Salzburg 2026

I just received the full program booklet for this year's festival and I'm wishing I could go. Every program shows a thoughtful creativity that is often missing in typical classical performances. The 150 page booklet, beautifully illustrated by drawings and sketches by Andy Warhol, lists nine opera productions, ranging from Mozart's Così Fan Tutte, to the Rossini rarity Il Viaggio a Reims, to Strauss Ariadne auf Naxos, to the rarely performed Saint Francis of Assisi by Messiaen, to newer works by Henze and Dusapin. The Vienna Philharmonic, as well as being the pit orchestra for most of the operas, will also give five concerts and the Berlin Philharmonic, two. There are also six guest orchestras including the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Vienna Radio Symphony.

No fewer than nine concerts feature music by György Kurtág, this year's featured composer. There are also four concerts devoted to the music of Olivier Messiaen including performances of the Catalogue d'oiseaux, the Visions de l'Amen and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Opportunities to hear any of these works are rare, but they are all on the program in Salzburg in August.

There will be solo recitals by Grigory Sokolov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Evgeny Kissin, Arkadi Volodos, Alexander Malofeev, András Schiff, Igor Levit and Yuja Wang.

There is also a wealth of other performances of chamber music, spiritual music, vocal music and a whole bunch of Mozart. Not to mention a lot of theater works.

I very much wish I could go, but it comes down to a housing problem for me! The cost of attendance at the Salzburg festival is first and foremost the cost of spending two or three weeks in Salzburg in the summer. Even AirBnb places are expensive and hotels are out of sight. After that is the cost of the flights. Third is the cost of the actual tickets, which are really very reasonable considering the superb quality of the performances. Two years ago I spent only €1,400 for tickets to fifteen concerts. But housing can easily cost four to six thousand dollars. The other housing issue is that this summer I will be building my new house, so that is where  my funds are going.

But I am very much looking forward to the 2027 and 2028 festivals and hoping to be there. 

Visiting Campeche

Instead of jetting off to Europe to hear some wonderful concerts, last year and this coming year I am focussing on visiting various places in Mexico. I was in Puebla at Easter, Oaxaca in October and I just got back from Campeche. This last is not a tourist spot, which I usually avoid, but it is a charming place and has a number of attractions. The place to stay is the Holiday Inn, though it is an hour's walk to the historic Centro. The walk is a pleasant one, though, along the Malecón or seawall. 

Along that seawall can be found a lot of pelicans:

The historic district features two large fortresses, each with a museum and well worth a visit. They were built to defend the port against pirates and the English back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Calle 59 has a lot of coffee places and souvenir shops. And the occasional pirate.

Not to be missed is a fine seafood restaurant named Marganzo where all the waitresses wear traditional dress. I had a lovely meal of shrimp risotto (accompanied by sangria)

Followed by grilled sea bass:

And flan with capuchino:

But the real highlight of the trip was the ancient Mayan city of Edzna. Only the central area of about two square kilometers of large buildings have been excavated and are open to visitors. The whole city occupies some 22 square kilometers. That central area includes some apartments, a combination amphitheater and strip mall, a ball court and a large temple sitting on a very large base. The sheer cost in terms of slave labor must have been staggering--no heavy equipment or power tools. Not even a wheelbarrow. 

This is a bedroom:

This is the amphitheater and at the top are spaces for little shops or tiendas.

This is the ball court where the ball was sometimes made of rubber and sometimes was a human head covered in rubber.

And here is the main temple pyramid:

Finally a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico:

Off to Campeche

 I'm off to Campeche for several days to escape the brutal San Miguel de Allende winter. This morning a crisp 11°. In Campeche it is a balmy 24°. Why the difference? San Miguel is in the central highlands at over 2,000 meters altitude while Campeche is on the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, we still call it that down here. Mind you, San Miguel doesn't actually have a winter as such. I took these photos yesterday:

Campeche is interesting in itself--it is one of only two walled cities in North America, the other being Quebec City. Campeche, an important port in the 17th and 18th centuries, was plagued by pirates. It is not a popular tourist destination which is one reason I'm visiting. I disliked Cancun rather intensely because it has obviously been over-run with tourists.

An hour's drive from Campeche is the ancient Mayan city of Edzna which looks well worth visiting and again, not frequented by many tourists.

It vaguely resembles Monte Alban, outside Oaxaca, which I visited a number of years ago, though of course an entirely different civilization. Monte Alban was the center of the Zapotec civilization in southern Mexico.

I'll leave you with another haiku:

It's true: sorrow is

Source of creativity

Joy is just joyful

Friday Miscellanea

Here's some good news: Blogger has moved the extremely annoying Google links icon from its position blocking the text off to one side where it is more easily ignored. Thanks Google, our friend and master. Let's see if we can find something interesting in this seasonal season.

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Here's something: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse? Well, obviously.

In Marx’s history of American pop culture, which places heavy emphasis on media, music, and fashion, with glancing mentions of literature, art, and dance, a theme emerges: Everyone is selling out or trying their best to. Craven commercialism has replaced creativity. Culture has become “a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.

Another way of looking at it is that creativity has been almost completely replaced by formula. The only path for anyone working in the internet is to find the formula that generates immediate appeal and hence clicks or traffic. But formulas are exactly what any creative artist avoids because they are the opposite of creativity. The ability of AI to instantly "create" plausible facsimiles of popular music styles is proof that these styles are nothing but empty formulas.

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Here's a theory for you: Anton Bruckner's symphonies are the high water of Western Civilization. While he personally doubted his own abilities, the music shows no doubt or anxiety about the worth of the musical culture. A few years later, the symphonies of Mahler are angst-ridden as the culture starts to disintegrate. Then World War I lays waste to Western Europe. Most of Mahler's symphonies were composed after 1900. In between we have the extremely revealing work Verklärte Nacht from 1899 by Arnold Schoenberg which to my mind perfectly reveals the beginning of the disintegration of the romantic phase in music. Soon after Schoenberg turned to atonality, a kind of aesthetic mirror of cultural alienation. Let's listen to this musical evolution.

I don't know if you hear what I hear, but the expansive expression of Bruckner is followed by the dark, internal doubts of the Schoenberg and then by the neurosis of the Mahler, despite its external brilliance. As Yeats said, "the centre cannot hold."

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LANDR Study Uncovers How 87% of Artists Really Use AI

LANDR, the AI-driven music tech and distribution platform used by more than 7 million creators worldwide, today shares results of its international study showing that a large percentage of musicians and producers are leveraging AI tools across almost every area of their workflow.

From songwriting and production to promotion and fan engagement, AI is shaping how music is made and shared.

And someone once said that 90% of art is bad, so I guess that tracks.

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Instead of composing (I'm in an extended dry spell) I have been writing haiku for the last few years. Let's end with one:

I'm very grateful

For my life, but I do not

Know quite whom to thank.

To all my readers I wish a happy and healthy new year with abundance and joy.

Friday Miscellanea

For our pre-Christmas and Hannukah miscellanea let's have an all-envoi extravaganza.

These were all chosen because they are all performances and works that have captivated me recently. In the case of Bach, it was not that piece, but the St. Matthew Passion by the Netherlanders, but I think I just posted it a few weeks ago, so let's have something seasonal. But I have definitely been captivated (obsessed by?) the Haydn symphonies recently. And by Celibidache's Bruckner. And by Alain Altinoglu's Shostakovich. Right now, I am convinced that the 4th Symphony could be the finest ever written. I could happily listen to nothing but it, over and over. And the Grigory Sokolov concert is as perfect as a piano recital could be. Not least because he played five pieces by Rameau as his first five encores (!) followed by some Brahms.

If this is the last gasp of a disintegrating European civilization, then at least it is a glorious one.

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.