Sounds & Fury

Earworm

We first saw this marvelous surreal commercial for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a Las Vegas resort and casino, last night and the music — a number by Austrian composer Marcus Füreder aka Parov Stelar titled, "Booty Swing"— keeps on playing in our head and refuses to leave.

An MP3 of the full three-minute number can be downloaded from Amazon for $0.99 here.

Smashingly Good Concept

Leave it to the Brits to come up with this smashingly good and perfectly apposite concept:

When Alex Ross started writing The Rest is Noise in 2000 he never expected that a book about 20th-century classical music would go on to sell 250,000 copies and win literary prizes around the world – including the Guardian First Book Award. Now the book's extraordinary success has scaled new heights with the announcement of a year-long festival at London's Southbank Centre which aims to bring it to life.

The Rest is Noise festival will take in almost 100 concerts, films and debates, starting on 19 January 2013 with a performance by the London Philharmonic. Conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the orchestra will play a Richard Strauss programme including the final scene of Salome – the opera whose premiere in 1906 is the "year zero" moment of Ross's book

RTWT here.

Would that some NYC genius had come up with the concept first.

Our congratulations to Mr. Ross. An apropos and well-deserved tribute.

Ave Atque Vale, Gustav

Pioneer practitioner in and pillar of the then-called "Authentic Performance" movement (the forerunner of the present day Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement), voluminously recorded Dutch harpsichordist, conductor, and organist Gustav Leonhardt has died at age 83 reports The Guardian. For many of our generation he was either a much-needed breath of fresh early-music air or the anti-Landowska academic and therefore, at the time, either praised or vilified, respectively. Either way, one never doubted his love of the early music to which he was devoted or his impressive harpsichord technique which was indeed formidable. His passing leaves the world of early music a little less rich. He will be missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Gustav, ave atque vale.

Fully Worthy

Here's the lede graf of a concert review by Fiona Maddocks of The Guardian fully worthy of the work described:

Double basses quiver and swirl on a note so murky it is hard to hear the pitch. A lone trumpet ascends in a three-note sunrise through an octave, followed by a cataclysm of thundering drumbeats. Add to that the evolution of the human race, man, superman, illness, death, transfiguration, a levitating Latvian maestro and a flying baton dropped somewhere amid the cellos and this was Symphony Hall, Birmingham last Thursday night, the CBSO's [City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra] first major concert of the year....

What's that? You don't know what work's being referred to?

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Our New Hero

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan. See below.]

If this report is true as related, New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert is our new hero.

Tuesday night's New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument — the iPhone.

[...]

"Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra," the concertgoer reports. She related how the orchestra's music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good "three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long."

Mr. Gilbert asked the man, sitting [in the audience] in front of the concertmaster: "Are you finished?"

RTWT here.

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Update (3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan): More from The New York Times.

Why Are We Surprised — Not!

In a double-blind test (i.e., neither testers nor testees knew which instrument was which until after completion of the test), could seventeen seasoned professional violinists, by playing the instruments effectively blindfolded, tell which of six violins — two Strads, one Guarneri, and three modern instruments (none of which three modern instruments was "the latest $50 lacquer from China" as reported by one perennially unreliable "professional music journalist") — were the old Italian instruments?

Apparently not, mostly. When the dust cleared, the scorecard read:

⚫ Couldn't identify which were the old instruments: 7
⚫ Misidentified which were the old instruments: 7
⚫ Identified the old instruments correctly: 3

We're not the least surprised. Over the past couple decades or so, we've heard live (but not handled) some modern fiddles that, aurally, were virtual paragons and in every way the equal of fiddles produced by the old masters. Please note, we said "the equal of", NOT, "the same as". Every fiddle worth the playing has its own special character aurally and it's not a matter of best but of personal preference.

Oh, and BTW, we guessed wrong on the two audio clips. We chose the one where the fiddle sounded best to our ear (the first clip) and assumed arbitrarily that was the old instrument.

Ethically Compromised Funding

British blogger Bob Shingleton of On An Overgrown Path has been running a series of posts that addresses what he calls the "ethically compromised funding" of classical music by which he means funding provided by "ethically compromised" companies such as cigarette manufacturers and greedy mega-financial institutions whose moneymaking practices are, in part, legally and ethically questionable. Despite his claim that it's his intention "to inform rather than condemn" and bring "transparency" to the practice, which claim, we feel bound to say, has about it more than a whiff of the disingenuous, it's clear this sort of funding is something of which Mr. Shingleton deeply disapproves.

We find Mr. Shingleton's position puzzling. Why disapprove? In our view, there's nothing of which to disapprove in such funding. We would go even further and say, if somewhat rhetorically, that, apart from funding by outright criminal agencies such as, for instance, the mafia, there is no such thing as "ethically compromised funding" in the sense that Mr. Shingleton uses the label. So what that tobacco companies such as British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International, "manufacturer[s] of the leading cause of preventable death," as Mr. Shingleton has it, support classical music organizations such as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the London Philharmonic? Even if one accepts Mr. Shingleton's characterization of these tobacco companies (which we do not), is their money thereby tainted and ought therefore to be refused, or is it more meet and does it make more sense to look upon the donation of that money to these classical music organizations as an effort on the part of the companies to partially compensate for the "evils" of the products they manufacture? Clearly, we favor the latter view.

Or put another way, there is no such thing as "dirty money" unless it be money earned through outright criminal activity. Any other view of the matter is the product of individual moral judgment on how the money was earned by the funder, and, by and large, moral judgments of this sort are notoriously and infamously arbitrary, not to mention tendentious.

Or put yet another way: stop whinging and take the money and run!

The Conductor's Prime Directive

New York magazine's classical music critic Justin Davidson tries his hand(s) out on the podium as a conductor and writes about it in an article for New York titled, What Does a Conductor Do?. In that article Mr. Davidson quotes trenchant advice to conductors from world-renowned Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink; advice that, laconic as it is, should be taken by every conductor as his(her) Prime Directive when standing in front of an orchestra in either rehearsal or performance. It says that conductors should always remember when waving their arms and hands about on the podium that "the musicians are very busy with playing. You should not distract them."

Sage advice indeed.

Well Worth Your Time

Here is a marvelous — and considering the venue (a major mainstream newspaper: The Philadelphia Inquirer), astonishing — multimedia feature on Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, among the most demanding and exclusive music conservatories in the world and easily the most demanding and exclusive in the nation. The feature is entitled, "The Curtis Factor", and it can be read and viewed here.

Well worth your time.

Say What? We Think Not.

Say what? A longtime musical partnership riven over a performer's choice of cadenza(!)? We think not. Even given that pianist Hélène Grimaud's decision to use a cadenza written by the most decidedly un-Mozartian Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) in her planned recording with conductor Claudio Abbado of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 instead of using Mozart's own, written-out cadenza is nothing short of bewildering and in questionable taste, it is, after all, a cadenza — something that by its very nature is and has always been a performer's choice, especially so in Mozart's time. Yet, because of that choice, it's been reported, Maestro Abbado has called an end to his participation in the recording and to his longtime musical partnership with Ms. Grimaud as well.

As we've said, we think not. There's something else going on there and it's got nothing to do with cadenzas (no, we've no idea what that something else might be).

Damn shame.

For Halloween

While we're a great admirer of aesthetic economy and especially so in matters musical, when it comes to the sort of economy on display in music written by those composers who adhere to the principles of the so-called "Minimalist" movement (or school), not so much. As with most things, however, there are exceptions. One such exception is music written for Halloween — John Carpenter's made-on-a-shoestring ($325,000), 1978 movie Halloween, that is. The music was written by Carpenter himself (who also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced the movie) and is responsible in no small part for the movie's seminally (and today iconic) creepy effect that defined (and spawned) a new genre of slasher horror flick where the visceral horror of gore and blood plays second banana to horror of the psychological sort.

And so, without further ado, we give you for Halloween the title theme from «shudder» Halloween.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Halloween Theme Song

Food Fight And Other Items Of Interest

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 10:41 AM Eastern on 2 Oct to add a footnote.]

Oh dear. The Washington Post's chief classical music critic Anne Midgette, a classical music critic we've long admired since she assumed her present position, has put her foot into it yet once again by virtue of her careless use of language (see this S&F entry for a remarkably similar previous instance). In her review of the Washington National Opera's season-opening production of Tosca, a production conducted by WNO's former General Director Plácido Domingo, Ms. Midgette had this to say:

All the [singers's] performances were hampered, indeed sabotaged, by the conducting. Placido Domingo, appearing for the first time since stepping down as general director, is a wonderful singer. But rather than supporting the singers, his conducting either drowned them out or tripped them up. He got warm applause, but I’m not sure his presence sells enough tickets to make up for spoiling the evening. Surely there are other ways to include him in WNO’s future.

Yikes! "Sabotaged"(!)? We doubt it and doubt as well that Ms. Midgette meant to even so much as imply that Mr. Domingo actually sabotaged anything, but rather meant to say that his substandard conducting undercut (as in diminished or weakened) the singers's performances.* For his part, Mr. Domingo shot back in a Letter To The Editor:

Midgette’s statement that my conducting actually “sabotaged” WNO’s recent performances of Puccini’s Tosca is offensive and defamatory.... An act of sabotage is a destructive act done on purpose. Her remark suggests not only that I "spoiled" the performances but that I did so intentionally. This is unconscionable.

To which Ms. Midgette, missing the point entirely, replied:

I am surprised that Mr. Domingo takes such exception to this review, since, as he himself has told me, an artist knows when he has done well or badly. I can’t believe he feels in his heart that this Tosca represented his finest hour.

And I’m sorry that an artist of his stature, faced with evidence that I admire him as a singer but not as a conductor, chooses to dismiss criticism as a personal attack, rather than the response of someone who believes him capable of representing the very best.

As we said, oh dear.

As to the other items of interest, we have this from artist representative Amanda Ameer of Life's A Pitch on the appearance last night of the great violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter on the Late Show with David Letterman:

Last night, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter performed on David Letterman to celebrate the release of her box set, which Dave called, "the ideal hamster habitat."

[...]

Why musicians feel the need to play songs-they-think-people-want-to-hear on national television rather than Real Classical Music, I will never understand, but Mutter chose to perform, "It Ain’t Necessarily So" from (THE GERSHWIN’S, h/t Sondheim) Porgy and Bess. It just seems like a wasted opportunity, and the unwashed masses are drawn to virtuosity in any field more than we think.

We agree thoroughly with Ms. Ameer as this was our thought precisely, and would add that the performance was positively embarrassing as not only were there problems of intonation(!) here and there but it was also clear that Ms. Mutter has little idiomatic feel for this music and would have done better — lots better — to have chosen even a wow-'em warhorse from the classical music rep with which rep she's so intimately familiar and in which rep she performs so superbly.

On a happier note, we just watched our DVR copy of last night's PBS's Great Performances presentation of "Hugh Laurie: Let Them Talk" (yes, THAT Hugh Laurie), a performance by the actor singing and doing admirable service on piano and guitar (while singing and otherwise) backed by some of the city's best jazz musicians in a set of New Orleans blues numbers recorded in New Orleans's historic Latrobe’s building in the French Quarter.

How was the performance? In a word, splendiferous, all things considered.

If you want to hear the performance for yourself it's available in an album of the same name ("Let Them Talk") an MP3 of which can be downloaded here for a mere $7.99.

That is all.

As you were.

* Ironically, Ms. Midgette could have used the term "sabotaged" properly and with impunity to say exactly what she wanted to say had she but given the matter a few seconds more thought and qualified its use by simply preceding it with the qualifier "unwittingly" the use of which qualifier in this context not diminishing one whit the uber-powerful censoriousness of "sabotaged".

Why Are We Not Surprised?

Composer Steve Reich on his personal pantheon of predecessor composers:

Beethoven was a great, great composer, whom I admire enormously. But for me, music history basically begins with Gregorian chant then goes to the end of 1750 with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then it goes on without me paying much attention until Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok and so on. The entire classical and Romantic period is filled with geniuses that I don't listen to and from whom I've learned absolutely nothing.

Why are we not surprised?

Jeez!

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 5:12 PM Eastern on 22 Sep. See below.]

We just finished watching/listening to our DVR copy of PBS's telecast of last night's season-opening concert by the New York Philharmonic and a more inapposite program would be hard to imagine. What, pray tell, was a bloody singer doing onstage last night as the soloist — the only soloist — for three bloody numbers(!)? This was the New York Philharmonic's season-opening concert fer chrissake. You know, the opening concert of a symphony orchestra. There should have been no singer within sight or earshot last night short of being part of a Mahler symphony or Beethoven's No. 9 or the like.

Someone at the Philharmonic seriously needs to get his (her) shit together.

Jeez!

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Update (5:12 PM Eastern on 22 Sep): Oops. Forgot to make mention of the curious close to the Tannhäuser overture in this concert. We've never seen the score for this work, but the broad, essentially three-against-four rhythm of the close of this overture sounded rhythmically out of sync to us in this performance.

But perhaps that's just us.

(Added 22:01) Just listened to this again. Turns out our hearing was out of sync, not the NYP. Seems we were "playing" the thing mentally at a somewhat different tempo and conflated what we "heard" with our inner ear with what we were hearing with our outer.

Weird.

Illogical But All But Inescapable

Robert Cushman, theater critic for Canada's National Post, in a column titled, "No One Should Take Opinion As Gospel, Not Even Our Critic’s", comments on a plainly illogical albeit universally and commonly experienced phenomenon:

When somebody fails to appreciate something you yourself have deeply enjoyed, it’s hard not to feel personally affronted. This isn’t logical — why should your own pleasure in something be lessened by somebody else failing to share it? — but it’s human. You may feel that your whole value system is under attack.

We think Mr. Cushman didn't quite capture the essence of that feeling as it applies to one's response to the opinions of arts critics one respects which opinions are 180 degrees contrary to one's own. It's not so much that one feels that one's value system is under attack — although that's most decidedly a key part of it — or that it lessens one's own pleasure (or challenges one's displeasure as the case may be) in the thing in question, but rather that it feels like a betrayal of the keenest, most personal sort. How could he?!, one says to oneself in utter dismay. Did he perhaps have a premature or otherwise Senior Moment, or suffer a transient ischemic attack, or is it simply that he'd been smoking or snorting some funny stuff before making his evaluation? One feels almost compelled to resort to such extreme explanations in order to attempt to dismiss or mitigate that feeling of betrayal. Such self-defensive tactics, however, are rarely if ever successful and the feeling persists despite one's recognition of its arrant illogicality.

It may be human, as Mr. Cushman observes, but that doesn't make the feeling any easier to bear.

On Hearing Bach In A Berlin Subway Played On An Accordion

We are halfway up the steps of the Gleisdreieck platform when I hear a tune that I know like breathing. It’s Bach’s A-minor fugue for organ, BWV 543, twisting in the air. But before you get too anxious about where this is going, let me add that the lines of monumental fugue pouring down the refuse-strewn steps are coming from an accordion. And [my wife] Jane and I know the performer. We’ve been hearing this guy for the last three months. He’s been following us around town like a musical stalker, little snippets as the U-bahn doors open briefly at stations up and down the U9 and U2, chords swelling from the far side of impenetrable crowds mobbing the platforms at Zoo or Alexanderplatz. He’s the phantom of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, and the songs from his subway squeeze box form a ludicrous soundtrack to this city, this time of year, this late in history: pretty, archaic tunes familiar from countless films, melodies that might coax harried commuters to cough up half a euro.

[...]

He’s up there, in the passage by the ticket machines, seated on a little stool, his back against the oily tiles like he’s some kind of indigent addict. Everything about him shocks me. First of all, he looks about fifteen. He’s a blond, crew-cut, scrofulous, anemic, and slightly lankier E.T. His instrument is an old Russian chromatic-button bayan, a massive thing that must be half his weight. The waterfall of sound issuing from the intricate machine is better than good. It’s pure architecture, big enough to fill this train station with the hint of more livable worlds. The chords form a map of forgotten possibilities, and the long, braided fugue subject unfolds as painfully as any sound you might pick to accompany this scarred place.

He heads into the home stretch, that phantasmagoric cadenza. As his arm extends, cuffing the drooping bellows like it’s a willful pet terrier trying to break free, all I can think about is putting him in a story.

[...]

[T]his Russian busker will never have any stage grander than the bowels of Central European mass transit systems. The guy plays the accordion, for God’s sake. He’s looking at subway stations and wedding receptions for the rest of his life. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if it sounds, down in those resonant tunnels, fuller than the organ in the Berliner Dom.

[...]

My brain seizes on a line from Broks, the story-telling neuropsychologist that my German students struggled with: “Great music cancels the distinction between the external world and our inner life.” And nothing in evolutionary biology can explain why it does this to us. “Experience is a first-person business,” Broks says. “Science operates in the third person.” Music is — what? A surprise counterpoint between the two. I’m sorry, but in Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring, as we stand there listening to the Russian busker play Bach, when nothing in me is strong enough to survive the annihilating past, this music makes me want to know what happens next.

A train from Ruhleben thunders in to the platform and disgorges its content. People walk past this one-man band at varying speeds, each making complex real-time cost-benefit analyses, calculating the trade-offs between net present enjoyment and future arrival. The accordionist lays into the bass of Bach’s tremendous final pedal point, herding the profusion back towards tonic. My wife and I stand transfixed. For as long as it takes this man to reach the final cadence, we are here, anyhow, going nowhere, present to the endless unlikelihood of existing at all.

—Novelist Richard Powers from his essay, "What Does Fiction Know?"

Inexpressibly Sad

This is sad news indeed:

After a fall last week that damaged one of his vertebrae, James Levine underwent emergency surgery on Thursday [1 September] in New York, forcing him to withdraw from his performances at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Levine was scheduled to begin orchestra rehearsals for the new season today [6 September]. According to his doctors, he was successfully recuperating from another back surgery when the accident happened while he was on vacation in Vermont.

While Levine will continue in his position as Music Director, Fabio Luisi has been named the Met’s Principal Conductor, with the new appointment taking effect immediately.

It's also something of a mystery to us why Maestro Levine didn't himself take this opportunity to announce his stepping down as the Met's Music Director. When the announcement is finally made as it's certain to be made in the imminent future, it now cannot help but appear that he was forced out by the Met no matter who makes the actual announcement or how diplomatically it's worded.

An inexpressibly sad way to end a brilliant and unprecedented epoch.

Four More For The Road

As we do almost every year, we had intended taking an unannounced hiatus in August — for us, the most intolerable month — but the universe conspired against our plan this year by arranging to have happen certain events which we simply could not let pass sans comment; ergo, two of our three August entries plus one which we added just because we were here anyway and it's something we would have written in the ordinary course of business. Following, in bullet-point-brief and in no special order, are four more.

⚫ The musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra (80 out of 100) formally told the Philadelphia Orchestra Association board and its president Allison B. Vulgamore to take their proposed "new strategic plan" for the orchestra's emergence from bankruptcy — a plan that would transform the orchestra from a world-class symphonic institution into a burlesque of a symphony orchestra — and stuff it where the sun don't shine. Way t'go guys!

⚫ She may be thirty pounds overweight but she's still gorgeous, still the Meryl Streep of the opera stage, and her rich, lush, burnished voice is now even richer and more lush and burnished than when she was at her proper fighting weight. Judge for yourselves (our thanks to Parterre Box for the link):

⚫ We couldn't care less about gossip and conjectural prognostications about future Metropolitan Opera productions and casts, so we never so much as even looked in on a Web page called "Met Futures" written for the last 15 years or so by one Bradley E. Wilber, an upstate New York college librarian, on his website A Bit B. E. Wilbered, but apparently legions of opera fans read the thing compulsively. Well, recently, the Met's legal department politely asked (NB, asked not demanded) Mr. Wilbur to please cease and desist and Mr. Wilbur complied voluntarily without so much as a whimper. From this we must conclude that the Met's legal department are an ass, and the celebrated Mr. Wilbur either a wimp or disingenuous: a wimp if he just caved, and disingenuous if he used the Met's request as an excuse to cease preparing and writing a long-running feature which he now found either tiresome or taking up too much of his time. You decide which the case might be.

⚫ And finally, Britain has an idiot for Prime Minister.

Worthwhile Reading

Here is a lovely illustrated essay on the waltz by attorney (yes, you read that right) George M. Wallace of the blog A Fool In The Forest titled "Bearing Valse Witness" that's well worth your time reading.

An excerpt:

Does anyone still compose a waltz? Well, the form did not die, certainly, even as Ravel was busily vivisecting it. To the north, in Denmark, Carl Nielsen was busily constructing the first movement of his Symphony No. 3 (aka the Sinfonia Espansiva) around a grand, driving waltz theme that recurs at intervals, over the objection of the sections around it. (Some enterprising choreographer could construct a fine dance from that movement, if not the entire symphony.)

Nielsen composed his symphony in 1910 and 1911, conducting the premiere in 1912. His waltz, therefore, falls in the middle of Ravel's composition process: begun after Ravel started his Valse in 1906 but completed prior to the outbreak of the war that so influenced Ravel's final version. While rumors of war can be detected in the brass and percussion — they become explicit in Nielsen's 4th and 5th symphonies of 1916 and 1920-22 — the Espansiva is a fundamentally optimistic piece, particularly in its final two movements.

A Matter Of Priority

In an article for the Metropolitan Opera Guild publication Opera News titled, "Coda: Lost Horizons", senior editor Louise T. Guinther writes:

For many of us who came to love opera before Regietheater took hold, current notions of effective dramaturgy boggle the mind. When did the directors and impresarios decide that an opera was a random collection of notes, independent of its dramatic and visual elements — a mere musical shell, to be filled up with and bent out of shape by whatever modern hang-ups seem most likely to catch the public off guard? When did wild controversy, booing and academic apologias in the press replace straightforward storytelling as signs of theatrical prowess? When did "making people think" become the top priority in an art form once clearly intended to make them feel?

When indeed.

Nothing in the above linked article will come as news to regular readers of S&F (and we thank one of those readers for pointing us to this article as absent that heads-up we would not have known about it as we don't ordinarily read Opera News), but it does contain a key thought we don't recall ever articulating explicitly before; viz., that opera is an artform intended principally to make audiences feel, not think. That, in fact, is what opera — is what music — is all about. Prior to our modern age, there's not a composer of opera (or of music generally, for that matter) who ever lived who thought otherwise. Whence, then, this perverse, noxious, and ass-backwards impulse to make opera audiences think first, feel after?

We're not really sure, but that it's in some fundamental way bound intimately to our present-day scientific and technological modes of thought concerning all things — cosmic or terrestrial, sacred or profane, mystical or quotidian — is a certainty.

Is that a step forward for art and for us as a species; a development to be applauded and welcomed rather than savaged and rejected? We confess we don’t really know the answer to that question, either. What we do know, however, is that in matters of art, and in matters of music most particularly, whenever the rational trumps the emotional — whenever the emotional is in some fundamental way conditional upon the intellectual — impoverishment is the ineluctable consequence.

That, too, is a certainty.