Friday Miscellanea

I've been contemplating my next trip to Europe and Aix en Provence is one festival that has caught my eye: The Ups and Downs of Europe’s Most Interesting Opera Festival.

With Simon Rattle leading a virtually unimpeachable London Symphony Orchestra in the pit, this “Wozzeck” was one of those operatic miracles: a harmonious meeting of singing, playing and direction at an impressively high level. It is the finest presentation at this year’s edition of the Aix Festival, the 75th.

It’s both understandable, and a touch disappointing, that the festival’s clearest success was also the most traditional production: McBurney’s “Wozzeck” could have come from any major opera house. But this type of show alone is not what makes Aix a summer music destination.

No. Its draw is also in the departures from tradition. Without them, Aix would be another Salzburg instead of the most interesting opera festival in Europe — though at this point in Pierre Audi’s tenure as artistic director, “opera” is too limiting a label, with a slate over the past week of film, music theater, concerts and, yes, opera, including two new works, each of vastly different character.

Sounds well worth a visit!

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 The often under-appreciated György Ligeti gets marquee treatment at The Guardian: How György Ligeti soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’

Ligeti was born in 1923 to Hungarian-speaking intellectual parents in Transylvania, recently under Romanian rule. He was a late starter as a musician, but decided to study composition after his desire to be a scientist was frustrated by tightening Nazi antisemitic laws. As the second world war escalated he found himself conscripted into forced agricultural labour, escaping the terrible fate of his father and brother only by luck. He began his life as a composer under grim artistic restrictions in postwar communist Hungary, finally escaping to the west in 1956. “I did not choose the tumults of my life,” Ligeti later said. “Rather, they were imposed on me by two murderous dictatorships: first by Hitler and the Nazis, and then by Stalin and the Soviet system.”

If all of this led to music that could be unrelenting, there is another side to Ligeti. A piece of old BBC footage shows the famously ice-cool Pierre Boulez getting the giggles while conducting a 1971 performance of Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures at the Roundhouse. Although the works are impeccably avant garde, you’re allowed to laugh. Ligeti – like Haydn – was a composer who could pull off that rare trick of being laugh-out-loud funny in music.

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Things are not good in San Francisco: SF Symphony and Musicians in Search of Harmony

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 22 musicians and one librarian have retired from the orchestra. Immediately before the pandemic, principal cellist Michael Grebanier died.

Three have left for other reasons. Chorus Director Ragnar Bohlin departed over the orchestra’s vaccination requirement, violinist Helen Kim became associate concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony, and violinist Eliot Lev is now a mental health professional.

The chair held by principal keyboardist Robin Sutherland, who retired in 2018 and died in 2020, remains open. Nadya Tichman stepped down from associate concertmaster and is now a section violinist; auditions were held recently for that position, but the results are not yet publicly known. All of these changes mean a cumulative 28 vacancies.

The orchestra has held auditions for and appointed new members for only a few positions. Rainer Eudeikis is now principal cellist. Matthew Griffith succeeded Luis Baez as associate principal and E-flat clarinet. Katarzyna Bryla-Weiss and Leonid Plashinov-Johnson joined the viola section. Last year’s round of flute auditions did not result in the appointment of a principal flutist. The results of recent auditions for principal flute, principal harp, and second bassoon have not yet been publicly announced.

Beyond the 28 vacancies, principal horn Robert Ward will retire at the end of 2023; again, the outcome of auditions for principal horn is not yet known. The orchestra said in an email that it does intend to hire a chorus director.

What this means is that the orchestra onstage at Davies Symphony Hall includes more than 20 freelance players each week...

Internal tensions aside, I can see a lot of reasons why musicians might not want to live in San Francisco.

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Violins in the sun: Stradivari's home workshop reopens in Italy

Of the 1,100 violins, cellos, violas and other stringed instruments made by Stradivarius, who died in 1737 aged 93, some 650 survive.

The "Lady Blunt" Stradivarius, which sold for $15.89 million in 2011, holds the record for the price fetched by a violin at auction.

French violin maker Benedicte Friedmann, 48, is one of more than 180 luthiers based in Cremona, a city with fewer than 70,000 inhabitants.

Chisels, pairing tools, bandsaws and small planes hang on the wall above her workbench where she carefully finishes a violin neck, and prepares to apply the varnish to the instrument, string it, and add the bridge.

It usually takes Friedmann around six weeks to finish her creations, using the same techniques as 300 years ago.

"The only thing that has changed are the tools, which have been slightly modernised," said the trained violinist, who tests her creations herself.

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Some envois. First an excerpt from Cosi fan tutte from the Aix Festival:

The Kyrie from the Requiem by Ligeti, a distorted version of which was used in Kubrick's 2001:

We only seem to have brief publicity clips of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony, but here is their youth symphony playing Salonen's Nyx: