Friday Miscellanea

The Wall Street Journal has a review of a new book by Norman Lebrecht: ‘Why Beethoven’ Review: Can a Genius Survive?

“Johann Sebastian Bach’s oratorios lay untouched for a hundred years,” Mr. Lebrecht writes. “The operas of Handel were hardly seen for two centuries. Mozart, popular as his operas may have been, had his symphonies and concertos used as kindling. . . . Schubert’s piano sonatas gathered dust for generations. Schumann’s symphonies were discarded, as were several Verdi operas. Beethoven, alone among classical and romantic composers, was embraced first to last, his time to ours. Why is that?” 

It is a sad fact in the 2020s that anyone writing a book praising the achievements of an artist on the order of Ludwig van Beethoven situates himself on the dangerous side of a political question. To sum up the pervasive critical attitude: Beethoven was white, his music is enjoyed by white people with money, and his “greatness” is a construction of a racist society.

Follow the link to read the rest. 

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This is a surprisingly intelligent discussion of musical elitism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azpxUnIgsts

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The New Yorker tells us about The Origins of Creativity. The sub-head reads:

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

Are they serious? Isn't this just like the Soviets' tendency to claim that they invented everything? Or the Chinese--but they had a bit better evidence. But wait, actually the claim is a bit narrower:

The term “creative nonfiction” is actually a fairly recent coinage, postdating the advent of the New Journalism by about twenty years. The man credited with it is the writer Lee Gutkind. He seems to have first used “creative nonfiction,” in print, anyway, thirty years ago, though he thought that the term originated in the fellowship application form used by the National Endowment for the Arts. The word “creative,” he explained, refers to “the unique and subjective focus, concept, context and point of view in which the information is presented and defined, which may be partially obtained through the writer’s own voice, as in a personal essay.”

So only "creative nonfiction" then.

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On an Overgrown Path has an interesting discussion of sound quality: Sibelius remastered or reimagined?

Classical music has a schizophrenic relationship with sound quality. On the one hand there is an obsessive preocuppation with hideously expensive 'acoustically perfect' concert halls. On the other hand recorded classical music has been chased down the rabbit hole of lo-fi by MP3s, streaming, ear buds, and mobile listening, and rarely - if ever - is sound quality mentioned in reviews of CDs. So it is not surprising but still disappointing that a major initiative by one of the largest classical labels to open the debate about recorded sound quality has passed unremarked, while classical's great and good continue their demands for yet another 'acoustically perfect' concert hall.

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Re the UK crisis: ‘A long-term fight for existence’ – full text of Simon Rattle speech on the crisis facing UK classical music

The last few months have been devastating for our sector. After the Arts Council’s swingeing cuts in November, which have affected all of us and left some extraordinary groups fighting for their lives, we were all stopped in our tracks by the proposed vandalism by the BBC, of which the closure of the BBC singers was only the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a kind of dishonesty at the heart of many of the decisions. George Orwell will recognise the language: ‘Refresh the administration’ and ‘reimagine the art form’

When the two largest supporters of classical music in this country cut away at the flesh of our culture in this way, it means that the direction of travel has become deeply alarming. It’s clear we are facing a long-term fight for existence and we cannot just quietly acquiesce to the dismantling or dismembering of so many important companies.

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Fashion and the Classical Musician. This is a topic I have loved to kick around, contrasting Grigory Sokolov with Yuja Wang. But this article manages to discuss a number of other artists as well.

Miuccia Prada, head designer of her eponymous company, once stated, “What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”

Classical music can also be considered “instant language,” especially when performed by the French piano duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who have been dazzling audiences throughout the world with their musicianship — and couture wardrobe — for more than five decades. Included in their custom-made fashion dossier? Feathered frocks by Prada, which the siblings donned while playing Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals for a 2005 televised concert at the Waldbühne with conductor Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

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 If you can get past the paywall, this might be interesting: How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge. I get similar feelings from YouTube these days which always seems to be wanting to nudge me into watching the most trivial clips no matter how I try to eliminate those channels.

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Very slim pickings this week, so let's make up for it with some stunning envois! First up a performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto by Bach from the 1950 Salzburg Festival. On piano and conducting, Wilhelm Fürtwangler:

I was led to this performance by a very hefty paper by Richard Taruskin. He avers that this performance, led by someone who reached maturity before the First World War, provides us with an example of "pre-modern" performance practice, what he describes as "vitalistic" as opposed to the rhythmically and dynamically uniform performances from modern performers which he terms "geometric." I'll be talking about this in a future post. But for now, let's have one of the "historically-informed" performances that Taruskin claims really stem from a modernist sensibility. This is Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music with the same piece.

 And finally, the Barbirolli recording of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius.