THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
We haven't put up a Wigmore Hall recital for a while. This one just appeared on YouTube.
The New York Times has an article on Bruckner: At 200, Bruckner Is More Popular Than Ever With Conductors. Why? The piece is a series of excerpts from interviews with several mostly minor conductors. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is one of the better-known:
What makes Bruckner extraordinary to conduct is that it’s probably the one composer who can really touch the absolute of playing music in a group, or singing music together, which is that it’s not about individual reward or pleasure — it’s really about a surrender to the collective. It doesn’t give you many solos if you are an orchestral player. You play a lot of tremolos if you’re a string player. Brass players tend to be more enthusiastic about it at first, because they get a lot to play. It’s been the same journey with every orchestra I’ve done Bruckner with. It starts with a little bit of, “Oh, it’s going to be long, it’s going to be tiring,” and once you get into a certain zone with this composer, it elevates you, and you feel like you’ve experienced what is truly the symbolic power of orchestral playing.
The Times introduces the article with this:
There was a time, as recently as three or four decades ago, when this composer was a relative rarity, especially outside Central Europe. His reputation preceded him. He was a religious man alien to the modern world, the author of monumental symphonies that many listeners found monumentally dull.
He was a provincial, uncouth, hardly a sophisticate like Brahms or Mahler. There was the forbidding editorial history of his nine (or is that 11? 18?) symphonies, and the lingering unease at his adoption by Nazi propagandists. If Bruckner was never exactly absent from the repertoire, he was long its resident eccentric.
The reason the Bruckner and Shostakovich were both deemed insignificant, minor, boring was due to the aesthetic hegemony of modernism. Music had to be 'progressive', ironic, crisp and dissonant in order to be taken seriously. It had to be on an intellectual foundation that rejected religion and emotional sincerity. Both Bruckner and Shostakovich massively failed this test, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
But as Nézet-Séguin hints, Bruckner (and Shostakovich) both used the large orchestra of the late romantic era in masterful ways. Bruckner especially, as another conductor hints at, is a kind of summation of hundreds of years of music history in his almost medieval melodic lines, quasi-Baroque sequences, and ecstatic use of all the resources of the myriad instruments of the orchestra. He synthesizes everything from Gregorian chant up to Wagner and goes slightly beyond. From a certain angle he could be seen as the apotheosis of Western Civilization in music.
The contrast with Mahler is instructive because with Mahler the autumn of the West starts to be felt. Where Bruckner is glorious, Mahler is unsettled and we start to see the exaggerated postures of decadence. Mahler died in 1911 and within three years the fabric of Europe would be torn to shreds by the First World War. But for Bruckner, there was nothing of this on the horizon.
This is mostly my own speculative take. The Times article is journalism, of course, and doesn't delve deeply. And the great majority of scholarship on Bruckner is still by German scholars, many of the earlier ones compromised by their association with the Nazi era in Germany. There is a new generation, of course, but I have the sense that they are still working out just what is going on with Bruckner!
One of the great Bruckner conductors was Sergiu Celibidache. Here he is with the Fourth Symphony:
This is pretty much the most heavy-metal piece for harpsichord, the Marche des Scythes by Pancrace Royer admirably executed by Jean Rondeau:
I don't have favorite recordings that last over time because I am in a process of constant discovery. One summer I spent listening only to gamelan music, the next summer it was Haydn string quartets. Right now I am listening mostly to Bruckner symphonies in this recording:
I think the problem with The Music Salon was that it was getting into a rut, so the solution seems to be to simply widen the horizon a bit. To that end, let's consider some outstanding movies of the last fifty years.
I'm not going to do a numbered list, that's too clickbaity, so I will go from well-known to obscure. The star of three of the best-known and frankly best movies of the last fifty years is, of course, Bill Murray. In order of well-knownness they are Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation. They combine real wisdom with great entertainment value and not a trace of pretentiousness.
Two really good movies from a French director are Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) and Leon, The Professional, both by Luc Besson. He did a lot of other movies, some specifically for the English-speaking market, like The Fifth Element, but I think these are the most interesting.
Another great director is Australia's Peter Weir whose really great films include Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Dead Poets Society. Every one of his films is utterly different from every other--no formulas!
I have to mention a couple of Japanese directors: Masaki Kobayashi who did Hara-Kiri and Akira Kurosawa who directed Seven Samurai, the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven western.
Finally, the most remarkable film I have seen in recent years, La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette.
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| A still from La Belle Noiseuse |
Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists,[a] are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666.
Old Believer theology is characterized by this strict adherence to pre-reform traditions, as well as the belief that the reformed church's heresy is coeval with the arrival of the Antichrist.As a result of this eschatological belief, as well as the church and state's mass persecution of the Old Believers, many fled to establish colonies and monasteries in the wilderness.
Now to Solzhenitsyn:
The Old Believers--eternally persecuted, eternal exiles--they are the ones who three centuries earlier divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority! In 1950 a plane was flying over the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. The training of airmen has improved greatly since the war, and the zealous aviator spotted something that no-one before him had seen in twenty years: an unknown dwelling place in the taiga ... What they had found were the Yaruyevo Old Believers. When the great and longed-for Plague began--I mean collectivization--they had fled from this blessing into the depths of the taiga, a whole village of them. And they lived there without ever poking their noses out ... In this way the Yaruyevo Old Believers had won themselves twenty years of life! Twenty years of life as free human beings... [The Gulag Archipelago, pp 431-2]
Now here is the fantasy part: in a world where the arts have been collectivized, including music, and the Swiftian dinosaurs, velociraptors of the backbeat, roam the land, crushing all before them, a small village of contrapuntalists, following the ancient rites of DuFay, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Bach flee into the taiga and for many decades preserve the tapestries of counterpoint, completely isolated from the world. Like the Old Believers before them, once a year they send a single representative by obscure woodland paths to the local WalMart to purchase salt, blank paper and HB pencils to continue their quest for salvation and really good music.
And, of course, once a year they perform Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume DuFay:
