Friday Miscellanea

"Guitar on a Table" painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919, just sold for $37.1 million

 Oh how I wish actual classical guitarists could get well-paid too!

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I’ve booed at the opera before. But what happened to a young soprano this week was plain cruel

There is nothing wrong in principle with protesting at the opera. I’ve very occasionally booed shows I hated, and I want to be free to do so again if I choose. Not everything on the opera, or any other stage, has always got to be cheered politely or given the reflexive standing ovations that seem ever more common. Booing and whistling at the opera or theatre can sometimes be healthy and necessary protest. It is actually a lot more common than you may think, especially on first nights, especially in continental Europe. I once even heard Luciano Pavarotti, no less, booed at La Scala in Milan.

What happened at Covent Garden on Tuesday evening, however, wasn’t booing but heckling. It was repeated and mean-spirited barracking during a touching and plaintive aria about the loss of a father. Most disturbingly of all, it was the heckling of a child. It took place during act one of Handel’s opera Alcina, to a boy character, Oberto. Covent Garden’s production gives Oberto a poignant prominence. The target was Malakai M Bayoh, a 12-year-old boy soprano who is alternating the role with another young singer during the six performances scheduled by the Royal Opera this month.

You really have to read the whole thing which is yet another example of the decline of civilized courtesy in society.

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And speaking of concerts, the Washington Post discusses encores: Has the encore left the building?

“It’s kind of wild to me that [encores] lasted through the ’90s with bands who were sort of cynical of showbiz tactics, because it’s such an old showbiz idea. Of course there’s going to be smoke and mirrors no matter what, but the encore is a pretty overt lie to the audience,” says Max Collins, the frontman of Eve 6 and BuzzFeed’s newest advice columnist, though he added that in the right circumstances, an encore can be an exchange of generosity between artists and fans.

The article is all about encores in popular music performances. It's a bit different in the classical world.

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On the acoustics of violins: Phantom notes played by violins turn out to be a real sound

Giovanni Cecchi at the University of Florence in Italy and his colleagues decided to investigate how different violins produce combination tones.

They analysed recordings of a professional violinist playing selected pairs of notes on five violins of different age and quality using a computer. Motivated by the ideas of 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz who showed that some musical instruments may be able to produce combination tones on their own, they decomposed the sound waves made by the violins into parts with different frequencies. The team found that all violins produced combination tones, but the oldest instruments produced the strongest ones. The magnitude of the most prominent combination tone for the oldest violin, made in Bologna in 1700, was about 75 per cent larger than the one from a modern mass-produced instrument.

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Music has influences in lots of interesting places: STILL HOT: Maurice Sendak’s ageless imagination

Music was an essential ingredient in Sendak’s creative process. “The work can’t happen without music,” he said in 1994. “I think everything I’ve done is a collaboration with a composer.” The catalogue contains a selection of Sendak’s “fantasy sketches,” each page a mini-drama with four to six rows of small black-pen line drawings moving from left to right—a wordless comic strip whose silent progression on the page has the feel of experimental musical notation. In fact, Sendak composed these pages while listening to music (such as Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” and Deems Taylor’s “Through the Looking Glass”)—the “catalyst,” he said, “that brought them to life [and] kept my pen moving across the paper.”

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I've been a fan of the fortepiano for a long time so it is nice to see this article from Alex Ross: Kristian Bezuidenhout Unleashes the Subtle Power of the Fortepiano

“These older instruments, and even the modern copies, function so differently in rehearsal and in concert,” Bezuidenhout told me. “Sometimes you have this feeling in rehearsal: ‘Oh, yes, this is really making sense, the piano is really helping me.’ Then, in concert, they kind of turn on you. The five-octave pianos, especially, can betray you, leave you in the dust. You say to yourself, ‘Where is that sound I heard four hours ago?’ It may have to do with a change of humidity, or a way of reacting to the room. But it’s as if they can sense your level of stress, your preoccupation, and then they seize up—like some kind of really mean cat.”

Yes, fortepianos can smell your fear! Not to mention guitars.

Some didacts of the early-music world would maintain that certain composers must be performed on so-called original instruments. Bezuidenhout, in remarks from the stage at Hertz, distanced himself from the charged word “authentic,” describing his work as “historically inspired.” For me, the experience of hearing a broad range of repertory filtered through instruments of various eras had the effect of freeing the composers from the tyranny of norms. This recital captured, above all, a sense of music as an evolutionary art, reacting to technology in flux and history in motion.

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Let's listen to some fortepiano. This is Kristian Bezuidenhout playing a Mozart sonata:

I don't think we have had much Richard Strauss lately, so here is his Death and Transfiguration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM0Y-Yly8jY

And let's have the earlier generation of fortepiano players: Malcolm Bilson playing a Mozart concerto: