Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a clip from a composer I had not previously encountered. Saad Haddad gives us some excellent advice for young composers. The sixth section, about not using music software until well into the process is one I strongly agree with.

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The New York Times gives us the Best Classical Performances of 2025 and a lengthy and worthy piece it is. In a year when I have had to forgo traveling to Europe to attend music festivals, it was a treat to read:

Shostakovich’s music was seemingly everywhere this year, 50 years after his death, in programs showcasing the dazzling stylistic breadth of his catalog. Among his fiercest champions is the conductor Andris Nelsons, who led two illuminating Shostakovich programs with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall and later ignited the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig on the opening night of a Shostakovich Festival. The genial sparkle of the Festive Overture and the clean-lined lyricism of the Second Piano Concerto, with a searching Daniil Trifonov, set up a shattering account of the Fourth Symphony. Clarity, weight and ferocity converged in a performance that captured Shostakovich at his most buoyant, embattled and enigmatic.

And my favorite rogue violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja:

In her long-awaited New York Philharmonic debut, the maverick violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja brought the intensity of a method actor to Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, playing with full-body commitment and sounds that included expressive scratches, whispers and wolf tones. What may live longest in the memory of the electrified audience was Kopatchinskaja’s encore, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong’s “Crin,” a 90 second anarchist tour-de-force of vocal and violinistic virtuosity.

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At some point everyone, even Rick Beato, just has to get away from pop music and play a little Handel.

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It shouldn't need to be said, but beauty in music requires dissonance. Some of the most heart-rending passages in Mozart depend on piercing dissonance--resolving, of course. Let's read what Jay Nordlinger has to say: The Beauty of Dissonance.

I often hear people say, “When I go to a concert, I like to have the music wash over me. It relaxes me, takes my cares away. It settles me down.” They speak of music almost as if it were a sedative.

Dissonance, on the other hand, is often disturbing. It prickles and piques, rather than soothes. Harmony is a crucial part of music, obviously. But disharmony, a.k.a. dissonance, is too. It has been embedded in music from the beginning.

The works of Bach are loaded with dissonance. Typically, he uses it to create tension and then gives us the resolution – the return to harmony.

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All the other stuff this week is pretty humdrum so let's leap into some envois. Taking a cue from the NYT, we really have to have a listen to the Symphony No. 4 of Shostakovich, a frequently underestimated work. Here is Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony.

 

And, of course, the Water Music by Handel.

One of my favorite Mozart dissonances, in the Andante from the F major Divertimento, K. 138.

Finally here is PatKo in a fierce battle with the Stravinsky Violin Concerto.