Friday Miscellanea

From the Wall Street Journal: Buying a Share of a Collectible Guitar? In This Market, You May Get Shredded.

This month, American guitar maker Gibson said it would use Rally, a site specializing in collectibles, to issue shares in prototype instruments designed in collaboration with famous players. Ownership of an EDS-1275 doubleneck model approved by Slash, of the band Guns N’ Roses, was chopped into 13,000 parts and sold for $5 apiece to 562 investors in just two hours.

Two more will follow: An SG Special modeled after the “Monkey” guitar played by Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, valued, like the Slash signature-model prototype, at $65,000; and a $100,000 Les Paul Custom signed by Adam Jones, of the hard-rock band Tool.

Combining hobbies with financial engineering speaks directly to the 2021 zeitgeist of amateur traders putting their money in unorthodox places as a statement of personal identity.

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The New York Times has an excellent article on a new recording of all three versions of Bruckner's Symphony No. 4: Jakub Hrusa and the Bamberg Symphony have released a new recording of them all.

This month, the Bamberg Symphony in Germany, led by its chief conductor, Jakub Hrusa, embraces the problem of the Fourth — or simply overwhelms it. The orchestra is releasing a four-disc set that includes recordings of all three versions, in new editions edited by Benjamin Korstvedt, a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, as part of the ongoing complete Bruckner being published under the auspices of the Austrian National Library. (For good measure, the recording also includes a selection of unpublished alternate passages and an alternate finale.)

Well worth reading and the article has excerpts from all three version of the scherzo.

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One of the most-neglected pieces by Shostakovich is, in my opinion, his set of 24 preludes and fugues for piano in all the keys. Igor Levit has just recorded them plus a piece in homage to Shostakovich on a new album:

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English Touring Opera Drops Half of Its Musicians in the Name of Diversity.

A report suggests at least 14 musicians have been told they will not be booked for the 2022 ETO tour. Many of those musicians were long-standing members of the ETO orchestra. The ETO says it is prioritizing “increased diversity in the orchestra” that is in line with “firm guidance of the Arts Council.”

Not a lot of detail in that article. We go to City Journal for a more complete discussion: Ripping Off the Veil.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching. Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.” In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians. Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Just to be clear, what we have here is a bare fact and then an interpretation of that. But I doubt we actually have the whole story. What is really happening here? 

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 The New York Times has a pretty extensive review of the Ojai Festival: At 75, the Ojai Music Festival Stays Focused on the Future.

In very Ojai fashion, there were so many living composers programmed that Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t even qualify as a headliner. If anything, he was a known quantity that unintentionally faded amid the novelty of other voices. Carlos Simon’s propulsive and galvanizing “Fate Now Conquers” nodded to Beethoven, but on his own brazen terms. And there continues to be nothing but promise in the emerging Inti Figgis-Vizueta, whose “To give you form and breath,” for three percussionists, slyly warped time in a juxtaposition of resonant and dull sounds of found objects like wood and planters.

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 Where Apple Sees the Future of Streaming:

The small but diverse group of classical-music lovers is in deep mourning after one of the pillars of its community died. Primephonic, a Dutch-American app that streamed a wide catalogue of classical music went dark last month, after being acquired by Apple Inc., which aims to fold the service into Apple Music. But why would the world’s largest company be interested in a closely held startup with a relatively small user base, a few dozen employees and no startling technological innovation to boast of?

The answer: Primephonic understood the future. Apple has realized that streaming services will succeed or fail depending on whether they master the four things the tiny company, along with its classical-music peers such as Idagio, have figured out: metadata, discovery, curation and quality.

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Violinist Nigel Kennedy cancels concert after Classic FM stops Hendrix tribute

Violinist Nigel Kennedy has pulled out of a concert at the Royal Albert Hall with only days to go after accusing the radio station Classic FM of preventing him from performing a Jimi Hendrix tribute.

Kennedy said the “culturally prejudiced” decision amounted to “musical segregation”, with the station he now calls “Jurassic FM” preferring him to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Wednesday’s show.

The Kronos Quartet were playing a Hendrix tune as an encore decades ago.

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Here are a couple of envois for you. First up is Igor Levit's new recording of the Fugue in A major from the set by Shostakovich:

Next the Kronos Quartet with Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix: