I don't think you can read it from this photo, but the banner advertises eight concerts in the Ouverture Spirituelle series. The Salzburg Festival is organized into a number of different series, each of which in a smaller or less-specialized context would be a whole season in itself. There are five other concerts by other ensembles that overlap with this series. Last night was La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations with vocal soloists conducted by Jordi Savall. The bio in the program notes that Jordi Savall has been researching, interpreting and performing early music for some fifty years. The two ensembles, choral and orchestral, noted above were both his foundation. The five vocal soloists I won't cover separately, but their performances were lovely with clear, open voices, unstrained and, without pitch correction (of course!), beautifully in tune. I have long been a lover of choral music and this was an evening to treasure. It consisted in two settings of the De profundis (Psalm 130), the first by Michel-Richard Delalande (used as funeral music for Louis XIV in 1715) and the second by the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Between these two in the program was a Te Deum, an ancient hymn of joyous praise dating all the way back to the fourth century. The composer was Marc-Antoine Carpenter (1643 - 1704), this is one of six Te Deums he composed. There was also an encore but I didn't know the piece--I might be able to find out from the local paper what it was. My feeling was that the best work of the evening, by far, was the Arvo Pärt with its other-worldly textures and pure harmonies. Absolutely a delight. Here is a performance by the Hilliard Ensemble:
Acknowledging applause at concert's end
Before the concert my German friends and I visited one of the stellar attractions of Salzburg: the Augustiner Bräustuben, a brew pub open for the last four hundred years, still using the original recipe.
Original stoneware?
The beer was excellent, but the food was really outstanding. The hilarious thing for me was that my German friends found half the items on the menu incomprehensible because they used uniquely Austrian vocabulary:
Menu in Austrian German
One friend said that the grilled chicken was simply the best she had ever had--I tried it and wow. As with fish, the trick with chicken is not to overcook it. This was moist and unctuous.
Grilled half chicken with potato salad
I had the venison stew with dumpling and green beans with "speck" (a kind of Alpine bacon). Wow, the sauce was made with red wine. Excellent!
Venison stew with dumpling and green beans
So that was an experience to remember. This is the kind of place that welcomes you and that locals treasure. If you are in Salzburg, don't miss it. And you won't find these recipes in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal! If you go, be sure to make a reservation.
Lots of jaunting around today with my friends from Germany. One of the interesting attractions is Hanger 7 near the airport. It is a large enclosure with the Red Bull collection of aircraft, ranging from a B-25 WWII vintage heavy bomber to an early Douglas passenger plane, to a Sukoi design and a couple of French jets--a few helicopters as well. There is also a collection of Formula One race cars. The backdrop is a magnificent view of the Alps.
Hanger 7 with the Alps in the background
Me with the Alps
An early Douglas passenger plane, seating 32
One of the French jets
Also a contemporary art exhibition
And some exotic trees
Interesting place to visit. Admission was free and there is also free parking (the only free parking lot in Salzburg).
Judengasse, one of the oldest streets in Salzburg
Mozartplatz
In the center of Mozartplatz is his statue and next to it were playing a trio of buskers.
Student buskers
Austrians are very fond of sundaes and iced coffees and all sorts of treats
So that's a little tour of some tourist attractions.
This week's miscellanea comes to you from the Hotel Via Roma in Salzburg, Austria where I am recovering surprisingly quickly from jet lag! Let's open with a somber piece from the New York Times: Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles. After sixty years conducting devoted mostly to pre-Classical era music by Bach, Monteverdi and many others, John Eliot Gardiner is being let go by three ensembles he founded:
Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.
The board of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, the nonprofit that oversees all three ensembles, said Wednesday that it had decided that Gardiner, who had been on leave since the incident in France last summer, “will not be returning to the organization.”
I have no juicy inside information to share, but I will say that conductors in particular seem vulnerable to the disease of arrogance and disdain towards their ensembles. There are lots of example. A friend of mine, a principal in a US orchestra, told me of a time when the conductor wiped his sweat off on her concert garb, which was just as disgusting as you can imagine. There were no consequences. And this is generally true, but striking one of your vocal soloists in the face, onstage would seem to be a bridge too far. The overarching principle here has to be that highly placed people, in whatever field, have to be accountable. And they, very often, are not. But let's not stop enjoying the enormous quantities of music that Gardiner produced when he wasn't abusing his soloists!
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I had exactly this nightmare! I don't mean that this happened to me, but I dreamed that it did. I was prepared to play one of the Rodrigo concertos, but the parts company sent the orchestral parts to a different one. But it actually happened to a pianist in real life. Let's let the cruel conductor tell the story:
It's interesting that she did not take the obvious course of simply walking offstage, saying to the conductor as she passed to let her know when he was going to stop being a jerk!
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Here is an interesting bit of music theory connecting musical structure with literary structure: A novel kind of music
What changed in this century or so between Purcell and Haydn? Three crucial innovations of musical composition are part of the story. One is a much greater variety of texture – the surface events and gestures of the music. Another is a more unified, integrated approach to overall structure, based on large-scale repetition and resolution. The last is a new system of harmony that was able to create a sense of proximity and distance, foreground and depth, over extended periods of time. I want to suggest some parallels between this 18th-century musical lingua franca and a familiar device from another medium: modern realist prose, which emerged through the 17th and 18th centuries – just when these musical conventions took shape.
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Here is that Purcell piece directed by Jordi Savall, whom I will hear in a concert this evening.
...we found that publicly backing charity causes on both an intermittent and regular basis earned musicians more likes, shares and comments. These artists also increased music sales, whether they sent these messages occasionally or constantly. Regular advocacy messages far outperformed intermittent ones in drawing attention and boosting sales.
This difference was even more prominent when compared to two other types of messages: commercial messages, which are meant to publicize their music, and self-revealing messages, which focused on musicians’ personal lives. Intermittent advocacy messages were less popular and led to fewer sales. However, regular advocacy messages outperformed both, attracting more engagement and driving higher sales.
Yep, there's a reason for it.
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Here is John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Vespers. You have to love any band with three theorboes!
An abbreviated miscellanea today. We will be out exploring some Salzburg attractions so I should have lots of photos to post tomorrow. Also tomorrow, there are two concerts, one in the morning at the Mozarteum with the Piano Concerto in D minor K. 466 and the "Linz" Symphony by, of course, Mozart with pianist Lucas Sternath and the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer. And, in the evening, pianist Igor Levit at the Grosses Festspielhaus with works by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven.
My hotel has been cleverly laid out so there is no view whatsoever, but if you stand in front, you get a great look at the Hohensalzburg Fortress, begun around 1100 AD and added to for centuries after. It was never captured and Salzburg was an independent state under a series of "Prince Archbishops" for a thousand years (until Napoleon came along). There are two mountains in town that I know of, this one, the Mönchsberg on the Western side of the Salzach river and the Kapuzinerberg on the Eastern side. There are apparently three more mountains in town, but I don't know anything about them. Last time we went up this one and saw the fortress. This time I think we might hike up the other one, which has a very old abbey on top.
Still getting over jet lag, so that's all I have for today. Tomorrow is the first concert with Jordi Savall directing ensembles playing French Baroque choral music and Arvo Pärt. Should be lovely! Saturday is Mozart and Igor Levit.
Here is the Charpentier Te Drum, which will be performed tomorrow:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Yesterday I attended a concert of violin and piano. In conversation with a violinist friend who also attended I mentioned that they simply don't program violin/piano recitals at the Salzburg Festival. She seemed surprised. They do have a lot of piano recitals though.
The concert last night, while seemingly enjoyed by many, was bad, but following the Tolstoy quote, it was bad in its own way. The soloist, according to the biography, had won prizes in fifty (50!) international competitions. And is only twenty-two years old. When I was a young performer I only entered one competition and had to drop out due to a nervous breakdown. The winner of that contest also had a nervous breakdown, but afterwards. His was more serious as, upon returning to Japan, he cut off one of his fingers so he could never play guitar again.
There are hosts of competitions now, it seems, and the path to career is apparently entering all of them. Also, judging by the concert, the key to winning is a ferocious ability to play many, many notes in quick succession, thereby bamboozling the judges. This was a bad, virtuosic concert, but for the audience, they did not seem to be able to perceive how virtuosity could be bad. It was bad because it was musically meaningless. It was virtuoso trash. This was keenly demonstrated when the artists departed from the main elements of the program, 19th century bon-bons, and played a Mozart sonata. This instantly revealed that the pianist was a banger, constantly drowning out the violin, and the violinist had no lyric sense nor grace and elegance. These performers should be enjoined from playing Mozart in public. Thank god they didn't program any Bach.
Good performances, like good families, are alike: they combine passion with grace, clarity with expression and are a delight to listen to. Bad performances can be bad in a thousand ways. This was one of them. Here is that Mozart sonata the way it should be played.
As I have done a few times recently, I will be flying to Salzburg next week to take in the music festival. After a couple of recovery days, the first concert will be on July 26th with Jordi Savall conducting vocal soloists, choir and orchestra in music by MICHEL-RICHARD DELALANDE, MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER, and ARVO PÄRT. This is the first of two concerts of largely early music I will be hearing, the second being Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble in works by Dowland and Purcell. I've never heard Pärt in concert before, nor Charpentier and Delalande for that matter!
There have been a lot of changes in the programming since I was a student in Salzburg in the 1980s. Back then they did a lot of integral series: Alfred Brendel doing all the Schubert piano sonatas in several concerts and the Alban Berg Quartet doing all the Beethoven string quartets. They also had some living composers. Then, Stockhausen (who presented seven concerts of his chamber music) and Lutosławski who conducted his then new violin concerto. Nowadays they have a "focus" on a particular modern composer, this year Schoenberg.
Also, they used to have more conventional chamber music, i.e. string quartets. This year, I think there is just one, but they have a lot of pianists. I have tickets to see six outstanding pianists: Levit, Sokolov, Simard, Kissing, Volodos and Kantorow.
This year I have several free days so I am going to explore more non-musical things like enjoy a visit to the Augustiner Bräustübl a brewery/restaurant founded in 1621 and still using the traditional recipe. Mind you, that is far from the oldest religious institution in Salzburg--by nearly a thousand years! St. Peter's Abbey, founded in 696, is considered the oldest monastery still in existence in the German-speaking world. The Benedictine monks don't have a brewery, but they do have a bakery. Lots of remarkable non-religious institutions as well. The Hotel Sacher has two branches, one in Vienna and one in Austria and both serve the famous Sachertorte.
I will be blogging every day, I hope, so if you want to come along, just drop by. I will try and post a lot more photos this year. And now we have to pretty much end with Salzburg's most famous resident, Mozart. Here is the Camerata Salzburg with the Symphony no. 40:
We don't have much actual music criticism these days, but we have a great deal of what the English would call "over-egging the pudding." YouTube has become almost unwatchable because of it, but I have commented on that before. Alas, we find it even in such rarified heights as writings by Richard Taruskin. In his scholarly works it doesn't appear, but when he writes for newspapers or magazines, it creeps out. Journalism these days is all about shouting out extremes. Here is an example from The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Referring to the performance of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven on the occasion of the falling of the Berlin Wall he says:
What did Beethoven symbolize? Just packaged greatness, I'm afraid, and all that implies of smugness and dullness and ritualism. Just what the revolutions of '89 were revolting against.
And that is why classical music is failing, and in particular why intellectuals, as a class, and even the educated public, have been deserting it. The defection began in the sixties when all at once it was popular music that engaged passionately--adequately or not, but often seriously and even challengingly--with scary, risky matters of public concern, while classical music engaged only frivolously (remember radical chic?) or escaped into technocratic utopias. By now, the people who use to form the audience for "serious" music are very many of them listening to something else.
Now I am a great admirer of Richard Taruskin who has delved so deeply into the truths of music history for the benefit of all, but here he really over-eggs the pudding. I'm not saying there are not large grains of truth here, but they are exaggerated to the point of being nearly irrelevant. No, performing Beethoven on the occasion of the Wall coming down did not just symbolize "packaged greatness." What an absurd distortion. And who was smug and dull? Certainly no-one present for that event, nor the musicians, nor the viewers worldwide. So "that," and at this point in the argument it is becoming vague exactly what it refers to, certainly has little to do with why classical music is "failing." Actually, the performance itself would seem to demonstrate that classical music had a distinct role to play on that occasion. Why would he claim anything different? And the idea that popular music was courageously engaging with those scary, risky matters of public concern that classical music was too dull or smug to deal with is just, well, pretty funny really. However this was just a momentary lapse.
But lots of other folks are indulging in excess. Here is a classic example from Ted Gioia:
"I spent ten years researching and writing a book about love songs.
I learned many things, but two facts stand out:
Everybody knows hundreds of romantic love songs, and can even sing along—because the words are deeply embedded in our memory.
Most people are deeply embarrassed about this, and don’t want anyone to know.
You can’t deny it. Every one of you knows the words to a bunch of sentimental, icky-sweet songs—but would hate to admit it to your friends."
What are the exaggerations there? Everything! He likely spent ten years off and on writing a book about love songs during which he mostly did other things. No, everyone doesn't know hundreds of romantic love songs. Unless you count "Don't Let Me Down," I doubt if I know more than a line or two from any love song. But even if I did know lots, I wouldn't be embarrassed about it and would be happy to admit it. You see, the whole thing is just one unfounded exaggeration after another.
It is much too much when both sides of a debate so absurdly exaggerate that you really don't want to hear from either of them ever again. And yes, I am talking about "climate change." Yes, climates do change, but the belief that any amount of human intervention can "fix" it and also that it doesn't exist at all are both so far from the truth--yet we hear this every day--that ignoring the discussion entirely is the rational choice.
Of course, politics, the wildly polarized politics that is the norm today, is the locus classicus which is why so many avoid it. A key tactic that instantly reveals both the existence of and the uselessness of partisan exaggeration is the pretending to foretell the future. No, no-one can do that and thinking you can is a variety of madness.
Why is everyone doing this? I'm not really sure, but part of it, I suspect, has to do with the idea that we need to manipulate and propagandize one another with every utterance. Just telling the plain, simple truth is too risky. It might not benefit us enough!
Let's have some plain, simple, truthful music from our old friend Joseph Haydn. Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the Symphony No. 94 "Surprise":
