Friday Miscellanea

Flowering Shrub

I took this photo in the country yesterday. Flowers in this semi-arid climate have evolved to save water and are either papery like cactus flowers, or gossamer like this shrub. Don't know the name, sorry!

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Another busy week for me, but not too busy to assemble a suite of links for your Friday amusement. The record store has largely disappeared and along with it the second-hand record shop. Now it seems the bookshop as well: The demise of the second-hand bookshop.

Decades, even centuries, of history and tradition are disappearing because of market forces, and the pandemic that we are all suffering through has sped matters up. So, although I would offer two hearty cheers for the Oxfam bookshops, please try and visit your local book dealer, if you’re still lucky enough to have one. Otherwise, this most eccentric and likeable of trades shows every sign of being annihilated forever, save for the most rarefied of dealers, and this would be a great pity, especially if it were to take place more or less through carelessness, rather than design.

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 Arthur Kaptainis, Canada's best music journalist in English, offers an evaluation of Kent Nagano's fourteen year stint with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal: Kent Nagano's legacy with the OSM: The magnetic maestro takes his leave.

Sometimes the music was bundled with social awareness. In Nagano’s first season, we heard The General, an oratorio interweaving theatrical music by Beethoven with words based on the Rwanda memoirs of Roméo Dallaire. Later came post-tragedy outreach concerts in Montreal North and Lac-Mégantic.

An unapologetic exponent of the classical canon — just read his memoir/manifesto Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected — Nagano was aware of the need to spread the word. In 2008 he took a subset of the OSM on tour to Nunavut.

Ten years later, to open what would be his last full season, Nagano chose Chaakapesh, the Trickster’s Quest, an opera on a First Nations subject by Tomson Highway (words) and Matthew Ricketts (music). This also went to the Far North. With, of course, a camera crew.

Not that media trimmings are needed to produce a worthwhile experience. All the hype would be worthless in the absence of something musical to say.

As recently as January, Nagano surprised me with a magical performance of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Emperor Waltz. “The beauties of the orchestration were captured to perfection,” I reported. Clapping between movements in Schubert’s Symphony No. 1 suggested that the conductor, at 68, had not lost his recruiting power.

That magnetism was particularly strong in the first years and manifested itself in programming that few other North American orchestras would hazard. A good example in 2008 was Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise as performed for only the second time in North America.

Sadly, the one time I was in Montreal in recent years, the OSM was not offering a concert, so I have not had the opportunity to hear Nagano live.

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NICOLA BENEDETTI LASHES OUT AT THE MUSIC BUSINESS:

Speaking about Covid responses on Scala Radio, the enterprising Scottish violinist said:

‘I just don’t believe that the route we’ve taken is the best we could have done. I think incompetency, vested interests in the wrong areas, I think just a lack of care, a lack of leadership, disorganisation, just bad management I think has gone on left, right and centre and it’s costing people their livelihoods.’

She went on to say: ‘Our prospects do not look good any time soon. We can’t see a clear end in sight that provides any sort of working business model. It’s not just musicians, it’s everybody involved in that ecosystem.’

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Here is some follow-up on that Schenker kerfuffle: SCHENKER INQUIRY FACES FIRST AMENDMENT CHARGE

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has written to the president of the University of North Texas, warning him that his inquiry into the Schenker furore violates the First Amendment of the US constitution. This may end up in court.

The First Amendment Bars UNT from Penalizing Scholarly Writing Others Find

Offensive

While the content of JSS’s series of responses to Ewell’s SMT address may be deeply offensive to some readers, it does not fall into any exception to the expressive rights shielded by the First Amendment and academic freedom. It is well-established that the First Amendment does not make a categorical exception for expression that some may find hateful, and equally well-established that it constrains public universities in penalizing students for exercising their right to free expression and faculty members for exercising their right to academic freedom.

Frankly, I have been waiting for a real confrontation between the woke progressives and some actual adults.

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I hate to put up yet another tale of woe, but this is the new reality: The Summer of No Music: Loss of concerts makes Denver question its cultural identity.

More than halfway through Denver’s bizarre, unprecedented Summer of No Music, an increasing amount of people — artists and fans alike — are wondering: Without live music, who are we?

We can already see what’s slipping away: Between April 1 and July 31, Colorado’s music industry lost 8,327 jobs and $344.6 million in sales revenue, according to a report released this week by Denver Arts & Venues. This represents 51% of total employment in the industry statewide and 24% of its annual sales revenue, wrote Colorado State University researcher Michael Seman.

Denver took the hardest hit, with losses in the metro region estimated at 4,525 jobs and $213.7 million in sales revenue — or more than half of all jobs in the region’s music industry and 25% of its annual sales revenue. The majority of these losses at both the state and regional level are in the “musicians, managers and agents” and “live events” sectors of the industry, the report said.

And this is after only six months.

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 Alex Ross reviews two new books on Poulenc in The New Yorker: Francis Poulenc’s Drunken Angels.

I’ve been holed up in Poulenc’s world on account of two absorbing new books: Roger Nichols’s “Poulenc: A Biography” (Yale) and Graham Johnson’s “Poulenc: The Life in the Songs” (Liveright). Both do justice to a composer who has often been overshadowed by the giants with whom he shared the early and mid-twentieth century. He was no originator, like Schoenberg or Stravinsky, nor did he possess Britten’s or Shostakovich’s command of manifold genres. He was, however, a composer of rare gifts, particularly in the setting of sacred and secular texts. As the decades pass, he grows in stature, and his aloofness from musical party politics matters less.

This is the kind of thing that Ross does well, so the whole piece is worth reading.

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This week's miscellanea demands two envois. First, here is a performance from September 2019 of the Symphony No. 5 by Mahler. Kent Nagano conducting the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal:

And second, Banalités by Poulenc with Véronique Gens, soprano and Roger Vignoles, piano: