Friday Miscellanea

 Alex Ross writes about Elemental Opera at Santa Fe

The chief novelty at Santa Fe this season is a new version of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” which, at the age of four hundred and sixteen, is the oldest opera still regularly performed. Although Harry Bicket, Santa Fe’s music director, is a specialist in early opera, he decided against using a period ensemble of harpsichords, theorbos, sackbuts, and the like; this would have required a total reconfiguration of the company’s resident orchestra. Instead, Bicket turned to the composer Nico Muhly, who has refashioned Monteverdi’s masterpiece in a captivating modern guise. 

I saw two other operas during my time in Santa Fe: “Pelléas et Mélisande,” directed by Netia Jones, and “The Flying Dutchman,” directed by David Alden. Both stagings tend toward grungy industrial imagery—churning wall fans are a shared element—and both make a somewhat head-scratching impression. Jones places the archaic castle dwellers of “Pelléas” in a bunker rife with signs of disease and delirium: oxygen cannisters are wheeled out, projections of medical data flicker on walls, mysterious doubles appear. Alden, for his part, transposes the maritime denizens of “Dutchman” to a regimented container-shipping milieu. As arresting as the images sometimes are, they get in the way of the operas’ fundamental qualities: Debussy’s eerie radiance, Wagner’s elemental swell.

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 It is hard to ignore Taylor Swift these days so here is The dark truth about Taylor Swift.

Beyond the first flush of love, then, lies mostly darkness, longing, and perhaps bittersweet recollection. My takeaway from Swift’s oeuvre is that a happy ending matters less than the sheer romanticness of love elevated by whatever dooms it to destruction, whether that’s the lover, some external circumstance, or the protagonist’s inner demons.

We could just shrug and say well, Swift has been unlucky in love — her fans are as well-versed in her doomed love affairs as they are her lyrics cataloguing them — and she has a knack for singing about this in a way that resonates with a wide audience. But why is this theme of thwarted, exquisitely painful romance so powerful?

Our love-affair with doomed love begins in early 13th-century France with the two-decade Albigensian Crusade which saw the Cathar sect persecuted, tortured, slaughtered and scattered by the orthodox Christian Knights Templar, leading to the deaths of an estimated 200,000.

You gotta love a writer who can tie Taylor Swift to the Albigensian Crusade...

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The Times Higher Education offers this: Music departments should resist the siren song of pop schools

As in other artistic fields, the modest but realisable aim of producing rigorous studies of musical, literary, cinematic or other texts – or their relationship to historical context – is often viewed as trivial compared with making major pronouncements on society, culture, globalisation, colonialism and more. Those claiming to be doing the latter often offer harsh verdicts on those doing the former.

But the chances of academic writings of this type from the arts having any significant social impact are extremely low, and this has contributed to the increasing bifurcation of scholarly and practical study. So, too, have the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, the introduction of tuition fees and other moves towards greater marketisation. In such an environment, a range of post-1992 institutions introduced vocationally oriented degrees in music technology and commercial music performance, which would not always have previously been classified as degrees.

Furthermore, the progressive marginalisation of the study of music theory and analysis, relentlessly dismissed as “formalism”, deprives music departments of the one thing, other than practical work, that is not undertaken (often more rigorously) by other disciplines.

The whole thing is worth reading, though you will have to register to access.

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From The Guardian: ‘I compose to seek the truth’: György Kurtág on depression, totalitarianism and his 73-year marriage

Kurtág is the last survivor of an outstanding generation of postwar avant garde composers that includes Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, but he emphasises how important Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály also were to both him and Ligeti. While Kurtág largely stayed in Communist Hungary, Ligeti escaped and settled in western Europe, though the two managed to remain closely connected.

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 And: ‘It’s vastly complex, even dangerous’: in defence of the recorder, the Marmite of the woodwind world

At the heart of the recent headline flurries lies a much deeper story about the future of music in schools in the face of successive funding cuts. Added to this, a Covid crisis that has dissuaded many children from picking up shared classroom instruments. It’s not just a crisis affecting the recorder: the numbers have dropped for woodwinds in general. “There was a time when you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a flute and clarinet,” says Nallen. Now they’re being taught privately. Perhaps what has fuelled the crisis for recorders more specifically is its ubiquity – which has fostered a kind of devaluation as a result. “Being cheap is a double-edge sword,” Nallen says. Yes, it makes the recorder accessible, but it can also be taken for granted, “because you can just throw it into a cupboard drawer.” 

“it’s a vastly complex instrument,” says Sarah Jeffery. “It’s even a little bit dangerous”, she adds with a smile, “because every little move you make can be heard.” My first encounter with Jeffery, a classically-trained recorder player and educator, was via her YouTube channel Team Recorder, a platform where she publishes weekly tutorials on all aspects of playing and music-making.

I had a virtuoso recorder player as a close friend for many years. Once, visiting his basement studio, I looked around in bemusement as it was filled with open shelving on which resided an immense collection of recorders. I asked him how many he had and he replied, "I'm not really sure, but I have twelve working altos..."

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From Gramophone: The art of the song recital

More than ever, vocal recitals arrive with a mission: dispelling pandemic isolation, endorsing social justice and, as ever, fostering reappreciation and rediscovery of great music touched by the voice.

Requiring only a fraction of opera-performance machinery, vocal recitals aren’t simply star singers working solo. This highly specific medium morphs every which way, with new outspoken repertoire, an influx of vocal talent from the early-music community and liberated performance manner. Yet art song maintains its identity – as pianistic as it is vocal, as literary as it is musical, with all elements fusing into a place where audiences better know the artists, the art and even themselves. No scenery. No costumes. No barriers between artists and audience.

That's all true and the lengthy article gives a detailed picture of what is happening with art-song performance worldwide. But I have misgivings. I suspect the picture is not as rosy as it seems. Where I live, for example, the chamber music society brings in pianists, violinists, cellists and string quartets every season but never a song recital. Never. Once a year they feature finalists in an opera competition, but that is rather different. I wonder how the art song is doing outside of major urban centers...

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Here is a review of a song recital at Salzburg: An evening with Rachmaninoff

Asmik Grigorian is a formidable singer—in technique, in voice, and in musical intelligence. She gave her heart to the Rachmaninoff songs, but also her head. She could be relatively cool. But then, so can the songs. She was not a wallower. But neither did she stint on emotion.

She produces a steady stream of sound. She can sing loud—very loud; high and loud; penetratingly loud—without stridency. Without any stridency at all. Mind you, stridency may come later. But it has not arrived yet.

After Grigorian had sung four songs, Geniušas sat down for three solo pieces. All of a sudden, the voice recital was a piano recital. This was slightly strange, but there are no hard-and-fast rules.

Geniušas played three pieces that Rachmaninoff himself played—that he, in fact, recorded. First came the composer’s transcription of his song “Daisies.” Then came his transcription of a hopak (a Ukrainian folk dance) by Mussorgsky. Third came his transcription of Rimsky-Korsakov’s winner The Flight of the Bumblebee.

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Easy choices for envois this week. First up, Monteverdi, of course, a performance from the Trigonale Festival:

Next, Taylor Swift, "Love Story"

György Kurtág, Eight Piano Pieces op. 3:

A Vivaldi recorder concerto:

Finally, the first song from Schumann's Dichterliebe: