Weird and nice things about Austria

One particularly annoying thing about both large corporations and highly developed nations is that they tend to become parasitic. They are always assessing you little extra charges, fees and taxes to drain away your life-blood. Or that's how it feels! Two examples, Lufthansa now charges you about $50 US for every checked piece of luggage. Both ways. And Austria charges €1.75 for each day you are in a hotel or AirBnb. This is just a little extra added on top of the multitude of other taxes.

The excuse for this is, of course, that the large corporation and highly developed state is taking care of you in some way, i.e. taking responsibility for parts of your life. Which, when you think about it is really just taking over parts of your life. An opinion writer in Canada before I left called this being a "junior partner in your own life!" Yep, pretty much.

The reason this bugs me is that Mexico is not like this. You are responsible for yourself. If you trip and fall into a hole, people nearby will be likely to assist you, but the government will not be interested.

Ok, what else? There is an old-money upper class here that you see at the opera in particular. Tall, slim extremely well-dressed women over six feet tall and fleshy, suspiciously tanned men in very flashy clothes that have the demeanor of mafia godfathers. And then there are the more rustic, earthy, very plainly dressed men that you find driving taxis.

 Austrians are quite fit; you rarely see anyone really overweight. And all sorts of middle-aged and elderly men and women are getting around riding bicycles. These things may be connected.

Time for a nice item: Salzburg has a remarkably well-developed and efficient bus system. There seem to be over 200 lines and the busses run about every 15 minutes during the day and every 20 minutes in the evening--and usually until midnight. Buying tokens is very easy. There is a machine that dispenses them at the bus stop. You can press a button to have the menu in English. Instructions are clear and simple. You pay with a credit card and your selected token along with a receipt is delivered instantly. I got a 24 hour token for €3.90 and used it for four trips.

One of the most dangerous places you can be is between a woman of a certain age and a glass of Sekt. I've been elbowed and shoved a few times.

Of course, just the names of streets can be strange. Here are the directions I had to follow to walk from my AirBnb to the nearest bus stop: right on Jodok-Fink-Straße, 72 m then left on Glockengießerstraße, .1 km then right on Michael-Filzgasse, 92 m left on Innsbrucker B, .2 km, slight right, then 53 m right on Maxglaner Hauptstraße.

Ending on a nice item: I quite like food in Austria. In the supermarket are an incredible selection of cold cuts, all of them tasty. The fruit and vegetables--especially tomatoes--are excellent. The milk--alpine milk!--is lovely. Whenever I come to Austria the first thing I want to do is head to a restaurant and order a wienerschnitzel, which is a lot like a chicken milanesa in Mexico, but with veal. But actually it tastes very different. Served with cranberry sauce. That little white nylon bag contains a quarter lemon so when you squeeze it over your schnitzel, you don't get lemon in your eye and the seeds don't drop on your food.

But yesterday I discovered a new dish: Gekochter Tafelspitz, a very traditional Austrian dish of slow boiled beef brisket. Here is the presentation:

Gekochter Tafelspitz

Sorry about the lighting! I was facing a big window. How it is served is first they place the large plate on the table with just the fried potatoes and a bed of creamed spinach (the green stuff). Then they place some pieces of beef on the spinach with some of the stock and the julienned vegetables. This comes from the bowl on the right. There is lots more for you to serve yourself. On the left is a small plate with two small bowls; these contain apple horseradish and chive sauce for the beef. The whole thing is just a delight. I had it with a glass of Zweigelt wine, Austria's answer to Pinot Noir.

Salzburg, Day 6, Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and Jupiter Ensemble

 

Desandre, Dunford and Jupiter

UPDATE: I put this up rather early in the morning and I didn't provide enough context. This concert is by Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Ensemble Jupiter. The first half was devoted to songs and instrumental pieces by John Dowland, the English lutenist and composer, and the second half to music by Henry Purcell.

Since you are not allowed to take photos during the concert and the photos I take afterwards are poor due to the low light levels and since the Festival sends out an email with an excellent photo for every concert (along with homework, sometimes), I'm just going to use these excellent photos.

In contrast to the Don Giovanni performance where I was barely qualified to attend the performance, let alone comment on it, I am highly qualified to comment on this performance. I not only know this repertoire, I have been performing it for nearly fifty years, longer, that is, than the artists on stage last night. But not nearly as well, let me hasten to add!

I have to make one technical comment up front: I am troubled by Thomas Dunford's practice of crossing his legs while he plays. He can certainly do this, with great success, and he uses a fabric strap to make it more stable. But the problem is, I am pretty sure that in the long term, i.e. decades from now, it may give him a bad case of sciatica. I have some sciatica in my left leg from using a foot rest to play guitar with, which is why I changed to a guitar rest that allows me to have both feet flat on the floor. About half of the younger guitarists these days are doing the same. But on to the concert.

The Canto Lirico series consists of three concerts, this one and two others with different artists later in August with vocal repertoire. The title of this program is Songs of Passion and from the very first song, an irony was revealed. "Come again: sweet love doth now invite" from The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of 1597 by John Dowland is a song I know well. In my score library at home is my transcription for guitar that I made some fifty years ago. The thing about Elizabethan texts is that they often reveal a bawdy side and that is especially true of this song. I remember being shocked to discover, on reading an excellent book titled Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge, that virtually everything the Nurse says in Romeo and Juliet is actually a sexual pun.

Here is the first verse of "Come again: sweet love doth now invite"

Come again: sweet love doth now invite,

Thy graces, that refrain,

To do me due delight,

To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,

With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

 Just read literally, those are rather odd lyrics. But to Elizabethans everything was quite clear. "Come again" is a reference to orgasm and the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die" is simply how you get there! In Elizabethan slang, "to die" is to have an orgasm. Now that verse makes a great deal more sense. Especially when you notice that the line ending in "to die" is a rising sequence. After I discovered Shakespeare's Bawdy I went through a number of songs by Dowland and others and discovered a host of sexual references. Oh, and if you want to be really accurate, you have to pronounce "sympathy" to rhyme with "die".

But, alas, none of this came across in the performance last night. The tempo of the song was too fast and the eroticism of the words and their musical setting was just not there. In addition, much as I love Lea Desandre, she is not at her best with English pronunciation. The performance had real strengths, of course. They did some interesting variations--for one verse, the strings (two violins, viola, viola da gamba and double bass) joined in singing. The Dowland Ayres are published with vocal and string parts as well as lute accompaniment, so you have various performance options. They also played with different tempi for some verses. All in all it was a very accomplished performance that, alas, missed the boat as to what the song was actually about. Lea Desandre is a terrific singer, but she does not do bawdy well.

After that, I'm afraid, I dozed off for a lot of the first half. The second half was all Purcell and they were much more at home with this music. Desandre does lament very well and the half ended with "Thy hand Belinda" and "When I am laid in earth" from Dido and Aeneas. Much though we loved to make sexual puns on those lyrics in first year music history they are not actually bawdy!

The audience in Salzburg loved the concert and demanded an encore which turned out to be a song composed by lutenist and director Thomas Dunford--a song, in English about how we are all drops in the ocean. It was well-received by the audience and the performers returned for numerous bows. It rather sounded to me like French pop music, but hey...

 Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and Ensemble Jupiter are really outstanding musicians and I am in awe of their facility with style and ornamentation. Dunford in particular is terrific at ripping off garlands of divisions on the lute and Desandre can do trills and graces till the cows come home. Their real center of gravity is in French and Italian music, I feel, and they are less at home with English music and especially John Dowland. They don't do somber terribly well.

But I was led to reflect on my own career: the truth is that these folks know how to read a room and give an audience just what they want to hear. And that was something that I was a lot less good at!

Some photos:

Just before the concert, Thomas Dunford popped out to check his tuning

Acknowledging the very enthusiastic applause

The three concert halls on the Karajan-platz all back on the sheer rock of the Mönchsberg

 which we can see here on the west side of the large lobby shared by the Haus für Mozart and the Felsenreitschule.

Two worlds and today's listening

After four hours last night immersed in the highly cultured environment of opera, it was rather a dash of cold water this morning just to glance at the news. The Olympics, especially the opening ceremony with some really unfortunate imagery (you know what I mean), the election in Venezuela, Lebanon, wild fires in Canada and California, the US election news. Well, you get the idea. Sometimes I really wonder where all this is going to end up. And then I am really grateful that we still have Mozart (and the other people).

Salzburg: Day 5, Don Giovanni

Of the two Mozart operas in production this year, I chose Don Giovanni because it is one with which I am the most familiar. The other one is La Clemenza di Tito which I hardly know at all. I have actually played in Don Giovanni years ago--there is a brief mandolin part that accompanies an aria. I noticed last night that Teodor Currenzis had, not only a mandolin in the pit, but also a theorbo and what looked like, from a distance, a Baroque guitar. At intermission I got a shot of the Baroque guitar and mandolin, but not the theorbo, but trust me, it was there (though not very audible).

The orchestra pit at intermission with the mandolin and Baroque guitar chatting.

Let me hasten to say that I can't possibly give a review of this performance! I would have to see it four or five more times, study the score in the arrangement that Teodor Currenzis is using (has created) and probably, just be a lot more wise and informed than I am. It is not often that I walk out of a performance at the end feeling truly inadequate to what I have just seen and heard. But in this case, yes. But I do have some observations about the unique appeal of opera.

Just one of the many surprising images from Don Giovanni

Yes, they really did lower a buggy down to the stage at one point--I'm not sure why! They also lowered a four-door sedan (it might have been a Tesla) as well, nose down, but it just disappeared after a while. At one point a baby grand piano just dropped out of nowhere to crash on the stage (I'm pretty sure that was a special prop because dropping a real baby grand piano twenty or thirty feet would probably just go right through the stage). It made an impressive noise, though. And the remnants were somehow used as the continuo for some recitative. I am only able to share the above image because something new at the festival is that, every day of a performance you have a ticket to, they send you an email ahead of time telling you how long the performance will be, as well as some more information. And a photo.

But let me go back a bit--the opera opens with the curtain going up on the interior of what we realize is a church: there is a large crucifix, some large religious paintings and a number of pews facing away from us, toward the crucifix. Before a note of the overture, ghostly figures in white come and remove all the pews, the crucifix and the paintings. Then the overture starts and, believe it or not, a real goat trots across the stage. That I do know the reason for: the goat is an animal associated with the ancient Greek satyr, half-man, half-goat, a solitary creature driven by lust who is the ancestor of the Don Giovanni character.

Quoting from the hefty program booklet:

The reason why Don Giovanni is a dangerous figure is because he strikes at the heart of a symbolic system by replacing Agape by Eros. And Eros--to paraphrase Georges Bataille--is always close bound up with death. Don Giovanni knows neither remorse nor guilt: in order to satisfy his desires he attacks the Law, discrediting and abrogating it. It is not coincidence that his first act in the opera is the killing of a father--the Father.

But I want to talk a bit about what is so compelling about this and other modern opera productions. It is really about creating illusions to intensify the performance. Some of the ones last night included some remarkable images: a line of fire (real fire) suddenly appearing, crossing half the stage (a very large stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus), a scrim dropping down, turning the whole stage area into a ghostly version of itself (this is enhanced by special lighting), oh, and speaking of lighting, there was one moment that I can barely comprehend: Don Giovanni kicks a bunch of stone fragments across the stage and suddenly the lighting changes so that they, and he, appear to be floating on a plane of oil or something unearthly. I have no idea how they did that, but they did and it was eerie to an extreme.

What makes opera so different is that when we see a special effect in a movie, no matter how well it is done, we know it is just a bunch of pixels that came out of a studio in Hollywood. There is nothing real there. But in an opera production, what we see on stage is actually real: that was a real goat, a real naked woman (or dozens of them at one point), those are real singers singing (without any processing or pitch correction), yes, there are stage props, but they are actual material objects, not pixels and the light is actual light. So the whole experience is entirely different. And, well, to me at least, much more interesting.

At the end of the opera the whole cast comes on stage, starting with the hundred or so women extras used in various scenes. By the time we get to the principal singers, there are two hundred people on stage. That plus the nearly one hundred in the orchestra pit starts to give you an idea of just how enormous a production like this is. And I'm not counting any of the backstage technical staff: designers, carpenters, lighting technicians, stagehands and a host of others--costumers! What does a production like this cost? A fortune! Good thing that the primary sponsor of the Salzburg Festival is Audi.

But no, I simply can't give a review, or even a detailed description of what went on--it was four hours long. But I can say that it was masterfully done and the singing and playing was fantastically accomplished. We are living in a golden age of opera production. And Mozart certainly knew what he was doing!

 

Salzburg: Day 4, Igor Levit

The audience gathers in the Herbert-von-Karajanplatz

The Grosses Festspielhaus before the concert: a photo of an empty concert hall is like an audio recording of a painter's brushes in their jar!

Igor Levit, despite his youth, is a distinguished artist with many honors including 2020 Gramophone  Artist of the Year. In 2022 his Shostakovich album ON DSCH was BBC Music Magazines Recording of the year. I saw him here three years ago in the smaller Haus für Mozart, but last night he was in the big hall, the Grosses Festspielhaus and it was oversold! They had approximately seventy extra chairs placed on the wings of the stage and I didn't see an empty seat in the house.

The program consisted of the Chromatic  Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 by Bach, the Six Piano Pieces op 118 by Brahms and, in the second half, Liszt's piano arrangement of the Symphony No. 7 by Beethoven. This last was the show-stopper, a stunningly virtuosic achievement by both Liszt and Levit. It was so strange to hear this very familiar symphony transformed on the piano, as Liszt himself suggested, like an engraving of a painting with all the light and shade but missing the orchestral color. There was one encore, the Nocturne in C# minor by Chopin.

I saw Igor Levit three years ago and he was very fine then, though I didn't quite find his Mahler Symphony no. 10 transcription entirely convincing. But tonight was a success on many levels and the audience gave a standing ovation. In fact, some stifled clapping broke out after the haunting Allegretto movement of the Beethoven. Clapping between movements is unheard of in Salzburg--normally, but Igor Levit has won a following here.

Salzburg: Day 3, Jordi Savall and a brew pub

 

Entering the Kollegienkirche, notice the banner

I don't think you can read it from this photo, but the banner advertises eight concerts in the Ouverture Spirituelle series. The Salzburg Festival is organized into a number of different series, each of which in a smaller or less-specialized context would be a whole season in itself. There are five other concerts by other ensembles that overlap with this series. Last night was La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations with vocal soloists conducted by Jordi Savall. The bio in the program notes that Jordi Savall has been researching, interpreting and performing early music for some fifty years. The two ensembles, choral and orchestral, noted above were both his foundation. The five vocal soloists I won't cover separately, but their performances were lovely with clear, open voices, unstrained and, without pitch correction (of course!), beautifully in tune. I have long been a lover of choral music and this was an evening to treasure. It consisted in two settings of the De profundis (Psalm 130), the first by Michel-Richard Delalande (used as funeral music for Louis XIV in 1715) and the second by the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Between these two in the program was a Te Deum, an ancient hymn of joyous praise dating all the way back to the fourth century. The composer was Marc-Antoine Carpenter (1643 - 1704), this is one of six Te Deums he composed. There was also an encore but I didn't know the piece--I might be able to find out from the local paper what it was. My feeling was that the best work of the evening, by far, was the Arvo Pärt with its other-worldly textures and pure harmonies. Absolutely a delight. Here is a performance by the Hilliard Ensemble:

Acknowledging applause at concert's end

Before the concert my German friends and I visited one of the stellar attractions of Salzburg: the Augustiner Bräustuben, a brew pub open for the last four hundred years, still using the original recipe.

Original stoneware?

The beer was excellent, but the food was really outstanding. The hilarious thing for me was that my German friends found half the items on the menu incomprehensible because they used uniquely Austrian vocabulary:

Menu in Austrian German

One friend said that the grilled chicken was simply the best she had ever had--I tried it and wow. As with fish, the trick with chicken is not to overcook it. This was moist and unctuous.

Grilled half chicken with potato salad

I had the venison stew with dumpling and green beans with "speck" (a kind of Alpine bacon). Wow, the sauce was made with red wine. Excellent!

Venison stew with dumpling and green beans

So that was an experience to remember. This is the kind of place that welcomes you and that locals treasure. If you are in Salzburg, don't miss it. And you won't find these recipes in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal! If you go, be sure to make a reservation.

Salzburg Day 2

Lots of jaunting around today with my friends from Germany. One of the interesting attractions is Hanger 7 near the airport. It is a large enclosure with the Red Bull collection of aircraft, ranging from a B-25 WWII vintage heavy bomber to an early Douglas passenger plane, to a Sukoi design and a couple of French jets--a few helicopters as well. There is also a collection of Formula One race cars. The backdrop is a magnificent view of the Alps.

Hanger 7 with the Alps in the background

Me with the Alps

An early Douglas passenger plane, seating 32

One of the French jets

Also a contemporary art exhibition

And some exotic trees

Interesting place to visit. Admission was free and there is also free parking (the only free parking lot in Salzburg).

Judengasse, one of the oldest streets in Salzburg

Mozartplatz

In the center of Mozartplatz is his statue and next to it were playing a trio of buskers.

Student buskers

Austrians are very fond of sundaes and iced coffees and all sorts of treats

So that's a little tour of some tourist attractions.

Friday Miscellanea

This week's miscellanea comes to you from the Hotel Via Roma in Salzburg, Austria where I am recovering surprisingly quickly from jet lag! Let's open with a somber piece from the New York Times: Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles. After sixty years conducting devoted mostly to pre-Classical era music by Bach, Monteverdi and many others, John Eliot Gardiner is being let go by three ensembles he founded:

Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

The board of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, the nonprofit that oversees all three ensembles, said Wednesday that it had decided that Gardiner, who had been on leave since the incident in France last summer, “will not be returning to the organization.”

 I have no juicy inside information to share, but I will say that conductors in particular seem vulnerable to the disease of arrogance and disdain towards their ensembles. There are lots of example. A friend of mine, a principal in a US orchestra, told me of a time when the conductor wiped his sweat off on her concert garb, which was just as disgusting as you can imagine. There were no consequences. And this is generally true, but striking one of your vocal soloists in the face, onstage would seem to be a bridge too far. The overarching principle here has to be that highly placed people, in whatever field, have to be accountable. And they, very often, are not. But let's not stop enjoying the enormous quantities of music that Gardiner produced when he wasn't abusing his soloists!

* * *

I had exactly this nightmare! I don't mean that this happened to me, but I dreamed that it did. I was prepared to play one of the Rodrigo concertos, but the parts company sent the orchestral parts to a different one. But it actually happened to a pianist in real life. Let's let the cruel conductor tell the story:

It's interesting that she did not take the obvious course of simply walking offstage, saying to the conductor as she passed to let her know when he was going to stop being a jerk!

* * *

Here is an interesting bit of music theory connecting musical structure with literary structure: A novel kind of music

What changed in this century or so between Purcell and Haydn? Three crucial innovations of musical composition are part of the story. One is a much greater variety of texture – the surface events and gestures of the music. Another is a more unified, integrated approach to overall structure, based on large-scale repetition and resolution. The last is a new system of harmony that was able to create a sense of proximity and distance, foreground and depth, over extended periods of time. I want to suggest some parallels between this 18th-century musical lingua franca and a familiar device from another medium: modern realist prose, which emerged through the 17th and 18th centuries – just when these musical conventions took shape.

* * *

Here is that Purcell piece directed by Jordi Savall, whom I will hear in a concert this evening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZRRNmXs70g

* * *

Public advocacy helps musicians’ fame and fortune, new study finds

...we found that publicly backing charity causes on both an intermittent and regular basis earned musicians more likes, shares and comments. These artists also increased music sales, whether they sent these messages occasionally or constantly. Regular advocacy messages far outperformed intermittent ones in drawing attention and boosting sales.

This difference was even more prominent when compared to two other types of messages: commercial messages, which are meant to publicize their music, and self-revealing messages, which focused on musicians’ personal lives. Intermittent advocacy messages were less popular and led to fewer sales. However, regular advocacy messages outperformed both, attracting more engagement and driving higher sales.

Yep, there's a reason for it.

* * *

 Here is John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Vespers. You have to love any band with three theorboes!

An abbreviated miscellanea today. We will be out exploring some Salzburg attractions so I should have lots of photos to post tomorrow. Also tomorrow, there are two concerts, one in the morning at the Mozarteum with the Piano Concerto in D minor K. 466 and the "Linz" Symphony by, of course, Mozart with pianist Lucas Sternath and the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer. And, in the evening, pianist Igor Levit at the Grosses Festspielhaus with works by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven.

Salzburg: Day 1

Hohensalzburg Fortress

My hotel has been cleverly laid out so there is no view whatsoever, but if you stand in front, you get a great look at the Hohensalzburg Fortress, begun around 1100 AD and added to for centuries after. It was never captured and Salzburg was an independent state under a series of "Prince Archbishops" for a thousand years (until Napoleon came along). There are two mountains in town that I know of, this one, the Mönchsberg on the Western side of the Salzach river and the Kapuzinerberg on the Eastern side. There are apparently three more mountains in town, but I don't know anything about them. Last time we went up this one and saw the fortress. This time I think we might hike up the other one, which has a very old abbey on top.

Still getting over jet lag, so that's all I have for today. Tomorrow is the first concert with Jordi Savall directing ensembles playing French Baroque choral music and Arvo Pärt. Should be lovely! Saturday is Mozart and Igor Levit.

Here is the Charpentier Te Drum, which will be performed tomorrow:

Virtuosity?

 “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Yesterday I attended a concert of violin and piano. In conversation with a violinist friend who also attended I mentioned that they simply don't program violin/piano recitals at the Salzburg Festival. She seemed surprised. They do have a lot of piano recitals though.

The concert last night, while seemingly enjoyed by many, was bad, but following the Tolstoy quote, it was bad in its own way. The soloist, according to the biography, had won prizes in fifty (50!) international competitions. And is only twenty-two years old. When I was a young performer I only entered one competition and had to drop out due to a nervous breakdown. The winner of that contest also had a nervous breakdown, but afterwards. His was more serious as, upon returning to Japan, he cut off one of his fingers so he could never play guitar again.

There are hosts of competitions now, it seems, and the path to career is apparently entering all of them. Also, judging by the concert, the key to winning is a ferocious ability to play many, many notes in quick succession, thereby bamboozling the judges. This was a bad, virtuosic concert, but for the audience, they did not seem to be able to perceive how virtuosity could be bad. It was bad because it was musically meaningless. It was virtuoso trash. This was keenly demonstrated when the artists departed from the main elements of the program, 19th century bon-bons, and played a Mozart sonata. This instantly revealed that the pianist was a banger, constantly drowning out the violin, and the violinist had no lyric sense nor grace and elegance. These performers should be enjoined from playing Mozart in public. Thank god they didn't program any Bach.

Good performances, like good families, are alike: they combine passion with grace, clarity with expression and are a delight to listen to. Bad performances can be bad in a thousand ways. This was one of them. Here is that Mozart sonata the way it should be played.

On the Road

 As I have done a few times recently, I will be flying to Salzburg next week to take in the music festival. After a couple of recovery days, the first concert will be on July 26th with Jordi Savall conducting vocal soloists, choir and orchestra in music by MICHEL-RICHARD DELALANDE, MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER, and ARVO PÄRT. This is the first of two concerts of largely early music I will be hearing, the second being Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble in works by Dowland and Purcell. I've never heard Pärt in concert before, nor Charpentier and Delalande for that matter!

There have been a lot of changes in the programming since I was a student in Salzburg in the 1980s. Back then they did a lot of integral series: Alfred Brendel doing all the Schubert piano sonatas in several concerts and the Alban Berg Quartet doing all the Beethoven string quartets. They also had some living composers. Then, Stockhausen (who presented seven concerts of his chamber music) and Lutosławski who conducted his then new violin concerto. Nowadays they have a "focus" on a particular modern composer, this year Schoenberg.

Also, they used to have more conventional chamber music, i.e. string quartets. This year, I think there is just one, but they have a lot of pianists. I have tickets to see six outstanding pianists: Levit, Sokolov, Simard, Kissing, Volodos and Kantorow.

This year I have several free days so I am going to explore more non-musical things like enjoy a visit to the Augustiner Bräustübl a brewery/restaurant founded in 1621 and still using the traditional recipe. Mind you, that is far from the oldest religious institution in Salzburg--by nearly a thousand years! St. Peter's Abbey, founded in 696, is considered the oldest monastery still in existence in the German-speaking world. The Benedictine monks don't have a brewery, but they do have a bakery. Lots of remarkable non-religious institutions as well. The Hotel Sacher has two branches, one in Vienna and one in Austria and both serve the famous Sachertorte.

I will be blogging every day, I hope, so if you want to come along, just drop by. I will try and post a lot more photos this year. And now we have to pretty much end with Salzburg's most famous resident, Mozart. Here is the Camerata Salzburg with the Symphony no. 40:

No conductor.

Over-egging the pudding

We don't have much actual music criticism these days, but we have a great deal of what the English would call "over-egging the pudding." YouTube has become almost unwatchable because of it, but I have commented on that before. Alas, we find it even in such rarified heights as writings by Richard Taruskin. In his scholarly works it doesn't appear, but when he writes for newspapers or magazines, it creeps out. Journalism these days is all about shouting out extremes. Here is an example from The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Referring to the performance of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven on the occasion of the falling of the Berlin Wall he says:

What did Beethoven symbolize? Just packaged greatness, I'm afraid, and all that implies of smugness and dullness and ritualism. Just what the revolutions of '89 were revolting against.

And that is why classical music is failing, and in particular why intellectuals, as a class, and even the educated public, have been deserting it. The defection began in the sixties when all at once it was popular music that engaged passionately--adequately or not, but often seriously and even challengingly--with scary, risky matters of public concern, while classical music engaged only frivolously (remember radical chic?) or escaped into technocratic utopias. By now, the people who use to form the audience for "serious" music are very many of them listening to something else.

Now I am a great admirer of Richard Taruskin who has delved so deeply into the truths of music history for the benefit of all, but here he really over-eggs the pudding. I'm not saying there are not large grains of truth here, but they are exaggerated to the point of being nearly irrelevant. No, performing Beethoven on the occasion of the Wall coming down did not just symbolize "packaged greatness." What an absurd distortion. And who was smug and dull? Certainly no-one present for that event, nor the musicians, nor the viewers worldwide. So "that," and at this point in the argument it is becoming vague exactly what it refers to, certainly has little to do with why classical music is "failing." Actually, the performance itself would seem to demonstrate that classical music had a distinct role to play on that occasion. Why would he claim anything different? And the idea that popular music was courageously engaging with those scary, risky matters of public concern that classical music was too dull or smug to deal with is just, well, pretty funny really. However this was just a momentary lapse. 

But lots of other folks are indulging in excess. Here is a classic example from Ted Gioia:

"I spent ten years researching and writing a book about love songs.

I learned many things, but two facts stand out:

Everybody knows hundreds of romantic love songs, and can even sing along—because the words are deeply embedded in our memory.

Most people are deeply embarrassed about this, and don’t want anyone to know.

You can’t deny it. Every one of you knows the words to a bunch of sentimental, icky-sweet songs—but would hate to admit it to your friends."

What are the exaggerations there? Everything! He likely spent ten years off and on writing a book about love songs during which he mostly did other things. No, everyone doesn't know hundreds of romantic love songs. Unless you count "Don't Let Me Down," I doubt if I know more than a line or two from any love song. But even if I did know lots, I wouldn't be embarrassed about it and would be happy to admit it. You see, the whole thing is just one unfounded exaggeration after another. 

It is much too much when both sides of a debate so absurdly exaggerate that you really don't want to hear from either of them ever again. And yes, I am talking about "climate change." Yes, climates do change, but the belief that any amount of human intervention can "fix" it and also that it doesn't exist at all are both so far from the truth--yet we hear this every day--that ignoring the discussion entirely is the rational choice.

Of course, politics, the wildly polarized politics that is the norm today, is the locus classicus which is why so many avoid it. A key tactic that instantly reveals both the existence of and the uselessness of partisan exaggeration is the pretending to foretell the future. No, no-one can do that and thinking you can is a variety of madness.

Why is everyone doing this? I'm not really sure, but part of it, I suspect, has to do with the idea that we need to manipulate and propagandize one another with every utterance. Just telling the plain, simple truth is too risky. It might not benefit us enough!

Let's have some plain, simple, truthful music from our old friend Joseph Haydn. Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the Symphony No. 94 "Surprise":

Friday Miscellanea

"the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That's a pretty good quote. Mostly though, after reading it we go "cool idea" and then go back to life as usual. It might be more useful to think of how it applies to one's personal behavior.

* * *

There has been a lot of criticism of director-driven European opera productions, but personally, the ones I have seen have been entrancing and stimulating. Alex Ross talks about a new production of Wagner: The Waves.

Leave it to the director Peter Sellars to make “Tristan” mind-bending once again. His production of the opera, created in collaboration with the video artist Bill Viola, was first seen last fall, in semi-staged form, at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, and the definitive version opened last month at the Opéra Bastille, in Paris. I saw the last performance of the Paris run, and came away in something like the state of dazed bliss that Baudelaire described. 

Esa-Pekka Salonen led the pioneering performances of the Sellars-Viola “Tristan” in Los Angeles last fall, and he travelled with the production to Paris. He offered a hugely impressive interpretation of a score on which almost every great conductor of the past century has made his mark. Already in the Prelude, you had a sense of a canny master plan, with crescendos plotted like parabolas of expanding size. Not unexpectedly, this contemporary-minded conductor made much of the work’s sharper edges: he had the violins lean on a passing note in the Act III prelude, highlighting a brief semitone clash. There was a startling sonority in the scene of Tristan’s death: the wind and brass choirs were eerily glassy and smooth, almost electronic in timbre. For the most part, though, this was an authentically Romantic reading, not a revisionist one. True to the atmosphere of the production, it had a surging and ebbing natural rhythm.

Read the whole thing.

* * *

 Can we now mark the classical concert reform movement as having reached its absurd stage?

The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music

Jonathon Heyward wears sneakers onstage and embraces genres like jazz as part of his effort to bring more people into the concert hall.

That might encourage Converse-wearers and jazz lovers, but anyone else? 

* * *

Norman Lebrecht asks the musical question: WHEN DID THE ARTS COUNCIL CHANGE ITS TUNE?

The Arts Council was founded in 1946, in the words of Maynard Keynes, ‘to encourage the best British national arts, everywhere, and to do it as far as possible by supporting others rather than by setting up state-run enterprises.’

The arts, said Keynes, ‘owe no vow of obedience.’

The Arts Council, he specified, is no schoolmaster or regulator. ‘How satisfactory it would be if different parts of this country would again walk their several ways as they once did and learn to develop something different from their neighbours and characteristic of themselves.’

Today, Arts Council England defines itself as follows:

‘We are the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our creative vision in ‘Let’s Create…’

How was that unconstitutional overthrow allowed to happen?

ACE needs urgently to be reverted to its founding purpose.

Does the UK even have a constitution?

* * *

JOB OF THE WEEK: PROFESSOR OF COMPOSITION AT £44 AN HOUR

At the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester they are setting their fees low:

Salary Grade: £44.30 to £54.44 per hour (dependent on experience) (pending Pay Review)

Closing date: 12 Noon, Tuesday 6th August 2024

Interview date: Friday 16th August 2024

Applications are invited for a professor (Tutor) in the School of Composition. The appointee will be a composer with extensive professional experience. The appointee will have appropriate teaching experience in higher education, or other specialist composition teaching experience.

While an essential area of experience will be acoustic instrumental and vocal composition, additional and complementary areas of expertise might include electronic music, experimental music, and/or composition for theatre, dance, screen, and video game.

The appointee will be expected to deliver one-to-one composition lessons at undergraduate and postgraduate level, potentially some small group teaching, and may be called on to contribute to auditions, examination, and seminars as required.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Wait, you were serious? Let's put this alongside another salary story:

CLEVELAND FAILURES TAKE HUGE PAY HIKE

Heads of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where teachers have voted no-confidence in the leadership, are doing well out of the crisis.

President Paul Hogle (pictured) added $180,000 to his pay packet, which now tops $700k.

Executive vice-president Scott Harrison now makes quarter of a million.

These figures are Form 990s from fiscal year 2023

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Wait that was also serious?!??!

* * *

It's a weird week when most of the items come from Slipped Disc. On to some envois. The only obvious choice is Tristan:

Here's something unusual: the first movement of the Symphony No. 15 by Shostakovich for piano, violin, cello and percussion trio:

And here is the original orchestral version:

Death and Transfiguration

 Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung in the original German) is a tone poem by Richard Strauss that expresses the dying thoughts of an artist who at the end achieves transcendence.

That piece was completed in 1889. Many years later, in the closing months of the war, April 1945, he completed a somewhat similar work, unlike the previous one, with no overt program. This is his Metamorphosen for 23 strings which he started composing the day after the destruction of the Vienna Opera House.

Here is a clip of an interview with a neurophysiologist and psychiatrist who also studied meditation:

I put these three things together because they, oddly, relate to one another. The experience of listening to the Strauss pieces cannot really be "explained" or captured with musicology or music theory any more than consciousness can be captured by the study of the neurons in the brain, as Roger Walsh explains. As Wittgenstein famously said at the end of the Tractatus:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

But I think Wittgenstein would agree that those things can be expressed in music. We should just not try and talk about them...

UPDATE: If you want a hard, analytic argument for why a pure physicalist explanation of the world is insufficient, here you go:

Today's Listening: Bach, Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen BWV 51

 You can't do any better than listen to a little Bach on a Sunday morning. This is a particularly ecstatic cantata.

Just the Fachs!

Despite over fifty years in the music biz, I discover new things nearly every day. Often they are in the world of opera as I developed an interest in opera relatively late in life and opera is a universe of its own. We are all aware that there are different types of voice--it was in high school choir that I realized I was a bass (or more likely baritone) when they stuck me in that section. As a classical guitarist I accompanied many singers and noticed that they came in different varieties as well, though in choir, they are only divided into sopranos and altos, tenors and basses.

But when you come to opera the basic division of lower and higher voices divides into a host of different types called "Fachs" (in German the plural is Fächer). These relate more to operatic roles and the qualities needed to realize them. From the Wikipedia article:

The German Fach system (German pronunciation: [fax]; literally "compartment" or "subject of study", here in the sense of "vocal specialization") is a method of classifying singers, primarily opera singers, according to the range, weight, and color of their voices. It is used worldwide, but primarily in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries and by repertory opera houses.^[1]

The Fach system is a convenience for singers and opera houses. It prevents singers from being asked to sing roles which they are incapable of performing, or roles for which their vocal timbre is dramatically unsuited. Opera companies keep lists of available singers by Fach so that when they are casting roles for an upcoming production, they do not inadvertently contact performers who would be inappropriate for the part.^[2]

Why is the German system used? Likely because Germany has 80 opera houses and Austria has another thirteen. Mind you, Italy has a similar number and the names of these different voice types are typically from Italian.

Believe it or no, I only heard of the "Fach" system when I stumbled across this very informative YouTube clip:

And for men's voices:

Friday Miscellanea

The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past.

--Asger Jorn, once member of the Situationist International

* * *

Every week I struggle to find interesting and entertaining musical items and try to avoid politics, obituaries and too much doom-saying. It's not easy! The New York Times helps this week with this piece about Gluck: The Composer Who Changed Opera With ‘a Beautiful Simplicity’

Today, Gluck suffers a little from a reputation for formality, even stodginess. But with the period instrument ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée conducted gracefully yet energetically by Emmanuelle Haïm, the Aix double bill was a reminder of the vibrancy of his vision, a majestic yet vigorous directness.

This rare juxtaposition offers an immersion in Gluck’s revolutionary innovations — what became known as his reform of opera, paving the way for Wagner and modernity. By the middle of the 18th century, bloated extravagance was the mainstream of Italian opera, dominated by singers burbling mindless coloratura in an endless parade of arias that barely held together as narrative.

Gluck wrote in 1769 that these abuses had “turned the most sumptuous and beautiful of all spectacles into the most ridiculous and tedious.” To counter this, his aim was “to restrict music to its true function of helping poetry to be expressive and to represent the situations of the plot” — to seek “a beautiful simplicity.”

One of the most exciting developments in French music for the last few decades has been the successful revival of French opera from the 18th century.

* * *

On An Overgrown Path thoughtfully considers that Great music has no independent existence

Changing the music in nuanced ways does not necessarily mean rappers with symphony orchestras. The Amsterdam Sinfonietta's excellent The Mahler Album also includes Mahler's arrangement of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 11 and an intensely moving arrangement for string orchestra of the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony. On other discs the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under artistic director Candida Thompson has recorded arrangements of two other Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich's Second and Fourth Quartets, Wagner's Tristan Prelude, and Berg's Sonata Opus 1. 

Although not as dramatic as Stokowski's Bach transcriptions these interpretations, particularly the quartet transcriptions with their added bass lines, made even this jaded classical nerd hear these masterworks with fresh ears. And in an expression of diversity that goes beyond classical's current myopic and tired obsession with gender diversity, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta is presenting in concert Philip Glass in India pairing Glass' Violin Concerto no. 2 “The Four American Seasons” with Indian ragas. All these are worthwhile case studies in changing the music without throwing baby integrity out with the bath water. (Incidentally, no personal connection with or free CDs and concert tickets, or - heaven forbid - alone payola, from the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, I just happen to be inspired by their work and buy their CDs.)

* * *

From the New York Times: The Nearly Lost Work of a ‘Born Opera Composer’ Returns

Only one copy of “Anna” survives today, housed in the vast collection of the Naples Conservatory. It takes time to read an opera from a manuscript orchestral score. You have to decipher the calligraphy before you can start imagining the sounds, and this one is a particularly hasty job, full of errors and none too clear. But as I picked my way through it, appreciation gradually turned to admiration and eventually to outright amazement. This was the work of a born opera composer. This was the real thing.

Here is one way of putting it. Bel canto operas are structured in individual numbers — cavatina, duet, finale and so forth — and “Anna” is made of 12 such numbers. Not a single one is boring; not one sounds like padding, not one fails to embody and advance the story, not one falls in the wrong place. The 20-something beginner had a master’s grasp of opera as drama.

* * *

While U.S. Companies Struggle, German Opera Houses Move Ahead Ambitiously

Since their closure in 2020 due to the coronavirus, American opera houses have been struggling to regain their financial footing—and their audiences. Most have reduced the number of performances they give and retreated to a repertoire of safe favorites. However, the Metropolitan Opera has taken a different tact by embracing untried contemporary works it hopes will appeal to younger, more diverse audiences. Recently released attendance data suggests that this Met initiative might not be working.

Bolstered by significant governmental support, European companies mostly appear to have returned to a pre-pandemic status quo. A recent visit to Germany found both the Hamburg and Berlin Staatsopers fearlessly mounting challenging operas of questionable popular appeal, but both Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and Modest Mussorgsky’s Chowanschtschina (better known in the U.S. as Khovanshchina) proved to be singular artistic and reasonably popular successes.

I've long been saying that the so-called "crisis" in classical music is mostly a North American phenomenon--things are very different in Europe.

* * *

I am planning on doing a post devoted to Leonard B. Meyer, but this was not the week for that! Coming soon, I hope. The theme this week seems to be opera, so let's listen to some. First up, a Venetian production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.

 Next Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina:

Finally Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi:

That should keep you occupied for the weekend!

Today's Listening: Schoenberg/Handel

 

The Survival of Culture

The strange situation in which a wealthy cultural nexus like San Francisco suddenly finds itself unable to afford the high culture of employing a creative genius like Esa-Pekka Salonen is a valuable indicator of an underlying problem.

When I was employed at McGill University, a high-quality English-language university in French-speaking Montreal, I had an interesting conversation with one of the administrators about who supported McGill. McGill was founded by a Scotsman, but a lot of its support came from Jewish donors. When a Quebec nationalist party was elected in the mid-70s, their aim was to starve English culture institutions like McGill in favor of French-speaking institutions like the Université de Montréal and the Université de Québec à Montréal. They also reshaped the composition of government departments and strove to remake the landscape of business in the province all with the aim of preserving French. One effect of this was a general exodus of English-speaking Jewish Quebeckers to Toronto, thus greatly diminishing the donor base of McGill.

A kind of inverted echo of this is what is currently going on in culture. Clement Greenberg described it as far back as 1939 in an essay titled "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." The relevant paragraph:

The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists' artists, its best poets poets' poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs--our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.

Is this analysis still true? Is the avant-garde the only living culture we now have? Many would disagree, mentioning the popular arts in music, film and so on. Those are what Greenberg would call Kitsch: "popular, commercial art and literature ... pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music ... Hollywood movies, etc." (skipping over forms that are no longer popular--for "Tim Pan Alley" substitute Taylor Swift).

Kitsch is a product of the Industrial Revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in additions to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort.  This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes ... To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide ... Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.

There is a great deal more in Greenburg's essay which is found in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 539.