Friday Miscellanea

Study shows that listening to music during stressful times can boost your mood and reduce stress. Well, duh. This study was done exclusively with participants from Austria and Italy and no information was given as to what music they listened to. I'll bet that the results would be different if you listened to Mozart or Metallica, Brahms or Björk.

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Here is what music-loving economist Tyler Cowan listened to in 2022:

I am listing only new releases:

Bach, Johann Sebastian, complete Sonatas and Partitas for violin, Fabio Biondi.  Perhaps the only recording I like as much as the older (stereo) Milstein performance?

Bach, Johann Sebastian, The Art of Life, Daniil Trifonov, The Art of the Fugue (favorite of Thomas Schelling!) is the main work here.  Schelling, by the way, was especially fond of the Grigory Sokolov recording of this work.

van Baerle Trio, Beethoven complete piano trios

Beethoven, Kreuzer sonata for violin and piano, Clara-Jumi Kang and Sunwook Kim

William Byrd, John Bull, The Visionaries of Piano Music, played by Kit Armstrong

Handel, George Frideric, Eight Great Suites and Overtures, by Francesco Corti on harpischord

Matthias Kirschnereit plays Mozart, the complete piano concerti, and two Rondos

Mozart, La flûte enchantée (yes in French), conducted by Hervé Niquet

Shostakovich/Stevenson, mostly Op.87, piano music, by Igor Levit

Szymanowski, Karol, Piano Works, by Krystian Zimerman

By far my biggest discovery was Benjamin Alard playing the complete keyboard works of Bach, mostly on organ and clavichord.  These are some of the best recordings of the best music I have heard, ever.

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The Guardian's listening list for January for the 26th is this piece (more interesting than today's piece) but the selections seem largely random:

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From Slipped Disc: ARTS COUNCIL COMMISSIONS ‘INDEPENDENT’ OPERA ANALYSIS

This might be Arts Council England’s lowest moment.

Last night, in response to protests from every major opera company at its lack of an opera policy, ACE issued this statement:

At the Arts Council we have a single 10-year strategy, Let’s Create, which shapes all our investment and development decisions. We will not therefore develop separate artform or sub artform strategies. But as the national development agency for creativity and culture, for the past few months we have been planning to commission an independent piece of analysis, designed to focus on consideration of opera and music theatre in relation to Let’s Create. This analysis will help us shape our future investment in opera and music theatre and to develop a shared understanding with the sector of the challenges and opportunities currently faced by it. We will share further details of this work later in the Spring.

I think the problem here, and one that comes with every "national strategy," one that Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years ago, is an epistemological one. Incidentally, it is the same problem that dogs most socialist policies. The problem is that a central authority, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Arts Council of Great Britain, develops a national policy (Stalin's Five Year Plans or opera in the UK) that will somehow lead to future progress. This policy is developed by a small group of administrators but applied at the local level. The knowledge problem is quite simple: no matter how much data they gather, the central authority lacks knowledge of what is needed at the local level. In the Soviet Union, exactly how many what what kind of tractors are needed in a specific district in Ukraine; in the UK, exactly what kind of opera and production will appeal to the audiences in Manchester or Glasgow. Central planning is notoriously bad.

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Also from Norman Lebrecht, never reluctant to over-share his opinions: Why I hate Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. Let me summarize:

• because his stepmother liked it
• because it is atypical: "The Sixth, however, is sheer escapism, a springtime day evoked in deep midwinter and telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does."
• because he hated hiking in the countryside
• because he hated Bruno Walter (the conductor of a famous recording)
• because Theodor Adorno: "Adorno, for me, cracks the Pastoral enigma. If we accept his proposition that Beethoven delivers both text and subtext, narrative and analysis, we can make of the symphony whatever we like – whether a benign Sunday jaunt or a thunderous sermon against a world bent on self-destruction. We can both love the melodies and loathe the context."

There, now you don't have to read it.

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Let's have some music. First, Bach, the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I played by Benjamin Alard:

And, of course, the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven conducted by Bruno Walter:

Finally from one of the very few people to have recorded all the Bach cantatas, Maasaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan with the Cantata BWV 30: