Friday Miscellanea

Despite Tensions, Salzburg Remains a Crammed Summer Stage:

Last Tuesday, I left one concert early — squeezing past the confused people in my aisle right after Jean-Guihen Queyras played Kodaly’s Cello Sonata at 7 p.m. — so that I could make it to the baritone Christian Gerhaher’s lieder recital. And had Gerhaher’s haunting Schumann not felt quite so conclusive, I would have run, at 10:15, to try and make the second part of a third program.

Salzburg has competition. The Aix-en-Provence Festival in France has more varied spaces and a commitment to new work; in Germany, Bayreuth has a laser focus on Wagner and, as in this year’s augmented reality “Parsifal,” an experimental spirit. Glyndebourne, in England, has pastoral grace; Lucerne and Verbier, in Switzerland, vibrant orchestras and chamber intimacy.

But Salzburg is still the annual stage, crammed to bursting.

What with my trip to Vancouver for the string quartet premiere, I just couldn't justify attendance at Salzburg this year. Plus, I'm still recovering from a rather agonizing travel experience the last time I went to Europe. But looking over the programming at Salzburg, there is so very, very much to see and hear there. I think I will be returning soon!

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From The New Criterion: Lady Macbeth gets her revenge

“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which she will return to the Met,” said the Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb of the superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in 2022. Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the Met severed all ties with Netrebko, alleging that she was an irredeemable supporter of Vladimir Putin, and declared that no pro-Putin artists could perform for the company. 

Gelb beclowned himself by effectively firing his company’s biggest star—and perhaps the only one who could reliably sell out the house—at a time of historic financial woe and poor attendance for the company. However, most of the civilized world still rejects compelled speech and the gratuitous politicization of art. Netrebko was canceled at a handful of other venues, but at Milan’s La Scala she remains popular and beloved. Just weeks after her ouster from the Met, she gave a sold-out recital here that was loudly cheered by an enthusiastic audience. As the summer portion of La Scala’s 2022–23 season concluded this July, she returned to Italy’s leading opera house for what may now be her best role, Lady Macbeth in Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of the Bard’s masterpiece of power and fate.

Read the whole thing.

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Here is a sad story: Exit the arts critics?

Nicole Hertvik, editor-in-chief and publisher of website DC Theater Arts, agrees that traditional cultural coverage has long been in decline. But the pandemic, which shuttered theaters and museums for roughly two years, dealt the coup de gras. Even The Washington Post, which under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hardly lacks for cash, has cut back on its Washington, D.C.-area arts coverage. In December of 2022 it even laid off the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic, Sarah L. Kaufman ­— one of the last full-time journalists in the country to cover the dance beat.

“They are looking to be a national or international publication, so they’re covering a lot more New York theater, and the bare minimum of what happens in the D.C. theater community,” Hertvik said. “Maybe 10 years ago The Post had a dedicated arts section every week. That’s all just gone. They had two dedicated full-time theater critics, and now they have one.”

If anything it is even worse when it comes to music critics.

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Bad behaviour at concerts is becoming normalised, experts say. Wait, weren't we just told that we had to loosen up, get more casual, in order to stop driving away audiences from classical concerts?

Concertgoers have been sharing footage of numerous artists falling victim to unruly fans. Harry Styles was hit in the eye with a sweet in Vienna, Bebe Rexha received stitches after she was hit in the face with a mobile phone in New York, and Pink was left stunned when someone threw their mother’s ashes on stage in London. In perhaps the most extreme incident, Ava Max was slapped mid-song by a concert-goer in LA.

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 The New York Times: At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

For the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.

It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.

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The public library is no recent invention: The great libraries of Rome.

Perhaps at the pinnacle of the imperial project was the Ulpian Library, inserted prominently into the Forum of Trajan in the centre of Rome by the emperor himself in 114 CE. It was distinguished by its twin Latin and Greek book collections, located directly opposite one another, with the colossal 38-metre-high Column of Trajan slipped between them. The separate collections were dominated by their single, high-ceilinged rooms, and flooded with desks and Corinthian columns that adorned their front porticoes and flanked the statues and cabinet niches. The rooms themselves were a luxuriant, polychrome feast of Egyptian granite, Numidian golden/purple giallo antico and Anatolian marble, all hauled on ships from across the Mediterranean and up the River Tiber at what must have been considerable expense.

This overwhelming sensory experience was a reflection of the metropolis itself – as magisterial as it was chaotic. And with space at a premium in this dense, unplanned urban fabric, the collections were incorporated as smaller components of other larger complexes of temples, porticoes and forums, concentrated in the ‘historic centre’ of the city rather than dispersed, creating a sort of clustering effect. Rather than drown out the libraries, the association with contexts of religious and civic importance only enhanced their importance in Rome’s sea of monuments – just like that legendary epitome of libraries across the Mediterranean, the Great Library of Alexandria, itself a branch of the Musaeum complex.

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Buddha Passion review – Tan Dun’s message of love and compassion opens EIF in spectacular style

There could hardly have been a better piece to open this year’s festival, then, than Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion (2018), receiving its Scottish premiere. The work’s key message – that truth and interdependency are the basis for a harmonious world – resonates closely with the ethos of Benedetti’s vision.

Buddha Passion was inspired by murals dating from the 4th-14th centuries in the Mogao caves in China’s Gansu province. The Chinese-American composer’s work sets an assortment of Buddhist texts in a mixture of Chinese, Sanskrit and English for four main vocal soloists, two Indigenous singers, two choruses and symphony orchestra. Comprising a prologue and six acts, it presents a series of tableaux symbolising the importance of love and compassion, and depicts the path towards enlightenment.

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For some reason, this is the first I have heard of them: Jacaranda’s 20th Season Will Be Its Last

Jacaranda is concluding its run in a defiantly uncompromising way, devoting its final season to a celebration of Arnold Schoenberg, whose thorny atonal music has never been called crowd-pleasing. 2024 will mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, and the five-concert season will feature seven of his works, including the Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Ode to Napoleon.

The season, which opens Sept. 23 at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, will also feature works by composers who inspired Schoenberg, including J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert; those who were influenced by him, including Alban Berg and Pierre Boulez; and some of his contemporaries, including Ernst Krenek and Richard Strauss.

Once again, Arnold Schoenberg starts to get the recognition he deserves, I quizzically observe.

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And now, the envois. First an aria from Verdi's Macbeth with Anna Netrebko:

Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 4, at the 2012 Proms:

An excerpt from the Buddha Passion by Tan Dun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAZOvEhQ0M

Finally The Book of the Hanging Gardens, by Schoenberg: