Inside Early Music: Bernard D. Sherman's Website

MUSIC

July 25, 2012 : Steve Reich fans may like Lisa Moore's Stainless Staining, which "was written for piano and soundtrack. The soundtrack is made up of samples of a piano (played both normally, and "inside") retuned to provide a massive harmonic spectrum of 100 overtones based on a fundamental low G#" - here it is online: http://soundcloud.com/cantaloupemusic/sets/stainless-staining

July 24, 2012: Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic on SymphonyCast tonight in Mahler's Second. About as great as I could imagine. This week only you can listen to it on their webpage - click on the second "listen" button. Again, here's a guy who critics want to underrate - he's popular, handsome, charming, and too nice to be a real master. But he's really really good.

May 11, 2012 - A follow-up on the top pianists poll: The name Grigor Sokoloff was suggested by Ken Woods, and unknown to a knowledgeable friend in the US. I noted taht the NYT has written about this: "He’s a star on this side of the Atlantic. In America his name will draw blank stares. In this day and age, how can that be?" Now, Ken emails that he had sat down to watch a DVD of Sokoloff in Paris and concluded that he really is the greatest. As it happens, the DVD is available free on youtube. And wow; by the development section of op 14 no 1 you'll be convinced.

May 2, 2012 - I loved Brandon McFarland's All Things Considered story about Marvin Gaye. As a Marvin devotee I loved the insight into his craft from a young singer. But one line rang dubious: "a lot of today's music doesn't feed the soul of those facing hardships the way it did in Marvin's day." True he's talking specifically about soul and R&B, and I'm shamefully ignorant of what's happening there. But I immediately thought of counterexamples such as Bruce Springsteen and... an American CLASSICAL composer, David Lang, whose Little Matchgirl Passion is a moving exploration of empathy (or its lack) for the poorest. And it won the Pulitzer Prize!

April 24, 2012 - Another FB poll: Who are the dozen greatest living pianists? I don't mean "never does anything wrong" but "when they're on, it's on a different level, beyond anything you can imagine being able to do yourself." I mainly came up with elders, and so did my friends. Here's our list (piano flourish, please) in alphabetical order. Agree? Disagree? Who'd we leave off?
* Martha Argerich (Force of nature. A "wild card," my friend Brian said - sometimes way off in an interpretation - but when she's on, it's on another level. And not just in powerhouse pieces, like a Chopin Polonaise; check her out in Jeux d'eau or Bartok Third with the Concertgebouw live.)
* Leon Fleisher (on the assumption that he is still concertizing)
* Richard Goode (nuff said)
* Marc-Andre Hamelin (not just a super-virtuoso)
* Radu Lupu ("The most talented person alive," said Dame Mitsuko. His Schubert, e.g. - well, the definition of another level)
* Ivan Moravec ("The greatest keyboard artist I've personally played with," said Ken Woods)'
* Murray Perahia (no comment needed)
* Mitsuko Uchida (no comment needed)
* Arcadi Volodos (like Hamelin, Jonathan Bellman notes, he has super-chops, but more than that. I'd point to his recording of the Schubert G Major sonata)
* Andras Schiff (thank you Mr. Schiff for making my life richer)
* Grigor Sokoloff (Suggested by Ken Woods, in the UK; unknown to a knowledgeable friend in the US. Turns out the NYT has written about this: "He’s a star on this side of the Atlantic. In America his name will draw blank stares. In this day and age, how can that be?"l
* Krystian Zimerman (nuff said)
Of course, great YOUNGER pianists are bustin' out all over, as Anthony Tomassini wrote - he listed Piotr Anderszewski, Leif Ove Andsnes, Jonathan Biss, Kirill Gerstein, David Greilsammer, Stephen Hough [NOMINATED FOR THE ABOVE LIST BY DANIEL NEHOIANU], Nikolai Lugansky, Alexander Romanovsky, Daniil Trifonov, and Yuja Wang. He argues that a new combination of technique PLUS interpretive depth is becoming common.
And then there are nominees who didn't win consensus in my poll: Paul Lewis, Vladimir Ashkenazy, etc.- maybe we're wrong about one or more. And the retirees, like Brendel and Naida Cole (who chucked her career to become a doctor. All I can say is that if she can fix patients the way she can play music, average human life expectancy will increase measurable.)
That's a total of 26. The bottom line: don't cry to me about the passing of a long-lost golden age. THIS is the golden age.

April 22, 2012 - Schumannic Possession: When I'm talking about politicians or financial advisers, it's a bad sign when I say they sound insane. But when I'm talking about musical performers, it's the highest compliment. The divine Naida Cole playing Chabrier's Bourree Fantasque, I said, sounded like one possessed, and exuded "sheer visceral delight in playing repeated notes insanely fast." Ferenc Fricsay and the Berlin Philharmonic played Beethoven's First insanely fast and sounded, I said, "as if they were possessed by the great god Pan."
Wish I hadn't used up my "possession" shtick, because I've been listening to the Orchestra of the Swan under Kenneth Woods in their new recording of the Schumann Second Symphony - and it is insane in just this way, the possessed, musically great one.
Schumann 2 is one of the hardest symphonies for interpreters. It's hard not to mangle the syntax by getting the phrasing wrong; it's hard not to bury the winds at certain points or to lose sight of other important lines - there's so much going on. Yet I've heard performances where you can hear it all but don't really want to, as the phrases have no life or shape and it all just sounds "notey." Quite the contrary here. Part of why is the insight, nicely explained in the booklet, into how Schumann conveyed meaning through allusion to other great music: Woods points to the allusions to Haydn's 104th, the Trio Sonata from Bach's Musical Offering, Mozart's Long live Sarastro! from the Magic Flute, Beethoven's To the Distant Beloved, and one of Schumann's own songs, Dedication. Sounds academic but it's not; it lets Woods and his players give the right weighting to what is more or less important. (And if you're a classical music buff, you will hear all the allusions and they will be meaningful to you.) All those many things going on form a coherent discourse in this performance. Another ingredient is how they build fearlessly not only to one climax but to an overall climax for the whole work. There is also the excellence of the players: listen to the oboe solo in the third movement, which - as a whole - receives a truly poetic performance.
But let me harp again on the divine madness - the insane glee, the visceral delight. When we're talking about Schumann, the words "insane" and "manic" are fraught, since he was one of the first great composers to be retrospectively diagnosed as bipolar (I haven't kept up on the literature so I don't know if that's still the diagnosis). But I mean something else - that Fricsay/ Naida Cole demonic possession by Pan. Other examples: Lipatti playing Ravel's Alborado; Glenn Gould's first Goldbergs; any number of recordings of Bernstein or Furtwangler. Part of it, in Swan/ Woods' first two movements, comes from speed (Schumannn's MMs are famously fast); yet some speedy performances have sounded merely rushed, as if the players were uncomfortable and pushed. What I want, when we're talking speed, is that sense of possession. In this performance the speed is not hectic but ecstatic. YES!
Divine madness, like this, must be experienced. On top of this, you get what is effectively (I've never heard it before) a new work: the Hans Gal Fourth, written in 1975, when it would have seemed "backward" in idiom -ha! The web page notes that it is pastoral and lyrical in style, which it is, but I had to read the booklet and understand the pain behind this music to find my way past its challenges, and I had to give it a few listens. Give it a chance: it will come to move you deeply. And it's hard to imagine a better performance. If my blog had a star system, this disc would certainly get 5 of them.

April 21, 2012 - E-books vs Paper Books: Been reading lots of books - and mostly on my iPhone4s. I plan to get a Kindle when I have a little spare cash. The advantages of physical books are familiar: if you grew up with them, as I did, you love their look and feel. Also, I tend to read non-fiction, and I rarely read it in a linear way, but often look at the index first, or skim through to get the drift, or go back to a crucial or favorite part to check something - or just plain jump around. It's easier to read in that jumpy way with an old-fashioned book than with an iPhone. BUT, the iPhone has the equal and opposite value: it forces me to read in a linear way, one page to the next, which is mostly good for me. Also, it's always with me, so if I find myself stuck in a waiting room or something -or when I'm doing my daily run on the treadmill - I can pick up where I left off in the book. AND... this is big... by necessity I move houses/apartments a lot, with seven different dwellings in the last decade. And my library is the single heaviest of my possessions - next to my car, which is, however, easy to move. (I don't own any appliances or a big TV. No need.) It would be easy to move my library if it were just a bunch of digits in the cloud. So... yeah.... ebooks are MY future. UPDATE: April 22. Janet points out another advantage to ebooks: permanence, both of the book AND of your annotations and notes. Most of the books I've owned, and the notes I've scribbled in the margins, are long gone - left behind in a move, or too moldy to keep, or just lost. But the "me" of 20 years from now will be able to have kept every book ever owned in the cloud (and, with a Kindle or iPad anything I scribble in it) and backed up. OK, digital rights could become a problem, but basically it will be way more feasible to keep a lifetime library.

April 20, 2012 - The Bassists did WHAT? I'm all a-twitter about the Twitter feed @LSOonTour1912 - a day-by-day posting of the diary entries of the London Symphony Orchestra's timpanist, Charles Turner, written during their US tour of 1912 - the first US tour ever undertaken by a European orchestra. Gareth Davies of today's LSO is posting them 100 year to the day after they were written. It interests me partly because I'm fascinated by the US in 1912, an extraordinary year in our history, but also because the diary gives a musician's-eye-view of the legendary maestro Artur Nikisch. I especially love the part where they get to the state I live in, Iowa - they did two gigs in Des Moines, playing in the Coliseum. Turner writes, "It is like a barn. Can’t play half loud enough" (today, by the way, Des Moines has a beautiful Civic Center with excellent acoustics). Right now (so to speak) they are in Milwaukee, where my dad was to be born six years later.
BUT HERE'S A QUESTION: Turner writes, "More trouble with Nick[isch]. He gets on the Basses and gets the bird back." What did "give the bird" and "get the bird" mean to an English musician in 1912? Today it would mean the basses made an obscene gesture with the middle finger, of course, and although the LSO was a self-governing organization from Day One in 1904, I find THAT hard to imagine.
UPDATE, APRIL 21: I asked the LSO, and LSO Administrator Jo Johnson answered brilliantly - "It seems that the etymology of the phrase 'giving the bird' is booing and hissing, like a goose, as opposed to the more obscene gesture we know these days. It was apparently in use in the music hall/vaudeville era - 1920s - to get someone unpopular off the stage. We can probably assume that giving the bird to the Maestro was more like tutting or grumbling loudly enough to be heard! "
BTW, here's a page with the LSO tour itinerary (it ended April 28) and the programs.

April 19, 2012 - While prepping for interview of Musicians from Marlboro, I read Alex Ross's superb "The Music Mountain" in Listen to This. Vivid portrayal of the life force that is Mitsuko Uchida, one of my favorite great pianists, quoting the wonderful Mitsuko-isms that emerge from her brain to the world with welcome frequency. An example, "For the Germans, the greatest thing since Karajan. Karajan, of course, was the greatest thing since Hitler." Alex doesn't say to whom she refers - only, "an overhyped instrumentalist"; otherwise I'd have guessed it was Christian Thielemann... anybody have any specifics?
Also love her comment on prodigies: "Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theater and see a teenager play King Lear?"

April 17, 2012 - Been a while, some odds and ends:
(1) Now doing @IPRClassical twitter feed; follow me (that's where I've been).
(2) Natalie Dessay. I had to babysit the board for last week's Met broadcast - La Traviata, a favorite opera for me too, of course. What I wasn't expecting was to be entranced by the soprano's singing. Here's an admission: most of the Met sopranos (I've baby-sat the board a lot) are not for me. To my ears, the voices sound forced or hard, the vibratos too intense, the production too heavy, etc. But Natalie was magic: unforced, free, effortless production; lovely sound, almost "light" in an early-music sense (yes, she's done work with William Christie), but - ah, those prejudices! - that doesn't mean her Violetta did anything less than profound justice to the tormented heroine. So I'm a blissed out new Dessay devotee.
3) Beautiful, honest, insightful interview with the great Thomas Quasthoff http://tinyurl.com/cf2qxdm
(4) You have simply gotta hear the new Orchestra of the Swan/ Kenneth Woods Schumann 2 - one of the great Schumann recordings. I'll write more about it shortly.
(5) If you've ever read Goodnight Moon to a child - ah, you have! - you MUST hear Eric Whitacre's setting on his new CD, Water Nights. As I tweeted in under 140 characters, Hila Plitmann's singing is perfect for the music, and Whitacre's music is perfect for the words. Wouldn't have thought an even okay setting was possible. (Raise your hand if you find Goodnight, Moon oddly comforting even at your advanced age. Ah, I see a lot of hands!)
(6) Really was exciting to have Sarah Plum and the Drake University String Ensemble broadcast the Four Seasons live out of our Studio One today. They made the long drive from Des Moines to Cedar Falls and then played their hearts out. Sarah is an awesome violinist to whom the considerable demands Vivaldi places are as nothing, and an artist with genuine interpretive insight and courage. Will try to get some sound on the Web sometime....

April 12, 2012 - Gramophone's first 50 inductees to its "Hall of Fame" list. Not too terrible, actually; much of it is defensible. But - naturally - there are some Huhs? Lang Lang makes the list but not Artur Schnabel or Alfred Cortot. HUH? To be sure, Schnabel and Cortot had lost their technical chops by the time they made recordings, and Lang Lang is super-talented and does have a bright artistic future - that is increasingly clear - and is the first major international Chinese classical star. But really, he's not yet ready for the hall of fame. Still, on the whole, not bad for a crowd-sourced exercise. UPDATE APRIL 17: It's obvious how it happened: it was based on voting and Lang comes from the most populous country on the planet. I'd bet Lang is a touch embarrassed; would be interested if anyone's heard anything like that.

April 3, 2012 - More on Ken Woods' post on the slow movement of the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2, discussed below: can't recall where I read it discussed, but it clearly is an hommage to the slow movement of Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7, which also has a cello solo. This fact strongly supports Ken's belief that this is a "Clara" movement. (Jon Bellman has shown that the first movement of the Symphony no. 1 is too, by finding unmistakable allusions in its development section to Schumann lieder.)
Also, Ken is clearly right that the MM doesn't apply so much to the beginning of the movement. I feel that it means more with respect to the piano's entry - clearly meant to be played rhapsodically.

March 30, 2012 - The greatest violinist I've ever heard in concert in my life? No question about it: Itzhak Perlman. Who has shared some lovely wisdom online, such as this on his Franco-Belgian bowing technique. (Presumably, he's no relation to Martin, in previous post, in recent generations, but who knows?)

March 30, 2012 - Martin Pearlman has (a) written an extraordinary article in Early Music America (not online) about Armand-Louis Couperin, long neglected by (among many others) me in favor of his cousin Francois; (b) produced, after decades of work, an extraordinary critical edition of his music, which he is - get this - giving away free online (what a guy!); (c) made some VERY wonderful recordings of his music, also free at the link; (d) pointed out to you pianists that his music would sound great on your instrument.

March 23, 2012 - My job has broadened my taste, forcing me to spend a lot of time with composers I once denigrated as Kleinmeisters. Now, I realize that some are great, though others are, well, not. My favorite of the great ones: Emanuel Chabrier - inspired magician; I especially love his piano works (for example the downright manic glee of his Bourree Fantasque, well conveyed here by Aldo Ciccolini. Camille Saint-Saens: I seriously underrated him. And Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor overture is a delight. ON the other hand, Franz von Suppe gives me little to cheer about. And there's a reason why you haven't heard of ... oh never mind....

March 17, 2012 - Great post by Greg on the storm movement in Beethoven's Pastoral symphony. We may think of Disney cartoon storms, but to Beethoven and his listeners it was more like our experience of a tornado; a thunderstorm was life-threatening and truly terrifying. Thus the "song of thanksgiving" that follows feels so profound, even religious (Beethoven inscribed, in German, "we thank Thee, God" over the hushed moment near the end).

March 16, 2012 - OK, not music, but: Marketplace has busted a story on This American Life about Apple in China, and in so doing shows how (and how well) our public radio system works. Instead of having a single monopoly provider, your station gets stories from competing sources: NPR (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, etc.); American Public Media (Marketplace, Prairie Home Companion); PRI (This American Life); BBC; independent producers; and local productions. In this case, APM busted PRI.
Also: the fabrication could only have been busted by someone with a reporter on the ground. Marketplace has a China reporter (who busted it), as does NPR and BBC. Fewer and fewer for-profit organizations have overseas reporters, because they are so expensive to deploy.
DISCLAIMER: THIS POST (like everything on this site) represents my private views as a listener, not those of Iowa Public Radio, its board, the Iowa Board of Regents, the University of Iowa, or in fact anyone other than yours truly.

March 15, 2012 - Truly great article by Jed Distler, classifying musicians into "line guys" vs. "chord guys." Incredibly enlightening. Read it!

March 13, 2012 - The new Bridge CD of music of Paul Lansky, "Imaginary Islands," is awesome. He is a computer-music man who started writing for physical instruments and instrumentalist and MY, what glorious results!

March 9, 2012 - The Dark Dozen. My friend and colleague Jonathan Ahl asked his FB friends to "name the saddest song you've ever heard." I found it easy (way easier than finding the happiest song). In fact, I thought of 12, listed below in alphabetical order. What are yours? (PARENTAL WARNING: Do NOT listen to all 12 in one sitting - mental health danger!):

1) Johann Sebastian Bach, "Have Mercy" from the St. Matthew Passion
2) Johannes Brahms, "Denn es gehet" from Four Serious Songs

3) Eric Clapton, "Tears in Heaven" (Jonathan Bellman's #1; he can't listen to more than a few seconds of it)
4) Leonard Cohen, "Dance Me to the End of Love"

5) Bob Dylan, "If You See Her, Say Hello"

6) Janis Ian, "At Seventeen" (THIS is the saddest song I've ever heard; it ranked #1 in Jonathan Ahl's poll)
7) Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II, "Ol' Man River" when sung by Thomas Quasthoff

8) Gustav Mahler, "The Song of the Earth" - cheating since it's six songs, so I'll go with the last, "The Farewell"

9) Otis Redding, "Dock of the Bay"

10) Franz Schubert - the all-time king of pain - "The Winter Journey" (cheating again, so I'll go with the last, the Hurdy Gurdy Man)

11) Giuseppe Verdi, "Willow Song and Ave Maria" from his opera Otello http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPAb4uOJPaA

12) Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome, I Could Cry"

March 5, 2012 - If you haven't read Jennifer Homans' extraordinary history of ballet, Apollo's Angels, do so immediately. (You'll thank me for this imperative. You're welcome.) And if you haven't read her beautiful tribute to her late husband, Tony Judt, do that even more immediately. And read the book she reviews, Thinking the 20th Century. And Judt's magnum opus, Postwar. You're welcome, again.

Feb 29, 2012 - NICE interview with Richard Egarr on WGBH by Cheryl Willoughby. On his teacher Gustav Leonhardt : "He was an odd man in some ways, very contradictory. He loved fast cars... he would have his latest Alfa Romeo ... he was above the speed limit all the time, and he would just pay the fines, he was very happy to pay the fines... He was very obsessed with speed yet he didn't have a fax machine, and it only under duress did he ever possess a CD player. ...I remember on this trip, it was late at night and we'd sort of got lost in the suburbs down there, and of course there was no GPS back in those days, so rather than get out a map and start looking he just looked up into the sky and found the north star, which was again this fantastic thing between being very concernd with the latest car and using the north star to navigate with.... He was a fantastic teacher. He really taught me to listen to what you're doing....He used to sit a very long way away during lessons, and would just know if you were making a bad physical gesture or doing seomthing which was not comfortable. He had fantastic ears. And it was a great lesson to really listen to what is going on in this strange instrument, the harpsichord, which is the unmusial instrument on the planet."

Feb 24, 2012: Excellent post by conductor Kenneth Woods on the slow movement of the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2 and its relationship to a Brahms song about the death of a young person (I'd add only the connection to Clara Schumann and her children). It sheds light on one of my long standing questions. This movement is the only one in Brahms with a really puzzling metronome mark: quarter note=84, about 50% faster than most pianists play it. It’s the only MM mark in Brahms that’s far removed from what musicians actually do; a few of his other MMs are on the fastish side, and many more are on the slowish side, but most are pretty close to intuitive practice. So why is this one so far off? It’s not a mistake: Brahms was very careful about MMs, providing them only for a handful of works, and only after much care and thought. Further, the MMs in this concerto were meant to guide conductors of his upcoming performances when he toured the concerto – testing it out in Meiningen, premiering it in Budapest and then around Europe.
I’ve heard some very intelligent theories for the movement’s speed. The pianist/composer Gianluca Cascioli points out that this movement has a 2-against-3 meter; the “3” is in the bass line, and, Gianluca says, it is only audible at the fast tempo. The great musicologist Walter Frisch makes a very different case: that it’s a matter of genre: Brahms heard this movement as a “serenade,” a type of orchestral work which was lighter and faster than a symphony. The arguments are both probably right.
Still, to most performers (e.g., Jeremy Denk) none of this matters: the movement feels right at a slower tempo. I think this has to do with its profound emotional content, and I think Ken's comments about the song points us to what that content is. (Although the song is in cut time...) Perhaps Brahms was afraid the movement would sound sentimental-schmaltzy if played for deep feeling - which only supports Ken's view - but if so Brahms has been proved wrong time and again. I’d like to hear a pianist try it at the MM (actually, Horowitz and Toscanini come fairly close, so I have my wish), but I don’t think it will ever catch on. There’s just too much there there.

Feb 19, 2012: Our Conversation about Beethoven's Ninth and Gustav Leonhardt. Here is a transcript of a fascinating conversation I had with some friends on Facebook. The opener: "The late Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt detested Beethoven's 9th, esp. the finale, which he called "the quintessence of platitude" and "the most vulgar music ever written." [All i've since been able to track down was, "“That ‘Ode to Joy’, talk about vulgarity! And the text! Completely puerile!”] What would you say to Leonhardt - the master of the subtle, esoteric art of the French clavecinistes - about this topic?"
Jonathan Ahl: "Platitude? Perhaps. But, even if true, I would think LVB elevated platitude to a higher art form in that movement."
Me: "Exactly! LvB was embracing the vulgar in its highest sense. He knew exactly what he was doing. He considered dropping it and replacing it with a purely instrumental finale in a minor key, but decided against it, fortunately."
Andrew Edlin: "Vulgar literally means 'common'. Since the 9th appeals to so many people, his comment is true. If he wants something exclusive he should listen to Stockhausen!"
Me: Right on, Andrew!: "Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!" The theme is like a drinking song; Beethoven knew exactly what he was doing.
Jonathan Bellman: I heard something like this from the revered musicologist Nicholas Temperley, at the University of Illinois when I was doing my masters. Always one to exercise self-control, I—a first-year masters student, remember—jocularly riposted, "Don't worry; I won't tell your Chair!" L-o-n-g pause. "I gather you disagree," he said, frowning slightly. When I extricated myself, it was another day of mental "goddammit, Jon, again? AGAIN?"
Fred Smith: It sounds like the musical equivalent to the most tiresome variety of academic political correctness.
Michael Goodleman: I can't image anyone perceiving the Ode to Joy as vulgar. In my humble opinion it's one of the most spiritual orchestral pieces ever. But at the same time Mr. Leonhardt may not have had the consciousness to appreciate it.
Me: I think you guys are right that this is about Leonhardt, not B9. But it's not PC so much as the opposite. Leonhardt lived on a 17th-century canal in Amsterdam in a 17thc house, beautifully restored and filled with 17th c antiques and instruments (and 18th c ones as well). He felt that music went way downhill after the French Revolution (I hope he didn't feel that way about political arrangements!). He played baroque composers as if Beethoven, Wagner, and Stravinsky had never been born, and thus was exceptionally convincing. And to any claveciniste at Versailles, Beethoven's 9th would sound supremely vulgar, and its sentiments Jacobin. So this approach contributed to Leonhardt's greatness, but is a poor barometer for the rest of us. Freude, schone Gotterfunken!
Fred: Thanks Barney - I'm sure you're right. Very enlightening answer.
Rabbi Alan Green: Wonderful discussion! Thanks to all for participating.

February 11, 2012. Two from the Next Generation of Great Performers: 1) Alondra de la Parra, here in Iowa this weekend to conduct the (excellent!) Quad City Symphony has the musicians very excited, and this clip of her conducting Dvorak's Eight shows why; 2) Ray Chen's new cd of the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn concertos arrived this week, and it's clear this kid is going to be one of the greats, not just another PR project. PS I interviewed Alondra, and find it interesting that she says that for her and the orchestras she conducts worldwide, gender simply isn't an issue. Progress!

Feb 5, 2012: So where does that leave "Historically Informed" Brahms orchestral performance? In my last post, I noted that Norrington is wrong about vibrato. Brahms clearly expected vibrato from orchestral strings, and probably well varied and modulated vibrato at that. My own writings suggest that his "fast tempos" are largely a myth - what we know of Brahms's tempi suggests he often took slowish ones. And how about small ensemble size? Styra Avins demolished that one; Brahms preferred a large ensemble if it could play well. Proportional tempo schemes tying together large works? Fuggedaboudit; that one was easy to debunk.

What's left? Well... gut strings instead of steel, but sounding sweeter than anything you hear in England today; wooden pre-Bohm flutes instead of metal; Vienna horns; leather-covered timpani with hard sticks. Portamento, more than we hear today, but less "thick" and coordinated than in Mengelberg - some players would slide while others did not, creating a much lighter portamento sound. Indeed, free bowing and fingering in string sections for the most part.

So yet again: Norrington, Gardiner, and Mackerras are giving us a modern style of Brahms playing. Turn to pre-war recordings by the likes of Clemens Krauss and Bruno Walter (here's an example) for a sense, at least, of period sound and style.

February 4, 2012: Norrington Is Wrong about Vibrato - I had the good fortune of reading through a pre-pub copy of a major study of 19th-century orchestral string vibrato by David Hurwitz, to be published in Music and Letters. It is thorough, definitive, and devastating. (You can read his informal writings on the topic here.). The conclusion: the clean, non-vibrato string sound that Sir Roger Norrington proclaims as historical is nothing of the sort; orchestral string vibrato was normal, rather than "just an ornament" to be applied occasionally. Richard Taruskin is again proved right when he says that it has nothing to do with history and everything to do with modern tastes.

I can't help but think of obsessive-compulsiveness, and to find the super-sterile sound as injurious to music as the super-sterile environments that give rise to autoimmune diseases like asthma. But I may be wrong; it may have more to do with Norrington's generation rejecting Romanticism and Norrington seeking a unique career niche. In any case, Hurwitz has settled the matter once and for all. Bravo, Mr. Hurwitz!

February 2, 2012: Stephen Fry on Wagner!!! Genius on genius - a BBC hour-long special, free online.

January 26: George Szell: Was His Strength His Weakness? Donald Peck, principal flutist of the Chicago Symphony, in his excellent book on his years in the Chicago Symphony: "He made mistakes on the podium, which resulted in the orchestra's looking bad. There was a terrible episode during one performance of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Szell was most emphatic, stating, 'Watch me! Watch me! After the storm scene, I will make a cut-off before we go on.' The concert came. He did not make the cut-off. Half of the orchestra did make a cut-off as he had admonished, and the other half didn't. It was a scramble..... he might conduct or not conduct, give entrance cues or not give them. All in all, that three-week period was rife with conductorial errors." WAIT! I thought Szell was the ultimate technician. Not so. The diagnosis? Szell was a giant, writes Kenneth Woods in his excellent blog, but was diminished when he was not in Cleveland: "[He] still inspires awe and fear in his colleagues who knew him in Cleveland, but less admired where he worked as a guest. ...He would have been an even greater conductor outside Cleveland had he just let players relax and play and not tried to control everything.... [he] had to rehearse and drill every detail in rehearsal until it was encased in concrete. The concerts always fell apart because he had hammered any and all flexibility out of us [says a player to Woods], then he would get inspired and try to do something different and couldn’t show it, and we were never sure whether to rely on what we saw in the concert or what he said in the rehearsal.” Chimes exactly with what Donald Peck said. The takeaway for leaders not only of orchestras but of anything is kinda obvious...

Jan 24, 2012 - A Gustav Leonhardt list. The maestro passed away on January 16, and I payed tribute last week by featuring a couple of his recordings on each of my show. How characteristic that he considered Beethoven's Ninth "The most vulgar piece in the history of music," and especially detested the finale for being "the quintessence of platitude"; he was the master of music of exquisite refinement, subtlety, and gravity.

What to listen to? Leonhart recorded at least three dozen composers (I've added as many as I could come across at Wikipedia) so any short list is based on very partial knowledge. Still, here is what I played, just a tiny sampling of a small subset of the master's work:
1) JS Bach, Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 731 - such poetic registration and phrasing
2) JS Bach: French Suite 4, Allemande - when it comes to a harmonic cloudscape unfolding, Leonhardt was unmatched (here's another example)
3) JS Bach: Matthew Passion opening chorus. No one has equalled him in this powerful tableaux. (alas, only available if you buy the CD, complete. Your call on how much it's worth to you. It's a mixed bag, but its best moments are supreme.)
4) JS Bach: Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor- a demonstration of Leonhardt's genius as a clavichordist. But you have to buy the Philips clavichord recital to hear it. Worth every penny.
5) JS Bach: Cantata 106 Sinfonia
6) John Dowland: Pavane in C
7) Claudio Monteverdi, Beatus Vir
8) Jean-Phillippe Rameau, Sarabande - he was the ideal interpreter of this piece
9) Girolamo Frescobaldi Canzona 3
10) Georg Bohm, Praeludium in g minor (from a Sony survey of the composer - again, worth every penny)

Jan 22, 2012. Thank you for the kind words, Kenneth Woods! It's an awesome CD, folks - hear it!

Jan 18, 2012. What Inspired the opening motif of A Love Supreme?: Alex Ross notices that the sequence of fourths that open John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is identical to that which begins the Fifth Symphony of Jean Sibelius. He does not posit a direct influence; these two great musicians could have arrived at the same motif independently. I'm going to step out on a limb and speculate that what led Trane to think about this sequence was working on his absolutely matchless interpretations of My Favorite Things, heard to special advantage in this take with Eric Dolphy. If there's anything to this (and who can know what really goes on in the mind of a genius?), props are in order to Richard Rogers for a great song and then to Trane for recognizing the musical potential of this Broadway hit and realizing it so fully.

Jan 15, 2012: Naida Cole Plays Like One Possessed - Try Chabrier's Bourree-Fantasque. After you hear her untrammeled manic joy - the sheer visceral delight in playing repeated notes insanely fast, for example - every other performance seems anemic. And after you hear her mystical, sad Satie, everyone else seems shallow. Take my word for it: http://www.amazon.com/Naida-Cole-Gabriel-Faure/dp/B000058TAN

Jan 14, 2012: A Test: How Influential Am I? Jeremy Denk's Bach Partita CD last year was one of the greatest Bach keyboard discs I've ever heard. His new CD with Joshua Bell is one of the best French violin CDs I've heard. Ergo: The two of them should record all the Bach violin/keyboard sonatas. Some of Bach's finest works, in what would be awesome performances. SO: will my posting this make it happen? Stay tuned.

Dec. 19, 2011: My reply in The Atlantic to Stephen Bloom about Iowa, "Look to Iowa's Future, Not Its Past" (and here's an updated version, dated January 16, 2012)

Dec. 16, 2011: Gustav Leonhardt, age 84, has cancelled all his future concerts because of ill health. May his health return completely. Meanwhile: thank you for everything, maestro. Here's an example of why he is the father of modern harpsichord playing and the awesome-est of them all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgwtiGjlubA&feature=related [To come: a list of my favorite Leonhardt recordings]

Dec, 15, 2011: My desert-island Bach; what's yours?:
Another list: since it's 2011, I'll let myself take 11 Bach cds to a desert island. All are great performances of great music with a lot of variety. I notice that you could get the total cost to about $141 if I use the cheaper of download or CD. PS: if I could take just one recording, it would be the Mass in B Minor.

1) Mass in B Minor - Dunedin Consort and John Butt on Linn $15 for a new CD from resellers. (an integrated work but also an anthology of Bach's finest sacred music). Here's the Sanctus, which was originally a Christmas piece written in 1724
2) Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1 - Maurizio Pollini on DG ($14) Another anthology of incredible variety and depth.
3) Brandenburg Concertos - either European Brandenburg Consort/ Trevor Pinnock (his second time around) $18 for the CD, or an even better deal: Jordi Savall: $9 for the mp3 downloads
4) Cello Suites - Stephen Isserlis on Hyperion (now that it's mid-priced, it's definitely the top choice ($19) Second choice is Yo-Yo Ma's second go-round; used cds sell for $8. Here's Isserlis on youtube.
5) Goldberg Variations - Andras Schiff on ECM (his second recording of them) $9 You'll know it's the right one if the liner notes are by Vikram Seth.
6) St. Matthew Passion - Arnold Schoenberg Chorus/ Concentus Musicus/ Nikolaus Harnoncourt (his third time around, and it's the charm: i may disagree about this or that detail, but the flow is irresistible: ($20)
7) Keyboard concertos - Perahia and ASMF (these concerti are in some ways an anthology of Bach's best concertos, as he ranked them in the late 1730s; Perahia and the ASMF are in top form) $15
8) Violin solo partitas and sonatas - Gidon Kremer on ECM (his second recording of them, not the Philips recording) ($20)
9) Partitas 3, 4, and 6 - Jeremy Denk on Azica (Denk gets many things uniquely right; he gives you not only the notes but also what they mean) ($12)
10) Orchestral Suites - Boston Baroque/ Martin Pearlman $12 (or $9 for Freiburg Baroque mp3)
11) Christmas Oratorio - Harnoncourt's third recording ($14 cd or $10 mp3)

What would be on your shorlist?

Dec. 5, 2011 - Talk-show host/interviewer supreme Charity Nebbe is having me on her show, Talk of Iowa, tomorrow to review the top classical CDs of 2011. Here's what we will cover, as well as some others that probably should have made the list:

1) J.S. Bach's Partitas 3, 4, and 6 played by Jeremy Denk, who gets so many of the movements so amazingly and uniquely right that it will be on my Bach top-ten list (TK) alongside records by the like of Gidon Kremer and John Butt. Denk understands what the notes MEAN as few people do. (Azica)
2) JS Bach et al. by Heinz Holliger with the Camerata Bern and Erich Hobarth (ECM)
3) LV Beethoven's Symphonies and Overtures by Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus - as great as everyone's saying (Decca)
4) Hector Berlioz - "The Ghost of a Rose," sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; such a genius (PBP)
5) Franz Liszt - The Lake of the Wallenstadts played by Nelson Freire - bewitching. Liszt CDs kept showing up all year, but this one I'll return to. (DG)
6) Nico Muhly, "Seeing Is Believing" - Hearing is believing. What a gift.(Decca)
7) Maurice Ravel, complete piano music played by Steven Osborne on Hyperion
8) Scarlatti sonatas played by Alexandre Tharaud (Virgin)
9) Franz Schubert's Unfinished Sonata in C, which Paul Lewis plays as if he's composing it then and there. Moves forward completely naturally, and yet sounds like he's discovering those magical modulations on the spot. (Says Lewis: " it is a piano redaction of an unfinished orchestral score, much of it un-harmonised, so you have to realise the implied symphonic harmonies; there are colours you have to realise." He does.) Two CDs full of great music and great playing. (Harmonia mundi)
10) Robert Schumann's "Rhenish" Symphony and Hans Gal's Third Symphony, played by the Orchestra of the Swan led by Kenneth Woods. The Gal is a real find, especially the slow movement; and the Schumann is a joy after the many punched-up but four-square performances. (Avie)
11) Charles Ives - the Violin Sonatas, for the glorious violin playing of Hillary Hahn and her incredible new teammate, well-known in Iowa, pianist Valentina Lisitsa (DG)
12) Trio Mediaeval. "A Worcester Ladymass" (ECM)
13) NPR ADDS: Mahler Symphony no. 2 with the London Philharmonic led by Vladimir Jurowski (sounds alluring!);
14) The Maltese Tenor, Joseph Calleja;
and here's Alex Ross's list http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-best-classical-music-recordings-of-2011.html

November 29, 2011 As of that date, here were 15 pieces of music guaranteed to put a big smile on my face:

1) Leroy Anderson (anything he wrote, but let's make it the "Typewriter Song"):
2) The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann" - not my fave Beach Boys, but sure sounds like a fun party!
3) The Beatles: "Back in the USSR"
4) Beethoven Symphony no 1
5) GF Handel: the "Laughing Chorus" from "L'Allegro" ("The Happy Man"- words by John Milton, and in this Youtube clip, the choreography is by a genius, Mark Morris)
6) Joseph Haydn. Symphony 98 finale
7) Martha and the Vandellas (for that Motown bounce), "Jimmy Mack"
8) Felix Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony, the first movement
9) Mozart: "The Marriage of Figaro Overture" when played in 4 minutes or less
10) Allen Sherman, "Shake Hands with Your Uncle Max"
11) The brothers Strauss -anything, but let's make it the Pizzicato Polka
12) Gilbert and Sullivan, "He's Going to Marry Yum-Yum (Yum-Yum).... On this subject I pray you be dumb (dumb-dumb)"
13) Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the Miniature Overture
14) Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (and I quote): "Uno, Dos, one-two-Tres-Quattro!"
15) Yackety Sax by Boots Randolph

November 18, 2011 I don't usually say that one Beethoven performance is the best, but I'm tempted... Ferenc Fricsay and the Berlin Philharmonic play Symphony no. 1 as if possessed, specifically by the great god Pan. They sound insane with joy. http://www.amazon.com/Symphony-No-1-Major-Op-21-Beethoven/dp/B002JPJ5KU/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1321659873&sr=1-4 (worth every penny of the $3.96 i payed to download the mp3s). Note that Gramophone's reviewer at the time thought the first movement insanely fast - way faster than the metronome mark. Big deal, say I: they feel it.

March 17, 2011: Update on NPR funding, after House votes to defund NPR, here's a good roundup/ analysis: http://www.current.org/federal/fed1106npr-fund.html

Jan. 2011: do THIS. "This," detailed at the link, is to write a letter or fax your ~~congressman /~~senator to encourage FY 2011 funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (NPR will be fine, but at the state level, CPB funding is crucial). Yes, letters and faxes are better. Details at the link. [PS: Since I am not a news person, my imploring you is not a conflict of interest.]

New: January 28, 2011: Backgrounder (by me, not an expert on Hungarian politics) on Andras Schiff and Hungary's Media Laws. UPDATE JANUARY 19, 2012: Damn - I was right. And things have gone downhill.

New: January 24, 2011: Bill Kling warns that the effort to defund public radio is SERIOUS, not just bluff, and could well happen.

NEW: Jan. 20 2011: The Bach Violin Glut of the 2000s and Its Strange Gender Gaps - Jan 20 version; no fewer than 26 violinists recorded the Bach cycle in the last decade. Way long post. The gist: 1) that's a lotta supply; a stab at why; 2) whether or not you used a period instrument could be predicted partly by your nationality and partly by your gender - if you used a modern one, bookmakers could give almost 4:1 odds that you were burdened with a Y chromosome. Next edition of Inside Early Music will never happen, but it would seek gender balance, and would look more into gender and the early-music movement.

NEW: Jan. 2011: My Decade of Bach (or what I remember of it).

NEW: Dec 23: really look forward to hearing the Alfred Brendel lecture dissing historical performance, "The Light and Shade of Interpretation." Presumably will be online one of these weeks. Here's a blog entry from the Telegraph: I'm happy that this topic is still controversial 14 years on.

NEW: Dec 23: Three notable music books of 2010 that I actually read? I was gripped by (1) John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: perspectives on the Passions - if you're into Bach, especially the Passions, you must read it; it's game-changing; (2) Jonathan Bellman's Chopin's Polish Ballade: op. 38 as a narrative of national martyrdom, which joins the short list of books about a single work that open up huge vistas of social, cultural, and political history (another example: Late Idyll by Reinhold Brinkmann); and (3) Alex Ross's Listen to This, which you can sample by reading this linked chapter on how the process of recording changed music radically. . For me, it is the classical-music book of the decade, except possibly for Alex's other book, The Rest Is Noise. I don't mean this as hyperbolic praise: the book revisits many of the essays that shaped my musical thought during the 2000s, and adds an end-of-decade perspective. PS: the chapter on Brahms - the last - is the best single essay on the composer I've read.

NEW (Nov 7) Virginia Heffernan says that Wikipedia is the best source on "stuff that was born on the Internet"; her explanation gets at why it's among the worse sources on classical music. The gist: at Wikipedia “'ownership'of an article — what in legacy media is called 'authorship'— is strictly forbidden." But academics have strong motives to be proprietary about their specialized expertise - they need attributed publications. The takeway (from Virginia): if you're a musicologist (or domain expert in anything) go thou and edit or create at least one wikipedia entry, for the public good. I'd add: it's the first source most novices will turn to for information on your beloved field.

NEW (Nov 4) If you dislike Cosima Wagner as much as I do, your preferred version of Richard's Christmas/birthday/baby-gift surprise, the Siegfried Idyll, could be Roger Norrington's un-romantically dancing deconstruction. If you're simply wanting a radical perspective on the piece, try Glenn Gould, playing it very very slowly on the piano. Unlike Roger, he appropriates the piece openly and with genius. On the other hand, if you want to hear it as Wagner's "Song of Songs to Brunnhilde" (good one, Joachim Kohler) a top choice is Furtwangler and the RIA Turino.

NEW (Oct 2010) Iván Fischer is conducting an awesome Mozart concert with the Concertgebouw on my radio right now. Here he is (from his one-time online diary) on why great orchestras are HARDER to conduct than mediocre ones: "The Berlin Philharmonic is in excellent form, strong musical personalities in the orchestra.... Strong personalities can create a side effect, though. If the feeling of rhythm and tempo is too strong, it is hard to make music together. This is the reason why top orchestras are more difficult to conduct..."

Labor Day, 2010. Relocated to new rental in Cedar Falls; just was mowing the lawn. A perfect moment to praise the labors of some excellent writers:
(1) The Oboe by Geoffrey Burgess and Bruce Haynes. Not just for oboe players. If you love an oboe work (say, the Strauss concerto) you must read it. And if you're interested in the historical-performance movement, the discussion of its history and challenges is sophisticated and contributes new material. It also reads nicely. One nice point: the revival of historical instruments began with instruments that had no modern equivalent, like the viola da gamba and lute, and came last to instruments whose modern descendants could play all the older parts well, like the oboe.
(2) Music of the Baroque by David Schulenberg - a textbook, and reads like one; but if you are interested in this era you MUST read it. It situates the music in its historical circumstances very precisely, discusses performance with unique expertise, and addresses broader aesthetic questions with thoughtful skepticism - arguing, for example, that Lydia Goehr is wrong to situate the triumph of the "work concept" circa 1800 (clearly, Schulenberg shows, it was alive and well in the 17th c). Above all, he takes you inside the creative process - the working procedures - of composers from Palestrina to CPE Bach, and does so quite readably.

NEW: July 30, 2010: How to play "The Moonlight" first movement - like Gianluca Cascioli. Here he is playing it for a masterclass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnvb4_02ZmE Gianluca explains in his Decca recording interview (ok, conducted by me) why it has nothing to do with moonlight, and why he plays it as fast as he does. "C-sharp minor is a strange, almost sinister key; it does not relate to something as Romantic as moonlight. Instead, the reference that strikes me is the passage in Don Giovanni when the Commendatore dies after being stabbed by the Don. Beethoven's triplets are close to Mozart's triplets, and the rhythms in Beethoven's melody are similar to the Commendatore's rhythm....Beethoven wrote down the Commendatore scene among his sketches, which means that he was particularly struck by it.....he wanted to take Mozart as a starting point (a good one!) just to get somewhere else, far away...... It is difficult to describe in words the feeling you have while playing, but Czerny's description comes close to my own: a dark night with a choir of ghosts heard from far away... One element behind my choice of tempo is that the listener must concentrate almost completely on the melody - the choral in the soprano. At slow tempos, very often one hears nothing but the slow triplets, as if they were the melody. But the true melody in the soprano gets lost in the piano's decay of sound, as the notes become disconnected. [My next question was:Does the alla breve meter, two per bar, also imply a fastish tempo?] GC: This was less important to me. For one thing, if you count two beats in a bar you might easily get it much too fast. It must flow, but it must be extremely calm, almost still. Also, what this time signature implied for tempo in Beethoven is not so clear......"

NEW: July 26, 2010 Very fine obit of Wendy Allanbrook in today's NYT, by Jim Oestreich. She embodied the word "humane."

New: July 15 2010: Very sad to hear of the death at age 67 of Wendy Allanbrook (Wye J. Allanbrook), a great musicologist and great human being.

July 2010: RIP Sir Charles Mackerras, at age 84. Alex Ross, as usual, says it perfectly: "He had a gift for leading a kind of performance in which nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen and yet everything goes radiantly right." Nice ideal in many areas.

June 2010: So that February From the Top in Iowa City - you remember, the one for which I provided a laugh-line? The full broadcast is now online. Alternatively, you can hear just my 46 seconds of fame - my voice comes in after 55 seconds of set-up, in which Christopher O'Riley interviews the incredible 16-year-old cellist Allan Steele.

March 2010: That article from last November - on the state of period-instrument Brahms, for Diapason France - I finally have an English-language version up, at this link. ["Mûrissements d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" - were published in the October issue of Diapason France (Diapason, Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37. This is the first of the two. The second appears in triply-expanded form in Early Music America, Spring 2010, as "Brahms, the Horn, and History")]

February 2010: From the Top did a show in Iowa City on Feb. 24, 2010; for some reason they interviewed me the day before to get a laugh line. Apparently it worked: listen in to the full broadcast (or, if you prefer, here are my 46 seconds of fame).

February 2010: The legendary Bruno Walter did NOT like modern flutes, and he did not like the power of postwar clarinet playing. Martin Mayer, in 1960, quotes him: "Think what the flute has gained up top of the range," he says, "but it has lost its beauty. Jean Paul wrote of 'the moonshine of the flute.' Who would now say, 'the moonshine of the flute"? [ILet me note that German and Austrian flutes were still made of wood during Walter's early career; German-speaking flutists resisted metal flutes and the Boehm key system precisely because the French had adopted them].... As for modern playing: "That is just a gentle clarinet," he said [of a clarinet solo in the Schumann Piano Concerto]. "But today they all play trumpet." Quoted in the excellent biography, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere, by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, p. 404.

February 2010: My article "Brahms, the Horn, and History" is coming out in this month's Early Music America. I was interviewed [at this link] about the topic by Jonathan Ahl on Iowa Public Radio's "Talk at 10" (November 2009): My articles on Brahms and period instruments - "Mûrissements d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" - were published in the October issue of Diapason France (Diapason, Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37). A note said that the original English text would be posted at this Web site, with footnotes. It was, but no longer is. Let me just say that I am stunned by the beauty of the graphic design of the magazine; would it be Chantal Vilaire who is responsible? Many thanks also to Gaetan Nalleau, the editor who asked me to write the piece. I am honored to be there! And to Nicolas Southon for his excellent translation.

April 2009: Good Times for Big Think What happened in music in the 20th Century? To have any idea, it helps to be in the 21st. And to be very smart. Consider: Alex Ross's masterful The Rest Is Noise, which has changed how we think about classical music's 20th C. Here are two other carefully researched, intellectually daring reconsiderations, both released in 2009.