Friday Miscellanea

Interesting article: The Six Cello Suites (BWV 1007-1012); Mstislav Rostropovich, cello. As a guitarist, I don't play the originals, but I am very familiar with these pieces, both on cello and because they are often played on guitar--especially the prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1. I have not heard the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play them, so should be interesting. This blogger, Evan Goldfine, intends to listen to every piece by Bach and blog about them. Let's see if he makes it through all three hundred cantatas!

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And here is a nightmare: THIS ‘SECRET’ COMPOSER IS BEHIND 650 FAKE ARTISTS ON SPOTIFY. HIS MUSIC HAS BEEN STREAMED 15BN TIMES ON THE PLATFORM

The existence of fake artists on the platform is now a well-known fact: Music released by musicians under pseudonyms, who have no real online presence other than their Spotify accounts and plays, and whose music can be found on many of Spotify’s key playlists dedicated to ‘mood music’.

This is the musical equivalent of Cheez Whiz. Useful, I suppose, but not something you would want to actually listen to.

On Tuesday (March 19), DN published yet another expose on Spotify’s fake artist problem, and reports to have identified the musician “behind the world’s most listened to network of fake artists on Spotify”.

DN reports that this individual is a composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr, whose music, it says, has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names”.

I know you want to hear something. This is Adelmar Borrego's Go the Distance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-QjrvmDW0

Reading on we discover that he makes over $3 million a year from royalties. I honestly don't know what to say about this. But it confirms me in my blanket rejection of anything that resembles background music--lint for the brain.

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DEI continues its ravages through the fabric of our society: Lost in music: why piano competitions must address the gender gap, The subhead gives a nice summary:

All five finalists at the last Leeds piano competition were male – a far from unique competition scenario. Now, the event’s CEO explains how they are dismantling barriers for female musicians

Now of course I am very much against the harassment of women (or anyone) and especially the use of non-disclosure agreements to protect powerful people, but to be brutally honest, the truth here is overpoweringly likely to be that the only "barrier" to female entrants to the competition were that they did not play as well as those who did become finalists. And yes, I did read the article, but it had the odor of special pleading all the way through. Just how much pushback am I going to get for stating this uncomfortable truth? The writer describes many ways in which they are going to try and adjust the "imbalance" but I suspect that nothing less than a 50% quota will be satisfactory.

If there were even the slightest attempt to be fair, there should have been a debate between the last judges in 2021 and the new CEO. This new policy is after all claiming that the male finalists did not earn their places but only achieved them because of mysterious "barriers" to female entrants. That sounds like slander to me.

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Some excellent music criticism from Alex Ross as he reviews two concerts: The Escher Quartet and Igor Levit Test Musical Limits

No equine units were needed outside Alice Tully Hall the other day when the Escher Quartet—Adam Barnett-Hart, Brendan Speltz, Pierre Lapointe, and Brook Speltz—played the Bartók quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour concert, under the aegis of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Still, it felt like a significant occasion. The Eschers, who have been playing together since 2005, when they met at the Manhattan School of Music, were nodding to another august group, the Emerson Quartet, which disbanded last fall after a remarkable forty-seven-year run. No one seems to have attempted a Bartók-quartet marathon until the Emersons undertook one, at Tully, in 1981; they repeated the feat seven times in the course of the following two decades. The Eschers were mentored by the Emersons and often emulate their elders. The emphasis is on technical perfection, formal cogency, and unity of interpretive approach. Underscoring the continuity is the fact that David Finckel, the Emersons’ longtime cellist, is a co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society. 

Three days before the Eschers occupied Tully, a no less striking marathon took place at Carnegie Hall. The thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit has pulled off many memorable exploits in his career—performances of Beethoven’s final sonatas and of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in single sittings; a rendition of the Goldberg Variations in the midst of a Marina Abramović installation; a twenty-hour-long immersion in Satie’s endlessly repeating “Vexations.” But the program he brought to Carnegie may have been his most audacious to date. It consisted of Hindemith’s Suite “1922”; the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, transcribed for piano by Ronald Stevenson; and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, transcribed for piano by Liszt.

I have a ticket to hear Igor Levit in concert in Salzburg in August.

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Here's some news from the world of science: Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others

A trio of neuroscientists at Aix Marseille Université in France, working with a psychologist colleague from the University of Connecticut in the U.S., has discovered what they believe to be the mechanism in the brain that controls the desire to dance prompted by music. In their study, published in Science Advances, the group conducted three separate types of studies to explore the brain's reaction to music and a subsequent desire to dance. 

The researchers suggest their work cumulatively shows that the sudden desire to dance prompted by music with a medium amount of syncopation is the brain's attempt to anticipate beats among the syncopation—it causes the body to literally lean forward repeatedly.

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 Now for some listening. First up a brisk interpretation of the Cello Suite no. 1 of Bach by Mstislav Rostropovich:

Here is the winner of the 2021 Leeds Competition, Alim Beisembayev from Kazakhstan in the competition finale:

Here are the Escher Quartet with the first movement of Bartók's String Quartet no. 2:

And finally Igor Levit with the Piano Sonata no. 30 by Beethoven: