Friday Miscellanea

Tonight I am attending a concert of the McGill Symphony Orchestra that I will report on tomorrow. This is to be distinguished from the McGill Baroque Orchestra, directed by Hank Knox, another old acquaintance from my student days, the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, the various McGll choral ensembles (such as the Capella Antica, the Concert Choir, the Jazz Choir, the University Chorus and the Schulich Singers), the McGill Wind Orchestra, and the various jazz ensembles, all of whom will be giving concerts after I leave.

I was also looking forward to hearing the Orchestre Métropolitaine and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, but neither are giving any concerts while I am here. I inevitably contrast the music scene here with that of Madrid, where I was last summer. Despite my being there in May, hardly the peak of the concert season, I was able to see a wide range of concerts by different orchestras as well as two operas. The offerings here, outside McGill who alone put on some three hundred concerts every year, are far sparser. Of course, Montreal is about half the population of Madrid: metropolitan population of 1.7 million with just over 4 million in the urban area. Madrid is 3.3 million in the city with 6.5 million in the urban area. Madrid also benefits from being on the European continent which means that it sees a lot of touring musicians and ensembles. I saw orchestras from Frankfurt and St. Petersburg as well as Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov. I will see if I can pick up some brochures advertising upcoming concerts at the event tonight.

* * *

Just for fun, let's have a look at what is available at the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid this week:

• Thursday night, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Schubert and Mahler
• Tonight, the Spanish National Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Afkham, Haydn, The Creation (would love to see that!)
• Next week the Santa Cecilia Classical Orchestra conducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius (the Violin Concerto, love to see that as well)
• Afkham and the National Orchestra again with Shostakovich, 2nd Cello Concerto and Stravinsky, Rite of Spring (really would like to see that)

and so on, I'm leaving out minor events and this is just in one facility.

* * *

Here is an odd item from the Violin Channel: two principal players from the New York Philharmonic were just fired for "unspecified misconduct."

The two musicians have been identified as Principal Oboist Liang Wang – and Associate Principal Trumpeter, Matthew Muckey.

Both musicians had served as members of the ensemble since 2006.

It is understood the two musicians had been under an internal investigation for the past 5 months.

“Following the investigation, the Philharmonic advised the musicians that their employment was terminated,” the orchestra has said in a statement.

“Mr Wang is extremely disappointed in the Philharmonic’s decision and emphatically denies that he engaged in any misconduct,” Liang Wang’s lawyer has said.

“Mr Muckey has not engaged in any misconduct, and there is no legitimate basis by the New York Philharmonic to terminate him,” a lawyer for Matthew Muckey has said.

No details of the allegations against the two men have been released.

More information plus a very long comment thread over at Slipped Disc.

* * *

And on a completely different note, there is a new Complete Complete Edition of Bach coming out from DGG:

Deutsche Grammophon and Decca are about to release ‘the biggest ever box set for a single composer’ on October 26. 

The complete works of JSB are housed on 222 CDs. The box contains 280 hours of music and weighs 13.5 kilos 

J.S. Bach – The New Complete Edition is the result of two years of curation, developed with the co-operation of 32 record labels and a team of scholars at the Leipzig Bach Archive.

It will cost over $500. Here is the trailer:

* * *

This might seem a bit off-topic, but it seems preferable to yet more stories about players being dismissed for unspecified offences: The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed.

The description of her dress does not end there. More sports are named. It’s hard not to feel that something has gone wrong; the record is skipping; whoever was manning the controls has stepped out for a cigarette—or a very potent joint. Why must the pattern contain every conceivable sport? Would not three, or four, or a dozen, have been enough? In a similar vein, one might ask why there needs to exist ten thousand types of birds or 350,000 species of beetles. But these are modern questions—not the sort of thing that interests God, or Nature—and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a modernist novel decidedly unconcerned with modern questions.

This sounds very much like the book Marcel Proust might have written if he had listened to a very great deal of Philip Glass...

* * *

For some reason, both the Montreal orchestras are very under-represented on YouTube. It must be a general policy as there are almost no professional videos of complete works. Instead we find little promotional clips advertising the new season or a recording. This, the first movement of the Symphony No. 6 by Bruckner, is about the most substantial clip I could find of the Orchestre Métropolitaine, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra's principal conductor and the new conductor of the New York Met.