Friday Miscellanea

For all those folks who have been missing it! Let's have a quote from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk 3:

Vermin were the death of Democritus, and vermin of another sort killed Socrates.

The editor tells us that Marcus Aurelius was likely thinking of Pherecydes of Syros instead of Democritus of Abdera. The "vermin" who killed Socrates were a jury of 501 fine and upstanding Athenian citizens.

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The New York Times did a big piece on what an amazing genius Taylor Swift is, but they seem to have memory-holed it already. Oh well. However there is another piece from the New York Times worth reading: Celebrating a Buffalo-Born Titan of the French Baroque Revival. William Christie is a nearly legendary figure who was hugely important in reviving the performing traditions of the French Baroque. The article delivers a well-earned tribute:

It was late August in Thiré, the tiny town in the Vendée region of western France where Christie has spent decades restoring an abandoned 17th-century manor house and planting a spectacular baroque garden. Now he was preparing to host his annual weeklong music festival there, Dans les Jardins de William Christie, which this year was the culmination of a season-long celebration of his 80th birthday and the improbable musical empire he has built. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Christie is venerated in France, where he played a key role in the revival of French baroque music and the reputations of composers like Lully, Charpentier, Couperin and Rameau. His inventive, vital performances showed that early music could be exciting and chic, and have sold out venues from the opera house at Versailles to the Brooklyn Academy of Music...

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A sardonic comment from Norman Lebrecht: NOT ONE SINGLE FORTE IN THIS WEEK’S CHART. Referring to the dreary somnabulance of the Apple streaming top ten:

1 Tchaikovsky: The Seasons Yunchan Lim

2 River of Music. The Kanneh-Masons

3 Sleep Max Richter

4 Max Richter: Sleep Circle (Faded) Max Richter, Louisa Fuller, Max Ruisi

5 For Arvo. Georgijs Osokins

6 Spanish Serenades Raphaël Feuillâtre

7 The First of Everything Eunike Tanzil DSO

8. Chopin Intime Justin Taylor

9. Moonlight Variations Pablo Ferrandez

10 Somnia Denis Kozhukhin

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Over at The New Yorker Alex Ross pens a tribute: Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, had one of those voices which reveal themselves in a matter of seconds. Take the opening of his Second Symphony, from 1943, which the Orchestra Now performed on the festival’s first weekend, under the direction of Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and chief musical curator. The first violins unfurl a lilting, lightly bopping tune in D minor. Ascending patterns elsewhere in the strings blur the outlines of that governing idea. The real Martinů giveaway is an underlying buzz of activity in the piano and the harp—D-minor triads mixed with C-sharp-minor, B-flat-major, and E-flat-major ones, suggesting a rickety machinery behind the lyrical action. These and a few other basic elements recur throughout Martinů’s œuvre: curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.

This is just the sort of thing that Ross does very well.

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One of the reasons I have reduced my postings is that I don't find much I want to comment on these days. Looking in all the usual places I find mostly the usual things: who died, who was appointed and who committed what sexual transgression. The news oriented sites like Slipped Disc are all about mundane events, the more scholarly sites are still beating the race/gender/colonization drums with the added spice of AI. And listeners seem to be tending towards the more soporific music. So let's listen to some non-soporific music:

Of course we have to have some Martinů. Here is his Symphony No. 2:

And just for fun, since we have never had any Martinů here before, here is the Symphony No. 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laI5pnq5X7g

Oddly, Blogger simply refuses to embed that clip. Usually heard on violin and sometimes on guitar this is Bach's gussied up orchestral version of the prelude to the E major violin partita:

And finally, for the hard-core among you, Sviatoslav Richter playing an all-Schumann recital in Moscow in 1985.