Record of the Week

I know I should be writing about Benjamin Britten as it is his 100th anniversary and all. But I always hate doing what I am supposed to do! So I will wait on that until the dust clears. Looking around, though, there sure is a lot of journalism about him this week, especially at the Guardian.

What else is going on in music journalism? Norman Lebrecht has his album of the week up at Sinfini "cutting through classical" Music (I just love quoting their slogan as it so captures their clumsy efforts to be cool). This week is on what looks to be a quite serious album by the Zehetmair Quartet. If you put Beethoven, Bruckner, Hartmann and Holliger all on the same CD you are certainly serious about something. A good review would try to tell us what exactly, along with impressions of the playing and, in the case of unfamiliar music, maybe something about the pieces.

Alas, we are dealing with journalism here, I'm sorry to say. I'm sure Mr. Lebrecht can do much better, but either the editorial policy or the sheer word-count limitation seems to have prevented that. Instead what we get is the usual strained attempt to be hip which seems to consist in writing in such a way as to try to appeal to people who don't know and don't like classical music and who spend most of their time listening to Kanye West. I'll leave you to doing your own Googling, but his latest features him pretending to ride a motorcycle in front of a screen showing landscapes of the Southwest while Kim Kardashian writhes seductively on his gas tank.

Back to the album. It certainly sounds interesting because of the repertoire. We all know the Beethoven, op. 135. Presumably because it was his last quartet, Lebrecht describes it as "unflickering in its glare at approaching death". I'm not sure I could think of a more ludicrously inappropriate description of a piece in which Beethoven goes out of his way to recapture the classical elegance and charm of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart. No glaring in this piece. The idiocy of always writing about a composer's last piece as if it were somehow a confrontation with Death is evident I hope? Composers probably no more know that their last piece is going to be their last piece than most of us know when we have eaten our last piece of toast.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who died in 1963, is not well-known outside of Europe where he is admired particularly for his eight symphonies. He did write two string quartets of which the one recorded here is the second, written just at the end of WWII. I did find a recording of the piece on YouTube; the performers are the Pellegrini Quartet. Blogger refuses to embed the clip, but here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu9k3SSTf9U

Just listening to a bit of the beginning, I am fascinated. Lebrecht calls the music "intimate and intense" and he is quite right! I look forward to listening to more of Hartmann's music.

How about the Bruckner quartet? Now this is odd: YouTube must hate me today as they also refuse to embed the one and only clip of the Bruckner quartet. Here it is played by the Filarmonica Quartet from Novosibirsk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKy7jfCQXb0

Will we have any luck with the Holliger? No, because the Zehetmair Quartet just commissioned it. But here is part of his String Quartet No. 1:

Lebrecht sums up by saying that this is "a bold and intelligent album, played with passion: a signature project." I'm sure it is, though I wonder what a "signature project" is exactly? But let me add that, at $33.69 US at Amazon, this is also a very expensive album though it seems there are two discs.

Let's end with Beethoven's Quartet, op. 135, smiling at Haydn and Mozart and emphatically not glaring at death. Here is the Borodin Quartet:

Mozart: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C major, K 467

The slow movement from this concerto was used in the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan which has given the concerto its nickname. Oddly, this seems to be the only Mozart concerto, apart from the "Coronation" Concerto, K 537, with a nickname. It was completed on March 9, 1785, less than a month after the D minor concerto and is as sunny as that one is stormy.

Someone mentioned to me the other day about how Mozart was depicted in the movie Amadeus, as an infantile goof. There is probably some evidence for that in his letters to his sister. But what they failed to depict in the movie, possibly because it may have seemed unbelievable, were his astonishing musical gifts. Mozart could well have been the most gifted musician to have ever lived. In the movie, there is really only one scene that hints at it: the one when he meets the Emperor and Salieri for the first time. Salieri has written a trivial little march to commemorate the occasion and plays it as Mozart enters. Mozart then sits down and recomposes it, on the spot, improving it in several ways. (Actually, he just decorates it a bit and changes a harmony--but I'm assuming that this is because it wasn't actually the historical Mozart doing the improving.)

The movie Mozart just scoffs at a little deceptive cadence--which is actually one of the better harmonic effects--and then turns it into a more dynamic piece with a little "Mannheim rocket". So much for the movie...

In reality, the historic Mozart did things that strain our credulity. When visiting Rome with his father in April 1770, age fourteen, Mozart attended a service at the Sistine Chapel at which a very famous Miserere by Gregorio Allegri was sung. This piece, dating from 1630, was kept for the sole use of the Sistine Chapel choir and no-one was allowed to take the score away or make copies on pain of excommunication! The piece is between twelve and fourteen minutes in length and begins with a five-part texture:

There are sections with a single voice, but also other sections in NINE parts! Now here is the thing, as described in letters, after hearing the piece sung on a Wednesday, Mozart simply wrote it out when he got home. The whole thing. On the Friday, when it was performed again, he went back and corrected a couple of passages. This is a simply astonishing feat of musical attention and memory. For comparison, the highest-level ear-training students at McGill are asked to take down short passages from an orchestral work of a page or two. They are allowed multiple hearings.

Here is a performance of the Miserere:

Other astonishing things that Mozart seems to have done is write a whole sonata for violin and piano in an hour. He didn't have time to actually write down the piano part, so he had to play it, well, not from memory exactly, but certainly from his head. On another occasion he didn't have time to write down the piano part to a concerto, so when he performed it for the first time with orchestra, he worked from just a few scribbled sketches. Has anyone else in music history ever done things like this? I very much doubt it!

But back to the Concerto, K. 467. It opens with an eight-measure sentence divided between strings and winds:

And the winds finish the phrase with a half cadence:

Then the last four measures are repeated, but this time altered to end with a full cadence that dovetails with the opening.

I won't put up all the themes of this first movement because, frankly, there are just too many! Unlike Haydn, who often found a single, simple theme to be all he needed for a whole movement, Mozart has a cornucopia of themes. He controls the form brilliantly by means of his harmonic structure, grandly and solidly in C major, but the themes just seem to grow like wildflowers. The piano enters with this little theme:

The orchestra comes back in with the opening theme under that trill. But there are lots of other themes. For example, as soon as the modulation to the dominant, G major, is firmly in place, the piano immediately has this new theme in the dominant minor:

And there are lots of other themes, some of which return in the recapitulation while others don't.

The second movement Andante in the traditional subdominant of F major, is unique with this hauntingly beautiful texture:

Malcom Bilson with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner have a particularly lovely performance:

The last movement, an Allegro vivace assai, begins with this energetic eight-measure period:

Now let's hear the whole piece. Here is Murray Perahia with the English Chamber Orchestra:

Miscellanea

Sting, performing "Mack the Knife" at a benefit for the experimental theater LaMaMa on Thursday night:

Notice that he has the excellent posture of a classical guitarist. That even looks like a 19th century guitar.

How to destroy an orchestra.

New music and its audiences.

Of course the thing to realize is that the problem with new music and its lack of an audience probably has more to do with ideology than the music itself. Mozart and Haydn strove to please and entertain their listeners above all and their music still has a lot of listeners. New music composers are seeking new, experimental sounds and don't have much of an audience.

Speaking of pleasing the listeners, the biggest-earning musician of 2013 was...



wait for it...


Madonna!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/11/19/the-worlds-highest-paid-musicians-2013/

I can't quite figure out what is pleasing about Madonna's music or stage show--or anyone else on the list for that matter--but I guess that's just me. (Thanks to a commentator for sending me that link.)

How to destroy music education.

How to get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice! Just don't do it at home.

Hmm, well all that was a bit pessimistic, wasn't it? So let's end with something up. The second movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 94 in G major:

Don't miss my update to the busking post...

Yesterday's post updated with photos.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2013/11/let-my-people-busk.html

"Let My People Busk!"

Busking, extemporaneous performance of music in public spaces, is probably the most precarious, least prestigious form of musical performance. When you walk onto a concert stage, even if the hall is only partly full, at least you know the people paid to hear you play. If you just go down to some public space, you never know what to expect.

Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht we have the story of one busker, a violinist, who went to court to win the right to busk in Ocean City, Maryland. Here is a sample of his playing:

In North America what you mostly hear on the streets are pop music buskers, scratching out a meager existence. But in Europe, at least when I was there, the scene was much more various. In Freiburg I heard a man declaiming avant-garde theater. In Paris, a small string chamber orchestra was playing Mozart in the La Bastille subway station. In Milan a young fellow was miming conducting an orchestra with recorded accompaniment. I have also heard a cellist play Britten and a violinist play Bach on the street in Montreal. And everywhere there was the ubiquitous Peruvian folk group with very loud drum and panpipes.

I know all this because I spent one fascinating summer busking with a flute player in Montreal and all over Europe: Paris, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Lucerne, Milan, Lucca, Verona, Siena, San Gimignano, Ferrara and Florence. Our repertoire was the greatest hits of classical music: Mozart, Puccini, Fauré, Beethoven, and so on. But the two biggest tunes were the slow movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo and the anonymous Spanish Romance. I also played a few guitar solos like Asturias and Recuerdos de la Alhambra.

Florence was really the Mecca, at least for our kind of busking. We had the whole setup: our own generator, lights, amplifiers, stands, even a simple kind of formal costume: white shirts, black pants. And we had a show, or at least the flute-player did. But the tune that would really make people stop and listen was the Aranjuez. Here is the tune; just imagine it with flute and guitar:

Florence was ideal because every summer it is filled with the special kind of tourist that is attracted to culture. They were surrounded by great artworks and we provided the classical soundtrack. Every evening we ensconced ourselves in the Piazza Signoria next to the Uffizi gallery and played our music. Believe it or not, we could get up to five hundred people, all standing, transfixed by the music. How we made money was both by collecting change and by selling recordings: cassettes and CDs. Some nights we made over $1000 US. We were undoubtedly the most professional buskers in the area. We even had a permit from the Florence municipality which came in handy one night.

I was playing my solo, Recuerdos de la Alhambra, with a large, enraptured audience when a blue Carabinieri jeep nosed its way through the crowd and stopped right in front! Here is the music I was playing. UPDATE: I replaced Pepe Romero's performance with my own:

So, here comes the jeep, with revolving lights. I stop playing as a young woman Carabinieri gets out and tells us we can't be playing here. We tell her we have a permit and I get it out of my bag. She looks it over and says to the officer in charge, with some amazement, "they have a permit!" All being in order, they drive away to the boos of the crowd. So then we played some Verdi!

There was one thing I loved about busking: it was a very pure activity. You never had any doubt that every person standing there was doing so just because they wanted to hear you. And as soon as you played something boring, they would leave...

I don't have time right now, but later on I will put up some photos from this tour taken in Strasbourg.

UPDATE: As promised, some photos of the busking tour of Europe. Alas, no photos of the carabinieri (they probably would have shot the photographer!). All these were taken in Strasbourg, in front of the cathedral. First, from left to right, myself, a member of the audience who was helping us play the "Toy" Symphony and Robert O'Callaghan, the flute-player (and the fellow who had worked out, over many years, all the tricks of busking):

"Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in E flat?"

"Now what was that middle bit?"

Notice the clothespins clamping the music down in case of wind.

The mellow charms of music...

Mozart: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D minor, K. 466

Richard Taruskin echoes many others in making the point that great works of music, such as the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven, have a reception history that colors the way we hear them. I suppose that is true, though I resist the idea that we are helpless victims of this history. I like to believe that every time we listen to a piece of music we have the opportunity at least to hear it afresh. Perhaps this comes from my experience as a performer. After all, life would be very dull if every time you played a particular piece it was the same as the last time you played it.

Sometimes the reputation of a piece of music almost appears to overshadow it. In the case of the Mozart D minor concerto, it seems to make Charles Rosen almost incoherent:

It is not a work, of course, that is much discussed (it excites no controversy) or much imitated; nor is it the favorite Mozart concerto of many musicians, just as no one's favorite Leonardo is the Mona Lisa. Like the G minor Symphony and Don Giovanni, the D minor Concerto may be said to transcend its own excellence. [The Classical Style, p. 228]

What does it even mean to say that a piece might "transcend its own excellence"? But Rosen also makes some useful observations. He notes the brilliant way the climax of the first movement is set up with a series of finely controlled rhythmic transitions. He also comments that:

No concerto before K. 466 exploits so well the latent pathetic nature of the form--the contrast and struggle of one individual voice against many.

This in particular had a large influence on the way Beethoven approached the piano concerto. This was the Mozart concerto that he chose to perform himself and he even composed a cadenza for it. It was certainly his favorite Mozart concerto.

This was one of the pieces that established Mozart's reputation in the 19th century and later as one of, if not the, great composer. Ironically, given how rarely Mozart used the minor mode, it is precisely those pieces that later generations idolized. The minor mode for Mozart was an extreme and one that, for the Romantics, established him as a Romantic composer. In the view of near-contemporaries like E. T. A. Hoffman, Mozart and Beethoven were the first Romantics.

The first movement opens with an intense and energetic theme with syncopated accompaniment:

The piano, when it enters, avoids all the rhythmic instability of that opening and presents an entirely new theme with octave leaps:

The slow movement, a Romance in B flat major (the flat submediant), opens with the piano solo:

But there is a dramatic middle section in G minor that reflects the tragic mood of the first movement:

A number of years ago Malcolm Bilson, accompanied by John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists, did a very fine recording of all the Mozart concertos and luckily, at least for now, this one is available on YouTube.

We should be grateful for that wonderful performance which is undoubtedly infinitely superior to that of the first performance on February 10, 1785. Mozart's father, Leopold, arrived in Vienna that very afternoon and tells us (in a letter to Wolfgang's sister Nannerl) that the orchestral parts were being copied as he arrived and that Mozart did not actually have the opportunity to "play through" (i.e. rehearse) the last movement! We tend to forget that most performances in the 18th century were given after only one rehearsal--and sometimes less! There is a letter by Haydn requesting that a new symphony of his be rehearsed at least once before the concert.

So, as Taruskin has pointed out in a number of places, the irony of very faithful (Werktreue, in German) performances such as the one above, with Malcolm Bilson playing on a reproduction of Mozart's own concert fortepiano and the whole orchestra playing on original instruments, is that the final result is almost certainly nothing like the original premiere!

Well, pace Charles Rosen, we seem to have found something to discuss about this concerto after all...

Not Listening to the Performance

I was just reading an essay by Richard Taruskin about various "historically informed" or "authentic" performances of the symphonies of Beethoven. Those scare quotes have been specially applied by Taruskin to indicate not that these performances are not "historically informed" but rather that the whole notion is questionable. But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

No, what occurred to me is that Taruskin gets rather more worked up about spurious justifications for this or that performance practice than I would. And I was wondering why. And that reminded me of an occasion when I said to someone that I don't actually go to the concert for the performance so much as for the repertoire. Huh? I mean that, assuming the performance is reasonably accurate and not too odd interpretively, I am quite prepared to largely ignore it. What I am listening to is the piece of music, not to the performance. Huh again?

Frankly, much of the time, I'm not so terribly interested in the particular performance, but much more interested in the piece. This is why the most important factor for me in deciding what concerts to attend is the program even more than who is playing it. I am perfectly happy to listen to Murray Perahia play Mozart concertos--or Maurizio Pollini or Grigory Sokolov or Mitsuko Uchida or lots of others. I find they all do a pretty good job in different ways. What I am really interested in is the concerto itself and how it is received by the audience. What did the composer do and how well did it work?

I did not come to this idea right away, it took quite a few decades. When I was principally a performer I was deeply interested in my own performances and deeply worried about them, but as time went on I was less and less interested in other artists' interpretations. Now I'm really just interested in the piece and as long as the interpretation does not seriously obscure the piece, I'm ok with it.

This might relate to something I ran across in another Taruskin essay where he talks about the problem of just what is a piece of music anyway? Is the "Moonlight" Sonata the published score? If so, which score? The original manuscript? A printed edition? Which one? Is it the performance of that score? If so, which one? Beethoven's (which we don't have)? Horowitz? Wilhelm Kemp? Artur Schnabel? Pollini? Lang Lang? Is it just a silly question? Surely the "Moonlight" Sonata, or any piece is, as Taruskin points out, an "intentional object", something that does not exist on a particular piece of paper or in a particular set of sound waves, but as a kind of object in our imaginations. The score is how we create a performance, but any one performance is simply an instance of the ideal object. This is all rather Platonic, isn't it?

So when I go to a concert, I go with the goal of hearing a version of that ideal object. The performance can make that more or less easy, but the performance is not the main thing I am listening for. Let me give an example. Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 in C major audaciously opens with three cadences, all three of which are in the wrong key! Well, actually the second is in the correct key, but it is deceptive. I wrote about this here. What I am listening for is how Beethoven is fooling us with those cadences. As long as the orchestra delivers them reasonably intact, I'm happy. For me, it really isn't about how lovely the tone of the flute is, or the violin's vibrato or the crispness of the conductor's beat. It is about the harmony. So that's why I am listening to the piece more than the performance...

Here is that movement:

And here is a performance of the "Moonlight" Sonata: