Friday Miscellanea

The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past.

--Asger Jorn, once member of the Situationist International

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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!