Today's Listening: Ligeti and Stravinsky conducted by Barbara Hannigan

This has just been posted on YouTube today. Sure hope they don't wreck it with ads:

 

Today's Listening: Prokofiev, Hahn

It is written somewhere that modern composers can't write a good melody. This is obviously wrong, but still it hangs around like an unwelcome dinner guest. This is one of the best counter-examples. The melody at the opening of Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto is lovely:

 

No Friday Miscellanea

Just too many other things this week, but I would like to share a lovely piece from a new recording by the Danish String Quartet. The CD is titled Keel Road and it is a collection of tunes from Northern Europe by Turlough O'Carolan, traditional authors, and some contributions by the first violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, the cellist.

Here is a traditional English tune "As I Walked Out":

That is about as delicately refined as traditional folk music gets.

Is it time to wrap up the Music Salon?

This blog has been going for over thirteen years now and here are the numbers: 3,919 posts, 13,497 comments, 3,225,209 page views. I suspect that a lot of those page views are Russian robots, but the other numbers are authentic. So, I count the blog as a success. But is it worth continuing? In the early days I was eager to post something every day and it seemed I had a lot to say about theory, history, all sorts of things. After a while I started getting quite a few commentators. This went on for a decade and it was very satisfying to me, especially the comments. But lately, my enthusiasm has lagged and I just don't have a lot to say. And neither do my commentators it seems. I almost want to say something about black music just to get the guaranteed response from Ethan Hein!

So I put it to you, my readers, should I continue the blog or has its day passed by?

Something to listen to while you ponder:

Friday Miscellanea

Jay Nordlinger is another regular attendee of the Salzburg Festival. Here are some excerpts from his recent chronicle:

As for The Idiot, it is an intelligent, generally compelling work, bearing the influence of Shostakovich (while not being imitative). For me, three hours of Dostoevskyan torment is a lot—but other people may have a higher tolerance for it. 

Salzburg has regular pianists, most of them born in the Soviet Union (and living in the West for decades): Kissin, Grigory Sokolov, Arcadi Volodos, Yefim Bronfman, Igor Levit. Alexandre Kantorow bids to be another regular pianist. He was born in France, in 1997. He won the Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow, in 2019. It would be hard to imagine the competition he would not win.

He played a recital in the House for Mozart, beginning with Brahms’s Rhapsody in B minor, Op. 79, No. 1. The first note I jotted down in my program was “non-bangy.” I am used to hearing this music banged. It was strange, the way Kantorow was playing it: nuanced, subtle. French. He has a wonderful sense of touch, a wonderful sense of color. Gradually, I liked this rendering of the Rhapsody. I never knew it was so interesting, had so much in it. 

An evening of chamber music was provided by the Belcea Quartet. The ensemble is named for its first violinist, Corina Belcea, Romanian-born. She formed the quartet in 1994 with fellow students at the Royal College of Music, London. I began this chronicle with a sartorial note, and I will make another one now: in Salzburg, the men of the quartet wore what appeared to be black sweatshirts. If performers dress like this (which is fine with me, by the way), why should men in the audience continue to wear coats and ties?

There were two works on the program, a masterpiece and a near masterpiece (in my judgment): Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, and Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7. The Belcea Quartet played them in the opposite order—the later work first.

At intermission, I said to a couple of musician friends, “The performance we have just heard is the hardest kind to review.” “Why?” they asked. The answer: Because there was nothing wrong with it. The work was well played, in all the particulars. But the performance did not move me (and this is a very moving work). We are in the realm of the personal, the subjective.

With the exception of Sokolov, in white tie as usual, it seemed all the pianists I saw were wearing exactly the same outfit: collarless black linen shirt and black pants.

* * *

There are some lessons to be learned from this: An Oasis in England’s Troubled, Polarized Opera Landscape.

Glyndebourne, a privately funded festival that receives little state support, has been mostly immune from the convulsions of the opera industry in Britain. In recent years, companies that rely on government help have faced dramatic cuts from Arts Council England, and have been subject to directives that many in the field have found insulting, if not ignorant.

Re the role of government:

But to many observers, like Morrison, the Arts Council’s decisions haven’t been sufficiently considered. “There’s certainly a misunderstanding,” he said. “Whether it’s willful or just a misunderstanding is questionable.”

Among the Arts Council’s beliefs that Morrison finds bizarre is that opera, even at its highest level, can be done inexpensively. There are many small companies that present works in parking lots and pubs, but that model cannot be scaled to the level of the Royal Ballet and Opera. “People want excellence,” he said, “and the British profession should strive for excellence. The notion that you can do that on the real cheap is a bit mad.”

The incentives for government do not match up with the support of genuine artistic quality.

* * *

Tyler Cowen is distinguished from other economists in that he really enjoys classical music. Here is his list of Spotify favorites. Inexplicably there is not a single woman composer on the list.

* * *

I don't have much in the way of favorite listening, because it is always changing. Occasionally I get hooked on a YouTube video like this terrific one of the Sibelius Symphony No. 4:

But that is fairly uncommon if by "favorite" you mean particular pieces I listen to quite regularly. Instead I usually have listening projects, like I have reading projects. Right now my listening project is the Bruckner symphonies with Daniel Barenboim conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Past ones have included all the Haydn symphonies and all the sonatas of Scarlatti. Here is Barenboim conducting Bruckner 8 with the Staatskapelle Berlin.

* * *

Recent reports have revealed that the dependence of US citizens on government has steadily grown. 

Americans Are More Reliant Than Ever on Government Aid

Americans’ reliance on government support is soaring, driven by programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That support is especially critical in economically stressed communities throughout the U.S., many of which lean Republican and are concentrated in swing states crucial in deciding the presidential election. Neither party has much incentive to dial back the spending.

On the other hand, funding for the arts is tending to go in the opposite direction: Who Pays for the Arts?

Nonprofit performing-arts centers have relied on tax-deductible private funding, as opposed to in Europe, where the arts have been primarily supported by government funding. It’s not a setup unique to the arts, said Laura Callanan, the founding partner of the impact investing nonprofit Upstart Co-Lab, who was formerly the senior deputy chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Obama administration. In other countries, she explained, “government has decided that it’s going to be responsible for supporting a lot of important issues, whether it’s education, health, culture—a whole range of things that are important to thriving communities. In the U.S., our government doesn’t play that role.” Instead, in America, the onus is on the private sector. “About 5 percent of philanthropy annually goes to arts and culture, and that’s about $20 billion a year,” Callanan said. “That’s substantial and is certainly on par with how governments in the UK and [other] countries throughout Europe fund their arts and culture. We just have a different system.”

But even in Europe, and especially in the UK, said independent curator and writer Fatoș Üstek, governments have recently pressured arts organizations to build a mixed-income model, and to decrease their dependence on the government.

Hmmm, something fishy here. It is almost as if government is eager to increase the dependence of the populace if that results in more votes. But as high culture is inherently elitist, funding for it may not increase the vote count.

* * *

The opening of the Israel Philharmonic season has been delayed, due to missiles.

The orchestra has informed patrons that its season-opening concerts in Tel Aviv are off  ‘in view of the extreme security situation’.

The concerts featured Mendelssohn’s violin concerto with Maxim Vengerov and Mahler’s 6th symphony. Lahav Shani was the conductor.

* * *

A few years ago my project was listening to the excellent box of Shostakovich string quartets in the live performance of the Emerson Quartet. Here is No. 7

Today's Listening: Bruckner Symphony No. 3

Before we get to the listening, I want to share the opening of this piece: THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS. You can't read the whole thing without a subscription, but the opening is enough:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

The first thing that took me aback was "College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course..." What the hell? Since when? Reading everything you are assigned is pretty much the bare minimum I have always assumed--though, ok, you might skim the boring bits. But in first year university I did all the reading plus I read a whole bunch of other stuff because it was the first time I had access to a really good library and bookstore. I've always been a reader. When I showed up for grade one (no kindergarten in my town) I could already read quite well. From the age of eleven I have read around five books a week. Some of that is light fiction, and some books I have read two or three times, but I think it is safe to assume that I have read between five and ten thousand books so far in my life. And I'm still reading at that pace. Still doesn't mean I'm smart or wise, of course. But I am well-read!

Ok, Bruckner. Is Bruckner's Third Symphony the most rock and roll symphony ever? You tell me. The most rock and roll movement is the Scherzo at 34:15:

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.