Sounds & Fury

We Interrupt Our Forced Hiatus For A Short Rant

We've just finished watching our tape of last night's PBS telecast of the Met's "HD Live" film of its March 2008 staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and we just want to say that if we ever in real life meet up with Barbara Willis Sweete — the apparent escapee from film school responsible for directing this "HD Live" film with its relentless, illusion- and drama-destroying use of multiple split-screen and relentless, illusion-destroying use of closeups — we will, with our bare hands, rip her a new one from stem to stern.

And when we're done with her, we'll look for a way to meet up in real life with theater director Dieter Dorn to do the same for him for his starkly geometric, insistently symmetrical, one-set-fits-all 1999 Konzept which by its stultifying act-to-act sameness, its faux-Appia shifts of color notwithstanding, dulled — even subverted — the emotional, mystic, and dramatic core of the music-drama for all its three acts; and for his apparently forgetting that a director is supposed to direct his actors to act and move about in ways dramatically appropriate, not leave them mostly free to wander about doing any damn thing it enters their heads to do (or so it seemed), complete with risible, Italian opera cartoon hand and arm gestures and facial expressions which these singer-actors apparently imagined constituted, you know, actual acting.

Jesus!

That is all.

As you — and we — were.

Blogging Hiatus

Due the problems and errors introduced by TypePad's new Compose Editor (see this S&F post), blogging on Sounds & Fury will cease except for the most pressing items until those problems and errors have been resolved by TypePad as at this point in time we don't know just how those problems and errors will be resolved.

All our posts prior to the introduction of the new Compose Editor are formatted using one consistent set of source HTML formatting code which is incompatible with the source HTML formatting code required by the new Compose Editor in its present state. Specifically, the delineation of paragraphs requires the explicit presence of certain formatting tags in the source HTML for the new editor that were not required by the previous editor as the new editor does not recognize the "Convert line breaks" option recognized by the old editor. Additionally, the new editor does not recognize the "justify" text formatting specified in our theme Design, and insists on formatting all text as "left align". Until those major errors are corrected, the HTML formatting of any posts made in the new editor will be incompatible with the HTML formatting of all prior posts resulting in a "broken" blog should the blog have to be republished to accommodate the requirements of certain TypePad functions. As things stand now, if we had to republish Sounds & Fury for any reason, every single post (1096 of them at last count) would have its formatting "broken" irretrievably by the republish; a prospect we don't want to even think about.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Strange-Looking Formatting Of Posts On Sounds & Fury

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:56 PM Eastern on 23 June. See below.]

TypePad has distributed a new and "improved" Compose Editor to a selective number of its users, and it's a true monster. Not only is it bug-ridden and introducing errors into other TypePad functions, but for those of us who compose our posts offline using HTML markup and then PASTE the marked-up text into the editor it's a veritable horror as it insists on re-coding that text with its own version of HTML making the source text unreadable in marked-up form. We beg your indulgence for any strange-looking formatting of posts on Sounds & Fury until we sort out the new TypePad editor's way of doing things, and adjust our markup accordingly.

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Update (2:46 PM Eastern on 24 May): In the process of "correcting" one of the errors introduced into other TypePad functions by the distribution of its new Compose Editor, TypePad has cleverly wiped out an entire Sounds & Fury category: Opera (mostly Wagner and Mozart). The hundreds of posts in that category seem to still be there, but their grouping under that category is gone. We've been told that TypePad is attempting to fix this "correction," but until such time as the fix is done — if indeed it can be done — S&F posts on opera will not be accessible via their grouping by category.

Stay tuned for further progress on this latest screw-up.

(Added 5/24: For more on all the above, see this post.)

Update 2 (23:56 PM Eastern on 23 June): This issue has been resolved and the category, Opera (mostly Wagner and Mozart), with all its posts intact is now restored.

A Little Simplistic, But Not Far Wrong

T

im Mangan, writing for The Arts Blog of the Orange County Register (we do wish he'd set up his own personal blog), has several hundred choice words to say about how the average classical music listener limits both his own musical horizons as well as those of classical music concert programming. Writes Mr. Mangan:

The average classical music listener – that is, the majority of those who attend concerts and opera performances and listen to the radio – is a simple soul. Looking into it, one finds that he prizes melody above all else. But not just any melody. The melodies of Hindemith, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, Lutoslawski, Glass or Adams, to name a few, will not do at all, and the average listener, in so far as he is able to define what a melody is, would not recognize these composers' efforts as such. No, by melody, the average listener means something narrower in scope, a tune, really, a song.

His definition of melody, though he doesn’t realize it, also includes a type of phrasing, regular and foursquare, and a question-and-answer design to the harmony. It’s this whole melody package that he enjoys most, which limits his aesthetic scope to the music from roughly 1750-1900. Beyond that he can find himself in rough waters.

RTWT here.

And More Distressing News

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May. See below.]

The appalling beat goes on. The latest to join the march is The Washington Post. Reports the Washingtonian:

The [Washington] Post collected six Pulitzer prizes for 2007, but it could lose as many as 12 Pulitzer Prize winners in the current round of buyouts.

[...]

Tim Page, who previously won for his classical-music criticism, is taking the deal and planning to teach.

Not altogether unexpected, but distressing nevertheless.

If true (no notice or confirmation from The Washington Post yet), Mr. Page's eloquent and authoritative voice will be sorely missed.

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Update (11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May): It's now public officially.

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Caution! Contents Dangerous!

Yesterday we received a shipment from Amazon containing two items: the new Deutsche Grammophon CD of Hilary Hahn's readings of the Sibelius and Schoenberg violin concertos (commented on in this S&F post), and the Decca/BBC/ORF DVD of The Golden Ring, the famous 1965 documentary detailing the making of Decca's Götterdämmerung installment of its history-making recording of the first complete recorded Der Ring des Nibelungen (often referred to in short as the Solti or Decca Ring). We've of course known of the existence of this DVD for years, but somehow never got around to ordering it. But as its price coupled with the price of the Hahn CD was only slightly above the right amount to give us free shipping for both, we decided now was as good a time as any to finally secure a copy for our library.

As might be imagined from reading our above linked post on the Hahn CD, we were very much looking forward to giving the Schoenberg another close listen or three, but since we figured the DVD would require only a single viewing, we decided we'd start with that instead of the Schoenberg and have done with it so we could give our full attention to the Schoenberg without having the distraction of an unauditioned new arrival occupying our thoughts.

Bad decision.

Why a bad decision?

The recording sessions for the Decca Ring were unique at the time as, contrary to then standard industry practice, each session consisted of an unbroken 15-or-so-minute take rather than the 5-6 minutes typical of the time so as to maintain both the musical and dramatic continuity for the performers of what was being recorded. Turns out, The Golden Ring is also unique as documentaries typically go as it documents several of those unbroken 15-or-so-minute takes — unbroken.

In our S&F post, "Goldovsky, Mozart, and Wagner: A Moment Briefly Revisited", we recounted the following incident involving ourself and the great opera maven and general manager, dramaturge, director, and music director of his own opera company, Boris Goldovsky:

Eventually, we got around to discussing Wagner, and at just the mention of the name, Goldovsky [a man who all but worshipped Mozart] turned his face toward the ceiling, threw his arms up in a sort of helpless gesture (Goldovsky was a native Russian, and, well, you know just how emotional Russians can get, especially after tucking away three or four shot glasses filled with lethal-strength vodka), and declared passionately in a vodka-thickened Russian accent which I here won't even attempt to mimic, "Wagner!, Wagner! He consumes me!"

I at first thought he was merely engaging in a bit of stage business to create a dramatic moment to precede some point he wanted to make. But it was no stage business. The man looked positively stricken.

I, of course, was stunned speechless, and my astonishment must have shown on my face because he quickly caught hold of himself and, poised and quietly, explained, "Every time I conduct Wagner the world disappears, and for days after, all other opera seems nothing but shit. Verdi is shit. Puccini is shit. Tchaikovsky is shit. Even Beethoven is shit. And...," and here he paused, leaned his face close to mine, lowered his voice conspiratorially, and with genuine distress written over all his features, he, in hoarse, shamefaced whisper declared," and, Mozart...even Mozart is shit."

Now do you understand why our decision to audition that DVD first was the wrong way to go? It's been some 40 hours now, and we still haven't managed to fully purge our system of that music's spell.

Bloody Wagner! They really ought to put warning labels on all recordings of his mature works. The man's music is positively dangerous — even in relatively small doses.

A Brief Note On Adams's Dr. Atomic

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 1:20 PM Eastern on 18 May. See below.]

We've just finished listening to today's Chicago Lyric Opera broadcast of its production of John Adams's opera, Dr. Atomic, the first time we've heard this work which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2005. The music is gorgeous, powerful, and Wagnerian-symphonic-rich throughout cum synthesizer-created soundscapes when dramatically called for; not at all what we expected. But as opera — as dramma per musica — the work fails utterly, its failure due entirely its largely prosaic, undramatic, clunky, and inept libretto by Peter Sellars (yes, that Peter Sellars) which has all the drama, power, poetry, and evocative resonance of a hockey puck. With certain exceptions such as the beautifully lyrical Act I Muriel Rukeyser-, Baudelaire-laced colloquy between J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, and the potent Act I close wherein Oppenheimer sings the terrible plea of the John Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person’d God", the libretto is, for the most part, little more than an artlessly strung together collection of artless quotes from contemporary documents and letters that, taken together, work to pimp Mr. Sellars's leftist view of this mythic, world-shattering event — in short, a libretto that's mostly unmitigated, pedestrian-grade, postmodern-style agitprop (surprise!). And as if to clinch the opera's postmodern provenance, there's its tacky, pop-culture-inspired title; a title more appropriate to a 1950s sci-fi B movie which, we're certain, is precisely why it was chosen.

And that's all a damn shame. Given the dramatic potential of the opera's mythically charged subject — a dramatic potential Adams's score mines musically and to powerful effect in spite of the leaden libretto that blunts and works against it in almost every measure — and the richness of Adams's lush, polytonal, polyrhythmic score, the work could have been made into an opera that could have stood comfortably alongside the very best. As it now stands, Adams has sold his score short — way short.

We'd very much like to see Adams do one of three things with this work (apart from losing its ridiculous, wannabe-cool title): 1) hire a real librettist to rewrite the text from top to bottom as an opera; 2) hire a real librettist to rewrite the text from top to bottom as an oratorio; or 3) chuck the present libretto altogether into the rubbish bin where it more properly belongs, and rework that glorious music into either an extended tone poem or three-movement dramatic symphony. It would be an aesthetic crime of the first magnitude to permit that music to remain hostage to the dead-weight libretto to which it's now wedded.

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Update (12:24 PM Eastern on 18 May): We've been admonished for passing judgment on Dr. Atomic without actually having seen the opera. The staging, we're told, makes all the difference.

Our answer to that criticism is that mounting a perceptibly flawed and badly cut diamond in the most exquisite of settings will neither mask nor mitigate its inherent flaws and make of it a stone of the first water.

An opera's libretto is the (music-)drama's dramatic armature (and we're here talking about opera that aspires to genuine dramma per musica, not opera as a pretext and platform for showcasing songbirds); that about which the (music-)drama is constructed. If that dramatic armature is fatally flawed, then the (music-)drama must ultimately collapse, and not even the most brilliant staging will serve to save it as dramma per musica.

From our first-time hearing, such is our impression of Dr. Atomic.

Update 2 (1:20 PM Eastern on 18 May): In a post titled, "Forgotten Symphony", composer and blogger Marcus Maroney of Sounds Like New writes:

I'm confused, though, about ACD's third "suggestion" at the end of his review, the one about how he wishes Adams would: "chuck the present libretto altogether into the rubbish bin where it more properly belongs, and rework that glorious music into either an extended tone poem or three-movement dramatic symphony." I'm confused mostly because ACD commented on Stephen Hicken's post about the premiere of the Dr. Atomic Symphony, premiered nearly a year ago.

Sonofagun. Forgotten symphony indeed. A clear case of cryptomnesia on our part. Even after following Marcus's link to Steve's post and reading our two-word comment there, it still didn't ring a bell.

Well, in any case, we're most pleased that John Adams saw fit to work this music into symphonic form, and we look forward to hearing the result when the work becomes available on CD.

Our thanks to Marcus for calling this to our attention.

The Met's Peter Grimes

Writing in 1853, Richard Wagner declared that the as yet unwritten music for his epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see," and when the music was finished, it proved Wagner as good as his word.

Benjamin Britten has little to do with Richard Wagner (or as little to do as is possible for a post-Wagner composer of opera), but one can imagine Britten saying the very same thing about his music for Peter Grimes. Virtually every measure of the extraordinary score is vivid with the sense and sounds of the sea in all its various moods and vagaries, and richly evocative of life in those coastline villages and towns whose very existence depends on the sea.

Last night, New York's Channel 13 (WNET) telecast the Met's 15 March Live In HD film of its new production of Britten's Peter Grimes directed and staged by Tony Award winning theater director John Doyle in his Met debut. We just finished watching our tape of Act I, and our extreme annoyance, even anger, has not as yet had enough time to subside to manageable enough proportions to permit us to go on to Acts II and III with due equanimity — beyond, that is, our skipping ahead to confirm our worst fear that the Prologue and first-act, two-scene set by set designer Scott Pask is used for the following two acts and their two scenes each as well.

And of what does that set consist? Primarily, it's a huge wall of blackened, sea-weathered wood planks, the wall provided with a number of open-doored or -shuttered cutouts along its width and height in which appear various of the opera's characters, the wall spanning the stage from extreme left to extreme right, and rising from stage floor into the flies.

And how is this supposed to symbolize or represent the fishing village (called the Borough in the opera, but meant to be an almost verbatim representation of Britten's native Aldeburgh) limned so brilliantly by Britten's music and Montague Slater's splendid libretto?

Only The Shadow and John Doyle know for sure, but we'd bet our last bippy that clever Tony Award winning theater director took his cue from this exchange at Grimes's "hearing" which forms the opera's Prologue:

Grimes
Stand down you say. You wash your hands.
The case goes on in people's minds.
The charges that no court has made
Will be shouted at my head.
Then let me speak, let me stand trial.
Bring the accusers to the hall.
O let me thrust into their mouths
The truth itself, the simple truth.
The truth itself!

Townspeople (chorus)
When women gossip, the result
Is someone doesn't sleep at night.
But when the crowner sits upon it,
Who can dare to fix the guilt?

Swallow
Clear the court!

Grimes
The truth — the pity — and the truth.

Ellen
Peter, Peter, come away!

Grimes
Where the walls themselves
Gossip of inquest.

And that for Doyle becomes everything that is the Borough; ergo, The Wall.

OK. We get it. Very slick.

And very empty, too; most especially as Doyle places the anonymous, gossiping townspeople — all clothed in dark-green and black, Puritan-like dress — in mostly static blocked masses in front of The Wall, not behind it and seen through the cutouts where the metaphor might have made some dramatic sense.

But in any case, the Borough is more than the malevolent gossiping of its inhabitants. It's a fishing village every detail of the daily life of which is centered on and ordered by the sea as Britten's music makes powerfully and abundantly clear. Where is all that village life in this production? It doesn't exist, and, further, is made of no consequence by Doyle's Konzept; a Konzept that blunts Britten's brilliant and evocative score at every turn.

But we don't wish to be misunderstood. We're not calling here for the fussy, natural realism of a typical 19th-century staging. The many-layered depth and profundity of Britten's music coupled with Slater's libretto can stand up to and even glory in an abstract stage treatment. But the abstraction must meet both music and text on their terms, not be some director's postmodern deconstruction of those terms; a deconstruction such as this one that fights against those terms every step of the way. We shudder even to think of how The Wall will play out in Acts II and III.

What's that? How was the performance itself? So far, pretty much first-rate for the most part, although we could, at times, have asked for a more passionately realized reading from the conductor, the excellent Donald Runnicles.

But we're running ahead of ourself. We're holding our considered judgment of the performance for another time. We have first to get through — and over — the staging of this production. I suspect that, ultimately, the only way we'll be able to accomplish that is to imagine our own staging as we listen to the performance with our eyes closed.

Off-Message But Noteworthy

George W. Bush may be a heart-in-the-right-place simpleton, and he and his entire Administration criminally incompetent, right-wing-loony, Neo-Conservative ideologues, but his speechwriters are apparently another and eloquent story.

Following is an excerpt from Mr. Bush's speech delivered earlier today to Israel's Knesset on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

President Peres and Mr. Prime Minister, Madam Speaker, thanks very much for hosting this special session. President Beinish, Leader of the Opposition Netanyahu, Ministers, members of the Knesset, distinguished guests: Shalom. Laura and I are thrilled to be back in Israel. We have been deeply moved by the celebrations of the past two days. And this afternoon, I am honored to stand before one of the world’s great democratic assemblies and convey the wishes of the American people with these words: Yom Ha’atzmaut Sameach (Happy Independence Day).

It is a rare privilege for the American President to speak to the Knesset. Although the Prime Minister told me there is something even rarer — to have just one person in this chamber speaking at a time. My only regret is that one of Israel’s greatest leaders is not here to share this moment. He is a warrior for the ages, a man of peace, a friend. The prayers of the American people are with Ariel Sharon.

We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the "natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate." What followed was more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David — a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.

Eleven minutes later, on the orders of President Harry Truman, the United States was proud to be the first nation to recognize Israel’s independence. And on this landmark anniversary, America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world.

[...]

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil. The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men. No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers. In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis.

And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the “elimination” of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant “Death to Israel, Death to America!” That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that “the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties.” And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

[...]

Sixty years ago, on the eve of Israel’s independence, the last British soldiers departing Jerusalem stopped at a building in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. An officer knocked on the door and met a senior rabbi. The officer presented him with a short iron bar — the key to the Zion Gate — and said it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of Jerusalem had belonged to a Jew. His hands trembling, the rabbi offered a prayer of thanksgiving to God, "Who had granted us life and permitted us to reach this day." Then he turned to the officer, and uttered the words Jews had awaited for so long: "I accept this key in the name of my people."

Over the past six decades, the Jewish people have established a state that would make that humble rabbi proud. You have raised a modern society in the Promised Land, a light unto the nations that preserves the legacy of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And you have built a mighty democracy that will endure forever and can always count on the United States of America to be at your side. God bless.

RTWT here.

More Distressing News

More distressing news from the MSM classical music critical front. Longtime New York Times classical music critic Bernard Holland has accepted the buyout offered him by the Times to relinquish his staff position as a Times classical music critic. That means the Times is now left with no-one on the classical music staff who deserves the title of critic.

Sign of the times (P.I.).

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.

Hahn, Salonen, Schoenberg, Sibelius: A Brief Note

Thanks to a heads-up by Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette (see this Sounds & Fury post) and a serendipitous subsequent airing on WQXR, we've now heard the new Deutsche Grammophon recording of violinist Hilary Hahn's reading of the Schoenberg and Sibelius violin concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and it's an impressive outing through and through. While Ms. Hahn's reading of the Sibelius is somewhat too cool and distant for our tastes and our understanding of the work, her reading is in every respect a perfectly valid one and performed here with flawless violinistic virtuosity.

But it's the Schoenberg that most captured our interest as it's a work we've now heard for the very first time. Ms. Midgette says that in this reading Ms. Hahn (and Mr. Salonen as well) are "smart enough not to get tied in knots by [the 'density' of] Schoenberg's score, and to see through it to the composer's inner romantic." After our one-time audition of this work and this performance, we respectfully disagree with that assessment — or, rather, with its wording. There's nothing in Schoenberg's score to "see through," and nothing "inner[ly] romantic" about this work. Its romanticism is up-front-and-center and in full bloom throughout the work's lushly orchestrated three movements; not the lyric romanticism of a Brahms or Tchaikovsky of course, but a full-blown romanticism nevertheless, 20th-century style, everywhere replete with unresolved dissonance and ferocious atonal 20th-century angst. Against big and sometimes sweeping romantic gestures in the orchestra the solo violin plays a largely "spiky" and "angular" counterpoint (to use praisefully two terms used pejoratively by Ms. Midgette) to electric effect, the gestalt deeply, arrestingly, and unabashedly heart-on-sleeve impassionedly expressive. And Ms. Hahn handles the impossibly difficult solo part with perfect assurance and a seeming effortlessness, her playing, again, flawless throughout, her tone rich and round whether playing angst-ridden fortissimos or tensely whispered harmonics.

We love this concerto at first hearing, and Ms. Hahn's performance here seems to us exemplary as does the performance of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Salonen. This CD will soon occupy a place in our highly selective, still rebuilding CD library where you may be sure it will be accessed numerous times in future so that we may become more intimately familiar with this remarkable work and with this apparently equally remarkable performance.

And Speaking Of First-Rate Writing On Classical Music...

Also from The Washington Post, here's a background piece on David Del Tredici's Final Alice — one of our all-time favorite 20th-century works — by classical music journalist Stephen Brookes. Writes Mr. Brookes:

It was the most outrageous thing the music establishment could have imagined. Here was Sir Georg Solti leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a new work by a leading avant-garde composer, and there were . . . arias! With actual melodies! Contemporary music, as everyone knew, was supposed to be thorny and atonal stuff, with no use for the outdated conventions of the past. Yet here was bar after bar of lush, unrepentant harmony, hummable tunes, symphonic gestures right out of Mahler. Even a fugue.

To the ruling avant-garde it was a slap in the face -- and as a final insult, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering, when the piece came to a close.

It was Oct. 7, 1976, and the work was Final Alice by 39-year-old composer David Del Tredici. Until that moment, he'd been a card-carrying member of the avant-garde. But in one bold stroke, Del Tredici jettisoned the strict composing system known as serialism (which dominated new American music, to the despair of most audiences) and embraced a neo-romantic style -- scandalizing his colleagues and setting off an earthquake in American music whose aftershocks are still being felt.

"Final Alice changed the face of music in this country overnight," recalls Leonard Slatkin, the National Symphony Orchestra's music director, who was in the Chicago audience that night. "It destroyed all conceptions of what 'new music' was supposed to be, and many composers will tell you that they were now liberated to write how they felt. It was the start of a revolution."

RTWT here.

A Hat's Off

We've often in the past come down fairly hard on classical music reviewer and journalist Anne Midgette (most famously — or as famously as anything written on this blog can be considered famous — here), but since her move from The New York Times to The Washington Post in January of this year to take the place of the Post's on-leave Pulitzer Prize winning chief classical music critic, Tim Page, and where her official designation is, "interim chief classical music critic," Miss Midgette has been turning out reviews and commentary that are of consistently high quality and well worth one's time reading. Take, for instance, her review of a recent Deutsche Grammophon release of Hilary Hahn's readings of two violin masterpieces by Schoenberg and Sibelius. Writes Ms. Midgette in her opening grafs:

Somebody forgot to tell the violinist Hilary Hahn that Schoenberg is ugly.

The music of Arnold Schoenberg, of course, isn't ugly at all; in fact, he's one of the last of the romantics. And that's exactly how Hahn understands him. Her new recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon, released last month, shows no traces of the spiky, unpleasant angularity that represents Schoenberg in the popular consciousness. And this is quite a feat, since the concerto is one of the more technically difficult pieces to play in the repertory.

Hahn used to strike me as a somewhat wooden, obedient player: the paradigm of the young prodigy. In this week's program with the National Symphony Orchestra, she offers the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1, which she has also recorded — the kind of virtuosic but rather empty fireworks piece that she seemed to me well suited for. It's interesting that her tone, which had seemed slightly thin, blossoms in the Schoenberg. The density of the score can make the piece sound clotted, but on this recording, it sings. All of that ferocious virtuosity is harnessed here in the service of a larger, expressive purpose.

Hahn's sensibility dovetails well with that of Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra on this recording. He, too, is someone who focuses expressivity through a quality of analytic intellectualism. Both musicians are smart enough not to get tied in knots by Schoenberg's score, and to see through it to the composer's inner romantic.

Or take for another instance her review of the most recent concert by the National Symphony Orchestra. Writes Ms. Midgette:

Guilty pleasures. Serious fun. Heavy entertainment: It's hard to know what to call the National Symphony Orchestra's program last night. It was filled with music that many people might dismiss as light, or even in bad taste: Paganini's Violin Concerto, written as a showpiece for a flashy virtuoso, and David Del Tredici's hour-plus Final Alice, as untrammeled and in-your-face as a piece of orchestral music can get.

Yet the concert was utterly intense and compelling. Many classical music fans will readily believe that the violinist Hilary Hahn can make something breathtaking out of the Paganini, but they may not be prepared for a dramatic reading of the last two chapters of Alice in Wonderland, performed with ceaseless energy and stratospheric high notes by a soprano who appears to be channeling Lucia di Lammermoor on acid. Believe me, the latter is as much worth hearing as the first.

[...]

Hahn...made her entrance in a black dress with decollete [sic] that reached nearly to her navel. I would not mention the soloist's dress had it not so well matched the piece she played, and the way she played it. On most women, that dress would have appeared provocative, vulgar; on Hahn it epitomized cool and classic elegance. By the same token, she took Paganini's showy and probably vulgar piece and treated it as if it were the finest music, and as if her prodigious feats of violin playing were all in its service.

I personally am a recent Hahn convert (though plenty of listeners could have told me my error long ago), so perhaps I speak with a convert's zeal: Her control over the instrument last night was jaw-dropping. She held a singing legato all through Paganini's leaps and double-stops and Italian-opera-style figurings, and in the cadenza she put all that aside and wove her own delicate net around the long lines of the music. When it was over, called back by applause, she offered a pure, clean, honest reading of the "Sarabande" from Bach's Second Partita; it says a lot about the way she played the Paganini that the Bach seemed a complement rather than a departure.

And then: Final Alice. It was written in 1976, and is in a way a psychedelic relic of its time, with lots of wild, luscious orchestral colors (including a theremin uttering its horror-movie "woowoowoo" sound effect at Alice's unpredictable growth spurts) to illustrate Lewis Carroll's inimitable dreamscape. It is easy to forget today that composers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s felt constrained to write in a particular kind of intellectual academic style, and with this piece Del Tredici is not merely throwing off those constraints, but giving the whole style the figurative raspberry. The work's tonal passages are less the issue than its sprawling, glorious self-indulgence: its obsessive focus on a forbidden love (the tacit fixation on the figure of Alice is at its heart); its length; its flashes of quotation (was that a big band? do I hear Ravel's La Valse?); and even, at the end, the composer's signature, when the soprano counts, in Italian, the chimes of miniature cymbals, until she reaches the 13th, when the whole orchestra whispers "Tredici!"

Both these excerpts are first-rate, insightful writing by anyone's standards whether one agrees with Ms. Midgette's expressed opinions or not.

We've no idea what's responsible for this flowering of Ms. Midgette as classical music reviewer and journalist, and we quite frankly don't care. Our only concern is with the result, and that result is indeed impressive. It's precisely what the MSM face of classical music most needs today.

Our hat's off to Ms. Midgette.

A Curiously Appealing Concept

This strikes us as a curiously appealing concept:

[B]eneath Kings Place, 150 strides from Eurostar St Pancras, rumbles a cultural revolution. Peter Millican, the out-of-town developer who bought the land in 1999, has created an office block that will also present classical music concerts and art exhibitions, completely free of public subsidy.

[...]

This is the plan. Half of Kings Place is let to the Guardian newspaper, the rest to Network Rail and other tenants who pay a commercial rent. Restaurants, bars and other amenities will be open to the public from breakfast to midnight, just like any other gherkin on the map.

The difference, however, hits the eye as you enter the lobby. On the right of security is an open sculpture gallery with a fully-curated programme and a working artist, Abigail Fallis, in residence. Down one escalator flight is a visual art gallery.

Another flight down are the concert halls, one space with 420 seats, the other 220.

[...]

Along with the art galleries, the music programme is filling up with famous acts. The opening in October will present 100 concerts in five days featuring Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Musick; the Brodsky, Duke and Chilingarian quartets; the Classical Opera Company and the pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier.

Two groups, the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are moving onto the site. Both are officially resident at the subsidised South Bank but it’s the private developer of Kings Place who is giving them waterside offices at peppercorn rent, as well as a free hand with programming content.

RTWT here.

And You Thought We Jews Just Made Good Fiddlers

This is really quite amazing, actually, and goes beyond being a mere circus stunt. The performers are members of the Israel Philharmonic: the finger guy is Ariel Zuckermann, and Eyal Ein-Habar is responsible for the embouchure.

Muti To Chicago Updates

First, we've been expecting this, and it's arrived, but, curiously, not from the expected quarters.

In response to our snarky closing quip in this post, one correspondent writes (and it's typical of the rest):

The Philly Orch safe? Safe from what? Muti wouldn't go back there as MD under any circumstances. Besides, you've no grounds for your nasty remark. Muti is one of the world's great conductors, and was at the time that he was appointed MD of the PO. How else do you think he got the job?

How Muti got the job is a matter to which we're not privy, and therefore can pass no comment. We can, however, supply the grounds for our "nasty remark," which is that during Muti's 12-year tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, he all but destroyed its signature sound, and turned the orchestra into an oversized if precise Italian opera pit band. It was saved from total destruction as a unique orchestral entity only by Muti's leaving and his being replaced by the perfect antidote: Wolfgang Sawallisch.

All by itself, that's grounds sufficient, but there's more. Muti has absolutely no feel for the cornerstone of the symphonic concert canon: the entire 19th- and early 20th-century Austro-German rep from Beethoven onward. His Beethoven cycle with the PO, for egregious instance, is a characterless, yawning bore, and we won't even speak of his insipid Brahms and Mahler, Schubert and Schumann, etc., etc.

How does this speak as to what to expect when he assumes directorship of the CSO? We'd rather not speculate. It's too depressing. Other commentators seem more sanguine. There's this and this (added 5/7) from Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times, this from John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, and this from Andrew Patner of the Chicago Sun-Times.

And then there's this from Alex Ross (added 5/7).

Take your pick.

What Is This Man Talking About?

On his blog, The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross links his latest New Yorker piece, Song of the Earth, and as we always do, we clicked over to give it a read even though it was a piece on John Adams (ho-hum; yet another piece on Adams), a composer in whose music we've but a lukewarm interest.

On a recent trip to the Alaskan interior, I didn’t get to see the aurora borealis, but I did, in a way, hear it. At the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the composer John Luther Adams has created a sound-and-light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen — a kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of The Place translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

Huh? Is that the kind of thing ol' John's been up to lately? Gone a bit loopy, has he?

Then, a little further down:

The Place, which opened on the spring equinox in 2006, confirms Adams’s status as one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century. At the age of fifty-five, he is perhaps the chief standard-bearer of American experimental music, of the tradition of solitary sonic tinkering that began on the West Coast almost a century ago and gained new strength after the Second World War, when John Cage and Morton Feldman created supreme abstractions in musical form.

Say what? And what's John Adams doing way up there in frigid Alaska anyway? He's a New-England-transplant-sun-'n-surf-Left-Coast boy, right? What is Ross talking about here?

The music of John Luther Adams, that's what.

Talking about his work, Adams admits that it can sound strange, that it lacks familiar reference points, that it’s not exactly popular — by a twist of fate, he is sometimes confused with John Coolidge Adams, the creator of the opera Nixon in China and the most widely performed of living American composers — and yet he’ll also say that it’s got something, or, at least, "It’s not nothing."

Indeed it's not. A listen or ten to the MP3 of Adams's Dark Waves embedded at the end of Ross's first-rate article makes that plain as plain can be.

What's that?

Oh. That. Glad you asked.

Dark Waves most decidedly has "a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end...saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods." In other words, genuine music, not gibberish.

Muti To Chicago

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:55 AM Eastern on 6 May. See below.]

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra today announced that it's secured the services of Riccardo Muti as its music director beginning with the 2010-11 season.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra said Monday that it had engaged Riccardo Muti as its next music director, luring the charismatic Italian maestro — one of a dwindling band of podium eminences — to the United States and adding a layer of luster to the city's cultural profile.

Mr. Muti, 66, will take over in the 2010-11 season. His contract will run for five years, and he is expected to conduct a minimum of 10 weeks a season and lead tours.

Whew! The Philadelphia Orchestra is now safe for at least another five years.

RTWT here.

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Update (2:55 AM Eastern on 6 May): For updates to the above, see here.