Through These Ears

Behind The Scenes With Andreas Scholl

Countertenor superstar Andreas Scholl has produced a very nice short film of interviews and rehearsal voyeurism.  Scholl hosts a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for Handel's Partenope at the Danish Royal Theater.  Even though they're brief, he gets some good insights into the work from both Music Director Lars Ulrik Mortensen and scenic designer Lous Désiré.

I suppose Scholl wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible with this, so everyone speaks English.  Although you may have to turn the volume up a bit to hear all the rehearsal chatter.

(From il giornale della musica)

Scholl makes an interesting point about Handel possibly adapting to the new (for his day) style simply to satisfy the public.  He ran his own company in London, and had to constantly struggle to turn a profit.  Handel's fortunes went through many boom and bust cycles, and it was a tough scene.  Sometimes the fad was for oratorios, sometimes for opera in the Italian style, sometimes it was something else entirely. Partenope was premiered at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, London, in 1730. 

This was just a couple of years after Handel had to shut down the company he ran for about ten years, the Royal Academy of Music (no relation to today's RAM).  He dissolved his company because everyone in London wanted to see John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and similar works.  So his response was to start a new Academy, and Partenope came along soon after.  Small wonder he was trying to strike a new pose with the music.

So London has been a tough scene for almost 300 years.  No wonder Daniele Gatti was looking for a break.

The short film is well worth watching.  The short-haired brunette is Tuve Semmingsen and the blonde singer we see briefly is the Partenope, Ingrid Dam-Jensen.  Also, it turns out that Scholl's doing three of these behind-the-scenes films, and he has a link to the first two on his own website. And is it just me, or does Scholl's speaking voice sound like a cross between Placido Domingo and Mandy Patinkin?

Danish radio station DR P2 will be broadcasting the performance live on October 11.

Proms 73: Vaughan Williams, Xenakis, Holst

(Following from this preliminary post)

Sometimes I have to admit that I'm guilty of being the kind of listener about whom Thomas Beecham said, "The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes."  I'm not English, obviously, but I can't deny that there are times when I just like the cool sounds.

Proms 73 was one of the better programming decisions I've seen in a while, obvious as the them was.  The Planets and Sinfonia Antarctica are not exactly galaxies apart in their character and perspective, and I would imagine that a space-themed work by any composer other than someone of Xenakis's unique vision would have made this program seem much more mundane.  Taking a trip to the Plëiades provided enough separation in time and soundspace to make the Holst sound more fresh than it would have otherwise.  That's what good programming is supposed to do.

Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antarctica sounds exactly like what it is:  a score trying to depict musically what a movie is showing visually.  Without knowing this was specifically about an Arctic expedition ("Scott of the Antarctic"), the otherworldly sounds - even the wind machine - could evoke any kind of alien landscape.  In the end it's all a bit too blatant for me, but that's just my own attitude towards the composer in general.

The performance was very straightforward, took the music at face value, and Brabbins even had a bit of fun with it.  This wasn't exactly an inspired performance overall, but for the most part well-played and directed.  Brabbins created the necessary tension most of the time, and mostly let the music do what it does. I was taken to that alien landscape more by the sounds of Vaughan Williams's music than I was by anything special in the performance.  Perhpas I was too busy anticipating the Xenakis to appreciate this properly, but that's how it goes.

There certainly are plenty of cool sounds in Xenakis's Plëiades, and right from the start he creates an entrancing soundworld.  But there's so much more going on that makes these sounds work in the ear, so it doesn't get tedious within two minutes.  It's the shifting patterns that does it; that, and the composer's attention to the details of sound.  There is a wide variety of instrumental color.  The first three sections feature instruments of a particular kind.  The first movement uses metallic sounds, in this case a microtonal instrument Xenakis invented for it called a sixxen - from SIX players and XENakis.  The second movement uses mallet/keyboards (such as the vibraphone).  Next the music combines sixxen and mallet instruments with skins (drums), and the final movement uses drums of different sizes. if figures are repeated, the kaleidoscopic palette of sound keeps it fresh.  This only happens, though, when the composer is extremely skilled, and has the imagination and craft to put it together.

Speaking of skill, the musicians of 4-MALITY and O Duo were pretty outstanding.  They dedicated a lot of effort to this, which is the only that this kind of music ever happens.  Anyone who saw or heard the concert will know that they spent four days of intensive rehearsal with a Xenakis expert (who's name I didn't catch), and played with a click track in their ear for the performance.  That's probably the only way anyone could get through all those polyrhythms and aural textures.

Interestingly, one of the reasons why Xenakis composed in this rather exotic soundworld is because he was interested in working outside of the standard realm of pitch and harmony.  I'll let the composer's own words speak here:

"Linear polyphony is self-destructive in its current complexity. In reality, what one hears is a bunch of notes in various registers. The enormous complexity prevents one from following the tangled lines and its macroscopic effect is one of unreasonable and gratuitous dispersion of sounds over the whole sound spectrum. Consequently, there is a contradiction between the linear polyphonic system and the audible result, which is a surface, a mass.

This inherent contradiction with polyphony will disappear only once sounds become totally independent. In fact, since these linear combinations and their polyphonic superpositions are no longer workable, what will count will be the statistical average of isolated states of the components’ transformations at any given moment."

In other words, cool sounds.  (The above quote is from here.)

The sounds were so inspiring that someone in the audience was apparently moved to vocalize his enthusiasm at the top of his lungs (approx. 9:10 into it).  Because the music had reached one of several ecstatic plateaus, and the sounds were so...well...otherworldly, this extra spontaneous noise hardly even seemed out of place.  I'm sure there plenty of people in sympathy with the feelings of the noisemaker, who in almost any other circumstance would be (quite rightly) shushed within an inch of his life.

The Planets was something of a let-down after all that.  Brabbins did not get the best from the BBC SO players.  Ragged wind entrances and what sounded to me like a lack of enthusiasm in the upper strings much of the time kept this from being anything more than an average performance.  He has some fine ideas for the piece, but the musicians needed to do more than just wallow in the spacey orchestra sounds.  This is one of those cases where I was definitely enjoying the composer much more than the performer(s).

One of these days, I'm going to get someone to organize a concert program featuring excerpts from famous film scores and the serious works from which they were stolen inspired.  Both the Vaughan Williams and the Holst are good examples, even more so because theSinfonia Antarctica is actually a film score turned into a concert piece.  As for the connection between the The Planets and film music, all I can say is that I remember when we played this piece back in my university orchestra days.  So many of the student musicians were muttering, "Man, this is ripped off from Star Wars," that the conductor had to actually stop rehearsal and make the announcement that the piece was was completed in 1916.  I used to have fun with this stuff in my record store (remember those?) days as well.  Any title for this program probably shouldn't include the term "Human Xerox Machine", but I'm sorely tempted.

I must add one comment about the overly intrusive applause between every single movement.  Putting aside for the moment the argument about whether or not anything should be permitted between movements, one thing has become clear to me.  Either my suggestion about encouraging the "shuffle", or any other idea of some way to acknowledge the moment besides clapping would certainly prevent loud noises from stepping all over the last note, as happened at the end of Uranus.  Even if someone just can't wait, or perhaps in the event that someone just couldn't tell the music wasn't over, the soft shuffling of feet or a light murmur definitely wouldn't have killed the moment.  That's really what it's all about anyway. 

Curiously, there was no applause between movements in the Vaughan Williams.  That only started in the Holst.  Did someone, merely intending to show their appreciation for just that moment, unintentionally cause a cascade effect?  It sure got worse and worse after every movement.  Of course, once it becomes obligatory and uniform, the whole point of applauding just for that one bit gets lost.

If one little friendly, polite, non-snobbish, inclusive and encouraging remark had been made beforehand about what sort of gestures or sounds were appropriate in these situations, it would most likely have prevented the most egregious moments,as well as enabled whoever it was to actually communicate his appreciation of the moment to the players. As for the incident of stepping all over the last note, even if one is going to allow clapping for the lack of any other inspired choice, the mere mention of, you know, waiting for a moment before bursting into applause would have helped immensely.  But we're afraid to do that because we don't want to appear snobbish or contribute to the oppressive, stuffy atmosphere that supposedly scares people away, etc.  Argh.  Rant ends.

My recommendations for recordings of all these works are:

Vaughan Williams from the complete set conducted by Adrian Boult (can't find an individual release),

The Xenakis performed by the musicians for whom the piece was written,

and for the Holst, Boult again, or Gardiner with an added bit of fun from Percy Grainger.

Valery Gergiev at the Klara Festival: Ustvolskaya, Tchaikovsky, and Silvestrov

(Following from this post)

This concert both met and exceeded my expectations.  It was great to hear two interesting works which were new to me, and to hear Gergiev in music far outside the Standard Rep.

The program:

Ustvolskaya:  Symphony No. 3
Tchaikovsky:  Violin Concerto*
Silvestrov:  Symphony No. 6

Sergei Krilov, violin*
Maryinsky Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, cond.

I had the broadcast start time as an hour before the concert itself actually began.  It turns out this is because Klara had an hour of preliminary stuff as part of the official broadcast, just to set up the mood for the actual concert program.  There was some discussion of Ustvolskaya and Silvestrov, as well as a nice interview - in English, with quick translations by the host - with Krilov (he likes new music and has new works written for him - I like him already).  He spoke about working with Gergiev,

Interspersed amongst the dialogue were recordings of various violin works, including performances by Salvatore Accardo and .  I don't know how I would feel if I was a journeyman violinist coming in to do one of the biggest warhorses of them all, and the radio station was playing other famous works performed by bigger names for the hour before I went on.  Krilov probably had no idea, of course.  The interviewer asked him if he liked to listen to the rest of the concert when he was performing, or if he just focused on his own concerto and nothing else.  I found that a bit odd.  I understand being curious if the soloist stayed around for the rest of the program after he was done, but before?

The only other oddity was the fact that sometimes they cut off the end of whatever recording they were playing to go back to the live signal.  They even did this in between pieces.  I know they had a lot of air time to fill, but maybe they were trying to avoid becoming the talk-fest that some German and French concerts broadcasts can become. 

Now on to the music.

Much like the couple of chamber works I've heard by Galina Ustvolskaya, her Symphony No. 3 was stark and on the dark side.  It's all sparse textures, often unisons, or tone clusters in the winds.  As seems to be her style, she is very economical with her ideas and figures.  The work is built around a seven-note motif, and a limited set of intervals.  Deliberate pacing, almost laser-like direct musical lines are enhanced by the sharp, pointed winds and percussion which make up the bulk of the instrumentation.  The piece isn't long, only about sixteen minutes or so.

The spoken text (there was no listing for the male voice doing the reading) is from a collection of medieval religious and literary works of a leading medieval scholar and chronicler, Herman of Reichenau, aka Hermanus Contractus ("Herman the Cripple").  All of Ustvolskaya's symphonies feature liturgical texts of some kind, and all appear to come from this source.  The composer herself has stated that she does not practice any religion, but rather considers herself to be "spiritual", and composes her music with that kind of outlook.  So, as there doesn't seem to be any personal connection to the religious text itself, I wonder if the semi-reclusive and physically self-conscious Ustvolskaya feels some sort of kindred spirit in Herman the Cripple?

Ustvolskaya apparently notates her music without barlines, but the deliberateness of the lines and figures probably helps keep things together.  The same note values recur along with that seven-not figure, which seems to a slight reworking of her famous teacher's "DSCH" signature, with one added note and repetition of another.  The figure nearly always ends with the same note repeated three times, which creates a sense of forward motion.  A plaintive, semi-dramatic reading of the "Jesus Messiah, Save Me" text fits right in with the uncomfortable, almost suffering instrumental music.

Apart from the occasional rough wind entrance (like the opening chord), Gergiev had things well under control.  However, I did not get the sense of much inner detail outside of highlighting the seven-note riff and maintaining the same deliberate (there's that modifier again), pointed attack on each note from the both the percussion and winds.  It wasn't like he just glossed over all the details, but more as if he saw the obvious basics in the music, and that was it, let's play.  The composer's economy of means probably makes her scores pretty readable, bar lines or no.  But it sounded to me like there was some deeper context that was left out.

In the end, I think this is a case of Gergiev getting a pretty clean, straightforward performance, certainly bringing out the main points of the piece, but lacking in depth.

An interesting overview of Ustvolskaya and her work can be found in the following link.  As always with composers who lived in or through the Soviet-ear, it's best to take the political stuff with a grain of salt.

The Lady with the Hammer

As for the Tchaikovsky, Krilov was fairly solid at first, if a bit too slow at the opening.  I don't think that was Gergiev.  He's got a nice sound, if not as bold as some, and he and the conductor used quite a bit of rubato, but with excellent taste, never breaking the line or making the larger picture sound disjointed (Kennedy's Elgar could learn from this).  Once things got going though, the runs got rougher and rougher, and Krilov kept falling behind the beat.  He was really not on top of the technical challenges, and strained to hit the top notes of runs, had some out of tune passagework, and didn't really shine at all.  Musicality was a distant second at that point, and Krilov's overly-mannered cadenza didn't really do much to allay that feeling.  In fact it seemed to highlight the technical flaws more than make things like a certain questionable appoggiatura sound spontaneous. Fine playing in the orchestra, for the most part.

The wind writing in the second movement is the best part of this whole thing for me, and that was nice right up until the badly out tune horn stepped all over the otherwise sweet violin entrance.  Ouch.  Both Krilov and Gergiev had just the write colors going (except the horn on its next entrance).  I could have used a more open top end from the violin here.  There wasn't a wide enough range of shading as we keep coming around to the melody.  There's a point where the light needs to shine through at the top of the phrase, and it didn't work.  Good things happening in the winds and lower strings made the difference.

The last movement went the same way as the first movement.  Simple as that.  Apply what I said about that questionable appoggiatura back then to the open pizzicato chords of the last, and then add the bit about not enough openness on top from the second, and nothing else needs to be said.  Also repeat the bit about good things from the winds.  It's nice to hear really good woodwind sounds from a Russian orchestra again.

Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's 6th Symphony was a treat to listen to, just for the instrumental sounds.  The almost mechanical shifting of the bright colors and sharp angles in strings and winds to darker hues (brass, winds, percussion, piano) made me think of so many pieces from the '50s and '60s where it's just one solid splash of stacked instruments after another.  In this case there was a slight feeling of rotating around a rising scale.

Even though the pacing was just as deliberate as the Ustvolskaya, there was more energy.  Gergiev had the pulsing chords breathing, and the line was maintained much more in this work.  I don't think it was because the note values in the Silvestrov were longer.  This piece could very easily have become a plodding, sloppy mess with all those staggered entrances and hazy chords and rumbling pedal points.  There were quite a few moments of Ligeti-esque textures.  Structurally, the Silvestrov piece seems similar to Ustvolskaya's Symphony.  Both works share a focus on refrains and repeated patterns which both develop and then come back in their original shape.  Silvestrov included a full string section in his score, as well as more winds, and he indulges in a much thicker soundworld.  I think Gergiev heard a little Scriabin here, especially the gauzy strings and harp section, which almost entered some kind of movie dreamworld and played it that way.

The dream state ends, and for some reason the previously hazy clouds of color come together as a slightly fractured Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, done at Leonard Bernstein's pace.  The sharp angles from the opening poke through the Mahler clouds, but don't break it up all together.  What happens is that the elements have become fragmented and fractured enough that they are no more than the little bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting around, but at well-timed intervals.  That's really the overall impression I get of this piece.

I have to admit Gergiev really brought out the details this time.  This is the kind of work that has so many seemingly static, episodic moments which can quickly turn into a disjointed mush.  Instead, I got a sense of clear forms and a focused direction.  He gets some really solid playing from everyone here, especially the brass, and I would imagine that as much as the various chords get transformed over and over, this must be really difficult to play in tune. It's also goes on for a long time (a real critic would say too long, in fact:  just over 55 minutes with no pause).  But to me Silvestrov lets that occasional breath of fresh air come back in just in time to set off the next wave of gauze, so I don't mind.  Gergiev was certainly in no hurry to get through it either.  Some may look down on the heavy reliance on such a famous melody, but in the end I think it ends up being so fractalized that one hardly notices that it's the anchor keeping the rest of the music from floating away and dissipating.

My confidence in Valery Gergiev has been restored somewhat, although not entirely.  I'm also going to find a recording of the Silvestrov, possibly here.

Brahms, Liszt, Scriabin, Andsnes, Muti: Reliving Some Beautiful Music

This was supposed to be the second part of my first attempt to give "before and after" posts about a particular broadcast, as I discussed here.  It didn't work out exactly as planned, but there are still some worthwhile things to be said about the music.

First of all, I have to admit to messing up my "Scheduled Post".  It was meant to go up a day earlier, obviously, and didn't actually appear until something like halfway through the first broadcast I listed.  I'll make sure to post any repeat broadcast of this concert.  The post was up in plenty of time to catch the second one (today's Valery Gergiev concert), and my review of that will be up tomorrow.

In any case, the only truly memorable part was the Liszt, although Leif Ove Andsnes was excellent in the Brahms.  Since there isn't much point in going over a performance nobody heard, I'll just leave it at that and recommend this instead.  Is it possible that Andsnes hasn't recorded the Second Concerto?  I like the first one better anyway.  I'm going to keep my eye out for him doing more chamber music this year.  On the Philharmonic website, they have some very good podcasts and video of an interview with Leif Ove Andsnes about the Brahms and working with conductors (this was apparently his first time working with Muti).  Charles Zachary Bornstein, the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, talks about the Scriabin (which to my ears only really got going about half way in).  They completely ignore the Liszt work, so I'll talk about that by itself.

It turns out that I misremembered the opening of Liszt's symphonic poem, "From the Cradle to the Grave".  It's actually his Faust Symphony which opens up with that tone row.  Incidentally that piece also bears the stamp of the Princess Caroline, as it was she who recommended (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) to Liszt that he add that final choral movement, with the tenor solo and Goethe verse.  Of course, Liszt was extremely fond of choral music, and wrote a fair bit of it himself, so he was most likely easily persuaded.  To me, that bit sounded out of place, even before I knew it was only tacked on much later.

"From the Cradle to the Grave", however, was even more beautiful than I remembered, and it's something that I think more people need to hear.  Regardless of whether or not one is a fan of his music (I'm not really a fan of his orchestral music outside of Faust and this), this is a special little piece.  Naturally, it begins with a gentle lullaby.  Liszt is already hinting at darker things to come, nudging just the right note up or down in the middle of a phrase.  At times the opening section hovers between Bruckner's best quiet melodies and a major/minor shifting that is more typical of Fauré.  I must say that Muti has the New York Phil. sounding very French towards the end of this section, and those players really are something when all the planets align.

An uplifting, Italian tune comes into view, quickly becoming more and more energetic, interrupted by a dotted figure in the brass.  This dotted figure becomes an undercurrent, then takes over the entire orchestra.  Eventually the more flamboyant, bombastic Liszt we know from Les Preludes and the like comes through, but the triumph doesn't last long.  That Italian tune points downwards now, slow and somber in the low strings and bassoon and bass clarinet.  The atmosphere is very moody now, with angular, almost menacing intervals that wouldn't be out of place in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which wouldn't be written for another twenty five years.  Muti has the mix of the full string chords and winds sounding almost Wagnerian here; it's quite appropriate, and without overdoing it at all.

The violins turn the melody back around to a reprise of the lullaby, still with a hint of the central melody.  Liszt plays it just as autumnal as Strauss in his famous twilight piece, with some more chords straight out of Fauré.  Since this is a Liszt form, the ominous dotted figure returns, as does everything else, but all is now muted, resigned.  Ever the spiritual one, he looks heavenward as the music slowly winds to a close, almost as if the life of the music itself has gone out.

This was a terrific performance, but this wonderful, different music can be found here (the Naxos version is too fast in the second and third parts).  I'm told torrents of the performance can also be found.

Classical Music Radio Broadcasts This Week - Attempting Something Different

(UPDATE:  Apparently today's (Monday) Gergiev concert on Klara doesn't start until 2pm EDT.  My apologies.)

I wrote something a while back about trying to find new and different ways to do music criticism and concert reviews.  With a bit of inspiration from Norman Lebrecht's take on more involved coverage of concerts and festivals, I'm going to try something a little different.

Rather than just a dry listing of a handful of interesting progams - which anyone can find through sites like this one - I'm going to list a couple of concert broadcasts and briefly discuss why I want to hear them, and what I might be listening for.   Afterwards I'll post a review, not only to give my view on the concert, but to follow up on my preliminary comments.  This should be a fun experiment, and we'll see how this kind of music commentary looks at the end of the week.

First, though, a bit of cheating.

I actually heard this concert months ago, but NRK is rebroadcasting it, and it's well worth hearing again, for a couple of reasons.  The program is:

Sept. 7 from 11:00am to 1:00pm EDT, broadcast on NRK Altid Klassik

Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B, op. 83
Franz Liszt: From the Cradle to the Grave (Symphonic Poem)
Alexander Skriabin: Le Poème de l'Extase

Leif Ove Andsnes, piano
New York Philharmonic
Riccardo Muti, cond.

Other than one brief moment of chamber music, it's been a while since I've heard Leif Ove Andsnes play.  I'm not the biggest fan of the Brahms 2nd Concerto, but I'm always happy to hear Andsnes, as well as that famous cello solo in the second movement.  The main reason I want to hear this concert again, though, is for the Liszt.

From the Cradle to the Grave is the last of his symphonic poems, a form which he invented.  Written from 1881-82, the original title was From the Cradle to the Coffin, but Liszt's long-time lover/companion/editor/advisor/troublemaker advised him to soften the title (a little bit more about the Princess Carolyn can be found here).  I prefer the original title.  It's an odd piece right from the start.  Liszt had already been experimenting with the outer edges of tonality and form, and had even gone so far as to compose a Bagatelle sans tonalité, and had begun to think about breaking free of tonality entirely.  This symphonic poem opens with a haunting line, which is in fact a full-on twelve-tone row.  The piece itself is not atonal, of course, and well within the Late Romantic harmony of his other works of his last years.  But it is, I think, more personal and moody than any of his other orchestral works.  That's no surprise since he wrote it near the end of his life, with declining health.  Forget about the Faust Symphony or Les Préludes. I think I find more interesting things in this piece than in any of his other symphonic poems.  I don't know why Ricardo Muti decided to resurrect this piece, but it's almost a "must hear", I think.

(Anyone interested in seriously learning about his absolutely amazing, heroice life should check out the incredible three-volume biography by Alan Walker.  Even if one doesn't care much for his music, Liszt was superhuman and led an amazing life.)

Scriabin's Poème de l'Extase is a good compliment to the Liszt work, and is one which Muti knows really well and has been championing for a long time.  Combine all that with the excellent sound of the of the NY Phil., and this is a good evening of music.  Yes, I've heard it already, but the Liszt especially deserves attention.

(UPDATE:  Review - sort of - is here.)

Sept. 8 from 1:00pm - 4:00pm EDT, broadcast on Klara

Galina Ustvolskaya: Symphony No. 3 "Jesus Messiah, save us"
Peter Tchaikovsky:  Violin Concerto in D, Opus 365
Valentin Silvestrov: Symphony No. 6 "Pathètique"

Sergei Krilov, violin
Maryinsky Theater Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, cond.

This is from the end of the Klara Festival (Flemish radio).  Gergiev, as usual, has been all over the place this summer, with varying results.  Even though he's doing music by composers from his homeland, there's no guarantee he'll know the scores very well.  The Tchaikovsky, of course, he'll know cold.  I've never heard Sergei Krilov before, so it'll be good to be exposed to a new artist.  As for the other two works, they're both fairly recent (written within the last 25 years or so), and I'm always keen to hear works I don't know by interesting composers.

Galina Ustvolskaya is a rather unusual composer.  She's sometimes described as the heir to Shostakovich, but I think that's more because of the personal connections (teacher/student, alleged lovers) than because of her music.  I don't know too much of her stuff, but from what I have heard (only chamber music, now that I think about it) her music can be both energetic and dark, with rough textures and moods.  The same could be said about Shostakovich, I suppose, but the personalities are quite different.  In any event, I haven't heard any of her music in quite some time, and have no idea how her Third Symphony, from 1983, will sound.

I've only heard a couple of orchestral works by Valentin Silvestrov, and it seemed like he was all over the place.  HIs musical language is wide-ranging, and can be appealing, from what I remember.  Perhaps doing film scores led him to be more cosmopolitan?

In any case, I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting music, as well as new artists, and this concert looks like a good fit.  Will Gergiev be able to fly in from wherever he is now on his insanely hectic schedule and make all this music work?  Does he know the Ustvolskaya and Silvestrov works well enough to get this orchestra through them with his usual cavalier approach to rehearsal?  Who knows.  I hope so.  His conducting technique is beyond reproach, but I sometimes worry about his focus and ability to bring out the details in difficult works.

Sept. 10 from 1:30pm - 4:50pm EDT - BBC Proms #73, broadcast on BBC Radio 3

Ralph Vaughan-Williams:  Sinfonia Antarctica
Iannis Xenakis:  Plëiades
Gustav Holst:  The Planets

Elizabeth Watts soprano
4-Mality
O Duo
Holst Singers (women's voices)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins conductor

There's obviously an otherworldly theme going on here.  The Vaughan-Williams piece has not worn well with me as I get older, but if Brabbins gets a little excitement out of his players and doesn't fall into that lugubrious, ham-fisted film music style that too many people use for this, I might like it again.  I kind of doubt it, but I'll still give it a shot, just because I like Brabbins.

On the other hand, I can't wait to hear the Xennakis.  It took me a very long time to be able to hear all the things he tries to do in his works, and I'm sure I'll discover new things about this one as well.  He wrote several works contemplating space and other worlds.  Plëiades is for massed percussion (to borrow from Percy Grainger) and can be both maddening and enlightening.  The percussion quartet 4-Mality (get it?) and the O Duo lads will take center stage for this big work.  I don't know if they'll be joined by any percussionists from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

I have to say that I'm not the world's biggest fan of music strictly for percussion ensemble.  I find that too many composers rely on bursts of sound and dense layers, and assume that it's enough to just move these gestures around the different instruments without worrying about real complimentary colors or exploring the varieties of combinations available.  The results are often too episodic, less than deeply thought out, and lacking in direction for my taste, but that's certainly never the case with Xennakis.  This should be fun.

There's not much that needs to be said about The Planets, other than what I already mentioned about the Sinfonia Antarctica.  There's some good music here, which I like a lot better than Vaughan-Williams.  They had different approaches to sound and color, though, and Brabbins will know that and direct his musicians accordingly.

So that's three interesting concerts for the week, and some things to look forward to while listening to them.  I'll post separate reviews for each one, and we'll see how this approach to concert reviews develops.  Any reactions are welcome.

New Music For New Audiences - OR - New Audiences For New Music?

William Weir has an article in the Chicago Tribune which addresses a very important point about getting people to listen to Classical Music.  After describing the difficulty of getting new works performed in the usual places for the usual audiences, he suggests that this might be the wrong place to look.  What about finding new audiences for new music?

This is not a new idea anymore (fortunately), and Weir offers a good entry point into that new world.  He quotes Greg Sandow, who often says that we should try to cater to pop music audiences, as part of a larger argument that maybe the traditional audience shouldn't be expected to like new music as much as non-Classical Music fans might.

After all, Weir says, the genre of "Classical Music" is so wide-ranging that no one will automatically like it all just because it's "Classical".  The example of Hoagy Carmichael and Radiohead both being "pop" is a reasonable analogy for the vast chasm between, say Corelli and Xenakis.  Yet they're both in the same section in the record shops (online or not).  No other genre encompasses so many centuries, so many countries, so many cultures, and so many permutations.  Of course, in reality it's rather silly - almost arbitrary at this point in the industry - to put all this music into one capital-C "Category".  The term "Classical Music" itself is essentially obsolete anyway, but until something better comes along, I'll use it, along with "New Music" for the contemporary languages, for the sake of argument.  (There is certainly an academic case to be made for why all this music should be considered parts of a greater whole, but this is not the place for that discussion.)

In one sense, it's a marketing issue.  The listener only cares about categorizing music in this way so he or she knows where to go to buy it.  Call it something else, and they'll still like it.  In fact, I would submit that some contemporary Classical Music would be received by the non-Classical audience much more readily if it was called something else.

But it's more than just a question of marketing and terminology.  In order to figure out which audience is going to like which music, one has to address the issue of language.  The genre of "Classical Music" these days has become almost as diverse as the human species, and it's important to understand that there are a wide variety of languages being spoken with which not everyone is going to be conversant.  I've touched on how the language of New Music might be familiar to non-Classical audiences before.   Now I'm going to take this idea further, and posit that in fact there are some contemporary languages which will be more appealing to them than to traditional Classical Music audiences.

The language of the Standard Repertoire (I don't intend that as a pejorative, I swear) tends to be that of the European harmonies and structures of the late 18th Century through to the middle of the 20th.  Yes, this is a gross generalization, but bear with me.  When I say "harmonies and structures", I mean the shapes and colors and emotions of the language.  These affect different people in different ways, depending on many personal things.  In the end it's a personal perspective, and so much of life experience contributes to that.

The personal music experiences of today's younger generations tend to include far more that is over-amplified and distorted or strange-sounding, violent or ugly, or harsh and dissonant than in previous generations.  The sounds that some Classical audiences reject are much more readily accepted by people who listen to other kinds of music.  There's probably something to Thomas Beecham's old adage that the public don't like music, they just like the noise it makes, but what it really means in this case is that the audiences who like other kinds of "noisy" (to more conservative audiences) music will have less difficulty getting into this kind of "noisy" music.

I'm definitely not saying that the younger, pop audience is more open-minded than the traditional Classical audience.  In fact, I'm saying that they're at least as prejudiced and closed-minded - if not more so.  How many times have we heard that "Classical Music" is boring?  Or, "That's too pretty, it's putting me to sleep", or other casual dismissals of 1000 years of music?  As often as not, it's because they are only exposed to one of the "prettier" languages, and their own personal experience simply hasn't prepared them to understand it.  That should be a familiar argument to anyone who cares about New Music.

Someone who is very into the grungier, more experimental sounds in rock or electronica will find many appealing sounds in contemporary works.  But the same person who enjoys the purely electronic sounds coming out of IRCAM can just as easily run screaming from the room at the sound of a harpsichord.  The language of one is familiar and enjoyable, the other is Lurch from The Addams Family. 

What this means is that there are many more people for whom the language(s) of New Music won't be so alien after all.  It's time to reach out to that audience.

I will say, though, that this won't be accomplished by adding a piece by Radiohead or a film music suite to a concert of Brahms and Rachmaninov. And I also don't think the kind of blues and gospel stuff Weir mentions is the way to go either, even if it's fronted by Matt Haimowitz on cello.  That's the wrong message to send also, as if none of the amazing languages of our genre cut it anymore.

Instead, I'd like to see a little suite from one of the new video games, plus something like Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead's "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" (not exactly to my taste, but it will bring that other audience in) along with works by living, breathing, interesting New Music composers who write in the more interesting contemporary languages.  There are so many to choose from!  One can come up with a nearly infinite list of combinations like this.

It's time to give up for good the idea that the old school composers will lead the way to new school audiences.  That doesn't mean that music isn't great, or that it should die out because new audiences dont care for it.  Instead, it means that the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep. starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep.

UPDATE: (Sept. 4)  I see that AC Douglas over at Sounds & Fury disagress with me.  I understand where he's coming from, and I have to say that there is room for both our positions.  In fact, our two approaches can work side by side with little effort.

The audience whom Mr. Douglas describes as "young but already grown-up persons who presently have little or no understanding of and little or no interest in classical music" are buying tickets today, not in twenty years.  So, while I will always approve of the outreach programs for the very young, and any and all efforts to cultivate the next generation of Classical Music lovers (who wouldn't?), I don't accept that as the only solution.

I've been through the argument that people don't understand how to listen to this kind of music, that they need to develop a longer attention span, etc.  Having been in the trenches of various battles in this industry, I no longer buy that as the only way.  "Get 'em while they're young" is great, but I've seen too many adults (or even late teens and young adults) get enthusiastic about something in the Classical Music genre, even if they've never heard any masterpieces or hallowed chestnuts of the repertoire.

The key is to stop worrying about getting this new audience to sit through a Beethoven String Quartet cycle or something once they have their ear in the door.  There's a thousand plus years of music, in an infinite variety of colors and flavors, and it's illogical to expect all music lovers to follow one specific time-line or canon (as much as I would love to from an academic standpoint).  I can't even begin to recount how many times I've seen someone whose first exposure to this world was through something with contemporary sounds and structures.  They're into it, and they don't care if they're supposed to listen to Bach and Mozart first, or that this is more complex than the music they're used to listening to.  That means nothing.  The evidence is out there, and so is the audience, just waiting for someone to make the effort.

As for future generations, I hope we never stop encouraging them in exactly the way AC Douglas suggests.  And there's no reason whatsoever that my other suggestions should interfere with or contradict this approach.

Tired of the Latest Pop Tunes? Try Boosey & Hawkes Ringtones!

Well, why not?

booseytones

But will they let composers submit new ones?  How would that look?  "Get the latest ringtones from today's hottest composers!"

Elliott Carter's Recent Works At Tanglewood - Online Video

The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival have generously made performances available online of several recent works (plus the  the Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord from 1961) by Elliott Carter.  The performers are all Festival Orchestra players and resident Fellows at Tanglewood, and the footage comes from a few concerts at "The Shed".  These are full performances, not extracts, and in fine quality.

Carter's music from the last ten years has gotten my attention more than his output from the last 50 years combined, including the Double Concerto.

Tanglewood WebTV

There's a drop-down menu at the bottom to go to the different videos.

The Concert Hall Is Not Like A Restaurant

It has long been my view that programming non-Classical works during a concert season is a problematic way to bring new audiences to Classical Music.  From the revenue-centric perspective of a venue or production organization, it does make sense.  Revenue is revenue, and we should all be happy if money is coming in from concerts of movie music and Broadway numbers to subsidize the music we're really interested in.  But that doesn't really bring new audiences to Classical Music.

This is what I call treating the concert hall like a restaurant.  It generally doesn't work, because people who go to a Pops concert or "An Evening with John Williams" don't tend to think to themselves afterwards, "Hey, that was good - let's go back next month and try something else on the menu".  Unless the non-Classical draw is programmed with "serious" concert music, very few will make the association between the server and the meal.

The same thing can be said about mixing non-Classical music in the Classical category on record labels and sales charts.  When Peter Gelb put the "Titanic" soundtrack on the Sony Classical ledger, it went to the top of the Billboard chart and made plenty of money for the division.  While this brought in some nice income to subsidize the serious music on the label, it was nothing more than a bit of accounting prestidigitation, and not an actual method of bringing new audiences to Classical Music.

So this is all fine and good for the profit center, but does little to get people to come to the other concerts.  Mixing genres in one program, however, is a different matter.  Having movie music or the like share the bill with more "serious" concert music will give the segment of the audience who came to hear the movie themes a chance to hear something which is part of the regular menu, so to speak.  Only then can they know if it's worth coming back or not.

In fact, this kind of audience is more likely to be receptive to more modern music than they would be to Mostly Mozart or Brahms #3.  The language of so much film music today is lifted directly from a lot of different 20th Century composers.  In fact, much of it used to be written by actual 20th Century composers, or at least people who were fully qualified to be so.  A quick glance at this list of significant film composers (by no means complete) shows a number of composers known at least as much for their concert music, if not more so:  Malcolm Arnold, Georges Auric, John Corigliano, Wojciech Kilar, Erich W. Korngold, Miklos Rosza, or Mikis Theodorakis.  What this means is that the more modern language of contemporary Classical Music will already be familiar to them.  This is an important point, and one about which I'll have more to say at another time.

The same thing can be said for what I think can be the next big draw for non-Classical Music fans:  video game soundtracks.  I'm not talking about the cutesy kiddie ones, but the interesting and sophisticated music for the more mature games.  War games and the big adventure games tend to have full-blooded orchestral scores, as well as music that would be considered elctronic or electro-acoustic if it were to come from the hallowed halls of a music conservatory.  There are already quite a few CDs for sale with this music, and they sell well.  It's not surprising when one considers that "Halo 3" was the biggest selling media release of all time, bigger than any record or movie release.  There are huge audiences out there who will happily attend concerts of video game music, in large numbers.  It's already happening in Europe and Asia.   This music is also heavily steeped in the language of modern composers, although the war games tend to have their more old-fashioned "war-movie music moments".  But audiences eat that up as well.

What this means is that programming along these lines gives many more opportunities to create that connection between Classical Music and the music they already like.  That's how taste barriers begin to break down.

Matthew Greenbaum Explains A Language We Didn't Know We Knew: Normative Dada

I missed this before, but I'm glad I found it now.  Composer Matthew Greenbaum has a fascinating piece on NewMusicBox which traces the threads of Dada and Surrealism from the early European avant-garde through to the "chance music" and experimentalism of the contemporary American music scene.  He also touches on the very human threads which are woven into this history.

Greenbaum convincingly demonstrates that much of what we think of as risky and original isn't either one of those things.

Read the whole thing here.

Learn about Matthew Greenbaum's own music on his website.