Friday Miscellanea

I have to prepare this miscellanea ahead of time as well, as Friday is another travel day for me. Friday morning I fly the little inter-harbour seaplane from Vancouver to Victoria, flight time 35 minutes. Then Saturday morning early I fly back in time to attend the last concert at 2 pm. The usual way to go from Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, located on the mainland, to Victoria, the second largest city and capitol located on Vancouver Island, is by car ferry. These travel every hour from harbours located quite a ways from the city centres so not very convenient if you have limited time as the whole trip takes about three and a half hours. The inner city harbour to harbour flights are more expensive, of course, but way more convenient. I'm looking forward to it because I haven't used the service before. Here is a screenshot of one of their planes:

I'll probably be able to get some nice shots during the trip from the air. Lots of charming islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

On with the miscellanea! The New York Times reviews a new six-hour opera: Review: ‘Stranger Love’ Reflects the L.A. Philharmonic at Its Finest

“Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.

Here is an excerpt:

You can't tell too much from that except for the overwhelming influence of Philip Glass and the fact that I was just about to kill myself by the end of the clip...

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 Adam Kirsch talks about opera and sex in The Paris Review: Faust and the Risk of Desire

Like Violetta and Alfredo in La traviata and Don Giovanni and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s opera, Faust and Marguerite helped me begin to understand things about love and sex that were still remote from my experience. In many ways, of course, these works were products of an alien culture: no one in my world associated sex with sin, as Marguerite does. But for that very reason, opera had more to teach me about the riskiness and perversity of desire than did Madonna and George Michael, who sold transgression on the radio. Thirty years later, I’m still perpetually surprised by the boldness of an art often thought of, by people who don’t listen to it, as old-fashioned.

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I once forgot my guitar in a restaurant in Montreal--luckily I noticed just a few meters down the street and rushed back to retrieve it! This violinist was not so lucky: STAR SOLOIST LOSES VIOLIN ON GERMAN TRAIN

The Berliner Zeitung reports that a 17th century violin ‘worth more than 100,000 euros’ was stolen on a Berlin-to-Stuttgart ICE train together with two bows.

The incident happened on Friday. ‘When the 59-year-old got off at Stuttgart Central Station, she forgot her violin case and its contents on the train. The woman only noticed the loss when the ICE was already on its way back to Berlin. The police assume that an unknown perpetrator stole the violin case during this trip.’

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In Classical Crescendo even Maureen Dowd is talking about sex and music:

As we discuss which musical genres are expiring — Is rock ’n’ roll dead, as Jann Wenner told me? Is jazz fading away? — it seems that classical music is getting hotter.

Albert Imperato, a New York music promoter, says the idea is breaking through that classical music is not supposed to be safe and relaxing. It’s supposed to tingle.

I think it was always supposed to tingle. But read the whole thing.

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 Some good news: Audiences Are Coming Back to Orchestras After ‘Scary’ Sales Last Fall

Before the pandemic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra had been averaging houses just over 70 percent. But in fall, said Melia Tourangeau, its chief executive, “we were happy, we were jumping up and down, if we got above 1,000” — about 37 percent of the 2,700-seat Heinz Hall. “It was very visible, and very scary.”

In Dallas, said Kim Notelmy, that ensemble’s leader: “We remained hopeful because we felt people were interested. But we weren’t seeing it translate into ticket sales.”

But then a turnaround appeared most everywhere, which many leaders ascribed to an easing of lingering health concerns around the pandemic, particularly among older segments of the audience.

“It seemed like a switch flipped right before Thanksgiving,” said Jeff Alexander, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the economic aspects of music: Taylor Swift’s Tour Is Wreaking Havoc on Ticket Reselling

Dollar sales for Taylor Swift’s tour this year are seven times that of Bruce Springsteen, eight times Morgan Wallen and Coldplay, nine times Adele and Beyoncé, and 13 times what this year’s Super Bowl did, according to StubHub.

And just for perspective, about 10.5 million times that of box office for my concerts. Just in case you were wondering!

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Pfitzner’s end is an essay on a musical conservative:

Pfitzner, in other words, shared the Burkean belief that what already exists must exist for a reason and shouldn’t be lightly discarded in favor of an abstract freedom. “That the nature of music has been grossly misunderstood for four hundred years,” he writes, “I will only believe if I am shown just the glimmer of something positive, something more beautiful . . . than music has produced so far.”

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John McWhorter in Is Musicology Racist? weighs in on the new book by Philip Ewell. Read the whole thing, but here are the concluding paragraphs:

There are surely reasoned debates one could have about Ewell’s various recommendations, but it is disturbing that they so often entail a relaxing of standards without presenting new challenges other than those that decentering whiteness might entail. Getting a musicology master’s or Ph.D. in Ewell’s world would be a lot easier: no need to play piano (or apparently, any instrument), no need to learn foreign languages, no need to take standardized tests or submit to anonymous peer reviews (two additional targets of Ewell’s) and so on. Ewell answers thus: “If someone says that enacting any of my recommendations represents a ‘lowering of standards,’ push back against that language. Usually a lowering of standards is code for becoming less white and less male.” He does not explain why his ideas do not involve a lowering of standards; he merely dismisses such standards as racist “code.”

The assumption, then, is that the “whiteness” or “maleness” of any given proposition must automatically be a mere power play rather than a reasoned aesthetic or logical conclusion. And that elicits a question we’re not supposed to ask: What if, where classical music is concerned, white people, in all of their perfidies otherwise, got something right? And I mean so right that all those trained in the close study of music should be familiar with it? Black people got it right with syncopation as default, with blue notes and, especially in Africa, with complex rhythm. All of these elements deeply season our modern musical experience. But Beethoven’s Seventh is just, in Ewell’s telling, white stuff? In a blog post, Ewell dismissed the composer as merely “above average” and fetishized by the white establishment.

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Let's have a brief excerpt from Gounod's Faust:

 

And some Offenbach by Fatma Said and Marianne Crebassa:

Here is the Prelude to Act 1 of Pfitzner's opera Palestrina: