Friday Miscellanea

There hasn't been much of interest in pop music lately other than how rich Taylor Swift is going to be by the end of her tour. But that changed this week. And the interesting thing is, this really isn't what you would call "pop" music though it sure is popular:

If you want to read up on what this is about: Oliver Anthony’s Army Is Here to Stay.

We’re noticing that protest songs — and particularly protest songs coming from independent artists who aren’t affiliated with the corporate record industry, like the Tom MacDonalds and Bryson Grays, for example – are beginning to take over the music business.

That’s a good thing — because pop music is a wasteland, and the record industry as it currently stands deserves to be disrupted and crushed.

So when a former factory worker and off-the-grid farmer goes and buys a top-grade microphone and a resonator guitar and belts out a protest song for the ages for his YouTube followers, and the record industry has no part to play in his near-immediate viral success, it tells you that the little guy isn’t done fighting.

That's more about the political aspects, but to me, the musical ones are just as interesting. Here's the thing: what I dislike about current pop music is that it is a big budget, high-tech industrial product. A lot of songs are written by a team of Swedes who know what people want, i.e. something very similar to everything else they listen to. But one person with a guitar and a bit of creativity and something authentic he wants to say really can be more powerful aesthetically than any amount of industrialized product. Music is not a frozen fish stick or a designer t-shirt. It is, at its best, the expression of an individual human soul. And some things I really like about this story is that Oliver Anthony is not signed with a record company and said this about his career plans:

"People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers. I don't want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don't want to play stadium shows, I don't want to be in the spotlight."

For another take on the phenomenon, here is the New York Times: How ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Reached the Top of the Charts

“Rich Men North of Richmond” sold 147,000 downloads in its first week, more than 10 times the sales of Mr. Combs’s “Fast Car,” the No. 2 song on the overall singles chart. Mr. Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” benefited from a similar surge last month, with just 822 downloads the week before its music video became a culture war battleground, according to Luminate. Following the backlash, the track sold 228,000 copies.

Mr. Anthony, who did not respond to requests for comment, has attempted to float above the political fray. “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and always have,” he said in an introductory video posted to YouTube earlier this month.

* * *

 What Spatial Audio Can and Cannot Do for Classical Music

Whether you’re focusing on a stray slide-guitar accent in the Dolby Atmos mix of Taylor Swift’s “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” or appreciating the serrated details of brass-arrangement filigree in Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, three-dimensional feel of large-speaker arrays into your ears.

But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or four-channel releases — in the 1970s.

Yes, I had a 4 channel setup in the early 70s but it never really seemed worth the effort.

* * *

‘When it hits a low C, it takes you to another dimension’: the musicians in love with obscure instruments

Why settle for a recorder when you could wield a contrabass clarinet – or something you invented yourself? Meet the players drawn to the unusual.

* * *

Piece Hall: Is this hidden architectural gem UK's best gig venue?

The Piece Hall, the world's only remaining Georgian cloth hall, is becoming a sought-after venue for global artists to perform at. Why is this little-known, architectural triumph in West Yorkshire captivating so many almost 250 years after it was built?

Jessie Ware likened it to playing a gig in Venice.

James's frontman Tim Booth agreed - it was as if he was on an open-air stage at an Italian piazza, the crowd roaring back at him on a truly memorable summer's evening.

As someone who has played in a few Italian piazzas, especially the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, I'm in complete agreement!

* * *

 Here's another tune by Oliver Anthony that is getting a lot of attention:

Here is a charming lute duet that I must have played with a hundred students:

How about a guitar duet:

Finally, Allan Pettersson, Symphony No. 6:

Sunday Musings

For the last week or two I've been reading a big book on science by the late Isaac Asimov. Remarkably clear and entertaining writer but even he can't make the myriad of sub-atomic particles too interesting. So I set that book aside temporarily to read one I just got from Amazon:

 Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) is a fascinating figure. I discovered him sometime in my late teens when I was still devouring libraries wholesale. I used to own three or four paperbacks of his poetry, translations and essays. He was an antiquarian, deeply interested in the troubadours, Dante and a host of other elder literature. He was hugely influential on generations of poets:

Much of Pound's legacy lies in his advancement of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century, particularly between 1910 and 1925. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, H.D., Aldington, and Aiken, he befriended and helped Cummings, Bunting, Ford, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.

My only personal connection with Pound was meeting and having numerous conversations with Basil Bunting when he was a visiting scholar at the University of Victoria in 1971. I was strongly attracted to Pound's love of world literature as well as his passionate, romantic modernism (reading his early poetry with its antiquarian language you would hardly place him in the 20th century). As well as being a brilliant poet and translator he was also an economic nut case and a repugnant anti-semite. At the end of WWII he was charged with treason and ended up spending many years in a mental hospital as being unfit to stand trial. A host of leading literary figures lobbied for his release including T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings and Ernest Hemingway. I ran across a collection of his fascistic speeches given during the war on Italian radio and was delighted and amused to see two blurbs on the back. One, from T. S. Eliot, stated that Pound was the most influential poet of the 20th century, which is likely true. The other quote, from Robert Graves, commented that, after his behavior during the war, he should have been hung. Pound seems to have known nearly every writer of the day. T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") introduced him to Robert Graves when they were at Oxford after the First World War. "Graves, this is Pound, you won't like one another."

I ran across this phrase this week: "Tradition is the enemy of Progress." Well, yes, of course, that is its primary function. You know what you are getting with tradition, while progress is always a bit of a crapshoot. The word "progress" makes a promise that events often betray.

For an envoi, let's listen to "De tous biens plaine" by Hayne van Guizeghem.

Hume on Art

I just ran across this short video which gives a good introduction to David Hume's thoughts on the standard of taste.

Friday Miscellanea

 Alex Ross writes about Elemental Opera at Santa Fe

The chief novelty at Santa Fe this season is a new version of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” which, at the age of four hundred and sixteen, is the oldest opera still regularly performed. Although Harry Bicket, Santa Fe’s music director, is a specialist in early opera, he decided against using a period ensemble of harpsichords, theorbos, sackbuts, and the like; this would have required a total reconfiguration of the company’s resident orchestra. Instead, Bicket turned to the composer Nico Muhly, who has refashioned Monteverdi’s masterpiece in a captivating modern guise. 

I saw two other operas during my time in Santa Fe: “Pelléas et Mélisande,” directed by Netia Jones, and “The Flying Dutchman,” directed by David Alden. Both stagings tend toward grungy industrial imagery—churning wall fans are a shared element—and both make a somewhat head-scratching impression. Jones places the archaic castle dwellers of “Pelléas” in a bunker rife with signs of disease and delirium: oxygen cannisters are wheeled out, projections of medical data flicker on walls, mysterious doubles appear. Alden, for his part, transposes the maritime denizens of “Dutchman” to a regimented container-shipping milieu. As arresting as the images sometimes are, they get in the way of the operas’ fundamental qualities: Debussy’s eerie radiance, Wagner’s elemental swell.

* * *

 It is hard to ignore Taylor Swift these days so here is The dark truth about Taylor Swift.

Beyond the first flush of love, then, lies mostly darkness, longing, and perhaps bittersweet recollection. My takeaway from Swift’s oeuvre is that a happy ending matters less than the sheer romanticness of love elevated by whatever dooms it to destruction, whether that’s the lover, some external circumstance, or the protagonist’s inner demons.

We could just shrug and say well, Swift has been unlucky in love — her fans are as well-versed in her doomed love affairs as they are her lyrics cataloguing them — and she has a knack for singing about this in a way that resonates with a wide audience. But why is this theme of thwarted, exquisitely painful romance so powerful?

Our love-affair with doomed love begins in early 13th-century France with the two-decade Albigensian Crusade which saw the Cathar sect persecuted, tortured, slaughtered and scattered by the orthodox Christian Knights Templar, leading to the deaths of an estimated 200,000.

You gotta love a writer who can tie Taylor Swift to the Albigensian Crusade...

* * *

The Times Higher Education offers this: Music departments should resist the siren song of pop schools

As in other artistic fields, the modest but realisable aim of producing rigorous studies of musical, literary, cinematic or other texts – or their relationship to historical context – is often viewed as trivial compared with making major pronouncements on society, culture, globalisation, colonialism and more. Those claiming to be doing the latter often offer harsh verdicts on those doing the former.

But the chances of academic writings of this type from the arts having any significant social impact are extremely low, and this has contributed to the increasing bifurcation of scholarly and practical study. So, too, have the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, the introduction of tuition fees and other moves towards greater marketisation. In such an environment, a range of post-1992 institutions introduced vocationally oriented degrees in music technology and commercial music performance, which would not always have previously been classified as degrees.

Furthermore, the progressive marginalisation of the study of music theory and analysis, relentlessly dismissed as “formalism”, deprives music departments of the one thing, other than practical work, that is not undertaken (often more rigorously) by other disciplines.

The whole thing is worth reading, though you will have to register to access.

* * *

From The Guardian: ‘I compose to seek the truth’: György Kurtág on depression, totalitarianism and his 73-year marriage

Kurtág is the last survivor of an outstanding generation of postwar avant garde composers that includes Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, but he emphasises how important Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály also were to both him and Ligeti. While Kurtág largely stayed in Communist Hungary, Ligeti escaped and settled in western Europe, though the two managed to remain closely connected.

* * *

 And: ‘It’s vastly complex, even dangerous’: in defence of the recorder, the Marmite of the woodwind world

At the heart of the recent headline flurries lies a much deeper story about the future of music in schools in the face of successive funding cuts. Added to this, a Covid crisis that has dissuaded many children from picking up shared classroom instruments. It’s not just a crisis affecting the recorder: the numbers have dropped for woodwinds in general. “There was a time when you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a flute and clarinet,” says Nallen. Now they’re being taught privately. Perhaps what has fuelled the crisis for recorders more specifically is its ubiquity – which has fostered a kind of devaluation as a result. “Being cheap is a double-edge sword,” Nallen says. Yes, it makes the recorder accessible, but it can also be taken for granted, “because you can just throw it into a cupboard drawer.” 

“it’s a vastly complex instrument,” says Sarah Jeffery. “It’s even a little bit dangerous”, she adds with a smile, “because every little move you make can be heard.” My first encounter with Jeffery, a classically-trained recorder player and educator, was via her YouTube channel Team Recorder, a platform where she publishes weekly tutorials on all aspects of playing and music-making.

I had a virtuoso recorder player as a close friend for many years. Once, visiting his basement studio, I looked around in bemusement as it was filled with open shelving on which resided an immense collection of recorders. I asked him how many he had and he replied, "I'm not really sure, but I have twelve working altos..."

* * *

From Gramophone: The art of the song recital

More than ever, vocal recitals arrive with a mission: dispelling pandemic isolation, endorsing social justice and, as ever, fostering reappreciation and rediscovery of great music touched by the voice.

Requiring only a fraction of opera-performance machinery, vocal recitals aren’t simply star singers working solo. This highly specific medium morphs every which way, with new outspoken repertoire, an influx of vocal talent from the early-music community and liberated performance manner. Yet art song maintains its identity – as pianistic as it is vocal, as literary as it is musical, with all elements fusing into a place where audiences better know the artists, the art and even themselves. No scenery. No costumes. No barriers between artists and audience.

That's all true and the lengthy article gives a detailed picture of what is happening with art-song performance worldwide. But I have misgivings. I suspect the picture is not as rosy as it seems. Where I live, for example, the chamber music society brings in pianists, violinists, cellists and string quartets every season but never a song recital. Never. Once a year they feature finalists in an opera competition, but that is rather different. I wonder how the art song is doing outside of major urban centers...

* * *

Here is a review of a song recital at Salzburg: An evening with Rachmaninoff

Asmik Grigorian is a formidable singer—in technique, in voice, and in musical intelligence. She gave her heart to the Rachmaninoff songs, but also her head. She could be relatively cool. But then, so can the songs. She was not a wallower. But neither did she stint on emotion.

She produces a steady stream of sound. She can sing loud—very loud; high and loud; penetratingly loud—without stridency. Without any stridency at all. Mind you, stridency may come later. But it has not arrived yet.

After Grigorian had sung four songs, Geniušas sat down for three solo pieces. All of a sudden, the voice recital was a piano recital. This was slightly strange, but there are no hard-and-fast rules.

Geniušas played three pieces that Rachmaninoff himself played—that he, in fact, recorded. First came the composer’s transcription of his song “Daisies.” Then came his transcription of a hopak (a Ukrainian folk dance) by Mussorgsky. Third came his transcription of Rimsky-Korsakov’s winner The Flight of the Bumblebee.

* * * 

Easy choices for envois this week. First up, Monteverdi, of course, a performance from the Trigonale Festival:

Next, Taylor Swift, "Love Story"

György Kurtág, Eight Piano Pieces op. 3:

A Vivaldi recorder concerto:

Finally, the first song from Schumann's Dichterliebe:

Friday Miscellanea

Despite Tensions, Salzburg Remains a Crammed Summer Stage:

Last Tuesday, I left one concert early — squeezing past the confused people in my aisle right after Jean-Guihen Queyras played Kodaly’s Cello Sonata at 7 p.m. — so that I could make it to the baritone Christian Gerhaher’s lieder recital. And had Gerhaher’s haunting Schumann not felt quite so conclusive, I would have run, at 10:15, to try and make the second part of a third program.

Salzburg has competition. The Aix-en-Provence Festival in France has more varied spaces and a commitment to new work; in Germany, Bayreuth has a laser focus on Wagner and, as in this year’s augmented reality “Parsifal,” an experimental spirit. Glyndebourne, in England, has pastoral grace; Lucerne and Verbier, in Switzerland, vibrant orchestras and chamber intimacy.

But Salzburg is still the annual stage, crammed to bursting.

What with my trip to Vancouver for the string quartet premiere, I just couldn't justify attendance at Salzburg this year. Plus, I'm still recovering from a rather agonizing travel experience the last time I went to Europe. But looking over the programming at Salzburg, there is so very, very much to see and hear there. I think I will be returning soon!

* * * 

From The New Criterion: Lady Macbeth gets her revenge

“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she will return to the Met,” said the Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb of the superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in 2022. Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the Met severed all ties with Netrebko, alleging that she was an irredeemable supporter of Vladimir Putin, and declared that no pro-Putin artists could perform for the company. 

Gelb beclowned himself by effectively firing his company’s biggest star—and perhaps the only one who could reliably sell out the house—at a time of historic financial woe and poor attendance for the company. However, most of the civilized world still rejects compelled speech and the gratuitous politicization of art. Netrebko was canceled at a handful of other venues, but at Milan’s La Scala she remains popular and beloved. Just weeks after her ouster from the Met, she gave a sold-out recital here that was loudly cheered by an enthusiastic audience. As the summer portion of La Scala’s 2022–23 season concluded this July, she returned to Italy’s leading opera house for what may now be her best role, Lady Macbeth in Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of the Bard’s masterpiece of power and fate.

Read the whole thing.

* * *

Here is a sad story: Exit the arts critics?

Nicole Hertvik, editor-in-chief and publisher of website DC Theater Arts, agrees that traditional cultural coverage has long been in decline. But the pandemic, which shuttered theaters and museums for roughly two years, dealt the coup de gras. Even The Washington Post, which under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hardly lacks for cash, has cut back on its Washington, D.C.-area arts coverage. In December of 2022 it even laid off the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic, Sarah L. Kaufman ­— one of the last full-time journalists in the country to cover the dance beat.

“They are looking to be a national or international publication, so they’re covering a lot more New York theater, and the bare minimum of what happens in the D.C. theater community,” Hertvik said. “Maybe 10 years ago The Post had a dedicated arts section every week. That’s all just gone. They had two dedicated full-time theater critics, and now they have one.”

If anything it is even worse when it comes to music critics.

* * *

Bad behaviour at concerts is becoming normalised, experts say. Wait, weren't we just told that we had to loosen up, get more casual, in order to stop driving away audiences from classical concerts?

Concertgoers have been sharing footage of numerous artists falling victim to unruly fans. Harry Styles was hit in the eye with a sweet in Vienna, Bebe Rexha received stitches after she was hit in the face with a mobile phone in New York, and Pink was left stunned when someone threw their mother’s ashes on stage in London. In perhaps the most extreme incident, Ava Max was slapped mid-song by a concert-goer in LA.

* * *

 The New York Times: At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

For the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.

It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.

* * *

The public library is no recent invention: The great libraries of Rome.

Perhaps at the pinnacle of the imperial project was the Ulpian Library, inserted prominently into the Forum of Trajan in the centre of Rome by the emperor himself in 114 CE. It was distinguished by its twin Latin and Greek book collections, located directly opposite one another, with the colossal 38-metre-high Column of Trajan slipped between them. The separate collections were dominated by their single, high-ceilinged rooms, and flooded with desks and Corinthian columns that adorned their front porticoes and flanked the statues and cabinet niches. The rooms themselves were a luxuriant, polychrome feast of Egyptian granite, Numidian golden/purple giallo antico and Anatolian marble, all hauled on ships from across the Mediterranean and up the River Tiber at what must have been considerable expense.

This overwhelming sensory experience was a reflection of the metropolis itself – as magisterial as it was chaotic. And with space at a premium in this dense, unplanned urban fabric, the collections were incorporated as smaller components of other larger complexes of temples, porticoes and forums, concentrated in the ‘historic centre’ of the city rather than dispersed, creating a sort of clustering effect. Rather than drown out the libraries, the association with contexts of religious and civic importance only enhanced their importance in Rome’s sea of monuments – just like that legendary epitome of libraries across the Mediterranean, the Great Library of Alexandria, itself a branch of the Musaeum complex.

* * *

Buddha Passion review – Tan Dun’s message of love and compassion opens EIF in spectacular style

There could hardly have been a better piece to open this year’s festival, then, than Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion (2018), receiving its Scottish premiere. The work’s key message – that truth and interdependency are the basis for a harmonious world – resonates closely with the ethos of Benedetti’s vision.

Buddha Passion was inspired by murals dating from the 4th-14th centuries in the Mogao caves in China’s Gansu province. The Chinese-American composer’s work sets an assortment of Buddhist texts in a mixture of Chinese, Sanskrit and English for four main vocal soloists, two Indigenous singers, two choruses and symphony orchestra. Comprising a prologue and six acts, it presents a series of tableaux symbolising the importance of love and compassion, and depicts the path towards enlightenment.

* * *

For some reason, this is the first I have heard of them: Jacaranda’s 20th Season Will Be Its Last

Jacaranda is concluding its run in a defiantly uncompromising way, devoting its final season to a celebration of Arnold Schoenberg, whose thorny atonal music has never been called crowd-pleasing. 2024 will mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, and the five-concert season will feature seven of his works, including the Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Ode to Napoleon.

The season, which opens Sept. 23 at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, will also feature works by composers who inspired Schoenberg, including J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert; those who were influenced by him, including Alban Berg and Pierre Boulez; and some of his contemporaries, including Ernst Krenek and Richard Strauss.

Once again, Arnold Schoenberg starts to get the recognition he deserves, I quizzically observe.

* * *

And now, the envois. First an aria from Verdi's Macbeth with Anna Netrebko:

Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 4, at the 2012 Proms:

An excerpt from the Buddha Passion by Tan Dun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAZOvEhQ0M

Finally The Book of the Hanging Gardens, by Schoenberg:

Friday Miscellanea

Found this over at Slipped Disc. Photo of a piano competition in Paris.
The contestant is probably Martha Argerich. Interesting jury!

Something in Barron's about the market for high-end musical instruments: Rare Musical Instrument Market Is on a Crescendo.

Tarisio may not be as well known as Sotheby’s or Christie’s, but it’s become the top seller of musical instruments since it began online sales in 1999. In the first half of this year, the auction house posted sales of US$28 million, a 20% jump from the year before and a record for Tarisio. The average value of each lot is now US$29,000, up nearly 50% from a year ago, according to the auction house. 

Notable, according to Tomé, is that 94% of items it brought to auction in the first half of 2023 were sold, meaning “there’s more demand than supply.” In fact, there’s been a 33% rise in new bidders this year, building on strong demand from the prior two years. The pandemic played a role by surfacing more instruments as people moved and making more collectors comfortable with online buying and selling.

* * *

 Review of a new book: Make It New and Difficult: The Music of Arnold Schoenberg.

For Sachs at age 77 to produce this impassioned defense of Schoenberg, composer of some of the most difficult and intimidating music ever written, might seem surprising, but the totality of Schoenberg’s life — as composer, painter, writer, teacher, exiled Jew and profoundly influential thinker — comprises one of the great narratives of 20th-century Western culture, and one can see how the story of this artist’s struggle for acceptance against the backdrop of the societal calamities of his era was so appealing to Sachs. 

Schoenberg’s artistic crisis was playing out against the looming threat of the Holocaust. Although he was 10 years ahead of the curve in identifying Hitler as a threat, by 1933 he was forced to flee with his wife and infant daughter, first to Boston and eventually, at the age of 60, to Los Angeles, where he remained until his death in 1951 at 76. Proud and combative in matters concerning his standing as a composer, he was by all accounts a congenial and loving family man. The Vienna-born composer who was mentored by Gustav Mahler ended up living on the same Brentwood street as Shirley Temple, was friends with Charlie Chaplin and had his portrait painted by George Gershwin. He was even invited to present the Academy Award for best musical score of 1937 but had to withdraw because of illness.

I'm not sure that asking one composer to review a book about another composer is the best choice, but it sounds like an interesting book.

* * *

 Afghanistan: Taliban burn ‘immoral’ musical instruments

Some of the items set ablaze in Herat included a guitar, a harmonium and a tabla - a kind of drum - as well as amplifiers and speakers, according to images online. Many of these had been seized from wedding venues in the city.

An official at the Taliban's Vice and Virtue Ministry said playing music would "cause the youth to go astray".

A similar bonfire of instruments was organised by the Taliban on 19 July. Its government posted photos of the blaze on Twitter at the time but did not say which part of the country it had taken place in.

All forms of music were banned from social gatherings, TV, and radio while the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan from the mid-90s until 2001.

* * *

 Norman Lebrecht with another controversial piece: Requiem for London’s music

t is a sad truth, widely acknowledged, that London is no longer a music capital. World orchestras that passed through once or twice a year no longer stop over. Headline artists save their signature concerts for Paris and Berlin. New music has dried up. There hasn’t been a premiere of world consequence since before Covid. London is falling off the music map.

Various reasons and excuses are attached to this decline, among them Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, economic woes and a government that is plundering funds from the capital and spreading it around the regions, going out of its way to penalise London orchestras while smiling upon pointless little minority start-ups that are barely above kindergarten level.

Read on for the details.

* * * 

This from Alex Ross: Apple Again Fails to Save Classical Music

For anyone who doesn’t need to be told the Story of Classical, the crucial test of an app will be its viability as a search engine. Apple Classical indeed represents a significant advance over the miseries of Apple Music and Spotify. If you go looking for “Beethoven Fifth,” the Fifth Symphony pops up—admittedly, as the third on a list of results that is headed by the “Moonlight” and “Pathétique” Sonatas. You can then go to a dedicated page for the work and scroll through more than five hundred options. At the top is an Editor’s Choice—very debatably, Gustavo Dudamel’s rendition with the Simón Bolívar Symphony. Listings are ordered by popularity, the insidious universal of the online world. This creates some confusion on the page devoted to the perennially underappreciated Swiss composer Frank Martin. His most popular piece is said to be “Ballade.” The algorithm can’t grapple with the fact that Martin actually wrote seven different scores titled Ballade, for various instruments.

I guess I'm living in one of what he calls "the remote hamlets of classical music." It's comfortable here and I have the secure knowledge that my CDs can't be disappeared or modified remotely by some vast, soulless corporation.

* * *

I never really 'got' opera until I saw a high-quality European production. Here is an article on staging Wagner: At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done.

After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.

When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.

But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.

* * *

Now for some envois. First the everlasting Martha Argerich playing Tchaikovsky at the Verbier Festival just a few years ago:

 Next, Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces:

And finally, Wagner, Prelude to Parsifal: