Cyber Classical : Proteus/Gerry Fisher

2009-05-23T21:39:00.001-07:00

Giacometti and Chicago

2009-05-23T21:30:00.001-07:00

Considering Henry Moore at the Art Institute

2009-05-23T21:15:00.001-07:00

The Modern Wing of the Art Institute welcomes the visitor with a soaring plaza perched above the mundane tracks of the Illinois Central. And even higher than that is a pedway that offers a thrilling walk over everything in sight. Outside melts into inside with the vast central hall leading subtly to the galleries along the sides, and the museum experience begins.

2009-05-23T21:10:00.001-07:00

It’s just a step out on to the street to another world – the new Millennium Park seduces us into a fantasy world of the future. Children dance to building-high faces and shiny public art adorns gardens named for corporations.

2009-05-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

Chicago’s Cultural Center, formerly the Public Library, is a great chunk of stone at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. It has survived the years and the vagaries of taste through sheer weight, it seems, since there is little about it of artistic quality. The stolid architecture is mostly notable for housing a multifaceted (and richly adorned) interior. Abuzz with activity and music, the building is a hub of information with a slant on the “Cultural” part of its name.

Art Institute stairway

2009-05-23T19:29:00.001-07:00

Art Institute stairway, originally uploaded by gmf45.

Main staircase of the Art Institute during the free days to celebrate the opening of the Modern Wing

Paperless Papers

2009-05-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

A good article from the Ft5/9: I thought Kindle was to replace the book, but that kind of stalled, so now it's going to save the newspaper? Nevertheless, something is struggling to be born and it will be paperless.
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(Copyright Financial Times Ltd. 2009. All rights reserved.)

Newspaper executives increasingly believe gadgets such as the Kindle, Amazon's sleek e-book reader, might fix their industry's malfunctioning business model. This week, The New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post announced plans to subsidise the cost of new Kindles to win electronic subscribers in certain markets. Even Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp, is making noises about handheld gadgets. If enough people bought them, the NYT, for example, could theoretically save up to 35 per cent of its flagship paper's operating costs if it sold only paperless subscriptions.

One problem is how to reach the point whereby electronic subscriptions make up for lost newspaper sales. Subsidising hardware - the latest Kindle costs almost $500 - might help; mobile phones only became ubiquitous after mobile operators handed out free handsets in return for multi-year contracts. But there are problems applying this to newspapers.

First, subsidies require an element of cash upfront - something many newspapers lack. Second, Kindle revenues may be measly. The NYT wants Kindle subscribers to pay about $170 a year to read news on its 10-inch screen. Yet one publisher reckons 70 per cent of that will go to Amazon, leaving $50 for the paper itself - enough to cover a small hardware subsidy but little else. Mobile phone operators make their margin by charging for extras such as data plans and roaming services. It is harder to see what premium services a newspaper could offer. Counting on advertising is difficult as no Kindle ad market yet exists.

A paperless future, therefore, remains some way off. But investors can draw one conclusion from the recent hubbub. Asking readers to pay for an e-book edition of The New York Times makes little sense if they can access the same content from a computer for free. If newspapers are serious about e-books, they will all have to start charging for online content as well.

Moldavan protest and internet

2009-05-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

Two articles from the BBC website show the political power of the new communication modes out there. The first is dated 4/8 and the second 4/26. Who's gonna be the McLuhan of the Twitter era?
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Riot police in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, have regained control of the parliament building that had earlier been stormed by protesters.
This followed the re-election of the Communist Party in Sunday's elections.
Thousands of anti-communist demonstrators stormed parliament, smashing furniture, throwing computers through windows and lighting fires.
More protests, which President Vladimir Voronin said amounted to an attempted coup, are expected on Wednesday.
In a televised address on Tuesday, he said he would protect Moldova from what he called a handful of fascists drunk on anger.
State TV quoted police as saying one woman had died from carbon monoxide poisoning during the protests. BBC 4/8
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It all started in a Chisinau cafe, when Ms Morar and a handful of friends decided to hold a peaceful protest against the Communist victory in what they thought was a rigged election.
"It just happened through Twitter, the blogosphere, the internet, SMS, websites and all this stuff. We just met, we brainstormed for 15 minutes, and decided to make a flash mob [internet-organised spontaneous public gathering]...
"In several hours, 15,000 people came out into the street."
BBC 4/26

Glenn Gould

2009-05-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

Glenn Gould's later recordings got progressively more remote from the real world of error, imperfection and the messiness of life. There is a dead feel to them, a lack of pleasure in the doing. Is this the result of the obsessive editing and tweaking he subjected them to? His search for perfection was ultimately sclerotic. It was no surprise that he died of a stroke. The following from the Canadian Encyclopedia discusses his recording technique.

"Gould became a leading exponent among classical performers of a true aesthetic of recording, which he passionately defended in articles and broadcasts, and practiced in dozens of albums for Columbia/CBS, developing a hands-on expertise in recording techniques.
A studio performer, he felt, need not be concerned with projecting musical effects into an auditorium for the purpose of catching and holding the attention of an audience; rather, he could subject the music to minute inspection of detail at every structural level. Moreover, he could allow the technology itself - placement of microphones, splicing, overdubbing, reverb, etc. - to influence the interpretation, and could defer many final interpretive decisions to the post-production process.
For Gould, recording had fundamentally altered the traditional relationship of composer, performer, and listener. He justified his interpretive experiments in part by arguing that there was no point in making yet another recording of, say, the Emperor Concerto without offering significant departures from conventional readings already available. Outside popular music, no artist to date has expanded the technological possibilities of recorded music, or explored its aesthetic and even ethical implications, more than did Gould."
Canadian Encyclopedia

Chicago Sinfonietta at Shedd

2009-05-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

Starting out on the right foot is generally a good idea for a performance of any kind. But it was at the beginning of their multiculturally inspired musical event at the Shedd Aquarium on April 30th that the chamber ensemble of the Chicago Sinfonietta was most flatfooted.
Playing the “Spring” section from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons may have seemed a good idea on paper for a program dedicated to “The Glory of Creation,” but the actual performance was unpolished and offkey and lacking in any rhythmic spring and one wonders why they bothered.
An equally dubious performance of some light music by the Czech composer Fibich followed, but things came to life thereafter as the group switched into avant-garde mode for a tasty morsel of the Japanese modern dance form known as Butoh.
Chicago-based Butoh artist Nicole Legette began her performance as an animated pile of white sheets at stage right, moving center to extrude herself as a pale humanoid figure doing complex and inexplicable moves in time with richly percussive musical back up.
Also intriguing (and demanding) was “Chewing Neckbones,” in which the reedist Mwata Bowden, a veteran of the legendary AACM, made profoundly otherworldly noises on the Australian didjeridu (aboriginal long trumpet) following up this virtuoso turn with an equally challenging avant-garde flight on the baritone sax. The jazz-inflected group of musicians provided prime backup on this piece, and gave a smooth rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge” to redeem their earlier missteps.
This was already an ambitious program, but it concluded with a section of all-out gospel singing, as the Steward Wilson Gospel Singers (seven strong) took to the stage to present some swinging versions of classic gospel hits. Well and truly done.
There was a lot to criticize in this rough-around-the-edges performance from awkward transitions to faulty intonation and pointless visual projections. But the Sinfonietta still deserves kudos for attempting this kind of program. They pulled no punches in the challenges they presented to their audience. And the sizeable group, who had trekked all the way to Chicago’s beautifully situated Museum Campus for the event, were quite enthusiastic in their appreciation. Nice to see so many people galvanized by so much unaccustomed sound.!

2009-04-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

It is unclear who first said “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, but the culprit might wish they had a penny whenever the phrase was used. In the opening sentence of Dark Mirror: The pathology of the singer-songwriter, Donald Brackett ascribes the wisecrack to Elvis Costello, who added in a 1983 Musician magazine interview: “it’s a really stupid thing to want to do”. But Costello himself tentatively attributes it to the comedian Martin Mull. Other contenders include Thelonious Monk, Frank Zappa, Schopenhauer, Yoko Ono, Steve Martin and Laurie Anderson; in fact, anyone you like.
What is clear, however, is that the quotation is overused, practically meaningless, and makes for a disheartening first line. It’s not hard to see why it gained currency both among artists (a glib bon mot at the critics’ expense) and critics (a licence to abdicate responsibility), but as Alex Ross, the author of The Rest Is Noise (2008), asks: “Why is music more difficult to write about than any other art form?”.
TLS 4/9/09 Wesley Stace

2009-04-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

My stylistic heroes were such as Macaulay (of the paragraph-length sentences) and Carlyle ( "O sea-green incorruptible!", but this from Rees-Mogg is right on.

When I was a teenager, I found myself caught up in the styles of two of the greatest prose writers of English literature, Francis Bacon and Edward Gibbon. Bacon's influence was benign; Gibbon's style can be a quicksand for beginners. Written by Gibbon himself, his Latinised style has a symphonic classicism - he really is the English Cicero. At 14 I did not have the ear to be anybody's Cicero. Under the influence of Gibbon, my essays resembled the tragedy of the R101 - the British airship that crashed in France because its engines were too heavy and it had too little gas in its bags. The craft did not have enough lift.
After reading Bacon, my sentences became more pithy, if somewhat staccato. Their brevity made them easier to read. I still operate on a rule that when one is having some difficulty with a sentence, the best thing to do is to cut it in half.
One would have to be a very clumsy writer to find oneself in trouble with a sentence of less than a dozen words. It is his short sentences that make Jonathan Swift so lucid to read.
William Rees-Mogg Times 4/15/09

Carla Bruni

2008-09-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

The critics have been quite rude about the third album, sung in the breathy mumbling tones that are her trademark. Bakchich, an irreverent news site, has just called it flabby, old-fashioned and "the ideal gift for the next grandmothers' day."

Nicolas Canteloup, the best current comic impersonator, has a running gag in which he imitates her as near inaudible. He mocked Bruni to her face on Europe 1 this morning, with a sketch claiming that she had won an award for boosting the sales of hearing aids. Bruni gave a cool performance, managing to brush off Fogiel's cheeky questions, such as "Would you have fallen in love with Nicolas Sarkozy if he wasn't president of France?" Charles Bremner Times

2008-08-27T17:00:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-08-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-08-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-08-10T17:48:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-08-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-05T06:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-06-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

KARINA GAUVIN SINGS BRITTEN IN CHICAGO

The Harris Theater was the scene for yet another of Benjamin Britten’s underappreciated vocal masterpieces tonight when the sensational French Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin dazzled in a performance of Les Illuminations, songs inspired by the perverse genius of Arthur Rimbaud.

This early cycle, written in 1939 , when Britten had moved to America as he thought for good (it was not to be), is a rich goldmine of musical invention, and a precursor of his great vocal music yet to come.

Obviously in love with the poete maudit and his dark visions, Britten almost becomes a Frenchman for this work. And Karina Gauvin with her range and technique had the musical and textual complexities under her command at all times.

The strings are used in strikingly orchestral ways from the opening fanfares on and there is such a wide range of tonal color in this piece that I almost had to check on my memory later to make sure it was only strings I had heard!

The tub-thumping of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra was the hardly necessary second half of the program. But even this oft-heard piece in a more than respectable performance could not erase the excellence of the English masterpiece that came before.

Salonen Piano Concerto: CSO and Bronfman

2008-04-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

For my money, the Chicago Symphony has kept its place at the top of the heap of American orchestras, as much by changing as by retaining its strongest elements. It’s the typical American orchestra, a kind of chameleon, very professional, kind of faceless, kind of a blank slate – until a strong-willed conductor puts his stamp on it and harnesses its virtuosity to his requirements. Americans are hybrids and at our best we reflect and refract the multitudes of cultural influences around us, and maybe focus them, clarify, de-mystify them.

These thoughts are provoked by the current concerts conducted by the eminent Finnish maestro, Esa-Pekka Salonen. In a rambling pre-concert “conversation,” Salonen told of his 16-year sojourn in remote California, and of how his relocation changed his Euro-centric attitudes, and his musical allegiances.

The journey he travels in his Piano Concerto clearly reflects his experience. Made-up Finnish folk music, mechanical birds, minimalism, Jazz, yes, even Gershwin – all figure in the fabric of this massively ambitious piece. There are wonderful stretches of orchestration, solos, ensembles and dramatic outbursts -- music that would test the limits of any orchestra.

But the CSO is up to most any challenge, and with the composer on the podium, they gave a rousing performance of this dense but not congested piece. Salonen is a masterful conductor, and he cleanly dissected his own music so that the pieces revealed their facets in sharp relief.

It was a work of many fragments, though. It didn’t cohere as a whole, and this was it’s downfall for me. It was exciting in places, even romantic in some other places, but basically an intellectual construction that reveals Salonen as the rebellious stepson of the Boulez school of modernism.

I have left the best part for last. Yefim Bronfman is a giant of the keyboard. The price of admission was more than paid off by seeing his almost superhuman pianism. Fighting the eternal battle of the keyboard versus the full orchestra, and winning it hands down, he negotiated mountains of notes with amazing dexterity and power.

If this concerto is flawed as a composition, it certainly does give two great virtuosos, the orchestra and the soloist, many opportunities to enhance their fame..

Anderszewski Beethoven on Virgin Classics

2008-04-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

Piotr Anderszewski, conductor and pianist: Beethoven Bagatelles Op. 126; Piano Concerto # 1. (Virgin Classics).

Gerry: This was an album that I actually bought, Bryant, do you think I spent my money wisely?

Bryant: Probably not. You could've saved at least $5 had you chosen iTunes.

Gerry: Do you think any of this music is dainty?

Bryant: Some of those early sonatas are; even the second concerto has bars of horse and buggy daintiness. But no, dainty doesn't come to mind in this recording.

Piotr Anderszewski is a Pole. Do you think he's more at home in the Chopin recordings or in these German works?

Gerry: Well, his first recording was of the Diabelli Variations, then Bach, so obviously he regards these as important. He was a student of Perahia & Brendel as well and the whole Marlboro school is in his background. That said I think the Chopin disc he produced came from the soul, so obviously he's got the blood. I think the mixture is what makes him somewhat unique. Used to be artists didn't mix the two.

Bryant: In regards to Perahia, he's gone back to Bach and now wants to play little else. He just a released a disc on Sony of the Partitas 2-4. What do you think of veteran pianists going back to well-worn repertoire when they could be recording some other composer's latest work? Are they obligated to find balance?

Gerry: I don't obligate any performer to any course of action...that said, I am not convinced his Bach performances are driven by great passion or originality. Maybe he needs this time to lie fallow and he'll go into the French repertoire or maybe some underperformed German school composer like Wainberg or Reger -- which is where Rudolf Serkin went in his later years. I contrast Perahia with Peter Serkin, who is always exploring unusual repertoire, and yet coming back to the standards with renewed insight. Maybe some artists just lose their curiosity with age. But they do have to follow their own muse and not pay any nevermind to folks like us who inhabit different skins.