Friday Miscellanea

This is quite a serious item: a substantial essay meditating on the current state of affairs in Europe from a cultural point of view. It wins a place here because the object of the meditation is the premiere of an oratorio at the Salzburg Festival:

Péter Esterházy, a novelist and poet with a Continent-wide reputation, had written the libretto for an oratorio that composer and fellow Hungarian Péter Eötvös penned for the Vienna Philharmonic.

Very worth your time to read the whole thing.

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Yes, we all know that these lists are just Internet clickbait, but we can't help but read them, right? The BBC has polled 151 conductors to find out what their favorite symphonies are. The envelope please?

The BBC Music Magazine top 10
1. Beethoven Symphony No 3 (1803)
2. Beethoven Symphony No 9 (1824)
3. Mozart Symphony No 41 (1788)
4. Mahler Symphony No 9 (1909)
5. Mahler Symphony No 2 (1894 rev 1903)
6. Brahms Symphony No 4 (1885)
7. Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (1830)
8. Brahms Symphony No 1 (1876)
9. Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6 (1893)
10. Mahler Symphony No 3 (1896)

And again, poor Joseph Haydn misses the cut!

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Eric Clapton is not only a guitar god, but apparently also a god of fishermen. He caught the biggest salmon of the season while fishing in Iceland a few days ago: a whopping 28 pounder!

(Just between you and me, that looks like a lot more than 28 pounds!)

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Speaking of guitars, here is an article titled The End of the Angry Guitar that talks about the falling fortunes of the guitar in popular music and how it might be experiencing a come back:

This is turning into an exceptional year for guitar music—the best so far this decade, in my opinion. But it isn’t played by strutting rockers with big egos and bigger amps. In fact, most of these stellar releases come from the outskirts of the music industry, from labels and musicians you don’t read about in Rolling Stone or see on TV. But make no mistake, they are producing fresh new music of the highest caliber.

If you follow the link, there are some examples. For some odd reason, they throw in a couple of CDs of lute music, but that's ok with me.

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My violinist sent me a very odd link about British Airways denying entry to the passenger cabin for a cello, whose owner booked a seat for it, on the grounds that the cello did not have a visa? At first we thought it was a satirical item from a comedy site, but it turns out it was true, sort of.

An amateur Swiss-based cellist has claimed she was refused entry to a British Airways flight from Zurich to Baltimore because the extra seat she had booked for her instrument required a USA ESTA visa.

Jane Bevan has told The Strad that airline staff requested she re-book all flights, quoting her a cost of over $4,000:

‘I booked the ticket for myself and the cello online using flight comparison website GoToGate,’ Bevan explained.

British Airways explained the problem thusly:

‘This was a highly unusual incident which arose after the customer booked a seat for her cello as a named passenger. This is what triggered the requirement for an ESTA from the US government. The ticket the customer booked through a third party website was non-refundable. We offer musicians a discounted rate to book a ‘musical instrument seat’, and on ba.com, we advise customers to contact us to discuss arrangements.’

Uh-huh. You know what I notice from this sort of incident? First of all, this kind of thing seems to be happening more and more and more. I think that the fundamental cause is the growth of the administrative state to the point that the sheer volume of government regulation and policy rules by large corporations is overwhelming ordinary people's simple, basic freedoms. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it might start with, as Instapundit keeps recommending, tar and feathers.

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There is a review of a concert celebrating Dutilleux's centenary in the Guardian:

The Proms has packed its centenary tribute to Henri Dutilleux into three successive concerts this week. The BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Juanjo Mena, gave the second of them, with Dutilleux’s Baudelaire-inspired cello concerto Tout un monde lointain ... – featuring Johannes Moser as the musing, rhapsodic soloist – the centrepiece of their programme.

I'm rather a fan of Dutilleux's music which I would best describe as "lapidary."

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Salon has a piece celebrating the 50th anniversary of possibly the Beatles best album: Revolver (heck, the best rock album by anyone). There isn't much I want to quote from the article, but this is mildly interesting:

As lively and inventive as the early Beatles albums were, “Revolver” is also the one that saw them unleashed in the studio. Abbey Road was quite primitive by the standards of our day, and less sophisticated than studios in California. But producer George Martin and Geoff Emerick went out of their way to make instruments sound uncanny, to allow Lennon to indulge strange ideas (a microphone, wrapped in a condom, submerged in water), to incorporate tape loops and unorthodox instruments into the sound.

I did a post on this album for my Retro Record Review #2. That's the one you want to read!

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To end the miscellanea today, I would like to unite the two themes of Dutilleux and the cello. Here is his concerto for cello and orchestra, written for Mstislav Rostropovich, titled "Tout un monde lointain..." This is the premiere recording with Mstislav Rostropovich, cello and the Orchestre de Paris, Serge Baudo, conductor: