Friday Miscellanea

Has the Friday Miscellanea, embroiled as we all are in the virus crisis, been sadly lacking in the whimsical lately? Why yes, yes it has.

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Over at the On An Overgrown Path blog is an excellent discussion of a requiem that is unjustly little-known:

These days warhorse Requiems are trotted out for so many routine performances, but Rudolf Mauersberger's Dresden Requiem remains unknown. Which is unjust as it is a magnificent and poignant work which ranks alongside Britten's War Requiem in its use of music to reflect on the horrors of war. Perhaps its unjustified neglect is simply because it commemorates the bombing of Dresden, an episode that many on the victorious side would prefer to be written out of history.

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 In the same blog is a wonderful homage to the incomparable harpsichordist Scott Ross with photos of his little house in Assas:

On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations, Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel.

The whole essay is well worth reading, not least for revealing that Mr. Ross detested the playing of Glenn Gould.

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 The 2020 Pulitzer Prize in music goes to Anthony Davis:

Anthony Davis’s opera The Central Park Five has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. The opera, featuring a libretto by Richard Wesley, \received a New Music USA grant for commission fees in 2015 and received its premiere on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera. It is described in the Pulitzer citation as “a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful.”

“That’s pretty far out!” exclaimed Davis (b. 1951) when reached by telephone minutes after the award was announced. “I never thought I’d get a Pulitzer for a piece with Trump on the toilet. I’m thrilled and excited. I’d like to thank Long Beach Opera and all the people involved with the production. It was such an incredible project.”

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The New York Times relates how The Berlin Philharmonic Tests a Musical Path Out of Lockdown:

The concert — which will be repeated on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall platform on Saturday — was organized to conform with local health regulations. No more than 15 musicians could be onstage at a given time, making this a de facto chamber event. The players were kept two meters (about six and a half feet) apart — except for wind players, spaced five meters (about 16 and a half feet) from one another and their colleagues. 

Yet though the seating arrangement was strange — and it was momentarily odd to see a conductor and concertmaster bow to each other rather than shake hands — it was also inspiring to see musicians trying to find some way, however awkward, to keep making live art. And the program chosen by Kirill Petrenko, the Philharmonic’s music director, spoke to this moment of disruption and fear; plumbed spiritual realms; and offered consolation.

He began by leading Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres,” in a version for 12 strings and percussion. Softly rustling riffs and scratchy-sounding strings hover over an eerily subdued yet ever-present sustained low bass tone. A lone percussionist played quiet rumblings from a lower balcony near the stage.

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Over at Slipped Disc we learn of a documentary about one of my favorite pianists, Friedrich Gulda:

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And that's it for today's brief miscellanea. Too many similar articles about the virus, the effects of the virus, the impact of the virus on musician's lives, how the virus will affect our future travel plans and on and on. So let's have some clips instead. Today's envoi starts with the Dresdner Requiem of Rudolf Mauersberger:

Scott Ross in a selection of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti:

Sometime in the early 1970s I purchased a box of the Beethoven piano concertos with Friedrich Gulda and the Vienna Philharmonic. I lost the LPs years ago, but I have always remembered the recording as my favorite of these works. Here is is the Concerto No. 4. Horst Stein is the conductor:

Today's Concert: Franck Cello Sonata

The Frankfurt Radio Orchestra people put up a new concert every day and today it is Valentino Worlitzsch, Violoncello and Elisabeth Brauß, Piano playing the César Franck Cello Sonata A major.

Make It Old

Apart from a certain ingenuity with rhythm, I suspect my principal gift as a musician is the unerring ability to always be out of step with everyone else. My outsider credentials are valid, and one example is that the motto of my aesthetic progress is likely "Make It Old" in contrast to Ezra Pound's famous modernist exhortation to "Make It New." Yes, my modernism is more like an antiquarianism. Mind you, the very phrase "make it new" which Pound used as the title for a book of essays in 1934, was actually discovered by him in an ancient Chinese manuscript, so there you go:

The actual genealogy of the phrase “Make It New” has been established by Pound scholars and is well known to those among them who specialize in Pound’s relation to China, but it is so often misdated and for that matter misquoted (tagged with a spurious exclamation mark) that its genesis is worth recounting in some detail. The crucial fact to begin with is that the phrase is not originally Pound’s at all. The source is a historical anecdote concerning Ch’eng T’ang (Tching-thang, Tching Tang), first king of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan. According to the sinologist James Legge, it is not a commonly told anecdote, but Pound was fortunate enough to have found it in two sources: the Da Xue (Ta Hio), first of the four books of Confucian moral philosophy, and the T’ung-Chien Kang-Mu, a classic digest and revision of an even older classic Chinese history. That Pound coincidentally found the same uncommon anecdote in two different places may be explained by the fact that both texts were prepared by the neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hsi (1130–1200 AD), who has perhaps the best claim as true originator of the slogan Make It New.

 I was a practicing rock and blues guitarist in the late 1960s when I discovered classical music, at the precise moment, in fact, when, according to Richard Taruskin, it was popular music that was where it was at as classical music was no longer where "serious" listeners went:

And that is why classical music is failing, and in particular why intellectuals, as a class, and even the educated public, have been deserting it. The defection began in the sixties, when all at once it was popular music that engaged passionately-adequately or not, but often seriously and even challengingly-with scary, risky matters of public concern, while classical music engaged only frivolously (remember radical chic?) or escaped into technocratic utopias. By now, the people who used to form the audience for "serious" music are very many of them listening to something else.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 1173-1176). Kindle Edition.

But, out of step as I was, what I heard in classical music, first Tchaikovsky, then Dvořák and finally, as I found my stride, Bach and Beethoven, was a range and depth of expression that, no matter that it was popular and ever-present, popular music simply lacked. Taruskin complains of the "packaged greatness" and smugness and dullness that celebrations of classical music, such as the impromptu performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven conducted by Leonard Bernstein at the fall of the Berlin wall, always seem to involve, but there was no packaged greatness in my encounter with the classical. It came in the form of scratchy old LPs and even 78s borrowed from the father of a friend. I still expect performances of the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert to skip a few bars as did the old LP that I listened to so many times!

For me part of the ineffable attraction of classical music was in the very fact that it was neglected, marginal. In the social circles where I grew up, rural Canada, there were no symphony balls, no Met galas--no symphony and no opera at all. Classical music was a minor little niche, not the expression of elite taste. Other minor little niches that I discovered over the years between my late teens and my late twenties were Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Homer, Dante (these latter in part due to Pound, in fact), philosophy and all sorts of antiquated culture. The philosophers I was drawn to were not Nietzsche or Hegel, but rather Plato and finally, Aristotle.

My career as a performer tended to show some of the same traits. Yes, I did perform the warhorses of the repertoire, no avoiding that, but every chance I got I played more esoteric music: Leo Brouwer before he became popular, obscure sonatas by Scarlatti and suites by Weiss. Even the occasional transcription of Froberger or mammoth sets of variations by really obscure Czech composers. Since what the audiences wanted to hear were tangos by Piazzolla, you can guess how my career went!

My whole life, my criteria for quality has always been connected to the unpopular because it seems clear that everything really popular involves deadly compromises. Quality, like veins of gold, is found in the obscure niches, in the neglected, in the scratchy old 78s, in the manuscripts few bother to read.

An old friend of mine says that true wisdom is always boring, likely because it states truths so timeless that we already know them, but are reluctant to admit it.

Let's listen to an old recording of the Unfinished Symphony by Schubert. This is Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1953:

Avant-Garde and Modernism

I make no apologies for postings inspired by writings of Richard Taruskin for the simple reason that most of what he writes is both interesting and provocative--something not true of most writing on music. But it is a bit surprising to be alerted to the aesthetic virtues of a 20th century composer by Prof. Taruskin. Still, there it is. The composer is Stefan Wolpe discussed in the essay "Optimism amid the Rubble" in the collection The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. My title comes from one brilliant throw-away paragraph that illuminates a distinction that I had been unaware of:

Avant-garde and modernist, though often interchanged, are far from synonyms. Where "avant-garde," originally a military term, properly connotes a combative, countercultural position, "modernist" has long come to imply an entrenched (indeed, a tenured) high-cultural one. The avant-garde is an outsider faction; modernists are insiders. One faction challenges authority; the other wields it. One stands to gain, the other to lose. And so one is optimistic, the other pessimistic. Wolpe's optimism, by turns exuberant and serene, shines through the craggy surface of his work and wins it new friends. It energizes listeners.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 714-717). Kindle Edition.

 The piece by Wolpe that Taruskin directs our attention to is Piece in Three Parts from 1961:

My own stance towards 20th century avant-garde composers like Wolpe, whose name I have heard, but whose music I didn't know, is ambiguous. I went through something of an apostasy towards the whole fraught enterprise, but then have had to return to it and work through the whole history again. It is fascinating to read Taruskin's brief recounting of Wolpe's difficulty with Stalinism in the Soviet Union despite being a committed communist his whole life:

Wolpe was disillusioned by the postwar political crackdown in the Soviet Union, too. The humiliation of Prokofieff horrified him. It confirmed and intensified his avant-gardism--his commitment to oppose all established power, which, he now saw, was by definition reactionary and intolerant of difference.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 730-731). Kindle Edition.

Taruskin hangs his essay on a perplexing little quote from Wolpe:

"It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing," Stefan Wolpe told an audience of young California composers in 1959. New York's most idiosyncratic serialist, a former dadaist approaching his seventh decade, was trying to keep them young at a time when modern music was going gray.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 684-686). Kindle Edition.

Which reminds me of a passage in the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas where he is discussing the relationship between the Good and the Beautiful:

"Good" and "beautiful" have the same reference but differ in meaning. For the good, being what all things want, is that in which the appetite comes to rest; whereas the beautiful is that in which the appetite comes to rest through contemplation or knowledge ... "Beautiful" therefore adds to "good" a reference to the cognitive powers, "good" refers simply to that in which the appetite takes pleasure, but "beautiful" refers to something the mere apprehension of which gives pleasure.

[Quoted in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas by Umberto Eco, p. 36.]

Apprehension, that is to say, knowledge of--the knowledge of, apprehension of, beauty, gives pleasure. But sometimes, we just think we know what beauty is and we would be better off not knowing how much we are knowing.

Difficult Questions

One of the core projects of this blog has been to advocate for the quality and worth of classical music. The main reason I feel this is a worthwhile project is that classical music seems more and more to be pushed to the margins of society and public life and fewer and fewer people are given enough exposure to find out if it has something for them or not. The great juggernaut of pop music rules us all.

But every time I read something by Richard Taruskin I run into difficult questions that he poses that challenge my project. Take this very succinct statement:

In the West, a century-long tradition of reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior, supported by the dogma that art is the concern of artists only and coupled with an ever-increasing passivity on the part of an audience that is deprived by its education and by the growth of the recording industry of participatory skills in music, has led to the extreme apathy that threatens the continued existence of art music in our culture. And yet anyone who questions the dogma of autonomy, harmful though it has become, is immediately and unthinkingly branded an enemy of art. I am coming to exactly the opposite conclusion. Art must be saved from the dogma. And while saying this I concede to my critics-I do not shrink from it-that a step away from our culture's apathy toward art and artists is a step in the direction of Auschwitz and the Gulag.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 222-227). Kindle Edition.

He goes on to say that he thinks the solution is finding a balance. It is a knotty dilemma indeed! On the one hand, one wants composers and performers to have the maximum freedom to follow the paths they find appealing or necessary for the pursuit of the artwork. On the other hand, yes, total autonomy also implies total irrelevance, though this is a bit hard for me to accept. The greatest music we have, however, from early times to Bach and Mozart, was all created under the seal of a current need. Bach wrote for the needs of the church and the Leipzig city fathers. Mozart wrote for patrons and to put bread on the table. It is with Beethoven that the seed of the fundamental autonomy of the composer is planted and we are still living with that dilemma.

This is a dilemma for me personally because I dropped out of a frustrating career as a performer to ultimately take up a new vocation (though long-standing as an inclination) as a composer. As a composer I feel more marginalized than ever, but the question is, what to do about it? What are the true responsibilities of a composer today? To try and write good music, certainly, but for what audiences? And how to do so without an obvious path to renumeration? I certainly can't solve the problem of the "culture's apathy toward art and artists" and how much is it my responsibility to try? And if I did accept the responsibility, how to even go about it?

I don't think that I have ever thought that art is the concern of artists only, but I have certainly thought that the fine arts are only really accessible to people who are willing to put some effort into it. I suppose this is elitist, but the arts have always been principally appreciated and supported by a certain minority in society. If this minority also happens to be the leaders of society, as in an aristocracy, say the rulers of Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, then the fine arts tend to do pretty well. In a society where the arts are supported and appreciated by a self-selected group of aficionados largely drawn from the middle class, as was the case in the 19th century, then they can still do pretty well. But in much of the world today, the fine arts, or classical music at least, gets less and less support from the general public and becomes more and more marginal. In the competition with pop music, classical music lost.

Was it just because of the "reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior" of the artists themselves as Taruskin implies? I can't quite think so. I see a give and take flow of causality and consequences: avant-garde composers do something challenging, pop artists find gold in more and more vulgarity and the dance goes on and on with each inciting the other. Thus we end up with a polarized environment. Crossover has always seemed to me to be the most distressing nexus of the dilemma because it takes just enough from classical music to be musically plausible, but then that music is stuffed into the seductive garments of a Victoria's Secret fashion show. Is the answer to the dilemma to be found in the clash of these disparate elements?

UPDATE: I really should have mentioned that the very powerful and practical solution that Taruskin goes on to recommend in the essay I quoted from above, lies in public funding of proper, serious, music education, something I heartily agree with.

Seven Types of Bach Interpretation

My title is an homage to a fascinating book by William Empson titled Seven Types of Ambiguity that I read quite a few years ago and am about to have another look at. There are times when I am tempted to adopt the policy of a newspaper columnist I once followed to never read a book I have not previously read. This guarantees that one never reads a bad book.

But back to Bach: occasionally I fall prey to the urge to categorize things, to recognize basic types and try to list them. Call it the clarion call of typology. There are, of course, a myriad of ways of playing Bach and you could simply throw up your hands and say that everyone has an individual approach. But I think that means that then, if you are a real Bach lover, you have to buy everyone's CD (assuming people still buy CDs, which I guess they don't--let's say instead "subscribe to every streaming service" to be more topical). Actually, I think I want, for the purposes of this post, to sidestep the obvious solution to that problem, which is to adopt some sort of aesthetic standard, whether it be objective or subjective, and just try and come up with some sort of rough classification of different ways of playing Bach.

But before I do that, a personal confession. Even though I have been a lover of the music of Bach from my earliest days as a classical musician, the mere fact of admiration did not bestow on me any sense that I had a conviction as to how the music should be played. I even recall saying to a fellow musician with whom I performed a lot that I really didn't know how Bach should be played. She was rather taken aback at that. In retrospect, I think this feeling came from the observation that the music of Bach, in its depth and breadth, had very much more in terms of possibility than nearly all the rest of the guitar repertoire. The fact is that the only truly great composer available to we guitarists is J. S. Bach, and only a few pieces at that.

My first two categories I owe to the excellent guitar maestro Oscar Ghiglia with whom I had the pleasure of studying at the Banff Centre quite a few years ago. Many students came to the class with pieces by Bach.

1. Play Bach as if you were going shopping. This was Ghiglia's comment to a young lady who, while certainly technically proficient, seemed to find nothing in the music except a string of notes. This is a not uncommon approach. People look at the score and see streams of sixteenths in very orderly groups and just play it with no more engagement than if they were picking out tomatoes in the produce section or sorting through t-shirts. We hear this a lot because, frankly, Bach sounds pretty good no matter how you play him.
2. Play Bach as if it were an opera by Rossini. A student was playing the Lute Suite No. 1 one day which has a very dramatic prelude in French overture style. Ghiglia was demonstrating how to reveal the harmonic drama and when he got to this intense 4/2 chord he looked up and, as if revealing the hidden libretto, simply said: "Revenge!" It was the perfect analogy, though on another day, he taught the same piece with an entirely different metaphor.
3. The aggressive approach, which I have at times described as "play Bach as if you hate his music." There are some quite famous guitarists, even ones supposedly known for being Bach specialists, who play this way. Every downbeat takes a heavy accent and the attitude is "I have the technique to play this music the way I want!"
4. The Fast and Furious approach. This is similar to no. 3, but faster. It is both the temptation and the downfall of professional guitarists to play everything too fast because it reduces all the problems of phrasing and interpretation to being minor details that flash by too fast to notice.
5. The quirky lute approach. This comes from the historically informed performance tradition. It shows itself in variations in tempo and the use of inegale. Everything is just a bit uneven and aslant.
6. The rich, resonant, arpeggiated approach. This is how you might describe some of the best harpsichord performances. The harpsichord is limited in terms of dynamic nuance, but is capable of intricate and crisp arpeggiations.
7. The transcendental, meditative approach which we find in some of the best performances on piano.

Yes, I have particular examples in mind. I am tempted to post them in random order and let the reader decide which correspond to which category. Or perhaps I will just let you provide your own examples? Maybe I will hold off entirely? Well, here are a couple of examples to get you started.

Friday Miscellanea

Is it Friday again so soon? It's true, when your normal schedule is turned upside down and you are more or less quarantined at home, the days do tend to blur together. So here we are. Thanks to Slipped Disc we are alerted to what Juilliard students and alumni get up to when locked down for a few weeks:

I got a rather odd feeling from this, something like these are all the cool people and, uh, we are not.

UPDATE: Soon after posting, I ran into a little clip that shows a rather different side of Juilliard:

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Also at Slipped Disc is an item on the San Francisco Symphony. Sadly, with the cancellation of the remainder of the season, Michael Tilson Thomas' farewell after 25 years as music director is also wiped out. The new conductor will be a personal favorite of mine, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who did wonderful things with the LA Philharmonic.

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The Lucerne Festival has just been cancelled and so, it is not looking so good for Salzburg:

Lucerne, 29 April 2020. With deepest regret, Lucerne Festival announces that the Summer Festival must be cancelled owing to the coronavirus pandemic. It was to have taken place between 14 August and 13 September. Owing to the provisions that the Swiss Federal Council announced today, it is not possible to present the concerts in compliance with the mandatory health regulations, nor is it possible, for organizational reasons, to postpone these events. This means that, for the second time since 1940 in its long, storied history, the Summer Festival will be cancelled.

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 The 21st century is turning out differently than I expected: Police Question Shostakovich Quartet on London Patio.

Rafael Todes and his family were playing the 4th Shostakovich string quartet for the benefit of their neighbours on Alexander Street, Bayswater, when the boys in blue paid them a visit to discourage socialising on the street.

Reminds me of an occasion when I was playing an outdoors concert in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence when a jeep full of carabinieri pulled up and demanded to see our permit. Luckily we had one.

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Over at Wenatchee the Hatchet's blog he launches a long series of posts about ragtime and sonata forms with one about Ragtime as Musical Ice Cream:

Ragtime and ice cream are intertwined, for better and worse, in American history.  I have found this to be the case at both a personal and a cultural level. 

I think I first heard ragtime at an ice cream parlor my dad took my brother and I to once in Portland, Oregon when I was a kid.  It was there that I remember hearing Scott Joplin’s music.   I had no words for the melodic and rhythmic vitality of Joplin’s music I heard at the age I was, but it made an immediate and positive impression on me. I asked who wrote the music.  My dad told me the music was written by Scott Joplin, one of America’s greatest musicians. 

Throughout my childhood there was another, more regular, reason I associated ragtime with ice cream.  I, like many other children in the 1980s, heard the strains of “The Entertainer” ringing out in chimes or bells when ice cream trucks would roll through the neighborhood.  To hear Scott Joplin’s music was to hear the visits of the ice cream truck on your street.

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Here's some interesting quarantine reading: When Dvořák Went to Iowa to Meet God.

Dvořák was fascinated by New York, but he found it no place to live, and had some difficulty completing his major projects there. Just when he was getting ready to find some way to return to Europe, his student, Josef Kovařík, convinced him to come for a while to the little town of Spillville, Iowa, instead, promising its woods and people would remind him of home. Dvořák accepted the offer with excitement and soon packed his family onto a train (he loved trains) out west. Within days of arriving in Iowa in 1893, two of his most beautiful works, the American Quartet and Quintet, spilled out of him. It was here also that he refined and titled his freshly completed symphony, From the New World.

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And for something rather more disquieting, there is this article in The New Republic: When Art Becomes Self-Help.

What does it mean to be an artist in an economy that actually doesn’t allow many people to make their living as artists? The art world is in the midst of a larger inflection point at the moment, as it increasingly recognizes itself as yet another industry built on hoarded capital and exploited labor. The art economy has metastasized over the past few decades. Auction houses can sell nearly a billion dollars of art in a weekend; a few mega-galleries are taking over as global franchises, supplanting more independent alternatives; and a few superstar artists face pressure to expand their studios as quickly as possible to meet collector demand, turning into mini-corporations. “Flippers” look to resell hot artists at auction whenever their prices blow up, often damaging their long-term career prospects (since the inflated numbers often set expectations too high, like an explosive start-up). Meanwhile, art workers face the same hardships as everyone else in the cultural economy, competing ferociously for scarce gigs that tend to be temporary.

And it is rather worse for composers...

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Alex Ross has a big essay on Brahms in The New Yorker: Grieving with Brahms.

I turned to Brahms because I always turn to Brahms, in moods bright or dark. I identify with the protagonist of Wallace Stevens’s “Anglais Mort à Florence,” for whom Brahms is a “dark familiar.” People who claim to find Brahms dry or dismal—it’s not an uncommon opinion, even among otherwise discerning music lovers—are speaking gibberish that I can’t debate, because I don’t understand a word. I find him the most companionable, the most sympathetic of composers. There is enormous sadness in his work, and yet it is a sadness that glows with understanding, that eases gloom by sharing its own. The music seems in a strange way to be listening to you, even as you listen to it. At a time when an uncommonly large number of people are experiencing grief, I recommend Brahms as a counsellor and confidant.

Fair enough. Even though I am not a big fan of Brahms, I have certainly sensed what Ross is referring to here.

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And the first hint of dawn appears: Live orchestral concerts to begin again – Berlin Phil schedules first post-lockdown performance for this Friday.

Public performances by the Berlin Philharmonic were suspended from 11 March as the German capital entered lockdown. But now it has been announced that Friday 1 May will make a significant moment, as members will come together on stage again and play as an orchestra for the first time in weeks. 

Friday's concert will strictly adhere to current social distancing guidelines in Germany, with players forming a chamber orchestra, spaced apart from one another on stage. The programme includes Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, music by Ligeti, Barber’s Adagio for Strings and a chamber version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with soprano Christiane Karg.

There will be no audience present in the Philharmonie, but the performances will be live-streamed for free via the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall.

Ah yes, that's the rub: we have to get the audiences back in the halls at some point...

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And now for a multitudinous envoi. First, of course that interrupted Shostakovich, Quartet No. 4 with the Molinari Quartet:

Next the American Quartet of Dvořák with the Prazak Quartet:

And finally the Intermezzi, Op.117 - 1. In E Flat Major by Brahms, played by Radu Lupu: