Friday Miscellanea

The Guardian has a very favorable review of Danny Driver's new recording of the Ligeti etudes for piano:

The influences shaping these pieces are those that permeate all of his later work, after it changed direction so decisively in the early 1980s – from the polyrhythmic player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow to the music of sub-Saharan Africa, chaos theory to the minimalism of Steve Reich. In the Études, Ligeti effectively created a new pianistic vocabulary, while remaining exuberantly himself – the moments when the music seems to evaporate in the highest reaches of the keyboard, or flounders in its lowest depths, find orchestral equivalents throughout his music of more than 40 years.

Danny Driver has been including groups of the pieces in his recital programmes for some years now. It’s clearly music that he admires hugely and understands profoundly...

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Slipped Disc has some very interesting reflections by French pianist Lucas Debargue:

 ‘I say something what might sound provocative. Pandemic was very damaging for culture, but it was very good for art. Art is a spiritual matter, it’s a matter of life and death. It’s not only entertainment. Of course, for entertainment it was disaster – and it’s still disaster. But art is dealing with inner life, what happens in one’s soul. It has nothing to do with surface, how famous you are, how many people read your books or listen to your CD.

‘Artists for me are like family who are keeping some very old spiritual values on earth. They are also kind of doctors. For me, an artist should be able to live being aware of big problems like this pandemic now and still create as much as possible. Even when in these horrible conditions, when you live in very little space – you can still have the space inside of you.

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We look to the San Francisco Classical Voice for a different view: Freelancers on the Edge: How They’re Making It During the Shutdown

“It took 25 years for me to reach a point in my career where I was constantly preparing for the next orchestra concert, opera performance, or recording session. Not having goals to work toward really messes with your head. The last year has been devastating. Everyone is depressed. There’s no adrenaline rush, no companionship, no artistic satisfaction. If you’re going to remain disciplined under these conditions you have to dig really deep.”

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The New York Times finally reports on the situation at The Met: The Met Opera’s Musicians, Unpaid Since April, Are Struggling.

The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.

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The Nation has an interesting piece discussing the relation between Canadian cultural critic Robert Fulford and pianist Glenn Gould. In the Vicinity of Genius: How a friendship with Glenn Gould created an unlikely cultural critic.

As students, Fulford and Gould would argue about music. Fulford was acquiring a taste for jazz and other forms of popular music, which Gould dismissed. Having to argue with someone as informed and quirkily opinionated as Gould forced Fulford into becoming an ad hoc critic, thus beginning a second career on top of journalism.

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Which brings us to our envoi and there really is only one likely choice. Here is Danny Driver playing two Ligeti etudes in a recent Wigmore Hall streamed concert. This clip will become unavailable in a couple of months, so listen now. The etudes begin at around the 33:15 mark: