First of all Happy New Year to all my readers. Thanks to you for your real contributions to making this blog moderately interesting! Let's have another of my intermittent public service announcements.
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If you are thinking of relocating to Canada, maybe think twice. Canada has for a long time had an excellent reputation in many areas: healthcare, friendliness, developed economy, weather---no, wait, not weather! There is an Australian economist who calculates that Canada is a very successful highly developed nation and maybe that is still true. But Canada has a whole set of worsening problems--not including weather, that's always been bad! Here is one Ottawa resident that gives his perspective:
He doesn't explain why these things are happening, just how bad it has become and that he is fed up. So ok, why is it that so many things are bad and getting worse? And by the way, it is not just Canada, other highly-developed nations, like Germany, are also getting worse in multiple ways. I think the one person who does have a handle on these processes and what generates them is Thomas Sowell who has many books on this and other matters. Trained as an economist, he has branched out into social policy. One outstanding book is The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. I mentioned I was reading it a week or so ago. I have finished and it is a brilliant account of a very difficult problem that threatens advanced societies.
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On to more practical matters: I have discovered the perfect breakfast. This comes from Japan and Korea and it is so simple it requires no recipe. You need to cook some rice--preferably Japanese-type rice. Put some in a shallow bowl. On top of this put two fried eggs, sunny side up, cooked on low heat (yes, salt and pepper). Sprinkle over top soy sauce and sesame oil to taste. Finally, sprinkle on top a finely-sliced green onion. That's it!
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We live in an internet environment where everything is dumbed down to achieve the maximum possible traffic. The thing is that this is not good for higher brain functions like creativity. Paradoxically I find reading things that are so difficult I only understand one sentence per page actually stimulates creativity because my mind is struggling to understand and in the process things get stirred up and little creative thoughts pop up. I'm not the only one to discover this... Here is what I am reading:
That is actually a first edition from 1959. I stumbled across it in a second-hand bookstore years ago and am just now finally sitting down to read it. Elizabeth Anscombe was a student of Wittgenstein's at Cambridge. There is a hilarious review of a reprint of this book on Amazon that says that he didn't understand this book until he read the Tractatus itself which he found easier to understand. Sample quote from very near the beginning of this book:
The whole theory of propositions is, then, on this view, a merely external combination of two theories: a 'picture theory' of elementary propositions (viz. that they have meaning by being 'logical pictures' of elementary states of affairs), and the theory of truth-functions as an account of non-elementary propositions; this latter theory breaks down rather easily, because it is impossible to regard generalized propositions that relate to an infinitely numerous universe as truth-functions of elementary propositions.
Well, of course!
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The Dismal Science, Economics, has a surprising number of good jokes. One is from Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck: "Next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities." Another is quoted in this clip:
The joke is from economist Simon Kuznets who said there were four types of economy: the Developed, the Underdeveloped, Japan and Argentina.
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Now for a musical sorbet: Les Soupirs by Rameau played by Joyce Chen:
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. --Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, p. 101.
I think they overestimated the timespan: even two or three generations might be enough...
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Is this a string-player's dream car?
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There is no need for me to describe my listening for the year as this blog has a pretty good account of it. So let's take a look at economist Tyler Cowen's listening:
2023 has been one of my very best years for classic music listening. I’ve discovered an unusually high number of excellent recordings, and made a lot of progress in understanding many composers better. Most of all, that would be Bach, Scriabin, Byrd, Handel, Robert Ashley, and Caroline Shaw, but by no means exhausting the list. For whatever reasons, I’ve just had an immense amount of emotional energy to put into these discoveries.
I thought I would write up a list of my favorite new recordings, but there are too many of them. Here are just a few:
Handel, The Eight Great Suites and Overtures, Francesco Corti. My whole life I’ve preferred these for piano, say by Richter. Corti is converting me to the harpsichord versions.
Frank Peter Zimmermann, Bach, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, volumes one and two. These are some of my favorite works to buy multiple versions of. I started off preferring the Milstein recordings, which still are wonderful. Last year went through a Biondi phase, now am enamored of these. I never tire of these pieces.
It is a marvel that such a revenue-poor, streaming-intensive musical world is generating so many new and amazing recordings for virtually all kinds of classical music. This is not what I was expecting five to ten years ago.
Another marvel is how many world-beating recordings are coming from young performers who do not have mega-strong preestablished reputations. A lot of them I have never heard of before.
Most of all, I am pleased to see that beauty is proving so robust.
The links to other lists by Alex Ross and Gramophone are just a bonus.
The family has announced the death last night of the German classical guitarist Heike Matthiesen. Heike was 59 and had been battling cancer for five years. She is survived by her mother and sister.
Many of us knew her as one of the sweetest, most benign and positive communicators on social media.
After years of study with Pepe Romero, Heike put a friendly new face on the fretful work of guitar playing, often in contemporary music. She will be sorely missed.
What I find sad is that there are so many excellent guitarists these days that I had never previously heard the name Heike Matthiesen! Like myself, she had studied with Pepe Romero.
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These days, when all musical adulation seems to be directed towards Taylor Swift, at least in the mainstream media, it is rather refreshing to recall one of the charismatic musical acts of a previous generation: On the Sly: A memoir of the Family Stone
The group’s legend-clinching moment came when it stole the show with “I Want to Take You Higher” at Woodstock 1969, despite being pushed back to 3:30 am in a rainstorm—“I hadn’t thought of it as a competition,” writes Stone, “until the results started to come in.” Then and there, the Family Stone, alongside Jimi Hendrix, briefly threatened to reclaim rock counterculture as Black culture, and to catch the world in a love embrace with all the imaginative impunity taken for granted by their Californian white hippie peers.
The clips of the Woodstock performance on YouTube are pretty poor quality, this will give a better idea:
“In any given orchestra season, you can look, and there are one or maybe two cello concertos,” says cellist Alisa Weilerstein when asked about her longstanding advocacy of the Barber Cello Concerto, which she recently brought to the Cleveland Orchestra. “Violin and piano always get priority in terms of concerto performances. One of [the cello options] is usually going to be a very well-known concerto: Dvořák, Elgar, maybe the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, but that’s already considered slightly more adventurous, even though that’s as classic as it gets.
“Then, if you’re going to program a mid-20th century concerto, you might do Shostakovich 1 or 2, and maybe the Prokofiev Sinfonia Concertante, although that’s also rarely played. And then there’s Barber. It falls in there, and it just doesn’t get programmed that often, unless both the conductor and soloist really want it to. The Barber is a piece I advocate for very strongly. I don’t always get it when I ask for it, but I’ve been getting it more often lately, which is nice.”
Of course the situation is far worse if you are a guitarist! There is really only one concerto that orchestras want to program, the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo. I was delighted to be asked to play the Villa-Lobos concerto with the CBC Vancouver orchestra, years ago, even though I only had three months to prepare amid a lot of chamber-music commitments.
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I suppose this was inevitable: a collection of creepy and awkward Christmas music album covers.
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This piece from the New York Times alerts us to some interesting European opera productions available on Amazon Prime: 5 Operas You Can Stream at Home.
Tobias Kratzer is a director who is willing to jerk a canonical text around to fit a contemporary concept. In his take on Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” for the Royal Opera in London in 2020, he upends both acts: The first takes place in a Jacobin milieu, amid the French Revolution; the second, however, departs from historical specificity, showing its chorus in modern dress. This approach fits an opera that has always proved a challenge for straightforward storytelling. Crucially, Kratzer’s direction of singing actors tends to be marvelous; here, the star soprano Lise Davidsen is truly gripping as Leonore.
Unfortunately, I discovered that a lot of these may not be available on Amazon Prime in Mexico.
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Let's have Frank Peter Zimmermann playing the Bach Chaconne:
Guitarist Heike Matthiesen with some Granados:
Finally, the Sinfonia Concertante for cello and orchestra by Prokofiev:
Not everyone likes the music of Steve Reich. Some really don't like it. Frankly it is a mystery to me why they don't. But it is also a mystery to me why I do. I'm not talking about the later music where he moves away from the repetitive pulse of earlier pieces, but those challenging early pieces themselves. I don't think it's hard to enjoy The Desert Music or Tehillim or a lot of recent pieces. But can you enjoy something like Six Pianos?
I first heard that in a music theory class in 1976. About half of the people in the class were pianists and it was fascinating watching the reaction of a few of them. First it was: "oh god, what is this?" Then it was "oh god, is it ever going to change?" Meanwhile others were enjoying the ever-changing patterns. This kind of music sounds as if it would be dead simple to copy--heck AI could do it even better. I don't know about that, but I do know that as soon as you try to copy it, you realize how very difficult that is.
I really couldn't say why I enjoy this music. But I do.
Lists are a perennial click-bait favorite on the Internet, but sometimes they are just fun to do. And towards the end of the year, sometimes one's thoughts turn to trends and summations. So here is my current list of top ten composers, most of whom will be obvious and a couple less than obvious. You might compare it to the one in the New York Times of several years ago by Anthony Thomassini. I wanted to link it, but search as I may I can't find the original. Here is a graphic:
In order: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner and Bartók. Here is my list:
J. S. Bach (of course)
Mozart
Beethoven
Schubert
Debussy
Shostakovich
Stravinsky
Steve Reich
Prokofiev (or Rameau)
Bartók (or Couperin)
Except for Mozart and Shostakovich, no opera composers (and yes, I do know Beethoven struggled to write an opera). I really wanted to get Rameau and Couperin in there without sacrificing Debussy and considered replacing Prokofiev or Bartók with either or both of them. Heck, Monteverdi and Josquin would be serious choices as well. I could give some reasons for why Mozart over Beethoven (mainly he was an outstanding opera composer even though Beethoven wrote more weighty string quartets, but also he wrote the best symphonic finale ever). The reasons I put Shostakovich over Stravinsky would take a Taruskin-sized volume to successfully defend so I will just let you guys argue over that one. Steve Reich needs no defence, I think? But, given my proclivities, why no Joseph Haydn? I struggled over that one. The thing is that he had the great misfortune to live at the same time as Mozart. But, man, did he ever write some truly great symphonies...
So my Christmas present to all you readers and commentators is something to argue about. In a civilized manner, of course.
Afterword: Apart from Mozart, I have not included any opera composers in my list because it seems to me that the composing of operas is so utterly different from composition pur et simple that there really need to be two lists, one of composers in general and one of opera composers. There would only be one name on both lists: Mozart.
I once had a brilliant friend that, in his telling, lost a well-paying job because he liked to read books in classical Greek during his breaks. So, reading can be dangerous!
Let me back up a bit. My friend was so brilliant that he was permanently expelled from the public school system in Canada in the 8th grade for, essentially, insubordination. He became so bored with the repetition of information, such as how chlorophyll works in plants, that he stood up in class and demanded that they study something new. This was apparently the last straw as he was banned from the system. You might think it is not possible to be expelled from a public school system, but I knew him for several decades and I'm quite certain the story is as I have related. He filled in a few years by working in a men's store and attending a monastery as a novitiate. When I met him he had returned to Canada and, a few years later, following my example, he applied, as an adult, to enter university.
I applied as an adult as well as I had been out of school for two years and had graduated high school with a miserable 53% average! Somehow they accepted both myself and, a year later, my friend. I was in music, of course, but he entered Classical Studies as a double honors major in Greek and Latin. He had already taught himself Italian and Hebrew, so I guess he had shown promise. After graduating he attended a different university as a master's candidate in philosophy. He later received a PhD in philosophy and followed that with an MBA. Seriously overeducated!
His first job was as a corporate loans officer with a large Canadian bank and this was the job he lost. Because he liked to read, in Greek, during his lunch break, this made his boss insecure so he got rid of him. He then got a new job as a hospital administrator.
I was reminded of this recently when I was in my office and during some quiet moments, reading a book by Thomas Sowell:
Someone walked into my office and, with no preamble, asked "is that fiction or non-fiction?" I answered "non-fiction" but I had the impression she would have been much happier if I had answered "fiction." I think she might have been quite upset if she had known the contents! But I whisked it out of sight and answered her business-related questions.
This wasn't the first time I have upset people who noticed what I was reading. When I was young, around twelve years old, my father was horrified to see me reading a comic book or science fiction. Back in those days science fiction was not well-regarded unlike nowadays. Most people these days are accepting as there is so much weirdness floating around that reading stuff like analytic philosophy can almost pass as normal.
I was sitting in a coffee shop one day, sharing a table with a stranger and reading on my newly-acquired Kindle. I had just discovered that a Kindle is actually a kind of bookstore and had downloaded a book I used to own but, like many others, one that had been lost in a move. The book was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I finished my coffee I closed the Kindle and got up to leave. My table partner, an older gentleman, said, "finished your work?" thinking that the Kindle was a tablet. I said, no, I was just reading something. So he asked, "What are you reading?" Oh god! I froze. Now, I should have said the latest Tom Clancy or something but instead I just blurted out the name of the book: uh, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein... He gave me a look and said, "oh yeah, I saw the movie." Good one! So, with some people, yes, you can get away with reading "dangerous books." But with many, I don't think you can. I suspect there are some authors who would instantly inspire hatred and loathing if people suspect you are reading them. If you want to know why, you should consult the book mentioned above by Thomas Sowell, one of those dangerous authors.
There are basically two kinds of writing about music in the mainstream media: ones that are not about the music and ones that are. The first group includes hagiographies of pop musicians in which the writer marvels at how wonderful and successful and beautiful or, if older, how enduring the artist is. The second group, fewer and far between these days, includes writing about the music. In that category we have an interesting piece about the performance traditions associated with Handel's Messiah, one of the biggest hits in the classical music repertory: Handel’s ‘Messiah’ Teaches Us a Surprising Lesson About Tradition. The writer, Matthew Walther, begins with the accretions that have grown up around the piece:
Many of the most popular recorded versions of “Messiah” emerged along with the rise of stereo in the 1950s. By that time performers and audiences alike accepted that the orchestration of the oratorio would be tinkered with and that the number of singers would be doubled or tripled or multiplied a hundredfold. The default idiom for Handel’s work was romantic, the proper mood regal rather than somber.
For my money, the best example of this kind of “Messiah” is a recording made by the British conductor Leopold Stokowski in 1966 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Stokowski was an artist incapable of embarrassment, a textually heedless showman known for his contributions to Disney’s musical “Fantasia” and his wonderfully lush orchestral arrangements of piano works such as Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque.” His “Messiah,” which features only 16 of the work’s movements, is not a sensitive interpretation. Listening to it with my head three feet away from my ancient Dahlquist speakers is the closest thing I can imagine to finding myself in the position of the shepherds in St. Luke’s Gospel, when “the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.”
But then he goes on to relate how the early music movement has influenced performances:
But this purist view was always dubious. It assumes that the correct approach to performing a piece of music can be “unearthed” in a straightforward archaeological sense. This understanding of authenticity — as something that requires discarding a tradition that evolved organically over time — has been influential, and not only in the world of classical music. It is of a piece, for example, with the 1986 edition of the Oxford Shakespeare, whose editors changed the name “Falstaff” to “Oldcastle” in “Henry IV, Part 1,” as its author may well have written in a manuscript that does not, alas, exist. In doing so they made a speculative attempt at recovering “history” but erased one of the most famous literary creations of all time.
Despite its reverence for the music of earlier eras (and its commendable rediscovery of countless works that had not been performed for centuries), the historically informed performance movement can be seen as a fundamentally modern project, one that unwittingly destroys the past — the actual performance tradition handed down to us by generations of conductors and musicians — in the name of reclaiming it.
And this was very much the point of Richard Taruskin's numerous discussions of the historically-informed performance trend which in his view was really as much or more about 20th century tastes as it was about Baroque tastes.
Let's have a couple of samples. Here is Leopold Stokowski conducting the Hallelujah chorus in 1966, the heyday of romantic excess in recording:
And here is the much tidier and restrained version by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient music in 1980:
"Meaning is not a process which accompanies a word.
For no process could have the consequences of meaning."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein (quoted in Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p. 53, footnote 35)
One of my hobbies is reading philosophy and I have a particular attraction to the more difficult ones: Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. The two most difficult books I have ever read are G. E. M. Anscombe's An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the one quoted from above. Ironically, I find these books interpreting and explaining Wittgenstein to be even more difficult than the originals. Probably because they get right into the thickets. Take the quote above, for example. You can just breeze past it. But if you want to explain it, well, that is the kind of thing that leads to footnotes a page and a half long, sesquipedalian footnotes!
Notebooks in different guises have been around since at least the late 13th century. In Florence they were used as ledgers, spurred the development of double-entry book-keeping, and, not least because they were made of paper rather than more expensive and less stable parchment, were integral to the rise of mercantilism. In the form of sketch books they allowed artists to depict their surroundings repeatedly and develop more realistic techniques.
In 2011, USC acquired KDFC in San Francisco and expanded the classical network to 10 cities, including Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, Oxnard, Monterey and Ukiah. The radio network known as Classical California now reaches around 1.5 million listeners per month. KUSC alone has the largest classical radio audience in the country, reaching more than 900,000 listeners each month over the air. KDFC and the other stations add another 500,000 radio listeners, with an additional 185,000 from the Classical California online streams online.
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Here is an article on historical performance: Hickup over the Littany. It's a review of a new book by Andrew Parrott.
One of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise. What is one to make of this description of the singing in the Chapel Royal in 1515, written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick? ‘More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano].’ The exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail. Or what does this résumé of national styles, written in 1517, tell us? ‘The French sing; the Spaniards weepe; the Italians, which dwell about the Coasts of Genoa, caper with their Voyces; the others bark; but the Germanes ... doe howle like wolves.’
Boy, would I ever enjoy doing a similar critical catalogue of today's pop singers. Maybe another day...
Four ensembles founded in 1973 continue to work in the light of these discoveries: the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Concert, the Taverner Consort and Players, and the Tallis Scholars (which I started as a choir in Oxford while I was an undergraduate there). The first two concentrated on instruments only; the Tallis Scholars worked with voices only; and the Taverner Consort, led by Parrott, set out to combine the two. Parrott’s problem was always going to be dealing with voices in parallel with the instruments. No one could argue that the newly interesting old instruments weren’t what the composer would have heard. But with voices everyone could argue that what they heard wasn’t right, which of course meant not to their liking. In his first recordings, Parrott was pragmatic, using the instruments that were available at that time, and guessing how the singers should sound alongside them. The purists of the time accepted his stance.
The really odd thing about this lengthy review and, presumably, the book itself, is that there is no mention whatsoever of the primary critic of the early music movement: Richard Taruskin. One wonders why?
Honestly, the majority is always wrong. Music is just the backdrop to their life. I’m not saying that mainstream music isn’t important to them, but they’re not connoisseurs. They’re not making it their whole life. But the people who really love it, they will be at the shows. They will find those shows. And the musicians who are making that music, who are the real musicians, will find an audience.
That’s why it’s all about the clubs. That’s why I wanted to play clubs again. Because once you’re playing in stadiums, and you have all that stuff—auto-cue and huge light shows and pyro—I don’t know if you can play a club anymore. You lose the feel for it. And to me, if you can’t do that, then who are you?
The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.
Bradley Cooper’s new movie “Maestro,” a portrait of Bernstein’s marriage to the Costa Rican American actress Felicia Montealegre, has a scene that features the Mahler Second and takes place in a cathedral—Ely Cathedral, in England. Cooper, who stars as Bernstein, is presiding over the vocal-orchestral conflagration with which the symphony ends. The sequence mimics a television film of Bernstein and the London Symphony performing the Mahler Second at Ely, in 1973. Cooper’s impersonation falls short of the real thing, as it must; his gestures are more angular and herky-jerky than Bernstein’s, less flowingly assured. But he is conducting: he is ahead of the beat, attuned to fluctuations of tempo, alert to instrumental and vocal entrances. The London Symphony, appearing as itself, responds with palpable force. You forget that you are watching a star actor play a star conductor; you become immersed in Mahler’s molten flow. For that reason, it’s one of the most striking music scenes recently put on film.
As always, worth reading the whole thing.
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The Mozart Matinee on July 27th at the Salzburg Festival, which I plan to attend, features the Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, so let's hear it:
Also on the program is the Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, also by Mozart:
Every Saturday and Sunday morning during the Salzburg Festival the Mozarteum Orchestra plays concerts of music by Mozart with various soloists. The Mozarteum is rather a unique institution. It is a fully accredited university, one of six in Salzburg, but it is a university with just one department: music.
The last concert I attend before flying back home is the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti with the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner. Here is the Vienna Philharmonic with Karajan conducting:
Looking over the program for the 2024 Salzburg Festival the differences between it and the first one I attended, in 1988, come to mind. Back then I was an impoverished student (and sessional lecturer, but that's almost the same thing) enrolled in Pepe Romero's master class. And that is the first big difference: back then the guitar had a significant presence at the Mozarteum summer courses and a very minor one at the festival itself. Now that presence has been erased. I wonder if replacing Pepe Romero with Eliot Fisk had something to do with that?
Another absence is contemporary composers. In 1988 one of the guests at the festival was Polish composer Witold Lutosławski who conducted the premiere of his new violin concerto played by, if I recall correctly, Anne-Sophie Mutter. Another composer guest was Karlheinz Stockhausen who brought his "family" of associated musicians with him from Köln. They gave seven different concerts of his chamber music, all from memory. It was in a smaller hall at the Mozarteum and I had the opportunity to chat with him afterwards. Prominent contemporary composers do not seem to be invited to current festivals, though each year there is a focus on a particular 20th century composer. This year it will be Schoenberg, last year it was Bartók and a couple of years ago it was Morton Feldman. No-one living.
Another feature of the 1988 festival that seems to have disappeared is the integral cycle. Back then Alfred Brendel gave a series of concerts in which he played all the piano sonatas of Schubert and the Alban Berg Quartet gave another series of concerts in which they played all the Beethoven string quartets. I'm afraid I didn't have much interest in opera back then so I don't recall what they did in that area. I was also too busy to attend many concerts what with master class every day and practicing in the evening. I did get to an open rehearsal of the Berg Quartet as well as one of their Beethoven cycle and one of the Stockhausen concerts.
On thing I find a bit surprising is that, while there are quite a few piano recitals now, there don't seem to be any violin recitals, with or without piano. But I don't recall if there were any back in 1988 either. Back then, as I recall, there were, apart from the Vienna Philharmonic, five guest orchestras. This year there will be eleven.
Here is a piece for solo flute by Stockhausen that I think was on the program in 1988.
I wonder if any of my innumerable international readers will also be attending the Salzburg Festival this summer? If so, I think it would be wonderful if we could get together for lunch one day. Just to tempt you, I'm going to list the concerts for which I have applied for tickets. How it works is, in December of the previous year, i.e. now, the program of the festival is posted online here. You have until January 22 to get your requests in and you will be informed of what tickets you have been allotted by the end of March.
There are seven opera productions, a number of plays, a ballet, and thirteen concert series of all sorts, from lieder recitals and piano recitals to chamber music, orchestras and so on. The Vienna Philharmonic is the house band; they give five concerts, each one repeated, plus they are in the pit for the operas. There are eleven guest orchestras playing a total of fourteen concerts. These include Utopia, Teodor Currenzis' new group, the English Baroque Soloists, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and a few others. There are eleven concerts with special emphasis on Schoenberg on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Lots and lots of concerts!
Here are the ones I requested:
July 26th at the Kollegiankirche, Jordi Savall conducting the Concert des Nations in music by Delalande, Charpentier and Pärt
July 27th: two concerts, a Mozart Matinee at the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum with the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer in works by, yep, Mozart AND pianist Igor Levit at the Grosses Festspielhaus with works by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven
July 28th, at the Grosses Festspielhaus, Don Giovanni by Mozart with Teodor Currenzis conducting the Utopia Choir and Orchestra in a new production by Romeo Castellucci
July 29th, at the Haus für Mozart, Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble in works by Dowland and Purcell.
If it just stopped right there, that would be a pretty great festival, but there is lots more to come.
August 1st, at the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum, the Camerata Salzburg with works by Wagner, Schreker and Schoenberg.
August 2nd, The Idiot, opera by Mieczysław Weinberg after the Dostoevsky novel with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the Vienna Philharmonic
August 3rd, another Mozart Matinee in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum with Ivor Bolton conducting the Salzburg Bach Choir and the Mozarteum Orchestra in works for chorus and orchestra by, you guessed it
August 5th, at the Grosses Festspielhaus, pianist Grigory Sokolov with works by Bach and others
August 6th, at the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum, pianist Pierre-Laurant Aimard with works by Schoenberg, Webern, Ravel and others
August 7th, at the Haus für Mozart, pianist Evgeny Kissin with works by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev
August 11th, another Mozart Matinee at the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum with Roberto González-Monjas conducting the Mozarteum Orchestra in works for soprano and orchestra by Mozart with soloist Regula Mühlemann
August 12th, at the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum, pianist Arcadi Volodos with works by Schubert, Schumann and Liszt
August 14th, at the Haus für Mozart, pianist Alexandre Kantorow with works by Brahms, Liszt and Bartók
August 15th, at the Grosses Festspielhaus, Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor
And that's it! I am going to miss a gazillion concerts by great orchestras and chamber groups, but I am going to see a lot of what promise to be outstanding concerts by some of the greatest artists of our day. Just a note about the geography: The big three halls are the Grosses Festspielhaus, which seats 2,200 people, the Felsenreitschule, which seats 1,400, and the Haus für Mozart which seats 1,500. These three halls are all in a row off Herbert von Karajan Platz. On the other side is the Kollegienkirche. I can't find the exact numbers, but it looks to seat around 800. Across the river, the Salzach, is the Mozarteum and its large concert hall, the Grosser Saal. In a typical bit of Austrian humor, the smaller hall of the Mozarteum is called the Wiener Saal hinting at the long-time rivalry between Salzburg and Vienna. I was lucky enough to play a short recital there when I was a young student.
Let's hear soprano Regula Mühlemann sing some Mozart.
I think I mentioned a long time ago that one of the most inspiring professors I had as an undergraduate was the teacher of Philosophy 100, a basic introductory course. These kinds of courses are hugely important because they tend to provide the foundation for all of our later ideas and progress--if they are good, that is! This professor, every now and then, would preface the class with what he called a "public service announcement." This consisted of something he had come across that he thought might be generally useful. One of them, for example, was regarding the use of hard contact lenses--he recommended against them (I don't think they are even offered any more).
This post is offered as a public service announcement. The basic idea I want to offer is that of knowledge and learning. I had a very wise friend once who said that all wisdom is boring. By that I think he meant that wisdom consists in basic truths that we already know. This is one of them: knowledge is good and therefore learning is good because we add to our store of knowledge. I have heard reference to one's skill set or stack which is a similar idea. What do you know? More specifically, what do you know how to do?
After quite a few years as a professional classical guitarist I ran into some roadblocks and this caused me to re-evaluate my course in life. The best thing that came out of this was a revival of my intellectual curiosity as a result of going back to school as a PhD candidate in musicology. Courses like research methods and paleography woke up my intellectual side which had been somewhat dormant. The nice thing is that I have continued to develop this side even many years later.
I took the Canadian Securities Course online which is what qualifies you to be a stock-broker and was horrified to discover that you only needed 60% to pass. I did the University of British Columbia pre-licencing course in real estate and also taught myself statistics. All these because I had neglected all these kinds of math-related things since Algebra in grade 11 which had really turned me off. I was asked to give some pre-concert talks as part of the chamber music series so I gave myself mini-seminars in Chopin and the Beethoven Diabelli Variations.
You see, when I was in high school it was a very difficult time in my life: my parents had divorced and I had no real guidance. I just felt isolated and alienated. University helped fix that, but since I was a performance major a lot of my intellectual capacity was not used. I think most of us have unused intellectual capacity. All I want to say here is seek knowledge, especially in areas where you are weak.
The thing is that we live in a distorted cultural environment where crude ideologies are being used to propagandize and manipulate the general population. You should ask a few questions: cui bono? Who benefits? In most cases there are very obvious beneficiaries and you should discount everything they say as special pleading. I don't want to get too specific as this is really not a partisan matter--we are all being manipulated. But just for example, when a Hamas military leader tells you how many innocent civilians were killed by Israel, this should immediately be discounted as special pleading. Sadly, even the major wire services like Reuters and Associated Press seem to lack any critical skills.
What is necessary to fill in the gaps in basic knowledge? These days very basic things like history and geography are needed so stop reading social media and pick up a couple of books. And beware of recent books in these areas because they are likely to be catering to the crude ideologies I mentioned earlier. Perhaps the safest thing to do is not read anything written since about 1970--even earlier in some disciplines. I say this because there is a Canadian school district that decided to remove everything from their libraries that was published before 2003 as being insufficiently deferential to the reigning ideology. Which is exactly why you should seek out the older books.
Right now I am giving myself a seminar on Wittgenstein largely because I find it extremely hard to understand what he is saying. Perhaps there is something else worth mentioning: the only person that can really educate you is yourself. Apart from the cost of buying a couple of books and a pencil to take notes with, education is free. All it takes is the will to learn and an investment of time.
Everything I read about higher education these days horrifies me: the idea that people would go to institutions that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition only to be crudely propagandized is both insulting and embarrassing. Insulting that this could be considered by any intelligent person as "education" and embarrassing that so many actually fall for it.
We really need some palate-cleansing music after that. Here is Scott Ross with a bunch of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.
November was quite a productive month and there were several posts with a flurry of comments, but the most came from one of those posts I put up occasionally where I just toss off a dissertation-level concept or theme. This one was on Musical "Structure." The basic idea here was that the basic meaning of the word "structure" refers to a physical plan like an architectural drawing or a street plan or a geometrical drawing. Music can't quite fit into this so I made the claim that "structure" applied to music is a metaphor. Music is like water in a river or stream: it flows. The stream bed or course of the river has structure, but the water itself does not. This caused quite a few comments!
I think you're forcing apart time and space in ways that simply don't plausibly account for actual human experience on this one. If you think humans are capable of dealing with time in a way that excludes space you might try to explain how that works a bit more.
Scores are merely one potential way in which we spatialize music but people listening to Dark Side of the Moon in surround sound experience it in spatial terms. Berlioz positioning brass instruments in specific places to make them seem distant (ditto Wagner) creates a sense of space in performances which is part of the auditory experience.
To which I replied:
I suspect that this might be one of those little insights that I stumble across from time to time that really deserve a whole book treatment. So let me try and offer a couple of details. Music is a particular kind of experience, and one in which we often turn away from the spatial environment. We often tend to close our eyes when playing. Music tends to be an interior sort of experience, though of course one we create and experience in groups as a shared interiority. When we follow the thread of a piece of music, we do so interiorly. A large part of music training consists in developing the skills to convert from notation to sound and vice versa. We can, over time, learn to look at a bunch of signs on a piece of paper and, with no preparation, convert them into a stream of music. If you step back and consider, this is actually a very unusual thing to do.
Oh yes, people like Berlioz and, before him Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli were famous for their polychoral music at the San Marco in Venice with its spatial effects. What is so special about this bringing the spatial into the auditory is that it is unusual, out of the ordinary.
Another comment:
David Hume and Ivan Pavlov are good referents to musical structure. Music structure is no different than artistic structure and the fact that music is organized in time is not a qualitative difference with other arts but a difference in degree of difficulty. Art is a mental construct quite obviously and is organized the way the brain/mind habitually organizes experience through contiguity, repetition, similarity (contrast) and the emotional affect incidental to such perceptions.
A good envoi to this post might be La Mer by Debussy with its very aquatic "structure."
The wide-ranging Friday Miscellanea for October 27 received an equally wide-ranging number of comments, putting it in the lead for the month. Some sample comments:
Will someone please confirm my understanding that we cannot assign Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704, I think) to the "second half of the Baroque period"? A writer did yesterday at the NYT and while the moment's irritation passed I've wondered if I actually had no cause for it, not that such things are engraved on the frieze of the Muses' temple, I guess.
The reply:
Taruskin, rebelling against the "Renaissance-Baroque-Classical-Romantic" template refuses to title his volumes with those words, instead just referring to the century. But traditionally, one would say that the Baroque began around 1600 with the first operas and the development of monody and the use of continuo. And it extended to the death of Bach in 1750. So Biber would fall in the middle, favoring the first half. But it might be best just to call him a 17th century composer.
So let's have some Biber, who was the composer before Bach who really started the genre of compositions for solo violin. Which pretty much ended with Bach as no-one has seen a way to progress from what he did. Here is a Biber Passacaglia from one of the Mystery Sonatas for solo violin. A friend of mine at grad school was writing her dissertation on them.
I have long had the idea of transcribing this Passacaglia for guitar and possibly pairing it with the Bach Chaconne in concert. Just now I decided to have another look at it and, not sure where I had stored the download I went to IMSLP. I was delighted to discover there that someone has already done a guitar transcription. That someone happens to be our frequent commentator Steven Watson!
One of our long-time commentators, who comments with the nom de plume "jives," was one of the featured composers in the California Festival that we mentioned a couple of times. His piece Unspoken Water was premiered by the Symphony of the Redwoods in November. Jeff just sent me the link to the recording which I would like to share with you:
The Friday Miscellanea for September 8 had the most comments. Wenatchee advocates for the neglected guitar composer Matiegka:
It took months of work but tonight I finished the 31 page (10,272 words not counting the heavily annotated score that IMSLP made available) analysis of Matiegka's Op. 17 Sonate progressive. It's picking up where the series started with Op. 16 back in July. Shameless self plug for that post ... https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/07/an-analysis-of-matiegkas-op-16-sonate.html
This year's the 250th anniversary of Matiegka's birth/baptism so I figured this is "the" year to do a really deep dive into how he handled sonata forms and what he did in his solo guitar sonatas. https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/09/an-analysis-of-matiegkas-op-17-sonate.html
Discussion of Matiegka continues...
To demonstrate what the fuss is about, here is the Andante movement from his Sonata, op. 17:
The winner for this month was the Friday Miscellanea for August 18. The comments discussed the recorder, György Kurtág, Taylor Swift, happy/sad music, and how the last movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 is actually pretty bad, partly because Beethoven wrote badly for the voice. Samples:
I'd never heard any Kurtag before and came aware quite impressed by his spare, intense style and clever textures -- I want to explore his other works -- but as an opera it was painfully slow. Only four characters, two of which disappear into their dustbins early on (I mean this literally; they were an elderly couple who each lived in their own dustbin), and much of the libretto was just monologue. Perhaps some of the problem lies with Beckett (the opera is based on his play Endgame), whose bleak imagination doesn't interest me. My fault, probably. Lots of people walked out over the course of the performance, which was a shame. Others were talking very enthusiastically about it afterward. For me it was a fascinating and special performance, even though it was also trying..! Actually, it was one of the few interesting premieres at this year's Proms (so far).
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Although it can be risky to equate major keys with “happy” and minor keys with “sad”, there’s often a crude correspondence. I think Mozart wrote significantly more major key music than minor key music. And yet it’s the minor key music we often feel is the deepest: the Lacrimosa from the Requiem, the 40th Symphony, the slow movement of the A major Piano Concerto. I particularly love the A minor rondo for piano, which seems to anticipate Chopin.
I know this preference for gloom colours my own reaction to music. It’s not rational, but art appreciation never is. I’m one of a small group of curmudgeonly grumps who can’t really enjoy Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. It’s too irritatingly positive, dammit. I think Stanley Kubrick was right to see something sinister in it!
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I think the worst music William Byrd wrote on his worst day is better than anything and everything choral Beethoven wrote. His choral music is just kinda dreadful. By contrast I genuinely like Haydn's oratorios and masses but as my old choir director in college put it, Haydn actually sang in church choirs and for those who can't stand choral music from the Classical period Haydn and Mozart are the best, or the best of the worst for people more steeped in English, French and Russian choral music and for Lutherans who prefer Schutz and Bach to Beethoven.
I'm a classical guitarist, though these days I often call myself a composer. I had an inkling of what this might mean when I went to my first final instrumental exam and one of the faculty jokingly said: "What are you going to play, guitar boogie shuffle?" One of the things that prevents music departments from sliding into the progressive morass of English departments is that there is usually a fair emphasis on performance. Nearly all music majors, even if they are not in the performance stream, have individual private lessons and since these are expensive to provide, they have to do final exams on their instruments showing that they can actually play something. Performance majors, at least towards the end of their program, have to give public recitals, also marked by a jury.
But the classical guitar has an uncomfortable niche in the classical music world as the electric and steel string guitars of popular music are better known. Here's that tune by the Ventures:
That's before my time as a guitarist, but it was right in the wheelhouse of the faculty examiner. It was repertoire he knew, but he had never heard of the big composers for guitar: Tárrega, Sor, Giuliani, Ponce, Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Throughout the history of the guitar there have been attempts for it to enter the musical mainstream (at least the classical one). In 16th century Spain, the primary domestic solo instrument was the vihuela, a double-strung guitar, basically. In the rest of Europe, the lute was very important, though alongside other instruments like the organ, harp and virginal. In the later 17th century the guitar very nearly broke into the mainstream in the form of the Baroque guitar with composers like Robert de Visée and Francesco Corbetta who were important composer/performers in the royal courts. The lute and theorbo also enjoyed some popularity in the person of people like Sylvius Leopold Weiss. But the trend failed to reach completion and the instrument(s) faded.
Another attempt was made in the late 18th century with Spanish guitarist composers like Fernando Sor and Italians like Mauro Giuliani. We could also count Wenzel Thomas Matiegka in this number. This attempt was even less successful as the harpsichord and piano completely triumphed over the plucked instruments in the person of the big three composers: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Yet another attempt to assail the ramparts of the classical mainstream was made in the mid-20th century by the great artist Andrés Segovia who really did take the Spanish guitar from the streets and put it on the concert hall stage worldwide. When he was alive he could tour everywhere and easily fill 2,000 seat concert halls. With the spread of his disciples like Oscar Ghiglia and pupils like John Williams and other virtuosos like Julian Bream, the future of the guitar seemed to be finally assured.
But the problem, as always, was repertoire. The sad truth is that there is no guitar repertoire that is absolutely essential. Think on that. The vihuela music of Luys Milan is less essential than the lute music of Francesco da Milano. The courtly guitar music of de Visée and Corbetta is far less significant than the harpsichord music of Couperin and Rameau and good god, the lute music of Weiss is vanishingly trivial compared to the harpsichord music of J. S. Bach. There is no possible way to equate the guitar music of Sor, Giuliani and Matiegka with the piano music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. In the 20th century, there are the few and feeble pieces of Tárrega, Falla and the more substantial, but still few ones by Britten and Ponce that are minor compared to ones by Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Debussy--need I go on?
The situation with ensemble music is even more dire and this underlines the fact that the guitar has never, quite, managed to escape the ghetto it has been in since the 16th century. There is virtually no worthwhile ensemble music with guitar. I know this because I spent much of my career looking for it. There is a small repertoire of duets by Sor and others, largely trivial. There is a small repertoire of music for violin and guitar by Paganini and virtually no-one else. There are quite a few concertos, starting with several by Giuliani, greatly increasing in the 20th century with ones by Rodrigo, Villa-Lobos, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Brouwer, but honestly, any orchestra would much prefer to program ones by Mozart, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff.
The one area in which the guitar stood a bit of a chance was in the repertoire for voice and guitar where we actually have a respectable repertoire, especially if we allow some transcriptions. We have a lot of interesting songs, ayres and chansons from the 16th century by, among others, John Dowland. We have the possibility of some lieder by Franz Schubert, who played and composed on the guitar (there is even a quartet by Schubert based on a trio by Matiegka) and in the 20th century we have song cycles by Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten and others. There is even a chamber opera, El Cimmaron, by Hans Werner Henze for voice, flute, guitar, and percussion. But that's it and especially given the decline in voice recitals, it just isn't enough.
I'm going to be in Salzburg for the festival this year and I am going to see if I can sit down with some people at the Mozarteum and festival administration to talk about the history of the guitar at Salzburg. When I was a student there in the 80s, the guitar had some presence. Pepe Romero taught a month-long master class and he even gave a concert of the Falla Siete Canciones Españoles with, I believe, Teresa Berganza. Originally composed for piano, but workable on guitar. Now, there is no trace of the guitar either at the festival or at the summer courses at the Mozarteum. What happened?
I think it is a question of repertoire. The classical guitar, with the possible exception of the Concierto de Aranjuez of Rodrigo, the Songs from the Chinese of Britten and a couple of solo pieces, simply has no essential repertoire...
In the lead this month, a rather sparse one for blogging, is this one Don't you like good music? possibly because it has a Victor Borge clip. The topic was applause, when, if and how much. One comment:
I like silence before the music, audience silence during it, and then some silent delay before any applause after a finale. All this to set a meditative mindset for closest listening and purest internal response. Also I like formality in the dress and comportment of the artists. Usually I like them to leave any introductions of the music and musicians to the written notes. And please, no crinkly candy wrappers!
To which I replied:
That summarizes it nicely. I think we want a classical concert to be as different from a Taylor Swift show as possible.
You can always count on Frank Zappa for a good quote:
Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
--Frank Zappa
We have mentioned the California Festival a couple of times and now Alex Ross weighs in: What Does California Sound Like? and no, it's not surf music. Or Katy Perry.
In 1936, Isabel Morse Jones, a music critic for the Los Angeles Times, made a modest boast: “We in the west have been permitted freedom to develop our music in our own way to a certain extent, because of the distances between us and the musical politics of the east and Europe.” For sure: by the mid-nineteen-thirties, California composers were already striking new paths. Henry Cowell, a Bay Area native, was exploring cluster chords, drones, and open forms. Lou Harrison, an Oregonian gone south, was absorbing non-Western traditions. John Cage, a graduate of Los Angeles High School, was beginning to theorize a music of percussion and noise. Meanwhile, European composers were fleeing totalitarian Europe and making their way West. In 1934, the modernist titan Arnold Schoenberg took refuge in L.A.; Korngold, Stravinsky, Eisler, and Rachmaninoff followed. The colliding energies of California culture triggered multiple revolutions in the ensuing decades, with the hypnotically looping minimalism of Terry Riley’s “In C” exerting global influence.
That just demonstrates how well-researched everything Alex does is. You should read the whole thing. Here is another sample from the close:
Perhaps the most topographically evocative entry in the festival was M. A. Tiesenga’s “Sketches of Chaparral,” which appeared at Green Umbrella, alongside no less notable works by Dylan Mattingly, Reena Esmail, and Samuel Adams. Tiesenga, a graduate of the perennially productive avant-garde hothouse of CalArts, salutes the most universal of California beings—the low-lying, prickly shrubs that cling to the state’s hills, mountains, arroyos, and deserts. On hiking expeditions, Tiesenga made charcoal rubbings of the plants, fashioned sketches from them, and began to transform the resulting shapes and patterns into a score.
This process harks back to Cage’s methodology in works such as “Ryoanji,” which employs drawings that the composer made at the rock garden of the same name, in Kyoto. Tiesenga, however, makes room for un-Cagean melodic gestures and euphonious harmonies. The performers are encouraged to bring their own sensibilities into play; at times, they react spontaneously to the undulating lines of Tiesenga’s chaparral drawings, samples of which appear in their parts. At one point, Joanne Pearce Martin, the L.A. Phil’s peerless resident pianist, divined a glittering, cadenza-like solo from a skeletal array of notes. “Sketches of Chaparral” is a formidable imaginative act, but it is also an act of mediation between the natural landscape—wounded but still magnificent—and a community of musicians who hope to restore paradise in sound.
But, for all this, the prominence of the word “wellbeing” in the ENO press release rings alarm bells. For opera’s contribution to health and welfare, its ability to improve lives, is a happy by-product. It is not the point. It is not opera’s job to do social work. Yet unfortunately this is where we find ourselves. It all started in the 1990s. A government in thrall to pop culture and “Cool Britannia” showed itself to be extremely ambivalent, nervous even, about the so-called “high arts”. New Labour set about redefining culture in two ways: as a commodified economic phenomenon (“the creative industries”) and, with the launch of the so-called “access agenda”, as a means for combating social exclusion. Art was henceforth to be put to service in solving all manner of social ills, health problems and educational challenges.
And we should also remind ourselves that being a lover of classical music confers no moral superiority.
The new ban encompasses a wide range of genres, including metal, hip-hop, or the popular corridos tumbados, which are modern Mexican equivalent of British ballads about Robin Hood. “We will no longer allow people to promote violence,” said Jorge Aguilar Osorio, general secretary of the city council, when announcing the measure.
The video, apparently filmed inside the Guayaquil prison and posted on YouTube over the weekend, pays homage to José Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar, a convicted murderer who has helped lead Los Choneros—a gang that reportedly partners with the Sinaloa Cartel to move cocaine to the United States.
Mariachi Bravo’s “El Corrido del León”—“The Lion’s Ballad”—taunts a government that has proved incapable of seizing control of its prisons back from the increasingly powerful gangs. With a high-production-value video recorded in part in a facility that holds Ecuador’s most dangerous convicts, the criminals are sending a clear message about who’s in charge.
I think the future is versatility—a mixtape. I really believe that if a piece is put next to the right piece, even if it’s Schubert and Taylor Swift… they’ll shine light on each other. I see that working perfectly.
Mind you, the rest of the interview is full of interesting insights into conducting.
What’s it like, then, coming into something like a revival of this “Onegin” at the Komische Oper, where it’s been done before, the orchestra has a set way of doing it—how do you get people to change from what they’ve previously done?
We just read the overture the other day, and I could tell everything they had penciled in. It drives me crazy. No offense to my colleagues, but you always can tell when an orchestra’s reading something on the page that’s not what Tchaikovsky wrote. Someone tried to make the music more interesting than Tchaikovsky intended, which is kind of embarrassing. It’s like over-editing or spoon-feeding musical ideas through pencil markings, saying: Crescendo here. Put a comma here. Little things are important for the clarity of the piece, but I don’t like when people add things for the sake of adding. And I always hear it in the first reading. So I very gently say, “Oh sorry, do you have a crescendo there?” “Oh yeah, we have it penciled in.” “Okay, please take it out.”
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Norman Lebrecht advertises his Album of the Year article on Slipped Disc. Click for a provocative photo of Yuja Wang, a specialty over there.
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There is very little M. A. Tiesenga on YouTube, but here is a piece for perhaps the most terrifying musical ensemble: two drum kits and two saxophones:
Here is the waltz from Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky:
