Sounds & Fury

You Mean, They're Not Popular?

Well, they should be. All of them. I want this album!

Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs: 2nd Quarter 2008 (Apr-Jun)

Below is Sounds & Fury’s quarterly ranked list of the Top 50 classical music blogs for the quarter ending June 2008. Eligibility for consideration for listing and a detailed explanation of the methodology used in compiling the ranked list as well as a key to reading the list’s entries can be found here. Of our list of 143 classical music blogs, 109 were eligible for consideration in this quarter's rankings. An alphabetical listing of all the classical music blogs considered eligible for inclusion in the S&F Top 50 for this quarter can be found here. If you know of any classical music blog(s) that meets the S&F Top 50 eligibility requirements but is not listed there, please leave the name and link of that blog(s) (the FULL link, please, so that it's clickable) in the comments section of that alphabetical listing. Do NOT leave the name and link in the comments section of this post as it will be missed when the time comes for collecting and evaluating such names and links. The comments section of this post is for your general comments, corrections, questions, and suggestions, and will remain open for the current quarter only.

The Google Backward Links counts for this quarter are the result of Google's periodic reindexing of its entire database of Web pages wherein all dead pages are tossed, new PageRank assignments are calculated for all pages in the new index, and new Backward Links (incoming links) counts are compiled for all pages based on the newly assigned PageRanks (as explained in the S&F Top 50 methodology linked above, for an outgoing link on a source page to be included in the Backward Links count of the target page, Google requires that the PageRank of the source page be above a certain PageRank threshold). Because of Google's database-wide reindexing, the raw Backward Links numbers for this quarter CANNOT be compared with the raw Backward Links numbers for last quarter as last quarter's numbers are based on a Google index that, in cyber-world terms, is now ancient history. Accordingly, changes in ranking from last quarter (▲=Up; ▼=Down; ▮=No change; and ■=Not included in last quarter's rankings) are by rank rather than raw Backward Links count.

We trust you’ll find the S&F Top 50 an informative and useful resource.

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Blogs Eligible For Inclusion In The S&F Top 50 — 2nd Qtr 2008

[NOTE: If you know of any classical music blog(s) that should be included in this list but isn’t, please leave the name and link of that blog(s) (the FULL link, please, so that it's clickable) in the comments section below. Comments and recommendations will be reviewed at the close of the next quarter. Accepted recommendations will be included in the Eligible Blogs list for that quarter.]

A View from the Podium
Abu Bratsche
Adaptistration
Adventures Of An Idaho Violist
AfriClassical
An Unamplified Voice
ANABlog
Arts Addict
Basically Modern
Bass Blog
Celeste's Scramblings
Cello Centered
Cellodreams
Cellogeek
Cellomania
Chamber Music Today
Cincinnati Pianist Blog
Classical Convert
Classical-Drone
Classically Hip
Collaborative Piano
Coloratur...Aaah
Corner Violin Shop
Countercritic
Daily Observations
David Duff's Classical Blog
David’s Waste Of Bandwidth
Deceptively Simple
Dial “M” for Musicology
Erling Wold
Feast of Music
Felsenmusick
Fugue State
Gavin Plumley
Gertsamtkunstwerk
Grecchinois
Hella Frisch
Holde Kunst
Hughsung.com
Intermezzo
Ionarts
Iron Tongue of Midnight
James Roe
Jason Heath's Double Bass Blog
Jessica Duchen’s Classical Music Blog
Life's a Pitch
Listen
Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks
Mind the Gap
Monotonous Forest
Most Of The Shebang
Mostly Music in the Midlands
Mostly Opera
Music And Life - Everywhere!
Musical Assumptions
Musical Perceptions
My Favorite Intermissions
My Fickle Ears Dig It
Mysteries Abysmal
Nico Muhly
Night after Night
Nimble Tread
Non Divisi
Northwest Reverb
Oboeinsight
Of Music And Men
On an Overgrown Path
On The Record
Opera Chic
Out West Arts
Parterre Box
Planet Hugill
Podium Speak
PostClassic
Prima La Musica poi le parole
Renewable Music
Roger Evans Online
Sandow
Score Desk
Slipped Disc
So I've Heard
Soho the Dog
Sounds & Fury
Sounds Like Now
Sticks and Drones
The Cello Geek
The Concert
The Detritus Review
The Gathering Note
The Horn
The Omniscient Mussel
The Opera Tattler
The Penitent Wagnerite
The Rambler
The Rest is Noise
The Reverberate Hills
The Standing Room
The Stark Raving Cello Blog
The Transcontinental
The View From Here
The Violin Blog
The Well-Tempered Wireless
Think Denk
This Blog Will Change the World
Timothy Andres
Wagner Opera
WagnerBlog
Yarnplayer's Cello Blog
Zeigarnika

S&F Top 50 Progress Report — The "Google Dance" Has Begun

Good news. What search engine specialists still call the "Google Dance" has just commenced. That's to say, Google has begun it's periodic re-indexing of its entire database of Web pages wherein a recomputing of that all-important number called PageRank is made for each and every Web page in the index (for instance, this time around, S&F's PageRank has increased from 5 to 6 — a HUGE increase as PR5 is a high-population middle ground; a sort of demarcation zone separating the important from the unimportant), and then the Backward Links count for each and every page is recalculated using those newly computed PageRanks. The Dance typically takes some few days to complete, after which time we'll then finally be able to compile our Second Quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings.

Stay tuned.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Read S&F Via RSS Exclusively

A major update has just been appended to this post.

Where We Were Wrong

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 12:43 PM Eastern on 27 Jul. See below.]

No one is more pleased than we to report that, on the evidence of the streaming audio webcast of the first act, our initial fears that a "train wreck of Wagnerian proportions [was] in the making" for the Parsifal that is the opening production of the 2008 Bayreuther Festspiele were ill-founded musically. Musically, the performance by all, Italian conductor Daniele Gatti very much included, was just fine overall. Yes, we've a few objections, but they all concern matters of more or less esoteric detail, and have mostly but not entirely to do with matters of tempi (too slow), and that, also mostly but not entirely, as it concerns the difficult — and decidedly esoteric — matter of internal metric pulse that's so critical to a proper reading of this most difficult and elusive of Wagner's scores. Our pleasure — and relief — that our initial expectations were in error musically preclude our proffering at this time a laundry list of our more or less niggling objections as proffering such a list at this time would serve only to make us appear surly at best.

On to Act II!

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Update (7:04 PM Eastern on 25 Jul): Unhappily, we were called away just after the opening bars of Act III and missed that entire act thereafter. We did, however, get to hear Act II in its entirety and, not surprisingly, what we objected to in Act I was present as well in Act II, and there did significant damage both musically and dramatically although, as was the case in the first act, the Festspiele orchestra performed most beautifully.

Of Parsifal's three acts, Act II is the least elusive and least treacherous to negotiate musically, but the most difficult to realize musico-dramatically as of the music-drama's three acts it's the only one that requires subtly nuanced, real-world dramatic interaction between its characters, the two outer acts for the most part (but, of course, not entirely) being more on the order of animated ritual tapestries. And here Mr. Gatti's tendency to too expansive tempi sans the presence of that critical internal metric pulse remarked on above which he either doesn't understand, or understands but is incapable of realizing properly, not only crippled the act musico-dramatically overall, but hamstrung the individual dramatic performances of the singer-actors the only one of whom who managed to escape unscathed both musically and dramatically was the superb Klingsor of Thomas Jesatko whose performance both vocally and dramatically was easily the best of the afternoon. The Zaubermädchen had more than their share of ensemble and vocal problems; the Kundry of Mihoko Fujimura, the timbre of whose mezzo-soprano is rather too soprano and not enough mezzo for this part, was flat dramatically and unnuanced due in large part to Mr. Gatti's failures as noted above, and tended to screech her high notes rather than sing them; and the Parsifal of Christopher Ventris was no more than competently adequate vocally and dramatically. Ditto the Gurnemanz of Kwangchul Youn and the Amfortas of Detlef Roth, both of Act I, of course.

As to the production itself, we heard no booing after the first act — which given the audience tradition at Bayreuth's Parsifal performances that calls for complete silence at act's close was not terribly surprising, although the delayed applause was — and none after the second, either. We're not quite sure what that says vis-à-vis the audience's acceptance of the Stefan Herheim Konzept, and perhaps the audience response after Act III, which act we missed, better told that story as it usually does. In any case, here's a link to a fair number of photos of the production straight from the Bayreuther Festspiele's handsome new website. The sets look quite lovely, actually, but it's a complete mystery to us what they have to do with Richard Wagner's Parsifal although you can be absolutely certain that the Festspiele's program book contained a detailed account of what they have to do with the Parsifal of Regisseur Stefan Herheim. We can, however, say in Mr. Herheim's Konzept's favor that at least there were no dead rabbits in sight.

Update 2 (12:27 PM Eastern on 26 Jul): For an overview of the Stefan Herheim Konzept and how it was received by the opening night Festspiele audience, see this Deutsche Welle piece.

Update 3 (12:43 PM Eastern on 27 Jul): And there's this from The Financial Times.

For The Record

George Hunka of Superfluities Redux has posted a separate addendum to his post on new music on which original post we commented here, and Kyle Gann of PostClassic has posted a lengthy expansion of his previous thoughts on the same matter here.

All these posts addressed the problem of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" new music where audiences are concerned (Mr. Gann's piece focused on complexity in music the tacit assumption being that in music complexity and difficult to understand have always a hand in glove relationship each to the other which is not always the case by any means and rather blurs the argument). But to our way of thinking, that perceived problem is misidentified the misidentification due entirely a misunderstanding where music is concerned.

We responded to Mr. Hunka's addendum in a comment in that addendum's comments section which comment we'd like to make a part of the public record of Sounds & Fury. Accordingly, a reprint of that comment follows instanter.

It's almost oxymoronic to speak of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" music [where audiences are concerned] unless one is using the terms as euphemisms for the repulsive. The concept of difficult plays no part in the reception of genuine music by a listener. It's a fundamental characteristic of all genuine music — underline, all; there are no exceptions — that it resonates with or makes its impact on listeners, positive or negative, sans any participation by the intellect the determiner of difficult and not difficult, and the effect is immediate. Genuine music in fact bypasses intellect altogether by its very nature, and engaging the intellect to receive it actually requires an act of will. That's almost a definition of genuine music. Any music that doesn't act in that way has no right to the title. Since you mention Wagner (incorrectly in your stated context, BTW; that honor goes rather to Liszt from whom Wagner filched much if not most of his "atonality" [Mr. Hunka had written that atonality "began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the Viennese School"]), the huge majority of the first audiences for, say, Wagner's Tristan (as opposed to professionals with axes to grind) understood little or nothing about its "difficult" music, but that didn't prevent them being emotionally captivated and overwhelmed by it.

I could do a full-length treatise on this thesis, and as soon as I can locate someone willing to pay me cold, hard cash up-front for my trouble, I will.

ACD

Gird Your Loins

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:43 PM Eastern on 23 Jul. See below.]

Time to start girding your loins. The 2008 Bayreuther Festspiele opens this Friday, 25 July, with a new production of Parsifal with Konzept by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, and with Italian conductor Daniele Gatti on the podium (he's currently music director of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna opera house as well as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra).

From what little we've heard of the production (Eurotrash in spades, natch, one tipoff being that the staging requires the services of a professional stunt man — a Festspiele first — as a stand-in for Christopher Ventris, the Parsifal, to take a 20-foot leap off who-knows-what followed by a few-minutes prancing about going who-knows-where), a cast of singers the names of none of whom we've ever heard before (Gurnemanz: Kwangchul Youn; Parsifal: Christopher Ventris; Amfortas: Detlef Roth; Kundry: Mihoko Fujimura; Klingsor: Thomas Jesatko), and an Italian opera conductor on the podium, we suspect a train wreck of Wagnerian proportions is in the making. If, however, you'd like to hear a live streaming audio feed from the Festspielhaus, you can log onto Bayern 4 Klassik radio on the Web beginning at 9:55 AM, Eastern, by following this link:

• Windows Media Player

Or Bartók Radio (same time) by following this link:

• Real Player

If we're awake and up in time, we'll probably tune in for at least a quick listen, loins fully girded, of course. We won't, however, be setting our alarm clock.

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Update (6:43 PM Eastern on 23 Jul): Things may not be as catastrophic as they first appeared to us they might be. Two members of the CM&OF have responded to the above with these reassuring nuggets of information:

"Wagnertuba" writes:

I have heard of most of these singers, and they are experienced Wagnerians. Daniele Gatti is a talented conductor who has conducted all over with considerable success. I don't know how good he will be in Wagner, but the fact that he's Italian is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to this composer. After all, Toscanini was closely associated with Wagner....

And "Daland" has this to say:

From Italy, here some details on Daniele Gatti: He’s no more in Bologna, where he worked close to Thielemann (and this can explain why he’s been called to Bayreuth). In January this year he conducted a most appreciated concert-performance of Parsifal in Rome, with the prestigious Accademia di Santa Cecilia orchestra (whose director is today Antonio Pappano, a long time Bayreuth guest). [...] He’s very much acquainted with Wagner and the German romantic and post-romantic musical school.

Sounds encouraging.

Our thanks to these two most generous informants. We now feel somewhat more sanguine about this opening.

How To Write A Classical Music Review

So, we think we heard you saying you don't know what all the recent fuss over almost-centenarian composer Elliott Carter is all about — beyond his being some five months shy of his 100th birthday and still active as a composer, that is. We confess that knowing as little of his work as we do, we didn't either — until we read this:

The first piece was one of those recent efforts, the 2003 fanfare Call, in a bright titular wake-up by horn player Michael Winter and trumpeters Brynn Rector and Christopher Coletti. It was a reminder right off the bat of Carter’s ability to turn typically "Carteresque" gestures to varied ends with context and orchestration; here the familiar trope of busy trills, fluttertonguing, and staccato mutterings coalescing into homophonic chords was like a sudden collective memory, a centripetal conversation that comes around to a shared anecdote.

Conductor Leo McFall led a performance of the Asko Concerto (2000) marked by beautifully saturated color. It’s one of a handful of recent Carter works that take the form of mini-orchestra concerti, tutti perorations alternating with often unlikely duos, trios, etc. The instrumental combinations are particularly arresting in this piece: clarinet and double bass harmonics with marimba/harp/piano sparks, cello with bass clarinet, trombone, and pizzicato strings, &c. The performance showed the expressive possibilities that have opened up for Carter’s music as the steady advance of technical proficiency has caught up with his vocabulary: that cello solo, for example (played by Marie-Michel Beauparlant), came off as positively Brahmsian. The piece also showed, in a particularly clear way, the complex relationship between rhythm and pulse and meter in Carter’s music. There was much of his penchant for fast music in slow tempi and slow music in fast tempi, but the fairly constant underlying pulse, even when it was more visible than heard, gave a sense of how much more than just a means of coordination meter is for Carter; it’s the tie that binds, the underlying connection between the instrumental individuals, linking them in common cause no matter how fractious the argument.

In those two grafs, one can almost — almost — hear the music, one can, and all by themselves those grafs are hint enough to make that recent fuss seem not the least bit unreasonable.

But there's more. Lots more, which you can read in two parts here and here.

There will surely be other reviews of these two concerts in the MSM, but we can assure you, with little possibility of our being in error, that nowhere will you read reviews more richly telling — or more poetic — than these two.

What's that? Who wrote them?

Don't waste time asking unnecessary questions. Click over and read them. That's what the bloody links are for, you silly person.

Inferiority Or Outrage?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

Playwright, critic, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux adds his voice to the growing chorus censuring The Guardian's Joe Queenan for what he had to say about "modern" or new music, and for how he went about saying it.

Once all [the] poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority complex — that Queenan just doesn't "get it." Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior.

Hmmm.

Well, even though we're in sympathy with much of what Mr. Queenan had to say in his piece, we must concede he unquestionably painted with a brush broad enough to paint Fifth Avenue without ever once having to lift the bristles from the pavement.

But is Mr. Queenan's attack really "an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior," or is it rather an expression of his sense of outrage at our postmodern art-is-whatever-the-artist-says-is-art Zeitgeist wherein snake oil pimped by charlatans is being bought wholesale and with enthusiasm by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better — most especially by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better?

We suspect the latter is more the case than the former.

But, then, perhaps that's just us.

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Update (7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): For more on this, see this post.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

New ears for new music! The new ears were necessary to appreciate the new music made by Serge Prokofiev.... As a composer, he is cerebral... The lyric themes are generally insipid.... The [Piano] Sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical development. The finale of the work evoked visions of a charge of mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic plateau.... Prokofiev uses, like Arnold Schoenberg, the entire modern harmonies. The House Of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage — above all, rage — disgust, despair, mockery, and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods.

—Richard Aldrich, The New York Times, 21 November 1918

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

The Arts Critic In A Non-Elitist World

There's lately been a remarkable amount of breast-beating going around the MSM critical community provoked by the recent rash of forced "retiring" of MSM arts critics nationwide from the MSM print pubs they served for many years — a few, for several decades. Their letting go was justified almost invariably by the suits at these pubs as having largely to do with the present and growing hard economic pressures threatening ink-on-paper publications, most particularly in the face of what is seen as a rapidly growing trend for ordinary folk to get their daily dose of critical arts commentary on the Web via writings to be found on an uncountable number of blogs by non-elitist bloggers writing non-elitist reviews in non-elitist language and in non-elitist terms ("A solid two thumbs up!") that a non-elitist public can (you should pardon the expression) relate to.

Well, it's a non-elitist culture we inhabit today, and we suppose the development of such a trend was only to be expected. It's now a prole's world out there, after all, and in a prole's world the first casualty is always and inevitably the arts. Not that the arts have ever been a high-priority item in America at any time in its history, and perhaps a thumbs-up (or -down) judgment is all The People need to satisfy their requirements. But while a count of thumbs judgment is perfectly adequate, even precisely what's called for, when reviewing the performance of, say, different brands of air conditioners, it tells us very little — almost nothing, really — about anything in the world of the arts. Are bloggers up to providing much more than that?

Why the hell not? Bloggers simply write in a different medium, and, pace Dr. McLuhan, the medium ain't necessarily the message. Problem is, very few if any bloggers are well enough informed and richly enough gifted to write like this:

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of Don Giovanni, he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera La Grotta di Trofonio, premièred two years before Don Giovanni, contains some strikingly similar demonic noises. Ever since, composers have tried to outdo each other with carefully engineered hammer blows of fate. Verdi’s Otello begins with a rumbling six-note dissonance; Strauss’s Elektra with a souped-up D-minor detonation; Alban Berg’s Lulu with a sharply stabbing figure that foreshadows the heroine’s fate.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten, the story of a woman’s degradation at the hands of a series of heartless soldiers, has a prelude of such stupefying intensity that it stands for the moment as the ne plus ultra. The full orchestra sustains an enormous dissonance spread out over many octaves. Beneath it, the timpani pound out, "in iron rhythm," the note D — perhaps a nod backward to Don Giovanni. The onslaught returns several times as the prelude unfolds, though it periodically gives way to a frenzy of competing voices: the trumpets tangle in independent rhythms, violins buzz around maniacally in their upper registers, the timpani repeatedly fall out of synch with the principal one-two pulse. The music is at once hyper-organized and deranged, a death machine that leaves chaos in its wake.*

So what?, you'll say. Suppose critical writing like that disappeared from the face of the Earth forever and was replaced by a multitude of thumbs-upers and -downers? The wisdom of crowds, and all that, you know. Would the world come to an end?

We suppose not. But, then, at that point we wouldn't much care one way or the other.

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* From, "Infernal Opera: Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory", Alex Ross, The New Yorker, issue dated 21 July 2008. RTWT here.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

The Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune has pretty sonority, but one does not find in it the least musical idea, properly speaking; it resembles a piece of music as the palette used by an artist in his work resembles a picture. Debussy did not create a style; he cultivated an absence of style, logic, and common sense.

—Camille Saint-Saëns in a letter to Maurice Emmanuel, 4 August 1920

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Yes, We Are A Closet Computer Software Geek

There's just no getting around it. We love messing about with new software if it's technically and/or visually pretty, and we just discovered a new free and reliable hosting site where one can have set up for free an installation of the brand-new Version 3 of the venerable phpBB forum software. Accordingly, we've set up a new classical music and opera forum named, cleverly, the Classical Music & Opera Forums. The CM&OF is NOT connected in any way with Sounds & Fury, but is an entirely independent entity. So, if the spirit moves you, do stop over and make yourself to home.

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

Midgette On Slatkin

In a remarkably blunt but fair-minded piece for The Washington Post, the Post's newly appointed classical music critic, Anne Midgette, interviews and looks back over the Washington career of the National Symphony Orchestra's departing music director, Leonard Slatkin.

[Slatkin] skitters across topics [in the interview], anticipating the criticism that may be lurking behind every question, mentioning it, steering away from it, then returning to it to show that he is not steering away from it, until one is left with the impression that outside criticism, despite his protests to the contrary, matters to him very much indeed.

The general impression is that conducting is a difficult métier for a man who describes himself as having been chronically shy in his youth. The particular impression, as Slatkin talks about his 12-year tenure at the head of the National Symphony Orchestra (which concludes with a gala concert tonight), is of encountering someone in the final throes of a failing marriage, going over ground that has been trodden many times before, prodding the scars of old wounds that still have a tired ache.

"It was probably time to go," he says.

"I know inside of me," he adds, "that I could have been better."

[...]

[Slatkin] generally gives the impression of fluency rather than profundity [in his music-making], and the orchestra sometimes seems not to care. He is effective in his signature American pieces because he is best at activity and complexity: Del Tredici, Christopher Rouse. But he is not someone you turn to for profound meditation. His modus operandi is to do a lot, quickly.

[...]

He excels on paper. He is great at coming up with unusual ideas, talking to the audience, sitting in on planning meetings and looking at Web sites in Detroit [where Slatkin will assume the post of music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra this fall], glad-handing patrons at fundraisers in St. Louis [where Slatkin was music director of the St. Louis Symphony]. In fact, he is outstanding at all the parts of the music director's job that aren't about making music.

RTWT here.

Off-Message And Mushy

We don't care if it's off-message and mushy. We love it. So will you.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

Waiting For Google (Administrative Note)

We're at present blocked from preparing our Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs 2nd quarter 2008 ranking as Google has not updated their Backward Links data since the first week of May (reflecting April's numbers), and consequently the existing data are way stale. According to the best guess of the best publicly accessible sources (and it can be no more than a best guess as Google is so secretive no one outside Google really knows), Google supposedly updates that data every 30 days or so. But a fair random sample of our newly expanded list of classical music blogs (148 at last count) shows that the numbers haven't moved since the first week of May (again, reflecting April's numbers).

And so we wait.

Refreshing News

In a post of 10 May of this year, we had, in part, this to say concerning the work of classical music reviewer and journalist, Anne Midgette:

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.

Apparently, The Washington Post agrees.

Amid the current trend to the contrary among newspapers, The Washington Post last week hired a permanent staff music critic to succeed Tim Page. Anne Midgette, who has been in the job on an interim basis since January, when Page took a leave of absence, has been hired officially as the Post’s classical music critic.

“In light of all the lay-offs around the country, they’re really bucking the trend in committing to serious arts journalism,” said a delighted Midgette in a brief telephone conversation.

The newspaper recently completed a round of voluntary buy-outs (of which Page availed himself, to start an arts journalism program on the west coast), offering early-retirement packages to some 200 employees; half of them accepted, having been asked to make their decision by May 15. That same day, the staff classical music critic job was posted.

“It’s fantastic that, after a round of buyouts, the music critic was one of the first people they hired,” said Midgette.

RTWT here.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: Special Wagner Edition

The more we see and hear of Richard Wagner, the more are we convinced that music is not his special birthright, is not for him an articulate language. ... Either Richard Wagner is a desperate charlatan endowed with worldly skill and vigorous purpose enough to persuade a gaping crowd that the nauseous compound he manufactures has some previous inner virtue; or else he is a self-deceived enthusiast ... too utterly destitute of any perception of musical beauty to recognize the worthlessness of his credentials.

—Henry Smart in the London Sunday Times, quoted in Musical World, 12 May 1855

Look at Lohengrin. ... It is poison — rank poison. All we can make out is an incoherent mass of rubbish with no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments with which the Chinamen, on the brow of a hill, fondly thought to scare away our English "blue-jackets."

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

Wagner] affirms that national melody is unhealthy and unreal, being simply the narrow-souled emanation from oppressed peoples.... The symmetry of form ... ignored, or else abandoned; the consistency of keys and their relations ... overthrown, contemned, demolished; the charm of rhythmic measure ... destroyed; the true basis of harmony, and the indispensable government of modulation, cast away, for a reckless, wild, extravagant and demagogic cacophony, the symbol of profligate libertinage! Are we then to have music in no definite key whatever? ... This man, this Wagner, this author of Tannhäuser, of Lohengrin, and so many other hideous things — and above all, the overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, the most hideous and detestable of the whole — this preacher of the "Future," was born to feed spiders with flies, not to make happy the heart of man with beautiful melody and harmony.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

The second part of the program began with a prelude and introduction of an opera by Monsieur Wagner, entitled, Tristan and Isolde. On this text, the composer certainly has surpassed anything that one can imagine in confusion, disorder, and impotence. One might say it was a challenge to common sense and the most elementary requirements of the ear. Had I not heard this monstrous piling of discordant sounds three times, I would not believe it possible.

—P. Scudo, L'Année Musicale, Paris, 1861

Wagner is a man devoid of all talent. His melodies, where they are found at all, are in worse taste than Verdi and [Friedrich von] Flotow and more sour than the stalest Mendelssohn. All this is covered up with a thick layer of rot. His orchestra is decorative, but coarse. The violins squeal throughout on the highest notes and throw the listener into a state of extreme nervousness. I left without waiting for the concert to end, and I assure you that had I stayed longer, both I and my wife would have a fit of hysterics.

—Letter from César Cui to Rimsky-Korsakov, 9 March 1863

With the last chords of the Twilight of the Gods, I had a feeling of liberation from captivity. It may be that the Nibelungs' Ring [sic] is a very great work, but there never has been anything more tedious and more dragged-out than this rigmarole. The agglomeration of the most intricate and contrived harmonies, colorlessness of all that is sung on the stage, interminably long dialogues — all this fatigues the nerves to the utmost degree. So, what is the aim of Wagner's reform? In the past, music was supposed to delight people, and now we are tormented and exhausted by it.

—From a letter of Tchaikovsky's from Vienna, to his brother, Modest, 20 August 1876

I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.

—From a letter by Moritz Hauptmann, 3 February 1849

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)