Friday Miscellanea

I like Ted Gioia's writing because he often finds unique takes on things, such as this one on the lullaby: Ten Observations on Lullabies.

Is any music genre more disrespected than the lullaby? It may be the oldest music genre, and almost certainly the most widely performed. Every one of us has benefited from the lullaby at some point in our life—if not as a singer, at least as a listener during our infancy. But show me a single musicologist who specializes in this genre. Who has written its history? What music writer has celebrated its power?

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The New York Times does its best to gin up some sort of controversy about the logo of the Salzburg Festival--without much success: The Thorny History of the Salzburg Festival’s Logo

The Salzburg Festival commissioned a report on the logo’s origins for its centennial last year, a jubilee that has stretched into this summer because of the pandemic. The research revealed new information about the life of its creator, the artist Leopoldine Wojtek, who began as a modernist but whose work took a conservative, Nazi-sympathetic turn in the 1930s, and who was married to one of the party’s most prolific art looters and schemers.

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An article on Italian spruce trees used for musical instruments: For Italy’s Musical Woods, Threats From Without and Within.

Though all the logs look identical—same length, straight and hearty—for Fabio Ognibeni, not all the spruce trees of Val di Fiemme, in the Alpine region of Trentino Alto Adige in Italy, are the same. Ognibeni estimates that just two to three out of 1,000—trees that he can recognize by sight—will make beautiful music. He can see how this wood will resonate in prestigious auditoriums and concert halls, in schools and homes around the world, in the form of grand pianos, violins, harpsichords, and harps. Ognibeni is the owner of Ciresa, a company that supplies “resonance wood” to luthiers and piano-makers, including globally known brands such as Fazioli, C. Bechstein, and Blüthner.

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Alex Ross has a new piece in The New Yorker: John Corigliano’s New Opera Reimagines Dionysus as Dracula

John Corigliano’s Dracula-infused opera, “The Lord of Cries,” which had its première last month at the Santa Fe Opera, thus has the field mostly to itself. The libretto is by Mark Adamo, Corigliano’s husband, who is himself an opera composer of considerable accomplishment. Adamo had been mulling over Stoker’s tale for years, seeking to fuse Dracula with the figure of Dionysus in Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” and in his rendition the vampire turns out to be a guise assumed by the pagan god as he seeks to unleash on Victorian England the same vengeful chaos that he once dealt out to Thebes. In the early scenes, Harker has returned from Transylvania, his mind in tatters. Dionysus arrives in England and recruits modern bacchantes from the inmates of an asylum; the doctor in charge, John Seward, becomes convinced that he can defeat the fiend only by becoming fiendish himself. Like Agave in “The Bacchae,” he ends up cutting off the wrong head. The core message of Adamo’s libretto, delivered in the final chorus, is that repression breeds madness and violence: “You may assuage the priest without, but not the beast within.”

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Slim pickings this week, but most of my attention is on the Festival concerts, so... We pretty much have to have the Brahms lullaby:

And here are John Corigliano's caprices for violin from The Red Violin: