Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a clip from a composer I had not previously encountered. Saad Haddad gives us some excellent advice for young composers. The sixth section, about not using music software until well into the process is one I strongly agree with.

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The New York Times gives us the Best Classical Performances of 2025 and a lengthy and worthy piece it is. In a year when I have had to forgo traveling to Europe to attend music festivals, it was a treat to read:

Shostakovich’s music was seemingly everywhere this year, 50 years after his death, in programs showcasing the dazzling stylistic breadth of his catalog. Among his fiercest champions is the conductor Andris Nelsons, who led two illuminating Shostakovich programs with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall and later ignited the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig on the opening night of a Shostakovich Festival. The genial sparkle of the Festive Overture and the clean-lined lyricism of the Second Piano Concerto, with a searching Daniil Trifonov, set up a shattering account of the Fourth Symphony. Clarity, weight and ferocity converged in a performance that captured Shostakovich at his most buoyant, embattled and enigmatic.

And my favorite rogue violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja:

In her long-awaited New York Philharmonic debut, the maverick violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja brought the intensity of a method actor to Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, playing with full-body commitment and sounds that included expressive scratches, whispers and wolf tones. What may live longest in the memory of the electrified audience was Kopatchinskaja’s encore, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong’s “Crin,” a 90 second anarchist tour-de-force of vocal and violinistic virtuosity.

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At some point everyone, even Rick Beato, just has to get away from pop music and play a little Handel.

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It shouldn't need to be said, but beauty in music requires dissonance. Some of the most heart-rending passages in Mozart depend on piercing dissonance--resolving, of course. Let's read what Jay Nordlinger has to say: The Beauty of Dissonance.

I often hear people say, “When I go to a concert, I like to have the music wash over me. It relaxes me, takes my cares away. It settles me down.” They speak of music almost as if it were a sedative.

Dissonance, on the other hand, is often disturbing. It prickles and piques, rather than soothes. Harmony is a crucial part of music, obviously. But disharmony, a.k.a. dissonance, is too. It has been embedded in music from the beginning.

The works of Bach are loaded with dissonance. Typically, he uses it to create tension and then gives us the resolution – the return to harmony.

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All the other stuff this week is pretty humdrum so let's leap into some envois. Taking a cue from the NYT, we really have to have a listen to the Symphony No. 4 of Shostakovich, a frequently underestimated work. Here is Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony.

 

And, of course, the Water Music by Handel.

One of my favorite Mozart dissonances, in the Andante from the F major Divertimento, K. 138.

Finally here is PatKo in a fierce battle with the Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

What I'm Watching

The first time I encountered Netflix I was visiting my sister in Virginia Beach and she said, let's watch a movie--Netflix has everything. So I searched for a few movies I would like to see and, of course, none of them were available. I did finally sign up for both Netflix and Amazon Prime, but usually I can find nothing to watch--there were a few good shows, like Downton Abbey, but I ran out. Luckily I have a pretty good DVD collection. My advice, as with books is BUY PHYSICAL MEDIA. So here are some movies I have been watching recently, none of which is available on either of my streaming services.

Back in the 80s we all discovered a wonderful world of Australian cinema and in particular, Peter Weir. This is an early film and possibly the most perplexing one ever. There is no resolution. At all. But it is extraordinarily beautiful in a Botticelli three graces kind of way.

This is a later Peter Weir film and an early starring role for Mel Gibson. The music is especially well done. When this was a first-run film I went back to see it four times because I simply could not understand the ending. I finally realized that it is a Buddhist ending. This is a rare example of the film being as good as the novel that inspired it.

Two Australian films and now two French films, the first an early film by Luc Besson. An extraordinarily beautiful film and I will say nothing more.

I have mentioned this film before, but I make no apologies for recalling it. I came back to it after watching a bunch of Marvel Cinematic Universe films and the contrast could not be more severe. Instead of furious action and shots lasting fractions of seconds, here there are long, very long shots of as much as, oh, ten minutes or so. In the first hour of this four hour film, two couples and a friend have dinner in the most ordinary way. In the last three hours of the film, a painter sketches, then paints, a nude model played by Emmanuel Beart. That's the story. And it is the best depiction of the actual act of creation I have ever seen onscreen.

I first saw this in a film festival four decades ago and never forgot it. Whatever I watch on Netflix I have forgotten by the next day. This is a superb recreation of upper-class life in Sweden in the late 19th century with the eeriest transition from non-diagetic to diagetic sound I have ever experienced.

Finally, a film I have somehow never seen until now. But a knight playing chess on a rocky beach with Death has to be seen, after all.

So, two from Peter Weir, two French and two Swedish, which means Ingmar Bergman of course.

And I realized something recently. I don't like American cinema. I most especially don't like anything from Quentin Tarantino. But I make exception, of course, for anything starring Bill Murray.

I'm leaving out the wonderful Japanese cinema, so I will have to do another post on that.

What I'm Reading Now

Here is what I am reading at the moment.

I must confess that I just read Part I which is just under 500 pages of fine print, so I don't feel too bad. While a great book, by that point I had had enough knight-errantry.

This is my most interesting recent discovery. The Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 and sadly committed suicide in 1972. For me this is entering an entirely new world in which everything is seen from a new and strange perspective. Very enjoyable.

Finally I am reading the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle for the second time. I also just finished the Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics which talks a lot about this book. This is easier to read than most Aristotle and much more applicable to life in the 21st century.

Tiny Friday Miscellanea

Just tiny things today. This is a new thing on Spotify, apparently. My "listening age" is 305. Yes, a lot of my favorite music comes from 1720.

A tiny bit of virtuoso violin music:

Nothing from Alex Ross as he is off studying Neolithic archeology in the Orkney Islands.

Speaking of the Orkney Islands their most famous musical resident was Peter Maxwell Davies. His beautiful Farewell to Stromness transcribes well to guitar:

I'm not much of a fan of Norman Lebrecht, but it often seems these days as if he is one of the few writers on music to risk saying something: The year the mob called the tune.

I cannot remember a time when there was so much political meddling in music and so little resistance. The Putin-allied regime of Venezuela sends out its propaganda orchestra to tour the US and Europe under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, who is about to become music director of the most visible US orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. 

If it’s not corrupt governments, it’s street mobs financed by Gulf states that dictate terms by force of numbers. In Belgium, a German orchestra was told not to turn up unless its Israeli conductor, Lahav Shani, denounced the war in Gaza. 

The Ghent festival director’s ultimatum prompted the Belgian prime minister to grovel an apology to the conductor and the German president to shake his hand.

 And another little clip, the Sonatina for flute and piano by Henri Dutilleux:

And it's adieu from me for this week.

Virtuosity vs "performing" virtuosity.

I recently saw a concert of cello and piano and it was a quite good and quite enjoyable concert. Apart from the Sonata for cello and piano by Debussy it lacked much musical substance, but that is par for the course these days. The ensemble was very good indeed and there was loads of musical expression. But in retrospect, there was one element perhaps worth commenting on. We are in difficult times for classical musicians where the market is limited but the number of young artists striving for recognition is all too abundant. So what do you do? Well, you become a technical master of your instrument, of course, but in addition to that you are counseled to "brand" yourself, to use commercial marketing techniques, to upgrade your stage presence--in Yuja Wang's case that may involve wearing performing costumes that are, well, risqué.

But there are other things you can do. And this is my topic for today. You need to be a virtuoso, of course, but equally importantly you need to signal to the audience that you are a virtuoso. I am reminded of the old story of Wanda Landowska, the early maestra of the harpsichord. One person who viewed her performing scores said that there were little notes here and there that said things like "look up," presumably to signal to the audience a transcendental moment. So this is certainly not new. But it has, until recently, been fairly uncommon in classical soloists. But the cellist in the concert I saw was an avid practitioner. He didn't just end a note, he "threw it away" with abandon. He "looked up" quite often to signal how moved he was by the music. Oh, and looked down and to the side as well as there were emotional highlights everywhere. We were witnesses to, not only a virtuoso performance but also the performance of virtuosity. Every gesture he made seemed to be exaggerated for emotional effect.

This is really not necessary for the virtuoso performance, but it is intended to charm the audience. As long as they think it is authentic and inadvertent. If we go back a few years and watch another cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, playing the Shostakovich cello concerto we can watch someone playing far more difficult and profound music without any of the added spice of miming emotional expression.

The concert I saw on the weekend ended with the Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano by Felix Mendelssohn and as we were leaving the hall I'm afraid my evil twin took over and I commented to my friends: "Whenever someone feels the urge to play Mendelssohn I usually counsel them to repress that urge and play Shostakovich instead--we will all be better off."

Friday Miscellanea

Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:

I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.

Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!

Here are a few recent recordings in the series:

Today's listening

One of those innumerable, terrific symphonies by Joseph Haydn:

And a photo I took yesterday. There are clusters of morning glory everywhere right now. November in Mexico.