MUSIC

This will never happen to you again,” the conductor Leon Botstein announced from the stage, referring to the novelty of hearing even one Miaskovsky symphony performed live, let alone two. The first performed, No. 16 (1935-36), epitomized the kind of conservative style and heroic stature favored by Soviet officialdom, though its themes were flecked by tart dissonances: a form of coded protest, in Mr. Botstein’s view.

Symphony No. 13 (1933), by contrast, was a revelation, its three movements conjoined into a single span of nocturnal contemplation and disturbance. The performance lacked perfect cohesion and finesse, but still captured the spirit of a gripping work Miaskovsky felt compelled to dismiss in an article published three years after its debut.

Steve Smith NYT Aug 16

SIMONE DINNERSTEIN IN CHICAGO

A surprising and contrasting pair of works which spoke to each other across the centuries at the hands of a spontaneous performer. George Crumb’s music is grounded in tradition, or rather traditions, as he happily riffed on themes of Thelonius Monk and Claude Debussy in nine kaleidoscopic sound experiences. This work exploits the piano from the inside out: strumming strings, percussive tappings and hands full of notes in spacey disconnection. An adventure in 20^th century modernity.And the venerable Goldberg Variations, 30 contrasting and seemingly disconnected pieces with changeable moods and exacting lines. And always that theme to hold the thing together.

Starting the program with Crumb was quite a nonconformist gesture – and one that paid out in directing the ear to fascinating parallels.

From the first attack on the piano at the opening of the Crumb it was obvious that we were in for a bumpy ride. Crumb is a composer who is not afraid to be delicate and almost dainty while also bringing in the heavy artillery of noise and decibels. With Crumb, though, it’s usually the peaceful voice that wins in the end.

And so it was with the Bach of the Goldberg Variations. The barefoot pianist had the message down. Her achingly slow performance of the aria at the beginning and end of the piece almost stretched to infinity, but she had control of the moment and it sang like so many other moments in a stimulating recital..

Purists could fault the highly pianistic and arbitrary treatment of Bach,’s score but his music translates so well and Dinnerstein has such an instinctive understanding of the inner life of the music, that all is forgiven. How gratifying to hear an artist with convictions and not just technique.

Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,

Il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

C'est l'Ennui!—l'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!

And yet, among the beasts and creatures all—
Panther, snake, scorpion, jackal, ape, hound, hawk—
Monsters that crawl, and shriek, and grunt, and squawk,
In our vice-filled menagerie's caterwaul,

One worse is there, fit to heap scorn upon—
More ugly, rank! Though noiseless, calm and still,
yet would he turn the earth to scraps and swill,
swallow it whole in one great, gaping yawn:

Ennui! That monster frail!—With eye wherein
A chance tear gleams, he dreams of gibbets, while
Smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile. . .
—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!

As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!

Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:

“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”

I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.

FILMS ABOUT OLD AGE

I Never Sang for My Father (1970, Gilbert Cates)
Antonia’s Line (1995, Marleen Gorris)
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)
Madadayo (1993, Akira Kurosawa)
Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
Saraband (2003, Ingmar Bergman)
The Notebook (2004, Nick Cassavetes)
Calendar Girls (2003, Nigel Cole)
Driving Miss Daisy (1989, Bruce Beresford)
Elsa and Fred (2005, Marcos Carnevale)
Harry and Tonto (1974, Paul Mazursky)
Safe House (1998, Eric Steven Stahl)
Tatie Danielle (1991, Etienne Chatiliez
The Shameless Old Lady (1965, Rene Allio)
Love in the Time of Cholera (2007, Mike Newell)
The Memory of a Killer (2003, Erik Van Looy)
Evening (2007, Lajos Koltai)
Boynton Beach Club (2005, Susan Seidelman)
Cocoon (1985, Ron Howard)
Venus (2006, Roger Michell)
Nobody’s Fool (1994, Robert Benton)
The Battle of Narayama (1983, Shohei Imamura)
The Gin Game (2003, Aaron Brown)
Harold and Maude (1971, Hal Ashby)
The Bucket List (2007, Rob Reiner)
Starting Out in the Evening (2007, Andrew Wagner)
Kotch (1971, Jack Lemmon)
The Lion in Winter (1968, Anthony Harvey)
A Thousand Acres (1997, Jocelyn Moorhouse)
The Sunshine Boys (1975, Herbert Ross)
Dad (1989, Gary David Goldberg)
Tell Me A Riddle (1980, Lee Grant)
Grumpy Old Men (1993, Donald Petri)
Being There (1979, Hal Ashby)
Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975, Sam O’Steen)

These, of course, complement Dr. Dennis McCullough’s picks from my previous post:

Umberto D. (1952, Dir. Vittorio De Sica)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)
On Golden Pond (1981, Mark Rydell)
The Trip to Bountiful (1985, Peter Masterson)
Foxfire (1987, Jud Taylor)
The Whales of August (1987, Lindsay Anderson)
Everybody’s Fine (1990, Giuseppe Tornatore)
The Company of Strangers (also called Strangers in Good Company, 1991, Cynthia Scott)
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993, Randa Haines)
To Dance With the White Dog (1994, Glenn Jordan)
Buena Vista Social Club (1998, Wim Wenders)
The Straight Story (1999, David Lynch)
Innocence (2000, Paul Cox)
Iris (2001, Richard Eyre)
About Schmidt (2002, Alexander Payne)
Secondhand Lions (2003, Tim McCanlies)
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005, Dan Ireland)
Aurora Borealis (2004, James Burke)
The Savages (2007, Tamara Jenkins)
Away From Her (2006, Sarah Polley)

Next up? Fictional accounts of old age.

I’ll start.

Patrimony (by Philip Roth)
The Optimist’s Daughter (by Eudora Welty)
As We Are Now (by May Sarton)
Angle of Repose (by Wallace Stegner)

Several years ago, I invited some nonmusical friends to my concert of Shostakovich Symphony 5. Beforehand, I gave the couple a CD so they could have a listen before the live performance. I didn't really want to bore them with my "vast" knowledge of the work, composer's miserable life, or why it is significant in history. That was in the program notes with the CD, which I encouraged them to read. If they had any questions after that or wanted more info, I told them to feel free to ask.

After the concert, I was eager to hear how they liked the performance.

"It was fine, sounded like the recording," said one friend.

That was it? I wanted to ask if they were moved by such a powerful and important work but my other friend started into her experience.

"We listened to the CD, and purposely chose not to read the jacket," she said. "We felt we wanted to listen on a blank slate, gather our own conclusions and see if more explanation was necessary. Having lost a friend to cancer earlier this month, I felt that the first movement expressed every possible emotion that I felt. The last movement to me was a sheer powerful force that beckoned me into wanting to live life to the fullest and enjoy every bit since my friend was no longer able to."

I was touched by her response and it sounded perfectly logical, so I asked the first friend why he had such a mediocre reaction.

"Well, the conductor gave too much information before the concert," he said. "He gave us historical facts that were interesting, and probably to a few in the audience, it was important. But for us, it took away our own personal meaning. We felt like ‘our piece' was no longer ours. Plus if we wanted a lengthy history lesson, well you know."

Neo Classical by Holly Mulcahy
February 4, 2008

The music the BBC banned

Bob Stanley

God-bothering was out until the mid-Sixties, which meant that Billy Fury's gorgeous My Christmas Prayer had no airplay. Equally sinful, in the committee's eyes, was having the audacity to reshape a classical tune into something more swinging. One barbarian at the gates was Perry Como: I'm Always Chasing Rainbows was his rendition of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu in C sharp minor. “This is a bad perversion of a Chopin melody and should be barred,” the BBC snarled, and, even in 1963, they stopped Ken Dodd's cover version from being broadcast.

The reason for this was the place on the committee of the conductor Sir Arthur Bliss. His wrath was incurred by such unlikely revolutionaries as Liberace and Mantovani, and the score of Kismet, borrowed from Borodin, which meant that MOR standards such as Stranger in Paradise and Baubles, Bangles and Beads were rarely heard. Bliss was a particularly stormy weather vane: while he considered Tony Bennett's version of Stranger in Paradise to be sufficiently tasteful (it reached No 1), the Four Aces' sprightlier version was out of bounds. Meanwhile, kids with flick knives were slashing cinema seats at screenings of Blackboard Jungle.

Brian Eno & David Byrne

He (Eno) adds: “Without even discussing it that much, we shared a feeling about what kind of record this should be. We both wanted to make an album that combined something human, fallible and personal with something very electronic and mathematical. We wanted to paint a picture of the human trying to survive in an increasingly digital world.” Which sounds a bit Radiohead, both in sentiment and in the way that the album is being released via the internet before it comes out on CD. “Yes. It’s deliberate,” Eno says. “I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped buying CDs”.

But surely the huge sales of the Coldplay album proved that the CD format wasn’t dead? “It’s changing. There are lots of new ways you hear about music now. I hardly go into record shops any more. I buy from iTunes.”

On his website Byrne goes one farther. “In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing plans to prepare for a record release. It’s going to be interesting to see if audiences find out about this record solely through internet word-of-mouth.”

The Marketing of CHANT: MUSIC FOR THE SOUL

The success of CHANT: Music for the soul is a classic mix of pre-existing conditions and and post-partum manipulation. It’s classic because its sales model replicates previous formulas – that is to say, it’s all been done before.

First there’s the thirst. From my experience in retail I know there is a deep yearning in a lot of people for spiritual connections. It’s a well-known known fact that so-called “Christian” music is massively in demand. And for some reason there is a reluctance on the part of retail to admit or fill that demand. Maybe it’s the paganism of record store employees combined with the blindness of the buyers, but no one seems to care about the Gospel and Christian sections at any store where I have worked. No one except the customers.

So there’s this massive market that’s underserved and hungry. Well, some folks saw that they could make some money catering to this taste – but how? The scientific theory behind major labels’ marketing strategy is simple: throw tons of product out and see what sticks.

But in the case of CHANT, there was a lot of calculation that went into the project. First off, this was an English project and release. Now, English music is a real mix of the grand and the banal, and this project was aimed right at the broad middle.

It was a good start to do public ads for the artist. “Looking for an authentic sound with appeal to a broader (younger) demo”. Got a buzz started early – this was different. It was another good move to pick the group they did -- one with a popular video on You Tube. Check out the video – it’s really good, and the music is performed beautifully.

Look a little closer at the video and you’ll notice something else: most if not all of the monks are very young. Here’s music that’s 1,000 years old – practically the earliest notated music that we possess, and these lads are less than 30 years old…personally I think that drove some of the sales where you’d never have seen that before... Even monks vowed to chastity can evoke rock star sex appeal.

You know, I figured they had a hit pretty early on. The first event that caught the world’s eye was when the release topped the Billboard Classical chart, edging onto the Pop chart as well without even a CD being issued. It was all about online sales. Itunes and the rest.

But what I also noticed was that the big success caught the label by surprise. Yes, they had prepped the field; they’d primed the New Age pumps – the Yoga journals, the “lifestyle” niches. I did read somewhere the mantra for marketers: It’s the niche, stupid! Well, they covered the niches pretty thoroughly just by doing what they always do.

And everything online available to them was covered as well. This was a new template of how to market music. But as I keep saying, this is the old way simply with new cast of characters.

And make no mistake, they fielded claims that you’d just roll your eyes at – how about “…proven to heal, calm and also give strength”; …provides instant relaxation…” “chant for a new computer gaming generation.” But, sorry, I do think there’s some truth in the claims – certain musics probably do have physiological effects on certain nervous systems at certain times. I’ve felt it myself…so this claim falls under the “permissible lie” rubric.

But the commercial package was also tightly controlled. And good choices were being made. The title change for the American market was smart – “Music for the Soul” is so much more marketable than “Music for Paradise.” The cover image of the monks -- quite Otherworldly and very transferable. Memorable.You don’t even have to remember the name of the album – the picture brands the product. The monks seem to walk on water. Inspired. The picture does reflect the English title, you know – that city in the distance is clearly Paradise!

The pope connection didn’t hurt, I’m sure, and the hefty boost of an NPR feature but we have come to a tipping point in “next level” marketing strategy, where sales just take off and feed off their own momentum. Multiplied sevenfold by the nature of the world wide web of course.

But the label didn’t expect the reaction they got. It’s always been that way – it’s the ones that are really big that that they’re unready for. The only exception to this that I can recall was the worldwide success of the Gorecki Third Symphony on Nonesuch, a label that for a while had its finger on the throbbing pulse of the latte lovers (still does, actually). I recall a WEA sales meeting where the Nonesuch rep was telling a room of hardened cynical music veterans that “this album will change your life.” Well allowing for a little exaggeration it did change a lot of assumptions about classical music.

Spirituality. That’s what Gorecki was about, and that was the appeal of the first chant phenom – which happened over 15 years ago – a whole generation ago. That one also caught the wise guys by surprise, but soon everyone was on the boat and for the next ten years it was all about the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos – and the recording wasn’t even new. It’s just that it filled a need in the marketplace. Supply and demand. New Age was doing well those days. The need was for stress reduction. A lot of people were buying Classical music for just that purpose – it’s still a great hook: check out the Adagios CDs.

A little bit after the monks came the Enigma explosion. Here was chant to a disco beat. Actually it was made to order with its gothick images and satanic associations by reversal but Enigma tapped into the sound of chant itself which is a vestigial echo in the collective memory of countless humans.

There have been other boomlets and tributaries of the motherlode of classical crossover, and this CHANT is in a long line of prototypes and precursors, but it is the harbinger of things to come.as well as a replicator of old business plans.

It’s among an aristocracy: one of the first classical releases to chart at number one with a digital-only presence. It wasn’t the first one (Dudamel had the first, though the numbers were considerably less than CHANT’s.). But it’s life has been acted out in cyberspace more so than in the terrestrial world and that’s a change.

MEDIA FIX

Then there’s Jason Fried, who started his 37signals software company in a spare ten hours a week and now counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as an investor. He says he built his business by paying attention to “the minutiae of navigating a site”—simple things like minimizing the number of times customers have to use their mouses and trading jargon like “advanced search” for specific, clearly written directions.

Deanna Isaacs, Reader

LIT CRIT
Orwell once wrote that he had ''a power of facing unpleasant facts.'' Hitchens adds that they ''were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.'' The best pages in this book show how Orwell's radical politics were often at war with deeply conservative instincts. A man who felt tenderly toward the English countryside, English beer and, incredibly, English cooking, who distrusted abstract language along with most 20th-century inventions, who was something of a homophobe and antifeminist, and who struggled in print against his own antipathy toward Burmese, Jews and the poor, is not an easy fit with ''progressive'' thinking. The pressure of these conflicts, and Orwell's honesty in working them out, help to account for the vivid prose and its moral strength. Orwell's sentences are so forceful that hardly a single one of them escapes political incorrectness of one type or another, yet he remained on the left to the premature end of his life, in 1950. ''By teaching himself in theory and practice, some of the teaching being rather pedantic,'' Hitchens writes, ''he became a great humanist.''

George Packer, NYT9

MUSICS

Dan Cairns

When I was a cathedral chorister, my choir gave the first performances of much of John Tavener’s early work, back when he was truly out on the weirder fringe, and long before he arrived at the relative formalism of The Lamb and Song for Athene. At times, the score would invite us to sing pretty much what we liked, or the notes would so resemble ink flicked maniacally at the page that the results tended to be equally arbitrary. Nico Muhly, a New York-based American musician, evokes early Tavener here, among referencepoints that also include Radiohead, Björk, Ligeti and Glass. If Sigur Ros (see below) eschew conventional structure, they are like Westlife compared with Muhly. In a transfixing exploration of the sung voice’s possibilities, he draws on Icelandic myth, English folklore, 17th-century church politics and royal superstition. It is never less than fascinating. It’s also fairly odd.

BOOKS

HOW MANY OF THESE AUTHORS DO YOU KNOW?

