Sunday Miscellanea!

Yeah, yeah, I know, this was supposed to come out on Friday.  But I've been just swamped with all manner of thing. Plus, I am going to be visiting relatives over Christmas so, while there will be some blogging, it won't be voluminous.

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I haven't written much about Shostakovich lately, but I just ran across this fascinating essay: 'He speaks to us': why Shostakovich was a great communicator. There is a quote from a letter that is well-worth the effort. We tend to forget what a profound sense of humor Shostakovich had.

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I include this item partly because Mozart is always a good idea and partly because I had not heard the Schabel quote before:

As Schnabel said, his music is too easy for children and too difficult for adults.

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Now I realise that Artur Schnabel, the great Beethoven interpreter of the first half of the century, said a lot of quotable things. A selection:

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.

Mozart is a garden, Schubert is a forest in light and shade, but Beethoven is a mountain range.

But my favourite Schnabel quote I can't seem to find. He apparently once explained his long refusal to record the Beethoven piano sonatas by saying that he was afraid that someone, somewhere, would listen to them while eating a ham sandwich!

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There was a time, extending from the late 1960s well into the 1980s, when stuff like this seemed to make a crazy kind of sense. An Eastern-flavoured wisdom. But I hope that now we can see it as the meaningless drivel that it is. Ever noticed how some kinds of statements actually seem to suck understanding from your mind?

“Since there could be no such thing as the absence of sound for a living, breathing human being with a pulse, what then could silence be? It was a matter of intent, Cage decided: The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention. Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind. … Does listening to random sounds we do not intend to hear – the drone of an airplane engine, a dripping faucet, the roar of a bus pulling away from a stop – constitute the experience of silence? Or does silence end the moment sounds actually impose themselves on our consciousness?”

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The first time someone did this it was just cute, or surprising or something. But it is starting to become tiresome. Here is violinist Filip Pogady doing a cover of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" in the style of a fugue for solo violin by Bach. Sorry, you have to go there as Blogger won't embed.

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John Doyle, usually the television critic at the Globe and Mail, included this in his choice of the year's best cultural events:

Death & Desire, at the Neubacher Shor Contemporary Gallery, Toronto

A mild evening in June in a tiny art gallery. A man strode to the piano and began playing Schubert. Two singers wandered through the audience. What ensued was dazzling, a rapturous evocation of naive, unbridled desire meeting neurotic, unfocussed longing. The naive desire was male, Stephen Hegedus singing Schubert’s delicate, inflamed Die Schone Mullerin (The Miller’s Lovely Daughter); and the manic longing was in Krisztina Szabo performing Olivier Messiaen’s starkly distraught Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (Song of Love and Death). This was Against the Grain’s Death & Desire, a fabulously inspired mash-up. Simply done, it was the most unforgettable night of the year and made, as a poet said, one little room an everywhere.

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André Rieu is likely the biggest-selling classical musician in the world with something like 40 million discs sold. There is an article and interview with him in the Guardian: "André Rieu: 'I spent £34m on fountains, ice rinks and gold carriages' " Here he is in a real super-star moment, leading thousands of football fans in a singalong of, of all things, a waltz by Shostakovich:

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Kyle Gann shares a very challenging recording project with us: the complete string quartets of Ben Johnston. Here is a sample page:

Those extremely peculiar accidentals indicate micro-tones. Really micro, micro-tones. Here is his String Quartet No. 6:

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For our envoi today I offer a magnificent trumpet obbligato by Handel, "The Trumpet Shall Sound" from the Messiah on natural trumpet. Dashon Burton, is the bass and the natural trumpet is played by John Theissen: