Upcoming in the same series, a Michael Jackson dance video using Verklärte Nacht as a soundtrack and Beyoncé dancing to Wagner, the love/death scene from Tristan.
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On March 2nd, Jessica Duchen's classical music blog turned fifteen. She takes the occasion to talk about the Yehudi Menuhin School, one of the finest places for a high-level specialized musical education. I knew a very fine violist who graduated from there. We spent an interesting session doing classical musical improvisation.
This place - one of sadly few specialist music schools in this country - has been subjected to some serious misrepresentation in the press, in particular ridiculous charges of that pernicious concept "elitism", which leaves you wondering how, if a young person has a talent and vocation, he or she would ever to be permitted to develop it with the necessary hard work. The vast majority of the children - around 90 per cent of them, according to the head teacher, Kate Clanchy - are on close-to-full scholarships, as talent does not correlate to a parent's economic situation, unless it correlates by landing upon those who can't afford to fork out for instruments and lessons. And it's a struggle to provide the scholarships, because the support from the government's Music and Dance Scheme does not increase at even half the same speed as the spiralling costs of running the place. These schools, including (but not limited to) YMS, Purcell, Chets and some of the cathedral schools, are the engine-room of musical life. Remove them and you cut off the nurture at the source, a future that many young musicians need in order to grow and flourish.
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YouTube is littered these days with chunks of Jordan Peterson talks ripped bleeding from context, so it is nice to see a rather more organized interview with someone who is in the same intellectual league as Peterson. Here is a conversation with him and economist Tyler Cowan. He has some interesting comments on Soviet-era propagandistic art:
If you think about the power of the music of Shostakovich, taken out of the Soviet context, this rings rather true.COWEN: What’s the main thing you learned over the years, living with those works, viewing the propaganda, thinking about it every day, every night?PETERSON: Art wins.COWEN: Art wins over propaganda. Why?PETERSON: All the time, yeah. Nothing wins over art. Nothing is powerful enough to stand in the way of art. Whatever artistic merit the canvases have stays as a permanent part of them, and the propagandistic aspect disappears as the context — the political context — disappears. All that’s left, in some sense, is the pure art and the craftsmanship. At some point, some of the paintings I have are just very realistic renditions of working-class people. All the propaganda is disappearing, so it’s very interesting to have those artifacts around.
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Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz and Slipped Disc has an item about a release of the complete works.
Hector Berlioz: The Complete Works contains a wealth of milestone recordings. Carefully selected from the Warner Classics and Erato catalogues with some additions from Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, they span more than 60 years, from 1956 to 2018. Among them are: the multi-award winning 2017 recording of Les Troyens conducted by John Nelson; the Symphonie fantastique and Lélio conducted by Jean Martinon; Janet Baker singing Les Nuits d’été conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, and L’Enfance du Christ conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
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Also at Slipped Disc is a brief clip of audience reaction at the end of a very special performance of Ligeti. Follow the link and be sure to read the comments, the most interesting part of the post.
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Over at The Guardian they have a retrospective on the Rite of Spring:
There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously fast Ko-Ko. Stravinsky was so delighted that he banged his glass on the table, spilling its contents on the people at the table behind. Parker’s musical quote could just as easily have been The Rite of Spring; two years earlier, in Paris, he’d quoted the opening bassoon melody in his solo on Salt Peanuts, acknowledging that he was in the city that gave birth to The Rite at its scandalous premiere in 1913.
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And that takes us full circle, I think? But let's not have the Rite as our envoi today. Instead, in honor of M. Berlioz, let's listen to his Harold en Italie, a viola concerto that is not a viola concerto:
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