I had an odd experience the other day at the Salzburg Festival: I requested a ticket to the Weinberg opera on The Idiot by Dostoevsky and hated it. Nothing odd about that, but I thought I would like it, that it would be interesting. Instead it was just grueling. The odd thing is that Weinberg was a friend and associate of Dmitri Shostakovich who is one of my favorite composers. How could they be so closely associated yet produce such an opposite aesthetic effect? I suppose this is a kind of phenomenological question as I'm just interrogating myself; I'm not doing a survey of listeners in general asking how do you respond to this piece by Shostakovich versus this one by Weinberg. I don't actually care who is more popular, I'm just curious about what the aesthetic differences are from my perspective.
Here is the Symphony No. 12 by Weinberg (written in memoriam of Shostakovich).
I think that previously I didn't listen to Weinberg very closely, just gave him a kind of vague proximity credit for being friends with Shostakovich. But now I listen closely, I see the problem. This music, while being in the same general sonic universe as Shostakovich, is an entirely different take on it. Take the very opening theme: to my ear it is both cruder and sloppier (rhythmically) than Shostakovich would have done. And it is very complicated, which makes it grueling for the listener. As the symphony goes on, this does not improve. It is disquieting, forboding and without relief. I picked that symphony by just typing in "Weinberg" to the search field and picking the first symphony shown. Now let's do the same for Shostakovich. That turns up the Symphony No. 15.
What an utter difference in mood, texture, orchestration! The whole is pervaded by not just expressiveness, but by powerful contrasts in mood from tantalizing to jocular to simply whimsical. And the melodic material is much simpler. There is nothing grim about this. The Weinberg, on the other hand, is pretty much grim all the time--sometimes quiet grim and sometimes loud grim, but always grim. And no Rossini quotes.
I could pick out specific works from each composer, but I rather prefer randomizing the selection as it is more objective. But I will definitely perform this exercise again with different pieces from each composer.
Some of the videos I shot were too large to be uploaded. But this is a pretty good one: a panorama of the city from the Museum of Modern Art, perched on top of the Mönschberg:
I'll go back and do some more and keep them short enough to upload.
Every Saturday and Sunday morning during the Festival there are concerts in the Mozarteum Großer Saal, which is part of the Stiftung Mozarteum, a different organization than the Salzburg Festival, but working in conjunction with them. The Großer Saal is not in the same location as the halls on Karajan-platz, but across the river in the newer part of town. It is the smallest venue of the five halls, seating about 800 people. Perfect for chamber music and solo recitals. Yesterday's concert made full use of the stage as it was for sacred music by Mozart with vocal soloists, mixed choir and full orchestra.
I saw two unique things at this concert--the first was that the gentleman sitting next to me was wearing one of those traditional Austrian jackets, with a mismatched shirt and tie and lederhosen! I'm pretty sure I have never seen anyone combining a shirt and tie with shorts. The other unique thing was the choir, the Salzburg Bach Choir, sang one piece, the Ave verum corpus KV 618, from memory. I have never seen a choir sing from memory before.
The conductor, Ivor Bolton is one of those hyper-active, hyper-competent Englishmen and he and his performers did a lovely job. No matter what some might say, Mozart is far from easy to perform. It requires precision, elegance, balance and clarity and those take a great deal of skill to manage. The program was all of music associated with Mozart's time in Salzburg and began with the Symphony in C, KV 338. It also included the Mass in C,, KV 258, the Venite populi, K 260 and the Litaniae de venerabili altaris KV 243. I have probably heard all these before, but likely did not pay much attention to the sacred music. I have always loved choral music and, really, it is often not well-recorded, so it is a treat to hear in concert by a really good choir.
So, an excellent concert and it made up for last night's opera.
Last night was the premiere performance of the Salzburg production of Der Idiot, based on the book by Dostoevsky, composed by Mieczysław Weinberg. The Vienna Philharmonic was conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the regie was by Krzysztof Warlikowski. It was sung in Russian with German and English sur-titles. The performance was in the Felsenreitschule which seats just under 1500. The stage backs directly up on to the rock face of the Mönchsberg and apart from lighting, there is no overhead machinery so the director can't do nifty things like lower a four-door sedan over the stage or drop a baby grand piano. The stage is very wide, but not very deep and there is a large room that can be moved and positioned according to need. I saw Richard Strauss' Elektra here three years ago. To give you an idea of the space, here is a video I shot as the audience was coming in:
As you can see, it is more horizontal than most opera houses. I have to say that I did not enjoy this evening--so much so that I left at intermission. This really has nothing to do with the competence of the performance which was excellent. It did have something to do with the fact that sometimes I find it difficult to sit in a small space for a long period of time. I was at a symphony concert once, sitting in the front row of the balcony, and I noticed someone fifteen or twenty seats away, obviously fidgeting. It was the assistant conductor, whom I knew personally. At intermission we chatted and agreed that we were both terrible audience members, finding it difficult to sit passively for long periods of time. I'm ok for a couple of hours, usually, hopefully with an intermission, but more than that I find challenging. I was ok with Don Giovanni the other night because the production was so fascinating. But last night was a real challenge because my legs were sore from several days of a lot of walking and, this is the more important part, I really didn't like the opera.
There were early signs: I tried to read the novel beforehand, but just couldn't get into it despite having read Crime and Punishment recently and a book on Mikhail Bakhtin that talked a lot about Dostoevsky. But I just could not get into this piece and as it went on and on and on and on (the first half, up to the intermission, was two hours) I began to long to be liberated! After a while I began to really dislike the music.
So that's as much review as there will be. Salzburg is a wonderful music festival, but obviously every concert is not going to appeal to every listener.
This morning is a Mozart matinée in the Mozarteum Grosser Saal which I expect will be very enjoyable.
The Festival is honoring the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg with eleven concerts featuring his music. I am attending two of them. This one, with the Camerata Salzburg, contains the fairly early work Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) which was possibly the first chamber music to have a programmatic narrative. But let's start with the hall. This concert was in the smallest of the festival venues, the Mozarteum Grosser Saal across the river from the main venues. The hall was converted from an older villa just before WWI and I estimate seats about 800 people.
Mozarteum Grosser Saal
The program consisted of three works, the Siegfried Idyll by Wagner dating from 1870, Kammersymphonie (1916) by Franz Schreker, who was primarily an opera composer and Verklärte Nacht, dating from 1899 (this version, for chamber orchestra, was done in 1943) by Arnold Schoenberg.
The Wagner is a familiar work, but Franz Schreker was unknown to me. On first listening it seemed a fine work with a lot of interesting textures and orchestrations. Perhaps a composer worth exploring. But we were really here for the Schoenberg. I first bought a vinyl disc of this way back in the 70s so I have heard it hundreds of times. But as time goes on I am more and more convinced that this is a really fine, probably great, work. I notice that the works by Schoenberg chosen for the festival focus are more early and middle than late (no piano or violin concertos, for example) and it certainly shows that while Schoenberg's innovations (pan-tonality, Neo-classicism, klangfarbenmelodie and so on) always get the most attention in program notes, the truth is that he wrote very, very fine music in all stages of his career. And this is an example. Sometimes I think there are too many codas, but this is a powerful, expressive, and profound work from beginning to end.
The Festival always has interesting programs and this page caught my attention:
Some analytical notes written in Barcelona in 1932
When I get home I might sit down with the score and see what it is about. The performance was really outstanding. The leader of the Camerata on this occasion, concert master Giovanni Guzzo, seems a supremely happy man and he and his orchestra are superb.
Kendall’s own journey began in Wembley, a suburb in northwest London, where she was born. Her grandfather was a jazz musician; the household was filled with music, dance and drama, and at the behest of her mother, a first-generation Guyanese immigrant, she took up the violin at 4, the piano at 7 and voice lessons at 14.
Kendall majored in voice and composition at the University of Exeter, and then earned a master’s degree in composition at the Royal College of Music, while also studying arts management at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. (“As a composer it’s incredibly helpful for me to understand press and marketing and fund-raising, as I’m likely to have to do it for myself,” she told The Guardian in 2018.) For much of the past six years, she has been in New York, where she completed her doctorate at Columbia University in March.
But it was a performance of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” cogently conducted by the English composer and musical polymath Thomas Adès, that stole the show. Written for septet and narrator (in this case, the Broadway actor Danny Burstein, affecting a Paul Giamatti-ish demeanor), the piece is frequently augmented by additional artistry, which on this occasion fell to a small outfit called the Paper Cinema, whose work, all executed live opposite the musicians, was projected onto a large screen at the rear of the stage. Had Messrs. Adès and Burstein and the band proved any less compelling, most people’s attention would have been focused entirely on the paper puppets and the pen-and-ink drawing of Nicholas Rawling, the outfit’s co-founder and artistic director.
The whole event sounds really interesting, so read the whole thing. Guitarist Sean Shibe is scheduled to appear later in the festival.
Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.
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For those of you interested in Wittgenstein, the London Review of Books has an exhaustive review of three new translations of the Tractatus: A Tove on the Table
It consists of 525 sections, or ‘propositions’, ranging in length from four words to about a page and a half of text and diagrams. Each is given a decimal number, with the numbers indicating subordination and interconnection. Thus propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is itself a comment on proposition 2, which is one of the seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality. They are written with great compression, hardly any examples, and little explicit argument. They are for the most part general and abstract. Wittgenstein makes few concessions to his reader. But there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about their cumulative effect and about the concision with which they encapsulate his elaborate system of thought.
I find it rather uplifting that, in a global market, a great composer can be revered in one section of the world and totally ignored in the rest.
It is entirely to the credit of Wolfgang Rihm, who died this weekend, that he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.
In his native Germany, and in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland, Rihm ranked as the most performed living composer and the most prolific. He was resident composer at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals and other summits of classical activity.
In Britain and the US, he had name recognition in the diminishing puddle of contemporary music, and nothing beyond. The BBC put on a weekend of his music at the Barbican some 15 years ago but the uptake was so poor the experiment was never repeated.
Read the whole thing, which has a number of insights.
Pop has always presented listeners with the illusion of choice – no matter whether you listen to Roan, Eilish or Carpenter, your $0.003 lines the coffers of Universal Music Group – but it’s certainly got worse in recent years, as artists and their teams have worked out new ways of gaming charts and algorithms. Taylor Swift has maintained a chokehold on the charts not just because of widespread listenership of her album The Tortured Poets Department, but because she has savvily released geolocked alternate versions of the record when a competitor, such as Charli xcx, comes within spitting distance of the No 1 spot.
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It took me a while, but I did finally appreciate how great a contribution Ringo Starr made to The Beatles.
The man cruelly mocked as “not even the best drummer in The Beatles” must be the most underrated musician of all time
So vast is the chasm between the way Starr is perceived and his actual talents that it would not be going too far to say he is the most underrated musician of all time. While his talent is not of the same stripe as hyperactive geniuses such as Ginger Baker, Keith Moon or Mitch Mitchell, it actually involves greater variety and imagination. He serves songs rather than swamps them, at the same time providing character. His nuanced skill frequently lifts recordings from the merely great to the classic. Witness “She Loves You” (1963). The Beatles’ second number one, it summed up their singular life-affirming charm and ensured they became less a chart act, more a social phenomenon.
Starr’s contribution is pitch perfect. To a recipe containing an unforgettable vocal hook, an anthemic chorus and trilling harmonies, he adds a dramatic opening roll, breathless pace, sizzling hi-hat and gleeful cymbal-splashes, the perfect final ingredients to a dish of exhilaration.
It is “Rain” that confirms Starr’s greatness beyond dispute. The B-side of the 1966 single “Paperback Writer” occupies a unique status in the Fabs’ corpus in being the only Beatles track where every band member contributes as an equal. In a pounding piece of proto-psychedelia, Lennon provides a quavering melody and scathing lyric, McCartney a belligerent, brawny bass and Harrison shimmering guitar shapes, while Starr goes gloriously haywire.
After kicking off with a dive-bombing tattoo, he weaves spell-bindingly blistering patterns. His unremitting display — heedlessly maintaining hectic playing on downbeats — sees him running the risk of distracting from Lennon’s anti-orthodoxy philosophising, but the shameless showboating never offends simply because its elevated quality justifies him being a joyous law unto himself.
Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories
Actually, I'm still regretting getting rid of my vinyl, decades ago.
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First up, a chamber piece by Hannah Kendall: Network Bed.
I'm sorry to admit that this is probably the first time I have put up a piece by Wolfgang Rihm. This is Concerto en Sol for cello and orchestra.
Here's a funny thing: Austrians don't talk to one another--much. I was just in a supermarket for a few minutes and the whole time the only conversation I heard was a few words between a customer and the meat guy. That's it. Lining up at the cash with three or four other customers and the cashier, no words were exchanged. Nothing other than the cashier stating the total owing. This would not happen in Mexico. Walking into the store, if you passed someone greetings might be exchanged and certainly people would be talking to one another throughout the store and absolutely the cashier would greet you as you stepped up and say a farewell as you left. This is normal. But in Austria it would, apparently, be unusual.
People accuse Mexicans of not being readers and this is true--at least you never see anyone reading anything, even a newspaper, in public. And certainly not an actual book. But they do constantly chat with one another. And if you pass a stranger in the street away from the center of town, you certainly say hello. If you walk into a restaurant you will certainly be greeted--by name if you are a regular. But Austrians are a taciturn lot.
The water however is fantastic: some of the purest water on earth, it comes right from glacial melt. All the lakes are pure and full of fish that are good to eat. Quite a contrast from Mexico which has one rather polluted lake and one little river in the south. Yes, where I live there is something we call a river, but as nearly all the year it consists of about two inches of barely moving water, I hardly think it counts.
And Austrian bathrooms are mostly really good. Modern, high-tech facilities. And no hunting for light switches--you walk in, the lights go on. Just like escalators. They start moving as soon as you approach.
And for lunch you can have a really big sausage:
That's a bratwurst with fried potatoes and onion mustard
