Friday Miscellanea

 Guitar 4-hands? You bet!

Ok, well how about four guitars? Here is the Dublin Guitar Quartet playing Philip Glass:

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There seems to be a new genre of YouTube clips that consist solely of silent captures of Yuja Wang in various states of concert undress:

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You might recall that I was born in northern Canada where it typically gets down to 40 degrees below zero in the winter. Once, in fact, I was outside when it was 60º below zero, but that was a unique experience. At 60º below you will NOT get your car started, even with a block heater. Here is a little video of Whitehorse in the Yukon at 40º below. Notice that there are few people on the streets and every one of them is very warmly dressed with especially the ears covered. At 40º below, your ears will start to freeze in just a couple of minutes.

That mist you see? It's not water vapor, it's ice crystals. Except in the shot of the river, that's steam coming off the water. At 40 below.

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Via Slipped Disc we are alerted to this report on Opera in Vienna:

The Staatstoper in Vienna is normally the busiest opera house in the world, so it was no surprise that it announced it intended to mount a full programme of opera for the 2020/21 season despite Covid 19.  Austria has suffered the virus like everywhere in Europe but owing to sensible policies it has recorded much lower infection and death rates than the UK... The opera house had taken sensible precautions for Covid. Socially distanced seating meant they were seating roughly one thousand instead of two thousand people, with gaps between seats. You had to wear masks when entering the opera house until you were seated, and then you could choose whether to take them off during the performance, although some people kept them on throughout. 

We saw 4 operas over 4 nights and there aren't many other places in the world where you can do that just now. ‘Elektra’, which was streamed round the world on the 11th of September, the night we were there, is of course very much a Viennese opera, composed by Richard Strauss and written by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal based on Sophocles’ play but heavily influenced by that famous Vienna resident Sigmund Freud. Our second night at Vienna starred one of the oldest and perhaps most famous opera singers of all, 79-year-old Placido Domingo, singing in Verdi's ‘Simon Boccanegra’.  Domingo now sings baritone roles, but he really isn't a baritone, just a tenor who finds reaching the high notes more difficult and can't quite get the depth and darkness of the lower notes. Having said that he remains a fine actor and carried off the role of the aging Doge of Genoa very convincingly.

Read the whole thing!

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Here is an article on Beethoven beautifully illustrating the dangers of knowing a little bit about something and unleashing the fell monsters of ideology.

 We hear the famous melodies for the thousandth time, whether in movies, commercials, or concerts, from the third, fifth, sixth, or ninth symphonies or from piano concertos and sonatas or pieces of chamber music. But the cutting edge of this music has been dulled through overuse. That is, we have forgotten, and no longer seem to hear, the intensely political nature of Beethoven’s music—its subversive, revolutionary, passionately democratic, and freedom-exalting nature. 

Let us, then, turn again with fresh ears and open minds to “the first great democrat of music,” in the words of Ferruccio Busoni. Let us draw inspiration from him in our own struggles to humanize and democratize the world. And let’s be sure not to forget, in the cultural wasteland that is twenty-first-century America, the nobler aspects of our civilization’s heritage.

The thing is that this is very plausible, but at the same time, only a half-truth. If it was for the revolutionary fervor of his music that we revered Beethoven, we might revere composers like Cherubini and Luigi Nono even more, because they are revolutionary in a more obviously political way. Beethoven is in the first rank of great composers, not for his political content, but for his aesthetic content. Not to say that the things the writer points out are not there, they are, but it is not the political referentiality that makes the music great. Beethoven is not the musical equivalent of Che Guevara.

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Europeans always seem to have the best think pieces on music. Here is one by Xenia Hanusiak: Music is a philosophy, rich in ideas that language cannot say.

Music is a Socratic teacher. Its melodies and call-and-response mechanisms, together with the subsequent variations in modulations and rhythms, steer us away from linear thinking and towards nuance. When we attend to an improvisation, track the journey of a voice in any one of Bach’s preludes, or follow the route of a single instrument in a symphony – the oboe in Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 3 (1971), or the clarinet in George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) – with our dissecting technique, we can subsume the formal inventiveness of music into our approaches to the art of questioning life, refining and redefining our interrogations to enlist more creative responses.

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Let's have some hopeful, heartfelt, happy envois today. First up, some Heinrich Biber, of whom we don't hear nearly enough:

And Mad Rush played by Philip Glass in a concert in Montreal: