BOOM'S DUNGEON

ILYA RASHKOVSKY plays Chopin, Rachmaninov, Beethoven

2012-01-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

Gorzow Philharmonic Hall

Ilya Rashkovsky

p i a n o
info

C H O P I N

Piano Concerto in E minor

Gorzow Philharmonic

Piotr Borkowski

November 11, 2011

Filharmonia Gorzowska

Poland

320 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

RACHMANINOV

Piano Sonata No.2 Op.36

CHOPIN

Ballade in G minor Op.23

BEETHOVEN

Piano Sonata Op.110

May 5, 2009

Bass Performance Hall

Fort Worth, Texas

192 - 256 VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

In science and mathematics building on the work of others to obtain deeper discoveries and more powerful explanations is essential to progress in these fields. But even if your results reach much deeper and wider than those of your older colleagues, this in no way negates the value of the latter's contributions to the discipline.*

In music, on the other hand, things can be strikingly different. If someone takes the formal, stylistic, thematic, and harmonic elements of your compositions and uses them to create deeper, richer, and more powerful music, chances are good that he will get all the credit from posterity, while you will end up being royally fucked. Your music will be all but unknown to future generations of music lovers because it will be ignored by performers, dismissed by composition teachers, overlooked by record companies, and denigrated (if mentioned at all) by popular accounts of the history of music.

I can think of no better example of such victimhood than the fate which eventually befell the piano concertos of Friedrich Kalkbrenner and Johann Nepmuk Hummel after Chopin had published his two works in this genre. Although Chopin had all but aped Kalkbrenner's D-minor concerto, and also used Hummel's A-minor concerto as a model, his works have eclipsed the earlier concertos so completely that regular concertgoers in the 20th century would go to their graves without having heard a single performance of Kaklbrenner's or Hummel's works. And while there must have been hundreds of recordings of the Chopin concertos issued by record companies large and small since the late 1920s, I don't think there have been more than two recordings made of Kalkbrenner's D-minor and more than five or six of Hummel's A-minor - all seemingly motivated more by the music's historical curiosity than by its unjustly neglected aesthetic merits.

I don't mean to suggest that this situation in music is in some sense "unfair". Unlike with science and mathematics, our appreciation of musical works has a significant emotional dimension. (I know a mathematician who gets teary-eyed every time he listens to a particular recording of Beim Schlafengehen, but I doubt he ever shed a tear while contemplating mathematical theorems.) As a listener whose ears have been conditioned by Chopin's melodic gift and harmonic inventiveness, I certainly feel some degree of superficiality in the concertos of Kalbrenner and Hummel (much more so with Kalkbrenner). And if my response is typical, I don't see anything unfair in the fact that concert pianists would much rather try to impress their audience with music that penetrates to the bone marrow rather than with music that only tickles the skin or massages the muscles, however pleasant the sensation may be. Yet I also think that the concertos of Kalkbrenner and Hummel have undeniable charm, and I would rather hear a concert performance of one of them instead of enduring yet another routine performance of the overplayed and over-recorded Chopin concertos. In fact, I would go as far as to claim that people unfamiliar with the piano music of Chopin's largely forgotten near-contemporaries have only a superficial appreciation of Chopin's musical genius.

Such idle thoughts should reveal the extent of my ongoing obsession with the Chopin concertos, or rather with his E-minor concerto, of which I must have dozens of recordings (augmented by vague memories of ten times as many concert and broadcast performances). Obsessed I may be, but that doesn't mean that Ilya Rashkovsky's excellently recorded live and unedited performance is just another item added indiscriminately to my alarmingly growing Chopin database. Rashkovsky's very focused, slightly hard (but never brittle) tone has the kind of luminosity I find indispensable for communicating the melancholy of Chopin's achingly arched melodies. With Rashkovsky's introverted but gracefully shaped phrasing, the performance gives an attractively classical feel to this quintessentially Romantic concerto - which is something I always prefer to rubato-laden, metrically unstable, dynamically volatile, and technically exhibitionistic performances. And although the tempos are decidedly on the slow side, I never felt they were dragging. I think Rashkovsky really prefers to give a more generous time scale to the music he plays, as witnessed by his (less successfully sustained) slow tempo in the Arioso of Beethoven's Op.110 which he played at the van Cliburn Competition. I hope I will hear more of his playing in the future.

__________________
* For those who care to have an example, here is one of my favorites. In 1936 the American mathematician Marshall Stone discovered a beautiful connection (duality) between algebra and topology. A few years later a brilliant young Soviet mathematician named Israel Gelfand realized that the connection between algebra and topology extends much deeper and wider than Stone had envisioned; and he proved that it holds for algebras that are far richer in structure than the very simple algebras investigated by Stone. Although Gelfand's result is mathematically much deeper and more general (and also has important applications in mathematical physics), Stone's theorem remains an important and much valued contribution to 20th century mathematics, learned by today's students of algebra, topology, logic, computer science, and category theory.

Cedric Tiberghien in Hohenems (2011): Beethoven, Schumann, Ravel, Debussy

2012-01-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

Markus-Sittikus-Saal

Cédric Tiberghien
piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonate cis-Moll, op. 27/2 „Mondscheinsonate“

Robert Schumann
Kreisleriana, op. 16

Maurice Ravel
Gaspard de la nuit

Claude Debussy
Masques, D’un cahier d’esquisses, L’isle joyeuse

May 21, 2011

Markus-Sittikus-Saal

Hohenems

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Sometimes I think that many young concert pianists are simply delusional. Surely they must know that, to attract the relatively small number of people who go to piano recitals and buy piano recordings, they must compete against countless other young pianists with similar training, talent, and technical endowment. To make matters worse, in the concert hall these youngsters also have to compete against the still living "giants of the keyboard", and on recordings against the living giants as well as the dead ones.

So, what does the young pianist do to improve his (or her) odds in this brutally competitive market? Does he try to intrigue you with a rare opportunity to hear a live performance of some unjustly neglected piano music of the past, say a passionate proto-Romantic sonata by Dussek or Hummel? Does he try to ignite your curiosity with a rarely heard work by an important 20th century composer, such as the melancholy first sonata of Roger Sessions, or one of Stockhausen's haunting Klavierstucke , or perhaps Elliott Carter's moody Night Fantasies? Hell no! He expects you to spend your time and money to attend a recital whose program consists entirely of pieces that have been played and recorded ad nauseam by just about every great, almost-great, and far-from-great pianist of the century.

Now let me get this straight: The young pianist expects me to dress up, drive across town, pay for parking, pay for tickets, sit for two hours in the auditorium, and then take a long drive back home - all for the privilege of hearing the fucking Moonlight Sonata played by some sultry-looking, carefully groomed, and fashionably attired skinny metrosexual twenty-something??? I would pass on this kind of recital program even if the ticket included a free backstage blowjob from the artist during the intermission. And I consider myself a fairly typical pianophile...

The point of all this is not that Cedric Tiberghien's playing shows him to be a bad pianist or inadequate musician. On the contrary, I think he is quite good. The problem is that there are too many other young pianists who are at least as good as he is. And most of them seem to be equally delusional in their belief that they can attain pianistic glory by starting off with recitals consisting of sorely overplayed and numbingly over-recorded segments of the piano repertoire.

Bachtwistle

2012-01-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE

Bach Measures

(Eight Chorals by J.S. Bach arranged for chamber orchestra)

ASKO-Schoenberg Ensemble

Reinbert de Leeuw

May 23, 2009

Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

As much as I love Birtwistle's music, I can't see the point of this 23-minute long dutiful exercise in Bachiana. Beautifully played, gorgeously recorded... and I still could not last through the whole thing. For a composer of Birtwistle's immense talent to spend time on something that could have been done just as well by the likes Hans Zimmer strikes me as a complete waste of creative energy...

Mahler 10th in New York (December 2011)

2012-01-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

Avery Fisher Hall

M A H L E R

Symphony No.10

(completed by D. Cooke)

New York Philharmonic

Daniel Harding

December 1 - 3, 2011

Avery Fisher Hall

Lincoln Center

New York City

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Having heard Daniel Harding's unexceptional concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (recorded live on February 17, 2011), I did not expect much from his visit to New York at the end of last year. As it turned out, the modesty of my expectations was only partly justified because Harding's New York performances of Mahler's 10th symphony produced some of the most seductive orchestral playing I've heard in a long time. The violins played with a tightly focused satiny tone which illuminated the music like a winter sunrise. The violas and cellos sang with the bronzed, clarion-like virility of Lauritz Melchior's voice. And the brass joined the strings in the opening Adagio to make even the best organists weep with envy and despair at such exquisitely voiced and gorgeously blended sonorities. What made the orchestra's sound especially intriguing to my ear was that its beauty relied neither on warmth, nor sweetness, nor buttery richness - the qualities often associated with "beautiful" orchestral sound. If there is an adjective that captures this kind of sound, I haven't discovered it yet.

With the orchestra's playing being so memorable, I could only regret that, as my guide to Mahler's symphony, Daniel Harding offered the musical equivalent of a limousine-driven sightseeing tour. Cruising at a steady and comfortable speed I got to see all the landmarks, but always in passing, and always from pretty much the same distance.
I wonder if the man invests so much effort in practicing the piercing eyes look for his publicity photos that he simply doesn't have enough time and energy left to ponder the musical riches of Mahler's scores. But then he did get pretty damn close to matching Derek Zoolander's famous Blue Steel Look...

Friedrich Kuhlau: Piano Concerto in C major

2012-01-16T19:52:00.000-08:00

FRIEDRICH KUHLAU

Piano Concerto in C major

Marianna Shirinyan, piano

Sjællands Symfoniorkester

Rolf Gupta

October 19, 2010

Copenhagen

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

When a rip-off of Beethoven's C-major piano concerto is so obvious, it is no longer an act of theft, but rather an act of blind adulation and worship of the Master. Being a musical pervert that I am, I have a soft spot for such derivative piano works; and Kuhlau's concerto gives me as much guilty pleasure as I get from concertos by Hummel, Ries, Moscheles, Kullak, Sterndale Bennett, Thalberg, and many other early 19th century pianists-composers. There is something melancholy about these relics of the piano's glory age, even if in their similarity to one another they remind me of a large and heavily inbred clan of good-natured folks from some village in the mountains of West Virginia.
In any case, the concerto is lovingly played by the Armenian-born, Copenhagen-based Marianna Shirinyan, and I can think of at least one piano buff (a fellow blogger) who might find this well-recorded, live and unedited performance as enjoyable as I have.

STOCKHAUSEN by Le Cabaret Contemporain: Tierkreis; Kontakte

2012-01-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

STOCKHAUSEN

Tierkreis
Kontakte

Le Cabaret Contemporain
Paul Lay, , Piano électrique Fender Rhodes
Julien Loutelier, Batterie
Augustin Viard, Ondes Martenot
Giani Caseretto, Direction musicale, guitare électrique

Laurent Durupt, Piano

Rémi Durupt, Percussion

Concert donné le 25 novembre 2011 à l’ODEON,

Scène Jean-Roger Caussimon, de Tremblay-en-France.

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Humanity has survived Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "revisiting" of Mussorgsky's Pictures, so I'm confident it will survive Le Cabaret Contemporain's hard rock take on Stockhausen's Tierkreis. Of course, since Fausto Romitelli had already legitimized distorted electric guitars and rock drums in serious music, Le Cabaret Contemporain cannot claim much novelty for their sound; and I personally wasn't all that excited about their re-imagining of Stockhausen's piece. Be that as it may, this stuff is all very hip and grungy, and I would not be surprised to find snippets of it in a soundtrack of a movie directed by Olivier Megaton or Pierre Morel.

JEAN-GUIHEN QUEYRAS in Amsterdam (Oct. 30, 2011): Vivaldi Cello Concertos

2012-01-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

VIVALDI

Cello Concertos RV 412, 416, 419

Concerto for Cello and Bassoon RV 409

Jean-Guihen Queyras

Akademie für alte Musik Berlin

X.30.2011

Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Years ago my then girlfriend took me to dinner at Spago on the Sunset Strip (my birthday, her treat). Three tables from where we were sitting I saw a pigmy whose face looked annoyingly familiar. A bit later I almost choked on my lobster ravioli because I suddenly realized that the pigmy was a very famous action movie star - the kind that easily fires a .50 caliber M2 machine gun (weighing 83 pounds) with one arm while carrying an unconscious damsel on the other. In real life, however, he projected all the menacing authority of a bipedal hamster on high protein diet. After that sighting I never could watch the guy's movies without laughing...
A few months later I had a similar experience when I went to hear the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock playing at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. What I heard from my seat a few rows from the stage was not the towering, muscled, athletic, edgy sonic presence of the period instrument band I knew from numerous Arkhiv Produktion CDs. Instead I heard a few thin-textured, bass-shy tuttis separated by long stretches of nearly inaudible, barely pitched buzz. After that I never could listen to a period instruments ensemble without laughing. (Which is exactly what I did at another concert where heavily perspiring Monica Huggett tried to scrape her way through the ascending melodic line with which the violin makes its entrance in the Beethoven concerto. I had to leave the concert hall in disgrace, with third degree burns left on my back by the fiery stares of numerous HIP devotees in the audience.)

I mention this bit of autobiographical trivia just make it clear that I wasn't fooled for a moment by the superlatively recorded beefy, muscular, lithe textures of the ensemble accompanying Queyras in the above performances of Vivaldi's cello concertos. Not that it mattered much to me, since the music itself easily gets on my nerves. I am just not the kind of guy who holds his breath when listening to endlessly repeated arpeggiated chords, which is what Vivaldi's concertos offer as (or rather in place of) thematic elaboration. But listen I did, and more than once, because I find Queyras' musical intelligence and instrumental craft simply irresistible no matter what he plays. If this musician can keep my attention through several numbingly predictable Vivaldi concertos, he probably would make me faint with a live recording of something more interesting, say Pintscher's Reflections on Narcissus or Holliger's Romancendres.

NORDISKE MUSIKDAGE 2010

2012-01-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

NORDISKE MUSIKDAGE 2010

Mattias Lysell (1971)

Gilded Splinters (DK Premiere)

Kimmo Kuitunen (1968)

TripleDuos (DK Premiere)

Klaus Ib Jørgensen (1967)

Moon-Pain - Moonlit

(Signe Asmussen, Mezzo)

Eivind Buene (1973)

Landscape With Ruins (DK Premiere)

Lotta Wennäkoski (1970)

Kuule II - for sinfonietta and bass clarinet (DK Premiere)

(featuring Heikki Nikula)

Esbjerg Ensemble

Jesper Nordin (cond.)

September 9, 2010

KØBENHAVNS MUSIKTEATER

Copenhagen

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

MAURIZIO POLLINI in Amsterdam (Jan.5, 1973): Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin

2012-01-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

MAURIZIO POLLINI

piano

January 5, 1973

Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

SCHUBERT

Sonata D.845

BEETHOVEN

Sonata Op.110

CHOPIN

12 Etudes Op.25

Etude Op.10 #12

Nocturne Op.27 #1

Prelude Op.28 #24

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

No longer will I blame DG engineers for the unpleasantly shallow and sterile sonorities of Pollini's studio recordings from the 1970s. As this excellently, if a bit distantly, recorded recital (Pollini's debut in Holland) shows, that's how he actually sounded in the concert hall. The upper registers are flinty, the lower registers are dry, and there is unyielding shallowness and hardness of tone across the entire keyboard.
     As for Pollini's musicianship, his music making is certainly not faceless. It has personality, alright, but the personality of a man with Asperger syndrome. And I say this as someone who actually likes emotionally reserved, objective playing, especially when it comes to Chopin's music. One only needs to compare Pollini's performance of Beethoven's Op.110 with the very similarly engineered live recording of that sonata performed in the same concert hall by Casadesus (1960) to hear the difference between the latter's emotionally reserved, objective, and technically immaculate musicianship and the former's technically immaculate musical sociopathy.
     Of course a technically demanding recital played without a smudged note (let along a wrong or missed one) is guaranteed to impress plenty of pianophiles - especially those whose childhood had been disfigured by endless and largely fruitless hours of practicing at the piano. Well, I was lucky to have a normal childhood, which is why the young Pollini's technical prowess, superhuman though it is, does not impress me all that much.

But at least the man is a smoker...

FESTIVAL NOVELUM 2011: Romitelli, Hurel, Momi

2012-01-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Fausto Romitelli

Trash TV Trance
for electric guitar (2002)

Philippe Hurel

Localized corrosion
for sax, egtr, perc & pno (2010)

Fausto Romitelli

Professor bad trip:
Lesson I
for ensemble & electronics (1998)

Lesson II
for ensemble (1998)

Marco Momi

Ludica II
for sax, egtr, perc, pno & electronics (2009)

Ensemble Court-circuit / Ensemble Nikel
Julien Leroy, direction
Sébasten Naves, réalisateur en informatique musicale

XI.15.2011

Théâtre Garonne

Toulouse, France
2011 Festival Novelum

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

JEAN-GUEHIN QUEYRAS and ALEXANDER THARAUD at the Frick Collection: Bach, Schubert, Debussy, Poulenc

2012-01-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

J.S. BACH

Sonata No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 1029

SCHUBERT

Das Wandern
Die Vögel
Ungeduld
Sonata for arpeggione and piano in A Minor, D. 821

DEBUSSY

Sonata No. 1 for cello and piano in D Minor

POULENC

Sonata for Cello and Piano

Jean-Guehin Queyras (cello)

Alexander Tharaud (piano)

The Music Room at the Frick Collection

New York City

March 7, 2010

128 kbs mkp3 (no re-encoding)*

I had no plans to add Queyras' New York debut recital to the blog because I do not think much of Alexander Tharaud's playing. But then I discovered that there are some very enthusiastic admirers of Queyras' musicianship among the blog readers, including at least one who could not get tickets for this Frick Collection recital because it was sold out. So, at the risk of creating a thoroughly misleading impression of being a nice fellow, I've added this recital to the blog.

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* Unedited single track including announcements and applause. To edit without degrading sound quality by re-compression, use MP3-SPLIT or MP3-CUT. Alternatively convert to a lossless format first (WAV, FLAC) and copy individual tracks using Audacity, Goldwave, or similar sound editing soft(free)ware.

JEAN-GUIHEN QUEYRAS in Fribourg (2010): BACH Cello Suites (complete)

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

Eglise du Collège Saint-Michel

(Fribourg, Switzerland)

J. S. B A C H

Suites for unaccompanied cello

BWV 1007 - 1012

Jean-Guihen Queyras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Guihen_Queyras
http://www.fims-fribourg.ch/PDF/10/Queyras_laliberte_08072010.pdf

[Cello: Gioffredo Cappa (1696), modern strings]

VII.10.2010 (Nos. 1, 4, 5)
VII.11.2010 (Nos. 2, 3, 6)

Eglise du Collège Saint-Michel

Fribourg, Switzerland

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

When the music is divine, the performance is sublime, and the recorded sound is perfect - even a surly misanthrope like myself will shed a manly tear of joy while communing with this always contemporary composer ...

Gödel's secret theorem

2011-12-30T08:41:00.000-08:00

Kurt Gödel

It was only months before his mental breakdown and death that the great Austrian-born mathematical logician Kurt Gödel discovered his last theorem, which revealed a shocking crack in the foundations of mathematics. After surveying the rather short proof he had written on the blackboard in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study, Gödel knew at once that his discovery, if made public, would cause immediate and permanent collapse of the world's banking system and financial markets, thus ending civilization as we know it. He sat for several hours in the chair next to the blackboard, frozen with fear, his vacant gaze fixed on the empty space before him. At long last he stood up, erased the proof, and went home a broken man determined to take his terrifying secret with him to the grave.

Unbeknownst to Gödel every office at the Institute had a hidden security camera designed to take snapshots of the office blackboard at regular time intervals. Somehow a copy of the security camera photograph showing Gödel's blackboard with his proof still written on it - the photograph still classified "Top Secret" by the U.S. government - had found its way into the hands of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Today that photograph was made public...

REBECCA SAUNDERS: Violin Concerto 'still' (different source recording)

2011-12-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

R E B E C C A S A U N D E R S
www.ensemble-modern.com/en/archive/press/interviews/2001/467
http://www.klausrudolph.de/galerie/01112005-rebecca-saunders-musikfabrik-koeln/

Violin Concerto "still"

(World Premiere)

Carolin Widmann, violin

BBC SO, Sylvain Cambreling

IX.29.2011

Beethovenhalle, Bonn

128 kbs mp3

In the original post on this performance I wondered about the weirdly fast electronic roll-off of sound decay after some phrase endings. The mystery has now been solved. This effect does not seem to have anything to do with the composer's intent, but instead is some kind of a defect in signal transmission or in the handling of the music files by the person who seeded the original torrent. One of my readers (Ben H.) provided me with a recording of Saunders' solo piano work from the same torrent (the work was played at a different concert, different location, date, etc), and the sound had the same weird roll-off effects.

Fortunately, another reader (whose username is משוגע־סאָפֿע) sent me a comment with nothing but a single link (which I initially took to be spam!) to a defect-free recording of Saunders' concerto. The recorded sound - apparently from a different source webcast - is less vivid (being 128 kbs mp3 - half the bitrate of the 256 kbs original webcast), but otherwise it is fully adequate and does not hinder the enjoyment of music. (Although I must admit that by now I have gotten so used to this roll-off effect that I'm afraid I'll miss its absence... )
With much gratitude to משוגע־סאָפֿע I added his link in the comments below.

Below is the original post:

Some words really get on my nerves because their indiscriminate use has by now stripped them of whatever meaning they might have had in the past. The words sustainable and green - used with pseudo-ecological sanctimoniousness in every conceivable context - are currently my linguistic emetics. As far as I can see, the only remaining meaningful way to use these two words today is in advertisements like this one:

VIAGRA: Sustainable erections that will make the have nots green with envy

But I am digressing. The relevant word that has been annoying me recently is avant-garde. These days it seems that every young composer who writes non-tonal, athematic, dissonant music is routinely described as an avant-garde composer, even though the music does not push (let alone cross) any formal or aesthetic boundaries that are less than half a century old. When it comes to formal devices and aesthetic affinities of many European composers born around 1960 - e.g., Rebecca Saunders, Isabel Mundry, Wolfram Schurig, Mark Andre, Johannes Maria Staud - there is hardly anything avant-garde about them. There is the post-Lachenmann commitment to extended playing techniques, the post-Stockhausen attention to spatial separation of sound, the post-Grisey fixation on the static properties of timbres, intervals, overtones, and textures at the expense of harmonic motion. There is also the seemingly inevitable time span of about 20 - 25 minutes, the basic pulse that is Moderato (occasionally replaced by hyperactive twitching à la Beat Furrer), the gestural rather than thematic rhetoric, and the mood that is as somber as the atmosphere at an oncology clinic. All this makes their music contemporary, to be sure, but no more formally and aesthetically challenging than Stockhausen's Gruppen (1957) or Lachenmann's Air (1968).

But then so what? One need not be an avant-garde composer to write music of deep intelligence, striking individuality, and lasting aesthetic appeal. (The music of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms should suffice to prove the claim.) And no music written by the younger living composers delivers these virtues more consistently than the music of Rebecca Saunders. Being well familiar with Saunders' music I thought I knew what to expect from her brand new violin concerto. Instead this concerto, despite its familiar stylistic trappings, gave me a 20-minute long equivalent of a Taser shock. The music narrowly oscillates around (what feels like) the principal tone, with close intervals creating a sonically claustrophobic environment within which the violin part coils and uncoils with the ferociousness of an angry reptile trapped inside a terrarium. Somehow Saunders manages to manipulate the timbral and textural aspects of sound so effectively that it creates an almost dizzying sense of motion, keeping me on the edge of my seat despite the fact that there is no real (i.e, harmonic) motion to speak of.
One particularly unusual (and initially startling) sound effect used in this concerto is difficult to describe with certainty without having any background information about the music. (Saunders' publisher provides none as of now.) It seems that the violin (perhaps with the entire ensemble) is subjected to some amplification, and many phrase endings are subjected to very fast electronic roll-off of sound decay (leaving behind only a faint sonic halo to shimmer for a second or two afterward). At first the effect felt very strange, as if there were interruptions in the signal transmission of the broadcast. After a couple of hearings, however, the effect became fully integrated in the aural fabric of the concerto, and now I think of it as an indispensable aesthetic component of the music.

This may sound melodramatic, but after the first hearing of Saunders' concerto - performed with tremendous authority by Carolin Widmann and the BBC SO under Sylvain Cambreling - I felt as if the aural afterimage of the music had been permanently burned into my brain. The last time I felt this way about a new piece of music was when I first encountered the music Helmut Lachenmann some years ago...

A pianist for whom life is not too short...

2011-12-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

Life is too short to play Rachmaninoff or drink bad wine.

Till Fellner,

in the interview by Lee Eiseman

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

October 29, 2009

This bit of wisdom comes from a pianist who obviously thinks that - despite the endless list of Beethoven recordings from such notable artists as Casadesus, Schnabel, Petri, Fischer (Edwin and Annie), Frank, Nat, Hess, Kempff, Barenboim, Brendel, Richter, Gilels, Gould, Solomon, Curzon, Guller, Fleisher, and many others - life is not too short for him, Till Fellner, to spend on playing meticulously planned, immaculately executed, and incomparably faceless all-Beethoven recitals season after season.

I don't know who the interviewer Lee Eisman is, but if I were in his place I'd ask this simple and straight forward question in response to Fellner's pronouncement: What the fuck is wrong with you pompous Austro-German keyboard pricks (beginning with Schnabel) who can't understand that a deeply felt and brilliantly played Rachmaninov prelude (e.g., Horowitz' Moscow recital) or a Mendelssohn Song without Words (e.g., Horowitz' Carnegie Hall recital of March 5, 1951) have vastly greater aesthetic worth than a sloppy, constipated, pedantic, or thoroughly de-personalized rendition of a Beethoven sonata?

Tonight I'll dream about Santa...

2011-12-24T12:20:00.000-08:00

No, not about some fat fuck in a red suit! About this Santa.

The joys of anterograde amnesia...

2011-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, while driving home, I played Jean Barraque's piano sonata on my car stereo to soften the boredom of a long commute. About ten minutes into this 45-minute long complex serial composition I suddenly felt (rather than thought) that I have no idea of how the music got to the point where it was at that moment.   If the music I listened to at that time were to be considered the whole of my experienced reality (which would be not far from truth, as I was cruising in a nearly empty carpool lane with next to no driving-related distractions), then I failed to form memories of events experienced only a few minutes earlier. It then occurred to me that listening to this kind of music - in which the organization of every parameter is perceptually inaccessible without a detailed knowledge of the score - is about as close as a neurologically normal person can come to experiencing what it's like to have anterograde amnesia.

I did not need music for the rest of my drive home because I was plenty entertained by chewing on the following conjecture: The seemingly insuperable difficulties posed by total serialism for the general audience may not at all be rooted in aversion to relentless dissonance and/or completely athematic pitch progressions.   After all, there is plenty of abrasive, aggressive dissonance in some (non-serial) compositions of Bartok, Shostakovich or Gubaidulina; and there are very long stretches of athematic (and not tonally anchored) writing in such popular works as Strauss' Salome. Instead these difficulties may be rooted in the genetically coded fear of (and the resultant stress from) disorientation.   (I say 'genetically coded' because in many contexts disorientation can be fatal: getting lost in the forest, losing the sense of direction under water, or just taking a wrong exit off the freeway at night to find yourself on the poorly lit streets of South Central LA.) The behavioral expression of this fear in the concert hall may take seemingly unrelated forms, such as fidgety boredom or anger at the composer. But then it is not uncommon for drivers who are lost to become irrationally angry at the passengers in their cars, or at some unknown "municipal assholes" responsible for poor street lighting and illegible street signs.

One immediate challenge to my armchair (or rather driver seat) speculation is the fact that I actually enjoy listening to the Barraque sonata (and to serial music in general). I find the often unpredictable unfolding of the music's parameters to be enjoyably stimulating. And, as a listener, I feel giddy rather than apprehensive about my existence in the perpetual musical "now", with no detailed memories of its past and no clear anticipations of its future.
     But then this enjoyment of serial music came to me only after a lengthy and gradual immersion in the music written in the second half of the 20th century. And this suggests the possibility that I have simply learned to disentangle this kind of musical experiences from my subconscious fear of disorientation, and to perceive them instead as thrilling, in the way in which we are thrilled by disorientation after having entered a maze...

I also began to wonder about the extent to which pianists who have played the Barraque sonata in public (Roger Woodward, Claude Helffer, Nicolas Hodges) had to rely on their procedural memory to get through the piece even with the score before them...   And then the drive was over. I was home. There were now better things to do than to speculate about the psychological demands of serial music. Like listening to the Barraque sonata on my vastly better sounding home stereo...

MILTON BABBITT'S Pop Art

2011-12-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

JOSEPH KALICHSTEIN in Aspen (2011): Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms

2011-12-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

Harris Concert Hall (Aspen, Colorado)

JOSEPH KALICHSTEIN

p i a n o

SCHUBERT

Piano Sonata D.959

Hungarian Melody in B minor D.817

MENDELSSOHN

Variations Serieuses Op.54

BRAHMS

Variations in F# minor on a theme by Schumann

Theme and Variations in D minor

VII.15.2011

Harris Concert Hall

Aspen Music Festival

320 kbs VBR mp3

(no re-encoding)

A rare opportunity to hear this well-known, much respected member of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio (and a long time teacher at Juilliard) in an excellently recorded live and unedited solo recital. I could not last through the variations part of the program (I think performances of 19th century compositions in the variations form should have be banned by now), but the first few bars of Brahms' D minor variations sounded as if borrowed from an Ennio Morricone 1960s film score. Somehow this spoke more strongly against Brahms than it did against Morricone...

HECTOR PARRA: Caressant l'horizon; MAURICIO KAGEL: In der Matratzengruft

2011-12-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

La Salle des Concerts

Cité de la Musique

Hèctor Parra (*1976)

Caressant l'horizon (2011)

Commande de Mécénat Musical Société Générale

Création mondiale

about 1

about 2

Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)

In der Matratzengruft (2008)

Création française

Markus Brutscher, Ténor

Ensemble intercontemporain

Emilio Pomarico, Direction

Concert donné le 9 novembre 2011

PARIS - Cité de la musique, salle des concerts

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Hector Parra is a new composer to me, so all I can say about the music at this point is that I found it interesting in more ways than one. It is also excellently played, although the sound of this 128 kbs webcast definitely benefits from a boost of low frequencies. (For my personal use I added 3.0 db below 250 hz.)

SILVIA BORZELLI: sur-itinéraire (in much better sound)

2011-12-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

SILVIA BORZELLI

sur-itinéraire for ensemble (2008 - 09)

This is the same performance from Festival Musica Strasbourg I posted earlier. However, instead of the originally posted somewhat dull-sounding 128 kbs mp3 webcast source the present recording comes from a high definition videocast, whose audio track was ~224 kbs VBR AAC (extracted without streaming and re-encoding, as I always do). The gain in depth of perspective, spatial separation of instruments, and definition of instrumental timbres/textures is immediately noticeable. (I estimated the bitrate by noticing that in some portions of the music my Foobar bitrate counter went up as high as 239 kbs.)
The original AAC file comes in MP4 container format and can be played in Foobar and other media players. Because it comes from a videocast, there is a longish silence in the beginning, and the end applause is abruptly truncated. For my own use, I simply converted the MP4 file to FLAC, removed the initial silence and faded out the applause before burning it on CD.

2011 International Rostrum of Composers (12 compositions)

2011-12-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

Auditorium RAI (Turin)

2011 INTERNATIONAL ROSTRUM OF COMPOSERS
information

Francesco Filidei (Italy)

Macchina per scoppiare pagliacci

Juan Pablo Nicoletti (Argentina)

Abismo al abisom

Bart Visman (Netherlands)

Sables, Oxygene

Christof Dienz (Austria)

Hey driver, cool down the h's

Anja Djordjevic (Serbia)

Spray of Evian

Lan-Chee Lam (China)

Ancient Colour

Iris ter Schiphorst (Germany)

Dislokationen

Daníel Bjarnason (Iceland)

"Bow to String" for cello & tape

Sven Sosnitski (Estonia)

Solara

Raminta Serksnyté (Lithuania)

Midsummer song

Jasna Velickovic (Serbia)

Last song

Albertas Navickas (Lithuania)

Blance t'a vu

Julieta Szewach (Argentina)

Como el Rayo que Estalla en los Aires, se Quebrarán las Estrellas

Auditorium RAI, Turin
(performers and dates in files metadata)

256 kbs webcast (no re-encoding)

Another heady trip in exellent sound. There is much electronics in these compositions (real-time as well as pre-recorded), with digitally processed voices playing a prominent part in several pieces. Much of this music is unabashedly tonal, often theatrical, and there is a strong multimedia feel to several pieces. Diverse stylistic influences range from Medieval Chant and Renaissance polyphony to Rammstein, Hip-Hop, and cheesy sentimental European film music.
    Predictably I found some compositions boring, and occasionally annoying (e.g., Serksnyte's exercise in morose Baltic spiritualism played by the Kremerata Baltica; Lam's "Ancient Colour" which felt more like "flavor" full of musical MSG).
     Some pieces were attractive, but I'm not sure if they will remain engaging after a few hearings. Szewach's uncomplicated but delicately layered composition for processed voices reminded me of Jonathan Harvey's poignant Mortuos Plango (1980), which probably explains why I found Szewach's piece initially appealing.
     Another initially appealing piece was Bjarnason's "Bow to String", with its rock-ish ostinatos intersected by an utterly banal, saccharine minor key harmonic progression that must have been used in a million European songs and film soundracks. To me this vapid harmonic progression felt like childhood comfort food - I grew up on those eight chords, so to speak - and I wonder if the created conflict between my subconscious attraction and conscious revulsion was the composer's intended effect. In any case, the piece, as I heard it, is not so much about thematic or harmonic material (of which there is little that is substantial), but about something that I am tempted to call Klanghaltung.

Because I am a huge fan of the late, much lamented, and sorely missed Fausto Romitelli, I naturally responded to Schiphorst's 20-minute long extravagantly hip, over-the-top theatrical blend of rock-flavored electronica, scratched record samples, distorted drum beats, and snippets of hoarsely screaming voices - all superimposed on the amplified piano and ensemble. I honestly think that compositions like Dislokationen should be staged rather than simply performed, and staged with all the visuial trappings of a Slipknot concert. (Perhaps it already has been done, and I am simply unaware of it...)

Finally there was the curious case of Filidei's short piece for traditional orchestra (played by the French Radio PO under Pascal Rophe) which stuck in my memory for all the wrong reasons. The shadow of Lachenmann looms as large over Filidei's piece as the shadow of Bruckner that looms over Furtwangler's symphonies (and over Bruno Walter's D-minor symphony too). I don't find Furtwangler's symphonies in the least interesting because I can get better second-rate Bruckner from Bruckner himself. But at least Furtwangler had the advantage of imitating a long dead and (at the time) not too well known composer. On the other hand, with Lachenmann still being very much alive, and with his influence being felt so strongly in so much contemporary music of the last three decades, Filidei's piece felt to me like an act of artistic suicide. After all, why would anyone commission a piece from "a guy who sounds like Lachenmann" when one can offer the commission to Lachenmann himself?

THOMAS ZEHETMAIR at the Frick Collection (2011): Bach, Hartmann

2011-12-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

J.S. BACH

Sonata for Solo Violin BWV 1003

K. A. HARTMANN

Sonata for Solo Violin No.1

Sonata for Solo Violin No.2

J.S. BACH

Partita for Solo Violin BWV 1004

Thomas Zehetmair

May 22, 2011

The Frick Collection

New York City

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

In my experience the average music lover is a reasonably open-minded person. He may have Furtwangler Rules! tattooed on his chest, but still will agree (if grudgingly) that Toscanini and Szell each had something worthwhile to say in their performances of Beethoven's symphonies. And what goes for Beethoven's symphonies, goes for Mozart's concertos, Schumann's piano music, and Wagner's operas.
Yet when it comes to Bach's works for unaccompanied violin, even middle-aged, bespectacled, balding men with advanced degrees in Accounting quickly turn purple of face and violent of heart at the mere suggestion that these works may be played differently from the one and only recording they have worshiped since their college days. If you are old enough to have spent a serious amount of time in the classical wing of Tower Records on East 4-th Street, you might have overheard a brief exchange between two distinguished looking gentlemen loitering next to the "B"- labeled CD bin, the exchange which quickly culminated in the loudly hissed Fuck implied counterpoint! Fuck Baroque dance forms! And FUCK YOU, you fat fuck who can't understand that this music is about metaphysical depth and theological grandeur, and not about the anal-retentive articulation of double-dotted notes!
No wonder sales clerks at Tower Classical kept a baseball bat under the counter (just to the right of the cash register) on the days when a new recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas was placed in the New Releases section...

With this in mind I am fully aware of the risk I take by describing Thomas Zehetmair's live and unedited performances of the two Bach works above as unforgettable realizations, which blend the formal and the emotive aspects of these compositions with supreme musical intelligence and instrumental craft. In these performances Zehetmair's musical insights are deeper than in his old studio recording, and the recorded sound has visceral immediacy completely absent in the antiseptic commercial recording. Speaking of the recorded sound, it seems that during the intermission the recording engineers either changed the microphone placement or adjusted the mixing balance, because the D-minor partita has a noticeably warmer, richer violin tone than the slightly hard-edged A-minor sonata which opened the recital.

This day of the year should be a natonal holiday

2011-12-11T05:01:00.000-08:00

E L L I O T T C A R T E R !

And you thought you like Dostoevsky ....

2011-12-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

Suppose you ask me who my favorite composers are, and I respond with the usual trio of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. I then add that
(a) the only works of these composers that I know are Bach's Cantata BWV 12, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and
(b) the only performances of these works that I am familiar with are recordings by Leslie Howard.
Knowing that Leslie Howard is a pianist, you give me that hard, squinty Dirty Harry look and ask if I'm fucking with you. I assure you that I am being utterly sincere, and point out that Leslie Howard has recorded the complete piano works of Franz Liszt, among which are
(i) Prelude for piano after Bach's Cantata BWV 12,
(ii) Operatic fantasy Réminiscences de Don Juan on themes from Mozart's Don Giovanni, and
(iii) piano transcriptions of all nine symphonies of Beethoven.
At this point, if you are a kind and very patient person, your voice will fill with pity as you exclaim: Boom, you hopeless imbecile! These works of Liszt are at best only approximations of the original compositions, and at worst they are outright recreations whose ties to the original music are as tenuous and superficial as your apparent grasp on the concept of authorship in music!

This imaginary exchange is more than an exercise in gratuitous stupidity. I know intelligent, well-educated people who will readily name Dostoevsky (or Proust, Böll, Moravia, Hemingway, etc.) as one of their favorite novelists, even though these people cannot read Russian (or French, German, English, etc). They read foreign literature in translation and, as far as I can tell, take it for granted that it is Dostoevsky's literary talent and craft they appreciate when they read a translation of Crime and Punishment. Why else would they name Dostoevsky as one of their favorite writers, and not, say, Smith or Dostoevsky-Smith - if Smith was responsible for the translation they've read? Why else would they predictably fail to know (or at least to remember) who translated the foreign novels whose authors' names they have so firmly committed to memory? And this tells me that such appreciative consumers of translated literature are no less delusional in their attributions of literary authorship than the above imaginary Boom is in his attributions of authorship in music.

To see why lets poke just a little bit at the task of translating something like a Great American Novel - say, Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men - which exploits, as an important literary component, the phonetic, syntactic, idiomatic, and etymological peculiarities of English spoken in the American South of the 1930s. Put yourself in the shoes of a Russian (or French, German, etc) translator who, like a deer in the headlights, stares at the mangled phonetics and syntax on page two, where "a nigger chopping cotton" notices the rising column of black smoke from a distant car accident and wearily remarks:

Lawd God, hit's a-nudder done done hit!

What I still remember after many years (correctly I hope) as the Russian translation of this utterance is a syntactically and phonetically ordinary Russian sentence - so ordinary that it could have been spoken (if informally) by anyone, from an illiterate peasant to a professor at the Moscow State University:

О Господи, ещё один сковырнулся!

(Oh Lord, another one bit the dust!)

The translator is not at fault. The Russian language has plenty of regional dialects, professional and criminal jargons, slang expressions, and other sources of phonetic, syntactic, and semantic deviations from the linguistic mainstream. But using any of them would give the readers a thoroughly misleading and faintly surreal impression that under the skin of a Southern plantation Negro hides a Siberian peasant, a Chechen gangster, or an old Jew from Odessa.
Never mind such minor issues as that the Russian translation uses the same word - негр (negr) - for both Negro and nigger. The translator was absolutely right to use an ordinary word (for "Negro") to translate a racial slur ("nigger"). There are plenty of racial slurs in Russian, including those aimed at dark-skinned people. But none of them can be used the way in which nigger is used in the inner monologue of Warren's university educated, highly intelligent, and good natured young Southerner: not as a conscious, deliberate insult; not with the slightest feeling of hatred, anger, or malice; but simply as an ordinary, matter-of-fact word used to refer to blacks in everyday life.
There are still even more minor issues, such as that the names of the two main characters - Burden and Stark - are meaningful English words, and there is every reason to think that a great writer like Warren chose these names at least in part because of their meaning. But the major, general problem is that there is nothing in the language of the Russian translation to suggest (as Warren's English does in numerous places) that the novel is first and foremost about the American South. And this loss obliterates a good deal of Warren's literary craft.

Of course translators, if good, try to compensate for this kind of loss in some way: by choosing appropriate idiomatic expressions, inventing colorful turns of phrase, perhaps employing non-standard phonetics here and there - anything that will augment the translation with some "local" linguistic colors and flavors in place of the irretrievably lost colors and flavors of the original. Which means that good translators of literary works always end up doing some amount of rewriting and grafting the newly generated literary flesh on the skeleton of the original work. (Boris Pasternak's Russian translations of Shakespeare is one example that readily comes to mind.)

All this is a rather trivial "lost in translation" stuff, but I am not concerned here with the legitimacy or usefulness of literary translations, or with the criteria for judging one translation as being better than another. I am only interested in the following simple and straightforward question:

Why the fuck is there no explicit acknowledgment of joint authorship for literary translations, the way it is explicitly acknowledged for musical transcriptions?

After all, the world of music never had any problems with "hyphenated composers" being prominently listed on the concert programs, Lp covers, or CD booklets: Bach-Vivaldi, Liszt-Schubert, Brahms-Schoenberg, etc. Yet in the world of literature we're lucky if we notice the translator's name printed in a tiny font at the very bottom of the book's cover. All too often, however, the translator's existence is not acknowledged on the cover at all:

To me book covers like these are instances of consumer fraud, pure and simple. And if you, my dear reader, sincerely believe that you appreciate Dostoevsky's literary talents without being a fluent reader of Russian, I have a sobering news for you. You don't.

FESTIVAL MUSICA STRASBOURG 2011: Jarrell, Staud, Manoury

2011-11-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Claude Debussy & Michael Jarrell, Orchestrateur
Trois études de Debussy (1992), Ext. des Douze Études pour piano (1915)

Johannes-Maria Staud
Contrebande (On Comparative Meteorology II) (2010)

Philippe Manoury & Emily Dickinson, Auteur
Noon (2003)*
text

Claudia Barainsky, Soprano
Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR
SWR Vokalensemble*
Anton Zapf, Direction

Philippe Manoury, Projection sonore*
Olivier Pasquet, Réalisation informatique musicale*
Matthias Reusch, Ingénieur du son*

Concert donnéle 8 octobre 2011

Salle Erasme du Palais de la Musique et des Congrès (PMC)

Strasbourg

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

A nice first step...

2011-11-29T05:16:00.000-08:00

Texting at a Cincinnati Symphony concert (image credit: AP)

The news making rounds in the classical music world is that Cincinnati Symphony has just established a special corner in the concert hall where patrons can text during the performance. That's a nice first step.
Now how about a special corner for music lovers to jerk off during the performance (perhaps while simultaneously sexting with the free hand)?

WQXR Beethoven Piano Sonatas Marathon (complete)

2011-11-26T12:54:00.000-08:00

WQXR Beethoven Piano Sonatas Marathon

Sunday, November 20, 2011
The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space
New York City

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Part One

Marina Radiushina – Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 1
Hyung Min Suh – Sonata No. 4 in E-flat Major, Op. 7, “Grand Sonata”
Alessio Bax – Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique”
Philip Edward Fisher – Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 14, No. 2
Evan Shinners – Sonata No. 11 in B-flat Major, Op. 22

Part Two

Daria Rabotkina – Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 2, No. 2
Michael Brown – Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28, “Pastoral”
Michael Brown – Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54
Inon Barnatan – Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90
Qi Xu – Sonata No. 25 in G Major, Op. 79
Alessio Bax – Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110

Part Three

Ching-Yun Hu – Sonata No. 3 in C Major, Op. 2, No.3
Yuchong Wu – Sonata No. 19 in G Minor, Op. 49, No. 1
Yuchong Wu – Sonata No. 20 in G Major, Op. 49, No. 2
Inon Barnatan – Sonata No. 6 in F Major, Op. 10, No.2
Benjamin Hochman – Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata”
Ching-Yun Hu – Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101

Part Four

Benjamin Hochman – Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No.3
Valentina Lisitsa – Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2, “Moonlight”
Drew Petersen – Sonata No. 16 in G Major, Op. 31, No. 1
Timothy Andres – Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”
Steven Beck – Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109

Part Five

Louis Schwizgebel – Sonata No. 9 in E Major, Op. 14, No. 1
Jonathan Biss – Sonata No. 12 in A-flat Major, Op. 26, “Funeral March”
Joyce Yang – Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major, Op. 31, No. 3, “The Hunt”
Timothy Andres – Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp Major, Op. 78, “A Thérèse”
Jeremy Denk – Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”

Part Six

Jonathan Biss – Sonata No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 10, No. 1
David Kaplan – Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, “Quasi una Fantasia”
Natasha Paremski – Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “Tempest”
Louis Schwizgebel – Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, “Les adieux”
Jeremy Denk – Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111

First a word on technical matters. In an earlier post I said that the sound quality of the complete videocast of these performances was inferior to the five audio-only selections provided by WQXR. That had to do with many small but annoying audio defects: clicks, dropouts, and such. As it turned out, the audio portion of these videocasts has the same bitrate (128 kbs mp3) as the audio-only selections, and the defects were due to some kind of glitch in integrating the audio and the video files in FLV container files. After I extracted the audio tracks from these videocasts, there were no audible defects of any kind. What you have here are individual sonatas (one per track, except for Op.106 which is divided into four tracks), organized in the order in which they were performed: six separate .ZIP archive files, each about 95 MB in size.

Now the natural question is why anyone would go to the trouble of downloading, extracting, and editing - let alone uploading - several hours worth of performances by young and largely unknown pianists. Here are some of my reasons:

1. As far as I know, there exists no complete set of Beethoven sonatas in live and unedited recordings. The few that are advertised as live - e.g., Barenboim 2005 Berlin cycle on DVD, or Lucchesini's set on Stradivarius - are either edited from multiple performances or contain post-concert patches. To me such recordings do not represent performances at all.

2. With one glaring exception (discussed below), hearing these imperfect, but often thrilling live and unedited performances by well-trained, sincere, and dedicated musicians is the best way to make yourself (a) appreciate the technical and interpretative challenges posed by these sonatas, and (b) stop taking for granted the Beethoven playing of such masters as Casadesus (live Op.110 from the 1960 Concertgebouw recital), Edwin Fischer (live Op.10 #3 from the 1948 Hamburg recital, Op.111 from the 1954 Munich recital), Horowitz (live Op.101 from the 1967 Brooklyn College recital), or the old Richter (the last three sonatas from the 1991 recital in Ludwigsburg). Moreoever, these WQXR performances also made me hear with "new ears" the Beethoven playing of several young pianists whose live recordings from various competitions have been available on this blog for some time: Hoang Pham (Op.7), Evgeni Bozhanov (Op.31 #3), Sean Chen (Op.109) and Martina Filjak (Op.106). Last, but not least, hearing the entire marathon confirmed beyond doubt something I've said in a few earlier posts: that Michael Brown is a superlative musician with a highly refined instrumental craft.

Now it is time to turn to the "glaring exception" mentioned in item (2) above. I was seriously unhappy with several performances, but decided against naming names and saying unkind things about the performers. The reason is simple: they are young, almost unknown, and at a point in their lives when they have to struggle a lot to have any kind of a career as musicians in a world indifferent to serious music. I am sure that this makes them quite vulnerable to harsh judgments of their playing, even when such judgments appear in anonymous blogs. (I was surprised to discover that several pianists - including some with high profile careers - had links to my (appreciative) blog posts about them on their Facebook or Twitter pages.)

But among these pianists there was one Ritalin-deprived mongoloid whose drooling fantasy was to make Lang Lang sound like a thoughtful and reserved musician by comparison. There is no metaphor or analogy that can illustrate what this retard did with his chosen sonata, so I'll have to describe his performance as directly and blandly as if I were writing a police report:

He bent Beethoven over the piano's sound board and, for the next twenty minutes or so, fucked poor Ludwig in the ass.

This public rape of a defenseless composer, loudly cheered by some enthusiastic humanoids in the audience, was far more chilling for me than the infamous rape scene in Stanley Kubrik's A Clockwork Orange. The rape which took place on the set of Kubrik's film was acted out, whereas the assault which took place at The Greene Space was as real as the keyboard on which I had just typed this sentence. I won't tell you who the Beethovenfucker is, except to say that it will be a very long time before I will be able to hear the Op.22 sonata again without having my skin crawl from the memory of his performance...

___________________

P.S. Although Fazioli is prominently listed as "the official piano of the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space", I just noticed that some video close-ups show Steinway logo above the instrument's keyboard. Perhaps the unusually "creamy" tone, to which I referred in my now deleted remark, is due to the close-up recording balance and the acoustic characteristics of that small auditorium? Or this could be the sound of a smaller Steinway model - something that one rarely hears in recordings of concert performances...

FESTIVAL MUSICA STRASBOURG 2011: Borzelli, Maia, Mincek, Bowler, Hudry

2011-11-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

Silvia Borzelli
sur-itinéraire (2008-09)
Première française

Igor Maia
Caminantes (2010)

Alex Mincek
poco a poco (2008)

Laura Bowler
Brugmansia (2011) *
Création, Ensemble Linea

David Hudry
Trois Esquisses (2009) **

Ensemble Linea
Jean-Philippe Wurtz, Direction
Jens Bracher, Trompette *
Luigi Gaggero, Cymbalum **

October 8, 2011

l’Auditorium de France 3

Festival Musica Strasbourg

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

These days the time I spend with very new music often reminds me of the time I used to spend in second hand record stores years ago. I often left the store empty handed, but still felt rewarded by a lingering gentle buzz of the preceding "treasure hunt" and its accompanying possibility of discovering interesting music or performers previously unknown to me.
Most of those record stores are long gone, and I thought I would miss them but I don't. Not in this brave new online world of ours, where I have access to more music than I have time to listen to - all of it from actual concert performances, recorded with realism unmatched by claustrophobic commercial recordings, and filled with excitement and musical momentum of real-time music making unmatched by anything that can be spliced together in the editing room of a recording studio. And although my online treasure hunt still yields few hits between many misses, the lingering buzz is just as enjoyable as what I used to feel emerging from the cavernous darkness of Record Surplus into the blinding sunlight flowing through the mid-afternoon emptiness of Pico Boulevard - where auto repair shops and plumbing supplies warehouses, framed by the piercingly blue sky and the impossibly sharp-edged shadows, looked so fucking beautiful as if they were painted by de Chirico himself...

That California is long gone too, but there is nothing in this brave new online world of ours to replace it - at least not until Amazon.com will begin offering Can-D and Chew-Z along with a miniaturized layout of Santa Monica's Palisades Park...

MICHAEL BROWN plays BEETHOVEN (XI.20.2011): Piano Sonata No.15, Op.28

2011-11-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

B E E T H O V E N

Piano Sonata No.15, Op.28

Michael Brown

November 20, 2011

The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space

New York City

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

When I first encountered Michael Brown's recorded performances from the Cleveland Piano Competition and the Ravinia Festival, I was very impressed by his deeply intelligent musicianship and cool but communicative pianism. These qualities are just as impressive in Brown's recorded performance of Beethoven's Op.28 from last Sunday's Beethoven Sonatas Marathon organized (and, regrettably, so vulgarly promoted) by WQXR.

Those who should have known better...

2011-11-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

As pictorial as a tone poem, this documents one of the most horrifying moments in world history. ... Terror. Screams.

Michael Steinberg - a well-known music writer and a former music critic for the Boston Globe - on Krzysztof Penderecki's composition Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

(For the Love of Music, Oxford U. Press, 2006, p.174)

Now the well-known story about this composition's title: Penderecki's original title was "8:37". However, this being Communist Poland of 1960, Penderecki was advised by some music bureaucrat (either from the Polish Radio or from the state owned music publishing house) to change the title so as to put an ideologically more advantageous face on this extremely dissonant modernist composition. Which he did. The rest, as they say, is history.

By the time Steinberg's book came out, this story had long been common knowledge. Here is one example of how this story was mentioned in a routine concert review published by the New York Times within a year after Steinberg's book:

If you listen to Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1959 “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” for example, you may think that its solid blocks of searing, high-pitched string sound are meant to evoke the agonies of those victims, but it turns out that when Mr. Penderecki wrote the score, he was thinking solely about sound, and he originally called the work “8’37.” The more famous name was an afterthought, inspired by cold-war propaganda and the threat of American nuclear power. Mr. Penderecki, 26 and making his way in Poland, thought it would bring the work some attention.

[ Allan Kozinn, "Tanglewood Festival: Can music talk Politics?", New York Times, August 1, 2007 (italics mine) ]

I don't believe even for a moment that Steinberg, with his impressive music credentials, did not know about the origins of the composition's title. Which means that he was a revoltingly dishonest hack who simply could not resist the satisfaction of repeating a conveniently anti-American myth*. In addition to being dishonest, the much credentialed Steinberg was a stupid hack as well. Even if Penderecki himself had been in Hiroshima at the time of its bombing, and had miraculously survived the explosion, it still would be sheer stupidity to speak of Penderecki's tone clusters as being about (let alone as "documenting") the event. If music could have extra-musical semantic content, there would be no need for obnoxious titles, nauseating dedications, smarmy program notes, and countless pseudo-musicological factoids in books, journal articles, and newspaper reviews - all anxious to remind us again and again that a given piece of music is really "about" such-and-such extra-musical thing, event, or concept.

Finally, let us not forget about the incompetent (or dishonest) assholes at the august Oxford University Press who sent Steinberg's book to the printing plant without having challenged his pseudo-musicological fabrications. And while we are at it, lets also hear it for the ignorant (or dishonest) pianists Andre Watts and Richard Goode whose laudatory blurbs adore the book's dust jacket.

________________________
* Steinberg is not worth digging deeper, but I suspect that, along with many American leftist "intellectuals", his heart never bled for those hundreds of thousands of American boys killed by the Japanese in the Pacific. After all, when you pluck an 18-year old boy from a farm in Nebraska, give him all of 30 days of basic training, put an M1 rifle in his trembling hands, and ship him to the front line - well, the boy ain't a civilian no more, right? He is now a professional warrior whose death (even when multiplied by hundreds of thousands) should never budge the arrow of a firmly anti-American moral compass...

Witold Lutosławski: Symphony No.4

2011-11-20T05:50:00.000-08:00

Witold Lutosławski

Symphony No.4

Podlasie Philharmonic Orchestra

Piotr Borkowski

November 27, 2009

Bialystok, Poland

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

A broadcast recording by a provincial Polish orchestra under a barely known Polish conductor offers a more communicative and more realistically recorded performance of Lutoslawski's 4th symphony than a well-known 1990s commercial recording with a major American orchestra under its big name music director...

Why am I not surprised?

IQ alert

2011-11-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

WQXR Declares November Beethoven Awareness Month

Friday, October 28, 2011

WQXR unveils a viral ad campaign to promote November as Beethoven Awareness Month and thus draws attention to classical music's famous composer.

* * *

I am so glad to see that mentally retarded people are making significant progress in American society: they now run a major radio station! Who else would think that a special, extra effort is needed to make humanity aware of ... Beethoven?

I suppose the next "awareness" campaign to be unveiled by the drooling imbeciles at WQXR will be this:

WQXR Declares December Water Awareness Month

WQXR unveils a viral ad campaign to promote December as Water Awareness Month and thus draws attention to life's most important liquid.

* * *

A treasure hidden in plain sight...

2011-11-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Tapestry Room
(Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)

B E E T H O V E N

Sonatas for Cello and Piano

Op.5 No.2; Op.69; Op.102 No.2

Laurence Lesser, cello

Russell Sherman, piano

(date unknown)

The Tapestry Room

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Boston
offered as free download from ISGM Music Library

It is a good thing blog posts are not written with a quill, because my hands are still a bit shaky after I listened again (for the third time) to the Lesser and Sherman recital. The last time I felt so completely floored by the combination of musicianship and personality in a very familiar repertoire was when I first encountered (many years ago) Edwin Fischer's live recording of Beethoven's Op.10 No.3 from his 1948 Hamburg recital.
Lesser and Sherman's Beethoven playing is simply unlike anything I've heard from later generations of musicians, but there is absolutely nothing old-fashioned about it (just as there is nothing old-fashioned about a vintage Bentley S1 Fastback - they just don't make them like that anymore). For example, their achingly arched phrasing and dynamic nuances in the Adagio sostenuto e espressivo of Op.5 No.2 add only 20 seconds to the timing of the earlier posted Ravinia performance by Gilad Kaplansky and Ron Regev. But the movement feels much longer because Lesser and Sherman have more to say about the music. If the arctic purity of the Kaplansky-Regev performance was (and still is) a heartbreaking experience for me, the Lesser-Sherman performance was an achingly nostalgic one.

Although ISGM website gives no date for this exceptionally vivid, live and unedited stereo recording, Sherman (born in 1930) must have been at least 76-years old because ISGM did not begin recording recitals in the Tapestry Room until 2006. (Laurence Lesser is eight years younger than Sherman.) To put their Beethoven playing in perspective, it helps to keep in mind that Sherman, who studied with Eduard Steuermann, gave his debut recital at the Town Hall a year before Schoenberg composed his String Trio Op.45. And Lesser, who studied with Piatigorski and Cassado, made the first recording of Schoenberg's Cello Concerto (an arrangement of Monn's D major harpsichord concerto).

In the end nothing I can say will convey the uniqueness of this recital better than comparing it to a very recent live and unedited performance of the complete sonatas by the much respected (and much younger) duo of the splendid pianist Wu Han (whose tone I savor in my aural memory the way an oenophile savors the memory of a particularly striking Bordeaux vintage) and her husband David Finckel (who is the cellist of the Emerson String Quartet). Han and Finckel are among the most musicianly performers before the public today (their long marriage makes their musical rapport quite unique), and I think their conception of Beethoven's music pretty much sums up today's ideals of performance practice. I happen to like their streamlined and tidy playing, but in comparison to Lesser and Sherman they sound almost as if performing different music.

BEETHOVEN: Cello Sonatas Nos. 1 - 5

David Finckel, cello

Wu Han, piano

January 31, 2010

Alice Tully Hall

NewYork City

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

P.S. While you are at ISGM's Music Library website, don't miss the 82-year old Seymour Lipkin's 2009 performances of Schubert's late sonatas. I knew the playing of this student of Serkin and Horszowski (and for many years a teacher at the Juilliard and Curtis) only from his superb studio recording of Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds (with Bernstein). To hear him live in D.575 and D.894 was a very special treat. In D.958, however, there was a serious memory lapse in the Andante, with Lipkin improvising (unconvincingly) the last minute or so of that movement.

GAUDEAMUS MUZIEKWEEK 2011, Vol.5

2011-11-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

Daan Janssens: Incipit

Roderik de Man: Hawar's tale

Anna Korsun: Landscapes

Luc Brewaeys: Speechless song, being many, seeming one

Raphael Cendo: Shadow

Giuliano Bracci: Tu vieni dal mare
Jacob Adler: glass on a chair...

Elsbeth Gerritsen (mezzo-soprano)

VocaalLAB

September 2011

Nicolaïkerk, Utrecht

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

GAUDEAMUS MUZIEKWEEK 2011, Vol. 4

2011-11-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

Kate Moore: 101

Roi Nachshon: New work

Sean Friar: Velvet hammer

Ted Hearne: Cutest little arbitrage

Ensemble Klang

September 2011

Vredenburg Leeuwenbergh, Utrecht

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

All pieces on this program share a certain stylistic orientation, which brings to my mind acned teenagers on Ritalin, and which really gets on my nerves. But then many things get on my nerves. So perhaps there is nothing fundamentally objectionable about this music after all, and my reaction is just me being my usual grumpy self ... ?

FESTIVAL MUSICA STRASBOURG 2011: Johannes-Maria Staud, Christophe Bertrand, Philippe Manoury

2011-11-08T08:34:00.000-08:00

Johannes-Maria Staud
On Comparative Meteorology (2008-09, révisée en 2010)
Première française

Christophe Bertrand
Okhtor (2010)

Philippe Manoury
Sound and Fury (1998-99)

Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg
Pascal Rophé

October 6, 2011

Salle Erasme

Palais de la Musique et des Congrès, Strasbourg

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

With complex orchestral textures, which make up for much of what is interesting in these compositions, the 128 kbs bitrate shows its limitations in conveying the transparency and depth of the original recording. Still, the sound is clean, the music is exciting and the performances are excellent (predictably so in light of Pascal Rophe's reputation as an outstanding conductor of new music).

ELLIOTT CARTER: Cello Sonata, Figment, Figment III, Catenaires

2011-11-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

E L L I O T T C A R T E R

Sonata for Cello and Piano

Nicholas Trygstad, cello

Lin Tung, piano

May 7, 2003

venue unknown

160 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Figment for solo cello

Anita Leuzinger

July 11, 2008

Miller Recital Hall

Manhattan School of Music

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Figment III for double bass

Brian Ellingsen

April 11, 2009
venue unknown

160 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Catenaires

Vassilis Varvaresos, piano

May 22, 2009

Bass Performance Hall

Fort Worth, Texas

256 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

There may never be a more musicianly cellist than Fred Sherry, and Sherry's studio recording of Carter's cello sonata for Nonesuch (with Paul Jacobs on the piano) has every virtue a fine studio recording can have. Alas, virtuous studio recordings are like virtuous women: respectable but not exciting. So it was a bit of a shock for me to hear Nicholas Trygstad's scorching live performance. Trygstad, who is the principal of Halle Orchestra, burned through the sonata with a Brahmsian passion; and the music - still indebted to the FDR-period Americana style of Harris, Schuman, and Copland - only benefited from Trygstad's approach. The audience seems to have gone completely wild at the end of the performance, with loud shouting and whistling of the kind I would expect to hear at a rock or jazz concert rather than at a recital of serious modernist music.

Carter's lovely short Figments also gain much from being heard in actual concert performances. Anita Leuzinger, who is currently the principal of Tonhalle-Orchestra Zurich under David Zinman, was the winner of the 2008 Naumburg Competition. Her splendid performance comes from the "Naumburg Foundation Presents" series of recitals by the competition's winners.

Vassilis Vavrareso's performance of Catenaires comes from the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition. The playing may not have the super-cool perfection of Sean Chen's performance from the Cleveland Competition, but, unlike Chen, Varvaresos generated a good deal of "heat of the moment" excitement.

No apologies are needed for the quality of recorded sound, which ranges from good (Sonata) to splendid (Figments). No matter what the bitrate is, each of these live recordings is infinitely better sounding than the two commercial studio recordings of Carter's music - both with Ursula Oppens - which I threw in the garbage today. One is a Cedille CD of the complete piano music, in which the piano tone has such a fake and unpleasant digital sheen that I could not endure it for more than a few minutes. The second is a Mode CD with two Piano Quintets whose shrill, glassy, and acidic sound simply defies description. I have no other recording of the quintets, but I will gladly live the rest of my life without this music if no better recording comes my way.

Now this is the place where the post should end with a brief, obscenity-laden homicidal fantasy in which the incompetent motherfuckers responsible for engineering these CDs are graphically removed from the ranks of the living. I hate to disappoint, but today I feel a bit tired for that. So let them die of natural causes. Soon.

GAUDEAMUS MUZIEKWEEK 2011 Vol.3

2011-11-04T16:50:00.000-07:00

PAUL ABEL: Línea de vacío

EMRE KALELI: I hear the fragile beauty of mortal earth

YOSHIAKI ONISHI: Départ Dans

LUCIANO LEITE BARBOSA: Resonant Choirs

NORIKO KOIDE: Kohaku

Nieuw Ensemble

Bas Wiegers, cond.

September 2011

Vredenburg Leeuwenbergh, Utrecht

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

GAUDEAMUS MUZIEKWEEK 2011 Vol.2

2011-11-04T08:44:00.000-07:00

1. THIERRY TIDROW: It had something to do with the telling of time
info

2. WEI-CHIEH LIN: Tracing the shadows of broken time
info

3. SERGEI KHISMATOV: To the left
info

4. VLADIMIR GORLINSKI: Ultimate granular paradise
info

5. ARTUR AKSHELYAN: Lichtfarben II
info

info 2

Insomnio Ensemble
info

Ulrich Poehl, cond.
September 5 and November 5, 2011

Vredenburg Leeuwenbergh, Utrecht

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

With his composition Lichtfarben II (gorgeously played by Insomnio) the Armenian-born and French-trained (post-graduate studies with Michael Jarrell) Artur Ashkelyan impressed me a good deal. He has a wonderful ear for ensemble sonorities, and his timbral combinations are interestingly pungent yet always with a beautifully rounded depth to them. Ashkelyan's intervals, although dissonant by the standards of the schlocky neo-romantic concoctions favored by some young Americans, have a remarkably consistent poignancy to them - in the sense in which the (much older and quite different) serial compositions of Dallapiccolla and Maderna radiate a remarkably consistent lyricism. Somehow this kind of poignant dissonance reminded me of the Italian composer Alessandro Solbiatti (whose very attractive music does not seem to be well known).
There are a couple of very small tonally-oriented islands in Ashkelyan's piece, where the piano part looks in the direction of Silverstrov's Postludes, although not anywhere close to Silverstrov's saccharine flavors. I felt that the music would have been better without these few short "friendly" gestures, but that might be my general grumpiness speaking. In any case, after having listened to Lichtfaben II a couple of times I felt amply rewarded for my curiosity, and have added Ashkelyan to my list of composers to watch.

The rest of these superlatively recorded and excellently played compositions, while interesting to explore, did not strike me as equally impressive. Gorlinski's piece is an unfriendly and (to me) not particularly memorable exploration of engine-room like sounds. Khismatov (another Russian) was represented by a more memorable piece for ensemble and voice that sounded in places as if it were inspired by ritual wailings of Siberian Shamans. Finally, the pieces by Tidrow ~~and Lin~~ are too soothing and inoffensive, which probably explains why I did not find them all that memorable. (After a while, Lin's piece began to reveal to me more substance than it did on the initial hearings. Which is something to be expected now and then with very new and unfamiliar music... )

GAUDEAMUS MUZIEKWEEK 2011 Vol.1

2011-11-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

1. Diana Soh: [Ro]ob[ta]jec[tions] (string quartet)

info

2. Miguel Azguime: De l'etant qui le nie (for piano & electronics)

info

3. Luiz Henrique Yudo: The maze of Saint-Omer (for ensemble)

info

4. Ezequiel Menalled: NN (for ensemble & electronics)

info

5. Chiu-Yu Chou: String Quartet Nr 1

info

6. Yu Oda: The scheme of the sea organ

info

7. Nick Deyoe: Lullaby (for percussion)

info

Doelen Quartet [1, 5]

Ensemble MAE [3, 4]

Reiner van Houdt [2]

Amsterdam Collage Ensemble [6]

Brian Archinal [7]

GAUDEAMUS MIZIEKWEEK 2011

September 6 and November 6, 2011

Geertekerk, Utrecht

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Much, much fun to hear what the youngsters are up to in composition these days. With superlative recorded sound, it was a hugely enjoyable sonic ride for me.

I'll think about the "substance" of these compositions later...

GEORGE SZELL live (II.5.1970): MAHLER Das Lied von der Erde + SCHUMANN 'Manfred' Overture (I.26.1967)

2011-11-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

Severance Hall (Cleveland)

M A H L E R

Das Lied von der Erde

Janet Baker

Richard Lewis

Cleveland Orchestra

George Szell

Feb. 5, 1970

Severance Hall, Cleveland

256 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

S C H U M A N N

Manfred Overture

Cleveland Orchestra

George Szell

Jan. 26, 1967

Severance Hall, Cleveland

256 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

Szell, who was already ill with cancer, died five months after this Mahler performance. Yet I heard not even a whiff of self-pity in his handling of Der Abschied. If anything, it sounds terse and impatient. But the rest of Das Lied shows a more angular, more passionate, and just a bit more human side of his conducting than what I remember from his CBS studio recordings.
The stereo broadcast (with front and back announcements included) is more distantly balanced than the Chicago WFMT broadcasts of the same era, and I prefer the more realistic Cleveland perspective. For my own use (but not in the uploaded file) I added just a tiny bit of bass (1.50 db below 250 hz) to compensate for a somewhat shy lower end of that recording - probably due as much to Szell's avoidance of richly resonant bass sonorities as to the microphones placement for that recording. (In the earlier, more richly recorded Schumann performance the low end presented no problems for me.)

Finally, I should note that there are some half-deaf nitwits who circulate Cleveland broadcasts which they record by feeding a low bitrate stream (96-128 kbs) from WCLV through a poor internet connection and a shitty sound card to an mp3 recorder (thus compressing again the already badly compressed sound files). The present recordings, however, are high bitrate copies of broadcast masters, obtained without any involvement of radio transmission, internet streaming, or computer soundcard.

WOLFGANG RIHM: Orchestral and Chamber Works - part 2

2011-11-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

Image: NASA

A deep mystery in cosmology today is the recently discovered acceleration in the rate at which the universe expands. It is a mystery because cosmologists so far have no theoretically well-grounded explanation of why there should be any acceleration at all, let alone why it should have the rate that it does. Hence the widely speculative conjectures about hitherto unknown exotic forms of energy as possible causes of acceleration: dark energy, phantom energy, quintessence, dark fluid, and more.

Energy-schmenergy! Here's a much simpler, empirically testable explanation:

The expansion of the universe is accelerating because this is the only way the universe can keep up with the accumulation of new scores produced by Wolfgang Rihm.

Without accelerated expansion Rihm's new scores would quickly push the mass density of the universe to the critical point at which the universe would undergo gravitational collapse back into the singularity from which it originally emerged some 14 billion years ago.
      Unlike the quasi-metaphysical speculations of cosmologists, the above explanation makes a directly testable prediction: As soon as Rihm stops producing new scores - either by choice a la Rossini or because of the inescapable biological limitations on the longevity of normally functioning neural structures - the acceleration will cease, and spacetime will then continue to expand at a uniform rate - just as it did from the end of the initial post-Big Bang inflation until the day Rihm was signed by Universal Edition.

I hasten to add that this cosmological explanation is not meant to cast a shadow of doubt on the quality of Rihm's music, much of which I find very enjoyable and occasionally unforgettably beautiful. It's just that there is a lot of it already, and its quantity keeps growing seemingly faster than the combined output of all the other living European composers. And since the energy which drives the expansion of this blog is neither exotic nor unlimited - it is simply whatever energy I have left after taking care of more pressing things in life - there is no way I could keep up with Rihm's music without bundling multiple performances into a single post.  The quality of recorded sound in the present batch of recordings ranges from acceptable-for-the-time-being (e.g., Viola Concerto No.2) to absolutely first class (e.g., Quartettstudie).

W O L F G A N G R I H M

IN-SCHRIFT
Stuttgard RSO
Jakub Hrusa
II.26.2010
256 kbs mp3

Ernster Gesang for Orchestra
Munich PO
Christian Thielemann
V.18.2011, Munich
FM => 320 kbs mp3

Viola Concerto No. 2: Über die Linie IV

Tabea Zimmermann, viola

Deutsche SO Berlin

Leo Hussain

IX.13.2011

320 kbs mp3

Lichtes Spiel
Ann-Sofie Mutter, violin
New York PO
XI.23.10
160 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Quartettstudie
Ebene Quartet
2004, Munich
FM => wav => flac

Protokol - ein Traum for six cellos
Eva Böcker, Conradin Brotbek,
Lukas Fels, Hans-Peter Jahn,
Troels Svane, Jean Guihen Queyras
XII.9.2009, Stuttgart
FM => 320 kbs mp3

ELLIOTT CARTER: Clarinet Concerto (two performances)

2011-10-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Harold C. Schonberg (1915 - 2002)

E L L I O T T C A R T E R

Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Scherzando -– Deciso -– Tranquillo –
Presto -– Largo -– Giocoso -– Agitato

Jerome Comte

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Boulez

February 28, 2009

Concertgebouw (Grote Zaal)*

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding) => WAV (track editing) => FLAC

Carl Rosman
Libra Ensemble
Mark Knoop

April 28, 2002
Iwaki Auditorium
ABC Southbank Centre
Melbourne, Australia

FM => flac

There are few ways to kill time that are more entertaining for me than exploring the Zeitgeist of our (relatively) recent past. The sense of the surreal I get from brief archeological excursions into books and various archival databases is often stronger than what one could get from looking at Magritte's paintings, smoking dope, or reading Victor Pelevin's novels. Here is one example:

... there is an international style of composition that is virtually devoid of individuality.

Harold C. Schonberg
Senior Music Critic

on avant-garde music in the article An End in Itself

New York Times

March 26, 1961

At the time of the article's publication avant-garde music already included such strikingly individual works as Stockhausen's Gruppen, Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maitre, and Carter's first two string quartets along with his Variations for Orchestra (to mention just some important composers active at that time).
For a powerful music critic at the most influential newspaper in the country failure to recognize the artistic significance of these works is already embarrassing enough. (Music criticism, after all, is not just about patting Mozart on the back while gently admonishing Rudolf Serkin for being overly serious in his performance of K.595 with the New York Philharmonic.) But Schonberg's concern was not with specific works or composers. He was quick to admit that "every age produced a lot of bad music", whereas it was the post-war compositional style itself that he saw as an insult to our basic standards of artistic sanity and our sacred aesthetic ideals (read: the kind of music that an average season subscriber to the New York Philharmonic will embrace as a worthy successor to Prokofiev's piano concertos and Stravinsky's ballets). And it was as a self-appointed defender of these "standards" and "ideals", and with the imprimatur of his powerful newspaper, that Schonberg went to war against contemporary music in reviews and Sunday pieces. His frequent, indiscriminate, and derisive use of "serialism" was eerily reminiscent of how the term "formalism" had been used a decade earlier by the Soviet officialdom to attack Soviet composers who were deemed to have deviated from the standards of Socialist Realism. In both cases there was a clear message that composers must adjust their subjective, internal creative impulses so as to compose music satisfying certain objective, external criteria of aesthetic worthiness.

And Schonberg got away with it. And he got away with it in a city that had already embraced post-war modernism in painting (Pollock, Rothko), sculpture (Noguchi, Smith), and architecture (van der Rohe, Saarinen). And he remained unrepentant to the end. Two decades after the publication of the above article Schonberg went on record saying "Many professionals would rate Carter a major composer. I do not." Then, to make sure we know that this curt dismissal is based on objective, irrefutable evidence, he added: "I have suspicion about a composer who at the age of 71 (at the point of writing) has not been able to attract a public." [Facing the Music, Summit Books, NY 1981, p.198]

Oh the fucking power of fearless inference from true but irrelevant premises to startling but false conclusions! It worked for Kant's metaphysics, and it sure as hell worked for Schonberg's aesthetics. I used to think that to feel stupid (while staring in disbelief at the printed page) one had to read the Critique of Pure Reason, but it seems that reading music criticism may do just as well. I simply can't see what attracting a public has to do with the aesthetic merits of a living composer's music. Bach went to his grave without having attracted a public beyond an occasional small gathering at Zimmermann's Coffee House. (Those who heard Bach's music at the Thomaskirche or at the court of Anhalt-Köthen did not go there for the music, and many disliked the music anyway. And lets not forget that Mozart was nearly 26-years old when he "discovered" Bach's music - three decades after Bach's death - through Gottfried von Sweiten.) Schumann departed this world without having attracted a public either. The only public that Ives had been able to attract was the clientele of his insurance company. That, of course, did not matter in the least. What did matter, and matter a lot, is that the music of these composers attracted the professionals; and it was the collective aesthetic judgment of professional musicians that prevailed over the superficial, unsophisticated musical tastes of the general public. Which tells me that being able to attract a public is not a necessary condition for acknowledging a living composer as a major artist. And it surely isn't a sufficient condition either. Hummel, to mention but one example, had a large public by the standards of his day, yet when he died his music pretty much died with him.

Attracting a public my ass....

There was plenty of time for all this to run through my head as I was listening to the surging ovation, punctuated by whistles and shouts, at the end of Jerome Comte's performance of Carter's Clarinet Concerto. I had to trim the ovation by several minutes during track editing because it felt ridiculously voyeuristic to stare at the speakers for so long while listening to the torrential outpouring of gratitude for a breathtaking performance of Carter's playful, joyful, exhilarating, and so unmistakably American music. And because it was Boulez who conducted that performance, before the applause died down I couldn't help but to borrow my last thought from Boulez himself (albeit with a one-letter misspelling):

SCHONBERG IS DEAD.

_________________________
* A couple of years ago there was a lossless copy of an FM broadcast of this performance circulating among Carter fans. While that FM broadcast sounds vastly more natural than the ugly commercial recording of the concerto issued by DG, its dynamic range is narrower than that of the present dynamically uncompressed recording by about 9 decibels (~130%). For me it felt like a revelation to experience the true dynamical profile of this concerto, not only because of the fully restored impact of the solo part and the percussion section, but also because the absence of dynamic compression allowed this spectacular recording to convey spatial separation of instrumental timbres and textures with as much realism as one can expect to hear without being physically present in the concert hall.
Although the sound of the Melbourne broadcast is not in the same class with the Concertgebouw recording, it is still very good, and it sounds more natural than most commercial recordings of this kind of music.

NICOLAS HODGES in Strasbourg (2011): Barraque, Pauset, Hopkins, Helffer

2011-10-24T18:02:00.000-07:00

N I C O L A S H O D G E S

p i a n o

October 5, 2011
Salle de la Bourse de Strasbourg
(Festival Musica Strasbourg)

Complete Program Booklet (pdf)

BRICE PAUSET
Sept Canons (2010)
Première française

CLAUDE HELFFER
Toujours courir pourquoi ? ... (1944)
Création

JEAN BARRAQUE
Retour (1945-47)
Intermezzo de la Sonate (1949)
Création
Pièce pour piano (1949)
Création
Deux morceaux – N° 1 (1949)
Création
Deux morceaux – N° 2

BILL HOPKINS
Sonatétude , Études en Série III, V, VIII (1965-72)
Première française

+ BRICE PAUSET: Six Préludes(1999)
(Broadcast after the Hodges concert)
Brice Pauset, clavecin
2001

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Nicolas Hodges made a brilliant studio recording of Bill Hopkins' Études en Série (Col Legno CD), but the present live and unedited recording shows that Hodges does not need the editing room of a recording studio to create superlative performances of technically challenging contemporary music. I've loved Hopkins' music from the day I discovered it (courtesy of the fellow music blogger Maready), and to hear it as part of an actual, brilliantly played recital was a real treat for me.
If Hopkins was a treat, Barraque was a shock. These early (and not officially acknowledged) pieces show him in a far more traditional compositional mode than that of the formidable 1952 Piano Sonata (Barraque's first officially acknowledged composition, and arguably one of the greatest piano compositions of the century.) In a few places Barraque's early music sounds cinematic, and even sentimental!

No excuses need to be made for the quality of recorded sound. Because the original engineering was very good (and there was no radio transmission, internet streaming, or computer sound card involved), the humble 128 kbs bitrate gave me no reasons to complain.

SERGIO TIEMPO in Vilnus (2009): Chopin Piano Concerto in E minor

2011-10-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

LITHUANIAN NATIONAL PHILHARMONIC HALL (Vilnus)

C H O P I N

Piano Concerto in E minor

Sergio Tiempo (piano)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Tiempo

Lithuanian National Philharmonic Orchestra

Modestas Pitrenas, cond.

November 28, 2009

National Philharmonic Hall

Vilnus, Lithuania

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

In the ranking of unusual hobbies, collecting recordings of Chopin's E minor concerto must be pretty far down the list - probably somewhere between impersonating a gynecologist and doing Albanian crossword puzzles with the help of Google Translate. So I'm not all that embarrassed about it; and if along the way I can check out a pianist previously unknown to me, my pointless accumulation acquires just enough meaning for me to delude myself into believing that I have not completely wasted yet another 40 minutes of my life.

Sergio Tiempo's playing (much appreciated by his mentor Martha Argerich) is certainly not boring, but whether listening to this excellently recorded live performance will make you feel admiration or blind rage is something you'll have to find out for yourself.

BOULEZ & Ensemble Modern in Amsterdam (2007): Andre, Poppe, Pintscher, Boulez, Varese

2011-10-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

CONCERTGEBOUW (Grote Zaal)

P I E R R E B O U L E Z

Ensemble Modern

IX.29.2007
Grote Zaal, Concergebouw

Amsterdam

Mark Andre: ...auf II...

Edgar Varese: Ameriques

Pierre Boulez: Notations 1, 7, 4, 3, 2

Matthias Pintscher: Towards Osiris

Enno Poppe: Obst

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Boulez and Ensemble Modern played the same program the next day (September 30) in Paris (Festival d'Automne a Paris), and that concert also was broadcast. A long time ago I posted an mp3 encoding of that Paris broadcast, but now I happily replace it with this vastly better sounding Amsterdam recording.

With my concern for better sound I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of an audiophile freak who mortgages his house to buy speaker cables good enough for signal transmission in quantum computing. I care about competently engineered recordings, not about "hi-fi" recordings, whatever the fuck the latter means. My most thrilling music listening experiences include such certifiably "low-fi" recordings as the 1947 Artur Rubinstein and Bruno Walter live Carnegie Hall performance of the Chopin E-minor concerto (Lp transfer, not the later NY Phil CD issue), and Furtwangler's 1942 broadcast (without audience) of Mozart's E-flat symphony from Berlin. These are among the most competently engineered recordings I know, and their competence always will triumph over the technological limitations of their time, making these old recordings sound more "real" to me than the poorly edited, freakishly balanced, and hideously equalized modern recordings boasting every super-duper gimmick of today's digital audio technology.

So here is why I bothered to replace the Paris recording with the present Amsterdam recording, even though there is not one iota of difference between them with respect to the interpretation and execution of the music performed. (The musicianship of all involved borders on the miraculous, which - to Boulez' immense credit - is something that today's audiences seem to take for granted when it comes to Boulez's collaborations with top-notch ensembles specializing in contemporary music.)
The Paris broadcast was recorded by someone who fed the signal from his FM receiver through his computer sound card to a recording software where it was encoded in 320kbs mp3. The main problem was not so much the effects of the sound card and mp3 compression, but that the broadcaster subjected the signal to extreme dynamic compression. For example, the dynamic range of Enno Poppe's Obst in the Amsterdam recording is more than 10 decibels (~150% !!!) wider than in the Paris broadcast. To hear Poppe's piece in its full dynamic glory conveyed by the Amsterdam performance was quite a revelation for me. (Apropos, I cannot get enough of this composer's music. In some of Poppe's compositions, such as Oel, I am fascinated by a subtle undercurrent of sadness which flows below the intricately woven instrumental lines - the kind of sadness that brings to mind abandoned, dilapidated houses in the rain...)

The Amsterdam recording, on the other hand, is a 256 kbs mp3 copy of the master recording, used as a source file for streaming, and downloaded directly (as data file) without any interference whatsoever from problems related to radio transmission and reception, internet streaming, and computer sound cards. Which is what
"no re-encoding" always means when I use it in this blog.

GEORGE BENJAMIN: Piano Figures

2011-10-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

G E O R G E B E N J A M I N

Piano Figures

Discussed by George Benjamin

Performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Video: 480 x 242 (540 kbs)

Audio: ~128 kbs mp3

English (with German subtitles)

26 minutes

FLV file (130 mb)

One of the readers of this blog is a great admirer of George Benjamin's muisc.
So am I.
The reader wanted to have this video.
Here it is.

JOERG WIDMANN: Flute en suite (World Premiere)

2011-10-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

SEVERANCE HALL (Cleveland)

JOERG WIDMANN

Flute en suite (for flute and orchestra)

World Premiere

Joshua Smith (flute)

The Cleveland Orchestra

Franz Welser-Moest

V.28.2011

Severance Hall, Cleveland

256 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

I like Widmann's music. I think it is well-crafted, sincerely felt, modern yet always listener-friendly (at least as compared to the music of other European composers of Widmann's generation.) But the present 24-minute long multi-movement suite for flute and orchestra gave me a heartburn: rather than being friendly the music is annoyingly chummy. It is a Schnittke-like collage of allusions to Debussy, Bach (with a direct quotation of the Badinerie from the B-minor Orchestral Suite), Stokowski transcriptions (the second movement is a chorale that sounds this way), and perhaps other composers (Quantz? Rameau? Irish folklore?) who composed for the instrument but whom I did not recognize because I do not particularly like the flute outside the music of Maderna and Carter.

Perhaps many will enjoy this concotion (the Cleveland audience applauded enthusiastically). But to me composing this kind of music on commission is like going on a first date and speaking mostly with the lines from famous films and novels of the past. However polished your delivery of these lines may be, you still will sound like a total jerk at that restaurant table. And I think Widmann sounded like a total jerk at the Severance Hall...

EBENE STRING QUARTET in Portland (2009, 2011): Haydn, Mozart, Schubert

2011-10-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

LINCOLN PERFORMANCE HALL (Portland State U., Oregon)

HAYDN

String Quartet Op.71 No.2

MOZART

String Quartet No.19, K.465

SCHUBERT

String Quartet No.14, D.810

X.4.2011 (Mozart)

III.18.2009

Lincoln Peformance Hall

Portland State University

Portland (Oregon)

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

As a rule I do not respond well to the characteristically dry and thin sonorities of the French school of string playing. Yet the playing of these four young Frenchmen radiated so much charm, elegance, and joie de vivre that by the time I was done with the Haydn quartet I had completely forgotten about my bias. (Later, when I watched a Youtube video in which they performed and sang(!) some lighthearted jazz standard on a French TV show, I instantly understood how irresistibly seductive the visual aspect of their concert performances must be for audiences around the world.)
    My admiration for their musicianship increased a hundredfold after I listened to their performance of the Schubert quartet - for theirs is the only performance that made me like the piece I have detested all my life! I must have heard close to one hundred recordings, broadcasts, and live performances of D.810, and every time I was put off by the shrill, provincially overblown hysterics of the Allegro movement. And not one of the performances managed to offer anything more than mind-numbing repetitiveness in the endless variations of the Andante. Schubert may have been a great melodist, but even a great melody will make you feel downright homicidal when you are subjected to 15+ minutes of simple-minded variations chewing this way and that on a few bars of the original theme.
     With the Ebene Quartet I finally got to hear the Allegro with all the intensity the music calls for, but with none of the fucking "Stanislavki's System" theatrical hysterics. Even more surprisingly, the Andante variations, often sung in half-whisper, went by painlessly with the purity and simplicity of Schumann's Kinderszenen instead of the dreadfully misapplied gravitas of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. (I say 'surprisingly' because I happen to think that in the age when Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra Op.31 is nearly a century old, and Carter's Variations for Orchestra is more than half a century behind us, one has to be mildly retarded to tolerate, let alone to find intellectually stimulating or challenging, all those endless performances of the 18th and 19th century compositions based on the variation form - withGolberg Variations being the only exception.)

DAI FUJIKURA: Ice (world premiere); Joule (world premiere); Fifth Station.

2011-10-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

LE POISSON ROUGE (New York City)

D A I F U J I K U R A

http://www.ricordi.co.uk/composers/index-dai.php

Ice

(World Premiere)
International Contemporary Ensemble

Matthias Pintscher

IV.27.2011

Le Poission Rouge

New York City

320 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

Fifth Station
Ensemble InterContemporain
Pierre Boulez
XI.19.2008
Louvre, Paris
FM => flac.

Joule

(World Premiere)
Sunwook Kim, piano

X.2009

Leeds, England

192 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

When a composer seemingly wants acoustic instruments to imitate the sounds and textures of electronic ones, I suppose it is pointless to object to the fantasy-world recording balance which places the listener right inside the ensemble - so much so that, listening with my old and trusted AKG K-240 DF headphones, I felt as if I was hearing rosin on the bows of the Ensemble Intercontemporain string players. You'll never hear music this way in a concert hall, but that may be irrelevant because Fujikura's sound world is far closer to Jimmy Hendrix' guitar feedback effects than to the buttery textures of a Brahms symphony floating in the acoustic warmth of the Boston Symphony Hall. Boulez delivered Fujikura's Fifth Station with such adrenalin-drenched intensity, and with such reassuring control of the piece's frenetic energy, that not even for a moment did I listen to the music "from the outside", so to speak. I simply went along for the ride, which felt like the 3:00 a.m. drag race on Hollywood Boulevard.

Fujikura's Ice is a more varied piece. Its initial five minutes of near chaos yield to a long stretch of meditative calm gradually building to a climax, after which the piece closes very quietly with what sounds like an homage to the traditional Japanese music for Shakuhachi flute. The live recording from New York City's Le Poisson Rouge conveys the intimate ambience of a jazz club performance very realistically, and I personally much prefer its wider dynamic range and its feel of space around individual instruments to the "in your face" sound of Boulez' broadcast from the Louvre.

SCHNITTKE: Concerto Grosso No.1

2011-10-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

BENEDICT TENT (Aspen, Colorado)

A L F R E D S C H N I T T K E

Concerto Grosso No.1

Aspen Chamber Symphony

Vasily Petrenko, cond.

VII.22.2011

Benedict Tent

Aspen Music Festival

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

For someone who goes out of his way to explain why he finds Schnittke's music irritating, I've recently posted (and listened to) a surprisingly sizable amount of Schnittke's music. Now I begin to wonder if my anti-Schnittke tirades are akin to fiery sermons of some Southern Baptist preacher who assures his congregation that all them homosexual perverts will burn in Hell! - yet about once a month the preacher can be found in another town, inside a dark video booth with a sticky floor, eyeballing a glory hole with the patience of an alligator waiting for an antelope to wade into the lake for a drink of water.
Well, at least I'm not repressed about what looks like my recent mini-obsession with Schnittke's music; and I gladly leave it to my readers to look for signs of subconscious, unresolved aesthetic conflicts responsible for my potentially incoherent attitude toward this composer.

So I'll say nothing about the music this time, but I want to explain why two of the five tracks in the present recording are in FLAC format instead of mp3. First, the sound is absolutely first class: it conveys the instrumental timbres, textures and balances of an actual concert performance with more realism than you will ever find in the digitally lacquered Schnittke recordings issued by many commercial labels. Yet there was one annoying problem: When the master recording was encoded to mp3 for streaming, the fucking mp3 format inserted a tiny silence gap at the beginning of each track. And because movements 3 and 4 are played without pause, the mp3 encoding created a very audible "hiccup" at the point of transition between these two movements. The gap was too short to be removed flawlessly without recompression (e.g. by MP3-SPLIT software), so I converted these two tracks to FLAC and removed the "hiccup" using Goldwave editor without leaving any trace of it whatsoever. But then I had to save the edited version in FLAC to prevent re-compression of the already (mp3)compressed data.

BOULEZ & EIC in Amsterdam (2005): Schoenberg, Hoeller, Carter, Boulez

2011-10-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

CONCERTGEBOUW (Amsterdam)

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

Chamber Symphony No.1

YORK HOELLER

Ex Temporum

ELLIOTT CARTER

Reflexions

PIERRE BOULEZ

Domains

Alain Damiens, clarinet
Ensemble InterContemporain

Pierre Boulez

II.26.2005

Grote Zaal

Concertgebouw, Amsterdam

256 kbs (no re-encoding)

All works on this program call for relatively small forces, which explains why the extremely close balance of this otherwise spectacularly engineered live recording works surprisingly well. I suppose this kind of sound will be absolutely thrilling for those who like to hear their music from the conductor's podium, so to speak. Of course the price for such close-up sonic thrills is that one has to infer the true dynamic difference between p and f instead of actually hearing it.
I, for one, am not enthusiastic about recordings which suggest that the dynamic profile of, say, Carter's Reflexions is essentially the same as that of King Crimson's Elephant Talk - because I think that Carter's inimitable rhythms depend in part on dynamic stratification of accents. Compared to this Amsterdam concert, hearing Reflexions performed by Boulez in Chicago - as recorded by CSO from a more realistic distance and with exceptionally wide dynamic range - is almost like hearing a different composition.
In any case, I suspect that in Europe (unlike in Chicago) Boulez gets some measure of control over how his concerts are recorded for broadcasting. His performances of Reflexions with EIC in Paris (world premiere) and later in Munich are balanced exactly the same way as this Amsterdam recording. Moreover, just about every other (non-Boulez) live broadcast from the Concertgebouw that I've heard (including commercial issues on the orchestra's label) sounded distant, slightly fuzzy, and somewhat too reverberant.

My primary interest in this concert was Boulez' Domains, which so far is the only live recording of this piece that I managed to come across. I never could warm up to this composition's studio recording (Harmonia Mundi), and I was eager to find out if an actual concert performance would reveal something about the music that the studio recording did not. No such luck for me. The music (performed with superhuman perfection, as was the rest of the concert for that matter) sounded as remote and aloof as it did in the studio recording. Well, at least it did not sound painfully dated - the way Boulez' IRCAM-based electro-acoustic compositions sound to me these days...

KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN: Symphony No.3; Concerto Funebre

2011-10-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

DE DOELEN (Rotterdam)

KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN

Symphony No.3

Rotterdam Philharmonic

Ingo Metzmacher

II.1.2004

De Doelen, Rotterdam

320 kbs mp3

Concerto Funebre

440 hz Strings Rotterdam

Gordon Nikolic, violin & conductor

IX.5.2010

De Doelen ( Jurriaanse zaal), Rotterdam

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Ingo Metzmacher believes strongly in Hartmann's symphonies: he programs them often and conducts them with utmost conviction. I hope that Metzmacher's passionate live performances will eventually undo the damage done to Hartmann's music by the slippery textures and incompetent editing of his commercial recordings for EMI. I am less hopeful that Hartmann's symphonies project enough originality and individuality to elbow their way retroactively into the historical vacuum marked (roughly) by Berg's Violin Concerto on the one side and Stockhausen's Gruppen on the other.
     Which is not to say that I personally find Hartmann's symphonies less than enjoyable. There is something sweet in his aesthetically sincere, well-crafted, life-long farewell to tonality, and I derive from it the same kind of guilty pleasure I get from the late of works of Zemlinsky. I certainly think that Hartmann's somewhat diffuse thematic material is more interesting and far more aesthetically durable than the vulgar "in your face" themes in the overplayed symphonies of Stalin's favorite musical serf Shostakovich. But history seems to have a great sense of irony: the music of a true anti-Nazi composer could not quite overcome the post-war bad rap of its German origins, while the lesser music of a Soviet composer who glorified a regime more monstrous than the Nazi Germany had been enthusiastically embraced by the West ahead of even the music of Mahler.

The present live recording of Hartmann's Third - arguably his most lyrical symphony - does not match the once-in-a-lifetime sonics of the earlier posted Metzmacher's live Sixth from Aspen. Still, it has much wider dynamic range and more natural instrumental balances than most broadcast you're likely to encounter these days. It also sounds more natural than many commercial recordings of orchestral music, which often are as compressed, two-dimensional, and metallic-sounding as recordings of pop music.
     As for Hartmann's popular Concerto Funebre, the above live recording was my first but rewarding encounter with the soloist and the ensemble. They are given a much more forwardly balanced sound, but mercifully its dynamic range does not feel at all compressed in comparison to many other circulating broadcasts of this work - e.g., the hideously squashed and two-dimensional sound of the 2011 broadcast from the Concertgebouw by the very talented Alina Ibragimova and the Dutch RPO under Carlo Rizzi. (When with the first note of the agitated Allegro di Molto the soloist and the orchestra suddenly seem to jump 50 feet away, even Gandhi himself would want nothing else in life but to locate the incompetent cocksucker responsible for engineering this broadcast and slowly strangle him with the chord attached to his headphones.)

A Perfect Pianist

2011-10-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

T I L L F E L L N E R

p i a n o

HAYDN: Piano Sonata Hob.XVI.50

SCHUMANN: Kinderszenen Op.15

LISZT: Petrarch Sonnet 123

IX.19.2011

Wigmore Hall

London

192 kbs webstream (no re-encoding)
=> WAV (track editing) => FLAC

MOZART: Piano Concerto No.18

SWR Sinfonieorchester

Anu Tali

II.22.2008

192 kbs mp3

Years ago I had what must have been a Perfect Girlfriend: she was good looking, young (early twenties), intelligent (earned a Ph.D. from a top school a few years later), erudite in the visual arts, and musically informed. She also was honest, kind, and optimistic. Not once did she have a headache or lose her temper fighting traffic on LA freeways. I also could add that occasionally she would rebuild a carburetor as a pleasant diversion from writing her M.A. thesis, but I won't because then you'll be convinced that I'm shitting you. (I am not!)
     Despite my Perfect Girlfriend's long list of virtues, what I remember most vividly about the time I spent with her is my persistent feeling of boredom. She had everything I could ever ask for in a woman except personality. There was something so anonymous about her that when our relationship ended I only felt a sense of relief as I went back to dating cynical secretaries, neurotic two-bit actresses, disillusioned MILFs, and tattooed heavy metal chicks - all so abundantly distributed along the coast of Southern California as if God himself wanted to make life easy for a young guy of modest means and immodest libido.

To be reminded of my Perfect Girlfriend by a piano recital, it takes a very special pianist indeed! The pianist must have it all: scholarly respect for the score, unforced and well-maintained technique, aversion to interpretative eccentricities, intelligent repertoire choices, and much more. And the pianist must combine these virtues to produce Perfect Performances, in which not a note is out of place, and which are so lacking in personality as to make Alfred Brendel's playing sound almost flamboyantly expressive by comparison. At present I can think of no better candidate for the pianistic counterpart of my Perfect Girlfriend than Till Fellner; and I think the above live recordings offer ample support for this nomination.

Of course I'm fully aware that Fellner is a darling of many critics, with Anthony Tommasini all but drooling on his computer keyboard when writing adulatory fanboy reviews of Fellner's recitals and recordings.*   For all I know, every music lover in the world may have a poster of Till Fellner hanging on a bedroom wall, in which case the only reaction to this post will be along the lines of Fuck you, Boom, you fucking pretentious philistine!

So be it. I usually hedge my bets when it comes to widely admired pianists whose playing leaves me indifferent (Argerich is one). But with Till Fellner I circle the wagons, dig in my heels, and draw a line in the sand.
     Till Fellner is a Perfect Pianist. And so is a Yamaha Disklavier.

__________________

* In fairness to Tommasini I should note that he also drools over other pianists who are relatively young, boyishly handsome, stylishly dressed, and keep their playing free of outsize gestures. He is the only critic I know who found it appropriate to praise a pianist for wearing a "stylish jacket"(!) in his laudatory review of the pianist's numbingly dull performance of the Brahms B-flat concerto. (The pianist was Leif Andsness, then still relatively young and boyishly handsome.)

KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN: Symphony No.6

2011-09-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

BENEDICT TENT (Aspen, Colorado)

K A R L A M A D E U S H A R T M A N N

Symphony No.6

Aspen Festival Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher

VIII.14.2011

Benedict Tent

Aspen Music Festival

Aspen, Colorado

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

This is how you know you're listening to an orchestral recording made by engineers who understand and care about music: At your usual volume setting the music sounds far too quiet and muffled. You decide to increase the volume of the files before burning them on CD but discover that the peak volume is already at nearly 100%. And your heart skips a beat because you realize that what you have is an orchestral recording with completely uncompressed dynamic range, and without any post-production boost of high frequencies. So you just crank up the volume on your amplifier, and every time there is an orchestral sforzando or a forte whack on the bass drum, the music "opens up" with thrilling vitality, and there is not the the slightest fatigue experienced by your ears throughout the entire piece.
Unless, of course, your amplifier is inside your laptop or computer speakers, and delivers just enough juice to power your grandpa's hearing aid or your grandma's vibrator. Or it is a stand alone audio-video-microwave-toaster-washer-dryer-and-everything-else-you-can-think-of-plastic-piece-of-shit, with more blinking lights on its front face than you'd see in Tokyo's Shibuya District on a Friday night, and with the manufacturer's promise to deliver hundreds of watts into countless speakers, doorbells, alarm clocks, pacemakers, and anything else you can plug into it - but only so long as this power is measured on a tiny interval of midrange frequencies, and lasts no longer than a fraction of a second. In that case the orchestral peaks will be clipped and what you'll hear will be a lifeless, muffled, faintly congested, and two-dimensional Muzak. You'll hate it, naturally, and once again praise the Lord for all those commercial recordings whose dynamic range is so compressed that you can hear ppp passages on your iPod earbuds while squeezing a couple of hundred rounds through your .45 Colt Automatic at a shooting range, and whose high frequency content is boosted so much that your cheap speakers (or iPod earbuds) will buzz and sizzle like the power transmission lines that run across the Nevada Basin desert.

Now you can understand why I was so pleased with the sound quality of this live and unedited recording of Hartmann's 6th Symphony. (Corigliano's Piano Concerto on this blog is another live orchestral recording whose engineering I find that gratifying.) Add to this the fact that Aspen's Benedict Tent is essentially an open space venue, and you will understand why I would gratefully carry the sound engineer's photo in my wallet (if I carried a wallet, that is).
As for the performance, the orchestral playing is good, and it communicates the excitement of a live concert to make a far stronger case for Hartmann's "conservative modernism" than what I remember from slippery and two-dimensional sounding commercial recording by Ingo Metzmacher and the Bamberg SO. (Apropos, the incompetent cocksuckers at EMI who produced this commercial set of Hartmann's symphonies did not even bother to invest minimal care into splicing together different takes without audible hiccups. Just check the Adagio of the 7th symphony at around 9:26.5 for one example of how the CD-buying public repeatedly gets fucked by the perpetually self-pitying recording industry). The Aspen orchestra, by the way, is essentially a "master class" orchestra, in which the front desks are occupied by experienced (often world-class) musicians, and the rest of the players are very talented young musicians (conservatory students or recent graduates). Many of these youngsters will go on to become players in top orchestras, and some may become world-class soloists - as it happened in the past with Joshua Bell, Lyn Harrell, Sara Cheng, and other famous musicians who are alumni of the Aspen Music Festival and School.

JOHN O'CONOR in Aspen: Beethoven Sonatas Opp.13, 109, 111; Bagatelles Op.126; Quintet Op.16

2011-09-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

HARRIS CONCERT HALL (Aspen, Colorado)

J O H N O ' C O N O R

p i a n o

B E E T H O V E N

Piano Sonatas Opp.13, 109, 111

Six Bagatelles Op.126

Quintet for Piano and Winds Op.16

Harris Concert Hall

Aspen Music Festival

Aspen, Colorado

VIII.17.2009 (Opp.13, 16, 126)

VIII.20.2011 (Opp.109, 111)

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

This distinguished Irish pianist has made many commercial recordings for Telarc, including the complete Beethoven sonatas. I remember well that when I tried to listen to some of those commercial recordings, I was bored to tears by the beefy, gargantuan, Steinway-on-steroids claustrophobic sound favored by Telarc engineers. Whatever interpretative insights O'Conor might have brought with him to the recording studio, they were instantly and permanently obscured by the annoyingly artificial sound of the piano coming from my speakers.
The present excellently recorded, live and unedited performances from Aspen show just how much Telarc engineers falsified O'Conor's very attractive luminous, crystalline, singing tone. These Aspen performances also suggest that O'Conor's technique may not be as consistently well-oiled as his commercial recordings would have you believe. (Although he is almost two decades older than he was at the time of his earliest Telarc recordings.) His fingers stumble in a few technically demanding spots, and his articulation occasionally stiffens under the pressure of a live performance.
But that's what real music-making is like anyway, and I don't want to suggest that O'Conor's occasional finger slips are an obstacle to enjoying these vibrant performances. (You'll never hear this kind of thrillingly "alive" recorded sound from studio-made commercial piano recordings.) What I did find somewhat objectionable is O'Conor's dynamically heavy-handed treatment of a couple of spots in the opening themes of the last movements of Opp.109 and 111. There was something jarringly coy for me in his shaping of a couple of phrases with a rapid dynamic descent from mezzo-forte to pp - the kind of expressive device I'd accept from Horowitz or Pachmann, but not from a modern pianist who should know better than to risk sentimentalizing Beethoven's inimitably manly themes. That being said, I still found the recitals completely absorbing from beginning to end, unlike O'Conor's commercial recordings (courtesy of my public library), none of which lasted in my CD player for more than a few minutes.

SAGUARO TRIO: Chopin, Mendelssohn

2011-09-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

CHOPIN: Piano Trio in G minor, Op.8
MENDELSSOHN: Piano Trio No.2, Op.66

Saguaro Trio
http://maximaltd.com/saguarotrio/bio.htm
Luanne Homzy, Violin
Karen Kang, Cello
John Chen, Piano

Bennett-Gordon Hall
Ravinia Festival
VI.30.2010 (Chopin), VII.11.2010
256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Judging by these superlatively recorded, live and unedited performances the Saguaro Trio must be one of the finest ensembles before the public today - and not just among the young generation of performers. A special treat for me was the playing of the pianist John Chen who won the Gold Medal at the 2004 Sydney International Piano Competition. As I listened to the Mendelssohn trio I thought that Chen was blending too much with the string players and I wished his playing were a bit more assertive. Then I listened to the Chopin trio and realized that Chen's deferential playing in the Mendelssohn piece was not at all a matter of his musical personality. Perhaps it was simply Chen's way of acknowledging that although Mendelssohn keeps the piano busy, he does not give it all that much to say. In any case, in the Chopin trio Chen came forth with such luminous, glowing tone, and with phrasing so pure and inevitable that I had to listen to the entire piece once again right away - just to make sure I was not imagining things. (Chen is reportedly very passionate about French music, and he recorded the complete piano works of Dutilleux for Naxos.)
My piano buff gushing aside, it is the ensemble, of course, that impressed me deeply. Their playing in these recordings, while technically immaculate and tonally refined, does not at all sound over-rehearsed or self-conscious (as it occasionally happens with chamber ensembles striving for technical perfection and tonal refinement).

Birtwistle's masterpiece for half-deaf nitwits

2011-09-22T17:54:00.000-07:00

BOSTON SYMPHONY HALL

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE

Violin Concerto

(World Premiere)

Christian Tetzlaff, violin

Boston SO

Marcelo Lehninger

II.3.2011

Boston Symphony Hall

FM => 320 kbs mp3

=> WAV (sound repair by Boom)

=> FLAC

Here is a perfect example of the subject matter which inspired my Ungrateful Motherfucker Rant a while ago. Harrison Birtwistle composed what is without the slightest doubt in my mind an absolute masterpiece - a violin concerto which is the most expressive, communicative, and absorbing composition to come from his pen since Tragoedia. The concerto received its world premiere in Boston a few months ago in a stunning performance by the immensely talented Christian Tetzlaff. The concert was recorded for broadcast (either by BSO or by WGBH, I guess) in thrillingly vivid sound - the kind of sound that should inspire mass hara-kiri by record engineers and producers at large and small commercial record labels peddling slippery-sounding, digitally disfigured impersonal assemblies of disembodied sounds they optimistically call "music". (Tetzlaff's later UK Premiere performance, more distantly recorded by BBC in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, sounds somewhat lifeless compared to the thrilling Boston recording.)

Now, this stunning broadcast was captured (or at least uploaded) by someone in 320 kbs mp3 - already an act of sonic vandalism (or appalling ignorance) given the high historical and aesthetic value of this performance. What's more - and here I have to pause to insert a mouthguard to prevent myself from grinding my molars into fine dust - this mp3 recording contained several very audible and annoying dropouts. No musical material was lost, mind you, only that it sounded as if the broadcast signal somehow "paused" for a fraction of a second here and there, with a loud click inserted into the pause.
It took me one listening session to locate these defects, and then I repaired them so that there is no trace left of any sonic anomalies whatsoever. But of course I had to save the result in FLAC to prevent re-compression of already compressed data files and subsequent degradation of sound quality. I would not have minded doing this work one bit if the original recording was a lossless copy of the broadcast. But I know from bitter experience that someday a lossless copy of this broadcast may become available, and my work will become a complete waste.

So, to the person responsible for this mp3 recording, here is from the bottom of my heart:

Thanks, you deaf fucking retard!

* * *

LEON KIRCHNER: Piano Sonatas 2 & 3; Piano Trios 1 & 2

2011-09-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

L E O N K I R C H N E R

Piano Sonata No.3 "The Forbidden"

Joel Fan, piano
http://www.joelfanmusic.com/bio.html

XI.2006

Fraser Performance Studio

WGBH Boston

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Piano Sonata No.2

Russell Sherman, piano
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Sherman

2007

The Tapestry Room

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Boston

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Trio I for Violin, Cello, and Piano

Qing Jang, piano

Bryan Lee, violin

Karen Kang, cello

VII.13.2010

Ravinia Festival

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Trio II for Violin, Cello, and Piano

Chameleon Arts Ensemble
http://www.chameleonarts.org/about/index.html

Gloria Chien, piano

Joanna Kurkkowicz, violin

Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello

III.26.2010

The Goethe Institute

Boston

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

For someone who had studied composition with Schoenberg and Sessions, and later enjoyed the financial security of tenured professorship at Harvard, Kirchner was a surprisingly conservative composer whose music is closer to the middle period Scriabin than to his illustrious teachers. Except for his works written for the piano, I don't find Kirchner's music particularly interesting or challenging, although I readily admit that it is very passionate, expertly crafted, and (to my ear) utterly sincere in every bar. As for his piano music, it is probably because Kirchner himself was an excellent pianist that his writing for the instrument - romantic in temperament, technically splashy, dynamically volatile - strikes me as being the most effective, communicative, and rewarding part of his creative output.

SCHNITTKE: Quintet for Piano and Strings

2011-09-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

GORDON HALL (Falls Village, Connecticut)

ALFRED SCHNITTKE

Quintet for Piano and Strings

Alexander Mekinulov, piano

St Petersburg String Quartet

http://www.stpetersburgquartet.com/quartet.phtml

VIII.21.2011

Gordon Hall

Falls Village Connecticut

Music Mountain Festival

320 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

If music can be said to evoke bubbling brooks, bird calls, war, love, death, and even transfiguration, then why not Dissociative Identity Disorder? There are distinct and seemingly independent musical identities - rooted in serialism, polytonality, dadaism, Stravinskian neo-classicism, Mahlerian romanticism, tawdry cabaret music, and sentimental film scores - which co-inhabit Schnittke's musical psyche, and which manifest themselves within a single piece by abruptly taking control of Schnittke's "compositional behavior" for a few bars here and there before being displaced by another musical identity.
If heard in studio recordings - where the inherent fakery of depersonalized assembly of musical material is combined with Schnittke's alternating, dissociated musical personalities - Schnittke's music is unbearably irritating for me. Yet, strangely enough, the same music can have a curious (if perhaps neither lasting nor healthy) impact in live performances. One such performance, I believe, can be heard in the present live and unedited recording of the Piano Qunitet.

I have not heard the Russian pianist Alexander Mekinulov before, and I'm reluctant to judge his pianism on the basis of a single performance, especially in light of the fact that the piano tone always sounds a bit milky and clattery in the unresonant acoustics of Gordon Hall. But I thought that Mekinulov's serious, musicianly handling of the piano part suited the music rather well. As for the St Petersburg Quartet, I actually dislike their "Russian sound" in the Classical repertoire, but in Schnittke's music their somewhat roughly blended textures proved to be an asset rather than a liability.

ELLIOTT CARTER: Intermittences, Piano Sonata, 90+

2011-09-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

FRASER PERFORMANCE STUDIO (WGBH Boston)

E L L I O T T C A R T E R

Piano Sonata

90+

Ursula Oppens, piano

live at the Fraser Performance Studio

WGBH Boston, October 2008

Intermittences

Elena Bashkirova, piano

2008, Bonn

All tracks 128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Ursula Oppens' pianism may not be all that ingratiating, but her musicianship is second to none. She had recorded much of Carter's piano music commercially, including two versions of Carter's magnificent and monumental piano concerto. As with all notable pianists (with the exception of Cortot, who played in the studio just as spontaneously and carelessly as he did on the concert stage), live recordings are always of greater interest to me than edited studio productions. (Oppens' first recording of Carter's concerto is not really "live", but an edited composite of two performances. Her second recording, also with Michael Gielen, is one of the most hideously sounding piano recordings I can think of - so dynamically compressed and with so much revolting digital sheen on the piano tone that I shudder every time I think about it.) The present performance, announced as being recorded live for broadcast by WGBH, is very communicative despite the humble bitrate of the original webcast.

Elena Bashkirova's recording Cater's Intermittences is the only live recording of the piece I've encountered so far, and I think Bashkirova makes an excellent case for this energetic 10-minute long composition.

As much as it makes me happy to hear performances of Carter's piano music, I can't help but to sigh with regret that Roger Sessions' three beautiful piano sonatas remain all but forgotten by today's concert pianists.

RON REGEV at Ravinia Festival (2007 - 2011)

2011-09-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

BENNETT GORDON HALL

R O N R E G E V

p i a n o

http://www.ronregev.com/bio.html

Bennett Gordon Hall
R a v i n i a F e s t i v a l
2007 - 2011

All recordings 256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

SCHUMANN

Sonata for Violin and Piano no 2 in D minor, Op. 121
Alexi Kenney, violin
VII.9.2011

POULENC

Sonata for Cello and Piano
Tony Rymer, cello
VII.1.2011

BEETHOVEN

Sonata for Cello and Piano no 2 in G minor, Op. 5 no 2
Gilad Kaplansky, cello
VII.28.2009

BRAHMS

Sonata for Viola and Piano no 2 in E flat major, Op. 120 no 2
Wei-Ting Kuo, viola
VII.10.2009

BRITTEN

Lachrymae for Viola and Piano, Op. 48

Luke Fleming, viola

VII.10.2008

STRAUSS

Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat major, Op. 18
Tessa Lark, violin
VII.3.2008

SCHUBERT

Sonatina for Violin and Piano in G minor, D 408/Op. 137 no 3
Diana Cohen, violin
VII.12.2007

BEETHOVEN

Sonata for Violin and Piano no 9 in A major, Op. 47 "Kreutzer"
Caitlin Tully, violin
VII.11.2007

BEETHOVEN

Sonata for Cello and Piano no 5 in D major, Op. 102 no 2
Gilad Kaplansky, cello
VII.23.2008

George Szell is the only other pianist whose playing I find so captivating despite the fact that, like Ron Regev's playing, it is known to me only through his performances of chamber music. This is not to say that Ron Regev's pianism is similar to Szell's. Regev's phrasing is more spontaneous, his tone is richer and warmer, with a proverbial "golden ring" to it, and his chords are voiced less analytically (albeit without any loss of transparency). For me the similarity between these two pianists comes at a more general, abstract level, and I would describe it in terms of authority radiated by their playing. This admittedly elusive notion involves far more than just unimpeachable technical security in the handling of the piano part. There is a feeling that the pianist knows the full meaning of every note in every instrumental part of the piece, and that each note of the piece seems to fall into place under the guidance of the piano part. I certainly don't suggest that most other pianists do not bring this kind of knowledge to their performances, only that their playing rarely makes me feel so strongly that they do. (Richter's and Serkin's recordings of chamber music surely radiate this kind of authority, but I am talking here about pianists known to me only through their performances of chamber music.)

All of the young string players partnered by Regev are very talented, and if some of them occasionally sound a bit reticent, this only adds a degree of charming chastity to the performances. Perhaps I am aesthetically perverse, but when 19th century chamber music is played with absolute, over-rehearsed (and usually studio-manufactured) perfection of ensemble, it sounds unattractively slick and even counterfeit to my ears. In any case, the overall level of musicianship is uniformly high, and in some cases no less than world-class. One of my personal favorites is the performance of Beethoven's Op.5 No.2, where the Israeli cellist Gilad Kaplansky's arctic purity of phrasing, sculpted with a strikingly individual throaty, reedy tone, turned this familiar cello sonata into a nearly heartbreaking experience for me. The other favorite of mine is the earlier posted violin sonata of Franck, where the violinist Tessa Lark makes the music sound more modern and more communicative than any other string player I've heard in this piece (and that includes cello arrangements).

And finally there is the quality of recorded sound whose naturalness and realism are simply addictive for me. (One exception is Beethoven Op.102 No.2, where Kaplansky's cello is balanced in such a way that its sound image is blocking the piano.) Compared to these live and unedited recordings from Ravinia's Bennett-Gordon Hall, even the best engineered studio recordings of the same pieces sound lifeless. In fact, the more the hi-fi credentials of commercial recordings are hyped in their CD booklets - Zillion Bits & Khz! Super Duper Mapping! High Definition! 3D Resolution! 360 Surround! Blah Blah Blah - the more lifeless and ugly the actual sounds coming out of my speakers or headphones turn out to be. Or so it has been in my experience.

When bad news ain't THAT bad...

2011-09-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

IF THIS NEWS REPORT MAKES YOU WORRY ABOUT EUROPE'S MENTAL HEALTH:

updated 9/4/2011, 7:29:41 PM

Mental illness affects 38 percent of Europeans, study shows

LONDON — Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

THIS NEWS REPORT WILL SHOW YOU THAT OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE MORE SERIOUS MENTAL PROBLEMS:

Fox News Poll:

45 Percent of American Voters Believe in Creationism

Published September 07, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Some 45 percent of American voters accept the Biblical account of creation as the explanation for the origin of human life on Earth.

Contemporary Cello: FONTANELLI, HERRINGTON, WUORINEN

2011-09-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

B.P. HERRINGTON (b.1976)
http://herringtonmusic.com/herringtonmusic_002.htm
That Blood's Too Red
(Rhapsody on an East Texas Ballad)

SIMONE FONTANELLI (b.1961)
http://www.simonefontanelli.com/
"...nel tempo che fugge" - II (2009)
(Premiere performance)
I - Andante un poco mosso e rubato (2:16)
II - Con folle disperazione (1:15)
III - Lento, sospeso (4:05)
IV - Brillante (2:04)
V - Estremamente calmo e dolcissimo. Preludiando (2:18)

Daniel Saenz, cello
Brendan Kinsella, piano
20.VI.2011
White Performance Hall
University of Missouri Conservatory of Music
Kansas City, MO, USA.

CHARLES WUORINEN

Variations II for cello

Michael Nicolas, cello

VII.7.2007

Bennett-Gordon Hall

Ravinia Festival

All tracks 256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

What does one get from crossbreeding Darmstadt master classes (Lachenmann, Furrer, Arpeghis) with childhood exposure to Baptist hymns of the American South and formal training at the Royal Academy of Music (London)? Apparently something as attractively individual as B.P. Herrington's That Blood's Too Red. This short piece is modern but not at all academic-sounding, and it combines dissonance and rhythmic complexity with episodes of quasi-tonal and rhythmically stable tranquility in such a way that the music never becomes gratuitously abrasive or boringly accessible. I have never heard of this composer before, but now I hope I'll be able to hear more of his music.
Compared to Herrington, Fontanelli's piece sounds more academic and less individual, although it is possible that other musicians (Nicolas Hodges?) could make a more convincing case for this music.

Natural selection my ass!

2011-08-31T20:30:00.000-07:00

I would think it takes very little mental RAM space to figure out that sidewalks in Manhattan get copious daily deposits of urine, feces, vomit, spit, garbage, soot, grime, and God knows what other unpleasant stuff from millions of people (residents, commuters, tourists), dogs, birds, rats and other members of the local fauna. So when it rains hard enough to create bubbling streams of water running along the curb toward the nearest storm drain, even borderline retards among us should know that this is not the kind of water you want to make contact with your skin, let alone your face and/or genitalia.
Any adult who does not know this is a living proof that something may be wrong with the concept of evolution by natural selection. The genotype of the two happy twenty-somethings in this photo - taken in Times Square shortly after the hurricane Irene passed through Manhattan - should have been "de-selected" long time ago because it produces such staggering stupidity at the phenotype level.

I wonder where these two will be 28 days later?

BERNARD RANDS: String Quartet No.2

2011-08-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

Bennett-Gordon Hall

BERNARD RANDS

http://www.bernardrands.com/

String Quartet No.2 (1994)

Miho Saegusa, Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu (violins)

Ayane Kozasa (viola), Nathan Vickery (cello)

VII.18.2011

Bennett-Gordon Hall

Ravinia Festival

256 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Almost everything I said about Richard Wernick in an earlier post applies also to this notable American (British-born) composer who is Wernick's exact contemporary. There are many prestigious awards (including the Pulitzer Prize), prestigious teaching positions (including an endowed chair at Harvard), high profile premieres (e.g., by the NY Philharmonic under Mehta), and a most impressive pedigree (Boulez, Maderna, and Dallapiccola were among Rands' teachers). Yet, despite such an impressive C.V., Rands music is barely known to concert-going public today. And the present (excellently recorded) performance of his String Quartet No.2 from Ravinia Festival is the first live recording of his music that I ever came across.
The music (all thirteen minutes of it) is less dramatic, less chromatic, and stylistically more diffuse than Wernick's. That being said, I still don't know what to make of it. Perhaps I need to hear it a few more times ...

Three things I hate to see coming my way

2011-08-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

#3: Minor neurological damage is likely from prolonged exposure to the loud and obnoxious jingle played over and over again:

Mr Softee Ice Cream Truck

#2: Moderate property damage is possible, including lost roof shingles, shattered window panes, and disappearance of unsecured outdoor furniture:

Hurricane Irene

#1: Catastrophic damage to one's aesthetic standards is nearly certain. Shattered faith in the future of serious music is highly probable. After-effects may last for months, and may include such typical signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as bouts of nausea, recurrent nightmares, and panic attacks:

Where to sit in the concert hall for a piano recital

2011-08-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

1. With pianists whose playing is extroverted, powerful, and strongly projected, I would sit toward the back of the hall:

2. With pianists whose playing is introverted and highly nuanced, I would sit next to the stage:

3. And then there is one pianist who recently proved that the best place in the hall can actually be under the piano itself:

Helmut Lachenmann's enemy number one

2011-08-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

Yep, that's the guy. Four times (on three different days) I tried to listen to my favorite Helmut Lachenmann recording from the 1993 Festival d'Automne a Paris. And each time Lachenmann's rarefied, otherworldly orchestral textures were shattered by this bird's incessant ear-piercing shrieking. Naturally I hated the bird for its anti-Lachenmann heckling. But I hated it even more for bringing back memories of another creature which once had annoyed me this much: a middle-aged subway psycho on a half empty mid-afternoon train I was riding back into the city some years ago.

The psycho's routine was to stop in front of a passenger, bark Whaddayawant! at the top of his lungs, wait for a second or two with his head bobbing slightly, then move to his next target and repeat the whole thing all over again. And again. And again...
I am neither a patient nor a friendly man, but on that subway train I had extra reasons not to feel chummy. I was hungry because I missed lunch. I had not smoked for a couple of hours. I still had the rest of the day ahead of me, filled with waling sirens, screeching buses, roaring helicopters, bone-rattling jackhammers, and – the curse of curses – all those people stacked on top of one another in their tiny, perpetually dark, poorly ventilated apartments. And in addition to all that I had to endure the psycho's endless Whaddayawant!... Whaddayawant!... Whaddayawant!...

At first I was absolutely certain about what I want: I want to rip the fucking larynx out of the guy’s throat and shout “Hello there!” into the open end of his windpipe. That felt good, but not for long because my next thought was: You want to perform involuntary tracheotomy on another man, and you call HIM a psycho?

By the time the psycho worked his way to where I was sitting, I wasn’t angry anymore. It was obvious that the man was exactly where he belonged, that this city was his, not mine. I even briefly wondered what would happen if I were to respond to his Whaddayawant! by telling him the truth: A cigarette and a shot of bourbon. Would his gaze suddenly go far, far away, to the time when people actually talked to him instead of only asking him questions like Have you been taking your medication? or Can I see some ID? Would he return from there as a dignified, cultured man on his way to see the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Acquavella Gallery? Or would he more likely pull a screwdriver from his pocket and stab me in the head?

In the end I did what every subway rider does in such circumstances, which is to become intensely interested in the topological properties of empty space just in front of one's knees. The psycho stood next to me for a second, then moved on, barking Whaddayawant! at a few more passengers before taking his survey of humanity's desires to the next car. As the sliding door closed behind him I realized that what I really want - more acutely, more desperately than anything else - is to pack my things and get the fuck out of this noisy, smelly, grimy, miserable city.
Two years later I did just that.

When a piece of music gets entangled with memories like these, it is best to stay away from it for a while so as not to risk making such unpleasant associations permanent. Which is why I still have not gone back to that Lachenmann recording. This is also why I didn't feel like trying to say something meaningful about the music or the performance, ending up instead with another episode from my years on the Island of a Thousand Sorrows.

HELMUT LACHENMANN

Accanto for clarinet, orchestra & tape

Ausklang for piano & large orchestra

Eduard Brunner, clarinet

Massimiliano Damerini, piano

SWR Symphony Orchestra

Zoltán Peskó

X.1.1993

Festival d'Automne a Paris

FM (France Musique) => tape => FLAC

MARC-ANDRE HAMELIN in Boston: Mozart, Liszt, Hamelin

2011-08-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

FRASER PERFORMANCE STUDIO (WGBH Boston)

MARC-ANDRE HAMELIN

April 14, 2010

Fraser Performance Studio

WGBH, Boston

LISZT: Piano Sonata in B minor

HAMELIN: Etudes Nos. 8 & 11; Little Nocturne

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

* * *

JORDAN HALL (New England Conservatory)

MOZART

Piano Concerto K.453

Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano

"Concert for the Cure" Orchestra

Simon Rattle, cond.

XII.5.2010

Jordan Hall

New England Conservatory

128 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Having recently discovered some very enthusiastic Hamelin fans among the blog readers I decided to add these performances to the blog, even though I personally don't think there is anything terribly special about them (besides Hamelin's predictably very polished pianism, of course).
The Fraser Studio recital includes three short interviews in which Hamelin speaks about his compositions as well as about the Liszt sonata. I thought these short discussions show Hamelin to be a very charming speaker.
The Mozart concerto comes from a benefit concert, and the orchestra (according to the broadcast announcement) included musicians from the Boston Symphony along with musicians from "other American orchestras" (whatever the latter means).

EMERSON STRING QUARTET live: Shostakovich String Quartet Op.117

2011-08-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

HARRIS CONCERT HALL (Aspen, Colorado)

SHOSTAKOVICH

String Quartet Nr 9, Op.117

Emerson String Quartet

VII.20.2010

Aspen Music Festival

192 - 224 kbs VBR mp3

(no re-encoding)

A reader's comment on an earlier post prompted me to give this recording another try. As it occasionally happens, the performance impressed me a good deal more than the first time around, perhaps in part because by now I've come to accept the banality of Shostakovich's music without trying to excuse it as a defense mechanism against the pressure from the Soviet officialdom. A martyr he was not. As a talented youngster who voluntarily and eagerly composed two symphonies glorifying the blood-soaked Bolshevik regime - with its already established concentration camps (long before the Nazis borrowed the idea), and with its casualties already in the hundreds of thousands - Shostakovich deserved his long years of paralyzing fear in the shadow of Stalin's mustache.

No, I think the banality of Shostakovich's music is entirely his own, and my guess is that, from the very beginning, he resorted to banality as a way of masking the lack of true originality in his music. His superior craft in blending the influences of Mahler, Hindemith, and Prokofiev is undeniable, but the resulting blends, even if often enjoyable, never reached the level of originality possessed by their sources.

Despite my reservations about this composer I think the Emerson players make a pretty strong case for his music. It also helps that this live and unedited recording offers more real and natural sound than the Emerson's often shrill and metallic commercial recordings for DG. (And despite the misleading advertising, their DG Shostakovich recordings are not genuinely live recordings anyway, but are edited composites of multiple performances and post-performance patchings. At least the players state so clearly in the CD booklet - something many other musicians conveniently forget to do.) Yet I still find their playing a bit too Noo Yawk for my taste to enjoy this performance as much as I have enjoyed the earlier discussed Shostakovich performances by the Pacifica Quartet.

ANDRE WATTS live: Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5

2011-08-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

OHIO THEATRE (Columbus, Ohio)

BEETHOVEN

Piano Concerto No.5

Andre Watts

Columbus SO

Andreas Delfs

I.22.2010

Ohio Theatre

Columbus, OH

320 kbs mp3 (no re-encoding)

Andre Watts is no longer the fleet-fingered virtuoso he was in his youth, and by now he must be bored to death having played the same few popular concertos decade after decade. The present (excellently recorded) live and unedited performance of the 'Emperor' concerto proves this much long before the first movement cadenza. But Watts still makes the piano sing - strikingly so when heard after a long exposure to the keyboard mumbling of so many of today's critically praised younger pianists.

I know it sounds awfully shallow to say that I listened to a performance primarily for the pianist's tone (and with my finger on the 'fast forward' button of the CD player's remote control). But then what else am I to listen for in this mind-numbingly over-performed and over-recorded warhorse of the standard repertoire? Surely not for another case of "probing musicianship" from some 19-year old winner of the North Pole International Piano Competition. In fact, I don't believe for a second in the "probing musicianship" of youngsters who, after having done the competition circuit, hope to claw their way to stardom with the 'Emperor' or the Chopin F-minor concerto. If their musicianship were so fucking "probing", they would be performing concertos by Carter, Sessions, Maderna, or Cerha (or, better yet, by Durand, Furrer, Neuwirth, or Plamondon), instead of competing with the Beethoven and Chopin recordings by every major pianist beginning with d'Albert and Lamond.

Schoenberg, Boulez, and the Schrödinger's cat

2011-08-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

SCHOENBERG'S GRAVE

S C H O E N B E R G

Piano Concerto Op.42

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Berlin PO

Jiri Belohlavek

I.24.2010

Berlin Philharmonie

320 kbs AAC (no re-encoding)
=> WAV (editing) => FLAC

Daniel Barenboim

Vienna PO

Pierre Boulez

VI.5.2005

Vienna

? => 192 kbs mp3

By now the story is old and tired: Soon after Schoenberg-the-man was buried Pierre Boulez proceeded to bury Schoenberg-the-composer in the infamously cold-blooded pseudo-obituary entitled Schoenberg is dead. Temperamentally Boulez's unceremonious postmortem of Schoenberg's creative legacy was the work of a pathologically ambitious scoundrel, if not a borderline sociopath. Intellectually it was an exercise in musicological triviality and ideologically motivated nonsense.
     The triviality is the essay's "central message" - that much of Schoenberg's supposedly revolutionary music is essentially 19th century music in which the tonal organization of pitch had been replaced by serial organization. Big fucking deal! As if without Boulez's help experienced listeners could not have recognized Schoenberg's decidedly old-fashioned rhythms, his traditional orchestral palette, and (to paraphrase the composer Iain Hamilton) his continuing submission to "the tyranny of the theme".
     The nonsense is the essay's underlying suggestion that these traditional aspects of Schoenberg's music justify a deflationary view of the historical significance, aesthetic merits, or the continuing influence of Schoenberg's oeuvre. Denigrating Schoenberg's achievements because they fell short of total serialism makes as much sense as chastising Euclid for failing to extend geometry to spaces with arbitrary number of dimensions, or dressing down Einstein for failing to apply quantization to gravitational fields.

I recalled this sordid bit of musical folklore because one of the two performances of Schoenberg's Op.42 listed above is conducted (of all people!) by Boulez. With Barenboim as the soloist, the performance proves that Schoenberg is very much alive, and it does so by presenting the music exactly as it was described by Boulez half a century earlier: as a 19th century concerto in every respect except for its serial organization of pitch. Barenboim's achingly arched phrasing, nuanced dynamics, and pellucid, silvery tone would be wholly appropriate in the Chopin E-minor concerto.   And the orchestra under Boulez - the supposedly austere, analytical, detached Boulez - radiates as much autumnal warmth as I would expect from Brahms' E-minor symphony. Performed so affectionately, as a nostalgic, wistfully lyrical dodecaphonic homage to the late 19th century, Schoenberg's concerto is an irresistibly charming piece of vintage modernism. (Regrettably a good deal of patience is required with the lispy sound quality of low bitrate mp3 encoding of what was most likely a mediocre quality stereo webcast.)

On the other hand Aimard's spectacularly recorded Berlin performance, which de-emphasizes as far as possible the music's 19th century roots, offers no less convincing a proof that Schoenberg is very much dead. With Aimard's steely and serious handling of the piano part, backed by refined but coolly impersonal playing of the Berlin Philharmonic, the tonal allusions of Schoenberg's tone row sound contrived, the themes sound amateurishly awkward, the old-fashioned Viennese rhythms have a limping quality, and the overall effect is that of faux modernism which is as hopelessly dated as the schmaltziest of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte.

Both performances, however, involve musicianship and instrumental craft of the highest order, and both (as far as I can tell) are fully consistent with Schoenberg's instructions given in the score. Which leads me to suspect that Schoenberg-the-composer, like the poor Schrödinger's cat, is both dead and alive, and that this paradoxical superposition of states collapses into one or the other definite state only when Schoenberg's music is experienced through an actual performance.
      I don't mean this quantum mechanical metaphor as a some musicological or metaphysical thesis. (There is enough scientifically illiterate lunacy in the humanities as it is.) I only want to illustrate the fact that no other composer's music strikes me as being capable of such schizophrenic duality when heard in different performances. The music of some composers simply leaves me intellectually and emotionally cold no matter how it is performed.   With other composers, the music remains intellectually and emotionally absorbing in all high quality performances, however different their treatments of the music's formal elements may be. But with Schoenberg's music (beginning with Op.4) one and the same composition can make me hold my breath in awe or fall asleep from boredom.

So perhaps the young Boulez wasn't completely wrong in his terse assessment of Schoenberg's music, but only half wrong. Or should it be half right?...

MARC-ANDRE HAMELIN in Aspen: BERG, STOCKHAUSEN

2011-08-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

BENEDICT MUSIC TENT (Aspen)

ALBAN BERG

Piano Sonata Op.1

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

Klavierstuck IX

Marc-Andre Hamelin

VII.7.2011

Benedict Music Tent

Aspen Music Festival

160 kbs mp3 (Berg)

256 kbs mp3 (Stockhausen)

(no re-encoding)

For a virtuoso pianist of Hamelin's caliber this performance of the Berg sonata is surprisingly cool. He underplays the music's Romantic rhetoric by avoiding pronounced rubato, lingering transitions, and dynamical outbursts, which makes the sonata sound more modern than it is. (And certainly far more modern than it sounds on many rubato-laden and dynamically unhinged commercial recordings, among which Barenboim's hideously spliced DG recording is by far the worst.) My guess is that Hamelin's streamlined performance of the Berg sonata was conceived as a prelude to Stockhausen's Klavierstuck IX, which he played as if the music came from an opium-induced hallucination of the old Liszt. Even Hamelin's tone, which usually bores me because of its generic quality, became haunting in the Stockhausen piece.
I've known Stockhausen's Klavierstucke for quite some time through performances by Kontarsky and Pollini, which (good as they are) never fully convinced me in the music's importance. Hamelin's performance did.

RICHARD WERNICK, FRED LERDAHL: recent string quartets

2011-08-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

GORDON HALL, Falls Village, Connecticut

RICHARD WERNICK

String Quartet No.8 (2010)

FRED LERDAHL
Third String Quartet (2008)

Daedalus Quartet

Music Mountain Festival

VII.16.2011

Gordon Hall

Falls Village, Connecticut

320 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

This must hurt: An American composer writes music for half a century, receives many prestigious awards (including the Pulitzer Prize), holds an endowed professorship at an Ivy League university ... and today, at the age of 77, he is nearly invisible in the music world. It was only a couple of days ago that I came across my first live recording of Richard Wernick's music. And I have been enthusiastically collecting live recordings of contemporary music for quite some time. (Of course there are some commercial studio recordings of Wernick's music, but these recordings are poor indicators of the composer's visibility. After all, the music of such archeological curiosities as Fasch and Locatelli had been commercially recorded too, but I probably have a better chance of bedding Megan Fox than encountering a Fasch symphony or a Locatelli violin concerto in the concert hall.)

In any case, I think Wernick's atonal (but not athematic) string quartet is attractive, even if it never ventures far from the sound world of Schoenberg's String Trio and the last two quartets. I simply happen to like the (admittedly old-fashioned) style of "atonal romanticism", so it matters little to me that Wernick's string quartet - like those of other "atonal romantics" Artur Schnabel, Leon Kirchner (one of Wernick's teachers), and Henri Lazarof, to mention some - is neither especially innovative nor particularly individual.

LUCA FRANCESCONI: Hard Pace (three performances)

2011-07-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

LUCA FRANCESCONI

Hard Pace
(Trumpet Concerto)

Hakan Hardenberger

trumpet
http://www.hakanhardenberger.com/

Frankfurt Radio SO
Arturo Tamayo
XI.22.2009, Frankfurt
FM => 320 kbs mp3

Gothenburg SO
Alexander Vedernikov

II.5.2009, Gothenburg
FM => 256 kbs mp3

Dutch Radio PO
Roman Kofman
X.22.2008, Amsterdam
192kbs mp3

I wonder if Gerard Grisey's influence is to blame for the fact that so much orchestral music written by younger European composers amounts to little more than "variations on a tone (or a simple chord)". This music is not going anywhere harmonically, it is rhythmically unadventurous (if not downright monotonous), and it often gets stuck for long stretches at some fixed dynamical level, be it a sedate mezzo-forte or an obnoxiously prolonged forte. (The latter seems to be Bruno Mantovani's specialty.)
Focusing almost entirely on color and texture might have sounded refreshing in the 1970s (e.g., Grisey's Les espaces acoustiques), but there is only so much a composer can say with such limited means. And I think Grisey along with Murail have said pretty much all that there was to say. Forty years later the same compositional strategy - even if augmented by the use of up-to-date electronics - generates as much novelty and excitement as the proverbial missionary position with the lights turned off.

But then perhaps I am missing something because this kind of music - from Dalbavie, Mantovani, Francesconi and others - continues to be performed all over Europe, as witnessed by the above recordings of Francesconi's Trumpet Concerto. This concerto certainly wants to be friendly to everybody, with its distant echoes of Miles Davis and Ennio Morricone, its use of electronic keyboard and electric guitar, and its occasional feel of a moody soundtrack for a high budget European film. These characteristics, however, are balanced very differently in the above performances. The closely recorded Frankfurt performance sounds edgier because the electronic keyboard has much greater presence in the orchestral textures than it does in the more distantly (and realistically) balanced, more mellow and jazzy sounding Amesterdam performance. In contrast to these two, the Gothenburg performance has the most straight-forward character of a traditional concerto, perhaps because Vedernikov (unlike Tamayo or Kofman) does not conduct much contemporary music.

MARC-ANDRE HAMELIN live: LISZT Piano Concerto No.2

2011-07-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

Hilbert Circle Theatre

M A R C - A N D R E H A M E L I N

p i a n o

LISZT: Piano Concerto No.2

Indianapolis SO

Jun Maerkel

May 7, 2010

Hilbert Circle Theatre

Indianapolis

320 kbs VBR mp3

(no re-encoding)

Here is a pianist with taste, intelligence, wide repertoire, and hordes of adoring fans. He gets top engagements, records prolifically, and is respected by professionals.
Prompted by something recently said to me by one of my readers, I listened (against my better judgment) to this excellently engineered live and unedited recording once again. And just as before - and as with every other Hamelin recording I ever heard - the performance left me as cold as a doorknob in February. (If only this feeling were real rather than metaphorical, given that the temperature outside is around 38C ...)

Despite all the above mentioned things that Hamelin has as a concert pianist, there is one thing that he does not have: an individual, memorable piano tone. I do not suggest that his tone is somehow ugly - there is certainly nothing brittle, metallic, banging, or shrill about it. Rather, Hamelin's tone sounds so damn generic to my ear that it makes me think of a Steinway grand that plays itself without any human intervention whatsoever. And to me, piano music played with generic tone is as boring and unattractive as a theater performance delivered in a dull monotone....

VLADIMIR FELTSMAN live (really): Schumann Kreisleriana, Arabeske

2011-07-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Harris Concert Hall (Aspen, Colorado)

V L A D I M I R F E L T S M A N

p i a n o

SCHUMANN

Arabeske Op.18

Kreisleriana Op.16

July 6, 2011

Harris Concert Hall

Aspen Music Festival

320 kbs mp3

(no re-encoding)

The two "live"CBS recordings which introduced Vladimir Feltsman to the West - the 1985 disc of Chopin Preludes Op.28 (allegedly recorded in concert at the US Embassy in Moscow), and his 1987 Carnegie Hall debut - are both disgusting fakes containing many poorly matched post-concert patches. Feltsman's studio recordings of Beethoven's late sonatas (on Musical Heritage label) are just as ugly. In addition to numerous audible edits, there is a generic piano tone floating in the dead acoustic ambience of a recording studio. Choosing between these two kinds of recordings is like choosing between the life of a hydrophobic fish and the life of a claustrophobic mole, which is why I simply gave up on this pianist and forgot about him for a long time.

Two days ago, however, I came across the present live and unedited recording from the all-Schumann recital given by Feltsman at this year's Aspen Music Festival. I can't say that the playing took my breath away, but it impressed me enough to listen to this recording three times in the span of 48 hours (with increasing interest and pleasure). To begin with, Feltsman's tone is instantly recognizable as the real thing, with enough precious metals in it to make many of today's over-hyped, generic-sounding pianists weep with envy and despair. Then there is a sense of genuine story-telling in his expressive but not mannered unfolding of the Kreisleriana. And although Feltsman is no longer a young man (he will be 60 next year), his playing still projects a good deal of technical authority despite some missed, smudged, or wrong notes. (I also felt that Feltsman slightly overpedaled in a few places, but that's a subjective impression. His tone remained luminous and clear throughout the entire piece.)

How sad that this good pianist and fine musician has been so badly misrepresented by his commercial recordings. Now I'll have to go back to Sean Chen's Kreisleriana and see if I can finally make up my mind about that pianist as well....

Grrrr... Grrrreat Pianists....

2011-07-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

A theater actor who constantly forgets or mangles his lines because he can't stand the repetitive and boring activity of rehearsing his roles... A mathematics lecturer who forgets to present simple but important lemmas, and who routinely messes up his blackboard calculations - all because he can't endure the mind-numbing and time-consuming preparations for his assigned courses...
      I think that a reasonable person would have a healthy doze of contempt for such sorry "professionals" who willfully disregard the basic responsibilities of their profession. And this contempt would not be diminished by loud assurances that although such "professionals" screw up the details of Shakespeare and Chekhov (or Gauss and Hilbert), they convey the big picture, the spirit, if you like, of Macbeth or Uncle Vanya (or the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra) better than most.

Yet when it comes to pianists, such unprofessional behavior can be looked upon with tolerance bordering on affection, or even adulation, as witnessed by the axiomatic inclusion of Cortot and Schnabel among the so-called Great Pianists.   This is not about wrong or missed notes per se. This is about the easily recognizable difference between wrong notes as neurophysiological accidents (which can happen to any musician) and wrong notes as the predictable consequence of willfully keeping one's technical equipment in the state of sad disrepair.

I would think that, for musicians who choose to make a living as public performers, the latter is simply inexcusable. Rachmaninov toiled at the keyboard for hours each day, playing simple pieces at 1/3rd the normal tempo. Horowitz slaved over tricky passages, repeating them hundreds of times until he got them to sound just right. Rudolf Serkin reportedly spent nearly as much time on practicing as he did on sleeping. But Cortot and Schnabel, it seems, were too busy communing with the spirits of Chopin and Beethoven respectively to waste their valuable time on the drudgery of serious daily practice.   And when the time came for these High Priests of music to communicate their masters' revelations to the public by actually playing the piano, the results (as preserved in studio and live recordings) often were as pathetic as a porn flick with an octogenarian male in the lead role.

There is something perverse, or at least hypocritical, in the fact that many of today's fine pianists, who no doubt take their professional responsibilities very seriously, go out of their way to make excuses for Cortot's and Schnabel's abominably unprofessional behavior. When I hear that the technical blunders in Cortot's and Schnabel's recordings are "endearing" (Stephen Hough) or even "fabulous" (Philippe Entremont), I shudder at the thought that the day may come when such affectionate tolerance will be extended to other professions - say, plastic surgery. Perhaps the eloquent Stephen Hough will eventually explain in his blog - at a suitably high level of generality appropriate for theoretical aesthetics - why it is acceptable to disfigure a composer at the keyboard, but not a patient on the operating table.

In the end, I think my problem is ultimately semantic in nature. I don't respond to Schnabel's playing at all, but I have most of Cortot's recordings, know these recordings very well, and expect to continue listening to them in the future. I certainly agree that there is something very special about Cortot's playing. I just don't think that this something is adequately (or even meaningfully) described by calling Cortot a great pianist.

PACIFICA QUARTET live: Shostakovich String Quartets Opp.110 & 118

2011-07-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

LINCOLN PERFORMANCE HALL (Portland State U., Oregon)

S H O S T A K O V I C H
String Quartet No.8, Op.110
String Quartet No.10, Op.118 (*)

P a c i f i c a Q u a r t e t

January 10 (*) & 11, 2011
Lincoln Performance Hall
Portland State University
256 kbs mp3

(no re-encoding)

These live and unedited performances by the Pacifica Quartet are surprisingly refined and focused, with absolutely state-of-the art recorded sound. If you respond to this music of communal apartments, food shortages, endless winters, and the ever-present smell of fear - then you are likely to enjoy these immaculate performances a great deal. I certainly did, but primarily because the music is presented here far more abstractly than in the supposedly "authentic" performances by Soviet (Russian) musicians. The latter make me feel like I'm stuck in Murmansk for the winter, with nothing but Tarkovsky films playing at the only local movie theater. Which is to say that the music of Shostakovich, not very interesting to begin with, only loses in performances which see relentless gloom as its principal message.

I described the refinement of the present performances as 'surprising' because the two Beethoven quartets performed at the same concerts were pure embarrassment: scrappy and whiny tone, relentlessly poor intonation (e.g., in Op.59 #3), bad ensemble. Perhaps the Pacifica players were saving all their energy and concentration for the Shostakovich quartets, while treating Beethoven as an insignificant filler... Or maybe they just can't play well with reasonable consistency... I really can't tell because these are the only live recordings by this group that I've heard. Incidentally, the folks in the concert hall were dead silent during the Shostakovich quartets, but did their best to cough out half a lung each during the Beethoven pieces. Were they reacting to the ugly sounds coming from the stage?