Month: July 2023

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross picks his way through the sonic landfill that most music-streaming services make of classical music, frustrating and/or confounding both classical mavens and listeners beginning to explore this art form.

Ross is not impressed by the new Apple Classical service (see headline quote). He has no use for Spotify (“obnoxious chaos”), not much for Qobuz (“a bit of a mess”). He likes the search and selection capacities of Idagio and the new streaming service of the British retailer Presto Classical.

He is impressed by the sometimes vast number of choices – Apple Classical, he finds, offers more than 500 Beethoven Fifths; less so by the hoops that users must jump through before arriving at those options. He misses printed opera librettos and notes, although some services offer PDF-format virtual booklets.

He notes that streaming services tend to be geared to playback from smartphones and other hand-held devices rather than computers, a significant drawback for him (and for me – a sign, I suspect, of our ages).

Ross’ bottom line: “[W]ith myriad possibilities accessible at the flick of a finger, it becomes harder to concentrate on a single album or on a single work. Gluttony takes hold, indigestion sets in. For that reason, I still prefer CDs or LPs: [T]he experience is finite and complete, with silence on both ends.”

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/apple-again-fails-to-save-classical-music

My bottom line: Streaming can wait. I don’t care to choose among 50 Beethoven Fifths, let alone 500. I’m fine with digital downloads in place of physical objects. Most mp3 downloads are much less expensive than a CD; higher-quality downloads are roughly the same price. (Highness of fidelity ultimately depends on the quality of playback equipment.) I don’t need booklets for most recordings and works, as there are plenty of information sources on the Internet. Speaking of which, there’s YouTube, whose praises I sang here:

http://wordpress.com/post/letterv.blog/15459.

On the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, pianist Stephen Hough started a thread of comments about whether audiences should applaud between movements of symphonies, concertos and other multi-part works.

Hough wrote that composers and performers must have expected applause after the big first movements of the Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Brahms piano concertos, and after the third-movement march in Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (No. 6).

“I don’t actually mind applause either, as long as it’s a heartfelt response and not something that the public is expected to deliver automatically,” replied pianist Marc-André Hamelin. “But, in any case, I’d much rather have applause between movements than cell phones at any moment!”

(via http://slippedisc.com)

The no-applause-between-movements protocol seems to be a product of the early to mid-20th century, possibly an artifact of Victorian-hangover Britain and even more uptight Anglophilia in the US.

Or maybe not. I began to wonder about this when I heard a concert recording of Jascha Heifetz playing the Brahms Violin Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall in the 1940s. Sustained applause followed the first movement. There was no audible evidence of outrage from the stage, no sign of the fun police being called in to quell the untimely demonstration.

Some 19th-century accounts report applause within movements, by audiences taken with certain themes or impressed by solo cadenzas – not unlike the response of a jazz audience to a improvisatory solo. And, of course, opera audiences once routinely demanded encores of popular or especially well-sung arias. Not that we need to revive those old practices.

Now who’s ready to address the more recent convention of audience appreciation, the obligatory standing ovation after a performance? A standing-O really should signify more than, “Hey, you got through the concerto without breaking a string.”

A second sampler of the season’s new classical recordings, with standards of Bach, Mendelssohn and Rachmaninoff, discoveries from William Grant Still and Radames Gnattali, and violinist Joshua Bell playing a novel arrangement of Saint-Saëns’ “Introduction and rondo capriccioso.”

1-3 p.m. EDT
1700-1900 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

J.S. Bach: “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050
Elbipolis Barockorchester Hamburg/Jürgen Gross
(Challenge Classics)

William Grant Still: “Ennanga”
(Ashley Jackson arrangement)
Ashley Jackson, harp
Harlem Chamber Players
(Bright Shiny Things)

Mendelssohn: Fantasie in F sharp minor, Op. 28 (“Sonate écossaise”)
Maximilian Schairer, piano
(Hänssler Classic)

Saint-Saëns: Introduction and rondo capriccioso in A minor, Op. 28
(Phoon Yew Tien arrangement)
Joshua Bell, violin
Singapore Chinese Orchestra/Tsung Yeh
(Sony Classical)

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor
Kirill Gerstein, piano
Berlin Philharmonic/Kirill Petrenko
(Berliner Philharmoniker)

Radames Gnattali: Sonatina No. 2 for guitar & piano
Fabio Zanon, guitar
Clelia Iruzun, piano
(Somm)

Writing for The Observer, Ed Vulliamy writes about the response of Ukrainian musicians to the Russian invasion of their country, from the opera house in Lviv to a nightspot in Kyiv.

“Music is a universal language. But music also comes from where you come from; it reflects the feeling of home, and what home means – and on the obligation to protect your family, your neighbour,” says Andriy Khlyvnyuk, the singer-songwriter of the Ukrainian pop band Boom Box who has spent the war in a police combat unit. “Anyone who grew up learning their language, and their poets and music by heart knows to say to the empire, any empire: ‘You will not do this to us.’ ”

Yevhen Stankovych, the Ukrainian composer of “The Terrible Revenge,” a new opera based on the Nikolai Gogol story, writes of his work and that of the country’s other artists, “All of this resonates with our reality, and what is happening.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/23/ukraine-musicians-fighting-frontline-pop-classical-music-boombox

In the spring, I posted on tests of Ludwig van Beethoven’s hair to identify what physical ill(s) may have led to his death.

Now, a more substantial sample of his body – the so-called Seligmann fragments, bones believed to be part of Beethoven’s skull – have been donated to the Medical University of Vienna by Paul Kaufmann, a descendant of the Viennese doctor Franz Romeo Seligmann, who collected the bones in 1863 during disinterment and relocation of Beethoven’s remains.

The university plans to have researchers test the bone fragments, hoping to shed further light on Beethoven’s maladies and death in 1827, The Washington Post’s Adela Suliman reports:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/21/beethoven-skull-fragments-paul-kaufmann/

Writing for the online British magazine Classical Music, violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster note that neglected music, notably pieces by women and composers of color, stays neglected because scores are full of errors and often are very costly to rent for performance.

They cite an example: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Nonet “costs £265 [about $347] for score and parts; by comparison, a set of parts for Mendelssohn’s Octet will set you back about £30 [$39]. . . . [I]t seems as if some publishers choose to ignore the fact that disproportionate purchase or hire costs are thwarting musicians’ dreams to perform lesser-known repertoire.”

Pianist Alexandra Dariescu, shortly after performing last fall with the Richmond Symphony, was planning to introduce Florence Price’s Piano Concerto to her native Romania, but had to replace the piece on her program because the score was so expensive.

“It’s hard enough convincing promoters and conductors to take a chance and program unknown works by female composers, but when a premium is charged for the materials, it’ll simply be impossible to play this repertoire and it feels like we’re taking a giant step backwards,” Dariescu told Urioste and Poster:

http://www.classical-music.uk/features/article/keeping-score-why-are-the-scores-of-underrepresented-composers-riddled-with-mistakes

(via http://www.artsjournal.com)

In the first of three programs sampling the season’s new classical recordings, music of the baroque, classical and romantic eras.

1-3 p.m. EDT
1700-1900 UTC/GMT
WDCE, University of Richmond
90.1 FM
http://wdce.org

Johan Joachim Agrell: Sinfonia in C major
Drottningholms Barockensemble
(Prophone)

C.P.E. Bach: Sonata in E flat major, Wq. 49/5 (“Württemberg Sonata No. 5”)
Keith Jarrett, piano
(ECM)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503
Ben Kim, piano
Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra/Michael Waterman
(Challenge Classics)

Cécile Chaminade: Piano Trio No. 1 in G minor, Op. 11
Martina Consonni, piano
Sarah Jégou-Sageman, violin
Jeein You, cello
(Warner Classics)

Carl Reinecke: Flute Sonata in E major, Op. 167 (“Undine”)
Juliette Hurel, flute
Hélène Couvert, piano
(Alpha)

Scriabin: Sonata in G sharp minor, Op. 19 (“Sonata Fantasy”)
Yuja Wang, piano
(Deutsche Grammophon)

Mubert, a company run by a software engineer named Alex Mubert, has announced that its artificial intelligence (AI) application has created 100 million songs. “That’s roughly equivalent to the entire catalog of music available on Spotify,” Ted Gioia writes on his online newsletter The Honest Broker. “The company notes that this adds up to 4.8 million hours of creativity.”

http://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-number-of-songs-in-the-world

(via http://www.artsjournal.com)

AI, which has been a thing ever since computers started winning at chess, is now The Thing in technology. Depending on who’s assessing its impact, it will either save or destroy human endeavor.

