I don't find a lot of what Ted Gioia writes to be very interesting, but he came up with a good one today: Google Thinks Beethoven Looks Like Mr. Bean. Well, no, that is another exaggeration, but from the evidence Mr. Gioia assembles it is certainly the case that Google is massively falsifying historic images of composers. This certainly doesn't look like Mr. Bean--but it looks even less like Beethoven:
This is what Beethoven actually looked like, from a contemporary portrait:
Follow the link for some more ridiculous images. What really and truly shocks me is people are still using Google? I switched to DuckDuckGo at least ten years ago. They aren't perfect, but at least they aren't insane.
Here is the "Tempest" Sonata for Piano with Maria João Pires:
The story is that classical musicians are afraid to, or forbidden to, improvise in performance. While there is certainly some truth in that, it is actually a bit more complicated. Through the 19th century the concept of the musical "work" became more central and along with that, the sacralization of the "score," the realization of the work. In the presence of a great musical work, the "Hammerklavier" Sonata by Beethoven, for example, what pianist would have the temerity to throw in a few improvisations?
But alongside this are a number of older traditions. In early music performance, for example, the improvisation of ornaments and rhythmic alternations is not only common, but encouraged. And we have a recent recording that takes that tradition up to the time of Mozart's piano concertos: A Pianist Who’s Not Afraid to Improvise on Mozart
“When Mozart wrote his concertos, they were a vehicle for his skills,” the pianist and scholar Robert Levin said by telephone from Salzburg, Austria — Mozart’s hometown — where he teaches at the Mozarteum University. “He was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap.”
Levin, 76, has long argued that Mozart, as a player, made up new cadenzas and ornaments in the moment. And he has sought to revive that spirit of improvisation in a landmark cycle of the concertos on period instruments, a 13-album project begun more than 30 years ago with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by Christopher Hogwood.
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On An Overgrown Path gives us a few things to think about: Tribalism is ruining classical music. After trashing Slipped Disc, for, well, being trashy he goes on:
There are many other well-meaning but nevertheless damaging examples of tribalism in classical music. Some time back Proms audiences were cited as the best in the world. Today attending a BBC Prom is like attending a football match. The tribe of fans cheer on the home team - the performers - at every opportunity. It doesn't matter if the home team musicians are playing well, averagely, or just plain badly; the fans cheers them anyway, usually between movements. While over at BBC Radio 3 the once-respected network has committed harakiri in a futile battle for the Classic FM tribe.
These are just a few examples of tribalism based on the prevailing erroneous assumption by classical brand marketeers that their target audience is a homogeneous tribe of affluent young people who have the attention span of gnats and turn into pumpkins if they are parted from their mobile phone for more than two minutes. This is just nonsense: there is no single mass market tribe for classical music. The classical audience always has been and will always continue to be a granular group of individuals with differing but overlapping tastes.
On the plus side he says that there is very little they can do to damage the product:
The transcendental genius of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and their peers across the ages
Thinking about opera as burying or at least challenging the status quo may seem antithetical to its nature. Yet opera always fares best when it goes against the grain: flaunting resistance to the beauty standards erected by mass media; fitting uneasily, if at all, with the rapid demands of the attention economy; feeling completely out of place with how we consume other art.
For every composer affirming authority in their work, opera’s history offers counterexamples: creators so committed to establishing a new world order in sound that they resisted all conventions and invented their own instruments, their own ensembles or their own theaters. Opera often appears to ratify the reigning ideology, but the art form is most exciting and viable when it is a subversive act.
Well sure, but the reason it has to be supported by an elite is that opera is the most fantastically expensive art-form ever.
Picture yourself at a classical music concert, enveloped by the sweeping melodies of Beethoven or Brahms. As you listen, you may not realize that your heart rate and breathing are subtly syncing with those of the people around you. A new study has shown that the shared experience of live music creates a remarkable physiological bond among audience members, revealing the profound impact of music on the human body. The research has been published in Scientific Reports.
However:
However, the timing of inhalations and exhalations did not show significant synchronization, suggesting that while the music had a powerful effect on the audience’s overall physiological state, it did not induce the kind of precise, rhythmic breathing often seen in activities like singing or chanting. “We found repeatedly that respiration rate becomes synchronized, but not the breathing-in and breathing-out,” Tschacher said.
Interestingly, the study also revealed that different types of listening experiences were associated with different levels of synchrony. For example, participants who reported being emotionally moved by the music were less synchronized with the rest of the audience. On the other hand, those who focused on the structure of the music—such as its melodies, rhythm, and harmony—or who paid close attention to the sounds of individual instruments, showed higher levels of synchrony.
So, not much in the way of actual results. Coincidentally, I did a little research of my own during a number of concerts at Salzburg. I know that I tend to physically respond while listening to music even though I try to minimize it during concerts so as not to disturb my neighbors. Some of it consists in mild nodding in time, movements of my hands in sympathy. Sometimes it is akin to the movements of a passenger's feet while in a car driven by someone not entirely in control--you know those times where you search for a brake pedal! So I often feel, especially in piano and guitar concerts, as if I do have a physical participation. So, during the Salzburg concerts I repeatedly surveyed the other audience members to see if I could discern anyone else also making physical responses. I looked at hundreds of people and didn't notice anything. The only people making these kinds of physical movements were the performers. I guess I'm weird.
While at first glance a Chinese orchestra may look similar to a Western orchestra, they are different as chalk and cheese. The string make-up (‘Huqins’ in Chinese orchestras) comprises the Eco-Gaohu (they look like bowed banjos), the Eco-Zhonghu; the Eco-Erhu, the Eco-Gehu and the Eco-Bass Gehu. Musicians play specially manufactured Eco-Huqins (the Gaohu, Zhonghu, Erhu, Gehu and Bass-Gehu are created without the traditional python skin) which have been in use by the HKCO since 2009, while the bright sound of Chinese woodwind instruments and brass invokes ancient Oriental ceremony. Celina Chin (Celina Chin Man Wah), executive director at HKCO, explains: ‘It dates back to the Chou (Zhou) and Tang dynasties, there was already a very big orchestra, nearly 1,000 people, especially for the King.’ For Chin, the HKCO sound is ‘just like a cosmopolitan image of Hong Kong; the instruments are traditional Chinese, but the sound is international.’
There will be no further updates to Finale, or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Notepad, Songwriter)
– It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore
– Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed (barring OS changes)
– After one year, beginning August 2025, these changes will go into effect:
– It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale
– Support for Finale v27 or any other version of Finale will no longer be available.
For a limited time, users of any version of Finale or PrintMusic can purchase Dorico Pro for just $149 (retail price $579).
I don't know anything about Dorico Pro, but I guess I will give it a try. I have spent over 25 years learning how to use Finale, but I guess I can simply continue to use it on my current devices.
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Let's start with Robert Levin and Mozart:
Here is the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra:
My favorite Beethoven piano concertos are Friedrich Guida with the Vienna Philharmonic, but this is pretty good too:
Now that I'm back home and have recovered from jet lag and a bad cold and caught up with work, I can contemplate this year's excursion to the Salzburg Festival. This is the third festival I have attended, though I was a student at the Mozarteum in the 1980s and attended a few concerts.
Inevitably this year was less of a sheer thrill than the first one in 2019 or the second in 2021. This is partly due to exposure and partly due to some internal chemistry I am still thinking about. I am a more seasoned festival-goer now, of course. I can find my seats and I know my way to the various venues and I have a smattering of understanding of the Salzburg bus system. So now, I guess, the problem is deciding which concerts to attend--eight months beforehand! The operas are nowadays the big show at Salzburg and it is always a bit of a crap-shoot--unless you have insider knowledge. I made one good choice, Don Giovanni, and one bad choice Der Idiot. Mind you, the critical consensus went the other way, which is not that important. Two of the concerts I most wanted to attend, Currenzis' of the Matthew Passion and the Berlin Philharmonic, were both outside of the time-span I was allowed. I did not choose a couple of operas that might have been very exciting, the Prokofiev for one. But I think I covered the piano recitals quite well--I saw six out of the eight major recitals.
I'm not sure of what I feel about this year's festival--that might have to wait a couple of months. But I can say that the Vienna Philharmonic doing Bruckner was an experience of a lifetime and the piano recitals by Levit, Sokolov, Aimard and Volodos were transcendental. The De profundis by Arvo Pärt was deeply moving and the production of Don Giovanni was absolutely delightful. Some of the other concerts felt more like work than pleasure.
Just for fun, here is Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing a Ligeti etude:
...what irreducibly constitutes good art as such? Or rather, what is the ultimate source of value or quality in art? And the worked-out answer appears to be: not skill, training, or anything else having to do with execution or performance, but conception alone ... Conception can also be called invention, inspiration, or even intuition.
--Clement Greenberg, Art International, 1962
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This is kind of fun: composer Samuel Andreyev tries to see how well Grok understands the concept of music notation:
Art that loses touch with the resources of beauty is bound to be sterile. But it is also true that striving self-consciously to embody beauty is a prescription for artistic failure. This may seem paradoxical. But, like many of the most important things in life, genuine beauty is achieved mainly by indirection. In this sense, beauty resembles happiness as it was described by Aristotle: it is not a possible goal of our actions, but rather the natural accompaniment of actions rightly performed. Striving for happiness in life all but guarantees unhappiness; striving for beauty in art is likely to result in kitsch or some other artistic counterfeit.
The trick, for viewers as well as artists, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian — the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.
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Critic Jay Nordlinger paid a visit to Salzburg and reviewed one of the Mozart Matinees: Mozart in the morning.
On Saturday morning, Manze conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra in an all-Mozart concert at the Mozarteum. Is that enough Mozart for you? (There never is, really.) The program began with the Six German Dances, K. 509.
As he prepared to give the downbeat, Manze looked like he was thinking the following thoughts: I can’t wait to get started. I can’t wait to hear and conduct this music. We are the luckiest people in the world to be doing this. Manze delights in music-making, as few do.
Does this have an effect on an orchestra (and an audience)? Certainly.
I attended two of the Mozart Matinees in the Großer Saal and had the same impression: all the performers, and especially the conductors, were very happy people, really enjoying what they were doing. But I didn't find the hall especially hot! Like all the venues apart from the Collegium church, it is air conditioned, though minimally.
Giacinto Scelsi died in 1988, aged 83. Virtually unknown for most of his life, his music had been discovered and much of it performed for the first time only in his last 10 years, when his works suddenly became influential on both sides of the Atlantic – American experimentalists such as Alvin Curran, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown were among his admirers, as were the French spectralists, especially Tristan Murail and Claude Vivier. The mystique that surrounded Scelsi added to the allure of his music – a self-taught composer who was born into the Italian nobility, he refused to have his photograph associated with his music and regarded himself as a messenger from another world. His intense later works were often confined to a single chord or pitch that was subjected to microtonal inflections and all manner of textural variation.
I have an earlier disc of Scelsi's music on my shelf, on the recommendation of a composition teacher, but I have to say I have never found it very appealing. Of course, I suppose it doesn't have to be.
It almost feels cruel to single out anyone from the cast of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” the greatest triumph of this year’s festival. With Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s spirited baton in the pit, and fearless singers onstage, Salzburg has given this rarity the showing it has needed to take hold in the operatic canon.
Beyond the leading trio of singers, though, the Australian mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas repeatedly asserted her presence on the vast stage of the Felsenreitschule as the confidently idealistic Aglaya. Bogdan Volkov, as the protagonist Prince Myshkin, flinched in her presence, and it was easy to see why. Thomas, a member of the Opera Studio at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, has a small frame but a big sound that easily soared over Weinberg’s thick orchestration, in monologues of exasperation, flirtation and rage delivered with the skill of a seasoned actor.
Esa-Pekka Salonen is leaving the San Francisco Symphony because the board won’t pay for his programming.
That’s widely known.
In the next few days the board will seek city permission to go ahead with a makeover of Davies Symphony Hall, with a projected cost of $100 million.
Sack the best gardener, build a better garden shed.
This tends to confirm my suspicion that firing Salonen wasn't really about the money at all. Which would you prefer: great music in a mediocre hall or mediocre music in a great hall?
What makes a great Bruckner conductor? “That’s a very difficult question,” Honeck explains, “because technically, from the baton, how you beat, Bruckner is very easy. It’s not like Stravinsky’s Sacre or Mahler. The same is true for Mozart.”
On the page, indeed, Bruckner looks pretty straightforward. There aren’t complex time signatures and rapid changes of tempo. But pacing those tempi can defeat many. “You have to understand that the tempo comes automatically if you understand the context in which it was written, the spirituality that was in the man and his music and to understand that spirituality. If there is contrapuntal writing, like a fugue, then understand that the second theme in the fuga is also important, the counterpoint is important so you must give it a life; if you take it too quickly, then you have a problem. The same is true with the folk music, you have to know which tempo or in which kind of style it was played.”
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I suppose we can kick off the envois with Manfred Honeck conducting Bruckner:
Why not some Mozart? Here are the aforementioned German Dances:
I could not help noticing that this year, and in all recent past years I am aware of, there were no classical guitar concerts at the Salzburg Festival, nor was there a guitar class. When I attended in the late 80s, there most certainly was a guitar class presided over by Pepe Romero and he also accompanied soprano Teresa Berganza in a performance of the Siete canciones populares españoles of Manuel de Falla though I don't recall the venue. Let's look at some other major festivals:
Lucerne Festival: lots of piano, especially Igor Levit, lots of orchestras and lots of violin. I looked at the first six pages of concert listings and no guitar
Verbier Festival: in the chamber music series there are lots of violinists, cellists and pianists, but no guitarists
I'm not going to search all of the European festivals. There are, of course, guitar specific festivals such as this one:
Guitar festivals always seem to feature a competition. This fulfills two purposes: it attracts a lot of guitarists and it sustains the belief that the only real problem in the guitar world is that classical guitarists are not as technically proficient as pianists. This is likely less true than it used to be. In any case, what we see is that the guitar is excluded from the mainstream music festivals and pushed off into its own ghetto. Is it because guitarists are poorer technically and musically? That may be true. But what I suspect the real problem is that the guitar repertoire that really attracts a broad audience consists of about a half-dozen pieces. Sitting in the smaller venues at the Salzburg Festival I asked myself, which guitarists playing which repertoire could be guaranteed to fill any of these halls. And no names came to mind.
Perhaps the real problem is not technique, but composition.
“We in this classical music industry sometimes wonder what we’re doing in this bubble,” he said. “But this tells us that it actually matters that there’s a symphony orchestra in a town. We are the good guys, in the cultural side of things. We are constructive forces of society, and it’s nice to be reminded of that.”
So, what now? Within five minutes of the announcement that he was leaving San Francisco, Salonen had the first of many job offers. At the moment, he’s not interested in taking on another orchestra, but there are many other ways to remain active. He is working on a horn concerto for Stefan Dohr of the Berlin Philharmonic, and he is considering writing his first opera.
Chase said that Salonen’s ideas for the field are “more porous and ultimately more powerful than institutions”; there’s a possibility that his work as a freelancer could evolve into something more project-based, with orchestral partners worldwide. When he was at the Soho House in Stockholm, he told Benkö, the interviewer, that it was kind of odd to see his old classmates start to retire.
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Here is economist Tyler Cowen's list of his favorite classical performances. Not many surprises. Lots of Bach and Beethoven but just Don Giovanni from Mozart.
Beving and Melnyk are two figures in a huge musical phenomenon unfolding on the fringes of classical music. It can be heard on film and TV soundtracks, adverts and call-centre hold music, and behind that trickledown lies an enormous number of albums, singles and playlists by pianist-composers now attracting more listeners than most big names of classical piano performance. Did you think Yuja Wang, the 37-year-old Chinese phenomenon, was one of the most famous pianists in the world? Think again.
Beving, Melnyk and similar artists work in a solo piano soundworld sometimes known as “ambient” or “neoclassical” or “postminimalist” – although categories aren’t really its thing. As one fan put it to me with a hint of impatience: “It’s all just stuff, you know?” And this particular stuff is about soulful simplicity. A stripped-back aesthetic. Quiet melancholy. It is a world of arpeggios and gentle undulations, of atmosphere rather than athleticism.
Set in the 17th-century Danish court, this is the story of Peter Claire, a young lutenist who arrives from England to join the royal orchestra. Atmospheric, tender and gripping, Tremain explores the extraordinary power of music through her language. Melodies have a “strange and haunting sweetness”, and notes are “carried, as breath is carried through the body”.
As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the most forceful and eloquent witnesses still living. More than that, she embodies a lost way of being—the intellectual spark of German Jewish culture before Hitler. With her shock of white hair, ruddy face, and exacting eyes, she looks twenty years younger than she is. She is mordantly funny. She speaks in epigrams and aphorisms. She has no patience with sentimentality or stupidity. An unrepentant smoker, she intersperses her remarks with well-timed drags on a cigarette. Her voice has descended at least an octave since 1945. The word “indomitable” might have been invented for her. She is perhaps the most awe-inspiring person I have ever met.
I have to agree: one of the most awe-inspiring people I have ever known was also a survivor of Auschwitz.
He felt wronged by the public and his fellow composers, who even when they admired him didn’t know what to do with his music, or his personality. Wagner wrote that Berlioz didn’t trust anyone’s opinion, and seemed to enjoy isolation, dooming him to “remain forever incomplete and perhaps really shine only as a transient, marvelous exception.”
Berlioz had faith that his time would come, though. By his estimate, things would pick up for him if he could just live to 140. He made it to 65.
But he wasn’t wrong. After his death, in 1869, some of his works, like the “Symphonie Fantastique,” became firmly entrenched in the canon, and he is the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, which begins on Aug. 9. Still, two weeks’ worth of concerts and panel discussions, as well as a companion collection of essays, can only begin to capture the breadth of Berlioz’s artistry.
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As a tribute to this still-neglected composer, let's have three pieces by Berlioz for our envois today. First, the Symphonie fantastique:
Next, Harold en Italie, a symphony/viola concerto based on a poem by Byron:
Finally, Roméo et Juliette, a dramatic symphony based on the Shakespeare play:
