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!

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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!

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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.

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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

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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.

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 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.