Friday Miscellanea

Found this over at Slipped Disc. Photo of a piano competition in Paris.
The contestant is probably Martha Argerich. Interesting jury!

Something in Barron's about the market for high-end musical instruments: Rare Musical Instrument Market Is on a Crescendo.

Tarisio may not be as well known as Sotheby’s or Christie’s, but it’s become the top seller of musical instruments since it began online sales in 1999. In the first half of this year, the auction house posted sales of US$28 million, a 20% jump from the year before and a record for Tarisio. The average value of each lot is now US$29,000, up nearly 50% from a year ago, according to the auction house. 

Notable, according to Tomé, is that 94% of items it brought to auction in the first half of 2023 were sold, meaning “there’s more demand than supply.” In fact, there’s been a 33% rise in new bidders this year, building on strong demand from the prior two years. The pandemic played a role by surfacing more instruments as people moved and making more collectors comfortable with online buying and selling.

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 Review of a new book: Make It New and Difficult: The Music of Arnold Schoenberg.

For Sachs at age 77 to produce this impassioned defense of Schoenberg, composer of some of the most difficult and intimidating music ever written, might seem surprising, but the totality of Schoenberg’s life — as composer, painter, writer, teacher, exiled Jew and profoundly influential thinker — comprises one of the great narratives of 20th-century Western culture, and one can see how the story of this artist’s struggle for acceptance against the backdrop of the societal calamities of his era was so appealing to Sachs. 

Schoenberg’s artistic crisis was playing out against the looming threat of the Holocaust. Although he was 10 years ahead of the curve in identifying Hitler as a threat, by 1933 he was forced to flee with his wife and infant daughter, first to Boston and eventually, at the age of 60, to Los Angeles, where he remained until his death in 1951 at 76. Proud and combative in matters concerning his standing as a composer, he was by all accounts a congenial and loving family man. The Vienna-born composer who was mentored by Gustav Mahler ended up living on the same Brentwood street as Shirley Temple, was friends with Charlie Chaplin and had his portrait painted by George Gershwin. He was even invited to present the Academy Award for best musical score of 1937 but had to withdraw because of illness.

I'm not sure that asking one composer to review a book about another composer is the best choice, but it sounds like an interesting book.

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 Afghanistan: Taliban burn ‘immoral’ musical instruments

Some of the items set ablaze in Herat included a guitar, a harmonium and a tabla - a kind of drum - as well as amplifiers and speakers, according to images online. Many of these had been seized from wedding venues in the city.

An official at the Taliban's Vice and Virtue Ministry said playing music would "cause the youth to go astray".

A similar bonfire of instruments was organised by the Taliban on 19 July. Its government posted photos of the blaze on Twitter at the time but did not say which part of the country it had taken place in.

All forms of music were banned from social gatherings, TV, and radio while the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan from the mid-90s until 2001.

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 Norman Lebrecht with another controversial piece: Requiem for London’s music

t is a sad truth, widely acknowledged, that London is no longer a music capital. World orchestras that passed through once or twice a year no longer stop over. Headline artists save their signature concerts for Paris and Berlin. New music has dried up. There hasn’t been a premiere of world consequence since before Covid. London is falling off the music map.

Various reasons and excuses are attached to this decline, among them Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, economic woes and a government that is plundering funds from the capital and spreading it around the regions, going out of its way to penalise London orchestras while smiling upon pointless little minority start-ups that are barely above kindergarten level.

Read on for the details.

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This from Alex Ross: Apple Again Fails to Save Classical Music

For anyone who doesn’t need to be told the Story of Classical, the crucial test of an app will be its viability as a search engine. Apple Classical indeed represents a significant advance over the miseries of Apple Music and Spotify. If you go looking for “Beethoven Fifth,” the Fifth Symphony pops up—admittedly, as the third on a list of results that is headed by the “Moonlight” and “Pathétique” Sonatas. You can then go to a dedicated page for the work and scroll through more than five hundred options. At the top is an Editor’s Choice—very debatably, Gustavo Dudamel’s rendition with the Simón Bolívar Symphony. Listings are ordered by popularity, the insidious universal of the online world. This creates some confusion on the page devoted to the perennially underappreciated Swiss composer Frank Martin. His most popular piece is said to be “Ballade.” The algorithm can’t grapple with the fact that Martin actually wrote seven different scores titled Ballade, for various instruments.

I guess I'm living in one of what he calls "the remote hamlets of classical music." It's comfortable here and I have the secure knowledge that my CDs can't be disappeared or modified remotely by some vast, soulless corporation.

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I never really 'got' opera until I saw a high-quality European production. Here is an article on staging Wagner: At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done.

After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.

When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.

But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.

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Now for some envois. First the everlasting Martha Argerich playing Tchaikovsky at the Verbier Festival just a few years ago:

 Next, Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces:

And finally, Wagner, Prelude to Parsifal: