Friday Miscellanea

Exhibit 1 in the "headlines that fail to deliver what they promise" category is a recent New York Times article titled What Makes a Musical Genius? in which we fail to discover a single clue as to what makes a musical genius. Instead we get humdrum reviews of recent books about Tupac Shakur, Sinead O’Connor, Rickie Lee Jones and others.

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I'm sure we all from time to time have to deal with the challenge of friends and relatives offering literary recommendations? As a public service announcement, let me offer the following strategy. A relative recently strongly recommended a book by Kristen Hannah titled The Nightingale. This might be a good book, I don't know, but I do know, from decades of experience, that I am usually better off following my own instincts when it comes to books. But I had the perfect riposte handy, which I offer to you: "I'm reading Shakespeare right now and I guarantee that he is better." Yes, a wee bit arrogant and condescending, but hey. Worked like a charm.

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The New York Times has an article celebrating Wigmore Hall: A Beloved London Concert Hall Grows Bold as It Turns 120. I've always been a fan of Wigmore Hall since my own debut there, quite a few years ago now:

The Wigmore is emerging from its most recent crisis with aplomb. As an early adopter of livestreamed concerts at the beginning of the pandemic, it won large dividends of good will and public donations. Whereas many small performing venues in Britain are reopening nervously after six months of forced closure, the Wigmore Hall is confidently poised to celebrate its 120th anniversary with an ambitious program, starting Sunday.

The hall has occupied a special place in music lovers’ hearts since 1901, when it was opened as a recital hall by the German piano manufacturer Bechstein, which had a showroom next door. The discreet wooden doors under an art nouveau canopy that lead into the 540-seat hall, with its red plush seats, marble, gilt and dark wood panels, are a portal to another era.

Probably the most important chamber-music venue in Britain, the Wigmore has an intensely loyal London audience that filled the hall for most of the 500-plus concerts a year it was staging before last March.

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 This is rather touching: Rick Beato is a big fanboy of Martha Argerich:

Well, and why not? Just wait until he discovers Mitsuko Uchida and Grigory Sokolov!

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The New York Times has a sizable review of a new recording of the Bach Cello suites on violin by Johnny Gandelsman: Bach’s Cello Suites, Now on Violin, With a Folksy Feel.

Gandelsman isn’t the only violinist to have tackled these classic works; Rachel Podger recorded them in 2019, a year before he released his own set. But his approach is singular: feather-light and rooted in dance and folk music. He treats the suites as six enclosed spaces, tracing long arcs through each one, the sections blurring as he plays them through without pausing.

Read the whole thing--it contains little clips from this performance set alongside excerpts from performances on cello, which is something that can really add concrete illustrations to a review. Unfortunately, perhaps due to copyright reasons, the excerpts are all bleeding chunks, beginning and ending randomly. If you want to get a better impression of the performance you should look for it on YouTube. I'm not very fond of the sound, but light and airy it certainly is, and yes, rather dancey as well.

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 Here's my off-topic bit for today: Jordan Peterson talking about Price's Law, which has all sorts of interesting ramifications--even for classical music as he mentions around the middle of the clip.

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The Wall Street Journal has a piece on how opera houses are struggling with all the constraints posed by the pandemic: Opera Makes a Strange Comeback: No Touching, N95s for the Chorus

Initially, theaters are staging concerts or smaller operas with limited casts. For the next season, which starts in the fall, some operas have reduced the number of performances. Gone for now are fully fledged performances of spectacles that involve scores of performers packed onto the stage.

“In a Wagner opera, how can you have an 80 people chorus with two meters between them?” said French opera director Christophe Gayral. “You’d need a football field.”

Directors are adapting plots and scenography to social distancing rules. Stagehands are moving curtains to make room for socially distanced cast members, while designers are integrating masks into the costumes.

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The Critic magazine opines as how conductors are not nearly as important as we think (which makes us wonder about critics as well...): And the band played on…

It never fails to amaze me how little the appointment of a chief conductor affects the general performance and perception of an orchestra.

Take, as a case history, the New York Philharmonic. America’s premier gateway for musical talent, founded in 1842, the Philharmonic has not picked the right conductor since Leonard Bernstein threw himself under its wheels in 1957 and came up with enough razzle-dazzle to magnetise a new generation. People are going into care homes these days still singing the themes from his Young People’s Concerts. Lenny welded an orchestra to a city and its rising teens.

The Philharmonic plays on. It sounds more or less the same and its patrons continue to cough up the dough

After he left in 1973, the bond frayed. Pierre Boulez brought six years of modernist chic, followed by decades of torpor with Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert and the incumbent Dutchman Jaap van Zweden (yes, who?). None of these baton wagglers grabbed the city by the love-handles the way Bernstein did, or tuned into its rhythms.

You can read the whole thing and not be much wiser, I'm afraid. This is an excellent example of journalism unhindered by musical understanding.

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Which brings us to our envoi and I can think of nothing more appropriate than Martha Argerich playing the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev at the Singapore Piano Festival in 2018: