Friday Miscellanea

These days are whirling by and I am not finished my post on Bartók yet. I'm finding the Antokoletz book on Bartók to be a challenging read. But it will get posted sooner or later! And then I think I will do a few more on Bartók who has not gotten a very full treatment here. On to today's miscellanea. First up, a little video from YouTube:

You can't fault his enthusiasm, I suppose, but one particular trend I notice lately is the embarrassing mugging for the camera that so many YouTubers think they have to engage in. The expression on this gentleman's face shows a level of enthusiasm about equal to that of an eighteen-year-old boy on being offered oral sex for the first time!

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Here's an odd item from Slipped Disc: AMERICA INFLICTED STEINWAYS ON THE WORLD

Reader’s Comment of the Day from Bernard Chevilly in Orléans, France:

Steinway & Sons pianos are in almost every concert hall in the world because the Allies imposed them after World War II. The most prestigious European concert grand piano was, until then, the C. Bechstein, but the Bechstein family, since the early 1930s, were close to Adolf Hitler (Helene Bechstein wanted to marry Hitler to her daughter) and therefore Nazis. The Soviets and the Americans reduced the Bechstein factory in Berlin to ashes in 1945. The Steinway, an American piano of ancient German origin (Heinrich Steinweg), but genuinely “American”, was then produced in Hamburg. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Steinways gradually took over all concert halls in Europe and, by extension, on other continents. To conclude: the massive presence of the Steinway & Sons, manufactured with the unconditional financial support of the USA in Germany, was a political decision, totally unrelated to music. This is why major brands such as Fazioli, Bösendorfer or Steingraeber & Söhne cannot compete at all in the world market for concert pianos.

How true is this? The last piano recital I viewed in Wigmore Hall was played on a Fazioli and Bösendorfer pianos are quite common--in Europe at least.

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In an Ironic Plot Twist, Culture Workers Occupying Theatres in France Are Now Blocking the Reopening of Venues:

Culture venues can finally reopen to the public in France after months of lockdown. But arts workers who have been occupying theaters in protest against pandemic-related closures say their needs have still not been met—and many won’t leave, preventing some theaters from reopening.

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There seems to be a trend to concerts returning sans intermission:  What to do when nature calls — and there’s no intermission?

in the expansive new season at Lyric: all of the fall operas were to be recast as one-act experiences, performed without intermission. To achieve this goal, Lyric said, it even planned to make some artistic compromises and reduce the running times so that no opera would run more than two and a half hours.

That is going to involve some serious cuts in many operas. 

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Four in 10 musicians could leave Britain over EU touring fears – poll

More than 40% of musicians polled about their work in the European Union said they would consider relocating to continue accessing jobs, with a fifth contemplating changing career entirely.

As well, it could be years before we even realize how much damage the pandemic did to the performing arts.

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Ok, here is our quirky bit for the day, and it's about guitar lessons.

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William Deresiewicz has just about the best discussion of the arts before and during the catastrophe of COVID: Stages of Grief.

The pandemic will likely extinguish thousands of artistic careers. And the devastation will extend to the businesses and institutions that connect artists to audiences. The big players with deep pockets—Live Nation, the mammoth concert, ticketing, and artist-management company, or Gagosian, which operates galleries in seven countries—will survive. The entities that founder will be the smaller ones—mid-tier galleries, independent music venues—the kind that are crucial for helping emerging artists gain exposure, for sustaining serious creators and performers who won’t or can’t sell out to the commercial mainstream, and for keeping alive the spirit and soul of the arts.

But there have been beneficiaries, oh yes:

But the most frightening prospect is precisely the degree to which this crisis has entrenched and extended the power of the platforms: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook; YouTube, which is part of Google; and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Because it is that power that is ultimately behind what has been happening to artists. Art hasn’t really been demonetized. For the companies reaping the clicks and streams, free content is a bonanza. Along with Spotify and a few other players, the tech giants are diverting tens of billions of dollars a year away from creators and toward themselves. They have been able to do so only because of their size, which has given them leverage over labels, studios, publishers, publications, and above all, independent artists, and because of the influence it has given them in Congress. And while almost every other sector has been suffering, the pandemic has functioned like a hormone injection for Big Tech. At the start of 2020, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—the Big Five—had a combined market value of just under $5 trillion. By the end of the year, that already terrifying figure had grown to more than $7.5 trillion.

The whole essay is well-worth reading.

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For our envoi today an interesting and varied program by Mishka Rushdie Momen recorded last month at Wigmore Hall. She is playing on a Steinway, but Angela Hewitt, who also just did a recital at Wigmore, played on a Fazioli.