Friday Miscellanea

This has not been a very productive week for posting, I'm afraid! Sorry 'bout that. Lots of housekeeping to do: after putting it off for years I finally updated my Mac OS from 10.11, whatever that one was called, to 10.15 Catalina. I wanted to both update my Finale music software and try out Sibelius and both required a more current OS. The only downside I can see so far is that the new Calendar wiped out all my reminders about birthdays and utility bills in my old Calendar. AGH!

* * *

With all the dispiriting news of the effects of the pandemic on the music world we have been forgetting that it is the 250th year since Beethoven's birth. The Guardian has a piece with cultural figures picking out their favorite Beethoven: 'The nearest to God we get': stars pick the Beethoven work they cherish.

‘Written after recovering from an intestinal disorder’

Katie Mitchell, director

Beethoven String Quartet in A minor, Op 132 – written in 1825 after he recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal disorder – is my favourite because of its strange third movement. Marked molto adagio, it is about 20 minutes long (depending on your recording) and alternates between slow funereal sections in the key of F and joyful fast movements in D marked “Neue Kraft Fuhlend”, or “feeling new strength”. It is these unexpected leaps of regrowth coming out of the slow sad sections that always fill me with possibility if I am feeling low. A study in hope.

* * *

I was going to attend at least one of Igor Levit's complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle at Salzburg in August. Slipped Disc informs us that he will be giving all eight concerts at the Berliner Festspiele:

From 25 August, Igor Levit will play Ludwig van Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas over eight concerts in the Philharmonie’s main hall. The Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim will perform Mozart’s last three symphonies. Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt will perform Bach’s solo suites in the Philharmonie. Trumpeter Marco Blaauw will accompany the film “Moving Picture (946-3)” by Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz with music by Rebecca Saunders, at the Zoo Palast cinema. The festival end on 23 September with a Wolfgang Rihm premiere, “Stabat Mater”, performed by Tabea Zimmermann and Christian Gerhaher.

The question is, how are they managing the seating in the hall?

* * *

On the other hand, we are also told that there will be no musical events in Philadelphia before March 2021:

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday announced a moratorium on most large public events in the city through Feb. 28, 2021, to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“I know this news will be disappointing for many Philadelphians, it was not an easy decision to make,” Kenney told a news conference. “But as we continue to battle COVID-19 and try to restore some sense of normalcy in our city, we know there will be many difficult decisions to come.”

The mayor said the moratorium will apply to events of 50 people or more on public property, including but not limited to festivals, parades, concerts, carnivals, fairs and flea markets.

Apparently this does not affect events in private halls?

 

* * *

One really gets the impression that certain employment policies in the arts are designed, not for fairness, but simply to achieve an ideological end: To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.

During the tumultuous summer of 1969, two Black musicians accused the New York Philharmonic of discrimination. Earl Madison, a cellist, and J. Arthur Davis, a bassist, said they had been rejected for positions because of their race.

The city’s Commission on Human Rights decided against the musicians, but found that aspects of the orchestra’s hiring system, especially regarding substitute and extra players, functioned as an old boys’ network and were discriminatory. The ruling helped prod American orchestras, finally, to try and deal with the biases that had kept them overwhelmingly white and male. The Philharmonic, and many other ensembles, began to hold auditions behind a screen, so that factors like race and gender wouldn’t influence strictly musical appraisals.

Of course, this wasn't the solution to everything. When I was a graduate student in performance at McGill way back when, one of my fellow students was flautist Tim Hutchins. Even then they were holding blind auditions, first in Canada, and then international. After his Canadian audition, no-one was chosen, but he later won the international audition and has been principal flute for the Montreal Symphony ever since. The obvious lesson here was that the Canadian auditions were a mere formality. No wonder Canadian musicians sometimes despair at actually getting work in their own country! So what is the problem with blind auditions today?

American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.

The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

At first it seems hard to disagree with the logic here, but it is necessary to accept the principle that equity demands that membership in an orchestra reflect the demographics of the community--a quota system in other words. Should not the onus be to explain why you are going to remove current musicians who have won their places fairly? Let's take this a step further: my envoi today is a performance by the Emerson Quartet. If it seems reasonable to force orchestras to reflect demographics in their makeup, then why should string quartets be immune? Shouldn't the Emerson Quartet, four older white men, be instead refashioned to include a woman and a person of color? Shouldn't all string quartets be thus reformed? Oh, you think that string quartets should be allowed to freely select their members as they do now? Then why should an orchestra be any different?

* * *

 WQXR, a New York radio station, has a two-parter on the rise and sputtering out of "crossover." Part One: CDs and Happy Accidents.

It is a story about what we, the music-buying public, think we think about classical music. It’s about new technologies, and how classical music got flipped and turned upside down. It’s about the corporate greed of the 1980s and the consumer excess of the 1990s. It’s about the music industry’s private hell of the 2000s. 

We’re talking about classical crossover. 

It was the success of The Three Tenors that encouraged an explosion of crossover-centric acts in the ’90s, among them Cecilia Bartoli and Andrea Bocelli. It was artists like these, Barbero contends, who “didn’t redefine classical crossover, but actually redefined classical music.” Before, a classical artist would stick to the core repertoire, and dispense some popular goods every once in a while, as a treat — it was like a Christmas bonus for the label. But after 1990, that crossover power became the norm; the expectation was that you’d crank out hit after hit, and maybe you’d do an entire Wagner or Mozart album. Crossover became such an integral pillar of label success that PolyGram eventually clove its classical department in twain, with “core” on one side and “crossover” on another.

And the sequel: Part Two: Hot n' Corny.

This decade of classical crossover dominance suffered a slow death, and started with big egos and bad ideas. Chief among them, in Barbero’s opinion, were the new pop executives in charge of the classical division, the kind of executives that replaced employees that actually knew something about the music. Classical divisions, which in the wake of the CD revolution swelled to massive numbers of employees, were shrinking as decision makers let pop divisions subsume them. “Labels had gotten so small, they shed most of their staff,” said Barbero. “And so they were essentially like divisions of pop, and the pop guys don't have anything to do with opera. They hear it for a second and they completely shut it down.” This lack of knowledge combined with an increasing reliance on sex appeal, and laid bare discriminations in the process.

There is a third part yet to come.

* * *

The Problem of Shostakovich?

The sheer extremity of the music is another striking feature, whether conveying manic elation, aggression, mockery or despair... Whatever is meant by profundity in music—the abstract quality above all that, together with beauty, makes people want to listen to it—Shostakovich achieved only intermittently. The constraints within which he had to operate fashioned his stream into a different course. We will therefore derive the most satisfaction from his work if we accept that it is best understood as a permanent and eloquent description of a monstrous tyranny, and recognise that in general it is unhelpful to divorce it from that context. 

At its best, this merging of music and historical commentary creates works of enduring power, and we may take as an example the justly famous 8th quartet, written “in memory of the victims of fascism and war”. It is spell-binding from start to finish. Although it begins with a homage to Beethoven, the piece is full of autobiography and self-quotation; it unmistakably evokes both the suffering of the Jewish people, which this most philo-Semitic of composers treated as a synecdoche for all mid-20th century human miseries, and the omnipresent fear of the secret policeman. Shostakovich had lived through both, and for that reason among others the work is invariably a success in performance.

* * *

And that gives us our envoi for today: the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich: