Just tiny things today. This is a new thing on Spotify, apparently. My "listening age" is 305. Yes, a lot of my favorite music comes from 1720.
A tiny bit of virtuoso violin music:
Nothing from Alex Ross as he is off studying Neolithic archeology in the Orkney Islands.
Speaking of the Orkney Islands their most famous musical resident was Peter Maxwell Davies. His beautiful Farewell to Stromness transcribes well to guitar:
I'm not much of a fan of Norman Lebrecht, but it often seems these days as if he is one of the few writers on music to risk saying something: The year the mob called the tune.
I cannot remember a time when there was so much political meddling in music and so little resistance. The Putin-allied regime of Venezuela sends out its propaganda orchestra to tour the US and Europe under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, who is about to become music director of the most visible US orchestra, the New York Philharmonic.
If it’s not corrupt governments, it’s street mobs financed by Gulf states that dictate terms by force of numbers. In Belgium, a German orchestra was told not to turn up unless its Israeli conductor, Lahav Shani, denounced the war in Gaza.
The Ghent festival director’s ultimatum prompted the Belgian prime minister to grovel an apology to the conductor and the German president to shake his hand.
And another little clip, the Sonatina for flute and piano by Henri Dutilleux:
But there are other things you can do. And this is my topic for today. You need to be a virtuoso, of course, but equally importantly you need to signal to the audience that you are a virtuoso. I am reminded of the old story of Wanda Landowska, the early maestra of the harpsichord. One person who viewed her performing scores said that there were little notes here and there that said things like "look up," presumably to signal to the audience a transcendental moment. So this is certainly not new. But it has, until recently, been fairly uncommon in classical soloists. But the cellist in the concert I saw was an avid practitioner. He didn't just end a note, he "threw it away" with abandon. He "looked up" quite often to signal how moved he was by the music. Oh, and looked down and to the side as well as there were emotional highlights everywhere. We were witnesses to, not only a virtuoso performance but also the performance of virtuosity. Every gesture he made seemed to be exaggerated for emotional effect.
This is really not necessary for the virtuoso performance, but it is intended to charm the audience. As long as they think it is authentic and inadvertent. If we go back a few years and watch another cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, playing the Shostakovich cello concerto we can watch someone playing far more difficult and profound music without any of the added spice of miming emotional expression.
The concert I saw on the weekend ended with the Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano by Felix Mendelssohn and as we were leaving the hall I'm afraid my evil twin took over and I commented to my friends: "Whenever someone feels the urge to play Mendelssohn I usually counsel them to repress that urge and play Shostakovich instead--we will all be better off."
