Today's Listening: Bach, Art of Fugue, Sokolov

This is a reminder of just how long Grigory Sokolov has been at the pinnacle of pianistic capability. Recorded in a concert in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1981.

Friday Miscellanea

Pickings this week are exceedingly slim, so we will have just a couple and make up for it with some scrumptious envois.

First up: ‘A New Philosophy of Opera’ Review: Curtain Calls

Operas such as Bizet’s “Carmen” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” with their exotic locales and doomed heroines, have been domesticated by opera producers into familiar, comfortable stories, performed over and over again for the initiated.

In “A New Philosophy of Opera,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon takes the radically opposite view, arguing that the foundational characteristics of opera—collaborative, boundary-crossing, multistranded, experimental—should be embraced in all their messiness and ambiguity. “Rebirth is opera’s true power,” Mr. Sharon writes, and suggests that the art form is infinitely richer and more welcoming than that tired old image suggests.

That has certainly been my experience.

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Trouble in San Francisco: The San Francisco Symphony: When the Ship Hits the Fans

A few things jumped out that I wanted to point out, because it feels like things are really starting to accelerate here. Without a change in course, it’s pretty clear that the S.S. SFS is headed straight toward an iceberg.

When it comes to the SFS meltdown, the media seems to smell metaphorical blood in the bay.

I continue to be struck by the fact that the current leadership of the San Francisco Symphony really has no defenders in any press: local, national, or international. They are getting hammered by all quarters, by all media. And if they were hoping to win over ABC7, that clearly didn’t go well.

Read the whole thing for a thorough and detailed drubbing of the management of the symphony.

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Skipping over a piece on how Taylor Swift would suffer if a new tax on unrealized gains were instituted, I guess that brings us to our musical selections. A Serenade in C by a teenage Mozart was recently discovered in a library in Leipzig. So yesterday the Mozart Stiftung in Salzburg arranged a premiere.

 Here is a fine performance of the E major Violin Partita (just the prelude) by Bach:

Debussy wrote a lot of chansons, which he preferred to call "mélodies." In the Debussy Edition box of CDs, four are devoted to them. I'm sure it is entirely my tin ear, but I have never quite managed to get into them. Here is one in a recent performance.

Actually, that was quite lovely... Speaking of lovely, I have put up at least part of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder before, but it was not a live performance. Here is Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra:

[Good lord, three harps, seven flutes, etc. It is as if Bruckner had written a secular cantata, except for a bigger orchestra! Sorry, I miscounted, eight flutes! Two contrabassoons?!?]

Today's Listening: Ravel

The Piano Concerto in G major with Klaus Mäkelä & Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pd_vQhb87Q

Adventures in Typology

Typology is basically the practice of dividing things up into different groups: things that are blue vs things that are not blue, Baroque vs Classical, harmony vs counterpoint, French vs Russian composers and so on. Just how you divide things up and which things you choose to lump together and which you choose to distinguish are issues with a lot of consequence. I'm not going to get into the weightier social consequences, instead I am going to do some creative typology, just for fun.

Let me postulate that there are two kinds of composers that we may distinguish as "composers who specialize" vs "composers who roam widely." This is not a typology that I have seen anywhere so let's see what we come up with. First of all, more detailed definitions. By "composers who specialize" I mean composers, like Chopin or Scarlatti or Bruckner, who almost exclusively wrote for a single instrument or in a single genre. Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano, Domenico Scarlatti wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord and almost nothing else, Rossini wrote almost exclusively operas and Anton Bruckner's output is largely symphonies with lesser amounts of church music and vocal music. But it is the symphonies that we listen to.

"Composers who roam widely" are ones who wrote for all or most of the important genres of their time, if not all. In this category we find a lot of big names: Mozart wrote everything from dance music and serenades to piano sonatas, to masses, to symphonies, to concertos, to opera and he was superlative at every one of them. J. S. Bach wrote for every genre of his time with the exception of opera and dominated some genres so thoroughly, such as the cantata and fugue, that he singlehandedly caused these to survive into our time. Beethoven wrote commandingly for every genre of his time with the exception of vocal music and opera. He wrote one opera and one song cycle and neither of them is on the same level as his symphonies, concertos and piano sonatas. One especially powerful example of a composer who roamed widely is Arnold Schoenberg. He not only wrote for most current genres, he also wrote for an astonishingly wide range of instrumental forces, from the immense late-romantic Gurre-Lieder, to the eccentric chamber group of Pierrot Lunaire, to the miniature piano pieces of op. 19, to the piano and violin concertos, to the opera Moses und Aron--it is hard to thing of a composer who explored such a wide range of possibility.

Now what does this typology tell us? These differences are probably due to factors coming from two directions: composers respond to demand, so if there is huge demand for solo piano or harpsichord music or opera, the composer will seek to fulfill it. But the individual aptitudes of the composer are equally important: if he or she has little attraction to opera or the symphony, they will likely not produce much repertoire in those areas. We should also consider that the needs of the patron, whether it be nobility, the church or a government body, is also very influential. One final factor is aesthetic: where do the demands of the aesthetic challenges of the time lead the composer?

Is this a useful typology? I don't know, what do the commentators think?

Friday Miscellanea

One of my favorite non-classical performers is Leonard Cohen and it's not because he is Canadian or a Montrealer. The Atlantic takes a stab at it: THE ANTI–ROCK STAR

Leonard Cohen never liked touring. “It’s like being dropped off in a desert,” he once said. “You don’t know where you live anymore.” By the time he hit his late 50s, he hated it so much that, after supporting his 1992 record, The Future, he moved into a Zen monastery and all but retired from the music business. Even after he returned with More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997), a wonderful celebration of his mid-career prime, he refused to cash in with a fresh calendar of live shows. Then, in 2005, he discovered that his bank account had been nearly emptied by his business manager. 

Cohen spent months in rehearsal with a band, fine-tuning his songs as he now wanted to play them—more quietly, more elegantly than ever. In 2008, at 73, he went back out on the road. Other than at a book signing, he hadn’t performed live in more than a decade. But something had happened in the interim.

His audience was larger—lines curving around blocks, scalpers demanding hundreds above face value. More striking, though, was the depth of feeling. Leonard Cohen, master of a cool, ironic, deadpan remove, had come to signify something new that mystified the performers themselves. “I saw people in front of the stage shaking and crying,” a backup singer noted after opening night. “You don’t often see adults cry, and with such violence.”

I remember, before he started touring again, he published a new book of poetry--he was a poet long before he was a musician--and when he did a book-signing in Toronto several thousand showed up, snarling traffic for blocks around.

* * *

Oops, I just missed the 150th birthday of Arnold Schoenberg which was on September 13. Here is a site celebrating it and listing all the concerts of his music going on worldwide: https://www.schoenberg150.at/index.php/en/music-events. There are a great many! Maybe he is finally winning the appreciation he deserves.

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Here is a stream of Gurre-Lieder: https://www.elbphilharmonie.de/en/mediatheque/opening-night-gurre-lieder/994

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Decline comes in many forms: THE STRIPPED-BACK STATE OF THE ARTS IN THE UK.

Today, Northern Ballet is performing Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon without its orchestra.

Two of the nation’s core arts institutions have been stripped bare by Arts Council England.

This is not what Maynard Keynes envisaged.

ACE must be reformed from top to bottom.

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I'm sorry to say this article has personal relevance: Pauses in Production: A Curious Case of Classical Composers. The author kindly lays out the main points:

• Classical music specifically may be more susceptible to longer dry spells due to the genre's larger scale.
• Creativity in composing requires both inspiration and "perspiration" (hard work).
• Composers are susceptible to writer's block when they try to simultaneously brainstorm and self-evaluate.

I'm in a lengthy dry spell myself caused by a multitude of things: lack of other musicians to play with, which has been a perennial source of inspiration for me; lack of venues to stage premieres in; and possibly the most serious, a profound doubt about the value and utility (two different things) of new music--at least as composed by me.

Mozart was said to receive musical ideas from vivid dreams and Brahms credited the Spirit of God. Such supernatural accounts are well received because they add to the “magical” and captivating nature of music. Alternatively, though, cognitive psychology explains great creativity as the result of an expert-level knowledge base (i.e., “genius”), acquired through experience, study, and practice, and from exceptional mental openness and flexibility by which composers connect and combine what they know to create new versions of knowledge. As human beings, composers need subjective reasons—“inspiration,” if you will—to motivate them to use their acquired musical knowledge and motivate them to think openly and flexibly. Ultimately I think great creativity in composing always requires both “inspiration” and effort. In my 2022 book Psychology for Musicians, I quoted Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winning contemporary classical composer Jennifer Higdon, who talked about teaching composition to others: “Students often ask me, ‘Should I wait until I am inspired?’ No, you should be sitting there writing every day to get the inspiration in the first place”

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This turned out to be very clickbaity: Welcome to Shorworld

A hedge fund multimillionaire turned composer. A businessman with apparent links to the Russian state. A cohort of superstar performers all too happy to look the other way. Inside classical music’s large, lucrative parallel world.

Lots of interesting looking articles, but all behind a paywall. And perhaps just a tad dubious...

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They Said Her Music Was Too Exotic. Now She’s a Classical Star

Ortiz, 59, who will be Carnegie Hall’s composer in residence this season, has spent her life channeling the sounds and sensibilities of Latin America into classical music. For most of the past 40 years, this has been a lonely pursuit. Teachers said her works were too exotic. Critics bristled at her sprawling sonorities. Top orchestras passed her over in doling out commissions.

But now, after a series of big breaks, Ortiz is thriving.

* * * 

First a song by Leonard Cohen:

I sometimes think they should have given that Pulitzer Prize in Literature to Leonard Cohen. Do we need some more Schoenberg? Well, of course. Here is an excerpt from Pierrot Lunaire with Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Next, a piece by Gabriela Ortiz. I can only find excerpts from her piece Téenek:

That's a pretty diverse set of envois. 

"It's a performance, not a recital!"

This is an item I considered for the Friday Miscellanea but decided it was too trivial. After reading Ann Althouse's post, perhaps I was wrong: "Excuse me. It’s a performance; it’s not a recital. Respect the audience. Respect me." The post refers to a piece in the New York Times about an incident during a performance of Tosca.

It was the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at a theater in Seoul, and the South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to enthusiastic applause, was singing a rare encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” one of the opera’s most beloved arias.

Then the unexpected happened: The celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu, who was singing the title role in a performance on Sunday, stormed onstage and demanded that he stop, according to local media reports and accounts by audience members.

“Excuse me,” she said, signaling to the orchestra to pause.

When the orchestra continued playing, she also refused to stop. “It’s a performance; it’s not a recital,” Gheorghiu said. “Respect the audience. Respect me.”

Althouse comments:

She's right about encores. They interfere with the immersion in the theatrical narrative. But so do breaking character and storming off. Both are pretty amusing though, I would think. But how can the audience reengage with a love story between Cavaradossi and Tosca when Kim and Gheorghiu are in hot conflict? I don't know. Maybe that's amusing too.

What do you say — encores or no encores? At least it's obvious that there should be agreement on the subject before the performance starts... unless this whole thing is a publicity stunt. It got me interested in Gheorghiu. Was that the point?

It is an interesting question. In the 18th and 19th century encores were very common during opera performances. But today they mostly are found in solo recitals with an occasional one in orchestral performances especially when there is a concerto soloist. One interesting aspect of opera commentary is the related question, do the characters in opera realize they are singing? Some critics think that, for dramatic reasons, they do not. In other words, if the performer repeats an aria as an encore, they in some way break character as the fact that this is singing and not just talking is suddenly to the fore. Well, and of course Gheorghiu radically broke character by storming onstage and asking the orchestra to stop playing.

One commentator at Althouse says:

Encores and standing ovations have long since been out of control.

Which is not true, of course. Encores in many places, especially other than major concert halls, have been diminishing steadily over the years. In the 70s I can recall attending concerts with eight encores (Andrés Segovia) and seven encores (Nigel Rogers), but nowadays the only artist in that league is Grigory Sokolov. Other than him, we see great recitals followed by one, or perhaps two encores. This is the opposite of being out of control. 

 

 

Friday Miscellanea

It's no surprise that most, if not all, of the marketed aids to "creativity" are really rather useless. But the reasons why are somewhat mysterious. I think it is something akin to what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category-mistake." Any pedagogical attempt to teach creativity is going to run into the problem that creativity is mostly about details and how they might form wholes whereas pedagogy is nearly always about general principles--bottom up versus top down. I say "nearly" always because in the area of teaching with while I am most familiar, private instrumental instruction, for much of the time you are dealing with details which is why it takes so long. But in the familiar models of learning, what goes on the blackboard and ultimately in the test is the principle--even if it is manifested in particular examples.

Which brings us to an article in The New Yorker: How Should We Create Things? The whole thing is worth reading, but here is a sample:

I’ve listened to music recorded or produced by Eno nearly every day for decades. He’s well known for coining the term “ambient music” (his “Discreet Music,” from 1975, is a landmark in the genre) and for working on career-defining records by Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and others; for the past few decades, he’s also made “generative” music, in which computer programs work within parameters he’s set to create compositions that unfold infinitely. More broadly, though, he’s developed a recognizable approach to creativity that’s cerebral, chance-driven, hands-off, impersonal, collaborative, meditative, ecological, extended in time, and open to accident. In the high-pressure environment of a recording studio, where every hour costs money, he introduces layers of abstraction, randomness, and play.

How Eno's approach helps is that it tends to short-circuit the idea of general principles in favor of accidental discovery.

As a writer, I’m more of a maker; I enjoy the exacting selection of words, the endless polishing of sentences. But, as a listener, I enjoy Eno’s world, and every now and then I try to enter it in my writing life. Many years ago, my wife gave me “Oblique Strategies” as a gift, and I use it from time to time while I’m writing. As I’m mired in endless revisions, it’s nice to be told to “define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor,” or to “go slowly all the way round the outside.” In some cases, the questions in the deck can directly inspire approaches in a piece of writing: “What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate”; “What is the reality of the situation?”; “Into the impossible.”

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And here's something on inspiration: Max Richter on the Music That Made Him. As this is mostly an illustrated list of influential music at different ages, it is impossible to summarize so you will just have to go read for yourself. But here is an introduction:

Max Richter spent his early years living in a cramped apartment near Hamelin, Germany, where his parents would play Bach and Beatles LPs on a cheap record player that popped out of a suitcase. When he was three, they moved to the English market town of Bedford and he quickly shed any evidence of his remote past life. “It wasn’t that easy being a German kid at an English school,” the composer, 58, recalls. “I was bullied a lot. It was ‘Sieg Heil’ and all of that. So I basically ditched the whole German identity, on the outside.” In himself, however, Richter naturally reconciled that dual identity, just as he has the allegiances to classical, ambient, pop, and folk music that make him the musical polyglot he is today.

I notice that we share a few albums!

* * *

An interesting take on Strawberry Fields Forever.

Lennon himself once said of the track, “‘Strawberry Fields’ was psychoanalysis set to music.” So, let’s psychoanalyse for a second.

The song is coloured by a sense of uncertainty. “Always, no sometimes, think it’s me,” he sings, or, “I think I know, I mean a yes / But it’s all wrong / That is, I think I disagree.” Throughout the song, Lennon can’t figure out what’s real, what’s right, what’s up and what’s down.

Perhaps this is Lennon’s attempt at grappling with his own difficult, complex and traumatic childhood. As a young boy, he never knew if he was coming or going, which parent he’d be staying with, who loved him most, where he would be living, and so on. There was so much uncertainty and confusion in his young life that maybe this trippy, unsure track is a reflection of that as Lennon crawled back into his youthful hiding spot and still found that same rocky sense of the world. Who knows, I’m not a therapist.

For a close look at the music, consult Walter Everett, The Beatles As Musicians.

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Ancient classical texts are still hugely influential despite the fact that 99% of ancient texts are lost: Doom scrolling

Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.

Because of new computer technology we might soon be able to read some of the vast library of ancient scrolls carbonized at Herculaneum:

On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap.

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Every era re-creates Mozart in their own image: Mozart's God.

It’s too early to say, of course, but it seems equally unlikely that it’s the Mozart we’ll see in the forthcoming Sky reboot of Amadeus—the 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play based on a playlet written in 1832 by Alexander Pushkin. We’re promised a Mozart who has been “playfully re-imagined”; Paul Bettany has been cast as Salieri and Will Sharpe (from The White Lotus) has been announced in the title role. It will, we’re assured, be “fresh, intimate and irreverent.”

That’s no great surprise in the year 2024, though the Mozart revealed in his music and letters is—in his own way—deeply reverent. In fairness to the creators of this new drama, it’s true that every era since 1791 has recreated Mozart in its own image. You might say that each generation gets the Mozart it deserves. In the spring of 2013, the Mozarteum in Salzburg mounted an exhibition at the city’s Mozart-Wohnhaus containing every documented portrait that is known to exist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and quite a few with rather shakier credentials.

It was eye-opening in all sorts of ways. Who knew that the famous painting of a bewigged Mozart in a red coat dates from nearly thirty years after his death? One portrait whose provenance is unquestioned—the one painted by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, and said by Mozart’s widow Constanze to be the best likeness—seemed almost drab by comparison: a small, half-finished image of a quizzical-looking man with bulging eyes, dun-colored hair, and a hint of an incipient double-chin.

It's a substantial article, probably worth reading.

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Excellent review of a Proms concert: BBCSO/Peltokoski/Kopatchinskaja review – conducting sensation reveals what the fuss is about

A lurching gear change saw Patricia Kopatchinskaja go head-to-head with Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, a work she introduced as “unplayable”, unless of course the violinist is endowed with an extra finger (for the record, she isn’t). Nevertheless, she took the plunge, playing with elfin grace and demonic fury in equal measure, her body shimmying with sheer delight in a work she clearly adores.

Kopatchinskaja managed to convey both the music’s inner logic and elusive spirit, guiding the listener along even the thorniest of paths. Playing with exceptional sweetness, especially in the upper register, and relishing each of Schoenberg’s motivic sidesteps, she unearthed several waltzes, a tango and a militaristic march along the way as she skittered and swerved through one of the toughest nuts in the repertoire. Peltokoski was a thoughtful partner, clarifying some knotty textures, before joining Kopatchinskaja in a pair of hilarious encores, the second requiring him to quack like a duck (you needed to have been there).

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Lots of great stuff this week, making choosing suitable envois easy.  First, here is that Brian Eno/David Bowie collaboration:

Next Max Richter On The Nature of Daylight:

And that incredibly scandalous canon by Mozart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9MN2WeqFY8

Finally Kopatchinskaja and Schoenberg:

Today's Listening: Bach, Sviatoslav Richter

There are a lot of recordings of this monument of music and as a Canadian I guess I am supposed to prefer that of Glenn Gould which is certainly fine. I also quite like Friedrich Gilda's and that of Grigory Sokolov. But this recording by Sviatoslav Richter is extraordinary.

Today's Listening: Handel

I rarely put up clips of Handel here, mea culpa, but this one is just lovely. Thomas Dunford and a new, to me, soprano, Ana Vieira Leite. Special treat for guitarists: harmonics on the theorbo.

 

Situational Aesthetics

 Victor Burgin (b. 1941) is a conceptual artist and theorist. Due perhaps to his academic background and extensive teaching experience, he is able to conceptualize the approach of artists more clearly than most. Some quotations, all taken from his essay "Situational Aesthetics" re-printed in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 894, originally published in 1969. His approach owes a lot to phenomenology.

Accepting the shifting and ephemeral nature of perceptual experience, and if we accept that both real and conceptual objects are appreciated in an analogous manner, then it becomes reasonable to posit aesthetic objects which are located partly in real space and partly in psychological space. Such a placing of aesthetic objects however involves both a revised attitude towards materials and a reversal of function between these materials and their context.

Cage is hopeful in claiming, 'We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use'; attitudes towards materials in art are still informed largely by the laws of conspicuous consumption, and aesthetic commodity hardware continues to pile while utilitarian objects, whose beauty might once have been taken as conclusive proof of the existence of God, spill in inconceivable profusion from the cybernated cornucopias of industry.

Perceptual fields are not experienced as objects in themselves. Perception is a continuum, a precipitation of event fragments decaying in time, above all a process.

Visual information concerning duration is gained, as it is gained when we observe motion, from observations of shift in perceptual field. In travelling past an object we are presented with an apparent configurational evolution from which we may abstract a number of discrete states. Comparison of expired configurations with the configuration of the moment tells us we are in motion relative to the object.

Time, in the perception of exterior events, is the observation of succession linked with muscular-navigational memories -- a visceral identification with change ... All behaviour has these space-time parameters in common. To distinguish, therefore, between 'arts of space' and 'arts of time' is literally unrealistic. The misconception is based in materialism, it springs, again, from a focus upon the object rather than upon the behaviour of the perceiver.

Vertical structuring, based in hermetic, historically given concepts of art and its cultural role, has given way to a literally proliferating complex of activities which are united only in their common definition as products of artistic behaviour.  

Art intended as propaganda is almost invariably both aesthetically tedious and politically impotent. The process-oriented attitudes described here are not intentionally iconoclastic and one should be suspicious of easy comparisons with Dada.

One might note that while one's experience of a painting is time-oriented in the sense that it unfolds over a span of time, contrary-wise in making theoretical plans of the structure of a piece of music, one is converting or reducing a time-oriented experience into a synoptic, spatial view.

Friday Miscellanea

Another interesting post from On An Overgrown Path: Classical music has a lot to learn

In June and July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin performed at camps for “displaced persons” – Holocaust survivors – including outside where the demolished Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had stood. He was deeply shocked by what he saw; yet in 1947 he returned to Germany to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the recently de-Nazified Wilhelm Furtwängler. Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in post-World War II Germany, explaining that he did so in order to support the rehabilitation of German music and to help heal the spirit of the German people. 

My header photo shows Menuhin playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in 1966 with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the now fashionably-reviled Herbert von Karan. The Jerusalem Cinematheque - Israel Film Archive describes that collaboration as an example of how "how music can still contribute to reconciliation today".

That's Herbert von Karajan, of course. Another great artist that participated in the use of classical music to heal the wounds of war was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau who started his career touring prisoner of war camps for German soldiers.

When he was drafted into the Wehrmacht during World War II in 1943, tending horses on the Russian Front, Fischer-Dieskau had just completed his secondary school studies and one semester at the Berlin Conservatory. He served in Grenadier Regiment 146 of the 65th Infantry Division south of Bologna in the winter of 1944–45 and entertained his comrades at soldiers' evenings behind the lines.

He was captured in Italy in 1945 and spent two years as an American prisoner of war. During that time, he sang Lieder in POW camps to homesick German soldiers. 

 * * *

The Guardian reviews an interesting Proms concert: Prom 58: Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä review – electrifying music-making from an elite team

The programme, at once crowd-pleasing and satisfyingly meaty, was about as Parisian as they come: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune; Stravinsky’s Petrushka, written for Paris’s Ballets Russes; and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, one of this orchestra’s calling-cards. Each was played with the kind of care and technical precision that might seem merely polished in the context of a recording but was electrifying in the hall.

That's a program I would love to have heard--mostly for Petrushka which I revere, but have never heard in concert.

* * *

I said the other day that opera is the most fantastically expensive art form ever--and symphony concerts are a close second. Here is an article that gives some details as to why: San Diego Symphony set for new era, after $125 million-plus concert hall redesign

To improve the sound quality of music in the hall, changes have been made from beneath the stage on up, including removing the outdated HVAC system that had been in the basement and caused distracting vibrations and mechanical humming for musicians during quiet instrumental passages. The hall’s new, state-of-the-art HVAC system — which is suspended between the ceiling of Jacobs Music Center and the parking lot above it — is virtually inaudible in the hall.

The stage is new and so are all the seats for concertgoers, nine rows of which have been removed. The rear of the stage now has a new two-level choral terrace for performances that team the orchestra with vocal ensembles. For singing-free concerts, the terrace will provide up to 90 additional seats that will put audience members this close to the performers on stage.

The entire stage floor has been replaced with a white oak hardwood floor designed with musical resonance in mind. Acoustical tuning chambers have been designed and installed on the stage walls and rear walls throughout the hall. Each multilayered wall now has exterior floor-to-ceiling metal mesh, sometimes known as banker’s wire, to additionally improve the sound quality.

The difference between hearing classical music in a well-designed space and in ad hoc places like churches, gymnasiums, plain old halls and, shudder, pubs (something recommended by those trying to make classical music more "relevant") is enormous.

* * *

Opera Philadelphia will offer all tickets for $11 all season long

The first production in which this ticketing model will occur will be in September for the American premiere of “The Listeners,” by Philadelphia-area composer Missy Mazzoli (“Breaking the Waves,” 2016). Costanzo said it will be the most expensive opera the company has ever attempted.

The opera is about a band of people who experience a mysterious and unidentifiable sound. The group then becomes vulnerable to the proclamations of a cult-like leader, which Costanzo says will resonate with the current election cycle.

It’s an ambitious production, particularly for a company still recovering from debt incurred during the pandemic, which forced Opera Philadelphia to postpone productions to future seasons and cancel its season-opening festival.

“When I took office on June 1, I did a lot of unraveling of the budget and I quickly realized that we had not only unpaid bills, but we had a cash shortfall,” Costanzo said. “We had to raise a lot of money quickly.”

Which they did:

He said he has raised $7 million in about 10 weeks, which allowed the company to settle its debts. Costanzo attributes the success of his fundraising, in part, to the new “pick-your-price” ticketing model.

“That fundraising is not only subsidizing this ticketing model, but a lot of it is inspired by this ticketing model,” he said. “Once you step into that opera house and you see demographically how different it feels because of pick-your-price, it’s going to inspire not only individuals to give, but I think the civic action will inspire corporations and foundations.”

I just hope that they aren't paying the musicians minimum wage... 

* * *

 And while we are on the topic, WHO’S MAKING HOW MUCH AT THE NY PHIL

The accounts are in for the fiscal year ending August 2023, and here are the top earners:

Music director Van Zweden (via Bajada Productions) … $1,525,711

Executive director Deborah Borda … $1,317,344 plus $400,000 bonus

Incoming CEO Gary Ginstling … $117,262 plus $55,000 bonus

Concertmaster Frank Huang … $361,713 plus $548,139 in bonuses

Principal oboe Liang Wang (pictured) … $253,524 plus $326,520

Principal clarinet Anthony McGill $394,715.

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What I'm reading:

The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Joseph and Henderson, eds.)

 Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel, Milorad Pavić

The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, (Harrison and Wood, eds.)

And on deck: The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (Williamson, editor)

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Now for some listening. First up, Bruckner, Symphony No 1, Paavo Järvi, Frankfurt Radio Symphony

An early performance by a young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

Mozart, Karajan, Menuhin:

Finally, Mäkelä conducting an excerpt from Petrushka by Stravinsky with the Orchestra de Paris:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1IKLLmIhEI&list=RDh1IKLLmIhEI&start_radio=1

Today's Listening: Couperin

I'm not sure you could find more airy, graceful, transcendent piano-playing anywhere. Sokolov, Couperin.

Today's Listening

The pleasures of listening are many and varied, but there are some wide, general categories. One of these is the unique and rare pleasure of hearing something so new and unusual you have little to compare it to. This is a pleasure associated with new music. Some examples I can recall: the first time I heard one of the piano-roll compositions of Conlon Nancarrow; the first time I heard Steve Reich (it was the DDG recording of Drumming); the first time I heard music by Arvo Pärt.

Another and contrasting pleasure is that of hearing a piece or group of pieces that you have heard hundreds if not thousands of times before--and the pleasure is enriched and deepened every time. This is what we experience when we listen to some of the music of J. S. Bach in particular. I have been listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier for some fifty years and it just gets better.