Proponents say it can kick scientific and medical research into hyperdrive, getting results in seconds rather than years. Critics worry that AI-enhanced robotics could upend a range of professions, from oncology to long-haul trucking, depopulating the workforce, de-humanizing the acquisition and use of knowledge – making most of us, as the British say, “surplus to requirements.”

Fields requiring human sensibilities, notably the arts, might have been considered immune to AI. A couple of years ago, software took assorted sketches by Beethoven and assembled a Tenth Symphony. Reviewing this creation for the online classical magazine Van, the Beethoven scholar Jan Swafford found that the result was “something that sounds unquestionably like a piece of music, only a gangly and forgettable one. . . .

“Artificial intelligence can mimic art, but it can’t be expressive at it because, other than the definition of the word, it doesn’t know what expressive is,” Swafford wrote. “It also doesn’t know what excitement is, because there’s a reason people call excitement ‘pulse-pounding,’ and computers don’t have pulses.”

The Intelligence of Bodies

While AI may be incapable (so far) of credibly composing a symphony, it may be usable for incidental and background music, jingles, ring tones and the like. AI’s prospects for composing pop songs are more murky.

Commercial popular music already is significantly automated in instrumentation (synthesizers, drum machines, etc.), and the compositional group-think that makes songwriters and performers replicate trendy sounds and subjects is as old as music itself. Everybody copies everybody else, and always has.

I haven’t heard Mubert’s songs. Maybe they will be indistinguishable from what we already hear on light-rock or smooth-jazz channels. Songs reflecting human feelings and life experiences, interpreted by humans with individual personalities and distinctive musical techniques – i.e., songs worth listening to – will be very hard to automate, even by the most sophisticated software.

André Watts, one of the first American Black classical pianists to earn worldwide acclaim, has died at 77.

Born in Nürnberg, Germany, to a US serviceman and his Hungarian wife who eventually settled in Philadelphia, Watts was a musical prodigy who performed as a 9-year-old with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1963, Leonard Bernstein tapped the 16-year-old Watts to appear in a “Young People’s Concert” telecast with the New York Philharmonic; later that year, the young pianist substituted for Glenn Gould in a subscription concert with Bernstein and the philharmonic.

After graduating from the Philadelphia Musical Academy (now the University of the Arts), Watts studied with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, graduating in 1972. During his studies, Watts appeared with several US and British orchestras, and by the mid-’70s was performing extensively and recording for Columbia Masterworks (now Sony Classical). He later recorded for the EMI/Angel (now Warner Classics) and Telarc labels.

Since 2004, Watts had been a member of the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University Bloomington.

An obituary from the Jacobs School:

http://music.indiana.edu/news-events/news/info/2023/07/andre-watts-passing.html

The Richmond Chamber Players will stage two concerts in their Interlude 2023 series, featuring music of Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartók and others.

The concerts begin at 3 p.m. Aug. 6 and 13 at Bon Air Presbyterian Church, 9201 W. Huguenot Road.

Artists include violinists Catherine Cary and Susy Yim, violist Stephen Schmidt (who doubles as the ensemble’s artistic director), cellists Neal Cary and Ryan Lannan, flutist Mary Boodell and pianist John Walter.

Tickets are $50 for a two-concert subscription, or $30 per concert, and may be ordered from: Richmond Chamber Players, P.O. Box 14654, Richmond, VA 23221. Tickets and subscriptions also will be sold at the door. For more information, visit http://richmondchamberplayers.org

Interlude 2023 programs:

Aug. 6
Kirke Mechem: Madrigal for flute & piano
Alfred Schnittke: “Suite im alten Stile” (“Suite in the Old Style”) for violin & piano
Mechem: Divertimento for flute & strings
Mahler/Schnittke: Piano Quartet in A minor

Aug. 13
Shostakovich: Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110
Bartók: Piano Quintet, Op. 1 – I: Andante – allegro
Radiohead: “Creep” for cello & piano quintet