A Heads-Up

In the unlikely event you don't regularly read Matthew Guerrieri's blog, Soho the Dog (and if you don't, you should), here's an excerpt from at least one post you shouldn't miss reading. Writes Matthew:

Washington, D.C., has always seemed to me a place suffused with intellectual insecurity (especially this millen[n]ium) but it seems to have spread into its musical life this past week. First, Greg "We Must Kill Classical Music In Order To Save It" Sandow — who's jumping the shark on pretty much a weekly basis these days — finds that Felicity Lott just isn't pandering to him as much as he would like.

[...]

My initial reaction — which I still think is true — is that if your idea of listening is to sit back in your chair and wait for something to hit you in the gut, then, yeah, the glories of Duparc and Debussy and Baudelaire are probably going to slip past you. The power of Baudelaire isn't just in his transgression, it's in the combination of that transgression with his formal discipline and poetic restraint. Decadence is supposed to be elegant, after all — that's part of the whole point. It's why Duparc's Baudelaire settings, or, to give a more extensive example, Faure's Verlaine settings, are so successful — the polished surface in quiet tension with the implications of the poetry. That demands an active engagement on the part of the listener/reader, and active engagement is what those composers would have expected; the unease is more profound if you find it on your own. Duparc and Debussy knew what Baudelaire was up to. Sandow doesn't.

Sandow blames standard recital presentation — "The form of the concert at war with its content," he writes. As usual, he implicitly proscribes something closer to popular culture — a presentation that underlines whatever the content "is." (Felicity Lott in torn nylons and safety pins, maybe.) But the form isn't at war with the content — even given the way that term has been cheapened through overuse along the banks of the Potomac — the form is content-neutral. The conventions of recital performance are designed to stay out of the way of as wide a variety of content as possible.

Precisely — all of it.

There's more, of course, with not all of which we agree.

RTWT here.