Salzburg 2025

 

This is the cover of the 2025 Salzburg program, which, oddly, is the first program book I have ever seen as I usually go online. The reason I have it is that the Festival, without my asking, just mailed it to my office. Probably because I have attended three festivals in recent years. I'm in the process of planning and building a house for myself, so I was rather planning on not attending this year. BUT!

The program is a hefty 156 page book which heralds what seems to be a renewed approach to the festival programming. I have mentioned before some differences between current programming and what was done in the late 1980s when I was a student there. Back then they had two prominent living composers in attendance with their music: Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom I met) and Witold Lutosławski (his new violin concerto was being premiered). But in recent years, no living composers, instead they had a "focus" on a 20th century composer. Last summer it was Arnold Schoenberg. And most of the festival programming was core repertoire. But for the coming festival they have changed the approach considerably. For one thing, instead of seven opera productions, there are twelve and it looks as if five of them are by living composers. There are also some premieres of new dance projects. And instead of a focus on one 20th century composer, they honor two: Dmitri Shostakovich and Pierre Boulez. Finally the chance to hear concert performances of Boulez, rare in recent years. There are also performances of major works by Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono and of two major works by Igor Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. From Shostakovich we have not only the Symphony No. 10 in the version for piano four hands and the orchestral version, but also a piano concerto and the whole of the 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano. Oh, and three string quartets and an evening of chamber music.

In a real tour-de-force, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is playing the last three piano sonatas by Beethoven in the first half of his recital and the Art of Fugue by Bach in the second half. And don't despair, there will be a lot of Mozart--five concerts entirely devoted to his music.

I've just skimmed the surface as there are loads of other concerts devoted to a long list of composers. For example, there are five concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic under various conductors and ten guest orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonic. Also ten piano recitals including, of course, Grigory Sokolov.

I really can't afford to attend this year, but maybe I will find a way. We have until January 21 to apply for tickets at the festival site:

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=9

Artisanal Music

From Wikipedia:

An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. 

The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.

I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.

In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.

So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.

Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.

What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.

A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.

I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.

Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

A Bach Film

I haven't been able to watch all of this film, but judging by the first part, it seems quite good.