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This seems to be a perennial item: really unfortunate album cover art.
You rarely get to hear the Northumbrian pipes these days. Especially in duet.
It just doesn't give me a relaxing vibe...
Alex Ross describes Petrenko in terms that remind me a bit of his bemusement at the glowing reception Grigory Sokolov received in Salzburg last year:
You rarely get to hear the Northumbrian pipes these days. Especially in duet.
It just doesn't give me a relaxing vibe...
Oh, if only electronic music sounded as interesting as that looks.
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Over at The New Yorker Alex Ross is tsk-tsking the appointment of Kyrill Petrenko to the Berlin Philharmonic. You know, I really should have been able to predict not only this article, but the stance he takes. After recalling how Simon Rattle began his tenure with a new work by Thomas Adès, Ross writes:
Kirill Petrenko, the forty-seven-year-old Russian-born conductor, who replaced Rattle in August, shows no interest in picking up where his predecessor left off. The main work in his first concert was Beethoven’s unavoidable Ninth Symphony. A short tour of European festivals also included Tchaikovsky’s inevitable Fifth. Marginally more modern repertory fleshed out the programs, in the form of Berg’s “Lulu Suite” and Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto. New music was conspicuously absent, and none appears in Petrenko’s remaining concerts during his first season. Conservatives in the orchestra and in the audience may be reassured, but this retrenchment is a troubling signal from a historically great orchestra that ought to be assuming a leadership role in global classical music.Progressivism is like a ratchet: there can never be retrenchment or consolidation, only advance into the adventure of the future. As an ideology, it always reminds me of those Soviet posters of Great Leaders staring off into the golden future. While the masses starve in the Ukraine, but never mind.
Alex Ross describes Petrenko in terms that remind me a bit of his bemusement at the glowing reception Grigory Sokolov received in Salzburg last year:
Because of his avoidance of publicity and his reportedly monkish immersion in the music, Petrenko has acquired a cultish mystique. A German critic has described him as a “maestro without myth,” whatever that might mean. In fact, classical music has no older or hardier myth than the notion of rising above worldly concerns and letting eternal beauty speak for itself.The idea of a "monkish" immersion in the music is very consistent with the idea of music as a true vocation, something one pursues on its own terms and not just because you are looking for a nice career. That this might result in a "cultish mystique" is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. The idea of a "maestro without myth" seems quite appropriate. The conducting profession is littered with people layering themselves with myth, largely to build careers (among whom, Simon Rattle comes to mind). Petrenko reminds me very strongly of Sokolov who also refuses to do interviews--even when Deutsche Gramophon is doing a documentary about him! This seems to be a Russian proclivity. It brings to mind the great Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman who turned down the two biggest prizes in mathematics (the Field Medal and the Millenium Prize, both with million dollar awards) simply because "the prize was completely irrelevant to me." So, the "myth" of rising above worldly concerns turns out to be one that is not limited to just Petrenko. Indeed, it seems to be shared by most members of the Berlin Philharmonic who voted him in as their new music director.
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Just to provide fuel for a hearty debate I offer this quote from an essay by Richard Taruskin on the aesthetic principles underlying the Early Music Movement:
The term "authentistic" is one coined by Taruskin to identify the historically informed performance practice, also known as the early music movement. The particular essay from which this quote is taken is "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" a particularly salient and challenging essay that I strongly recommend.I would go so far as to suggest that all truly modern musical performance (and of course that includes the authentistic variety) treats the music performed as if it were composed--or at least performed--by Stravinsky.Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 1503-1504). Kindle Edition.
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Your smartphone can now identify art for you: Wondering Who Did That Painting? There’s an App (or Two) for That.
Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Shazam’s wild success — it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year — has spawned endless imitations. There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art.Aw, and I was all ready to say, where's the music app? Maybe if I have time this weekend I will download Shazam and try it out on very obscure Baroque composers. Plus some tricky ones like the Symphony No. 37 by Mozart (actually by Michael Haydn with an introduction by Mozart). Or maybe some aleatoric music by Cage or a baryton trio by Haydn. Honestly, I should be able to stump a mere AI ten times out of ten. Right?
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Let's have a couple of envois today. First, a couple of those baryton trios by Haydn. Why, oh why couldn't the Prince have been an amateur guitarist? The music starts around the 2 minute mark.
Next, the Symphony No. 37 by Mozart, which is actually by Michael Haydn with a slow introduction by Mozart. It is still sometimes programmed by ensembles that don't realize it isn't actually by Mozart as I discovered when writing program notes a few years ago.
Am not going to spend $30 to read the Taruskin (and am still only on the verge of beginning the Kerman Opera as Drama anyway) but will point out the 16 pages of this essay by Roland Jackson (musicology professor at Claremont Graduate Univeristy; died in 2015) that appeared in one the Claremont publications, whether the Review of Books or elsewhere can't be sure. It is a .pdf. Have you had a chance to listen to Teodor Currentzis's Rite of Spring from 2015? I wonder how someone up on the 'historicism' versus 'presentism' business (this is an element of Jackson's essay, Taruskin being a 'presentist' in that construction) hears that. Glad to see the Miscellanea this morning!
ReplyDeleteOh darn, more homework!
ReplyDeleteI read the Johnson article and it was worth the time. It is good to read a critique of Taruskin from time to time.
ReplyDeleteNow may have to add Text and Act to the 'borrow from the library' list although from what I can tell from your post and his review it is all about a series of musicological (theoretical, historical) presupppositions and questions that don't have anything directly to do with the beauty or quality (or lack thereof) of specific concert performances, so I may bracket all of it away until I have more time: it isn't as if I'm ever faced with the need to choose this performance of Carissimi or Lully rather than that 'historically informed' one, after all, and, so far as recorded music goes, as an audience of one I am sovereign, am I not? whether a wise and well-informed sovereign is a different question altogether. More time, more time! :-)
ReplyDeleteI find Taruskin is always worth reading because of his enormous knowledge and unique perspectives. Text and Act is one collection of essays largely about performance practice but it also delves into questions regarding Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky. There are other essay collections that are also very interesting. You might find the one titled "The Danger of Music" particularly interesting as it has a host of interesting perspectives. For example, one essay asks why Horowitz is so often disparaged. Another one discusses why one often has to defend classical music against its devotees.
ReplyDeletethe subtitle for The Danger of Music is, if memory serves, something about a collection of anti-utopian essays. At his best Taruskin asks provocative questions. He does have a weakness for occasional well-poisoning. I've read some work by Bruce Haynes that takes a somewhat comparable tack to Roland Jackson's rejoinder to Taruskin on early music studies.
ReplyDeleteThat the high art traditions in the wake of 20th century style modernisms have become insular I don't dispute. I even agree that Taruskin's right to point out, as he does in an essay or two in The Danger of Music, that the gap between the academic canon and the repertoire canon in concert music has gotten large. I don't share his contempt for Hindemith, though, obviously. :)
Yes, the whole title of the collection is "The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays." I agree with your estimation of Taruskin. He is pretty much indispensable, though, because I don't know of anyone else who so adroitly challenges the conventional wisdom.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that Slipped Disc claims that François-Xavier Roth (succeeding Jean-Claude Malgoire) as director of Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing is the 'mainstream ending the reign of the Baroque' (although NL puts it much more wittily, ahem) at that ensemble. (I know Malgoire chiefly via his Handel.)
ReplyDeleteI imagine that this is nonsense; why wouldn't the presumption be that the estimable Maestro Roth is going to continue the basic attitude of Malgoire with the ALT rather than that he was chosen in order to upset the applecart? Perhaps there may be explicit statements somewhere that address this which haven't been shared on SD.
All of their concerts through 2020 (with the exception of two 'modern' operas and a couple of programs where I can't discern whether 'period instruments' etc are in play or not) continue to be HIP, so far as I can tell i.e. that is the balance as it had been during the tenure of founder Malgoire, who died in 2018; Roth's first concert is in late Spring, I think.
It's at this level about which I wonder what are the practical effects of e.g. adhering to a Taruskinian view of things or to one explicitly pro-HIP, whatever exactly that might mean. I expect this requires to delve into much more detail about training and preferences of the various conductors and their ensembles than anybody has time or energy for.
I'm re-reading the whole of Text and Act right now, up to essay 8, and I should point out that Taruskin's view is not a simple one. For example, he chastises the HIP movement for being doctrinaire, for privileging text over act. One consequence of this is that Mozart piano concertos, for example, are, almost without exception, played in strict adherence to the score which is contrary to Mozart's own performance practice, which was that of ornamenting the piano part, especially in slow movements. He also defends performing traditions as they are a living and vital connection to the past of classical music. He criticizes historically-informed performance because it really isn't historically informed, but rather a pick and choose version of history according to the tastes of the performers, i.e. our tastes.
ReplyDelete