Second-guessing the Man Booker judges' longlist choices ahead of Tuesday's announcement has taken off this year, on both the prize's own site and Picador's blog - where £50-worth of Picador books are on offer to the person with "most correct guesses". On the Booker site, one blogger tallied up scores in the guess lists, ranking authors by number of mentions as follows: Tim Winton (11); Alexis Wright (9); Andrew Crumey, Damon Galgut, James Kelman, Salman Rushdie (all 8); Peter Carey (7); John Burnside (6); Steve Toltz, Mohammed Hanif, Poppy Adams, Sadie Jones, Zoë Heller, Aravind Adiga (all 5); Howard Jacobson, Ross Raisin, Helen Garner, Nadeem Aslam, Sebastian Barry (all 4); Joe Dunthorne, Joseph O'Neill, Helen Walsh (all 3); David Park, Elizabeth Lowry, Patrick McGrath, Michelle de Kretser, Amitav Ghosh, David Lodge, Philip Hensher, Stephen Galloway (all 2). Booker gamblers, meanwhile, should move early: Anne Enright was available at a generous 11-1 the day after last year's longlist was announced.
John Dugdale

LIT CRIT

50 Drawings to Murder Magic

Antonin Artaud

Artaud’s last piece of writing is an incantatory text designed to accompany the enigmatic drawings with which, in his final anguished years in a mental asylum, he filled a series of 12 exercise books. The text is reproduced here in facsimile with a literal translation on the facing page, and is followed by a selection of the drawings:
‘They are not drawings/they figure nothing,/disfigure nothing,/are not there/to construct/build/institute/a world/even an abstract one./They are notes,/words,/pier-glasses,/because they are ardent,/corrosive,/incisive/thrown forth/by who knows what/submaxillar/subspatular/whirlwind/of vitriol,/they are not there as if/nailed down and/doomed never more/to move.’

Seagull Books | hardback |ISBN: 9781905422661

Fig. 33 Djamileh, elevation and ground plan, Haroun's palace, 1913 (cat. 32

BIZET: DJAMILEH in Chicago

Classical music fans in Chicago have a little-known resource right downtown at the Chicago Cultural Center, where this week an equally unknown gem of a French opera is receiving its Midwest premiere.

The opera is Djamileh, written in 1875 by Bizet, the composer of Carmen, and it’s easy to see why this particular antique has quietly slipped into obscurity. The story, a faded bit of orientalism, revolves around a jaded potentate and his insatiable thirst for the pleasures of wine, women and gambling. The libretto trots out every cultural and sexual stereotype of its age, and ends with a nasty scene where the prince rejects his lovelorn slave girl only to turn around and tell her he was just testing her. The opera ends with a rapturous duet.

Apart from the story line, however, the opera has plenty to savor. The music has sparkle and gracefulness and the vocal lines offer plenty of opportunities for the three soloists to shine both alone and together in some masterful duets and trios.

This performance offered a pared-down orchestra with the score reduced to chamber-music proportions by the musical director, Francesco Milioto, and the reduction worked beautifully. The musicians were a nicely balanced group and played with verve and style.

The three vocalists had a tougher time of it – the space in Preston Bradley Hall is not kind to voices, and trying to make these cardboard characters believable had to be a major challenge. They did their best, however, and they kept the attention of a capacity audience in spite of all the staginess of the production. Bill McMurray as Splendiana, the prince’s servant, stole every scene he was in, and Katherine Pracht has a lovely mezzo voice that was just right for the exotic slave girl. The trio was completed by Cornelius Johnson as Haroun, and the ensembles, including some excellent choral passages, were satisfying and attractive.

Musically this performance was really superior entertainment. Bizet had a fertile musical imagination and it would have been interesting to know how far and where he might have gone had he lived – in fact he died not long after this opera was penned.

So all praise to the Cultural Center for their industry and resourcefulness in presenting this quite special production. And lovers of classical music: you are hereby put on notice: pay attention to what goes on under the splendiferous Tiffany dome – or you might be missing the next unknown treasure they dig up!