Friday Miscellanea

Over at the blog On An Overgrown Path there is a sobering post on supply and demand in classical music:

Slipped Disc reports a rumour which may well have substance that the BBC Concert Orchestra is targeted for abolition in a list of proposed BBC budget savings, and Norman ends his report with the exhortation "Prepare to go to the barricades". Before manning the barricades Slipped Disc readers should consider the following. The BBC including its house orchestras is funded by a license fee. Over the last four years almost 3.5 million households have stopped paying that license fee. The rate of cancellation is increasing: up from 798,000 in 2016/17 to 860,00 in 2017/18. This means the decrease in license fees numbers is running at more than a compound 3% a year, a loss that has not been recovered by fee increases - the cost of a license was frozen for six years from 2010. That decrease represents an annual loss of BBC income of £130 million. To put the loss into perspective, the total license fee funded budget for BBC orchestras and performing groups is £33 million. So the saving from abolishing all the BBC orchestras would only offset one third of the annual revenue loss from license fee erosion.

Read the whole post which argues that there is an oversupply of classical music in all forms.

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The Times Literary Supplement has an article on a new biography of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn that discusses his brief stint as a music critic in the 50s and 60s. He was

possessor of a strong judgemental streak, shading into intolerance. ... That last character trait was also to the fore in his role between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s as a music critic under the pseudonym Francis Newton. Elvis Presley he dismissed in 1956 as “a peculiarly unappetising Texan lad”; Miles Davis four years later was not only “of surprisingly narrow technical and emotional range”, but came unhealthily close to “self-pity and the denial of love”; soon afterwards, the musical limitations of the trad jazz phenomenon were “only exceeded by the deficient amateurishness of many of its musicians”. In 1959 his survey entitled The Jazz Scene received a respectful enough review from Philip Larkin. Even so, “there are times when, reading Mr Newton’s account of this essentially working-class art, the course of jazz seems almost a little social or economic parable”. And Larkin added that “Mr Newton has little charm as a writer”.

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Here is a very heart-warming project: Afghanistan's first all-female orchestra Zohra visits the UK.

No-one claims that in Afghanistan, the Taliban influence has been rooted out entirely. Violence continues. But two decades ago, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music would have been unthinkable.

ANIM was founded in 2008, with international support, to bring music education to young Afghans. Not long before that, the Afghan capital Kabul had finally been wrenched from the grasp of the fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Taliban.

In the Taliban years, music - once a thriving and rich part of Afghan culture, admired around the world - had all but disappeared.

Today in Kabul, ANIM teaches music skills to some 250 young people, both male and female. That figure is about to rise to 320 and there are plans to expand to cities such as Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Jalalabad.

I wish them well, but worry that the Taliban might yet return to power in Afghanistan in which case this orchestra, like the Hungarian Philharmonic in the late 1950s, might have to continue their touring in exile.

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When I was a concert artist there were a number of activities I tended to avoid: bowling (potential broken fingernails), skiing (potential broken arms), carpentry (potential hammered fingers) and so on. I used to shudder at the news that guitarist John Williams liked to build furniture in his spare time. The thought of those irreplaceable fingers being in the neighborhood of a power saw... And now Anne Midgette in the Washington Post tells a story that confirms all those fears: A pianist/composer’s dream of dog-sledding in Alaska came true. It ended with a severed finger.

Yotam Haber is an established composer and pianist, an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, a former artistic director of New York’s MATA festival and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission, among many other honors and awards. Since childhood, though, he has had another dream: to race sled dogs in Alaska.

Last week, Haber’s dream came true. On March 2, he got to ride through the streets of Anchorage in the ceremonial opening leg of the 2019 Iditarod, the legendary dog-sled race, on the sled of Blair Braverman, one of the most visible contestants in this year’s race. Haber had come to Alaska to help with Braverman’s sled dogs, as well as to record the sounds of runners on the snow to incorporate into a piece he was writing for the New York-based Argento Ensemble.

But the dream ended three days later when, dragged behind a tipped dog sled, Haber watched his right index finger snap off “like a twig,” followed by a geyser of blood.

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The Victoria Symphony Orchestra, based in my old home town of Victoria, British Columbia, has a new conductor, Christian Kluxen, and I like the cut of his jib:

The concert will start with a bang — a dissonant chord comprising every note of a D-minor scale. For thus begins Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les élemens (1737), a programmatic suite, originally intended for a ballet, that was inspired by the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) and opens with a depiction of the chaos preceding Creation.

(By a curious coincidence, this rarity has been performed twice here in the past few years.)

Sunday’s program also includes a short symphony by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1775) and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa (1977), one of the first specimens of Pärt’s trademark “tintinnabular” style — slow, spare, contemplative music inspired by Medieval chant and polyphony and by the sound of bells, and often dubbed “holy minimalism” because of its evident spiritual aspirations. Tabula rasa is a two-movement concerto grosso for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano, and will feature violinists Christi Meyers and Victoria Lindsay.

The program closes with Haydn’s splendid Symphony No. 96 (the “Miracle”).

What a great program! When I lived there the orchestra never wandered outside a rather narrow, tired repertoire.

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Time is short this morning so let's move right on to the envoi. I just acquired a 16 CD box of François Couperin and the first disc features his Leçons de Ténèbres the third of which is for two sopranos and is one of the great landmarks of French Baroque vocal art: