Friday Miscellanea

Here's a little video that might make you think:

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She just had the urge to help out--or she had way too much to drink: "Woman thrown out of theatre for singing along 'loudly and badly' to musical The Bodyguard." You see, there are objective aesthetic standards in music.

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Over at the New Yorker, Alex Ross has a piece about a recent performance of the late Schubert Piano Sonata in B flat, D960. The slightly overwrought title is "The Trill of Doom."

The other day, I sat with Sir András Schiff, the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist, in a practice room at Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, contemplating a great musical mystery: the trill in the eighth measure of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960. “It’s the most extraordinary trill in the history of music,” Schiff said, peering at my copy of the score. Sixty-one years old and an undisputed master of the Germanic repertory, Schiff has earned the right to make this sort of pronouncement, although he delivered the remark softly and haltingly, with a sense of wonder.

I dunno, whenever I read one of these columns by Alex Ross I start fidgeting in my seat because he always goes just a bit over the line. He is a big time music critic and hob-nobs with prominent artists, but honestly, why does he always come off like the nerdy kid who is just too earnest about everything? Oh, right.

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I have a special fondness for the acerbic, the biting and the sardonic commentaries because they help to cut the nauseating sweetness of the sycophantic ones. I offer for your consideration this review of poetry posted on the London Underground:

Like the lingering fart of a fat dog, it is impossible to ignore the poetry on the London Underground. There is something mind-numbingly awful about the posters that sit insultingly in trains and on the walls of Tube platforms. This city deserves better poetry because it would be impossible for its current batch to be any worse.

Now there's a metaphor that will stick with you.

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Here is a note from the extremely odd world of the arts in Canada: ‘Godfather of Canadian Arts’ to receive Peter Herrndorf Arts Leadership Award. The first odd thing is that the recipient of the Peter Herrndorf Arts Leadershop Award is, wait for it, Peter Herrndorf. And no, not junior, the very same Peter Herrndorf. That ought to give you a bit of a hint about how inbred the arts are in Canada. Who is Peter Herrndorf you ask? Here is his official biography. An excerpt:

After graduating in 1962 from the University of Manitoba in Political Science and English, Peter Herrndorf received a law degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1965, and earned his Master’s Degree in Administration at the Harvard Business School in 1970.  He received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from York University in 1989, from the University of Winnipeg in 1993, from Dalhousie University in 2000, from Carleton University in 2004, and from the University of Manitoba and Brock University in 2006.

Peter Herrndorf stepped down as Chairman and CEO of TVOntario in February of 1999, and was appointed as a Senior Visiting Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto later that month. He began his new role as President and CEO of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on September 1, 1999.

What does his career have to do with the arts? I mean, apart from the fact that he was a CEO of a tv network and now of the National Arts Centre. That must be it, the National Arts Centre. But isn't this like giving an arts leadership award to, I dunno, Sumner Redstone of Viacom and CBS? Don't you get the distinct impression that Canada really hasn't the foggiest idea of what leadership in the arts might be? The "leader" in the arts is the guy who sits in the back office managing the budget? Don't you have the feeling that if Canada had been running Vienna back in the early 19th century that they would have ignored Beethoven and given the arts leadership award to Anton Diabelli? In my book the people that lead the arts are not the administrators and bureaucrats but, you know, the actual artists?

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I'm sure you've been wondering, as I have, what kind of car Janis Joplin actually drove. In the song she asks the Lord to give her a Mercedes Benz as all her friends have Porsches. But in real life she drove a hand-painted Porsche that she bought for $3500:

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This piece in Spectator magazine is actually pretty good: "How to defend the arts using liberal values." Quite a concept...

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Though not a big fan I've never had anything against Adele. Until now, that is. Friday she released a new video and a new, slimmer figure. The song is titled "Hello":

Takes forever to get going as there is almost a minute and a half of what looks like sepia home video of Adele talking on the phone and taking covers off furniture. Then the song starts and it seems to be as much about showing off her new cheekbones as anything else. Oh yeah, and there is this black guy who keeps muttering in the background, I guess he's the lost love. I lost interest around the 3:30 mark as it sounds pretty much like every other diva-ballad. Once you have heard Schubert on lost love this stuff just...

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Here is an interesting musician: Lucas Debargue, who just won fourth prize in the Tchaikovsky competition, plus a special award from the Moscow music critics. He is the kind of musician that used to be very common: utterly possessed by the music and rather uninterested in worldly success. As he says, "If I had wanted great success, I would have gone to business school."

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I suppose our musical envoi today has to be this, back when pop singers were a tad less pretentious: