Friday Miscellanea

That old and antique song we heard last night:

Methought it did relieve my passion much.

 More than light airs and recollected terms

Of these most brisk and giddy pacèd times.

--Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2 Scene 4

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The Return of Tower Records? 

For many years, nothing much happened with Tower, as people were getting their music from iTunes and then Spotify. But then an opportunity seemed to arrive: the unexpected comeback of vinyl records. People are rediscovering the pleasures of having a record player. Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl outsold compact discs. “Customers seem to want a more physical experience, like touching something, listening to a vinyl, a sense of community,”  Zeijdel says. “When we were doing market research, a lot of kids, basically, what they’re doing with vinyl is that’s their alone time and their quiet time. They put the phone away, they listen to a vinyl, and just then decompress.”

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Neuroscience, the cosmos and trees: going deep with composer Hannah Peel

Peel is also one of our most exciting crossover composers. Her brilliant new album, Fir Wave – finished over lockdown – explores and develops sounds from a recording by BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. Her musicbox-heavy score for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, got an Emmy nomination last summer, while her eerie soundtrack for TV thriller The Deceived won critical acclaim. She’s Paul Weller’s orchestral arranger (she’s been working on his forthcoming LP: “he’s just fab”), and collaborated on a micro-opera about dating in lockdown, Close, with librettist Stella Feehily.

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In Canada: How independent companies are saving opera

Across Canada, indie opera companies are making the art form cool again; daring and provocative again. Pre-pandemic, the collective mass of these companies was on the verge of something truly special: making opera mainstream, something to be wafted over a crowded pub, or poured out freely in church basements and makeshift venues coast to coast. Insert how the pandemic ruined everything here. Indeed it did. But the eventual return of these companies to live performances will also be a return to realizing a future for opera that is relevant, diverse in representation, and uninhibited in expression. 

The opera revolution that is upon us now has been brewing for over a decade. Emerging from the minds of artistic directors and all-around tinkerers, to be realized in the voices of the next generation of artists who are swapping out the old for the new. If only the government grants flowed as freely as these directors' imagination, then Canadian opera would enjoy a more robust share of mainstream entertainment. So here's a friendly reminder to private donors, big and small, to keep in mind the long-struggling companies in your local communities, which lack the fundraising visibility of the larger ones. For it is in their hands that the awesome power of this art form will be passed on to the next generation of opera-goers.

 If only 50% of that were true!

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Alex Ross at The New Yorker: Conjuring the Music of Proust’s Salons

On July 1, 1907, Marcel Proust organized a short concert to follow a festive dinner at the Ritz in Paris. The program, with its interweaving of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and protomodern strands, exemplifies the impeccable taste of one of the most musically attuned writers in literary history:

Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1

Beethoven: Andante [unspecified]

Schumann: “Des Abends”

Chopin: Prélude [unspecified]

Wagner: “Meistersinger” Prelude

Chabrier: “Idylle”

Couperin: “Les Barricades mystérieuses”

Fauré: Nocturne [unspecified]

Wagner: Liebestod from “Tristan”

Fauré: Berceuse

Afterward, Proust reported to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, his friend and sometime lover, that the evening had been “perfect, charming.”

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Norman Lebrecht has an acerbic essay at The Critic titled: Myth of Igor, the Great Composer.

In half a century, no composer has attained the fame and stature of Stravinsky, none has dined with ease at the Elysée and the White House. Stravinsky was the last of the Great Composers. Once he was gone, they locked the canon and threw away the key.

Before you contest that proposition, let’s raise a cheer for the closure of the canon. Across the world right now, from the BBC to the Boston Symphony, dead white male composers are being replaced with diverse unknowns amid a confessional wave of collective guilt at our colonial worship of the Great Composers cult. Stravinsky will have his privilege checked at this summer’s music festivals, and about time, too. But I still see newspaper critics saluting him as the “greatest” of his century.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. If nothing else it is a compendium of muck-raking (Stravinsky's affair with Coco Chanel), half-truths (yes, there are some loud bits in the Rite), criticism lite ("He mixed cocktails with Cocteau and aphorisms with Apollinaire until war broke out, when he found there was not much left in his toolkit") and maladroit comparisons (Prokofiev). My three favorite twentieth century composers are actually Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, but it would never occur to me to try and diminish one of them by beating him over the head with another. They are, all three, indispensable. Still, Lebrecht rarely forgoes the opportunity to diminish the quality of music criticism.

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In honor of that Proust concert, two of the pieces. First, Couperin's “Les Barricades mystérieuses,” probably the best-known of his pieces for harpsichord:

And now the Violin Sonata No. 1 by Gabriel Fauré:

And let's end with something by that mythical Great Composer, Stravinsky. This is the Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja: