Friday, September 2, 2022

Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times does a good job on a major composer: John Adams, an American Master at 75.

There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”

Some composers die young, but, luckily, some do not!

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And a new piece by Alex Ross in The New Yorker: How Radical Was Rachmaninoff?

Sergei Rachmaninoff, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, in upstate New York, was almost universally considered a throwback during his lifetime. Progressives scorned him as a purveyor of late-Romantic schlock. Conservatives cherished him as a bulwark against atonal chaos. Neither side saw him as innovative. In 1939, four years before his death, Rachmaninoff wrote, “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.” Nonetheless, he enjoyed immense popularity, which he retains today.

This is a venerable meme in discussions of composers: you can look for innovative elements in supposedly reactionary composers or conservative elements in avant-garde composers. Both approaches can be fruitful because creative people usually have complexities that resist being shoehorned into a particular category. Just think of Schoenberg's essay "Brahms the Progressive."

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Here is a piece by Jay Nordlinger On the preservation of classical music. While interviewing Marilyn Horne they discuss the ups and downs of recorded classical music:

...singers today have many fewer opportunities to record than their predecessors did—fewer opportunities than their teachers, and their teachers’ teachers, did. The recording industry is transformed. Who will pay for an album of, say, Schubert songs? A person can go to YouTube and hear Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fritz Wunderlich, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . . . Marilyn Horne.

Artists from a few decades ago were able to record vast repertoires while artists today struggle to get a relative handful out.

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Norman Lebrecht admits that even with his criticisms, SALZBURG HITS 96% ATTENDANCE.

The festival has turned in a dazzling result for this summer – a near-record attendance and 31.1 million euros at the box-office.

The alltime record attendance is 97%.

Even last year, as the pandemic lingered, nearly every concert I attended was close to being sold out. When I get over my current aversion to air travel, I'm sure I will be back in Salzburg.

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I'm often skeptical of "studies" but this one is plausible: Playing music in childhood linked to a sharper mind in old age, study suggests.

Researchers have found a link between learning a musical instrument in youth and improved thinking skills in old age. People with more experience of playing a musical instrument showed greater lifetime improvement on a test of cognitive ability than those with less or no experience, a paper from the University of Edinburgh has said.

Researchers found that this was the case even when accounting for their socio-economic status, years of education, childhood cognitive ability, and their health in older age.

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We start with some John Adams, of course. He had an early success with his Shaker Loops for string orchestra:


 And some Rachmaninoff. This is his Piano Concerto No. 2 with Evgeny Kissin:


And finally, Marilyn Horne with a Rossini aria, "Cruda sorte" from L'italiana in Algeri.


9 comments:

  1. I wonder whether classical musicians will embrace the DIY/self-production approach that has been the mainstay of pop, dance and hip-hop since personal computers got to be cheap. You couldn't record an orchestra in your garage but you could certainly record Schubert songs that way. You'd just need two good mics for the piano and one for the singer.

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  2. That's a really good question! I certainly did some home recording when I was a rock musician, but when I moved over to the classical world I just did it for self-criticism. When I started recording professionally it was with the CBC in Canada. And, of course, when I was playing recitals at universities where I was employed, they were usually recorded.

    I think that you need an acoustically resonant space for the best classical recording. A local church would work.

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  3. Churches are excellent. But you could also do a basement hung with moving blankets and do reverb in the box, convolution reverbs are amazing right now.

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  4. Yeah, I'm probably way behind the curve when it comes to reverb technology!

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  5. The Alex Ross piece immediately reminded me of Taruskini's "Not Modern and Loving It" essay from Russian Music at Home and Abroad.



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  6. I belatedly realized that by now all seven of Ferdinand Rebay's solo guitar sonatas have been filmed or recorded. Maybe for 2023 I'll have to do some marathon blog post series on the guitar sonatas of Rebay and Wenzel Matiegka (next year is the latter composer's 250th anniversary of his birth, after all).

    One of the handy things about the contemporary scene of recorded music is that guitarist composers whose work were de facto consigned to oblivion have been getting recorded. It's way easier to explain how sonata movements actually work guitarist to guitarist drawing on actual literature than trying to do something like go through a Beethoven piano sonata (although I lately heard Maria Yudina's take on Op. 111).



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  7. I think I am due to re-read "Russian Music at Home and Abroad." As I recall it was packed with masses of detailed information.

    Have to have a listen to those Rebay sonatas. I know I have heard one or two...

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  8. When I get to blogging through them I'll let you know and make sure to have links. I've had the hardbound volume of the seven sonatas for years. But it's one thing to have the scores and another to blog about them knowing people can't possibly hear the works. That's changed, thankfully.

    Rebay is, by his advocates, a composer who was a pianist and wrote for guitar because of his niece and if you hate Brahms and/or Schubert you will probably hate Rebay's music. :) I am indifferent to Schubert but like "some" Brahms so Rebay's work has been interesting. He was particularly good at writing chamber music pairing guitar up with woodwinds and strings. His sonata for oboe and guitar in E minor is fun.

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  9. Well, I love Schubert and I am starting to come around to Brahms, so I might like the Rebay.

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