Friday Miscellanea

I haven't looking into the details, but apparently you can stream concerts from the Leipzig BachFest. Looks interesting and appealing.

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Here is a very interesting news item. Up to this point there has not been a formal lobbying group of German concert agents, something I find surprising. GERMAN CONCERT AGENTS FORM POLITICAL LOBBY GROUP. Or maybe music is so well subsidized in Germany that they never felt the need?

The mission:

– Clarification and standardisation of the status of guest artists under labour and social security law.

– Improvement of model contracts and industry-wide acceptance of regulations that acknowledges the artists’ preparation in advance for projects and entitles them to compensation payments in the event of cancellations through no fault of their own.

– Recognition of artists’ media and personal rights in connection with streaming and digital distribution of opera performances and concerts.

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This is a rather sad story: Violinist Apologizes for ‘Culturally Insensitive’ Remarks About Asians

A master class by the renowned violinist Pinchas Zukerman was supposed to be the highlight of a recent virtual symposium hosted by the Juilliard School.

Instead, Zukerman angered many of the roughly 100 students and teachers in the class on Friday when he invoked racist stereotypes about Asians, leading Juilliard to decide not to share a video of his master class afterward with participants, as it had initially intended.

At one point, Zukerman told a pair of students of Asian descent that their playing was too perfect and that they needed to add soy sauce, according to two participants in the class. At another point, in trying to encourage the students to play more lyrically, he said he understood that people in Korea and Japan do not sing, participants said.

What is both sad and weird about this is how could Zukerman have possibly gotten to this point in this life without recognizing that these kinds of remarks are biased, and, not to mention, false? Does he live that sheltered a life, flying from concert hall to concert hall, oblivious to everything else?

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It wasn't very long ago that it was possible to make the joke that soon we will have period instrument performances of Stravinsky. No longer! The historically informed movement has reached the early 20th century: The Conductor Transforming Period Performance--Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy and more: François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, are pushing historically informed practice into the 20th century.

Roth and Les Siècles have done Berlioz, too, not least a “Symphonie Fantastique” that matches Charles Munch’s for unhinged intensity.

But it is highly unusual to hear period performances, like theirs, of later music, using instruments and approaches fitting for the late 19th or early 20th century. The orchestral works of Ravel? An early version of Mahler’s First? Stravinsky’s trilogy for the Ballets Russes, including “The Rite of Spring,” reissued recently? Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune,” the symphonic poem that Pierre Boulez once described as breathing life into modernity?

Early music this is not.

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This is good to hear: Intermissions are back at Lyric Opera of Chicago. The idea of opera with no intermission just didn't seem that civilized.

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Pretty thin pickings this week--maybe I should not have done a mid-week miscellanea? So let's have extra helpings of musical envois. First up, some Caccini. This is his big hit Amarilli mia bella with Jevtovic Rosquist, soprano and David Tayler, archlute.

When I was young I had an album of Pinchas Zukerman playing a lot of the famous virtuoso violin pieces, which included this piece by Wieniawski:

And finally, a cello concerto by Bach's son C. P. E. Bach: