Friday Miscellanea

Here is some healthy criticism of the ending of a New York tradition: Mostly Not Mozart.

“The Mostly Mozart Festival,” intoned Louis Langrée, as the maestro prepared to conduct his final symphony at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall August 12, after 21 years at the helm of the annual summer event, “is no more.” Langrée was being dramatic, but not overly so. Lincoln Center’s dissolution of Mostly Mozart, and its stripping of the festival’s musicians of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra name, is a big deal—or it should be. That it’s received so little attention is yet another sign of how post-pandemic New York has lost its will to fight for its civic and public culture.

Mostly Mozart is, or was, synonymous with Lincoln Center. The July and August weeks-long festival of, yes, mostly Mozart and other classical composers dated to 1966, almost to Lincoln Center’s founding (give or take a pandemic, and a few first-decade hiccups).

So why get rid of it? And why do so in such a harsh fashion, turning the first summer since 2019 that concertgoers have been able to enjoy a normal season into a depressing and confusing time, rather than a joyful one?

Read the whole thing.

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Alex Ross also weighs in: Requiem for Mostly Mozart

Although the traditional performing arts have abiding issues with élitism and exclusivity, a swerve toward pop hardly compensates for the profound societal inequalities that are embedded in our celebrity-driven culture. Symptomatic attitudes can be found in a 2018 book titled “New Power,” which Timms wrote with Jeremy Heimans. The authors reject top-down leadership and embrace a model that they call “open, participatory, and peer-driven.” Facebook and Twitter are among the lead cases. Anyone who has paid attention to the decimation of the public sphere in recent years will be aware that power tends to stay in the hands of a few, no matter what hazy rhetoric accompanies each changing of the guard.

At Lincoln Center, New Power also takes the form of sonic force: according to an app on my phone, the sound level at an outdoor dance contest approached a hundred and ten decibels. I saw elderly people wincing as they made their way, sometimes with walkers or canes, into Geffen. Lincoln Center now radiates disdain for those who wish simply to listen to music they love in a comfortable hall. I can only hope that classical programming doesn’t continue its downward spiral next summer, when the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will return under a new name. It’s worth noting that the festival provides employment for dozens of musicians whose financial situation is considerably more precarious than that of Timms, who, according to a tax filing, received a salary of $1,469,816 in the fiscal year 2022.

Read the whole thing.

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 Here is a new book on Schubert: Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer by Lorraine B Bodley. From the publisher's blurb:

In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one. Drawing on extensive archival research in Vienna and the Czech Republic and reconsidering the meaning of some of his best-known works, Bodley provides a fuller account than ever before of Schubert’s extraordinary achievement and incredible courage. This is a compelling new portrait of one of the most beloved composers of the nineteenth century.

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From Slipped Disc: ANOTHER UNIVERSITY SHUTS DOWN MUSICOLOGY

Dear Colleagues, I write on behalf of musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Currently, the university has a proposal to remove Musicology as an area of research and teaching.

Musicology is integral to research and teaching at Victoria University of Wellington, both within the New Zealand School of Music and within the broader Humanities. The area is known for research in New Zealand music, women and music, historical performance practice, early modern and nineteenth-century music. As part of the Music Studies Programme, Musicology sits alongside Ethnomusicology, Theory and Analysis, and Jazz Studies.

The university’s current plan of widespread cost savings across the university would cut a third of music staff and eliminate musicology completely by disestablishing the roles of Professor of Musicology and Associate Professor of Musicology. This will result in the closing of teaching and research in Musicology in Wellington and would greatly diminish the future of music research and teaching in New Zealand.

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And here is an interesting point of view: Dismantle the maestro myth and classical music will suffer

In the Times, Richard Morrison notes that ‘young conductors today tend to be well-schooled, well-mannered technocrats.’ Imagine thinking that was progress? There were already too many ‘well-mannered technocrats’ when I started concert-going in the noughties. Routine concerts by jobbing conductors who had their careers solely because they were good at ingratiating themselves with the players – often by letting them slack off – made me wonder whether I enjoyed classical music at all. Luckily we all had the incredible Technicolor recordings by the infamous mid-century monsters to retreat to (recordings that rather undermine the facile idea doing the rounds on Twitter that ‘being a good conductor means being good with people, and in order to get the best from musicians, you must treat them right’. Tell that to Fritz Reiner.)

The question is who on earth would shell out 200-plus quid to see a ‘well-mannered technocrat’ conduct Elektra or The Rite? I want a beast on the podium conducting this rep. Not a musical version of Rishi Sunak.

Worth reading the whole thing as this is just the conclusion. But I have to say that I think that the "mystique" of the maestro is pretty much bullshit. The truly outstanding musicians I have met in my career were also very decent people. 

Another piece on John Eliot Gardiner: WHY THE CONSTANT GARDINER WILL BE BACK

The least surprising feature of the withdrawal of Sir John Eliot Gardiner from all engagements for the rest of 2023 is the lack of reaction one way or the other, from those who have worked with the condcutor for up to half a century.

JEG, 80, has always been a controversial figure. Stories about him abound wherever singers and musicians congregate. They were still being whispered in social media corners this past week, but never in public media.

Why is that?  A number of reasons.

1 Many well-known performers owe him their start in life. Whatever he may have said or done to them since, the sense of gratitude persists.

2 Many musicians nurture hopes that he will engage them in future. As a self-starter, he casts by his own rules, not the formbook maintained by the music industry.

3 Quite a few musicioans are fond of one or other of his ex-wives and children and wish to spare them distress.

4 JEG is reputed to have friends in high places.

5 Most important of all, no conductor has created more work for more musicians at his own personal risk over a longer period in music history. JEG may have stepped back for the rest of 2023, but the music biz expect he will be back before very long, and there will be no want of bookings.

It is not uncommon for very creative people to have difficult personalities, but I don't see why they always have to be indulged. A conductor was once nasty to me and I simply withdrew from the concert. Sure, this is not always an option, but when conductors misbehave they can be reined in as this incident with John Eliot Gardiner demonstrates. 

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Metro: Classical music plan at some stations for 'more soothing journeys'

Classical music is set to be played at some Tyne and Wear Metro stations to create a more "soothing" environment.

The sounds of Mozart and Bach were heard about 20 years ago along parts of the system in a bid to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Operator Nexus said the plan was not directly linked to trouble but anything that made passengers "feel more comfortable" could only help.

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And now, with a sense of relief, leaping into the envoi section. Let's start with an illustration of why we listen to a lot of Mozart. Here is the Symphony No. 38, "Prague" with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Philippe Herreweghe:

Here is the second movement of the Trio No. 2, op. 100 by Schubert. This always seemed to me to be the archetypal European art movie soundtrack.

I suppose we do need to have some John Eliot Gardiner. Here he is conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the Cantata BWV 113 by Bach.