Friday Miscellanea

The classical album of the week over at The Guardian is Esa-Pekka Salonen's new recording of Stravinsky's Perséphone. This is a less well-known work, but from the glowing review, one worth making the acquaintance of:

Radiant beauty is not a quality that is automatically associated with Stravinsky’s music. But in Perséphone, the “melodrama” for tenor, female narrator, chorus, children’s chorus and large orchestra that he completed in 1934 to a text by André Gide, he composed one of the most radiant and lyrically beautiful scores to be found anywhere in 20th-century music. It’s one of Stravinsky’s greatest achievements, and alongside his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, one of the high points of his neoclassical period, though perhaps because of the forces it requires and its curious hybrid nature – part ballet, part cantata – performances and recordings have always been rare.

Coincidentally I have been working my way through the Sony box of seven CDs of Salonen conducting Stravinsky and I want to highly recommend his interpretations. He has a wonderful sense of pacing and orchestral balance and, above all, clarity. The Guardian reviewer concurs:

As Esa-Pekka Salonen’s beautifully modulated performance demonstrates, however, those inconsistencies do not matter at all when the music is unfolded with such meticulous attention to detail. Nothing is forced, and all the elements, sung, played and spoken, are integrated so carefully.

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Sadly, the music world lost a unique voice this week; Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin passed away at seventy-six.

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Slipped Disc keeps us informed about all sorts of facets of the world of music, including who is sponsoring whom: Yuja Wang and Rolex. Follow the link for a clip. That one won't embed, but here is another one. The weird thing about this one is that they have eschewed Yuja Wang's piano playing in the background music in favor of the most dreary orchestral pablum which entirely eliminates Yuja Wang's aesthetic agency.

Does anyone else find these marketing promotions creepy?

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No Friday Miscellanea would be complete without a little controversy and this certainly qualifies: New Music Festival is Accused of Israel Bias. The festival is Donaueschingen and the issue is the refusal to commission a work about the 2008/9 Gaza conflict. Go read the whole thing, but especially the many comments.

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This year is marked by centenary celebrations of both Leonard Bernstein and Claude Debussy, but who is winning the contest for performances? Go to Slipped Disc for some comments.

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The New York Times reports on the Bard Music Festival and in the process offers a reconsideration of Rimsky-Korsakov:

The Bard Music Festival, which began last weekend and continues through Sunday, makes the case for a reappraisal, with a series of performances and lectures that illuminate his role in forging a Russian national style. In the estimation of Richard Taruskin, the eminent musicologist who spoke at one of the opening weekend’s events, Rimsky-Korsakov — a Russian naval officer who came to write 15 operas and taught Stravinsky — deserves better than to be belittled as a “craftsman who does trivial things exceedingly well.” In Mr. Taruskin’s estimation, he is nothing less than “the most underrated composer in history.”

It was reading Taruskin that alerted me to the importance Rimsky-Korsakov played in the musical development of his student Igor Stravinsky. Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of the "Mighty Five" group of Russian composers who were all of them basically self-taught amateurs:

In 1871, he accepted a professorship at the fledgling St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he found himself having to teach fundamentals of music theory he barely understood. “I was a dilettante and knew nothing,” he later wrote in his autobiography. For the next three years, with an admirable combination of humility and diligence, he set about teaching himself counterpoint, composing dozens of fugues, and poring over scores by Bach, who had been a particular target of disdain among the Mighty Bunch.

The reviewer takes a very odd approach, elevating "shame" as a prime motivator in Russian nationalist music which doesn't quite ring true for me.

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 The Smithsonian has an interview with Jay Nordlinger about the irrelevance of "relevance" in great art:

Does art need to be relevant to a person’s life in order to be appreciated?

That’s the buzzword of the day, “relevant.” I think it’s one of the great nonsense words of our time. What does it mean? The Bach B Minor Mass is great. Is it relevant? I don’t know. It’s great. Is greatness relevant? Relevant to what? I think art can be liked and loved and appreciated. It instructs us and consoles us and thrills us and lifts us up. But this mania, this fashion, this fad for relevance is bizarre.

It’s a perversion of art. I think it goes hand in hand with attempts to politicize art. A lot of people think that if something isn’t political, it doesn’t really matter. I suppose that’s what they mean by “relevant.” What’s the relevance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Brotherhood? Well, that symphony is a lot more than that – beyond our power to put into words.

There are a lot of other interesting things in the interview.

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 Great musical organizations are usually the product of the vision of a particular creative mind. They can easily be reduced to run-of-the-mill institutions by managers who lack that vision. Such seems to be the fate of the Oregon Bach Festival. This review constitutes a kind of obituary:

Judging from the seven events I saw this year, OBF 2018 was below the standards of years past. Nothing distinguished it from an ordinary lineup of classical fare. No artistic vision unified the schedule or oversaw the standards of performance. Engaging with how a particular conductor thinks about music was no longer possible for devoted audience members. Following that conductor’s musical talent (first Rilling, then Halls) from year to year and piece to piece has been the most important feature of OBF. With the absence of a world-class musician heading the festival, I felt a profound artistic void.

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Unfortunately I can't find a clip on YouTube of Salonen conducting Stravinky's Perséphone, but there is a nice one of Petrouchka and Orpheus. This is from the 7-CD box I mentioned before.