books

inside early music
(oxford university press)

"Excellent . . .a great achievement." -The Times Literary Supplement

"I can't imagine a better book of its kind... readers will profit greatly, and they are addressed considerately and without condescension." - Richard Taruskin

performing brahms
(cambridge university press)
Winner, Association for Recorded Sound Collections "Award for Excellence: Best Research in Recorded Classical Music"

"As all-embracing as you could imagine...I predict [it] will never be surpassed or superseded." - Sir Charles Mackerras

''[encourages] interpretive freedom...One of [its] virtues lies in its variety of perspectives...[collated] into a satisfying whole." - Roger Moseley. Jrnl. of the Royal Musical Association

MUSIC

 

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 the "fast tempo" ideal is a myth - what we know of Brahms's tempi suggests he took slowish ones quite often. And how about small ensemble size? Styra Avins as demolished that myth; Brahms preferred a larger ensemble than the Meiningen if it could play well. Proportional tempo schemes tying together large works? Fuggedaboutit.

What's left? Well... gut strings instead of steel, but sounding much 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 coordinated than in Mengelberg - some players would slide while others did not, creating a much less thick 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 taste 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 - I wish I could share her inspired piano playing with you for free, but one has to pay. Do it! Spend 99 cents, at least. 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, you won't regret buying this: 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 I've suffered through.  (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.

1) Elijah Wald's history of what actually happened in American pop music in the 20th Century (misleadingly titled "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll") - I endorse the review in the New York Times book review and recommend the book highly.

2) Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's book on what actually happened in 20th-century classical music performance: The Changing Sound of Music: He's brought research methodology to new levels of accuracy, and is intellectually fearless and original. And his book is available free online at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html

NEW: January 24th, 2009 - This Is How People Listen to Classical Radio - in terms not of the "importance" of the piece, but of the emotional effect. Kudos to Greg Sandow for being able to put himself in the ear-space of a listener. This is how it's heard. I also appreciate that my failure to program high-dissonance modernism could be seen not as a lack of responsibility, but a quest for "a fuller view of life than screams alone can give." I also appreciated the comments by radio professional William Lang. Like him, I'm constantly looking for new music that will not drive listeners away. Observation: such music is far more likely to come from West of the Atlantic than East, probably for reasons involving funding and peer pressure.

NEW: January 14th, 2009 - You have been reading Greg's five-part posts on where Classical Music is in 2009, right? Read it: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/ RE: post 1: I wrote the following comment to Greg: "Just a loose thought about yet another possible reason why the [classical-music] audience has aged [over the last half of the 20th c, relative to the population as a whole - Greg demonstrates it carefully and has some excellent ideas on why. I suggested adding one:} "(1) music became more and more a marker of group membership - it had been that for centuries, but became more so; (2) people had increasing numbers of options about which group to become a member of: more mobility; (3) crucially- "the young" increasingly became a group you could identify yourself as a member of. Having one's own music (to mark off "us," the young, from "them," the old) became increasingly important (4) having lots of different "musics" to choose among became increasingly possible (recording being a big part of this? And prosperity/leisure?)...... None of this is to replace anything you [Greg] said - it'd be just one more element."

January 14th, 2009 - Instructions for Puck: - oxytocin for Helena and Hermia; vasopressin for Lysander and Demetrius. [re "Anti-love drug may be ticket to bliss" - John Tierney's angle, in the New York Times]

December, 2008 - So... year-end roundup time. Entry #1: the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music, David Lang's The Little Matchgirl Passion. Deeply haunting music about a problem very much of the moment: starving children. The committee is no longer in an uptown ivory tower. It's also telling that no CD is out - the piece was distributed free online here. No waiting. The age of Youtube.

December - Entry # 2 Newspapers are dying and music-critic gigs disappearing, but I'm struck by how good the critics in the USA are in 2008. Having Anne Midgette on the staff of the WaPo is a prime example.

November, 2008 - I gotta get back into this - haven't touched this site since April. Wanna think about 2 things: (1) why we like the music we like; (2) the question of music affecting life/personality/behavior. The latter strikes me as politically fraught, complex, nuanced, easy to get wrong. But it's what jumped out about me in this story from NPR. (3) Felix Mendelssohn. Strongly recommended background reading: Deborah Hertz's brilliant How Jews Became Germans.

April, 2008: Officer, he had a strong jaw, slight underbite, and furrowed brow: Forensic anthropologist Carolyn Wilkinson reconstructs the wigless head of J. S. Bach from a cast of his skull and other evidence. How he might have looked when he was not in full dress and you had just hired him to play for a wedding. - March, 2008

It's scientifically designed to be the most unpopular song ever written. Naturally, I love it. Especially the rapping opera singer - April 2008

Clap Your Hands Say Bravo! The above reminds me of a previous question about whether It's OK to Applaud between movements at a classical concert. The proscription against that sure chimed with the proscription against "histrionics." Anyway, I hold with those who say Express yourself! See: Alex's short essay and Greg's post .

. Essential: the 2nd edition of Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (published in 2007). Our core sense of what music IS (at least for classical fans) turns out to be about 200 years old.

Why not just give Alex Ross his Pulitzer right now and be done with it? (for The Rest Is Noise.) So I wrote in October. I'm delighted that the NY Times has since put it on its "10 Best Books of 2007" list and that the Washingon Post, LA Times, Economist, Time, Newsweek, and Slate put it on their best-of-year lists. His writing has by itself improved the future of music.- Jan 1, 2008

. The tone of moral outrage sounds Wieseltierian, and he bullies the defenseless, but Richard Taruskin on the state of classical music is not to be missed. (Much more essential, though, is his Oxford History of Western Music. There he had to seek the tone of the balanced observer - although his difficulties with that role are part of what make the book so compelling.)- Nov. 2007

 

 

. recordings I liked at the time (been forever since i updated this, so I might not like them now)-

. Why do people still record Bach's solo cello suites? Because they are Jean-Guihen Queyras, that's why. (I also love Yo-Yo Ma, especially the second time around, and above all, I love Steven Isserlis, now at mid-price on Hyperion - an easy "first choice.")
I admire Taruskin's famous review of the pioneering Casals recording: Casals was striving to make them heroic and marmoreal - Bach from the age of Wagner. Anner Bylsma was going for a radically different ideal - rooting them in Baroque dance and the style of Baroque lute improvisers.Queyras? He's one of those young artists who has all of history behind him (he studied with Bylsma); but he has gone beyond the oppositions (and the examples) and has made the music his own. He uses a modern cello, but you might not be able to tell. Natural in spite of being so informed. Glorious to hear such intonation, tone, bowing. UPDATES: Isserlis is down to $25. Everything I just said about Queyras goes double for him. Btw, if you're going to read just one book on the suites, I strongly recommend Allen Winold's Bach's Cello Suites: Analyses and Explorations. I greatly enjoyed Eric Siblin's very different book The Cello Suites.

. Isabelle Georges and the Sirba Octet, Du Shtetl a New York, a joy. Check out this Youtube excerpt: Bei mir bist du scheyn.

. Barenboim on Beethoven - a 6-DVD set from EMI, On Discs 5 and 6 Barenboim gives masterclasses to young pianists, including Alessio Bax, Jonathan Biss, and Lang Lang. Sample this Youtube excerpt. E.g., the part about a piano crescendoing on a single note.

. Suzanne Vega. Genius. Leonard Cohen. Genius.

. I love The Shins. I like the way James Mercer's lyrics play with cliches - evoking them then subverting them. (E.g., in Saint Simon, "Mercy's eyes are blue [evoking cliche, but then.... ]/ when she places them in front of you [were you expecting that image?]/ Nothing holds a Roman candle to ["Roman" transforms the "holds a candle to" cliche, making it resonate with the song] etc... ) I like how the music works with the words - sometimes by opposition. (Try A Comet Appears - the line "let's carve my aging face off/ fetch us a knife/ start with the eyes/ till all that's left is a grimacing smile "- such a violent image, such tender music. And the two adjectives earn their keep; the verbs, like "carve" and "fetch," do more of the work. As they should.) I like how he undermines the potential repetiveness of the strophic song by meaningfully varying the returns [Australia: "damned to be one of us, girl/ faced with the dodo's conundrum/ i felt like I could just fly/ but nothing happened every time I tried" --- later in the song becomes "dare to be one us, girl/ facing the android's conundrum/ i felt like I should just cry/ but nothing happens every time I take one on the chin..." - with a beautiful, surprising new harmony at "take one on the chin..".]
I like his control of metaphor (in the same song - Australia - early on, the line "keep your wick in the air and your feet in the fetters" is a striking set of verbal sounds, but seems obscure; but much later in the song it connects to "you don't know how long I've been/ watching the lantern dim/ starved of oxygen..." And the last line: "so give me your hand and we'll jump out the window.." -- that chimes with the dodo's conundrum, maybe?) Above all the music... the man has always been known for his ability to write a hook, and his music is inventive way after the hook. Australia uses a polka rhythm, begins with a hook full of syncopation, and then has the melody start in the same non-tonic harmony that the hook reached up to. Similar invention right through to the end. Here's an interview with Mercer on the craft of songwriting: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/40237-interview-the-shins My top-10 Shins list, in alphabetical order: Australia; A Comet Appears; Kissing the Lipless; New Slang; The Past and Pending; Phantom Limb; Pink Bullets; Saint Simon; Sleeping Lessons; Those to Come.

. j'aime beaucoup Ravel. I'm into his piano trio and piano concertos. On Youtube you can watch the Beaux Arts Trio playing this Trio and Leon Fleisher play the Left-hand Concerto and Martha Argerich play the G Major! And Rattle/Berlin in La Valse ! - a You Tube not to be missed.

. Ludwig won't roll over: In fact, he's never had it better. Yes, I love golden-age masters like pianists Claudio Arrau, Béla Bartók, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Annie Fischer, Leon Fleisher (ok, a modern), Wilhelm Kempff (sometimes) and, of course, Artur Schnabel, and conductors like Wilhelm Furtwaengler, Otto Klemperer, George Szell, and Bruno Walter, the Quartetto Italiano and Busch Quartet, etc. But not the concept that we live in a lead age in which nobody can play it like the greats once did, and that younger artists all sound as if they were shaped by cookie cutters. My view: so many of my fellow oxygen-consumers devote so much of their lives to this music that we shouldn't be surprised that some of their playing is from the top. Examples: Andras Schiff's Op. 109; Ronald Brautigam in the Waldstein; Mitsuko Uchida and Helene Grimaud (both) in the oh-so-manly "Emperor"; Garrick Ohlsson's op. 2 no 3; Perahia and Paul Lewis's Op. 10 no 2; Jonathan Biss in op. 13; Peter Serkin in op. 27 no 1; the Takacs quartet cycle; the Vanska symphony cycle; the Barenboim symphony cycle; Angela Hewitt's Op. 7 and her cellos sonatas with Daniel Muller-Schott;; .... more to come as I think of them. [BTW, I oppose Vanska's extreme literalism in principle, but the results shut me up.]

As of April 2008 I was excited about Trevor Pinnock's return to the Brandenburgs on Avie; Peter Watchorn's Well-Tempered Clavier book 1 on his own Musica Omnia label; Rene Jacobs's Don Giovanni on Harmonia mundi; Marc-Andre Hamelin's Haydn sonatas on Hyperion: the the the Shahams playing Prokofiev on their own label; Yevgeni Sudbin playing Scarlatti; Hausmusik playing Mendelssohn; Pierre Hantai playing Scarlatti. [I'll update this one of these days.]

Handelian bliss, part 1: Andrew Manze and the Academy of Ancient Music's recording of Handel's Op. 6 concertos - and btw, this opus is not just another set of Baroque concertos, but a cornucopia of invention (some of which is plagiarized, but who cares?) And this is not just another recording. Try the effortlessly overdotted rhythms at the beginning of op. 6 no 10; you can hear how to these players this style has become a natural language. And try the unhurried Allegro Moderato in the same concerto - the vitality comes from within, not from mindless briskness, and the performance makes you feel the music's almost childlike delight. The group plays with (and in) character throughout. And you can download it.

Handelian bliss, part 2: Don't hold Gramophone's enthusiasm against it: the Messiah by the Dunedin Consort and John Butt really is inspired. Ideal for those who've heard the thing way too often and don't care if they ever hear it again (because it's the first attempt to record the Dublin premiere version, and it makes the "small-chorus" ideal so intimate); just as ideal for someone coming to it for the first time.

.If you like the idea of Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill performing "The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria" et al., you gotta hear them. Available at emusic.com and on a CD, "Tryout." (Also: don't miss their musical/ operetta Lady in the Dark.)

. I love Ben Folds. If Sasha Frere-Jones hates it, it's probably for me. Contrary to John McWhorter, of whom I'm a fan, there is a kind of verbal intelligence available in the pop world even now. More on this later.

. Nigunim by Frank London, Lorin Sklamberg, and Uri Caine - moving, beautifu, (Thank you, LK.). Even though I don't romanticize the Chassidim as they seem to. Also: Srul Irving Glick's A Night at Heaven's Gate And, in a different vein, the Klezmatic's Woody Guthrie CDs.

. I love Rene Jacobs in Haydn's symphonies 91 & 92 on Harmonia mundi - check out 92's opening . What is more beautiful than a string section playing superbly and perfectly in tune? - Which brings us to....

. ...another exclusive! - sample Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Brahms Tragic Overture. Rattle, who's often dissed as superficial, proves otherwise. I've heard other conductors project these inner voices but make them sound like too-precious detail. Here they are meaningful - and moving. Beautiful phrasing. (also: the strings in Rattle's new Berlin Mahler 9th on EMI. Phew!)

. Eric Ewazen's Down a River of Time is heartfelt. I like so much of what I hear from this unabashedly neo-romantic composer.

. When old means new: the Debussy release from Andante.com (early recordings, e.g., Coppola's La mer) . And at emusic, Sibelius bud Robert Kajanus conducting the Sibelius Fifth. Kajanus and Coppola bring a lightness, volatility and spontaneity to the music that would be hard to regain once the works became Classics.

. Mozart - Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter playing the first movement of the duo sonata in C, K. 521 (iTunes) strikes me as a mind-blowing synthesis of imagination, finesse, and wild energy. The musical equivalent of the right stage of hypomania. And Rene Jacob's recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni (at youtube, here's a documentary), and Figaro and Cosi - no "hypo" to this mania!

. What's on my iTunes? Aside from the above?: Ray Charles, I Don't Need No Doctor; Martha and the Vandellas, Jimmy Mack (the stereo version), Miriam Makeba's The Click Song, Mahler Adagietto by Bruno Walter with the New York Phil,. (and his Mahler Fourth from Vienna in 1955, from the Andante set); Paul Robeson (anything I can get my hands on, but above all Balm in Gilead); Louis Jordan (Look out, sister, look out!); Neal Young's Harvest Moon; Death Cab for Cutie's Plans; Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Paul Simon's Only Living Boy in New York City; and lots of Handel and Bach (two opposites, really). And a lot of Bob Dylan (notably Blood on the Tracks, and John Wesley Harding, and Modern Times, and odd songs like Isis, and Tears of Rage, and Visions of Johanna, and It's All Over Now Baby Blue and and...) and of the Beatles.

.  Some Blogs I Like:
I) Music:
. Alex Ross (www.therestisnoise.com)
. Greg Sandow (www.artsjournal.com/Sandow)
. Dial "M" for musicology (http://musicology.typepad.com/dialm/)
. Think Denk (http://jeremydenk.net/blog/)
. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
. http://www.gfhandel.org/
more TK soon