Sounds & Fury

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".

An Offer You Can't Refuse

Over the years, we've had occasion to comment on the justly celebrated 1953 Bayreuther Festspiele Ring conducted by the justly celebrated Wagner conductor Clemens Krauss calling it perhaps the greatest Ring of which we've recorded evidence. We've said (and say) this even though the recording was done in mono and our decade-old Gala Records CD pressing suffers from a transfer that muddies and blurs much of the orchestral sound, and even though the original miking presents the singers (perhaps, in toto, the most stellar cast ever assembled for this epic work including Hotter, Varnay, Resnik, Vinay, Windgassen, Greindl, Neidlinger, Stolze, and Kuen, all in their prime) on top and up front with the orchestra under as if it were merely accompaniment as would be appropriate for most Italian opera but is grossly inapposite, even perverse, for Wagnerian music-drama.

Since we purchased our Gala pressing of this performance a couple other small-record labels of which we're aware have come up with remastered pressings of their own and, from what we've heard of them, they're somewhat better than our Gala pressing but a bit pricey and so we declined to lay out the bucks (always in short supply around here these days).

A few months ago, we received an eMail from one William Hong, an engineer and devoted Wagnerian and one of S&F's longtime readers, informing us that, as a labor of love, he was in the process of working on a remastering of the Krauss Ring of his own and asking us whether we would be interested in hearing the results when it was completed. We assured Mr. Hong we would and to please notify us when the files would be available for download.

That notification came last week and we forthwith downloaded the four 320kbps MP3 .zip files (one .zip file per music-drama), and spent some few hours listening through the entire cycle and were blown away. The remastering is first-rate — a HUGE improvement over our Gala pressing in every respect. We asked Mr. Hong whether he had any intention of marketing the set commercially and were informed he had no such intention but would gladly make the set available at no cost to all who wanted a copy for their personal use. He also informed us that he also had available CD-length file formats suitable for burning for those who would prefer to have the cycle on CD.

So, if you're interested in obtaining a copy of this laudable remastering of the Krauss '53 Bayreuth Ring for your own use you may contact Mr. Hong to obtain the links to the files by eMailing him at notungschwert@aol.com and requesting same.

It's an offer you can't (or, rather, shouldn't) refuse.

Trust us.

A Further Remark On Britten's Turn Of The Screw

A member of an opera forum asks concerning Britten's Turn Of The Screw, "Why does Miles Die?"

I had always assumed that Quint had taken him, but it is clear that Quint says he has failed. So why does Miles die? The Governess says something to the effect of "what have we done between the two of us?" Has the conflict been too much for the boy?

To which we responded:

I don't blame you for being confused on this point in Britten's opera. As I've previously noted [in this S&F entry], Britten and his librettist stripped the opera of all the ambiguity of the original tale and made the spirits of both Quint and Miss Jessel very solid, real things for the children and the governess and — and this is key — the audience. There's no ambiguity in the opera as there is in the original tale that those spirits might have been delusions on the part of the children, or that the children may even have been innocent of any such presence, or of the governess who might in fact be a pathological neurotic case. The power of Miles's final cry ("Peter Quint — you devil!") and, in fact, the power of the entire tale depends on that ambiguity (who is Miles calling a devil; Quint or the governess?). In the opera, Miles's death seems almost off-the-wall and pointless.

Glyndebourne Turn Of The Screw Review — Twitter-Style

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 7:20 PM Eastern on 23 Aug. See below.]

Beautiful staging, but all wrong. Needs more dark, more gothic (lowercase "g"). Mostly bright, 1950s quasi-Mies or -International Style just doesn't cut it. See the full opera for yourself here for the next couple weeks or so.

⚫ Fine performances from all, musically and dramatically, chamber orchestra included. The kid was super-fine.

⚫ Still can't accept a tenor as Quint. The character demands a dark baritone.

⚫ Britten and his librettist stripped the opera of the ambiguity of the original tale. Bad decision, huge loss.

⚫ We're crazy for Glyndebourne. That beautiful, intimate theater is one day going to force us to spend money we don't have just to experience it in the flesh. We'd love to hear and see the entire Mozart canon done there, one opera after the other in chronological order. Heaven!

---

Update (7:20 PM Eastern on 23 Aug): For a further remark on this opera, see this S&F entry.

Beautiful Or Really Spooky?

We vacillate between one and the other and can't decide. There's of course no reason at all why it can't be both, but that rather skirts the question, doesn't it.

You decide for yourselves.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for link.)

A Couple Minutes Of Sheer Beauty

Below is a video which is part of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of the work of the late Brit fashion designer and couturier Alexander McQueen (1969-2010). Before today we had no idea who or what Alexander McQueen is or was, and now that we do know, couldn't care less. What caught our attention was the sheer beauty of this video the haunting music for which is from the John Williams score for the film, Schindler's List. We trust it will serve to help start off your week in the best way possible.

(Our thanks to WagnerBlog for the link.)

The Future Is Now

The entire four-opera set of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in a package so small you can put it in your shirt pocket or dangle it from a string around your neck?

Yes indeed. Right here. (No, we do not recommend this particular set on musical grounds. Merely its method of storage and delivery.)

Sometimes it's a great world out there.

(Our thanks to the blog Superconductor for the heads-up.)

And That Was That

Celebrated author V. S. Naipaul is convinced that not only can he, within a paragraph or two, tell whether a novel has been written by a female or not, but that no female writer who has ever lived is his equal as a writer.

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

Yes, well, perhaps that's all true (although we wouldn't bet on it), but we can't help thinking back to what, for the longest time, we, too, were absolutely convinced of; viz., that no female, no matter how technically adept she might be, could ever play the fiddle with the command and fire and depth of emotion of a male, and that we could tell within twenty measures or so whether the fiddle was being played by a female or not.

Then one day, some thirty or so years ago, we switched on the radio about ten measures into the Beethoven Violin Concerto and of course stopped what we were doing to listen (one never passes up a chance to hear the Beethoven). The performance was riveting. We couldn't place the fiddler as this fiddler, whoever he was (there was no question the fiddler was a male), sounded like no fiddler we'd ever heard before. We mentally flipped through every fiddler known to us and could come up with no match. Then came the announcer. The orchestra was the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan, and the fiddler was someone named Anne-Sophie Mutter. She was 16 years old.

And that was that.

How To Strike The Proper Balance?

Gilbert Hetherwick, former President of Sony BMG Entertainment’s classical division, has written an article for his Web-only weekly, the Grouse House Gazette, which he's titled, "Classical Music’s Digital Demons: Who Doesn’t Want To Be 'Perfect'?" (link requires Adobe Reader). In that article, Mr. Hetherwick reveals the huge extent to which current digital editing of recorded classical music can, and too often does, undetectably transform even an inept performer into one that appears a veritable paragon.

We're ambivalent about this practice. On one hand, it's clearly fraudulent to use editing to make an inept or even mediocre classical music performer appear to be a flawless artist and no argument can justify the practice. On the other hand, we can think of any number of legitimate arguments to support the practice of extensive editing of recorded classical music to make the performance of the music itself as perfect as possible. The problem is there's no way to do the latter without incurring the consequence of the former. How to strike the proper balance so that what results from the effort is no fraud but an act of good faith vis-à-vis the music itself?

Beats us; ergo our ambivalence.

(Our thanks to Norman Lebrecht for pointing us to the article (but not for providing the link which Mr. Lebrecht — careless of the "hard facts" blogger that he is — got wrong).)

A Conversation With An Exterminator

I got out of bed early yesterday morning (early being defined as, "before noon") in not inconsiderable pain due a bad hip and in a really pissy mood. This, I predicted instantly and with little hope of being in error, was not going to be a good day.

Limping into the kitchen, I began my daily ritual of brewing my first cuppa, a routine I ordinarily accomplish pretty much on autopilot, and let the hopper-fed, conical-burr grinder run too long thereby producing enough ground coffee for three cups instead of one; mismeasured the water first time round; and set the timer for the wrong brew time.

Yes, most decidedly not going to be a good day.

Bach was badly needed here, I determined, slipped the CD of Book I of the Well Tempered Clavier into the player (Gould, of course), and set it going.

That's the ticket all right, thought I, and almost immediately felt the pain in my hip — or, rather, the pain's edge — begin to dissipate a bit and my head and pissy mood begin to clear.

Coffee done and cupped, I then sat down at the computer to go through my morning rounds on the Web. I'd not been at it more than five minutes when came a knock at the door. Annoyed (I hadn't been expecting anyone to stop by), I called out a "Who is it?" in a not too friendly or welcoming tone. "Exterminator," came the reply.

Oh damn! What the hell is he doing here, and so early in the day? Limping to the door, I opened it and there stood a uniformed young guy in his mid-twenties or so whom I'd never seen before, equipment in hand and all pleasant smiles, who wished me a good morning, said he was sorry to bug me (bug me; get it?), but it was that time of month again and he was there to do his company's monthly apartment building preventive maintenance thing. I grunted my assent and returned to my business at the computer, the full flower of my pissy mood reestablished.

A few minutes passed. Then, from the kitchen, "Bach?"

Did I just hear right? "Excuse me?" I shot back. "Is that Bach we're listening to?" came the reply. I couldn't bloody believe it. "Yes," I said, now stopping work at the computer. "A prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier," I continued gingerly. "Which book?" "One," I replied, now definitely unable to believe this conversation. "I like Bach but I'm really more a Mozart man myself," said the exterminator.

What the hell was in that coffee I'd been drinking? Surely I'd entered into some Twilight Zone parallel universe where such conversations with twentysomething exterminators were perfectly ordinary things. I mean, this exchange couldn't possibly be taking place in this universe in this 21st-century America.

But it did and it was, and though the above was practically the full extent of the conversation, just like that my pissy mood evaporated, the pain in my hip at once became bearable, and the day now promised to be a very good day indeed.

And so it turned out to be.

The Proof

Since 1974, the year of its inception, we've been a huge fan of the PBS science series NOVA. Although like pretty much everything else in American culture, the series, generally speaking, has deteriorated during the past two decades or so, in NOVA's case in both choice of subject matter and in quality of presentation, in 1997 NOVA aired an episode titled, "The Proof"; a telling of the tale of Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles's search for the proof of the (in)famous mathematical theorem known as Fermat's Last Theorem; a problem that had evaded successful solution for some 350 years since the theorem was first proposed by one Pierre De Fermat in 1637 but the proof of which Fermat never supplied although he indicated he'd accomplished it.

Sounds like it would make for pretty dry TV fare for all but math geeks, does it not?

Well, it's not. It's in fact among the most, if not THE most, engaging, suspenseful, thrilling — and moving — episodes NOVA ever aired.

"The Proof" is a brilliant 45-minute film by director Simon Singh and writer and producer John Lynch made originally for the BBC and titled originally simply, "Fermat's Last Theorem", and thanks to Google Video (and with a hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily for the reminder) we can present the video of the full BBC film below (no video of the NOVA edition exists on the Web).

Do enjoy.

Learning How To Become A Conductor...In Three Minutes

Riccardo Muti explains how one can become a successful conductor of a symphony orchestra even if one is not a musician. The entire course of instruction, declares maestro Muti, takes but a mere three minutes to complete, and he then proceeds to makes good on his promise — hilariously.

The Gift

Were one to pose the question, "What is the most challenging music of all?" to a survey of string players the all but unanimous answer would almost certainly be: the string quartet. And for good reason, too. String quartets require — require absolutely — a melding among the quartet's four players — musically, emotionally, and intellectually — that's nothing short of preternatural; a melding that when perfect results in the four players playing together — even breathing together — as if they were a single organism, and when less than perfect results in a musical train wreck of one sort or another even were each individual player a genuine virtuoso. So exposed and demanding is string quartet playing that there's simply no middle ground.

The above observation is provoked by our sitting down to audition in earnest Mozart's six so-called "Haydn" string quartets performed by a string quartet formerly unknown to us (which quartet shall here remain nameless as shall the major label for which it records, but which quartet will here be referred to as SQX and its members all referred to by the male pronoun).

We can't quite remember how we came into possession of this three-CD album (which, we hasten to add, is NOT the album we linked in our previous post concerning these string quartets) but it's certain we didn't purchase it ourself as had we done so we surely would have chosen a performance by a string quartet whose work was well known to us from past performances. It's not that there's anything particularly amiss with SQX's performance interpretively. In fact it's quite acceptable if not at all remarkable on that count. The problem is the four players can't quite seem to agree among themselves on the matter of intonation and it's driving us up the wall. Were one to listen to each of the players playing his own part individually his intonation would be just dandy. But the four together are a musical catastrophe.

Now, we freely confess we're hypersensitive to this sort of thing. Our sense of pitch is exquisitely acute; something for which we take no credit at all just as those possessing so-called "absolute" or "perfect" pitch can take no credit. It's simply a fact of life; a genetic thing; a gift (or curse, as the case may be) one is granted at the moment of conception or not, and one which cannot be later acquired. But our knowing we're hypersensitive to this sort of thing is no help at all. We managed to get through the first of the six quartets (K387) without too much trouble as SQX's intonation problem made itself manifest only here and there in that work. But we're now auditioning — or, rather, attempting to audition — the third of the six (K428) and it's a horror. We just can't manage to get through it and the only solution, we're afraid, is to simply toss this album in toto and acquire another with a string quartet whose work we know and trust. There's just nothing for it. We have our "gift" to thank for that.

And so it goes.

Whatever Gets You By

We've been watching the six-hour documentary, Circus, a film by documentary maker Show of Force made for PBS, the first four of the hour-long episodes of which have already aired on WNET (Channel 13, New York), and the final two episodes of which will air next Wednesday, 17 November at 9:00 PM EST, and what a splendid effort it is.

What immediately caught our attention was the opening title theme of each episode; a thoroughly delightful number titled, "Whatever Gets You By" — an original song by a band called The Features from their album, Some Kind of Salvation — as it so perfectly captures the spirit of the circus life depicted in the documentary. It sounds to us a lot like a French cabaret song even though we've never been in a French cabaret in our life.

Here it is. See what you think. And do pay special attention to the instrumental arrangement.

Transcendent

We've never been overly fond of Bach's six French Suites. For the most part, they've always struck us as Bach-lite, and while there's not a thing wrong with Bach in his lighter moods, it mostly ill suits our fundamentally dark and gloomy spirit.

There is, however, one movement we return to often, and often find occupying our mind in the form of an earworm that refuses to be denied. It's the Sarabande from Suite No. 1, and for those familiar with the movement, its attraction for us will be no surprise in the light of what we've above written. Over the years, we've heard a number of readings of this Sarabande on both harpsichord and piano, all played by keyboardists whose musicianship is unquestionably first-rate. But to our ears only one of these seems to have captured the innate profundity of this deceptively simple movement. Perhaps needless to say for longtime readers of S&F, that reading is by Glenn Gould.

Previously on S&F, we had this to say about Gould's Bach readings:

Over the past few months or so, we've found that our recorded music listening has consisted mostly of rehearings of Bach's keyboard works performed by various keyboardists ... and were struck by how all those readings save Gould's seem to share a single element in common: they all deal with the music at its impeccable and complex formal surface ... seemingly never daring to go, or even look, beneath. Gould alone dared that, and ... produced readings that truly deserve that overworked encomium, transcendent. After absorbing Gould's reading of a Bach keyboard work, all other readings of that work seem lacking in one way or another, or even just plain "wrong" no matter how stylistically note-perfect they may be.

And so it is with this Sarabande.

Here, for telling instance, is a reading by that most excellent pianist András Schiff. Note, please, that he takes the repeats of both limbs of the binary as written, and his reading of this lovely Sarabande is impeccable formally and stylistically albeit taken at a tempo that's, shall we say, somewhat too brisk for this dance form; a first-rate reading by any standard (the standards of doctrinaire HIPies perhaps excepted), and every inch a proper German Baroque sarabande.▼

Now, here's Gould's reading. And note, please, that he omits the written repeat of the second limb of the binary. After listening closely to this reading, we trust we'll not have to explain to you why.▼

As we've written, a reading that "truly deserve[s] that overworked encomium, transcendent."

Nora Goes Minimalist

Nora decides to dump the atonalist route and go all minimalist on us.

(Our thanks to Jason Heath's Double Bass Blog for the link.)

Balls Of Steel

As we finished our reading of Hector Berlioz's Memoirs, we couldn't help wondering how it was possible that Berlioz, in his concertizing tours across Europe and Russia to make known his music using whatever musical forces were available in the cities he visited, could have had any of his major works performed in anything like a coherent, representative fashion given how miserable most of those musical forces apparently were, and how typically limited his number of rehearsals. We were thinking especially of the Symphonie Fantastique — an astonishingly original work that must have been absolutely mind-blowing for orchestras back then (c. 1840s and 1850s) — whose strange rhetoric and daunting rhythmic complexity are a challenge to get right even for orchestras today (we've heard the first movement done right only once: by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a recording done for RCA sometime in the 1950s (later converted to stereo) the audio of which, sadly, is goosed almost beyond tolerance.)

Ol' Hector must have had balls of steel to keep on going as he did.

Ave Atque Vale, Sir Charles

One of the genuinely gifted conductors of this century and the last, Sir Charles Mackerras, died today at age 84 of cancer reports Australia's The Sydney Morning Herald. He was a champion and conductor of the works of Janacek, and a fine conductor of the operas of Mozart, his 2002 recording of Idomeneo for EMI with Ian Bostridge, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Lisa Milne, Barbara Frittoli, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus being a first-rate example.

He will be missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Sir Charles, ave atque vale.

A Kind Of Progress Of Sorts

Alex Ross, in remembrance of Cesare Siepi, the just deceased "supremely sensual Italian bass," as Alex put it, has posted a video clip of Signor Siepi singing the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni in the ultimate encounter between Giovanni and the Commendatore in a 1954 Salzburg Festival production of the opera conducted by the great Wilhelm Furtwängler.

A conductor (in)famous for his at-times glacially slow tempi (we once heard a Rheingold conducted by Furtwängler that clocked in at some 3 1/4 hours!), Furtwängler here turns Mozart's dramatically spot-on framing tempo of Andante for the entire alla breve encounter into a quasi-Adagio, later on becoming a plodding Adagio verging on a Largo, all of which we suspect was intended by Furtwängler to lend to the encounter what he considered to be the proper requisite mix of gravitas and terror, but instead distorts and all but enervates the dramatic impact of the entire climactic scene.

We might understand such liberty of tempo applied to any number of works by other composers of opera, but perhaps more than anyone Furtwängler should have known better than to second-guess the musico-dramatic directions of a master musical dramatist such as Mozart. When Mozart writes Andante, he means Andante and not Adagio or any other tempo because Andante is what the drama requires at that point to make its proper musico-dramatic point, have its proper musico-dramatic effect, and produce its proper musico-dramatic affect.

We're fairly certain that what Furtwängler did then no conductor today could do without being roundly (and justifiably) savaged for the impertinence.

A kind of progress of sorts.

And For The 4th...

The greatest march ever written by the greatest composer of marches who ever lived in its greatest performance ever.

OK, so the tempo taken here is a bit too fast to actually march to. So what?