Prospect Magazine has revamped its website. If I understand the rules correctly, you can read quite a few of their pieces when they first come out, for free, for a few weeks, and then you have to pay for them, either at about a quid a go, or with a £25 annual sub. Please tell me if I've got that wrong.
Prospect is, I think, very good, which is why I bother with a web operation which charges. Normally I wouldn't.
So anyway, that means that you can read this most informative piece about the Philharmonia Orchestra by their regular classical music writer, Stephen Everson.
Everson makes many telling points, of which I have picked these, for the somewhat ignoble reason that they have also mostly been made here:
It is ironic that as the quality and enthusiasm of orchestral musicians has increased, so the interest in orchestral music within the general culture has declined so markedly. "We're in a period now where the broad population of this country is totally unfamiliar with orchestral music and reluctant to enjoy anything that requires some investment of time and thought. Our world is shrinking by the day because of the overwhelming impact of popular culture. When I was a kid, although I didn't grow up in a musical family, you were always aware of orchestral music on the radio because there was the light programme, and the home service. The musical language you grew up with was the basic harmonic tonality that underpins music from the Renaissance until the present day. Now that language is almost entirely foreign because rap music and garage and house have no harmonic references at all. It's purely linear. People's experience of great music is now negligible. If you put on Dvorak's New World Symphony, over half of the audience are hearing it for the first time."
This next bit was particularly interesting to me, because I saw this coming, as I am sure did many others. Not only are public subsidies harder to come by, but corporate money is getting harder to extract, because the generation that now runs these things, both public and private, grew up with the Beatles, rather than with the Proms on the Third Programme.
This has consequences for the orchestra's ability to find commercial sponsors. When Whelton first went to the Philharmonia, he found he could raise about £800,000 a year, and spend only half a day a week doing so. "You'd go to one company and put a proposal, and there'd be a yes or a no; if it was a no there'd be another ten companies you knew were interested. Chairmen of boards and managing directors were from a generation that was passionate about music and opera. But those people have retired. In the main, the people in those positions now have no interest in high culture. First of all they're with each company a very short time, secondly they're driven entirely by adding shareholder value, and thirdly what we do is something alien to most of them … they'd prefer to take clients to a football match."
And then Everson homes in on how film music is surviving as one of the few routes from popular culture to classical music. It's not that much of it is classical music, in the sense of being great and part of the classical canon. It is that it is at least, unlike most music these days, written in the same language as classical music.
More fundamentally, it requires orchestras to rethink how they can build and maintain their audience. "Most people's only relationship with orchestral music these days is in the cinema and occasionally the television. We gave a concert of film music in the Festival Hall recently that was sold out, and in the middle of it we did the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony and the overture to Figaro. The people listened to those pieces with just the same level of concentration as they did Star Wars. They loved the emotional impact of that music – that's their starting point now. I wrote to a critic the other day who complained that we were putting the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto in a concert and I said look at the symphony it's with, which was Prokofiev's 5th. Now, I think that's central repertoire but 3,000 people probably heard it for the first time that night. Familiarisation is the only way to build the audience. If you can get the public from film music to, say, Pictures from an Exhibition and then to the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto and then on to Prokofiev's 5th, they've got one more piece in their repertoire. If we don't succeed in doing that, our audience will become narrower and narrower. When I came to the Philharmonia, it was the last season that you could do even very mainstream concerts at the Festival Hall that would be packed to the gunnels."
Prokofiev's 5th has long been a favourite of mine, ever since I was first persuaded by a record reviewer to buy the Karajan DGG version, which is still regarded as one of the best.
Everson also ruminates upon the soon-to-be undertaken revamp of the accoustics of the Royal Festival Hall, which is the performing home of the Philharmonia.
Here's a picture of the RFH, seen from the downstream of the two new Hungerford footbridges.
The Festival Hall is a place I might well go to more often if the accoustics were up to scratch.
Usually when caught short for a posting with midnight approaching, I shove up a picture, either hand done by some dead bloke, or one of mine done with my camera. But tonight, I'll give a plug for a CD, by the Yggdrasil Quartet. Funny name that: Yggdrasil. Still, I shouldn't grumble. I expect there are places in the world where "Micklethwait" raises a bit of a smirk.
Anyway, the Yggdrasil Quartet's recording of two Schubert quartets is, the bit of it I've listened to, very fine indeed.
I bought this CD because BIS have a reputation for superb recordings and all round technical excellence. I think that there is a special pleasure to be had from a really good recording of string quartet music, even if you can get used to a bad one. I was not disappointed. The CD cost me only £3, which is all part of how happy it made me. (I wouldn't dream of paying the full wack for a CD with pieces that I already have lots of CDs of.) So far I've only listened to the non-famous quartet on it, Number 10 in E flat major opus 125 no. 1.
I don't know this quartet very well. I know Death and the Maiden, the other piece on this CD, but not Number 10. And the less magnificent a piece of music is, the more important is the sound that it makes, and the sound that this piece makes in these hands is real Rolls Royce stuff.
Critics are fond of praising technically less than perfect string quartet playing to the skies and beyond. What matters to them is the music , and not the sound that it makes. With some music, I agree. But with string quartets, I really like it when the harmonies are truly harmonious to the point of heavenliness. So much of string quartetness is harmony that if harmony is done badly, that utterly spoils it.
My most favourite string quartet performance of all is the Quartetto Italiano's recording on Philips of Beethoven's Opus 132, the slow movement being a high point. This music, as composed and heard by the already deaf Beethoven, sounds perfect, absolutely perfect. And the playing of it must be absolutely perfect too. Musical but imperfect is, for me, no use at all. And the Quartetto Italiano make a sound that is as near to the sound of heaven as you will ever hear on this earth, which as far as atheist me is concerned means ever full stop.
I wouldn't put the playing of the Yggdrasil quite in this class, but it is very good. And maybe their Death and the Maiden will be even better.
Last time I went to a concert, I promised myself I would write about it here, but took the task too seriously, procrastinated, and eventually failed to write a word.
Well, earlier this evening I went to another concert, and this time I am damn well going to put something about it here, however feeble or unpersuasive.
The venue was the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. The musicians were the Chilingirian String Quartet (keep scrolling and clicking until you get something), plus another cellist, Raphael Wallfisch, and the music was: the Beethoven Street Quartet in F opus 18 no 1, the Bach Suite for Solo Cello No. 5 in C minor, and the Schubert String Quintet in C major D956. The Chilingirians did the Beethoven. Wallfisch then did the Bach. Then, after an interval, all five of them together did the Schubert.
The weak link in the proceedings was the leader of the quartet, Levon Chilingirian. I feel like a swine for saying something like this, but it is true. After all, this was music making of the highest order, and nitpicking seems churlish. Nevertheless, I spent the entire time he was playing wishing that I could find it in me to enjoy his playing more than I did. Maybe the accoustics didn't help him, in particular when he played high notes, and maybe he toned down his playing of high notes a bit, and maybe this affected his control. Whatever the reason, whenever he was up there and out on his own, and should have been rhapsodising like an angel in flight, I found myself thinking that it was all rather earthbound and scratchy and lacking in rhythmic certainty. Only when he played low down and was harmonising with the others did the quartet playing, or quintet playing, suddenly have that real, hear-a-pin-drop, magic about it. I've not had time to put on a recording of any of the music I heard this evening, but I intend to, and when I do, I expect to hear just what it was I was missing this evening.
Wallfisch, on the other hand, was a revelation, especially in the solo Bach, which of course involved no playing whatever by Levon Chilingirian. The utterly simple Sarabande, devoid of double stopping or of any complicated skittering about, was especially affecting, as was the way he immediately after it launched into the Gavotte that followed, with infectiously foot-stamping elan. In his hands this music really danced. I now am listening to the highly regarded Fournier DGG recording of this music, just to get the names of the movements right (given that the programme was mute on the subject), and frankly, I remember Wallfisch's playing as far more fun than Fournier's now sounds. Although maybe being able to look at the charming expressions that played on Wallfisch's face made it all sound better than it really did.
In the Schubert, Wallfisch merged with absolute precision into the ensemble around him, and again, I found his facial expressions fascinating, communing this time with his fellow musicians. He looked like Napoleon, but nice.
The other cellist, Chilingirian regular Philip de Groote, a very fat man indeed who moved nothing except his left hand fingers and his right arm when playing (too much effort, presumably), was exactly everything that his leader was not quite. Despite not appearing to notice that they were even there, he harmonised perfectly with Wallfisch and the rest of them, and was in general a beautifully sure foundation to the two ensemble pieces. When the spotlight beckoned he was more than equal to it. Much the same applies to the other two Chilingirians.
It was a fine, fine evening. But had there been a first violinist in the same class as the guest cellist, it would have been a great one.
The Schubert Quintet is one of the great masterpieces of Western chamber music, and despite my complaints about Levon Chilingirian, this performance certainly made that fact very clear. Far better a concert where you know it's great but where you are left feeling that it might have been even greater, than one where you are left wondering what all the fuss is about.
This is a picture I took at the end.
Not one of my best, but good of the chairs and music stands.
The event was organised to commemorate the life of a lady called Miriam Elton, who died this year. Miriam Elton spent her last days at the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted, Herts. They're now raising money to build a new version of this place, and the money raised by this concert will be going towards that.
When classical CDs first hit the shops, I recall anti-capitalist whingers saying that it was all Brahms and Beethoven symphonies, but nothing obscure and interesting, and generally capitalism screwing up. I knew that things would eventually change, and they did, with a vengeance. There is now virtually no limit to the music you can get on CD. Oh, there are some gaps still to be chased down and filled, but the choice of stuff you can now get is fantastic compared to the bad old days of records and cassettes.
With DVDs, I have been eagerly anticipating similar bounty. New big distribution movies of course all now come out on DVD, and I presume that quite a few more go straight to DVD after only the most casual distribution in the cinemas if any. Although I further suppose that you might have to know where to look for such oddities.
Better than that is that the best movies of the pre-DVD era, starting with the most popular ones like Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life and all the Fred and Gingers and the James Bonds. This part of the job is now well underway. Although, I'm still waiting for DVDs of the classic Ryan O'Neal, Barbara Streisand screwball comedy What's Up, Doc?, and of Metropolitan, to show up in HMV Oxford Street.
And then of course there are all the ancient TV shows that you can now get on DVD. Those are already in HMV in strength.
Nevertheless, most of what I have seen available on DVD has been pretty mainstream, not really all that esoteric or obscure.
But now, however, comes news of something that I would rate as genuinely off the beaten track.
This is from the a latest DVD issues leaflet that fell out of the this week's Radio Times:
Silent ShakespeareCLASSIC SILENT DRAMA These early film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays feature a new score by composer Laura Rossi. As well as the first Shakespeare film - King John (1899) – the collection also includes: The Tempest (1908), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1910), King Lear (1910), Twelfth Night (1910), The Merchant of Venice (1910), Richard III (1911). DVD extras include: filmed introduction and commentary by Judith Buchanan, sleeve notes by Nicci Gerrard, bibliography.
Never heard of those last two.
And that's my point. Silent Shakespeare? What on God's earth is the point of that? Well, I guess they have the words stuck on at the bottom, so maybe not so bad. But even so, weird. Learn more about it here.
In five years time? Or ten? It'll be a new world.
Happy is the classical music fan who adores a musician who used to be adored by millions but who has now gone out of fashion with younger listeners. Everything is available on CD (as an after-echo of the man's huge popularity) but it is now available second-hand for next to nothing.
I give you: Yehudi Menuhin.
Correction. The orthodoxy now seems to be that Early Yehudi Menuhin is (and remains on CD) very fine, when his violin technique was faultless. However, this kind of technical fineness is now ubiquitous, and now recordings are better, so ... Late Menuhin, however, is not fine at all, because his violin technique was suddenly not faultless. And he even became one of those sad instrumentalist/conductors, who conducted because he couldn't play properly any more.
I don't go along with any of that, other than the bit about the fineness of Early Menuhin.
On the strength of Early Menuhin genius, and at a time (the 1930s) when 1930s recording quality was all there was, a whole generation of adoring fans bought everything he did, then and later, and either liked the later stuff also or were disappointed. But they bought it. Then they started to die off, and now those unfashionable Late Menuhin CDs languish in cardboard boxes in the market for a quid or two each.
For me the Menuhin experience really began when I listened to a Late Menuhin (1970) recording with Wilhelm Kempff of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, in A major opus 47.
I don't usually like pieces for only violin and piano. I realise this is not a very elevated thing to say, but when I listen to such pieces I think: What is this for? What is it saying? The point being that it had better be saying something, because the actual sound of the thing is so dull. Piano trios now, with all those luscious chords, they're completely different. Ditto most violin concertos. Ditto almost all piano concertos. They sound great. Piano trios and violin concertos and piano concertos sound so great that they can often say nothing at all for all I care, other than: hey listen to this! But a piece for violin and piano has to really say something to me, or I'm not amused. (I find violin and piano music dull in way that I do not find either either solo violin music or solo piano music boring. Why is that?)
Please do not confuse this with objective critical description of actual music. I am trying to describe how I feel about these things. If you feel differently, do not be affronted, just a little bit baffled, and you might even want to stop reading this. Because, above all, I do not want to persuade you that you dislike the sound of a violin sonata even if you actually like it. I would hate to give you a dose of false consciousness.
Anyway, this is where Late Menuhin comes in. Late Menuhin was, for me, the supreme master of using his violin to actually say things. Every note he plays has a meaning, an emotional charge of some kind. And what is more: a good one, the right one. That Kreutzer sonata performance with Kempff amazed me with its total eloquence, quite unlike anything I had ever heard before when listening to this piece in other hands.
What I love about Late Menuhin, whether violin playing or conducting, is that, faced with a world in which he must suddenly live within technical limits (unlike in his glorious youth), either his own or of the other musicians he must now make do with, his response was not merely to try to correct those technical limitations as best he could (which I am sure he did do his best to do), but also into making every note mean something. Even more than Early Menuhin did. In his youth, Early Menuhin was often (it sounds to me) content to let the music just flow through him, with no technical friction, so to speak. There was no added value (in modern business parlance) but, wondrously, there was hardly any subtracted value either (apart from what the old recording subtracts). Which is how most of the current generation of musicians all try to play also, often very successfully. Perfectly oiled and perfectly functioning music machines, you might say. Personal hi-fi kits. But when, for Late Menuhin, the friction suddenly cut in, he had to live with it, but made damn sure that he always always always, every fraction of each passing second, added something. That's how it sounds to me. His playing became a triumph of eloquence over technique.
For me, Late Menuhin was the Laurence Olivier of violin playing. But whereas Olivier often got on my nerves by imposing his own rather bizarre meanings upon something which already, automatically, means something, namely words, Late Menuhin imposed much better and thought-through meanings, based on a lifetime of excellent music making and musical study, upon something that has no such automatic meaning in the way that words do, namely … music.
When I listen to Late Menuhin playing something like the Mendelssohn violin concerto, I realise that nice though that usually sounds, that too can often mean very little, when many others play it.
The most extraordinary case of a Late Menuhin triumph that I have recently heard is the Late Menuhin recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto.
As I have written here before, this is an extraordinarily difficult piece to bring off.
Two things tend to go wrong with modern perfect-machine performances of this extraordinary piece. First, because the thing is so ferociously difficult to play, and because the idiom (as with the Mendlessohn concerto) is so culture bound and elusive, the perfect machine player, time and time again, does actually introduce a lot of friction. And second, that plunges our poor perfect machine musician into a world he is utterly unused to.
To switch metaphors, the modern musician functions like a perfect window, or tries to. He stands between you and the music, and his idea is to let you see the music perfectly, through him. When this plan goes wrong, his usual recourse is ferociously, even desperately, to clean the window. Which is often counter-productive. Any meaning he may have detected gets lost. Windolene gets all over everything. Blah blah blah. Mess.
Late Menuhin is quite familiar with these dilemmas, because he lived with them every day. He did his share of window cleaning, but what he would also do was, as it were, talk about what you could just about, okay, see through the window. Yeah yeah, sorry about the window, but never mind, look at that, he would say, at that little house next to the trees, with the late blossom on. Look at this tiny wisp of smoke here, these clouds, the strange light at this time of day. And look, there's a storm coming. Through those bigger trees? See it? I'm right you know. (Smile.) A Late Menuhin performance is like a permanent running commentary on the music he is playing.
For my money (which as I say doesn't need to be much) Menuhin's playing is technically adequate, given the extreme excellence and fascination of the commentary that always accompanies it.
To speak thus of commentary is probably not quite right, because it suggests an imposed meaning rather than a meaning found within the music, but this is the best I can do for now.
That Late Menuhin Elgar performance, with Sir Adrian Boult, is now almost universally denounced (and thus now seemingly unavailable – I can find no suitable link to it) as not nearly as good as the early one by Early Menuhin with Elgar himself conducting. And this Late Menuhin Elgar recording is a supreme example of all of the above. (By the way my picture of this earlier recording is the Naxos redo, which seems to be somewhat preferred to the EMI version, and is the one I have.)
I had spent decades obeying the critical orthodoxy about this (see what I mean about critics muck you about if you let them) by carefully not listening to it. But following a series of good experiences with Late Menuhin CDs, I finally came upon a second hand version for next to nothing of the Last Menuhin Elgar. And when I finally did listen to it, I loved it. Loved it. Late Menuhin doesn't always play things exactly as he wants to. But you always know how he is trying to play it, and how he is trying to play it is utterly marvellous. That's how it sounds to me. It's somewhat like a great but rather elderly actor doing Hamlet.
(By the way, I rather think that I first heard snippets of this Late Menuhin performance of the Elgar Concerto on a Radio Three Record Review comparison of all the various versions of the Elgar Concerto in which the reviewer hinted at a similar attitude to Late Menuhin to the one I now have. Can't remember who that was.)
I also love Late Menuhin's conducting, and buy everything of that I can get hold of cheaply. But let that wait for another posting.
This link to this Samizdata posting today about more Fritz Werner Bach, plus a reminder that I continue to churn out stuff for here, will probably be your lot today.
Well, here is a nice picture of Medellin, which is in Central America somewhere, I think (Columbia?), which I tried to steal from Harry Hutton's picture gallery. "Public" means, I can do that, right? (I mean, what the hell do I know about intellectual property. I signed up for that CNE gig to find out about it, not because I know anything about it already.) But I couldn't make that work.
That big church on the right looks to be quite something, and it still towers over its surroundings.
Flickr seems to be getting very popular nowadays. Can it show pictures as big as I like to, 800 by 600, filling most of your screen? That Medellin picture ought to be as big as possible, I think.
JP, your New York pictures will go up this weekend, I hope, big as possible, but I promise nothing.
From a Gramophone review (June 2003 issue) by Ivan March of this DVD, of Rostropovich playing Shostakovich Cello Concerto 1 and the Prokofiev Symphony-Concerto:
When he came to know Shostakovich personally in the 1950s Rostropovich wanted to ask him for a cello concerto. Fortunately he never did: the composer's wife later told him that only if he did not ask or mention his wish might Shostakovich produce something out of the musical hat. She was right and in 1959 the great cellist's restraint was rewarded.
And what is more it was rewarded with another cello concerto, Number 2, which was also dedicated to Rostropovich. Not surprising, given how well he played the first one. That old recording he made for CBS (now Sony) with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra was one of my most treasured LPs.
Over the years I have watched the rock bottom price for second hand and bargain give-way loss-leader classical music CDs fall, slowly but surely. What I mean by this is the lowest price that a serious classical CD will be offered for. I don't mean something from the front cover of a magazine with lots of mere snippets; I mean the real deal. A decade ago it was about £5. A few years ago it was about £3. Now, it is £1.
Click on that to get it bigger and more legible.
I bought these five CDs from Neil's classical CD barrow in Lower Marsh (which is the same street as Gramex the second hand classical CD shop is in), a couple of days ago. They aren't all of them all that super-desirable. But they are the real thing. Real classical CDs, of great music, very well performed and recorded. I've just listened to the Jupiter Trio CD, which was released only this year by the way. It is excellent, the Shostakovich in particular being outstanding.
Prices still have a bit of falling to do. These CDs were £1 each, but others at Neil's were £3.50, and some were as much as £7.50. Gramex often charges only £3, for older stuff, and sometimes only £2. But Neil has now set the floor for the market, in London anyway (which is, frankly, all I really care about – this is why you live in a city for goodness sake) and all the others will be dragged down.
The charity shops are all over the place, often charging more than the full price for their CDs. That's one of the signs of a plummeting market, when the amateurs often charge more than the pros, because they just don't know what has happened to the market they've wandered into.
Naxos CDs are starting to look overpriced.
I am a fanatical, not to say pathological, collector of different CD performances of the same favourite classical music pieces. This morning, prodded by an emailer, I was checking out different versions of the various Beethoven piano concertos.
To this end, yesterday, I put on the Barenboim/Klemperer recording of the Emperor Concerto, number five, which I remember liking a great deal when I last listened to it.
Yesterday, however, when I played it again, I did not like it nearly so much. Barenboim's piano phrasing seemed relentlessly wrong, even ham-fingered. I did not enjoy the performance at all. How very odd. How come I used to like this performance so much and now liked it so little?
Although after playing it I did put the CD back in its case, I did not return the case back to its place in my CD shelves, and this morning I realised the mistake I had made. I had not been playing the Barenboim/Klemperer version of this piece. I had been playing the later version done by Barenboim conducting the Berlin Philharmonic from the keyboard, with Klemperer nowhere to be seen or heard. I made this mistake because both performances, in the packages I have of them, come in a box of three CDs, because both had "Barenboim" on the spine, because both are from EMI and logoed in the same way, and because the spines of both are the same EMI red colour. I am now listening to the real Barenboim/Klemperer performance, and it is very bit as good as I remembered it as being.
This episode tells me two things.
First, there are limits even to what Daniel Barenboim can do, musically. Maybe he can play the piano part of the Emperor perfectly, while simultaneously conducting an accompanying symphony orchestra, but on this particular occasion, in my opinion, he definitely did not manage to do so satisfactorily, let alone as well as he did with Klemperer.
And second, I was reassured that different performances of the same piece really can be so very different. Possessing as I do so very many multiple copies of different favourite pieces, I am often, frankly, unable to hear much difference, and fear that I have wasted tons of money and yards of space by purchasing pointlessly duplicated pieces which might as well be straight copies of the same disc for all the difference they make. But here was a self-inflicted blind test of my own abilities as a listener, and I passed. My own ears, even when misinformed, did not let me down. I spotted a big difference even when I thought that the two versions I was actually comparing were not two versions at all, but one and the same. So hurrah for me. I can do this! And hurrah for all those different versions of things, because they too may really be different. (See this posting for another such comparison, this time between two different performances by different soloists of the Brahms violin concerto.)
Of course what you really want is for the different versions not to be different from each other by being good or bad (as was the case with these two Barenboim performances – and with those Brahms performances also, see above), but by being good in one way, or good in another. Fast and good or slow and good. "Classical" and good, or "romantic" and good. And as it happens, that emailer I referred to above did alert me to just such a contrast.
However, blogging is blogging, and the rule to follow is: one thing at a time. I am not Neville Cardus, and must not presume upon the attention span of my readers by continuing a posting even when an obvious opportunity for a break presents itself. So, more on this topic later, maybe, I hope.
Late: and the moral of the above, put next to this, is that opinions on these things can differ wildly. Maybe I should have another go at listening to that Berlin performance.
A few years ago a battle of the gauges began, to see what kind of CD, if any, would replace the regular CD, for playing music.
And the winner is: Hybrid SACD.
This is a Super Audio Compact Disc, which means that it will sound even sexier than a regular Compact Disc, provided that you have a zillion quids worth of SAS (Super Audio Stuff) to play it on, but which, being also "hybrid", will in the meantime play on a regular old coal-powered CD player such as I still have, and will go on having for the foreseeable future until the price of the new kit drops enough (see below).
Hybrid SACD is a format developed by Philips and Sony and combines a SACD (ie physically a DVD layer) with a CD layer.Both layers are read from the same side, which means that the SACD layer must be reflective for the red laser but will transmit the infra red CD laser. Such discs can then be played on both a CD player (which will read the CD layer) and a SACD player.
The original idea may have been to get us all to replace our old CDs, the way we replaced our old gramophone records and cassettes, and what is more go back to buying CDs at "full price" instead of for a fiver or less. But that won't happen. The great CD bonanza of the eighties is not going to be repeated. CDs are okay.
On the other hand, if they want to sell me a Hybrid SACD for the same price as I now pay for a regular CD, to play on a machine which I don't yet have, but in due course will have because it has become as cheap as a regular CD player (see above), well, then, okay.
But if they think that all of us who love, e.g., the Elgar Violin Concerto are going to rush out and buy Hilary Hahn's new DGG version of it, just because it is a Hybrid SACD, and pay DGG an extra tenner for the privilege, despite the fact that the reviewers say it is boring, they will have to think again. A few may splash out on the new format. See the Karajan Beethoven below, which was recorded in 1963! But not enough to rescue business-as-usual.
This is a photo (click to get it more legible) of a New Formats classical music flier that came with a DVD I bought recently of Lang Lang at Carnegie Hall. (Worth a go second hand at £6. Not worth remotely the full asking price, from what I hear.)
This is not a new world. It's just the next bit of what really is business as usual, concerning which more anon.
The most interesting thing about Hybrid SACD is probably the re-design of the plastic case which they are using to flag up which is regular CD and which is Hybrid SACD, concerning which more anon also.
Those Fritz Werner Bach CDs were everything I hoped, the second ten being just as wonderful as the first ten. And the second ten were even cheaper, hardly more than twenty quid at the Bond Street branch of HMV (which is in Oxford Street just across the road from Bond Street tube).
Particularly wonderful is track 2 of Cantata BWV 78, which is on CD 3 of these second ten. This is sung by the lady choristers. Werner, and in particular his harpsichordist, who I see now was Marie-Claire Alain, accompany it with a bounce and a joy that I have never heard before. It has become fashionable these days to talk about Bach writing dance music. I've never really heard this myself, until now.
Googling for "Bach Cantata BWV 78" revealed that this particular Cantata certainly seems to strike a lot of chords with a lot of people, and this second movement especially.
Here, for example, the writer zeroes in on this movement, and helpfully supplies the words, to save me typing them in again, in both German …
Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten,
O Jesu, o Meister, zu helfen zu dir!
Du suchest die Kranken und Irrenden treulich.
Ach, höre, wie wir die Stimme erheben, um Hilfe zu bitten!
Es sei uns dein gnädiges Antlitz erfreulich!
… and English.
We hasten with weak [feeble], yet eager footsteps,
Oh Jesus, Oh Master, to seek after your help!
You tirelessly seek out the sick and those who have gone astray.
Oh, hear us, as we, our voices raised, pray for your help!
May your merciful countenance be gracious unto us!
The way Werner and his ladies do this makes it sound as if this is already happening.
Those Fritz Werner Bach CDs were everything I hoped, the second ten being just as wonderful as the first ten. And the second ten were even cheaper, hardly more than twenty quid at the Bond Street branch of HMV (which is in Oxford Street just across the road from Bond Street tube).
Particularly wonderful is track 2 of Cantata BWV 78, which is on CD 3 of these second ten. This is sung by the lady choristers. Werner, and in particular his harpsichordist, who I see now was Marie-Claire Alain, accompany it with a bounce and a joy that I have never heard before. It has become fashionable these days to talk about Bach writing dance music. I've never really heard this myself, until now.
Googling for "Bach Cantata BWV 78" revealed that this particular Cantata certainly seems to strike a lot of chords with a lot of people, and this second movement especially.
Here, for example, the writer zeroes in on this movement, and helpfully supplies the words, to save me typing them in again, in both German …
Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten,
O Jesu, o Meister, zu helfen zu dir!
Du suchest die Kranken und Irrenden treulich.
Ach, höre, wie wir die Stimme erheben, um Hilfe zu bitten!
Es sei uns dein gnädiges Antlitz erfreulich!
… and English.
We hasten with weak [feeble], yet eager footsteps,
Oh Jesus, Oh Master, to seek after your help!
You tirelessly seek out the sick and those who have gone astray.
Oh, hear us, as we, our voices raised, pray for your help!
May your merciful countenance be gracious unto us!
The way Werner and his ladies do this makes it sound as if this is already happening.
These photos of Daniel Barenboim at the temporary until-it's-redone-properly Warner Classics website, especially the three colour ones, are very strange. They make him look not like the quite old gent that he now is, but rather as if he had been made up to look old about thirty years ago, and photoed then. I think it's the fact that they forgot to grey the eyebrows and eyelashes. Maybe he dies his eyebrows and eyelashes black so that he can influence orchestral musicians just by moving his eyebrows and eyelashes up and down, but I doubt this. More probably he is of a physical type whose eyebrows and eyelashes are the last of his hair to turn grey. All the same, it looks odd to me.
Maybe there's been photoshopping, in particular beefing up the colour contrast, and this has had the effect of making him look unreal.
I'm not trying to undermine Barenboim's status as a musician, which is very high and deservedly so. Several decades ago I saw him conduct in London, Mozart mainly, including piano concertos from the keyboard, but especially the late Mozart symphonies. Something about the way he conducted, something about the kind of sound he seemed to want from an orchestra - long legato paragraphs and sonoroties, elbows and armpits as well as just hands, made me think even then that he should in due course be Georg Solti's successor in Chicago, which he later was, and that he would (like Solti) one day make a notable Wagner conductor, which he now is. Even in Israel.
I recently rhapsodised here about some Mozart piano sonata recordings by Ronald Brautigam. And that got me thinking about how Beethoven piano sonatas sound on a similar instrument. So when I came across a bargain box of Beethoven piano sonatas played by Melvyn Tan, on Virgin, five CDs for a tenner, I grabbed it.
At two quid a throw you can't be disappointed, and actually this is pretty decent playing. But in Tan's hands, I don't find the fortepiano adding much, and I do find it subtracting quite a lot. Again and again, when Tan plays, I found myself thinking that, if this is how it sounded when Beethoven himself played these pieces, then what Beethoven would have wanted them to sound like would be how they do typically sound to us, played on the modern piano.
I found Tan's rhythmic habits somewhat disconcerting. Again and again, I felt that the smooth flow of the music was being needlessly mucked about with, but maybe this is just the result of what I am used to hearing rather than what I ought to be hearing.
I would now love to hear someone else doing those Mozart sonatas on the fortepiano.
And I would also love to hear Ronald Brautigam playing the Beethoven sonatas. (How many (forte)pianists do you now think that of?)
I suspect that I would not especially like the Mozart, but would find Brautigam's Beethoven absolutely thrilling.
When writing about Brautigam's Mozart sonatas, I said that Mozart piano concertos don't sound nearly so good on the fortepiano. Yet, I completely forgot about this posting, in which I rhapsodised also about Brautigam playing the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto, on the fortepiano. This man can really play.
Warner's are just about giving away lots of discs in HMV Oxford Street at the moment, and one of the more interesting of these gifts (actually it cost £1.99) has been an Apex CD by pianist Til Fellner, playing Schumann's Kreisleriana, and Julius Reubke's Piano Sonata. Stupid cover graphics (like all of this series except the ones with Yehudi Menuhin on the front), but perfectly decent playing, so far as I'm any judge.
I love music for organ plus orchestra – Handel Organ Concertos, Poulenc Organ Concerto, Saint Saens 3rd Symphony, you name it. But I have an aversion to solo organ music, perhaps because it is for ever connected in my mind with compulsory school chapel, a form of compulsion I seem to recall resenting above all others. (Eventually I took to skipping it. The Real Rule under the Official Rule seemed to be that if I didn't boast about this, which I didn't, they wouldn't make a fuss either. They, or some of they, must have known.) Accordingly, the only thing I knew about Reubke until now was that he had perpetrated solo organ music. So to hell with him.
But now with this Piano Sonata disc, at a mere £2, I am willing to give him a go. It's on the CD machine now. Snap verdict: it sounds very like the Liszt Piano Sonata. This is not surprising, since Reubke was one of Liszt's most favourite pupils, apparently. But even given that fact, the resemblance is extreme. So, if you like Liszt piano music, this is highly recommendable. I quite like it. But this is the kind of music, I think, that responds to great playing, of the sort that causes people to say "the playing was better than the music". Fellner is good. I would like to hear someone like Richter, Gilels or Lazar Berman doing it. I'd like to hear someone playing it to the gallery, instead of tastefully.
Reubke died in a hotel room at the age of 24, according the sleeve notes of this CD, but it doesn't say how or why. Nor could I learn this from any other source. Was he a huge loss? Maybe. We'll never know.
So, Fritz Werner's Bach Cantata recordings are wonderful. But have a read of this, from the sleeve notes:
Fritz Werner was born in Berlin on 15 December 1898. At the end of the First World War he was taken prisoner by the British, and he only began to study music in 1920. In 1936, on the recommendation of Wilhelm Kempff, he was appointed organist and choirmaster of the Nikolaikirche in Potsdam, a Neo-classical church designed by the famous German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Two years later, in 1938, Werner was appointed to Potsdam's Garrison Church, the Prussian "Holy of Holies" where the Prussian Kings were buried. At the outbreak of the Second World War he fought in the Polish campaign and in the battles around the Maginot Line in France. The Nazis then gave him the job of Musikbeauftragter in Occupied France. In this position, part of which put him in charge of music for the radio, he came into close contact with the composer and director of the Paris Conservatoire, Claude Delvincourt (1888-1954), who, like Werner, possessed humanist qualities which were widely recognised. Another part of Werner's job was to send French musicians to Germany for travail obligatoire (forced labour), and his protection of many of them made him a much-loved figure in the musical life of Occupied France, which he upheld with conviction. An illustration of Werner's compassion is contained in a charmingly mischievous anecdote concerning the twenty-year-old oboist Pierre Pierlot, whose playing features prominently in this Edition. Pierlot was told that he had to go to Königsberg in eastern Prussia for forced labour. He replied that his father would not let him go because it was too far. By the time the German official involved had found out who his father was, Pierlot had escaped his clutches. But not for long; a month later the German bumped into him again in the orchestra where he was principal oboe. Pierlot hid as best he could behind his desk until the leader called out "Pierlot, give us an A!". The German pretended he had heard nothing. He was Fritz Werner. After the war, when Erato needed a first-rate oboist to play in the Bach cantata recordings in Germany, Pierlot eagerly offered his services by way of thanking Werner, to whom he owed so much. The story has it that when Werner apologised to Pierlot for not at once recognising him because he looked so well, the oboist replied: "Since you Germans were driven out of France we can eat as much as we want, just as we used to. And, by the way, you look much better in a shirt than in a uniform". In August 1944 Werner again became a prisoner, this time of the Americans. He later returned to Germany, where he was interned in the Heilbronn-Böckingen camp, from which he was released in 1946.
The spine-chilling phrase here, just in case you missed it, was that bit about his protection of "many of them". So, Werner saved Pierlot, and "many of them". Good for him. But who did he not manage to save, or worse, who did he choose not to save? I'm not saying he's evil, but it certainly seems that this man got pretty close to some evil things, an impression that is reinforced by this biography of Werner (which is where I found the photographs of him), which, on the matter of Werner's war, has only this to say:
In 1936 he stated his career as a church musician at Berlin and Potsdam, where he became Kirchenmusikdirektor in 1938. He served as organist at Potsdam until the outbreak of World War II, when he left Germany and became a music director of the German radio in occupied France.After the war he returned to Germany, settling this time at Heilbronn. …
My guess would be that Werner, like many other of his musical compatriot contemporaries, loved and worshipped music above everything, and did as much as he had to, and as little as he had to, to become a good and successful musician in those bad, bad times. Anybody know any different to that? All I really know about this man is his Bach conducting.
I have long admired the Bach Cantata recordings made by Fritz Werner for Erato in and around the 1960s. His performance of Number 30 – "Freue dich, erlöste Schar" – is my all-time favourite recording of any Bach Cantata, by anyone.
So when Erato recently issued a couple of ten CD sets of all the Bach Cantata recordings that Werner made, for the bargain price of less than £3 per CD, I eagerly snapped up the first ten, and having got stuck into these I intend also to buy the other ten. They are wonderful.
Bach interpretation since the war can be divided into three phases, which have overlapped in time and are inevitably somewhat blurred at the edges.
Phase One. Solemn, deeply meaningful, but too slow. Extreme case: the Karajan DGG Brandenburgs. See also Klemperer. Bach as Bruckner. Fifties to seventies, when this style was shut down by the record companies.
Phase Two. German church cantors who specialised in Bach. Karl Richter, Helmut Rilling, Fritz Werner. Faster, but still grand. At its best: radiant. I like all of these performances. Rilling is still going, as if Phase Three (see below) had never happened. But best of all of these is Fritz Werner. I am a devout atheist, but I cannot help noticing that these men were/are all Christians. Timing: late fifties to seventies and in some cases (Rilling) seventies onwards.
Phase Three. The "authentics". Eighties and nineties onwards. I cannot be objective about this style, because basically I hate it. At its worst: totally un-transcendent, landing like a ton of bricks on the first beat of every bar, recorded by fussy little men with names like Trevor and Ton (although the absolute worst one of all is called "Reinhardt" – see the Samizdata link above), who look (and – more to the point – radiant the spiritual atmosphere of) spare parts managers rather than conductors. God knows what these people actually believe they are saying with this music. (I told you I couldn't be objective.)
Perhaps I ought to add a Phase Four. This is: the Bach Collegium of Japan directed by Masaaki Suzuki.
These are wonderful performances, done by honest-to-God Christians, which somehow make the best of the authentic style (which I do admit has a best – clarity, sparkle, even Phase Two type radiance, which Phase Two itself can often lack – Suzuki was actually taught by Ton, see above).
But unfortunately, whereas the Werners and the now deeply unfashionable Rillings can be got very cheaply, for around a fiver or less, these Suzuki performances (on BIS) are ultra-fashionable, are sold at full price, and have yet to appear on the second hand market or in the bargain boxes at the big new-CD stores like the HMVs of Oxford Street. £17 for three cantatas is too strong for me. I have a few of the early issues of this wonderful series, got second hand before it became widely realised just how wonderful it was, but after about number 10 cheaper copies just haven't been obtainable.
I can find no reference on the Internet to the newly packaged bargain boxes of the Werner recordings, even though these are already available brand new in some of the big London stores, like HMV. The Warner Records Internet operation is, as of now though presumably this will change, beneath contempt.
All of which began as a the briefest of brief intros to a piece about what Fritz Werner did during the war, which I will now do as a separate posting.
I'm listening to the new LSO Live Falstaff conducted by Sir Colin Davis, or at any rate to the sound it makes, and this sound makes me want to pay attention to it seriously some time very soon, perhaps by watching the DVD of Falstaff by some other people that I picked up very cheaply a few weeks back.
Meanwhile, here is a picture, of the back cover of the Davis/Falstaff CDs, which perhaps goes some small way towards explaining why English is doing so well these days. It occupies less space. It uses fewer letters to say the same thing. It is shorter.
I have sort of known this for a long time, but this really brings it home:
I took it out of the plastic case to reduce reflection. (No self portrait this time, I'm afraid.) As often here (but not always), click to get it bigger, i.e. in this case somewhat easier to read.
The opera itself is sung in Italian. Where would Italian come in this comparison? In the middle, alongside French, I'm guessing.
Here's am NYT story that I can link to from here. It's about performance enhancing drugs, but the performances in question were not athletic; they were musical.
RUTH ANN McCLAIN, a flutist from Memphis, used to suffer from debilitating onstage jitters."My hands were so cold and wet, I thought I'd drop my flute," Ms. McClain said recently, remembering a performance at the National Flute Convention in the late 1980's. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest, she added; her mind would not focus, and her head felt as if it were on fire. She tried to hide her nervousness, but her quivering lips kept her from performing with sensitivity and nuance.
However much she tried to relax before a concert, the nerves always stayed with her. But in 1995, her doctor provided a cure, a prescription medication called propranolol. "After the first time I tried it," she said, "I never looked back. It's fabulous to feel normal for a performance."
Ms. McClain, a grandmother who was then teaching flute at Rhodes College in Memphis, started recommending beta-blocking drugs like propranolol to adult students afflicted with performance anxiety. And last year she lost her job for doing so.
College officials, who declined to comment for this article, said at the time that recommending drugs fell outside the student-instructor relationship and charged that Ms. McClain asked a doctor for medication for her students. Ms. McClain, who taught at Rhodes for 11 years, says she merely recommended that they consult a physician about obtaining a prescription.
Ms. McClain is hardly the only musician to rely on beta blockers, which, taken in small dosages, can quell anxiety without apparent side effects. The little secret in the classical music world – dirty or not – is that the drugs have become nearly ubiquitous. …
Fascinating.
In sport, there is widespread agreement that drug-enhanced performances are not "real", although all the word-of-mouth I hear says that drugs are ubiquitous in athletics also, and the difference between the successful athletes and the ones who get banned is merely that the successful ones are more skilful at hiding what they are doing.
In classical music the debate is much more about whether drug-enhanced (or maybe that should be: drug-enabled) performances are actually as good as non-drug-enhanced(abled) ones. Use of such drugs is very widespread, says the NYT article …
But some performers object to beta blockers on musical rather than medical grounds. "If you have to take a drug to do your job, then go get another job," said Sara Sant'Ambrogio, who plays cello in the Eroica Trio. Chemically assisted performances can be soulless and inauthentic, say detractors like Barry Green, the author of "The Inner Game of Music," and Don Greene, a former Olympic diving coach who teaches Juilliard students to overcome their stage fight naturally. The sound may be technically correct, but it's somewhat deadened, both men say. Angella Ahn, a violinist and a member of the Ahn Trio, remembers that fellow students at Juilliard who took beta blockers "lost a little bit of the intensity," she said. Ms. Ahn doesn't use the drugs, she said: "I want to be there 100 percent."Indeed, the high stakes involved in live performance are part of what makes it so thrilling, for both performers and audiences. A little onstage anxiety may be a good thing: one function of adrenaline is to provide extra energy in a threatening or challenging situation, and that energy can be harnessed to produce a particularly exciting musical performance. Performance anxiety tends to push musicians to rehearse more and to confront their anxieties about their work; beta blockers mask these musical and emotional obstacles.
For me, classical music is the drug.
Next: drug enhanced blogging …
My thanks, as so often, to Arts & Letters Daily for the link.
You know how some pieces of classical music sound wonderful when played on the right instruments and nothing like so impressive on other ones. Think especially of the Bach Double Violin Concerto (deranged for harpsichord and orchestra) or the Beethoven Violin Concerto (ditto piano and orchestra). Played on the right instruments, this music is wonderful, but with the wrong instruments it is extraordinarily diminished. Fun to listen to but … put it this way, "fun" says it all.
But now, I have discovered another such contrast, and this time in a good way. I have just been listening to some truly excellent CDs by Ronald Brautigam of Mozart piano sonatas played, not on a modern piano, but on a fortepiano, which is what they had just before they had finalised the modern piano, or pianoforte.
I have heard Mozart piano concertos played the usual way, with a modern piano and orchestra, and the "authentic" way with a fortepiano and orchestra, and in my opinion the comparison entirely favours the modern piano. Played on a fortepiano, for example on the CDs done by Melvyn Tan or Malcolm Bilson, these pieces sound small and constricted, strictly eighteenth century, and in a bad way. Played on a modern grand piano, by a modern grand piano virtuoso, they take wing magnificently. Indeed, one of the very first pieces of classical music that ever grabbed me by the throat was the Mozart D minor Concerto, K466, played for me first by Ashkenazy, later by Katchen and Barenboim.
But, unlike the Beethoven piano sonatas, which are every bit as magnificent as the Beethoven piano concertos, the Mozart piano sonatas have always seemed to me to be a bit of a let down. They have several pretty tunes. But that's all they were, pretty. Like those Mozart piano concertos played on a fortepiano, they seemed small, even insignificant. I've got wonderful CDs of these pieces, by the likes of Alfred Brendel and Mitsuko Ushida, and (above all) Sviatoslav Richter, but even when Richter plays them, you feel that it is the player who is magnificent, rather than what he is playing. It's great playing, but not of great music.
But with Brautigam, and his wonderfully strong sounding fortepiano, all that sense of disappointment vanishes. This music sounds truly great.
When a fortepiano plays along with an orchestra, what you hear is a keyboard instrument that isn't strong enough compared to the orchestra, and the music is diminished. But when the fortepiano plays on its own, especially the way Brautigam plays it, and recorded the way Brautigam is recorded, and with music by Woflgang Amadeus Mozart for precisely this instrument, with lots of reverberation, it sounds positively orchestral. It sounds bigger than a piano. It's a piano and a harpsichord, the best of both worlds instead of the worst. And the Mozart sonatas, which sound small and female (in a bad way) on the piano, sound grand and orchestral. Or something. In truth I am not sure why exactly this music sounds so magnificent, but magnificent is how it does indeed sound, on these CDs.
I got them because somebody died, and Gramex, the second hand CD cathedral in Lower Marsh, got the lot. There was a feeding frenzy about two weeks ago, which I completely missed, and which is presumably when volumes 1, 2 and 6 got snapped up. But I still got volumes 3, 4 and 5, for £4 each. Cheap at twice the price, although at twice the price I would have said no. More fool me.
It isn't every day you discover a whole new collection of unreservedly great pieces by … Mozart. But today, I did.
Incoming email from Alan Little:
You might find this interesting, from Tyler Cowen et al's excellent libertarian economics blog Marginal Revolution: The DVD format is taking over the classical music world, especially opera.I don't think music DVDs will be all that relevant for me. Even if they're as cheap as CDs and have at-least-as-good sound quality (I know audio-only DVD is supposed to be great, albeit a stillborn format; I haven't really seriously listened to how good movie DVD soundtracks are), they're still not relevant to my music-listening life. I mostly listen to music while doing other things, whereas a DVD expects you to sit down and give it your undivided attention. With a toddler in the house my attention is almost never undivided. I would consider buying DVDs if they were cheap and there was an easy way to get the audio off of them into a usable format (CD or mp3) – I do know how to do this but it's laborious and I really don't think I could be bothered on a regular basis.
The point passed on (from Klaus Heyman of Naxos) by the Marginal Revolutionary Tyler Cowen about DVDs of opera is that opera on DVD is now starting to sell massively better than opera on CD, i.e. opera with only the sound. Thus, although DVD-ing an opera is presumably at least as bothersome as merely recording it, and copying the DVD is no easier, DVDs of opera, because many more are willing to buy them if the price is right, are now roaring down the supply/demand curve, and are thus finding their profitable price to be way below that of opera on CD.
Which is obvious, because opera is a dramatic thing as well as an audio thing. I am so obsessed with classical music that I have lots of CDs of operas, because I love the sound they make. But trawling through the libretto to find out what the hell they are singing about (seldom in English of course) is very irksome, and you miss lots of excitement by not being able to see, e.g. Wagner giants or Queens of the Night or Czars of Russia or Kings of Egypt, plus all their assembled minions. Obviously. So, although I can just about be doing with opera on CD (I bought the new René Jacobs Marriage of Figaro only yesterday), opera on DVD has already been a godsend to me.
I also have a few operas on VHS, but they are terrible. They look terrible, and above all, NO SUBTITLES. DVDs, in addition to be far nicer to look at, DO HAVE SUBTITLES. This is crucial for me.
I like DVD operas even when the production is weird, as they tend to be for Ring Cycle operas, for example, with dams and goldfish bowls instead of the Rhine, 1920s society hostesses instead of Norse Goddesses, and (my favourite Wagnabsurdity so far) scruffy librarians waving enormously long spears in the Boulez/Bayreuth Gotterdammerung. (Is the idea is that they are losing their grip, having inherited power that they no longer know how to use? Maybe that's it.)
(Wagnabsurdity. Did I just think of that word? I mean, I did, but who else has?)
However, what Alan Little says about undivided attention is also very, very true. When I sit down to watch a DVD, any DVD, I have to look at it and listen to it, and I have to look and listen continuously or I lose the plot, literally. This also is very irksome, and DVDs don't answer this problem. They are this problem, as Alan says.
Now I agree that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony packs a hell of a lot more punch if you concentrate on that all the way though also, but the fact is that if you do a blog posting or some work-work or something during the second movement and completely ignore it banging away in the background, but then tune in again to the last movement, you can still get a lot out of that experience. Music, to refer back to this quote (which I notice Alan also liked and quoted) music happens now, and if all you do is tune into it now, having ignored all that went before, you get a great deal of what it is saying. Tuning into an opera now, in the middle of an act, means you miss the point.
To put it another way, DVDs of opera have the potential to break out of the ghetto of being listened to only by people who already love this music, like me. Opera can be, as it used to be before the gramophone was invented, in the vanguard of classical musical publicity, instead of staggering along at the rear the way it has for the last fifty years or so. (Opera arias are a complete other matter!)
I need two things before I go mad with operatic DVDs.
First (originally I put this second – but actually it is first), I need for the DVD opera sellers to stop trying to gouge twenty five quid per opera out of me, and to settle for a tenner. After all, that's all that they now charge me for Lawrence of Arabia, which was a hell of a lot more of a bother to make even than an opera DVD. It may not seem fair to them but sorry, twenty five quid is more than I can get into the habit of spending. (Economics – I am becoming more and more convinced – is all about the cost of habits rather than just of individual items.)
And second, when that negotiation between supply and demand has finally been settled in my favour, for lots of DVD operas if not all of them, I will then be wanting a good fat book called Opera on DVD, which surely must exist, but which I never seem to come across in bookshops, even in the shelves groaning with guides to classical CDs. The Internet is great at giving me the best price on an opera DVD that I have already decided I want, but I need to decide what I want in the first place. Anyone know of a book like that? Or a website? The point is not prices, in the sense of £11.99 instead of £14.99. Once I know what I want, I can keep an eye open for it, and buy it when I see it cheap enough. Or, I can finally get into the buying-stuff-from-the-Internet habit, which so far I have not done because I like to combine shopping with taking some exercise. What I want is comparative reviews, of things like, say, all the four regularly available DVDs out there of Turandot (plus of the new DVD of Turandot which has just come out), which are descriptively helpful as well as (which is fair enough) opinionated, so that even if he hates it I will be able to tell that I might like it, or vice versa, so that I know what I am looking for.
I'd even consider regularly buying a monthly magazine entirely devoted to opera on DVD, with opera on CD only mentioned in a sneering little page near the end laced with yet more DVD propaganda.
Caution one. Forget about video. It has to be DVDs. (See above.)
Caution two. I don't want an "Internet Site" where I can spend thousands of happy hours chatting about why the Levine New York Met Ring is better/worse than the Boulez Bayreuth Ring, and why the latest one from Germany is barking bonkers etc. etc.. I do not have these hours. More fundamentally, such hours would not be happy. I am not that fond of my fellow classical music enthusiasts. Mad, sad bastards the lot of them, as good as, as far as I'm concerned, and I bet that's just how most of them feel about me. If all that Alan Little and I had in common was a liking for classical music then – no offence (as people say when they are about to be offensive) – I wouldn't be interested. Happily he is also a blogger, and a general discusser of all manner of other things that also interest me. An entirely different proposition.
Even if both of those conditions are fulfilled I probably won't go mad. I like opera, every now and again. Real opera lovers love it. Obviously. (As this person would say. Good that she's found her blog voice again.)
Tonight I am listening to: A London Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams. And I have chosen the mono version done by Sir Adrian Boult with the LPO, from this boxed set of all but the last of the nine RVW symphonies.
I do not offer a general review of this lovely piece, with an exhaustive explication of exactly what makes it so lovely. I just wanted to make what I hope is one interesting observation.
I refer to the second movement, "Lento", and in particular to the lovely tune in this second movement, which we first begin to hear (on this particular recording anyway) at about 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
To me, this tune could have come straight out of the sound track of a Hollywood biblical epic. It would have sounded completely in place had it occurred, not in a piece celebrating London, but in a story celebrating the life of, e.g., Jesus Christ. I'm thinking in particular of the scenes in Ben Hur where Jesus is seen, but only, by us cinema viewers, from behind. We see that archetypal hair-do, evocative of all that is magnificent and history-changing, yet at the same time consoling and loving, but only Charlton Heston gets to see Jesus' face. It's been a long while since I've seen this movie, and heard the actual music that Miklos Rozsa wrote for the Jesus scenes, but I do definitely seem to remember them sounding very similar in atmosphere to this London Symphony tune.
There is, by the way, a distinct whiff of similarly Israelite harmonies in Vaughan Williams' glorious Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and, for that matter, also in the original Tallis anthem which that piece was inspired by.
And now, that tune has come and gone. The third movement is back to the hustle and bustle (and also the Georgian stateliness) of London, as if Israel had never been thought of.
All of which leads me on to wonder about this whole musical nationalism thing. We are constantly told that particular harmonies evoke particular national moods or national landscapes. I wonder. I suspect it may be pure association caused by the constant placing together of certain sorts of music with certain sorts of imagery and certain sorts of national myths and stories, the actual connection being accidental. Had the music chips landed only somewhat differently, Dvorak could have sounded unmistakably Italian and Tchaikovsky unmistakably Finnish.
That the music of Vaughan Williams of all people made me think of ancient Israel rather than of ancient or not so ancient England is a particular irony, because RVW of all people is credited with creating an "unmistakably" English sort of sound, the one dismissed unkindly by Elizabeth Lutyens as cowpat music. (Scroll down to the start of para 2 of the review linked to.)
So: Vaughan Williams. Unmistakably English, except when he sounds unmistakably something completely different.
A further thought about how music consoles the grieving (see the previous post).
Think of how grieving people often move rhythmically, like musicians, obsessively and repetitively following the rhythm of the kind of rather rapid breathing you do why you cry inconsolably. Think also of how Shakespeare, in one of most famous lines of all, uses repetition to communicate Lear's grief at the death of his favourite daughter: "Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never."
Maybe that says something about how music chimes in with the needs of the very miserable.
On second thoughts, what that probably tells you is how to describe grief with music. And music like that isn't necessarily going to make you feel any better. Worse, if anything, would be my guess. And I would further guess that you need music with long smooth lines to it, that contradicts and changes such grief stricken rhythms, to console the otherwise inconsolable.
It is diabolically hard to write about music. You grab overwrought and inexact metaphors taken from religion or from nature. (Heaven, hell, mountains, waterfalls, etc.) I don't like that, unless God is explicitly mentioned or unless it's something like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Or, you can resort to musical jargon about descending sevenths and transition sections and key changes, and so forth. Which can work if you can do it, but on the whole I can't. Or, which is what I prefer, you focus on banalities, about which you can at least be more precise, like what the CD cost or how nice the lady playing it looked in her pretty dress.
In the latest (October 2004) issue of the BBC Music Magazine, however, there is to be found a paragraph which manages to be exact about the nature of music, and about its power to move, and quite profound at the same time, or so I think. Religion is alluded to, but not in any way that compromises on precision. On the contrary, the religion thing is cleaned up and clarified, I think.
It is from an article by Jessica Duchen. The article itself is not, I believe, on line and linkable to, although Duchen now has a classical music blog. Duchen's article, entitled "Musician, heal thyself", is about why music – classical music especially – consoles and comforts the people whom it consoles and comforts. Duchen herself says that she was much consoled by listening to Bach when her mother was dying, and by playing Janacek on the piano when her father died. But she also spoke to many others whom music had also comforted.
Why does music have such power to support during the most demanding times of our lives? Why does it carry us through when nothing else can? …
Among those Duchen spoke with was a certain Richard Bittleston, "an organist and special minister for music in the Unitarian Church who has also worked in music therapy".
'… I once played a Schubert impromptu at the funeral of a musician,' he says. 'It had been his favourite piece and its impact was highly charged, both negatively and positively. The positive charge was the fact that here was something that was still alive. The music communicated an idea about eternity that we would never be able to put into words. It made a particular impact on the musician's wife, who wept profusely. …'
Yes, but why does it do this? Now we get to the bit that I really like.
'The ultimate power of music,' continues Bittleston, 'is that it temporarily demands you to exist in the present. There are no problems in the present! The performing arts are unlike other art forms, which are tied up with anything but the present. In music you can literally leave your problems behind, because they're not there. That would be a very Zen Buddhist way of looking at what music is. In Christianity it was once argued that music transports one through the gates of heaven. But what they were really saying is the same thing - it transports one not through the gates of heaven, but slap-bang into the place where you actually are, which is the now. That process dissolves all problems, at least for a time. I think this might be defined as heaven in some circles.'
Now. That doesn't say everything about music for me, because in addition to its now-ness, there is also the way it progresses (especially Western classical music), the way it brings the immediate past into now and sets up an immediate expected future now. So now is not all that is going on. But to get all this past and future stuff you do have to concentrate on that nowness, or you lose it.
That, at any rate, has been my experience.
Take just recently. My latest clutch of second hand classical acquisitions included a double CD of assorted chamber music by Louis Spohr (at a mere fiver from Neil's barrow in Lower Marsh) and this SACD/CD hybrid disc of the Brahms Violin Concerto, played by Joseph Swenson (scroll down – it is there), on Telarc (for £:3.50 ditto). Excellent bargains both, and notice that, in my part of the market, SACD seems to command little in the way of a premium. (I bought it as much to scrutinise the new and – presumably – they think – improved CD case that SACD/CD hybrid discs come in.
The Brahms is a lovely piece which I can't hear too often, and of the Spohr discs, follow the link above, scroll down, and they end by saying this:
MDG Gold are releasing some wonderful recordings and should be given the appropriate accolades. This is an exceptional double CD set of previously released material that will give Spohr’s chamber music a significant boost and gain him many new supporters. Superbly performed and recorded this is a release worthy of inclusion in any serious collection.
So thank you Neil of Lower Marsh, very much. But I only feel this now, after the difficulties I am about to recount were surmounted.
Because, both these fine recordings misbehaved in my hitherto very satisfactory Marantz CD-48 player. The Spohr went haywire on side 1 track 3. The Brahms played for a while but then went completely crazy, jumping hither and thither like a mad thing, and eventually deciding that there was "no DISC" inside, regardless of the fact that there plainly was. With the Spohr disc, I blamed the Spohr disc. After all, most stuff is playing fine, so it has to be the disc, right? But then, when the Brahms disc was playing its evil tricks, I thought, hang on, maybe I've been here before.
A few years ago, a great many of my CDs started misbehaving, and I thought that (a) CDs don't last and had finally starting melting into oblivion, and that accordingly (b) Western Civilisation was now at an end. But then I thought, for no reason that I can recall, but I did, that maybe it was my CD player. So I bought another. My tastes in fi are relatively low – medium at best - so this was not an especially painful procedure. (What matters to me is adequate sound with no clicks and jumps.) And sure enough, from then on, almost all CDs except those which had quite clearly been stampeded upon by hippopotami worked fine. Western Civilisation could proceed with undimmed excellence.
So, when these Brahms and Spohr discs started misbehaving, I tried them on a different CD player, which this time I already possess. My Goodmans GPS 280 digital radio cum CD player. And guess what: no problems. None at all. The entire Goodmans GPS 280 cost only £100 or thereabouts, so it isn't the technical splendour of its CD player that is making the difference, simply the fact that the Goodmans GPS CD players is working properly, while the Marantz CD-48 is not now working so well. Nearly, because most things still play fine on it. Just not quite properly.
Come to think of it, I do seem to recall some mugs falling out of the mug cupboard on the Marantz CD-48. So maybe the descending mugs jerked the CD player out of alignment, or made some connection dodgy, or something.
Could this not be mended, for less than the price of a new CD player? Maybe, but who needs the grief of finding out. Have you ever tried to get a piece of electronic equipment mended? – after it's out of warranty, I mean? I have. Never again. They charge an arm just to tell you what needs doing and whether it's worth it, and actually doing it costs the other arm, and a leg. Forget it.
Our world is not now organised to mend things. It organised to make things. So, if your thing is not working, throw it away, and get another. Okay this doesn't work with cars yet (although give it time), but this is definitely the rule to apply to something like CD players. So that is what I will do.
The reason I mention all this is that, commenting on a piece I did on Samizdata about books, which also mentioned CDs in passing, Andrew Duffin had this to say about whether the CD format will last:
Well if it does you had better make sure you buy good ones; none of them seems to last more than about ten years before the information becomes unreadable.Stick to books I say. And vinyl for your music.
But I have many thousands of CDs which are the best part of twenty years old (including many second hand ones which were at least a decade old when I bought them), and the only time I've suffered a plague of jumpings and clickings is just before I replace a CD player, i.e. now, and that previous time. Apart from that, no worries.
So maybe, probably I would say, Andrew Duffin just needs a new CD player.
Further thoughts. CD copies tend to cause problems, in my experience, more so than factory done originals. Plus: could there be any significance in the fact that, like many of those copies, both the Spohr and the Brahms discs mentioned above are gold in colour rather than silver, on their playing surface? Does that make things harder for a very slightly wonky CD player to deal with?
The Proms. They're televising them all of this week. They take place in the Royal Festival Hall. The accoustics are controversial, but the place looks wonderful. Here's how the inside looked on the telly:
It was an all Dvorak programme, with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. For me the highlight was a fabulous performance of the Violin Concerto, given by Sarah Chang. She's an American, with parent originally from Korea.
Her technique is ironclad, and you knew that if this was how it sounded, this was how she meant it to sound.
Which might have been why she was no obviously enjoying herself so much. I would too, if I could play beautiful music like this, as beautifully as she did.
The rapport between her and Mackerras and his orchestra was excellent throughout.
And the audience went predictably mad at the end. Here's one of those fading-from-one-to-other TV snaps I like so much, which saves me the bother of showing the audience clapping, and the performers lapping it all up, in two separate pictures.
Mackerras and the orchestra did the New World Symphony in the second half. I've nothing against this piece. It's beautiful. It's not its fault that it gets played so often. It's a fine piece, and they played it very finely. It was just that, for me, this evening, Chang playing the concerto was the thing.
This Concerto is not quite as well known as the Beethoven, the Mendelssohn, the Brahms, or even the Bruch. Maybe it's the glorious Dvorak Cello Concerto that makes it seem less wonderful than it really is. Ditto the Dvorak Piano Concerto, which is held in even lower esteem, for equally mysterious and bad reasons.
Chang has recorded this concerto, for EMI.
My TV system doesn't record digitally, and the analogue reception is garbage. Eventually I'll have some kind of Tivo/hard disc gismo. Meanwhile, life's too short to lash up an answer that will be obsolete soon anyway. So I generally now either watch stuff when it's on, or not at all
This evening I watched the first of four shows on BBC3 about guerrilla homes, which means little boxes craned onto the top of bigger buildings, or just lashed up without planning permission buit prettily enough then to be tolerated, from a kit of parts. Said presenter Charlie Luxton: "Planning permission sucks." Go Charlie. Now tell us what you think of property rights. Maybe you think they suck too? But without them, it's anarchy, and not in a good way.
Then I watched a Channel 4 documentary about the design of the new tower they're building in New York to replace the Twin Towers. I seem to recall hailing the idea of teaming Libeskind with SOM's David Childs as a good one. This show made it look like a complete mess. The Childs design would have been pretty good. The Libeskind design would have been pretty good. The Childs/Libeskind/Governor of New York design looks like it's going to be pretty bad, with a stupid, pointless point stuck on the top, in a way that has damn all to do with what is underneath it. Scroll down here for more about this show.
And then I switched to hearing the last bit of Messiaen's Éclairs sur l'Au-delà…, on BBC4. Very fine, by the sound of it, as supplied in their customary fine sound by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Rattle.
Here is a link to the CD they've recently done of this piece. I think this will sell very well, and that in three months it will be havable in HMV Oxford Street for way less than full price.
I have been trying to like Messiaen's piano music recently, but have yet to succeed. The Turangulila Symphony sounds just that tiny bit too slushy and Mantovani-ish for my taste. This sounded rather better. On the strength of what I heard, I want the CD of all of it. When it's come down a bit.
I've now listened to it again on the radio, and can report that Pinchas Zuckerman's performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto last Sunday at the Proms was fine, contrary to what I guessed at when I first half listened to it. There were occasional imperfections of tuning, and some of Zuckerman's phrasing was not quite to my taste, being a little too swoopy and glissando-ed for my entire liking. But it certainly wasn't the "mediocre" performance I thought I had half heard on the night. Quite the reverse. The Prommers gave it a loud ovation, and they were right to.
So, apart from the obvious, not listening carefully enough, where did I go wrong?
I think there were two things happening which had me confused about this performance. First, I think the sound on my TV is very unsuited to bringing out the best in the performance Zuckerman gave of this piece, and to performances of violin concertos generally, come to that. Digital radio, plugged into my medium-fi, was far better. By lowering the treble and beefing up the bass, as is my taste, I spared myself the scratches and hisses that often go with violin concertos, especially difficult ones with lots of vehement bow-hitting-the-strings-really-hard passages. Thus purified, the excellence of Zuckerman's performance sang through, past all the scratching and hissing I heard, or think I probably heard, on Sunday.
But second, I now think that I blamed the messenger for the message. Simply, I now believe that I like this piece less well than I told myself I liked it. I especially don't care for the first movement movement.
Listening to the radio this afternoon, once this thought had occurred to me, I realised how much more beautiful the orchestra tended to sound than did the violin. And whereas on the night I blamed Zuckerman for this (regarding the piece itself as beyond criticism), now I think I blame Elgar. All that scratching and scraping. How much more beautiful those orchestral legatos sounded, with their long and generalised string sound, with discreet brass and woodwind reinforcement to create that unique Elgar sound.
Notice that the quality I am complaining of in Elgar's solo violin writing is the very thing that my TV's scrappy sound system with its excessive treble and inadequate bass emphasised. All that frantic scratching and scraping. On the TV it was all an order of magnitude more scratchy and scrapy.
I listened to several other performances of this piece before hearing Zuckerman's performance again, as I promised I would, and none of them ,ade much of impression on me (although I did find myself admiring the one by Kyoko Takezawa with Colin Davis and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on RCA). And I think it was the music I was failing to respond to. After all, if a young Zuckerman, a young Nigel Kennedy, Heifetz even, didn't work for me, it must be me and the music that are not in sync. With messengers like that, it has to be that the message itself is unwelcome.
Please don't misunderstand me as saying that you shouldn't like the Elgar concerto, or worse, that you should stop liking it on my account.
The slow movement and the final movement, with that long and soulful cadenza, are better, for me. And Zuckerman played those movements very well indeed, although again, with the occasional tiny blemishes of tuning and phrasing that would probably be redone in a studio recording. But if I had really been enjoying the music such things would not have bothered me. I would have tuned in to the wonderful things that Zuckerman was also doing, with what is, I know, for many many people, a wonderful concerto. Definitely my loss.
I now want a critic, to tell me if Pinchas Zuckerman's performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto at the Proms on Sunday night really was as mediocre as I suspect it of having been.
Basically, I just thought there were too many duff notes and badly phrased phrases. Zuckerman's playing sounded to me choppy and ugly, in a way I certainly don't recall from having for many years owned Zuckerman's recording of this wonderful piece with Barenboim and the LPO. So, I switched off and did something else. I didn't switch off the TV set, on which he was playing. I just switched off my mind and ears.
Because of that, I have zero confidence in the satisfactoriness of my response, which could just have been wrong. If you want a critic to tell you about this performance, I am not it. Although this performance didn't grab me, that could be because I just wasn't in the mood to be grabbed, and if God had been the soloist I might still have allowed my mind to wander. I don't think that's what happened, but I really can't be sure. Maybe, for example, it was the fussy looking gestures of conductor Sir Andrew Davis (whom I have never much enjoyed looking at when he conducts) that also put me off.
The announcers and non-critical responders rounded up by the BBC to react to Zuckerman's performance had nothing bad to say about his playing, but they never do. They are there to accentuate the positive and make you keep on listening, and there is usually something positive to say about any half adequate performance. And then they talked with Zuckerman himself, and that was all about how wonderful it was to be playing Elgar in England with an English orchestra, and about how Zuckerman has to teach American orchestras how to play this music. He has, after all, recording this piece twice, and played it in concert halls all over the world, many times.
So now I find myself genuinely curious to learn if my casual impression matches with anyone else's properly considered opinion. Was it just me, or was this a decidedly imperfect performance? And I ask, because I truly want to know, the way most people who say "Was it just me or …?" are not truly asking.
Sadly, I can find no reference via google to anyone else's response to this performance, so here's what I will do. I will listen to that first Zuckerman recording, and to maybe a couple of other recordings, of this lovely piece. Then, I will listen (which may perhaps be more focussing than listening and watching) to the repeat of this concert that Radio 3 is broadcasting on Thursday afternoon. Much of the point of this posting is to remind me to do just this, despite the fact that there is a Test Match starting that day. And this time I will try to listen properly.
If no other critic will oblige me with a considered opinion of this performance, I will have to do the job myself. Assuming I manage to do this, I will report back.
But that's not my central point here. My central point is that concert reviewers do definitely have their uses. They educate the tastes of their readers, by either reinforcing their confidence in their judgements, or by undermining that confidence. Both processes are valuable.
Today I got a DVD for next to nothing in a remainder shop, but a DVD with a difference. It was of a very good pianist (Zoltan Kocsis), playing some classical piano pieces.
One of the pieces was Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111 in C minor. Maybe experts would find some faults with Kocsis' performance but I couldn't.
Watching him scorch his way through this amazing music made me realise that listening to CDs of piano music is a quite different experience from watching it being played as well.
When you watch a pianist at work, you know, a fraction of a second before it happens, what will then happen. When you see that right hand reaching out to the right and descending ferociously towards the keyboard, you know that what you are about to hear is going to be high, and loud. With a CD you have no clue as to what will hit you.
I believe that watching Kocsis' playing enhanced my enjoyment of it. It's almost as if your eyes are helping out with the listening. Your ears receive incoming data about what the music is doing, and so do your eyes.
This made me think of two other things. First, it made me remember a guy called Joseph Cooper, who used to appear on a classical music TV quiz show. One of his tricks was his "silent keyboard". He would play some piece on it, and all you could hear was a subdued clattering noise. What was the piece? Any real pianists watching this could always tell, and I often could too.
And the other thing this made me think that there is an opportunity here for a comic piano act, where the right hand descends with great ferocity onto the top end of the keyboard, and the comic pianist leans forward with enormous classical music type intensity toward the place of contact between his hand and the keyboard. But no loud high noise ensues, because Mr Comic Pianist pulls back from the loud noise at the last minute. Instead, his left hand, utterly unwatched by his intense classical music head, and hidden by his body as it leans forward with classical music intensity, plays a very low, very soft note. Maybe a Debussy type chord. The pianist turns in amazement to see what his left hand did. The point being that this is typically not what happens when you see a pianist play.
When you watch a conductor conducting an orchestra, you often know how loudly people are going to play, and who is going to play. But you don't know what they are going to play. You really don't know how it's going to sound. But with a pianist, you pretty much do know, just before it happens. As I say, this changes things. And it particularly changes things when the composer is late Beethoven, because with late Beethoven you never know what will come next. Unless, that is, you do.
I hadn't really taken all this in before. Well, it interested me.
Tonight on BBC4 TV I was lucky enough to hear a snatch of Magdalena Kozena singing some songs by Novak (before incoming phone got in the way), at the live Prom they have just shown. She didn't look nearly as glamorous as she does in her publicikty stills, but she has a truly beautiful voice and made wonderful use of it this evening. I have CDs by her, but have never heard her sound so good.
Classical music on TV is often somewhat of a waste of all that camera work, but when someone is singing in a foreign language, the subtitles are a real help.
Later in the concert, however, there was an extraordinary moment, at 9.29 pm to be precise. Jiri Behlohlavek was conducting a very nice performance of the Prague Symphony by Mozart. Except that during the last movement the proceedings were jarringly interrupted by a plug for the latest manifestation of the rerun of Robert Hughes Shock of the New series, about Modern Art. And then it was back to the Mozart as if nothing had happened.
Imagine being the person responsible for a grotesque cock-up of this sort? And I wonder if any reference will be made to this interruption, now that the concert is over they are all clapping?
Here comes the same advert again. And now a voice says: "You're watching BBC4." Yes dear, I know, but do you know what BBC4 just did? It would seem not. Now they are showing a little programme about Bollywood movies. No apparent realisation of or apology for what happened.
There's a new season of Proms starting this Friday. Last year I went to a prom, and heard Esa Pekka Salonen conduct a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which combined being note perfect with being completely boring. In fact it was the most boring performance of a Beethoven symphony I have ever heard. While it was happening I thought: is it just me, or is this very boring? Then, next morning, I read the critics, and they found it very boring too. So critics do have their uses.
However, ever since that boring performance, I have had something of a phobia about this piece. Perhaps Beethoven's Ninth Symphony itself is boring, I found myself saying. So those critics didn't do a complete job for me. I have listened to the occasional CD of this piece since then, but you know CDs. They all have a tendency to be note perfect and boring too. With a lot of music note perfect is good. But with Beethoven's Ninth it means you aren't trying.