Talking of Lebrecht and Karajan, as I was in the previous posting, I totally agree with this piece by Dominic Lawson about Karajan, and think it very well expressed.

Quote:

Some have seen his early affiliation to the Nazi Party as an indicator of strong political belief in the doctrines of Adolf Hitler. In fact, Karajan’s only faith was in himself and his ambition to become Germany’s – and later the world’s – dominant interpreter of classical music. There is no evidence that he had any interest in politics, other than the politics of personal achievement in the always brutally competitive world of classical music. In other words, he used the Nazis as much as they used him. Indeed, he once admitted that he “would have sold my grandmother” to get the orchestral appointments that the cultural commissars of the Nazi Party had it in their gift to award him.

Norman Lebrecht wrote a characteristically stirring article in the London Evening Standard a couple of days ago, damning the classical music business for launching the celebrations: “It amazes me to see Karajan’s demagogic pose in Paris, where he conducted the Horst Wessel Lied during Hitler’s occupation. It astonishes me no less to hear the self-made Valery Gergiev and Simon Rattle claim Karajan as a mentor, as if they secretly covet his power.”

Well, perhaps they do, although no conductor will ever again wield the power that Karajan exercised. Apart from anything else, it is hard to imagine any modern orchestra tolerating the dictatorial behaviour he inflicted wherever and on whomever he conducted. Surely, however, what the likes of Sir Simon Rattle worship is not Karajan’s character but his musicianship. Lebrecht describes him as “a moral and creative nullity” but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he believes the first part of that accusation leads inexorably to the second.

It doesn’t follow. Much as we would like it to be the case, there is no connection between good character and good art ...

Having not read very much about Karajan’s supposedly Nazi past, but a bit, I said pretty much all of that stuff about how Karajan wanted only the power to make music the exact way he wanted to, in this talk.  It is good to have it all confirmed by someone else who has presumably researched Karajan a bit more thoroughly.

Radio 3 played the Eroica Symphony this afternoon.  I knew it was the Berlin Phil because the Radio Times said so, but I missed the beginning so I didn’t know who the conductor was.  It sounded very fine to me.  Excellent, but a tad too “Germanic” and to be the recent, excellent Abbado recording.  So who?  It sounded so beautiful, while still sounding suitably like Beethoven.  So, probably Karajan.  Yes, Karajan.

I’m listening to a CD of the Riccardo Chailly/Concertgebouw version of Bruckner‘s Fifth Symphony, a piece that has been an obsession of mine ever since I chanced upon Christian Thielemann’s superb (I think) DGG recording of it.

Once again, I am enthralled.  But this time, it is not because I find Chailly’s to be an especially enthralling performance, although it does indeed sound well above averagely splendid to me.  No, what is giving the experience a special edge of excitement, not unlike that of attending a live concert, is that the CD is in an appalling state of decrepitude, and I am listening to it for the first time since I bought it, second hand.  Most second hand CDs work fine, and anyway, all the second hand CD dealers I deal with are extremely eager to stay on the right side of me, and will swap anything back if it doesn’t work properly.  So, I often don’t check the condition of CDs when I buy them.  I should, but often I don’t.  I didn’t check this Chailly Bruckner 5, for if I had, I would probably not have bought it.

So anyway, now that I have bought it, I put it on the machine anyway and hoped for the best.  And I’ve reached the fourth of the four movements, so far without any mishaps.

Normally when you listen to a CD, you know it’s going to be perfect, especially if it’s a conductor like Chailly conducting an orchestra like the Concertgebouw.  There will be no untoward squawks from the woodwind, no scrappy string playing, no out of place drum bangs, no obvious failures of ensemble.  The brass will be predictably magnificent, the chords impeccably – nay sumptuously - blended.  Which means that there is a fatal tendency for the ear and mind to wander.  It ought not to be so, but, with me, it is so.  When I am listening to a live performance, one of the things that keeps me listening is the possibility that something will go wrong. This is especially the case when a difficult concerto is being played by a new young soloist who may not be quite up to all its demands.  Well, nothing will go wrong with the Concertgebouw, I know that.  But the fact that my particular plasticated manifestation of this particular recording could go horribly wrong at any moment lends a whole new intensity to the experience of listening to this wonderful piece.

It occurs to me that perhaps some of the intense and to me inexplicably irrational loathing that some people still seem to feel for the late Herbert von Karajan is the result of the fact (if fact it was – I never witnessed his conducting live) that when you were at one of his concerts, you did not get that feeling you usually get, of a quarter of a per cent possibility of disaster, or indeed the feeling that things might go in any way differently to what Karajan had decided beforehand.  Listening to Karajan, that is to say, was like listening to a pristine Karajan CD.  Which is okay if it is a pristine Karajan CD, costing a tenner.  But not what everyone wants for their fifty quid in a concert hall.

Fingers crossed.  Still no catastrophes, and I do confess that my mind did wander a little during the last few minutes.  I was, after all, writing this.

Aaaaargh!!!  A blemish.  Half way through the final movement.  Clickety click.  Not bad enough to bring the whole thing to a grinding halt, but ... clickety bloody click.  Damn damn damn.  I took it out, cleaned it, and tried again from just before where it happened.  Still there.  And I fear there will be more because some of the scratches are circular in direction rather than spoke-like, if you get my meaning.  Circular ones are the worst, because they blot out a whole gob of what the machine is trying to read.  It’s the difference between an easy little fence for a horse, or a huge fence involving a great stretch of water.

Finished, with no further horrors.  I then really cleaned it, and the blemish is less bad, in fact hardly detectable.  It’s just that a fraction of a second of this marvellous music goes missing.  Infuriating.  Now that I’ve been listening to this recording, really listening to it, I find that it is truly excellent, and I want to own it in pristine form.  I will keep a particular eye out for another second hand copy.  It really is very good.  Buying it again, at full price, would just be too sad.

They’ve been playing the Vaughan Williams symphonies on Radio 3, each afternoon this week.  No 2, one of my favourites, was on Tuesday, and I was once again struck by how there were passages in it that would not have sounded out of place if they had been plucked out of this “London” Symphony and placed in the midst of Miklos Rosza’s music for the Jesus Christ scenes in Ben Hur.  I think I wrote on my old Culture Blog about how artificial are the associations between particular orchestral sounds and particular nationalities, using this same orchestral coincidence to illustrate the point.  The typical Vaughan Williams Tallis-drenched string sound has become attached to the English countryside, but this association is merely the product of certain pictures constantly being shown, especially on television, alongside certain sounds.  Vaughan Williams actually took orchestration lessons from Ravel, I recall learning recently.  So, if a Frenchman had written those symphonies, would they now be regarded as typically French.  Yes they would.  Was Vaughan Williams Jewish?  No.  Had he been, would his music (with not a note changed) have been described, then and ever since, as sounding ecidedly Jewish?  Yes.  No question.  Are they now described as sounding Jewish?  Not that I’ve ever heard.

Now I am listening to a Naxos CD of two symphonies (2 and 5) by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924).  This is very good music, definitely two notches above average, which isn’t always true with more obscure stuff.  Sometimes, there’s a good reason it’s obscure.  Anyway, while listening to this very good CD, I heard another mismatch between the actual nationality of the composer (Irish/British – born in Dublin – career in England), and what his nationality sounded like while I was listening.  The last movement was apparently inspired by a Milton poem involving ancient Greece.  Yet if I had had to guess who wrote it, blind, I would have guessed: Glazunov.  The last movement sounded particularly “Russian”.  There was something about the way the brass instruments were combined with the strings, and something about the rhythm.

The inverted commas being there because all I mean by “Russian” is that it sounded like the sort of stuff that Russian composers, most particularly Glazunov, just happened to be composing at the time.  We now think of that kind of sound as typically Russian.  Again, that is merely how it turned out.  That sound could have ended up being regarded as sounding typically somewhere quite different.

There’s no great mystery about why Stanford might sometimes sound like Glazunov.  Both Stanford and the Russian composers who were his contemporaries were steeped in the same Germanic orchestral sounds and traditions, as this guy explains very well.  I heard Glazunov.  He heard Brahms.  As did I, before I started hearing Glazunov instead.

Of all the arts, music is the one that is least dependent upon the particular circumstances in which it is created, the most abstract.  Painting tends – often if not always - to be painting of the people and places it was painted in.  Literature and poetry, ditto.  But music has a life of its own.  What is music, especially purely instrumental music, about?  Anything, and nothing.  What connection do particular sounds have with particular people and places and words, only the connections that creators choose to create.

All photoed rather hastily, and the lighting is the usual Billion Monkey indoors artificial mostly dark with occasional blinding patches of white caused by the proximity of a lightbulb, but, you get the pictures.  On the left: the problem.  On the right: the solution.

This kind of posting will cut no ice with mere readers.  But every so often I have to remind you people that my most important reader is me, in a few months or years time.  Oh look, that was when I had all those five foot tall CD heaps.  And there’s that giant CD shelf that collapsed into the room and killed my brother and maimed me for life, before I filled it up.  This will warm the cockles of my faltering heart, the way me burbling on about the Cold War ending, and what a Good Thing that is, never could.  Oooh.  I see that in April 2008, I was of the opinion that the Cold War ending was Good.  Well, twiddledidee.

In the Evening Standard last Wednesday, a big article, with a picture of Daniel Barenboim at the top - which was what got me reading it, in the paper version - starting like this:

Half a mile north of King’s Cross, behind a spectacular, rippling glass facade, a gleaming Xanadu named King’s Place is rising out of the urban wasteland.  There are offices, galleries, and canal side restaurants with, magically, for the money-lenders, the new St Pancras Eurostar link down the road.

Rippling glass facade?  North of King’s Cross?  That would be this:

I snapped those on March 4th.  I pass this thing every time I walk from Kings Cross railway station to Kings Cross Supplementary.  To make the point about Eurostar being just nearby, I snapped the one on the right here only seconds later.  That pointy thing on the left is the roof of what St Pancras Eurostar, with the even pointier thing behind it being the Post Office Tower.

So, then, what about this rippling facade just down the road from Kings Cross Supplementary?  And what has it to do with Daniel Barenboim?

But one aspect of this development, arguably its most important, has barely merited comment.  A state-of-the-art 420 seat auditorium, designed by Dixon Jones, architects of the Royal Opera House, and described by the site’s visionary developer Peter Millican as “a jewel box”, opens with a five day festival in October.

Yes, come to think of it, I do recall reading on the outside of this edifice something about a concert hall being included in among it.

Understandably, it’s being marketed as a “music venue”, embracing everything from bongo to bass viol.  But those in the know scoff as such weasel words.  The fact that the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta will have their homes here gives it away.  To state plainly: London is about to get a new concert hall.

Die crossover philistines!  Tremble before the classics, World Music wankers!  Taxpayers, hand over your wallets!  You know that authentically period performances of obscure Haydn operas sung in a manner you consider ridiculous, and modernistical weirdnesses reverently performed by a small ensemble of Boulezy obsessives, are good for you!

Fiona Maddocks goes on to rhapsodise about how the audience for live classical music is growing, and better yet, is starting to look cool instead of just decaying.  The opposite of looking like me, in other words: sleek, stylish, young.  The Barenboim connection (Barenboim is even more ancient than me) is that Barenboim’s latest London venture, a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas as the Royal Festival Hall, sold out in the blink of an eye, and is being raved about by all who have attended.

So if, by the time they open this thing I’m still going to Kings Cross Supplementary, I might take in the odd concert on the way back.

I’m listening to Rob Cowan - half an hour into this, for an hour - decide which is the best CD of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Cowan is making copious references, not unreasonably, to what Stravinsky himself said it was all about.  Nature, religious ritual, young virgin dancing herself to death, a time of long ago paganism, that kind of thing.  Stravinsky said it came to him in a dream, complete with dancing maidens, etc.  I suspect humbug.  Stravinsky strikes me as a typical modernist, in the bad sense of striking carefully contrived modernistical poses calculated to outrage, which he claimed were merely spontaneous, “honest” impulses.  Stravinsky is not a favourite of mine, but humbug or not, I like the Rite of Spring, or bits of it anyway.  I am eager to learn who Rob Cowan declares to be the winner.

But, I can’t accept all this talk about nature.  To me the Rite sounds thoroughly industrial.  Rigid rhythms don’t say nature to me, they say the works of man, which were causing such a stir and making such a deafening noise at just the time that the Rite got written, just before World War 1. 

Consider that scene in The Hunt For Red October, in which the black sonic analyst wizard speeds up the noises being made by the otherwise inaudible Red October, turning them into a rigidly rhythmic boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, and adds: “That’s got to be man made.” Indeed.  “You can almost smell the sweat and tribal grease paint”, Cowan has just said.  It sounded like a locomotive to me, and it smelt of steam and oil, not nature.  But, when listening to it I am entirely able to see factories and machines and smoke belching from chimneys rather than dancing Clark Gable movie extras.  Art has a life of its own, distinct from the intentions of its mere creators.

And the winner is: this:

That’s it on the left there.  I of course reckon that something looking more like the picture on the right would have made more sense.  Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.  (I’ll be a poet yet.) Happy Easter everybody.

Simon Hewitt Jones calls it astonishing, and technologically it surely is.  But it is also the dreariest performance of Land of Hope and Glory I’ve heard in a long time.  Johnathan Pearce wouldn’t like it at all.

It’s the sort of thing that the Conservatives might use at the next election to communicate how creepy Labour is, except that it might be too easily used to describe them as well.

The mood is not improved by seeing all the contraptions to enable oldies to meander about, which also combines being very impressive with being very depressing.  Toshiba has seen the future and it is robots ferrying oldies around and playing classical music, perfectly, but very badly.

Picture from, and more reportage, here.

On January 6th I gave the first of Christian Michel’s 6/20 Club talks of this year.  I also recorded it.  Since then, I have wondered whether it should be stuck up on the internet or quietly forgotten.  But the word of mouth from friends I have asked about it has been encouraging, anyone bored by it will feel free to switch it off at any moment, so, what the hell?  Here it is. I listened to it again today, to take my mind off the fact that England were about to lose at rugby to France - although strangely England ended up winning.  And it sounded okay to me.

It’s about music making during the twentieth century, and about the contrasting ways that the classical and pop musicians responded to the opportunities of electronic recording and broadcasting.

If you want to start where I start talking, skip the first five minutes, which is Christian Michel introducing me at generous length.  I then talk until 53 minutes have elapsed, and there’s then a Q and A period which lasts about another half hour.  During the Q and A, me saying “mmm” is a lot louder than the people speaking from the floor, because the one microphone I used was just under my own chin, but most of these contributions and questions are just about audible, especially with a bit of nob twiddling.

I did a Samizdata posting a few days before I gave the talk, to get myself thinking and to solicit the thoughts of others, which you can read, together with its comments, here.