’s lives can feel loud and inescapable – but often what drifts away is less visible.
For the last few years, I have felt the inescapable disappearance of music from my friends’ lives. Even people with whom I have longstanding relationships that were born from a shared love of music have simply let it go, or let it fade deep into the background. A 2015 study of people’s listening habits on Spotify found that most people stop listening to new music at 33; a 2018 report by Deezer had it at 30. In my 20s, the idea that people’s appetite to consume new music regularly would be switched off like some kind of tap was ludicrous. However, now I’m 36, it’s difficult to argue with.
* * *
Together on the Way: An interview with composer Eva-Maria Houben
Some people say to me: “Eva-Maria, you write so many compositions! How can you do that?” And I say, “It’s because I do not stop: I’m always composing.” If I ride my bicycle or if I go for a swim or if I sit in the garden listening to the birds, I’m always composing: it’s a form of life. When I’m on my bike or swimming, I compose in my head, and then I can sit and write. But I do not distinguish between composing in my head and composing on paper or on the computer. And so I work on many pieces, sometimes simultaneously. I do not revise a piece when it’s concluded: it’s gone, and people perform it. I do not take it back and then work on it again. And I do not have the vision that I could create a perfect piece or the one and only piece. Every piece is one piece within a long row of pieces; it’s one step on a way that can never be finished.
* * *
Upending Expectations for Indigenous Music, Noisily
Raven Chacon wasn’t sure he should accept the commission that would soon earn him the Pulitzer Prize for music. A Milwaukee ensemble had asked Chacon — a Diné composer, improviser and visual artist born on the edge of the Navajo Nation — to write a piece for its annual Thanksgiving concert in 2021, slated for a 175-year-old cathedral downtown. The offer smacked of cliché, another act of holiday tokenism.
“My impulse is to turn down any Thanksgiving invitation, not because I’m anti-Thanksgiving but because that’s the only time we get asked to do stuff,” Chacon, 44, said in a recent phone interview.
But he slowly reconsidered, recognizing that performing on Thanksgiving in a cathedral (with an enormous pipe organ, no less) offered a rare opportunity to address the Catholic Church’s violent role in the conquest of Native Americans. He penned “Voiceless Mass” and, at the premiere, positioned violinists, flutists and percussionists around the seated audience, their parts cresting through a hangdog drone.
* * *
And now for some envois. First up an excerpt from a piece by Eva-Maria Houben for organ, piano and percussion:
Next, excerpts from Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova:
I got the strangest email the other day from Blogger. The subject line read: "Your post titled "Friday Miscellanea" has been unpublished" Okaaaay. Which one? There are hundreds over the last several years. Here is some of the text of the email:
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we
allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Friday Miscellanea"
was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our
guidelines and have unpublished the URL
http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/01/friday-miscellanea_24.html,
making it unavailable to blog readers.
Why was your blog post unpublished?
Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy. Please visit
our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.
Visiting their community guidelines page did not, I'm afraid, help. Apart from just text about music, the only thing you might find on a post here are music examples and YouTube links. Don't see how either could have been infected with malware and viruses. They suggest updating the content to reflect their policies, but I have no way of knowing which post was "flagged." And what does that mean, anyway? Flagged by whom?
This is disconcerting to say the least. There is no appeal, it seems, nor no way of contacting a human being as the email is from a "no-reply" account. So, there is nothing to be done.
If this happens again, or happens several times, I may have to simply reconsider continuing the blog. I have derived enormous satisfaction over the years, but if every post is to be subject to a draconian and unaccountable, not to mention unknowable, standard, then I choose not to participate.
Thanks to my readers over the years and let's hope we can continue!
The Wall Street Journal this morning has this article: Travel Woes in Europe Won’t End This Summer.
Airlines are preparing for this summer’s travel disruption in Europe to continue into fall, with some of the region’s biggest airports extending caps on passenger numbers as they struggle to keep up with the rapid recovery in air travel.
Major hubs including London Heathrow, Frankfurt Airport and Amsterdam Schiphol have all recently said that capacity restrictions will last until at least October as they battle to recruit more staff.
Airports across Europe imposed limits on the number of passengers and flights that could pass through their facilities this summer after, at times, becoming overwhelmed by a stronger-than-expected rebound in demand. After two years of pandemic-related travel restrictions, passengers returning to the skies have been greeted with long lines at security, a scourge of lost baggage and regular flight delays or cancellations.
For passengers, the continuing threat of disruption could deter some from traveling.
Speaking as one of them: a definite yes!
I attended the Salzburg Festival last summer when there were still a number of restrictions and the trip went smoothly. But this year, the ominous indicators started popping up just days before my departure. My travel agent called to say that we needed to modify my schedule both coming and going. I had a long flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt and then a short hop to Dresden, both with Lufthansa. So Lufthansa was saying sorry, but the Dresden flight was no longer available so they had booked me on a four and a half hour train to Dresden instead of the one-hour flight. No fun after an eleven hour trans-Atlantic flight. But I agreed as I seemed to recall that when I booked the flight that no cancellations were allowed. Ok. But next, my return flight was also not available, again, because of the Dresden leg. I had to move to the day before or the day after. So I moved to the day before so I wouldn't have to arrange for an extra day's accommodation. So far so good, right?
Alas, things did not go as planned. The flight from Mexico City was delayed two hours so I missed the train to Dresden which was leaving when I was still waiting for my baggage. I stayed the night in the airport Hilton and took the train the next day. So, I finally got there, a bit worse for wear. Unfortunately I came down with some sort of bug so I felt crappy the whole time I was there. Now for the return trip: I was hoping this would go better, but I read in the Wall Street Journal that 45% of Lufthansa flights out of Frankfurt were delayed. I figured as long as the Dresden one was on time I would be ok. And so it was and I was there beforehand for the flight. Just a note about the Frankfurt airport. It is very large and does not have an internal transit system as some US airports do. So you walk. My Dresden flight arrived at gate A something. My Mexico City flight was leaving from gate Z23. So I walked. And walked. And walked.
Then things started to go wrong again. They announced that the flight was over-booked and asked for volunteers to move to the next day with a cash incentive. I didn't consider that as I just wanted to get home. Then the flight was delayed an hour. But ok, as long as we get there. I was planning on spending the night in Mexico City anyway, to rest up. The flight was fine until just fifteen minutes before we were due to touch down, the pilot came on and announced that there were heavy thunderstorms in Mexico City and we didn't have enough fuel to avoid them. So we were going to divert to the nearby city of Queretaro to refuel before continuing on. My heart sank in my chest. This is after twelve hours essentially trapped in a not very comfortable seat.
Originally the pilot mumbled something about only being on the ground in Queretaro for twenty minutes or so. Once we got there, after a very, very long taxi, he announced that we would be there forty-five minutes to an hour. After an hour he announced that the fuel truck had finally arrived. After re-fueling, it seemed to take another hour to get ready to take off again. So I think we were on the ground in Queretaro for about three hours. The final leg to Mexico City was very quick, but that still meant that the flight, which was supposed to arrive at 6:30 pm local time, actually arrived around 10:30. Then it took an hour to get through Mexican immigration and luggage pick up. I got to the hotel around 11:30.
One more note on the pilot: the take-offs and landings on all these flights were extremely bumpy which I had never experienced before with Lufthansa.
It's like the whole company had a nervous breakdown just before my departure.
So that's the story of my summer vacation!
In retrospect, knowing what I know now, when my travel agent called to say that both flights had to be changed I should simply have said, no, cancel the whole trip and then try to get a refund from Lufthansa based on the fact that this was not what I had paid for--way back in March!
After the longest hiatus in Music Salon history, more about that later, we return with a substantial Friday Miscellanea.
First up an extensive review of Bayreuth's new production of The Ring in the New York Times: Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic.
About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.
His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.
But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.
Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.
In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.
* * *
Here is a fascinating and informative clip on the evolution of the timpani:
* * *
I'm just seeing this Guardian article from a few weeks ago: Russian sponsorship row overshadows opening of Salzburg festival.
After a recent sell-out performance by Currentzis’ ensemble at the Elbphilharmonie, which organisers were quick to emphasise was attended by Ukrainian refugees and also involved Ukrainian musicians, Mischa Kreiskott, a leading German music critic, said: “The choices of music can be seen as a commentary in itself – especially the Strauss … they are of a dark persuasion.” He said that Currentzis was doing nothing less than trying to save his orchestra: “He knows it is under threat and the musicians feel it too … you see it in the passion with which they perform. It must be very difficult for them right now.”
I suggest reading the whole piece as there are a variety of accusations and responses. I have to say that the most compelling performance I attended at the festival last summer was by Currentzis.
* * *
A sobering message from Norman Lebrecht: The vast plight of the Proms
This summer’s BBC Proms will be the last festival of British orchestras as we know them. This is not due to Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, inflation, the gas squeeze or any other headline. It is the consequence of half a century of mismanagement and mental indolence on the part of safe-seat executive suits who turned a Nelsonian blind eye to the gathering storm. Well, it’s all over now.
The death sentence was delivered by the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, in a statement terminating BBC Four, which televises most of the Proms, and urging the BBC’s six orchestras in London, Manchester, Scotland and Wales to look for “alternative sources of income where possible.” The insincerity of that suggestion is on a par with Vladimir Putin’s “special measures” in Ukraine.
There is no “where possible” — as Davie, a former boss of BBC music and radio, is well aware. Private cash for concerts has become scarce and BBC orchestras have no brand to sell apart from the big one — the GazProm Last Night of the Proms. Davie knows what lies ahead for his orchestras: oblivion. All he can do is soften the pill and spread the blame. The party’s over.
* * *
Yet another in the long line of essays bemoaning the strange fate of 20th century modernist music: The Disappearing Modernists.
Except for a small niche of connoisseurs, classical music patrons these days spend their money on endless performances of a musical canon that mostly ended around 1910. Why is there this difference in public reception of modernism in the two art forms? Why is abstraction no longer seen as avant-garde in art and sculpture, but continues to be in music? Why do people line up around the world to see canvases by post-1910 painters, why do paintings by Willem de Kooning and Frank Stella sell at auction for millions, but the orchestral music of Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, or Elliott Carter is never played at pops concerts (and rarely at subscription performances, for that matter)?
This is actually another review of The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century by John Mauceri that we have mentioned before, though this is a much more detailed discussion. Most of these kind of critical discussions of the failure of modernism to attract audiences focus on the deficiencies of the music: it is just too dissonant or jagged or simply lacking in proper tonal organization and charm. But it might be interesting to have a look at how audiences changed over the course of the 20th century. In any case, this is an aesthetically and historically complex issue that has not been explored deeply enough.
* * *
Max Emanuel Cenčić: staging rare operas at Bayreuth Baroque:
To opera lovers all over the world, Bayreuth means Wagner: the summer festival dedicated to the German composer is one of the most famous and well-respected in the industry. But in Bayreuth there are two opera houses: the Richard Wagner Festpielhaus, and a Baroque jewel, the Margravial Opera House, built in the middle of the 18th century. This theatre, whose spectacular interior was designed by the Italian architect Bibiena on the model of the old imperial opera house in Vienna, is currently a museum for most of the year, except two weeks in the summer, when it hosts the Bayreuth Baroque Festival.
* * *
More on Currentzis: Under Pressure to Cut Russian Ties, Maestro Forms New Orchestra.
The conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia, announced on Monday that he would form a new international ensemble with the support of donors outside Russia.
The ensemble, to be called Utopia, will bring together 112 musicians from 28 countries, many of them soloists and principal players in renowned orchestras, for a European tour that is to begin this fall and go through 2023, according to a statement. The group will rely on ticket sales as well as donations from European benefactors to finance its operations, the statement said.
Currentzis, who has made a career of defying conventions in classical music, said he wanted the new group to shake up the traditional model of orchestras, in which musicians play together for years in the same concert halls. He said in a statement that the new group would “leave behind the framework of respectable institutions which, while being blessed can also be doomed to create what could be described as a certain standardized international sound.”
* * *
Here is a film of Currentzis rehearsing the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5. There is a long spoken introduction that may be interesting:
And here is one of those hateful modern pieces, the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók:
And for something completely different a Georgian folk trio:
 |
| The street sign at the corner where I am staying |
Actually things started to come apart three days before when my travel agent called and told me that certain legs of my flights were not available. I had booked this in March. I was scheduled to fly Lufthansa from Mexico City to Frankfurt with a connecting flight to Dresden. The connecting flight was cancelled so they were putting me on a train (four and a half hours instead of two hours on the plane), However, since the flight was two hours late out of Mexico City, of course I missed that connection. I stayed in the Holiday Inn at the Frankfurt Airport. Good hotel, by the way, but total cost came to over 300 euros. So the next day I had to buy my own train ticket to Dresden (around 100 euros) which involved a considerable wait in line. The train itself, an ICE, intercity express, was quite nice.
The other news from my travel agent was that the flight back was also screwed up: no seat available on the Dresden Frankfurt leg. I remind you I purchased this ticket in March. We solved that by moving to a different day. You might be wondering why I didn't get after Lufthansa to replace my train ticket the next morning? Well, the employees all went on strike the day after my flight. I just hope that my flight back does not get canceled!
Dresden itself is very pleasant, warm but not hot and most days have been sunny. Mind you, I have been trying to recover from the flight for most of a week: insomnia and health issues. I've sometimes thought of spending more time in Germany, but I can see several reasons why that would be undesirable. The first is transport. At home I have a private driver that takes me wherever I need to go. This is not very expensive. In Germany as there is no Uber (at least not in Dresden) and taxis are very expensive I would be forced to use the public transit which, while efficient and modern, is also inconvenient and expensive.
In this part of Dresden, a very pleasant middle-class residential neighborhood, there is a single large grocery store, remarkable in its sheer ugliness and unpleasant atmosphere. It is overcrowded and grim. There are absolutely no other options, no corner stores, no 7/11 type stores, no mom and pop groceries and no markets. I wonder why this is? My general impression is that individual entrepreneurs--small businesses generally--are severely discouraged in Germany. One consequence is far fewer options for most people.
Yes, I'm sure there is a rich cultural life in those areas that I like--notice that the cross street where I am staying is Haydnstrasse. But in many other ways, ordinary life in Germany is very constrained in ways that are not acceptable for me. It does make me realize that I am lucky to have the kind of life I do with so many advantages.
Follow-up a few days later. We had lunch in a lovely medieval era restaurant near the Frauenkirche in the central part of Dresden. Nearby was a Canadian steakhouse named Ontario:
And down the street was an Australian restaurant. In the neighborhood where I am staying, the choices are not so good. Mind you, there is a pretty good breakfast place, what they call a "Bäckerie-Conditorei" where you can get typical German breakfasts of rolls with coldcuts and jams and a pretty decent milchcafe. But apart from that the pickings are slim. There is a bistro with hearty German dishes somewhat sloppily presented and a kebab house that I found simply inedible.
I'm flying back today and, to be frank, I will be very happy to get home! More later of course, when I am feeling better.
