"Downsizing at The New York Times has hit the culture department. Among those taking the recently offered buyouts are Bernard Holland, music critic; Jennifer Dunning, dance critic; Diane Nottle, deputy editor for classical music and dance; Gwen Smith, assignments coordinator for dance and art; and Lawrence Van Gelder, senior editor."
From Caleb Duepree of Classical Drone, this meme:
1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag three people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
"You only had to say 'I do' and you were stuck with it like marriage. It was also easy work to get. The war was on and I was almost the only roughly male person left with two arms and two legs."
--Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
I tag (sorry if you've already been tagged, and assuming they're still blogging): trill, Patty at oboeinsight.com and Jeremy Denk.
One performance remains of what I would consider the best musical production in Houston this season: Houston Grand Opera's production of Britten's Billy Budd. Easily the most strongly cast of HGO's productions this season, it bodes well for a five-year look at the composer.
Neil Armfield's production (from Welsh National Opera and Opera Australia) is stunning visually. Charles Ward says he "...did get tired of the endless rotation of the set piece...", but I'd have to disagree. The set makes one feel appropriately uneasy and afloat. The angeling of the hydrolic set-piece was always well thought-out and made the singers project to full advantage as well as giving a creepily skeletal representation of the ship's positioning on the ocean. Yes, the set-piece did creak, as mentioned by our oh-so-observant critics, but don't all moving set pieces? This was far more effective than staging this opera flat could ever be.
Daniel Belcher is certainly a strong Billy Budd, presenting a strongly sung and characterized portrayal. He doesn't make one forget Thomas Hampson on Nagano's recording or the originator of the role, the powerful Theodor Uppman, but he is new to this role and I have a feeling will be called around the world to sing it as he grows into it. Andrew Kennedy steals the show as Vere, singing the demanding part with utmost ease and shading of voice. I hope to hear more from him at HGO. While there was some strain in the upper register in Phillip Ens' Claggart, it suited the character, and he was stunning in his low register. The HGO chorus is simply amazing and dug into Britten's part beautifully. The orchestra also played magnificently in what was easily their most challenging score this season. While both Ward and Scott Cantrell feel that Patrick Summers hushed the orchestra too much, from where I was sitting (Row E orchestra), the power was there when necessary, as was the repose.
Next season brings A Midsummer Night's Dream with a dream cast indeed: Laura Claycomb singing Tytania is something I'll be eagerly awaiting all year.
From yesterday's All Things Considered:
"Lazlow Jones, the GTA [Grand Theft Auto] writer-director, says he's gotten frustrated with the level of outrage that surrounds the game. But on another level, he understands that sometimes it takes a while for the public to recognize greatness in its midst. He points to the debut of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score The Rite of Spring, which scandalized Paris in 1913.
'The entire hall erupted into a riot,' he says, 'and there were politicians and people calling for it to be banned, because it was some kind of hedonistic thing that was certainly not art.'
A hundred years later, Jones observes, we look back on The Rite of Spring as one of the great compositions of the 20th century.
So Jones, for one, is taking the long view on Grand Theft Auto."
The wonderful Boston-based new music group Juventas! has its podcast up and running. Included are interviews with composers they've performed (all under age 35) as well as clips from live performances. Please given them a visit!
Much has been floating around the blogosphere the New York Time's misguided Bernard Holland column on George Perle . The article is so poorly argued that I feel bad criticizing it.
"It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off...I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms." Actually, taken out of the continuum of Western musical history, it doesn't sound reasonable to me to say Webern's Op. 27 picks up where Brahms "left off". That work picks up where Webern's own prior works (notably, of course, the variations movement of Op. 21) left off. The link to Brahms happens at the beginning of Webern's career. It's reasonable to say that the Passacaglia picks up where Brahms "left off" - for me the connection to the finale of Brahms' fourth symphony is clear. Holland over-simplifies his discussion by presuming that two pieces with the same title will automatically be connected. Yes, it does take a bit of work if one wants to really explore where the connections lie, but they are clearly there, and they truly do make sense with familiarity. The move from late Brahms/Wagner/Mahler to early Schoenberg/Berg/Webern is easy to see. The move from there to Schoenberg and Berg's aphoristic pieces is clear. The move from those to Webern's work is clear. The move from there to Perle's work is clear. If you take the shortcut, as Holland wants to do, then, yes, you run the risk of getting lost.
Is it necessary to make those connections to enjoy Perle or Webern? Of course not. One must turn off their "tonal filter" and open their ears to a language other than that to which they were born. Yes, it's a challenge, and it can be uncomfortable. Great art should make us uncomfortable from time to time. Holland says that music prior to the 20th century wanted "to come down where it started." I for one don't want to come down where I started. If I take a trip, I want to end up somewhere spectacular, different, exotic. Otherwise, what's the point?
I want to thank the Schoenbergs, Weberns, and Perles out there. I want to thank them for:
Sorry, Mr. Holland, the "explorers" will not be forgotten, at least not by those who truly care.
This afternoon's concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra was incredible. Yet again, I ask: with all the music director openings around the USA, why isn't Daniele Gatti in the running for all of them? I've long loved his recordings of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Respighi's Roman trilogy, but today's Shostakovich Fifth Symphony confirmed two beliefs: (1) the BSO continues its prominence as one of the great orchestras in the world, and (2) Gatti's intensity and commitment to music is what makes us love going to the symphony. He is fearless as a conductor, and technically beautiful to watch. Conducting from memory, his left hand drew gossamer phrases through the air during the symphony's many lyrical string melodies, contorted with the sardonic changes of texture and melodic twists in the Allegretto and frighteningly conjured up an aural juggernaut at the opening of the finale. The orchestra responded with the most spectacular sounds I've heard in quite sometime. They, too, were taking risks, noticeably pushing the dynamic capacities of their respective instruments to both extremes.
Garrick Ohlsson was a fine soloist in the Schumann concerto before intermission and I was already on cloud nine after his gutsy performance, but he was frankly overshadowed by the music after the pause. The concert is repeated tomorrow at 8pm, and anyone within striking distance of Symphony Hall will be missing out if they're not there.
A.C. Douglas, in an ongoing rant about compositional procedures of various creators, writes:
"If, on listening, one can immediately discern or sense a process at work in the piece's creation, the piece is a failure as music."
I've been listening to "O Tod, wie bitter bist du", the third of Brahms' Four Serious Songs, which I'm hoping nobody thinks "is a failure as music", and I hear many processes at work.
The first half of the song is a gloomy reflection on death from the perspective of somebody young and without worry. Immediately apparent are the voice's descending thirds, canonically imitated (a musical process) by the left hand of the piano. Apparent next is the asymmetrical rhythmic shift (another musical process) on the repetition of the words "wie bitter", giving us a feeling of 4/2 meter instead of the written and audibly established 3/2 meter. Next comes another canon, this time spurred by the pianist and answered by the singer, melodically perfect, procedurally impeccable, reflecting man's thinking about death musically through a learned compositional procedure. I immediately discern what Brahms does to musically paint the shift in mood for the second half of the text to one of hope. The descending thirds that began the song become ascending sixths (for theory nerds, the inversion of the third). The mode shifts from minor to major. Brahms makes sure the listener follows this shift in modality but not tonality by the strongest cadence yet in the piece, emphasized metrically and registrally (the piano lands on low E octaves for the first time). Brahms further elucidates the text musically through the following circle of fifths progression, an immediately identifiable harmonic progression. Further along, Brahms seems to want to move us back to the minor mode, ending on a pause on dominant harmony. The question of how Brahms will end the song--in the despair of minor or the hope of major--is raised. Brahms has previously juxtaposed descending thirds in the minor mode against their inversion, ascending sixths, in the major mode. It would only make sense that Brahms would musically answer the question he's raised by using one of these signals. And indeed he does, offering the ascending sixth in the voice that rises from B to G#. In addition to offering us the affirmative, ascending sixth motive, he has composed it to ascend to the major third above E, solidifying the hopeful, major mode ending to the song.
I find it hard to believe that Brahms didn't have these connections in mind from the inception of this song. And, upon listening, I find it immediately audible that Brahms purposely pitted major against minor, thirds against sixths, to musically illuminate the text. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Brahms thought about a way he could technically illustrate the words "O Tod" in two contrasting yet intimately related ways.
I'm not suggesting in any way that a listener has to hear these processes to find the music successful. However, for someone to suggest that their immediate audibility in some way diminishes the quality of the music or the listening experience is hogwash. If that were true, many movements in music would be "failures" - the fugal finale of Beethoven's Op. 110, where process is immediately evident; the motivic transformations in Bach's chorale prelude on "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit"; the inverted recapitulations in Barber's Piano Concerto or Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra; the mode reversal at the recapitulation in Schubert's D 887; the crystallization of the words "O King" in Berio's Sinfonia - the list could go on and on. The fact is, the marriage of gorgeously controlled process in music with emotional substance benefits all of these works greatly. The question of which came first is a moot point, but I for one seriously doubt that in any of these instances the composer in question didn't preordain that these technical aspects would occur and would be audible to some listeners. The quality of these pieces is not harmed one iota by their composers wearing their technique on their sleeves next to their hearts.
