Monday Music, ear-stretching edition

Reverse your morality, listen to bands
That play only music you can't stand.
--Brave Combo, "Do Something Different"

I make a point of listening to music that I don't like.  I should clarify; I don't go around all the time listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, because there is a difference between music that I don't like, and music that is bad.  There is a lot of music out there, in all sorts of genres, that is generally regarded as good or great, but that has never really clicked for me.

The works of Wagner, or Prince, or Phillip Glass, or Ornette Coleman get wonderful reviews, but generally, I don't like them.  It's not a matter of genre--I'm an opera nut, I like good pop, I'm a fan (to the Real Doctor's chagrin) of American minimalism, and plenty of post-bop Jazz.  There's got to be some reason that such folks are held in such critical esteem--something they alone can communicate, in some dialect of the language that I yet don't have an ear for.  I figure that it must be worthwhile to get that message.

So, if I have the time and the space between my ears, if something comes around on the radio that is good but that I don't like, I try to give it a listen.  Sometimes it doesn't work, despite my best efforts.  I remember driving the length of the Sacramento Valley one night listening to Die Walkure and just not getting it at all.  Some other folks report feeling deep insight into human relations and duty to family and honor when listening to this piece.  I felt tedium, the perfect musical equivalent of driving the straight, flat, barren stretch of I-5 on a moonless night.

I think I started feeling strongly about some music in my teens.  Decades on, there are pieces I love so much that hearing them causes a physical reaction.  There are pieces that I've studied, and played, that I appreciate more and more every year.  But I'm never going to hear the Goldberg Variations for the first time, and have it knock me on my ass, ever again.  That only happens once and it happened over thirty years ago.

Nonetheless, I keep listening, and once in a while I come upon a treasure--I get to re-live that feeling, the emotional wallop, of hearing something great for the first time.  It's why I keep listening, both for something I haven't heard, and to good music I don't like.  Yesterday I had to drive to Portland and back, a six hour round trip.  The folks who run the show at Sirius Radio's opera channel decided they should play a vintage performance of Donizetti's Lucia Di Lammermoor, with Sutherland and Bonynge.  It's classic stuff, critically acclaimed; it's also been proven by experience to leave me unmoved and bored.  I never really loved Sutherland's voice or the whole Donizetti schtick.  What the heck, though, I decided to give it a listen. Well, I got it, to the point where I wanted to stop the car and applaud at the end of the mad scene.  Whooooo-ah, that's some singing there.  And now I want to hear it again.

So I'll keep listening to music I don't like.  Maybe I can't say that I don't like Walkure.  Maybe I should say that I don't like it yet.

Monday Musical Offering, Found in Translation

Translation is treason.  That is what we're told, at any rate, when it comes to the art of opera these days.  There's so much concern about purity, and not just in the early music camp, that performers and audiences seem obligated to experience exactly what the composer experienced.  In opera, composers and librettists worked together to make words that flowed with the pulse of the music, to make assonance and cadence work together.  Opera in translation belittles the work of both musician and scribe, and crudely misrepresents art.

To which I say, what a load of horse poop.

Set aside that "purity" and "what the composer heard" are imaginary and belief in these goals is a road to fundamentalism.  Set aside that until the middle of this century, it was common practice to hear opera performed in the vernacular, so one can hear recordings of Boris Gudonov in German or Siegfried in French.  Hell, set aside the existence of Otello and Falstaff and Romeo et Juliette and Faust.  Rigidity about original language performance puts a fence around opera, and says "you don't get to enjoy this until you fully understand Italian (or German or French or Czech or...)"

Supertitles are the most common way to try to satisfy the purity police and provide some degree of comprehensibility, but I don't feel like they are adequate.  If composer's intent is important, then I'm pretty sure that the composer did not intend for us to be reading during their works.  Reading supertitles, the voices on stage are forced to compete with the much less mellifluous voice in your head.  If supertitles are the best solution to the problem of language in opera, then the best way for me to enjoy the poem "Eugene Onegin" is to listen to somebody reciting it in Russian while I read a linear translation.

Translation is necessarily inexact; translation changes the sound of the piece; translation interpolates one more artist between the artist and the audience.  All true, and all trivial compared to experiencing an opera as it should be experienced, through sound and spectacle.  Opera isn't about words, but music (this is sometimes used as the dividing line between opera and musicals).  It's true that the sound of English is very different from Czech, but if you're not Czech, then the Czech language sounds like noise (and if you do speak Czech, then listening to an Australian singing Makropolous in the original language probably also sounds like noise).  And hopefully, just like the conductor, orchestra, and singers, our translator is an artist.  And fortunately, such artists are not rare.  I'm pretty sure that the politicians who claim the Bible as their favorite book know very little Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.  One of my favorite books of all, The Cyberiad by Lem, I know only in translation by Kandel; one of my favorite guilty pleasures, the French Asterix comics, are well enough translated by Bell and Hockridge that some of the puns are actually improved in English.

What spurs this rant is a recent purchase: CD's of  Don Carlos and Ariadne on Naxos.  These are from Chandos' thoroughly excellent "Opera in English" series, of which I own several and I want to get them all, eventually.  The translations are extremely good (there are occasional clunkers, but they're not bad enough to disrupt the flow of things), and having the meaning of the words intelligible as they are sung increases the impact of the music to an astonishing degree.  Opera, at its best, gives me the chills or puts a major lump in my throat.  Well, I've listened to Don Carlos' Auto-da-fe scene a bunch of times, and Rodrigo and Carlos swearing their friendship, but listening to them and finally understanding the words made them hit me like a ton of bricks.  Same for Zerbinetta's big number and the meeting of Ariadne and Bacchus in Ariadne.

It may be, years hence, that I'll have studied enough Italian and German to fully understand these in their original tongues; but until that time, I will probably be listening to these recordings a lot.  I have recordings of Falstaff both in English by middle-of-the-road performers and in a powerhouse performance conducted by Toscanini, and I listen to the English version a lot more.  Pure or not, I derive a lot more enjoyment and feeling from hearing these operas in a language that speaks to me.  Which, when you get to it, is most likely the author's original intent.

Why didn't I know about this?!?!?!

In case you were wondering about my musical tastes, there's some things about which I'm an unabashed enthusiast. 

I really like Bach's "Goldberg" Variations.  I started off falling in love with the 1955 Gould recording, then getting seduced by the 1981 Gould recording, attended a good performance by Peter Serkin and a great performance by Jeremy Denk, not to mention the great recording by by Simone Dinnerstein.  The Goldbergs are one of the desert-island ten; I'd have a real hard time deciding which recording to take. 

I am an avid fan of what some see as excesses of late 19th-early 20th century Romantic pianism--the overcooked exuberance of Godowsky, Brahms, Liszt, Busoni, and their ilk.  I especially like it when they took the music of an earlier era and reworked it for their own ends; I have oodles of recordings of Bach in transcription.  Chasing this genus of genius leads one to the music of composers who are still really good, just not well-remembered, such as Rheinberger and Reger.

Also, I've always been a great fan of piano music for four (or six, or eight, or one) hands.  My first piano teacher, Mr. Bangs (really, that was his name), was really into the stuff, and his enthusiasm spread.  He got me and brother M. to play some of the Dvorak Slavonic dances, and ever since, whenever I meet someone who is also a pianist, I work my way around to see if they're interested.

So I wonder how it is that I only found out about the overlap of these sets

just a couple of days ago? Joseph Rheinberger--friend of Brahms, teacher, composer mainly remembered for tons of organ and choral music, but also author of lots of excellent chamber and piano stuff (not to mention some good 4-hand music) decided that the Goldbergs needed to be popularized.  They're awkward to play, being written for a two-manual harpsichord, so he figured he'd split the music between two pianos.  And, being a romantic, he felt that the writing was a bit spare, so he fleshed it out, just a bit.  A few decades later, Max Reger* a composer of similar sympathies, felt that the arrangement was OK, but needed a little more.  So, there we have it.  And there it sat for a hundred years. 

Well, no matter.  Pretty much as soon as I became aware of it, I went and purchased a recording

 and downloaded the score from IMSLP.

It's fabulous, meets and exceeds expectations, scratches all my itches and pushes all my buttons.  There's a You Tube video of a few minutes of the piece, if you want to get a taste. 

*Today, Reger is most famous for his reply to a music critic: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is in front of me. Soon, it will be behind me."

Culture comes to the hinterlands (updated wth video)

One of the things that I have really missed since moving from Sacramento to Roseburg is a lively classical music scene.  The Real Doctor and I were spoilt rotten by the concert programming at UC Davis—the yearly series by the Alexander Quartet, the recitals by Garrick Ohlsson and Joshua Bell and the like.  The scene here is considerably colder, as might be expected in a town of 20,000.  Roseburg’s nearest neighbor with artistic aspirations is Eugene, over an hour away, and beyond that, there isn’t much less than three hours away.  Roseburg gets a yearly visit from the Eugene Symphony, which is the best orchestra in the southern Wilamette Valley.  There is a Community Concert series, whose offerings tend to be jazz or pop-classical.  There is the Umpqua Symphony Association, which focuses mainly on local talent for its handful of concerts each year.  If we went to every concert that could be filed under “classical music” this last year, we’d have seen less than 10 events, of wildly variable quality.

Given that, here’s a big shout-out to the proprietors of MarshAnne Landing Winery, who have seen fit to invite some classical musicians to have recitals in their tasting room/gallery.  The space can hold thirty people or so, making it quite cozy; the “stage” is nook with a decent-but-not-fabulous upright piano and room for a string quartet or a single very expressive violinist.  The concerts are the personal effort of the winery’s proprietors, so programming is necessarily modest.  Joshua Bell won’t be playing there, and the two recitals we’ve seen may be all for the season, but they’ve been thoroughly appreciated.  I don’t feel like being the music critic here; my attitude is more gratitude than judgement.  So, I’ll go on about some externalities.  

One program featured the violinist Lindsay Deutsch, playing a very casual show of Gershwin, Piazzola, Vivaldi, Brahms, and De Falla (the pianist played one of the Debussy Images while the violinist took a break).  The concert reflected the cultural stereotype that when you go out into the sticks, you have to play pop or light classical stuff.  It was pretty clear that there were a few audience members who would not be satisfied with any violin show that did not involve some of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—and “Winter” was duly served up, to audible sighs of contentment.  The Brahms concerto was presented, but with apologies about its length and (to prevent boredom, I guess) as isolated movements separated by shorter, snappier pieces.  It was nice to get the Piazzola; it’s a little off the beaten path, and I really enjoyed the De Falla “Suite Popular.”

The concert by Chamber Music Amici of Eugene was a bit more “Serious”; a Mozart violin sonata, a cello sonata by the 20^th-century Portuguese composer Luis Costa, and a string quintet by Bruch that, while written in 1918, had only been published around 1980.  It was so nice to hear unfamiliar stuff presented straight up; the cello sonata was convincingly delivered and the Bruch made me go home and buy a recording.  The performances were good; the Amici have day jobs, and though most are connected with music, the violinist for the Mozart is a practicing physician. 

A couple of the instruments being played were of interest to the Real Doctor and me.  We are both a bit geeky about violins, and sometimes my attention to the music can be diverted by attention to the violin it’s played on.  In this case, the instruments were both inspired by Guarneri “del Gesu”, but took the inspiration in different directions.  The first, from across the room, really had the look of a del Gesu, but as it was played, it just didn’t seem to have the same tonal oomph.  It (and the player) was clearly aspiring to tonal richness, but it just was not really there.  The second instrument looked del-Gesu-ish, maybe early 1730’s, but just didn’t seem visually to be abused enough for a violin of that age.  However, its sound was rich—not as rich as the best del Gesu’s, but much more satisfying than the first violin.   

There are different schools of thought about what makes the difference between a good and a great violin.  Being who I am, I tend to think in graphs.  Here’s what some people like, which happens to be the first violin:

On any note, at any volume, the violin can only produce a limited number of interesting tones; however, it’s extremely uniform across the entire spectrum.  There’s also this:

Combine that with the fact that it tends to sound good under the ear of the person playing it, and you have what some people—including big names such as Hahn and Tetzlaff—find satisfying. It should also be noted that the brown line for your average student violin rarely gets as high as the brown line above. 

Here’s a rather different sort of violin, which happens to be the second violin, and also is more like the violins of Stradivari and del Gesu.

Few or no notes are wanting in tonal richness, and some regions are positively oozing with the stuff.  But,

It takes a lot of work to pull that stuff out of the violin.  It’s harder to play, and effectively use the entire endowment of the fiddle—but if the player has the skill and patience to exploit it, the results are amazing. 

The violin is a tool, a physical entity.  So what makes this difference?  The musicians giving these concerts were generous enough to let us take a closer look at their instruments and tell us about them. 

The first violin was a Vuillaume, made in the mid-1800’s.  Vuillaume enjoyed a reputation for making the finest copies of the finest violins, so it’s not too surprising that the fiddle visually announced itself as “del Gesu” from across the room.  However, close-up, a couple of details emerged.  One was that the arching was very low—if you looked at the fiddle side-on, it was several millimeters skinnier than a classic Cremonese instrument, which bulges out 15 or more mm front and back.  Another structural detail that affects sound was the absence of recurve as the arch blends into the side of the violin; if you were an ant, marching from the bridge to one of the sides, your trip would be downhill all the way, rather than pitching up for the last few paces.  These structural details—and lack of tonal richness--are pretty characteristic of Vuillaume.  Now, these are not horrible fiddles; I wouldn’t reject one as a gift, and one recently sold at auction for over $200,000.  They are just not my thing.

The second violin of note was an American instrument made by Carl Holzapfel in Philadelphia in the 1920’s, who was (it turns out) the great-grandfather of the violinist.  It had nice arching and nice recurve.  As I mentioned, it also had terrific sound; according to the violinist, it won a slew of awards and was the pride and joy of its luthier.  Holzapfel has some limited recognition as a good maker, and despite the obvious quality of the instrument, it will never sell for a tenth of what the Vuillaume will bring.  Go figure.

This raises a couple of questions.  The obvious one is why does sound mean so little in the sale price of a musical instrument—but the answer there is probably like the answer to why a 500-square foot apartment in downtown New York costs as much as our farm.  Another question, to which I don’t have a good start of an answer, is why Vuillaume made the copies he made in the way that he made them.  Was he aware of arching, and discounted it as meaningless?  Did it just not register in his eye?  I just don’t know.  To emphasize the point, I’ll close with photos of a different Vuillaume and a real Cremonese violin (alas, I can’t remember its identity; I think it’s a Petro Guarneri; the photos were taken during the 2012 Claremona workshop).  

And here, courtesy of Michael Darnton, is a video of a Brothers Amati violin that really illustrates the classic shape I'm talking about: Go watch this!

Well, we liked it

A couple of weekends ago we went to see a rather remarkable concert--the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff playing the entire Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. I don't really have standing to offer trenchant criticism of the concert--I'm not really a violinist, and I'm not that familiar with the score. So, I used the concert as an opportunity to learn the music--follow along with the score in hand, see and hear the architecture of the music. Unsurprisingly, I'm convinced that the Sonatas and Partitas are really good stuff.

I can talk a little about the performance--Tetzlaff clearly can do whatever he wants on the violin, and some of what he did that night was really magnificent. He communicated the music clearly, and with enough freedom that it became personal. I particularly enjoyed his slower movements. I did take issue with some of the faster movements, especially the Gigues with which the suites end. These are supposed to be fast, but they are dances and should maintain their distinctive triple beat. However, Tetzlaff played them really really fast--so fast that they pretty nearly lost their beat, and just became a rapid-fire string of notes. However, on the whole, I really enjoyed the concert.

There were people there who did have standing to be critics; seated behind us was an older woman who also had the score with her. She worked as a violin teacher, and she said of his faster movements that "that's not the way I learned it. Perhaps he had a plane to catch."

A fun way to spend Halloween. Well, more fun than handing out candy at any rate.

The Real Doctor and I went to see a lecture/demonstration by Alfred Brendel on the last night of October. Brendel no longer gives concerts; his fingers no longer have the agility or stamina needed to live up to his standards. However, his mind is still sharp and overflowing with wit and scholarship, so he gives lectures punctuated by short musical excerpts. The subject of this lecture was humor in music.

It’s good practice in argument, as in war, to dictate the field of action to suit your own strengths. Brendel did this. Although he has an extensive recorded repertoire, from Bach to Schoenberg and beyond, he has made his name as a cerebral master of the Viennese classics, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. So, he chose to define humor in such a way that it can only really be found in the high Classical style (and perhaps Ligeti).

Humor can be found in music where we see foiled harmonic expectations, pratfalls where expertise fails, the simulation of laughter, inappropriate or contradictory expressions, and the like. The bottom line is that, by his definition, humor basically requires expectations—expectations that can be created by the relatively structured nature of the Classical style. (Though I’m not sure Brendel would approve, this is exactly what PDQ Bach and Victor Borge take advantage of.) Having set up his argument, Brendel easily carried it off, dismissing any opposition. When Schumann writes a piece with the marking “mit humor,” the piece itself is not funny, it’s pervaded by a humorous mood. When Bartok lampoons Shostakovich in the Concerto for Orchestra, it’s not humorous, it’s grotesque. Scherzos—“jokes”—from Chopin to Rachmaninoff? Not really funny funny, again, more grotesque. Bach? Not funny at all.

You might imagine that an evening watching an elderly German guy dissect and analyze humor would be deadly. It was actually quite entertaining. Though he’s not as strong at the piano as he used to be, Brendel illustrated his rather narrow argument with excellent examples. The humor in a Haydn sonata was intensified when Brendel played the same piece drained of all humor by hewing to expectations. A riotous Beethoven Bagatelle that incongruously juxtaposes a jaunty mood with a minor key was made funnier when Brendel played it in the major, turning it into an icky puddle of sap. Beethoven (who is for my money the funniest composer out there) received the most attention, especially the Diabelli variations. Interestingly, for Brendel, Mozart and Schubert are pretty much without humor. Their music is so concerned with beauty and singing that humor just didn’t seem to interest them.

There was an element of gentle polemic to the evening as well. Brendel is intellectual, but he is also a vigorous advocate of humor. Why, he wondered, is coughing permitted in concert halls, but laughing banned? Why do some players do their best to suppress humor? He concluded, somewhat sadly, that some people just don’t get it. It’s like being color blind. It’s not their fault.

In his role as humor advocate, Brendel does come across differently from Brendel as concert artist. He satirized the humorless Haydn player by sitting at the piano and charging right into a witty sonata movement—then playing it as it should be played: sitting at the piano, pausing to arch one eyebrow above his glasses at the audience, and then launching into the joke. On the whole, he was much more facially involved than I had ever seen him, emphasizing jokes and contrasts with a degree of mugging that I found surprising. So, although he had a sound intellectual argument as the foundation of the evening, Brendel left me with another question.

Music is about communication by sound, and the role of the performer is to communicate the sounds the composer specified (plus some of his or her own interpretation) to the listener. There definitely is humor in music; I can listen to a recording of the Diabelli Variations or Bagatelles in a dark room and still get a laugh. But when we are dealing with humor—or pathos, or whatever emotion is needed—how much of the performer’s job is visual? And, did Brendel’s face answer this question in a way that his intellect would approve of?