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.

Sleeping Beauty : ABT

2008-04-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

A.B.T. 's Sleeping Beauty in Chicago

Main floor free seat, major American company, full-length Sleeping Beauty; Good opportunity?But I had just seen a full-length Swan Lake by a sterling Russian troupe weeks ago and the images and sensations lingered on. This was quite different.

The first thing I noticed were the absolute rigidity of pose the secondary performers adopted; not just still but statue-like; or like painted figures in a child's story book. Every minimal move clearly determined; the stage a picture; no messy life-like behavior. And so what? Isn't this a fairy tale? Even more than Swan Lake this is clearly an elite child's box of dolls come to life. 1890 was the debut in Petersburg and I'm sure the Czar's lovely daughters were among the audience, or the lovely daughters of some other aristocratic family who were living a doomed life of fantasy with terror ready to break in at any time. Tchaikovsky's ballets all have a sense of that underlying horror that lurks outside.

In this odd production, the lurkers -- the evil fairy and her bug-like minions have all the scariness required to disrupt and threaten. I came to life when they arrived. Maybe this was going to be fun after all. It was.

The bugs did their work and the sleepy head was carried off, and the cardboard figures mimed incomprehesibly and danced quite well, all said.

Really, in these overlong dramas it's just about enjoying the set pieces as they unroll; the high point for me was the entry of the male dancers and Sid Smith got it right in his Tribune review, so I'll just quote him:

The charismatic Carreno remains a sure-footed, comfortable star, a study in soft landings, clean technique and effortless control. He and the hunters, in their romp that opens Act II, take over the stage with an exhilarating rush.

There was a lot more to enjoy in this production, and the company just got better as time went by, so there were grand, gay, and sweet moments throughout. And a lot of misfires as well -- literally with a bizarre rocket blast that seemed strangely disconnected to the actual witch it was meant to transport...

I can't really say I was enlightened by the quirks of staging. I think choreography by committee is not usually successful. How does anyone interpret the switching of period costumes back and forth -- yes, I read the note that said it was the hundred-year sleep of the beauty, but it was just a device to get a different costume theme going as far as I could see...

But I am not a cranky purist, and I like attending performances that are vital and exhilarating. This A.B.T. show was energetic from start to finish. If I didn't get much of a sense of coherence in the action, and if it was more about technique than about the shadings, i enjoyed watching this first class dancing machine give us their (almost) best.

Cyber Classical is Baaack!

2008-04-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

Listen to Cyber Classical every Thursday from 8:00 to 10:00 PM.

Radio.DePaul.edu

Sangre de mi Sangre or Padre Nuestro a Masterpiece?

2008-04-09T06:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a film with certain narrative or structural weaknesses has so much excellence in its content that you are well rewarded if you just throw out your criticisms and enjoy the moments as they unfold.

"Sangre de mi Sangre" (the better title is the original "Padre Nuestro") was just given two showings at the Chicago Latino Film Festival. It's a film that deserves wider distribution. Perhaps overlong, and with a plot that is rather too complex and relies on coincidence a bit too much, this movie nevertheless sucks you emotionally into the lives of its characters, Mexican immigrants living at the margins in New York City. The core of the movie is the story of the two young Mexicans trying in their separate ways to survive in an alien environment. The plot revolves around stolen identity and personal interconnections as the two protagonists try to gain security through money or through relationships. The story recalls another masterpiece of ambivalence, "The Son", and I'll say no more, except to indicate that the conclusion of the action is richly satisfying, if harsh. Just a word about the performances: the director is clearly a genius at handling actors. The leads give virtuoso turns to their characterizations, and the cast throughout shows never a false note.

Swan Lake: Makarova and Perm Tchaikovsky: Get Going!

2008-03-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Makarova's Swan Lake in Chicago was a wonderful dance experience missed by a lot of people, judging from the sparse attendance at yesterday's performance in the Auditorium Theater. But who knew? There wasn't a lot of prepublicity, nor anyone tooting the horn ahead of this gem of a troupe. Plenty of horn blowing in the ballet, though. So much of the showmanship of the original was captured here: the drama of the story, the individual starry characterizations, the plush ensembles and even a pit orchestra with energy and full-blooded Russian style. A little rough around the edges, to be sure, but so true to the heart of this piece.

Only two performances left! So get out there, Chicago!

Jonas Kaufmann: The Whole Package?

2008-03-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

Jonas Kaufmann: Romantic Arias (Decca)

Here's a voice we'll be hearing for a while. The brief back story of this handsome young German tenor is interesting: he was trained as a light tenor, and by good fortune was allowed to liberate the drama of the lower and richer tones which he says were what he used " in the shower or the elevator."

So his career is a product of a very personal drive which he reveals in his choice of repertoire and his intensely dramatic presentation The arias on his calling-card disc are a mixture of the usual and the slightly less so.

He opens with a full-throated run-through of "Che gelida manina" from La Boheme, and then he takes an abrupt left turn into French opera: Bizet, very idiomatic, with a minor but gorgeously-sung aria from Carmen, turning at last to his home tongue with the show-stopper and only hit from Flotow's Martha -- which he nails as well as Siegfried Jerusalem did in the recent past.

So we get him as eclectic, fluent in various languages and styles -- dare we say Post Modern? An artist who brings as much sensibility and style to Wagner as he does to Massenet. His lyric gifts also enhance an affinity with Italian Opera. Verdi is in his soul, and he did begin his debut disc with an emotive Puccini.

Highlights of this disc include an aria from Don Carlos, the 5 minutes of glorious Wagner, and especially a Berlioz aria from The Damnation of Faust, sung with Wagnerian greatness of soul.

The proof is in the Opera House performance, of course. So we will have to see him. Is he the real thing or the product of the electronics of the recording medium? I suspect he's the whole package, relying on field reviews of his performances. Can't wait to see him in person!

Although the disc is nothing but a collection of snippets, there is something to enjoy in most of these performances, not least the conducting of Marco Armiliano, whose accompaniment matches Kaufmann's eclecticity with stylish performances in a variety of styles. The two artists seem to be on the same wavelength, and the result is a very satisfying CD. It's ipod ready since almost every cut is a keeper: just rip and burn!

Max Reger

2008-03-16T09:34:00.001-07:00

Peter Grimes

2008-03-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

URBAN OPERA
Peter Grimes at the multiplex

Well, I wanted the experience of the Live from the Met hookup which brings Grand Opera to a cine near you in HD. I’d heard such great things about the experience. So when Bryant suggested we attend the showing of Peter Grimes today, I gladly went along.

But, although it was definitely worth going, I don’t think I’ll be doing it very often in the future. Really, there’s just too much annoyance added in (city driving and parking) and too much energy sucked out, to make it a vital need for me.

Opera live is best really live, and not second-hand through a distancing medium like a movie theater representation. Yes, some of the frisson of the immediate with its potential for the unexpected is there at first, but the absolute control of the technical elements soon takes off that edge. The only spontaneous things that I saw were in the clumsy but endearing interview segments with an uncomfortable Natalie Dessay doing her darndest not to sound scripted.

Best unexpected interchange: Natalie trying to prompt tenor Dean Griffey for his own personal take on the guilt or innocence of Peter Grimes (he wouldn’t be pushed). I’ve always wondered how these artists can take this kind of intrusion into the flow of their performances.

Griffey in particular seemed to be so identifying with Grimes, that I wondered if he wasn’t tempted to smack Ms Dessay around a little. Patricia Racette was herself quite the Ellen Orford, with her very idealistic interpretations and her almost pedantic descriptions of the technical aspects of the music. Both of them give great performances, by the way – quite stellar.

Maybe it was just this production, but I really didn’t see Grimes as just an “outsider” being unfairly tarred and feathered by the moral righteousness of his community. I actually was agreeing that Ellen was quite wrongheaded to set Grimes up with another young boy to abuse, honorable as her reasons were. I was thinking that she was sending this scared kid to his doom. And so it was.

I wonder what it is about this opera that makes it one of the most celebrated of the last 50 years. Certainly the music is quite wonderful; Britten is such a genius of orchestral color and emotiveness. But the libretto is so bookish, so prosaic. There are great vocal parts for many of the characters, and there are such rich characters for good performers to get their teeth into, but the whole thing is rather like a musical version of a Victorian novel. Sweeney Todd comes to mind – there’s even a bit of twisted humor now and then.

And then there is the inventive use of the chorus, who are collectively one of the most important characters in the drama. And the moral ambiguity of the story is quite absorbing, no easy answers here.

But it’s all so unremittingly down, so clearly spiraling to a painful end, that I left before the last act, which I knew was just going to be more and worse tragedy, however gorgeous. The “issues” were of the time and in the psyche of the original artists. Britten, obsessed with young boys, reveals perhaps his struggle with the monstrous side of his fascination, and paints a deeply disturbing picture of an almost erotic intensity.

Liberals of the time (and surely Britten and Pears were socially liberal) had much to say about the power of the ignorant majority, the “other- directed” as opposed to the more heroic “inner-directed”, as Riesman’s Lonely Crowd called them. (Ellen vs. The Borough). It’s a gripping morality play we are watching here, and although it’s got lots of great musical moments, and displays great inner conflicts, I can’t help feeling that moral ideas are not best served by the medium of Opera.

Maybe I was scared to be sucked into the whirlpool of the inevitable denouement – I’ve heard the recordings and I listened to it on my car radio as I retreated, and it’s implacably intense, even masterfully so. But I had had enough reminders of my own inner conflicts, and my love-hate with the Fifties, which haunted my childhood. I wanted out, and Bryant wanted to go as well, for his own reasons – he said he was bored with some of it (great admission, Bryant!) .

Hvorostovsky In Chicago: Eugene Onegin

2008-03-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

A Woman’s Triumph

This great melodrama Tchaikovsky hatched in 1879 from Pushkin is one of the best tickets in town. The plush, but modern, staging is brought off in style and with great imagination. There is not a weak link in the singing, and the acting is at the highest level as well. The cast, including Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Dina Kuznetsova and Frank Lopardo, is joined by an acting chorus that forges a collective characterization that enlivens every scene they’re in.

Of course the opera has its problems. For one thing, people don’t do much. They just stand around picturesquely, read books and sit at writing tables. And the music is not always top flight Tchaikovsky. It has flashes of greatness everywhere, but much of it is boilerplate, standard issue accompaniment to the high-tone soap opera which unfolds at a leisurely pace.

Every Russian brings his own feelings to this unhappy love story and that prior engagement with the story probably helps to fill in the gaps in the episodic structure of the opera. For first-timers the great set pieces might seem disconnected. But that said, it would be wrong to dwell on the opera’s weaknesses, when there are so many things to savor in the Lyric production (which dates from 1997). In fact, the set pieces, led by Tatyana’s letter scene, are outstanding here.

A special word about Dina Kuznetsova: her very real character has depth and breadth, and she makes the writing of an effusive love letter an epic rollercoaster ride. Add in a rich and flexible voice, and we have a truly memorable Tatyana both as child and mature woman.

The successful performance of the letter scene determines how we judge Onegin’s patronizing rejection of her. If we identify with the girl’s ardent longing, then we will see Onegin as a cad, which he does seem to be in this defining interpretation by Hvorostovsky. This artist is at the peak of his craft now, so we need only sit and be seduced. His stage presence is magnetic, his movements are leonine and always on key. It does seem as if the Siberian tiger is overworked of late (he backed out of half the run this year), but Onegin’s principal emotion is ennui, and he isn’t on stage all that much, so the baritone could almost phone in his performance.

He’s got to be ready to take command of the last scenes, however, and Hvorostovsky does so with power and economy. There is an almost verismo climax as Tatyana turns and runs out of Onegin’s life forever, and he is confronted with his great bereavement and stands abashed and alone at curtain’s fall.

This high strung psychological drama would seem to be perfect for the music of Tchaikovsky, but his score doesn’t always plumb the depths as deeply as his purely orchestral music. Maybe the addition of words made the passions too concrete for him, so closeted, to put his soul out plain to see, with so much sexual ardor attached to his most revealing musical effusions. Maybe the constraints and conventions of Russian opera of the time put a rein on his creativity. His personal life was undergoing its greatest upheavals at the time, with his panic-driven marriage, and his admission of his homosexuality, so that has to be figured in.

But his understanding of the emotional center of Tatyana, from her repressed early years to her strong and ultimately triumphant later self, is at the root of this opera’s success. His own personal struggles shed light on his portrayal of her, Lensky , and Onegin’s rich and affecting stories.

Alfred Brendel's goodbye to Chicago

2008-03-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

The pianist Alfred Brendel would never, but never, inject any sentimentality into his patrician interpretations of the classics, but one wonders if he experienced a slight catch in his throat at the loving response his audience of long time fans gave to his farewell appearance at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

He offered a kind of microcosm of his career, great gobs of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert with smaller dollops of Bach and Liszt. It's not a broad range he covers, but he goes deep and his technique is still near flawless. He's seemingly slowed down a bit -- this was most noticeable in the Mozart Sonata -- but he fills the spaces he creates with such inight and precision, that it all seems right.

Never showy, he still fights the tics which show how intensely he is concentrating on the musical challenges he boldly tosses off.

His program was thoughtfully chosen, as much for the substance of the pieces as for the respect shown to the intelligence of his audience. Nothing commonplace, but music at the heart of the composers' work. Who programs the other Beethoven Sonata "Quasi una fantasia" instead of the Moonlight Sonata? Who would be likely to open a program with a complex series of variations which ends in an anticlimax as does the exquisite Haydn work? And the encores, spotlighting the lesser-known Brendel: the second movement, so romantic, from Bach's Italian Concerto, and some almost impressionistic Liszt.

The second half of the program was devoted to Schubert's last Sonata, and it too was a deeply considered choice -- a valedictory piece to begin with done with a profound understanding of the sequential nature of the structure, it's emotional rather than logical structure.

I was really moved to see this humble yet somehow grand artist walking slowly out of my life...

PROTEUS

Cyber Classical Program #65

2008-02-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

Sunday February 24, 2008

Nothing about the music we played. I'll fill that in later. We got all wrapped up in the Oscars and indulged our second love, film!

Oscar Night:

Bryant, what was important about this night?
What about the international aspect of the awards? Is that a change for the better?
-----------------------
Bryant: The number of international winners this year is unprecedented -- it seems. For critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum, who have written books deriding the Hollywood system and particularly the Academy Awards, this is a small step in legitimizing the awards to world cinema fans. And, if you can get past all the self-importance, the award ceremony presents a friendly face to the rest of the world, i.e., plenty of anti-Bush and anti-Republican statements are made. Doncha think?

Gerry: Actually, I don't. I haven't examined the list of winners in detail, but I'm willing to bet that all of them, with the possible exception of the low-budget "Juno," are beholden to Hollywood/American corporate money, just to get seen by Academy members. Token Liberalism is warm and fuzzy, but there are actually films out there that represent their cultures more honestly and with greater artistic integrity than the user-friendly stuff that passes for "international" cinema.

Bryant: I think that's an elitist and bogus phrase, if you'll excuse me. A movie made in France or Pakistan *is* international cinema, any way you look at it. As for greater artistic integrity, would you care to elaborate?

Gerry: Just because a film is made on Pakistan, or has Pakistani actors does that really make it Pakistani if the entire funding was European/American, or if the script was written by an Englishwoman, or if the actors are, say Indian or Sumatran? Take a look at the credits at the end of any International film that gets distribution widely, and you'll be enlightened..

As for artistic integrity, I don't mean that these beholden films can't have it but that for me, I am more moved by films that come from the heart of the culture that produces it rather than by ones that have as their primary function the utilization of cultural "style" for the purposes of making a lot of money for the international cartels that fund them.

Bryant: I see your point. But isn't a Pakistani film that has AmEuro backing better than no film at all? I still hope that many of the artistic choices are still left to the director and his/her vision. David Lynch continually goes to France's Studio Canal to get financing, but I still think of his films as uniquely his own. In my opinion, of which you will most certainly disagree, the best films transcend a culture or a politics or a nationality. Andrew Sarris and Truffaut talked a lot about an "autuer theory"; that movies are the complete products of its director. Do you seek out movies because they are about Iran or because Makmahlbaf, for instance, directed it? Or better yet, the storyline seems interesting?

Gerry: Well, I think the "auteur" theory is a bit "old", and not really accurate in a lot of ways. When a director employs a cinematographer who stamps the visual experience with his unique view (think Bergman and Nyquist), who is the auteur? Think of Fritz Lang making film noir under the American studio system (which he did try to stamp with his point of view, however subversively) and you'll see what I mean. Th artifact called "film" is such a tangled mess of creators and motives that pure "auteurism" is almost impossible now. By the way, I think it's almost impossible for any film to transcend its culture (which includes nationality), since what you are able to see is so much a part of where you're from, culturally, historically, personally, that you would almost inevitably miss all the cultural subtleties that make a film such a great way to communicate feeling to people.

Bryant: So even if a director gets "final cut,"--which is most certainly not always the case--then isn't he essentially authoring the film? Yes, many competing visions go into film production, so I would agree that "pure" auteurism is a myth. But if you have final say, then the baby's yours. This kind of relates to your idealistic view of world cinema which is completely unshackled by Western influences or finances. In other words, everything is corrupt and adulterated. OR, another way of looking at it, these ingredients make the films their own things. Truffaut has gone on record saying he thought Hitchcock's Hollywood period was more artistically interesting than his British period. But now I'm veering from the topic at hand. I need to be thinking about the QNG.

Gerry: Get to work, we'll do this later.

Cyber Classical #64

2008-02-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

February 17, 2008

Gerry: Apres une Reve -- the encore piece chosen today by Joshua Bell to follow his spectacular pyrotechnics in the Violin Sonata by Saint-Saens -- just about reflects my feeling this evening. I came home after the concert at Chicago's Symphony Center, pretty well nourished by Bell and his equally talanted accompanist Jeremy Denk, fell asleep and dreamed about baby grizzly bears dancing with ground squirrels (think PBS)...

I'm still trying to get my mind in gear as I start show# 64, accompanied by my partner in crime Bryant Manning, who has his head in his laptop trying to get done with a profile for Time Out Chicago, his new gig.

Vivaldi: L'estro armonico, Op. 3 #6 and Op3 #1

I start with a fluent performance of Vivaldi concertos byTafelmusik, the early-instrument group from Toronto - Bryant and I saw this group at Ravinia last year and I was underwhelmed and a bit disappointed by their choice of music and the drab performance of it. But their recordings sound much better, really alert and on the mark.

Gerry: What do you remember about the Ravinia performance by Tafelmusik?

Bryant: I reviewed it for the Sun-Times and thought it was OK. I liked their presentation (standing up like a cocktail party), but the music never seemed as crisp and alive as this disc. Go figure.

Nielsen: Symphony No. 4 "The Inextinguishable"; Paavo Berglund/Royal Danish Orchestra (BMG).

Bryant: I chose this because I love Nielsen's symphonies, but never got to know the 4th all that well. This performance was off-da-hook! Berglund got all he could out of his players, or to use a sports metaphor, they left everything on the field. Highly recommended!

Guess this piece:

Faure: Barcarolle #1: Jean-Philippe Collard, piano (EMI)

Bryant started out with a quick off the mark guess of Bach: and that wasn't as off as it seems, since there was some subtle counterpoint in the opening bars -- but then it got more decorative and flowery, and it wasn't long before the word "French" popped out. And it wasn't a very long stretch to "Faure." We should and will be playing more of this disc in future programs.

Prokofiev: Violin Sonata #1: Vadim Repin and Boris Berezovsky (Erato)

Gerry: For comparison with the performance that was the highlight of Bell & Denk's concert. Weightier violin playing, more power from Repin and Berezovsky, more sweetness and refinement from the other two artists. Both excellent performances; Bell trumps Vadim in projecting the feathery glissandi that mark the first and last movements. Berezovsky provides a heavy ominous opening that Denk didn't project as forcefully.

Augusta Read Thomas: Rumi Settings for violin and cello; Piano Etudes 1 & 2/Stefan Hersch, violin; Julian Hersch, cello, Amy Briggs Dissanayake, piano (Art CD)

Gerry: Mixed feelings on this music. Very clearly modernist in stance, and very well played by the artists. I will still be looking to Thomas' orchestral and larger chambeer works before I come to any conclusions about music.

Rodrigo: Coplas del Pastor enamorado (Domingo & Barrueco); Zarabanda lejana (Barrueco) (EMI)

Alexander Borodin: Symphony #2. Simon Rattle/ Berlin Philharmonic.
Gerry:Rattle plays this repertory piece like he means it! This is one of the best, and best recorderd performances I have heard of this, and it brings out the Borodin so known from the Polovitsian Dances.

Moritz Moszkowski: From All Over the World: 6 Pieces for Piano 4 Hands. (Tudor)

Bryant: These didn't quite capture my attention like the Mozkowski works you played last week. They seemed a little more dainty, but I still liked the thick textures throughout.

All for this week!

Ainadamar in Chicago

2008-02-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

When an artist of the magnitude and quality of Dawn Upshaw puts her heart and soul into a work by a little-known composer, you have to take notice. The very American soprano has been making a specialty of Osvaldo Golijov, and getting his work performed pretty extensively in major venues. To great applause – Ainadamar got a standing ovation on Feb 12th at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, where a pretty sizeable house witnessed a truly memorable performance.

From the very entrance of a distraught Ms Upshaw, the audience was pulled into the emotional heart of the story of a great artist’s murder by Falangists in 1939. The libretto by David Henry Hwang focused on the murder of Lorca as the central event of the piece – is it an opera? A passion? I think it is a new hybrid concert form where the drama is as important as the music.

The lighting, the sound effects, the mikes on the singers, the supertitles, everything was centered on the staged drama of an inexorable tragic loss. The reiterated gunfire (becoming percussion effects) was a jolting climax, but the piece sort of petered out in a too prolonged ending. Still, the performances were never less than compelling. I could wish all music or theater were as deeply felt as this one was.

Dawn Upshaw was always magnificent, with a new layer of chest tones that really extend her range of expression. Jessica Rivera was every bit as marvelous vocally (I was already converted when I saw her as Kitty Oppenheimer in Dr Atomic). And the magnetic Kelley O’Connor brought a flexible mezzo to the trouser role of Lorca. The three artists had wonderful dramatic and vocal rapport, and their trios were quite ravishing.

I think the music also represents an exciting new hybridity quite different from the artificial insertion of “exotic” elements into basically western contexts that is the older way. Here the foreign is domestic, and both are fully integrated into a coherent whole.

Interestingly, I was prepared to dislike this piece. Just hearing the CD as I did, without knowing anything about the narrative, was disorienting to me, and I dismissed the score as pointlessly eclectic. I missed the point. Another lesson in drawing conclusions too easily!

Cyber Classical #63

2008-02-10T19:39:00.000-08:00

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Burhan Ocal: Orient Secret/ Classical Ensemble of Istanbul
(L'empreinte Digitale)

Classical music from 18th century Turkey. Since I get to do the show on my own this week, Bryant being stuck in Michigan somewhere, I am taking the opportunity to play whatever the heck I want to. And today I want to hear recordings I haven't heard before -- it's the thrill of the new which keeps me going, and it's all new to me -- and you the listener!

10:05 ---
Bryant is back home (he just IM'd me) safe and sound if frozen. I'll get his take on the music I'm playing and post it here so we can still have our dialogue.

Anton Webern: Six Orchestral Pieces op. 6/ Sinopoli, Staatskapelle Dresden (Teldec)

Really rich recorded sound on this disc; and the music has its large moments as well as Webern's patented minimal quietnesses.

Pierre Boulez: Pli Selon Pli. Last Movement, "Tombeau"/ Boulez, BBC Symphony, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano (Erato).

Successor to Webern in many ways, this is a largely orchestral section of a larger work setting poems of Mallarmé. Like the Webern it has its big orchestral moments, but ends on a prolonged quietness....The Tombeau is in memory of Verlaine, who inspired the poem. I love all the cultural cross connections -- and all the artists involved are heroes of newness - my theme for the night!

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Symphony #5 (1962). Gabriel Chmura, Nat. Polish Radio Sym. (Chandos).

Angular and almost traditional, the music has a lot of Central European gestures; it's bold yet relaxed and lyrical in places. Multi-tonal. I like the last movement which insinuates itself into the ear and goes out like so many of tonight's pieces into quietness...

Update: Bryant had a bad trip; his window broke and he drove most the way exposed to the coldest day of the year. But he's home and dry now and listening to Cyber Classical. Tomorrow's his first day at his new position with Time Out Chicago. We're both at the beginnings of interesting and multi-faceted jobs, my third week at WFMT selling ads starts tomorrow, and I'm loving it so far. More as the events multiply....

Moritz Moskowski: New Spanish Dances for piano 4 hands (op 23). Ulrich Koella & Gerard Wyss.(Tudor)

Gerry: More "new" music. Fills the space nicely. Salon music with a slight edge.

Bryant from home: i loved the duo piano work: concise, ever-changing, and very melodic. That was a lot of fun. Who wrote it? Moszkowski?
RadioDePaul (11:07:35 PM): yes
PaceBM (11:07:44 PM): A gem I do say
RadioDePaul (11:07:58 PM): I'll post that thought.

Anton Arensky: Piano Trio No. 1 Op 32/Borodin Trio (Chandos)

Bryant:When I interviewed the Manhattan Piano Trio's manager last week, he said this was his favorite trio ever. I've yet to hear, so glad you're playing it!

Gerry: This performance by the Borodin Trio has to be the best available. They do put a lot of soul into it. 2nd movement is so suave.

Shostakovich: Piano Trio #2/ Vadim Repin, violin, Dmitry Yablonsky, piano, Boris Berezovsky, piano (Erato).

A couple of my favorite Russian musicians, good pals in real life (Vadim & Boris). It's a real gem of a performance. So to bed...

Tonight's Cyber Classical

2008-02-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

Sunday February 10, 2008

Bryant is trapped in Michigan by the elements, but the show will go on, so tune in to radio.depaul.edu at9PM for a program of CDs I've never heard. We'll listen for the first time together to music by Weinberg, Schwertsik, Raff and Arensky and some others.

Cyber Classical #62

2008-02-03T19:17:00.000-08:00

The blizzard program
Sunday 02/03/08
9:00 P.M. Chicago.

As the snow falls lightly down into pillowy drifts, and cars spin out and people scurry back to warm homes or shelters, Cyber Classical is on the air with music to listen to in darkness.

Charles Ives' Symphony #4, with its bizarre sonics and insistent originality is just the thing to get the blood circulating in housebound heads.

Ives: Sym 4/ Serebrier, LPO (BMG)

Then our contemporary original: John Adams and his Shaker Loops, shivery music for a winter night, with some of the same drama as in the Ives. And ice coldness. The orchestration is a lot heavier than I remember the original version.

John Adams "Shaker Loops" (1978, rev. 1983) Bournemouth
Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop.

So on to Bryant's first choice for the day:

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Concerto for Orchestra
Minnesota Orchestra. Composer conducting. (Reference Recordings)

Gerry: What made you pick a CD by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski for the show?

Bryant: As I was browsing my collection, I wanted to snag up a disc that wasn't something I'd heard a hundred times. In fact, I don't remember anything about this CD! Plus, the really weird looking name was enticing.

Gerry: I like this music; although it was dedicated to his memory, it doesn't sound much like Bruckner -- at least the first movement; there's a lot of hard edges and big orchestration, but no psychology that I can hear. More Bartok than anything. The Adagio goes into more tonal areas with drama and some liquidity. Then all hell breaks loose until the end, which goes out quietly. Pretty solid stuff. Do you think it will be entering, as they say, the repertoire?

Bryant: Theoretically, yes. Logically, no. Unless Pierre Boulez or some other visionary conductors with a world-class orchestra at their disposal was listening tonight, I doubt Strowaczewski will get his due exposure. But I'm going to be optimistic and predict there will be a revival at some point, because that was a pretty gripping and substantial work.

Guess this artist: Beethoven Symphony No. 7 (First movement)
Gustavo Dudamel; Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (DG)

Gerry: I thought it was propulsive and energy-filled. The studio sound here is so bad I originally thought it was a historic CD, or at least an older one. Not big on subtlety or refinement, but I bet Ludwig would've liked it... B, you saw young Gustavo live; how did he seem as compared to the impression given by this disk?

Bryant: Well, no recording is a suitable replacement for a live performance, and this is no exception. I didn't hear him do LvB in person, but heard his take on Mahler's 1st. I would agree with you that were wasn't a ton of nuance in the Beethoven, but I will say he is more interesting in the Mahler. Andrew Patner interviewed him for WFMT and asked him what other kinds of music he liked. He responded in the thickest Venezuelan accent: "I like-a da bo-leros!"

Saint-Saens: Parysatis -- Airs de ballet.
Geoffrey Simon/LPO (Cala)

Gerry: Here's an oddity, by one of the most fertile musical minds of the later 19th Century, who lived into anachronism, dying in 1921. It's a ballet suite from incidental music used in a play about some bloodthirsty Persian queen we've never heard of, and sounds like a briefer version of the bacchanal from Samson&Delilah, written decades earlier. Old SS never really changed that much, but always had a musical idea or two up his sleeve. Very rich stuff, I thought.

Anton Webern. "Langsamer Satz" for String Quartet. Carmina Quartet (Denon)

Bryant: This was nothing like the Webern we've come to know in his Op. 6 suite. This was a page out of early Schoenberg, his mentor, and other late romantic repertory. I loved it, because you could tell there was a serialist underneath the flowers and tenderness. It was a nice prelude to his thornier and more desolate sound. Any quick thoughts on it, Gerry?

Gerry: Very smooth and clean, without sentimentality, almost like some proto Norwegian semi modernist. Am I off base? I'll bring some major Webern next week for a quick comparison. I like listening to composers like Webern & Schoenberg in their early works because you can use them as keys to unlock the emotional kernel in their latter more unyielding pieces.

Brahms: String Quartet # 1/ Emerson Qt. (DG)

A fav of both of us. New and fresh. I picked up this CD on my first day at WFMT. Nice little extra!

Bryant: This was also my first appearance in Time Out Chicago. I wrote a 280-word review of this disc.

Liszt: Transcendental Etudes (Selections)
Boris Berezovsky, piano. (teldec)

Gerry: Boris Berezovsky and I go back: I had to cart him around to his various appointments in Chicago about ten years ago, and we ended up at his hotel bar competing in shots of vodka. I lost. My boss at WEA next day almost fired me for being such a demonstrative bore at a large fancy dinner party for Boris. A memorable night, though.

Cyber Classical #61

2008-02-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

Cyber Classical Show #61
January 27, 2008

Esa-Pekka Salonen. "Insomnia for Orchestra"
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Salonen, conductor.
(DG)

Matthias Pintscher: Sur "Depart"
NDR-Sinfonieorchester, Hamburg/Eschenbach
(Teldec)

Christoph Willibald Gluck. "Allesandro."
Musica Antiqua Koln. Reinhard Goebel.
(Archiv)

Guess this piece: Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto: Andante
Kyung Wha Chung, LSO/Previn
(Decca)

George Enescu:Suite No. 2 for orchestra
Orchestre Phil. de Monte-Carlo/ Lawrence Foster
(Erato)

George Crumb. "Voice of the Whale."
For electric flute (Daniel Pailthorpe), electric
cello (Bridget MacRae), electic piano (Julian Milford)
(BlackBox)

Eugene Ysaye: Sonata No. 4 for violin solo (Dedicated to Kreisler)
Philippe Graffin, violin
(Hyperion)

Mark-Anthony Turnage. "Two Memorials," "An Invention on Solitude,"
"Sleep On." The Nash Ensemble. (BlackBox)

Jean Sibelius. "En Saga."
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Kirill Kondrashin. RCO

Cyber Classical #60

2008-01-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Show no. 60
January 20, 2008
(Revised 1/23)

Glenn Branca. Symphony No. 8 (first movement)
The Glenn Branca Ensemble, con. G. Branca (Blast First)

My first exposure to this iconic figure. It's sufficiently hard to get his music on disc that I grabbed this at the DePaul library the minute I saw it. Ok, so that's what it's all about, is it? It's a bridge to the rock kids. Guitar based, relentlessly rhythmed and amplified. And it was a real experience -- much more to be there I'm sure, and I'd go in a minute. A welcome new wrinkle to our program.

György Ligeti. Trois Bagatelles for David Tudor.
Fredrik Ullén, piano. (BIS)

Bryant picked this for fellow critic Stephen Marc Beaudoin. We wuz bamboozeled! Should have noticed the dedication to David Tudor, which might have wakened associations with Cage, which might have made us wary but no, we put it on and actually thought we had a defective CD and dead air, so we panicked and pulled it off...and it was simply a witty modernist position being taken by Ligeti, consisting of a single piano note and its endless decay. At Cyber Classical at least you will get the truth even if it reflects against us...

Anton Arensky. Symphony No. 1 in B Minor, Op. 4.
USSR Symphony Orchestra; Yevgeny Svetlanov, con.
(VOX)

Our only 19th century item today. Bold, rich, and sounding
at times like Tchaikovsky at times like Rimsky-Korsakoff. His chamber music is well liked by some.

Arvo Part. Cello Concerto "Pro et contra."
Bamberg Sym; Neeme Jarvi, con. (BIS)

This was a "Guess This" item for Bryant. Part acting up. Very appropriate that the CD did too! He guessed it after several strong hints -- "west of Russia""...etc.
That magnificent Estonian Neeme Jarvi conducted with vigor.

York Bowen. Sonata in E minor for Violin & Piano, op. 112
Endymion Ensemble (Epoch)

Wow, a whole new composer to sample...this was music suitable for a matinee with the Queen Mother, and I'm not being patronising, I'm simply placing it in its time and place. I believe he's got an interesting Violin Concerto which has been compared to Glazunov's.

Henry Cowell. Symphony No. 15 (Thesis)
The Louisville Orchestra (Robert S. Whitney
& Jorge Mester, conductors) (first edition)

A late and somewhat academic piece with still lots of that great American gruffness and orchestral spunk. Recommended.

Debussy. Preludes, Book II.
Jorge Federico Osorio, piano. (Cedille)

Cedille goes on its unconcerned way just releasing the CDs it wants to and getting lots of positive reviews. They seem to have a business plan in place which insulates them from the tumbling market for CDs, or else they have another source of income.

Philip Glass. Symphony No. 5 (Selections)
Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies, con.
(Nonesuch)

I finally got to audition this 2-CD Nonesuch box before the show and I was immediately taken with this vocal extravaganza written for the Millenium. I think it is first class Glass. I loved the text, the chorus, the soloists and the conducting. As for Glass' music, there will have to be some winnowing pretty darn soon!

Dr Atomic in Chicago

2008-01-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

For me there was a disconnect between what I was hearing and what I was seeing. The music of Adams was rich, inventive and full of foreboding. The choral sections were particularly strong and well-sung. I thought the sound design was involving and even the anti-climactic ending was satisfying to me. The baritone (almost a tenor at times) of Gerald Finley was always in the right place, and his performance of Donne's tortured poetry, standing in front of the curtained bomb, was riveting. Good singing from the rest of the cast as well, especially from soprano Jessica Rivera as Kitty.

The work however failed to cohere for me. The staging was great in spots but studded with arbitrary and overly fussy elements. I was not impressed with the balletic bits, which reminded me more of Sharks and Jets (old in their time), and seemed to be deployed to give some needed physicality to a static script.

The libretto was the problem, and what was happening on the stage was too often uninteresting in spite of the profundity of the issues. It seems as if Peter Sellars the stage director couldn't tell Peter Sellars the librettist when enough was enough...A good example was in the lengthy bedroom scene in Act I. But there was so much good music and such a core of drama (can we say Apocalypsis) underlying it all that it's hard to be too hard on the thing. It's just that this opera will not be on any top ten of mine any time soon.

CYBER CLASSICAL PROGRAM #59

2008-01-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY, JAN. 13, 2008

I call this session the “Kleist session.” read to the end to find out why….

Glazunov. Symphony 6.
Russian State Symphony Orchestra. Valeri Polyansky, con. (Chandos)
A composer who always delivers value…this symphony is full of orchestral variety and rewards the listener with a journey through the landscape of late Romanticism. Annotators call him imitative of Tchaikovsky and Wagner, and I guess he stood on their shoulders, but his work is much less fraught with emotion, more extroverted; it just flows naturally. I always look forward to hearing his music, and will be playing more in the future. The Chandos recording is a bit tinny sounding, but a good idiomatic performance.

Bright Sheng. "China Dreams"
Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra
Samuel Wong (Naxos)
Bright Sheng seems to have made all the right moves in his varied musical career. Bryant noticed that each movement of this work was dedicated to a different conductor and his biography reads like a grant proposal. All of which would be irrelevant if the music was more engaging. It is fluent, a kind of Chinese flavored take on Gershwin, Copland, Respighi and other western composers, but I really was not feeling any compulsion to pay it much attention.

Brahms "German Requiem" 4th mvmt "Wie lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen."
Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado (DG)
Bryant’s dedication to a fellow critic. Obviously discriminating…

Charles Ives "Symphony No. 2"
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, con. (RCA)
We don’t play Ives very often on Cyber Classical. This should be a staple item, and reminds me how good a conductor Ormandy was in repertoire not associated with him. I think he got better as he got older and the Philadelphia strings were just purrfect in those days.

Brahms. "Piano Quartet No. 3”
Rubinstein, p. Guarneri Quartet (RCA)
How amazing this recording is! Rubinstein at close to 80 and the youthful Guarneri breaking boundaries…

Harrison Birtwhistle. "Punch and Judy"
The London Sinfonietta, David Atherton. (Etcetera)
In another job I have noticed this recording being always in demand, and sadly it’s out of print. I don’t know what’s up with Etcetera; they’ve got the first SACD version of the Ring just out, so they’re in the game still, but a lot of their older classic titles have gone missing.

Which brings up the question of the SACD: are they staying or going? Are they good for all or good for nothing special? Do we really need them? Maybe they’re the last best improvement to the venerable CD before it becomes obsolete. Any other thoughts?

Othmar Schoeck "Elegie Op. 36" Various songs
Andreas Schmidt, baritone (cpo)
A composer I’ve liked before – in particular the Horn Concerto. This music is dark and melancholy, based on poems by Lenau about a lost love. Bryant pointed out Schoeck’s Opera Penthesilea based on the Kleist play. Next to read! Is there a recording of this in print?

Brings our time full circle as I had earlier copied a translation of the”Beggerwoman of Locarno“ for Bryant to try to hook him on Kleist. Here’s the ending, prefiguring Poe, who must have known about Kleist:

Overcome with horror and tired of life, the Marquis had taken a candle and set fire to the wooden paneling all around him. In vain, his wife sent people in to rescue the wretched man; he had already found his end in the most dreadful manner possible; and his white bones, gathered together by his people, still lie in that corner of the room from which he once ordered the beggarwoman of Locarno to stand up.

Cyber Classical Program #58

2008-01-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

Sunday, January 6, 2008 9 - 12AM

WRDP. Radio.Depaul.edu

We start a new year; thoughts of the death of our show are far behind us lost in the swirling waters of our wake. We're like a transatlantic liner turned ghost ship, still plying the old route, even though we've been superceded, outmoded. and unnoticed for 2 years. Not many passengers on board, and they are all hollow-eyed and wraithlike, older than Eld, fixed on the past with relentless intensity.

And yet...
The vital pulse of the music brings a flush to pallid cheeks; how can this beauty not be young forever?

Here's what we played:

Jacques Offenbach: La Perichole
Regine Crespin, Alain Vanzo, Jules Bastin
Alain Lombard/ Strassbourg Phil. (Erato)

Starting the New Year and ending the Holiday Season with Operetta is a tradition worth keeping up. And this recording has so much to offer: three great voices and a vital flow of energy from start to finish. It dates from 1977, rather late for Crespin, but she is always an artist who inhabits the soul of whatever she sings, especially if it is French. And as for someone who is forever young, who but Offenbach?

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari: String Trio in B minor.
Deutsches Streichtrio (CPO)

Bryant picked this out from the DePaul library collection. It's an early work by a mostly unplayed late Bavarian-Italian musician which he pegged as more classical than he expected. I found it fluent and well-played. Another unknown gem from CPO.

Versailles: L'Ile Enchante
Capriccio Stravagante/Skip Sempe
(Alpha) Cuts 18-21.
Music by D'Anglebert, Lully and Marais.

A treasure trove from the wonderful Alpha catalogue, reflecting happier days at the ingrown court of Louis XIV. Skip Sempe plays D'Anglebert harpsichord music, a Marais sarabande calls to mind the great viol music of the time, and we hear Lully's incidental music to Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme before Strauss got ahold of it.

Beethoven: 6 Bagatelles, op.126, 7 Landlerische Tanze
Olli Mustonen (London).

LvB's last piano work; playful and full of contrast. Our "mystery piece"-- well-chosen by Bryant to mystify even this Beethoven lover...solid playing from Mustonen.

Einojuhani Rautavaara: Symphony 8 "The Journey"
Leif Segerstam, Helsinki Philharmonic (Ondine)

Our clear winner for this day's show! A dramatic deeply felt symphonic showpiece. I think the Chicago Symphony could take this one on with great success -- maybe Maestro Haitink would consider? Not that this performance isn't wonderful. Go buy it!

Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet in F sharp minor
Chilingirian Quartet w/ Stephen Coombs, piano. (Hyperion)

Bryant, who is always up on the backstory of the music we play was surprised to learn that Hahn was Proust's lover and friend. He was also a consistantly interesting creator of gorgeous salon music, and Hyperion has brought us a masterpiece of the genre.

Werner Egk: Fearlessness and Goodwill
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor.
Bavarian Radio Orchestra/ Istvan Kertesz
(Orfeo) Recorded in 1966?

Two artists early gone in an Orffian oratorio. Great conducting and a peerless voice distinguish this old-fashioned piece from the composer Hitler declared a worthy successor to Wagner.

So it goes...until we bring you more discoveries next week.

2006-08-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
Program #26
Aug 28, 2006

Bartok: Two Portraits for Orchestra
SWR Symphony Orch.
Hans-Martin Schneidt

Jardin Ottoman
Burhan Ocal, tanbur & voice
Taksim, Pesrev & Song
(L'empreinte Digitale)

A good pairing, since Bartok surely encountered Turkish music like this in his musicological wanderings. This entry gave rise to some pointed questions from Bryant as to just what constitutes "classical" music, and whether Jazz or "World" music counts.

I've never had an answer to this conundrum & can only say I know it when I hear it, and Turkish classical passes the test easily: it's a complex, organised pattern of tones (or actually, modes)and rhythms , used in elite situations, and represents the apex of aesthetic sophistication. (Yes, I like it)
I'm looking for some Persian classical music to play in the future...

Cherubini: String Quartet # 3
Hausmusik, London
-----------------------------------------------
Mystery Piece:
Bach, Italian Concerto
Maggie Cole, Hpscd
Sarasa Emsemble

Top of the second hour regular opportunity to win a CD; no takers today. More cuts from this disc will be played in later shows featuring vocalist Emily Van Evera, who is in magnificant voice in music by Purcell & Handel.

J.A. Hiller: Overture "Der jagd"
Max Reger: Hiller Variations (op. 100)
Herbert Blomstedt/ Gewandhaus Orchestra, Leipzig.
(Querstand)

A case where the derivative far outshines the source.
Played in a live recording by a legendary conductor & orchestra. This disc is from a celebratory box set dedicated to Blomstedt & the Gewandhaus on the Querstand label. A real rarity. I'll play the Nielson 5th sometime soon.

Alan Bush: 8 Preludes
Peter Jacobs, piano

Here's a name of ill-omen that Bryant brought in; new to me and interesting. I wasn't immediately grabbed, but on reflection there was some interesting piano writing and it was pretty well played. Bush was a tough old Communist who lived to 95.

Ernest Chausson
Poeme
Philippe Graffin, violin, Vernon Handley/ Royal Liverpool Phil, Orch.
(Avie)

Brand new from Avie, and with such a fine recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto by this young French violinist.

Vaughan Williams: 5 Variants of Dives & Lazerus
Barry Wordsworth/ New Queen's Hall Orch.

2006-08-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
Program # 25
Aug. 20, 2006

Dante: Lo mio servente core
Ensemble Lucidarium
L'empreinte digitale
cuts 1-4

Messe de Tournai
Rene Clemencic
Clemencic Consort
Oehms
cuts 3 & 4

Janacek: Glagolitic Mass
Eliahu Inbal
Deutsches-Symphonie Orch. Berlin
Denon

Faure Pavane
Orch & Ch. Sym. de Monreal
Charles Dutoit
Decca

Debussy: Pelleas & Melisande
Act 4
Roger Desormiere, cond.
EMI

Debussy: Reverie
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano
Decca

Faure: Pelleas & Melisande
Michel Plasson, Orch de Toulouse
Frederica Von Stade, sop.
EMI

Schonberg: Pelleas & Melisande
Hungarian Nat. Phil. Orch.
Zoltan Kocsis, cond.
BMC (Budapest Music Center)

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2006-08-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
PROGRAM #24
AUG 13, 2006

Grieg: Adagio from Piano Concerto in A min./ Francois Rene Duchable, Orch Phil. de Strasbourg (Decca)

Prokofiev: Flute Sonata in D maj./ Marina Piccinini, flute, Andraes Haefliger, piano (Avie). First U.S. broadcast.

Schnittke: Sonata for Violincello & Piano (1978)/ Maria Kliegel vc, Raimun Havenith p. (Naxos)

Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible (complete film music) / Riccardo Muti, Philharmonia Orch. (EMI)

William Boyce: Symphonies #8 & #5/ English String Orch. William Boughton (Nimbus)

Britten: Simple Symphony/ Britten, conductor (Decca)

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PROGRAM NOTES

Bryant began the show solo, as I ran three blocks for the CD I wanted -- in 6 minutes time. First piece was the Mystery Music for listeners to guess, which turned out to be the slow movement from Grieg's Piano Concerto. I had no idea...2 minutes and counting...

Breathless I ran in with the disc I had left in the car's CD player, the new disc by flutist Marina Piccinini. Nowhere in the USA except here on Radio Depaul. Bryant voiced his true feelings about the flute and its wimpy sound..I promised to play the flute sonata by Poulenc in the near future. He did like the Andante, however. Me too.

Schnittke: not wimpy, but with a delicate ending.

Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible: not wimpy!This ran 74 minutes.

Boyce: Symphony #8 in Dmin & #5 in D; 2 contrasted styles, both Handelesque. Or Purcellian. Or just Boycean, since he really had his own way with the short-lived English style. Was he the last?

Britten: Simple Symphony/ Britten conducting (stylishly). (Decca)

After 74 minutes of Slavic intensity, Bryant's last two choices cleaned the palatte like lemon sorbet.

2006-08-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
PROGRAM #23 UPDATED
August 6, 2006
6:00 - 9:00 PM

Bach,Keyboard Concerto #7 in Gmin BWV 1058/ Angela Hewitt, piano, Australian Chamber Orch., Tognetti, dir.

Turgenev: Fathers & Sons/ Extract read by Bryant Manning

Mozart: Fantasia for Pianoforte K 475

Muzio Clementi:Symphony #1 in Cmaj/Claudio Scimone, Philharmonia Orch. (Erato)

Gluck/Kreisler: Air from Orfeo/ Grumiaux, violin (UNI)

Kurt Atterberg: Symphony #7/ (CPO)

Delius: Walk Through the Paradise Garden/ A. Davis, BBC Sym. Orch. (Teldec)

Szymanowski: String Quartet # 1

Dvorak: Piano Quartet #2 in G/ Ax, Stern, Larado, Ma (Sony)
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PROGRAM NOTES

Rather sketchy information on the play list, but enough to identify most of them. A very substantial program, highlighted by the reading from Turgenev. Maybe Bryant will pass along the text.

The Bach concerto, a staple of the piano for a century, gets a good run-thru;from Angela Hewitt. It was intended to clear the air for the switch into prose.

The reading was a worldly passage depicting a lifestyle long past, and the Mozart Fantasy was somehow just the right music for it. The period instrument sounded as though it could have been in the family for 50 years or more.

Clementi is interesting as much for his faded reputation as for his music. Such a giant in his day, and now so forgotten. His obsession for perfection, which prevented the symphonies from being printed, reminds me of Dukas, another obsessive, and also of Debussy, and Sibelius. They all created masterpieces, but at much personal cost, and with long stretches of non-productivity and downright self-destructive behavior.

Atterberg, on the other hand was fertile in musical thoughts for decades, and produced a body of work that is always alive and changing. The symphony Bryant picked is from a box set of his complete symphonies on the CPO label: a nice overview of a fluent musician.

Stay tuned...I go to Pittsburgh, but return in time for Cyber Classical Radio.

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NEXT PROGRAM

Long planned, a 75-min piece featuring (Russian) words and Music from the film score to Ivan the Terrible by Prokofiev. Muti conducts magnificently.

2006-08-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
Program #22
July 30, 2006
Gerry Fisher & Bryant Manning

Over an hour late due to unavoidable circumstances, so we lost any listeners who tuned in at our regular start time of 6PM. Turned out that we were playing music for 2 people and ourselves...

Avison/Scarlatti: Concerto #5/ Cafe Zimmermann (Alpha)

Beethoven: Symphony #7/ Janos Ferencsic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Live 1979) CSO CD

Du Min Xin: "Great Wall Symphony" (Marco Polo)

Darius Milhaud: Symphony #4 ("1848")/ Milhaud, conductor (Erato)

Handel: Arias from Theodora and La Lucrezia./Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Avie)

Chopin: Rondo a la Krakoviak, Op.14/ (DG)-----------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM NOTES

The Beethoven was an unexpected discovery; a great night at the CSO in the glory years. Janos Ferenscic was a fine conductor unknown on this side of the iron curtain.

Bryant only played one movement of the "Great Wall Symphony" , which was plenty...

In the Nationalist vein as well was Milhaud's "occasional" Symphony ("Composed for the centenary of the 1848 Revolution"). Militarism subverted with a Gallic wink.

Bryant suggested we should play something by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who had just died. I listened to the Handel aria disc she did for the French label Avie, and picked two sublime moments to celebrate her achievement. In the aria from La Lucretia, we get a viola da Gamba solo which is Handel at his creative best. (Margriet Tindemans has been in Chicago on occasion; a wonderful gambist).

The last piece in our truncated show was Chopin's early Rondo a la Krakoviak, rounding out the Nationalist theme this week.

2006-08-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

CYBER CLASSICAL
PROGRAM #21
July 23, 2006

Radio DePaul WDRP
Radio.depaul.edu

Schubert: Symphony 9/ James Levine, Chicago Symphony (DG)

Claude Debussy: String Quartet in gmin/ Quartetto Italiano/Recorded 1954. (EMI)

Anton Webern: 6 Pieces for Orchestra/ Hans Rosbaud, Concertgebouw Orch/ Recorded 1959. (Teldec)

Sandor Veress: Concerto for Piano, Strings & Percussion/Andras Schiff, piano; Heinz Holliger, Budapest Festival Orchestra (Teldec)

Ligeti: Lontano/ Jonothan Nott, Berlin Philharmonic (Teldec)

Milton Babbitt: Homily for snare drum; Beaten Paths for marimba/ Group for Contemporary Music (Naxos)

J.S. Bach: French Suite #1/ Glenn Gould, piano (Sony)

J. M. Kraus: Symphony in C#/ Peter Sundkvist, Swedish Chamber Orchestra (Nazos)

Antonio Rosetti: Symphony in Efl major. Concerto Koln (Teldec)

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PROGRAM NOTES

An appropriate start for a Chicago-based show with the CSO conducted in expansive style by James Levine. Bryant and I heard Brahms... The Debussy provoked Bryant to say he would never have guessed the composer, and I saw his point: no foggy impressionism here -- nothing but clear rationality in crystalline lines of sound. France seen through Italian spectacles.

The "First Hearing" piece Bryant played for me to guess was early Webern which starts out very big, like the post-Romantic Schonberg, not at all like the later gnomic miniaturist Webern became. Tricky. Not to mention that it was an old recording by the Concertgebouw Orchestra!

The Sandor Veress Concerto is an unknown treasure of a piece, with lots of color and ample substance; glorious playing from Schiff...a favorite artist for both of us, it turns out.

Some short excercises by New Music Master Milton Babbitt made us laugh. First hearing for both of us...and probably the last...

The last hour was devoted to 18th Century music, with Bryant throwing a softball "First Hearing" question, asking the listener to identify the composer, not the piece...and someone called! Unfortunately, that meant Bryant had to give up his Glenn Gould Bach CD to the winner, so it was joy mixed with sadness...

The last two pieces were serindipitous choices that featured music by unknown composers of great merit who lived amost exactly contemporaneously: J.M. Kraus (1756-92) and Antonio Rosetti (c. 1750 - 92). I was quite taken by Rosetti, a transplanted Czech, but was trumped by Bryant's choice selection by Kraus, who is a much more interesting composer...

July 30, 2006

(To come)

2006-06-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

The core question is:What makes this form of "journalism " different from what came before? how does the new medium we are swimming around in change or affect the results we achieve? Is it a matter of scale? Speed? Multiplicity?Is interactivity a real difference, or just a rewiring of Letters to the Editor?

Did Mass Media really begin with the Printing Press? Did Cyberspace begin with the Internet?
.
And in regard to purposes: are the unintended consequences of our activities more significant than the conscious objective?

The first printed book was the Bible; the unintended consequence of the printing press was to destroy the hegemony of the Bible.

The objective of the Aztec power elite was to keep the masses ignorant and supersitious. The unintended consequence of that was to render the social fabric so weak that it was destroyed in an instant by a handful of determined individuals who exploited just those weaknesses. Compare Saddam's Iraq. Contrast England in WWII.

My inclination is to believe that there is nothing new under the sun, so it will take a lot to convince me that the core elemants of our communication technology are any different from those of the Sumerians who produced writing as an accounting medium and unleashed consequences that are playing out to this day.

2006-06-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

"THE BLOG"

Interested in this subject? Post your definition of what a BLOG is. and how to best use it.

The first thing is to understand the medium: what is it? How is this medium best exploited? Apply McLuhan.
The second is to focus on the objective. What purposes are best served by this medium? Personal? Political? Social? All and many others?
How is a blog dissimilar from, say, the Spectator Papers? Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats"? or Eleanor Roosevelt's column "My Day"? The "New Journalism" of the Seventies? Is a blog a "mass" medium?
Are the popular effects of the old journalism mirrored in the effects of the blogosphere today? aren't they just exponentially bigger? Or are they resally different?
Other aspects: Interactivity; breaking news (tsunami info from the field)
Negative potential; Disinformation (deliberatewly created by enemies) Spying; Apply Orwell. Misinformation. Gossip reported as fact. Unsubstantiated statements on equal plane with substantial research.

And so on...

Playlist

2006-06-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

WRDP Show #12 Playlist
Easter Sunday Program 4/16/06: Olivier Messiaen: Couleurs de la Cite Celeste/ Orchestre du Domaine Musical, Pierre Boulez (Erato)Mahler: Symphony 2, 4: Urlicht, 5: Im Tempo des Scherzo/ Eliahu Inbal, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (Denon)Biber: The Resurrection from Die Rosenkranz-Sonaten, John Holloway, violin, Tragicomedia (Virgin)Brahms: Schicksalsied/ Danish National Symphony & Choir, Gerd Albrecht (Chandos)Beethoven: Christus am Olberge/ Domingo, Orgornasova, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Kent Nagano (Harmonia Mundi)Derek Jarman/ ST: Blue, 1&2John Corigliano: Sym 1, (1): Of Rage & Remembrance Barenboim, Chicago Sym., Stephen Hough, piano. (Erato)Arvo Part: Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten/Neeme Jarvi, Scottish Nat Orch. (Chandos)Bach: Aria, Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen, from Cantata No. 82, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Nonesuch)