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February 21, 2007

The latest Hatto rumours

I talked to some interesting people re 'Hattogate' yesterday and given the nature of some of the conspiracy theories currently flying around the internet, I think I really should say something about one of these people: a consultant radiologist who was involved in Hatto's cancer treatment at Addenbrooke's Hospital and saw her every 6 weeks during the last eight years up to her death. I think that this conversation at the very least scotched any suggestions that she didn't have cancer, or that she died before the official date and someone impersonated her for a few years.

Her cancer was ovarian, the symptoms of which you couldn't and wouldn't fake (I know quite a lot about this as my sister died of it too). The extraordinary thing is that she had it for 14 years. I'm sure I've read larger figures for the length of time she was ill, but it was apparently 14 years, which is extraordinary enough for a vicious disease that more often kills its victims in 3-5. Apparently she was in excellent spirits, very lively, impeccably turned out and had astonishing strength and stamina for most of that time.

This relates to the issue of how much critics' responses to a recording (or anything else) are affected by factors external to the music-making. For example, I have been a Hattocynic all this time. Now that I've learned that she had the same disease as my sister, and one that I myself have to be screened for every year as it can be genetic, something has inevitably shifted: I find I'm more inclined to take her side, wondering whether all the identifications of recordings that have been posted to Wikipedia have been scientifically tested for matching wavelengths... Suddenly I want those recordings to have been hers! Just at the point when more and more factors seem to suggest that they weren't.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 21, 2007 at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

Modena (2002). Keith Fullerton Whitman /keith, terry, morton (and aworks)/

Originally from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 21, 2007 at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2007-02-21

Originally from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 21, 2007 at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

Last Night in L.A.: New Voices

Monday Evening Concerts are alive and well and being given in the great acoustics of Zipper Hall!  And if you don’t know why that’s important you’re reading the wrong blog.  Last night’s program was the most stimulating in four or five years, stimulating because it presented works by six talented composers, works that were fresh and alive and downright good music.

One of the fresh approaches in the new MEC is to have a musician serve as curator for the program, selecting composers to bring to our attention and determining the works to support the rationale.  In this first program Steven Stucky identified six composers in their early-to-middle careers, composers he felt we should know more about.  As Stucky pointed out, the awards received and notable appearances given by these six point out they are certainly not “unknown artists”; instead, they are composers we should know much more about.  Our local Xtet group provided the professional musicians for five of the six works (student violinists performed the sixth), and composer/conductor/professor Donald Crockett of USC and Xtet conducted four of the pieces.

The concert began with “Gran Turismo” (2005) by Andrew Norman, one of the twenty-year-olds, currently in Rome enjoying his Rome Prize.  His bio lists 12 other prizes for composition.  The work is a delightful perpetual motion for eight (8) violins.  It was inspired by some paintings by Italian Futurists, particularly those of Giacomo Balla showing racing cars, paintings attempting to show movement and speed.  A great start for a concert! 

James Matheson wrote the next work, “Falling” (2000) for violin, cello and piano.  Matheson did his graduate work (MFA, DMA) at Cornell, studying with Stucky and writing his doctoral thesis on Harbison’s music.  Also with awards aplenty (I’ll stop saying this), Matheson received a commission from Carnegie for Upshaw’s Perspectives series, a composition for soprano and chamber orchestra.  “Falling”, with a recurring motif of descending notes only to end in peaceful contemplation, acknowledges pre-modern musical forms while speaking in contemporary musical language.  I could find only one clip of another work by Matheson on the Amazon search, and another clip on iTunes.  I’d like to hear both his Carnegie commission and his work for the Albany Orchestra.

Sean Shepard, the other composer in his 20s, closed the first half with “Lumens” (2005) for violin, cello, flute/piccolo, clarinet, piano, and percussion, primarily tuned percussion.  His web site gives three clips, which sound exactly as I remembered the performance, plus notes on the composition.  I find it interesting that he would mention that some might object to the prettiness of the work, but that he persisted and was able to write something that might be so accessible.

A slightly older contingent had works in the second half of the concert, kicked off by “peal” (2000) by Philippe Bodin.  This is a work for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano.  Bodin’s note describe the work as variations on a theme of a two-voice canon.  My ears don’t hear canon inversions, so I’ll accept his description.  His personal web site provides two good clips (and here) of the interesting music.

If applause can be trusted, the audience favorite was the fifth work, “Darkness Visible” (1998-1999) by Ana Lara.  Her work (for violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion).  This is accessible, but moody — quite appealing to an audience hearing it for the first time.  Her web site gives eight mp3 clips, all of other works but bearing a compositional relationship to what we heard last night.  Amazon has only one composition of hers, on a multi-composer CD.  One of her compositions was performed by our local Long Beach, but her works deserve much more exposure.

The program closed similarly to its start, with a work about speed (or time), “Faster Still” (2004) by Brian Current.  The master, Alan Rich, quotes Stucky as describing the work:  “It’s as if Elliott Carter wrote only arpeggios.”  The work is for solo violin and piano, accompanied by a traditional string quartet.  The solo violin part is fast and furious (most often), and the piano part is probably somewhat challenging, although it’s not as showy.  Tempi change constantly.  No sound clips are available.  Only one of his works is listed by Amazon.  His web site, however, does provide some interesting mp3s, on two web pages.

Steven Stucky made his point:  these are composers we should hear more.

Saturday night we saw the L.A. Opera’s production of “Mahagonny“.  The reviews haven’t been good.  I liked it.  Very much.  I thought it was the best realization of Brecht’s theories of theatre that I’ve seen, and Audra McDonald was a great Jenny.  Conlon as conductor kept all touches of romanticism out of the playing.  Of all my musical enthusiasms from college, the one to last has been that for Kurt Weill’s music.  I think Brecht is seeming more and more like an historical artifact, but that music is still fresh and bracing.

Jerry Z

Originally posted by JerryZ from Sequenza21/, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 21, 2007 at 02:01 AM | Comments (0)

Remembering Gian Carlo Menotti

John Kennedy, Jack Beeson, Tania León, and Lee Hoiby share their memories of Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007).

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 21, 2007 at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2007

Woman Composer

At a time when there are more female role models, mentors, and opportunities, the number of women entering composition looks as if it is drying up.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

An Enemy of the People

The attention of an audience should be of paramount importance for any music.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

W.H. Auden holding court ...

Another chance encounter with a writer was due to my friend Julian Pettifer, who was at St John’s (Cambridge). He said there would be a special guest in his rooms that evening, and asked me to drop in late for coffee. I climbed in and found to my delight the rumpled figure of W.H. Auden holding court. He was relatively sober and hugely entertaining, and I could see immediately why so many people found him charming. In later years he became a prize bore when drunk, which was most of the time, going on endlessly about who had sung the Third Lady in The Magic Flute in 1952. Happily, before that I was with him on a number of occasions when he was reading his own works, at which he excelled.

Once in Edinburgh, after a BBC recording, we went to the pub to have a drink with Stevie Smith at her eccentric best. Within twenty minutes Wystan and Stevie had started on a nostalgic journey through Hymns Ancient and Modern at a hideously out-of-tune piano. I rushed back to the BBC, rounded up a camera crew, and got back in time to film a few minutes of this priceless duet. It is often trotted out in commemorative programmes. Of course, in today’s BBC you would have to have it planned eighteen months in advance.

W.H. Auden was born on 21st February 1907. The story above is taken from John Drummond’s autobiography. Now take a magic carpet to Monteverdi in Cambridge

John Drummond's autobiography is published by Faber, ISBN 0571200540. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)

Classical music should embrace marginality

Regular reader Bernard Tuyttens gives us the heads-up on the post below from A Sweet Familiar Dissonance as a contribution to the current debate, or should that be despair? about the changes to BBC Radio 3.

Tom Strini suggests that the best thing for the future of classical music would be to "embrace its marginality." I tend to "flip-flop" on this issue (if you'll excuse the expression) though most of the time I try to keep a positive outlook. I would like to think there will always be a few people who love classical music - maybe enough to keep it alive indefinitely - but the world we live in is discouraging to a classical music fan. "Singers" who can't read a single note of music make millions of dollars and fans dismiss as "boring" anything that requires the least bit of thoughtful attention. People who have never bothered to listen to even one complete symphony - people who, in fact, may not even realize that the five minute excerpt on some "classical for dummies" CD is not the complete symphony - have already passed judgement on the entire rich and exciting thousand year history of classical music and actually believe they are fully qualified to do so.

Marketing is the primary culprit in this apparently bleak situation. The goal of marketing is to get people to buy - to spend their money without thinking. No matter how much they appear to be appealing to your intelligence, the fact is, intelligent thought is the number one enemy of marketing. Music, like everything else, has become a product to be sold so it is packaged to attract immediate attention, not to satisfy over the long run.

But, in addition to dumbing down the audience, marketing has turned us all in into scorekeepers. We know that number recordings sold or number of dollars made is not an indicator of quality but, nevertheless, we wail about the unfairness of an industry that rewards an untalented, thin-voiced bimbette with vast riches and popularity while real musicians with many years of training and practice remain in obscurity and often have to take other jobs to make ends meet. We should keep in mind that economics has never been and never will be fair.

If classical music is destined to be marginal it is not the only artform of which this is true. I would like to think that truly intelligent people will eventually get bored with most commercialized forms of entertainment - though it may take quite a while with so many things competing for our attention - and will seek other options. When they do, they will find not only classical but a number of other genres, some even more obscure, in which quality is still important. As Strini notes in the article, we have many more choices now and each slice of pie is thinner than it used to be.

Maybe it will be a healthy thing if the music world becomes more like the book world. Some people read mysteries, some read romances, some read science fiction, some read westerns and so on. Millions of people read Stephen King but there are hundreds of other authors who are each read by only a few thousand devoted fans and they keep writing, perhaps dreaming of greater fame but still happy to perform for their limited audience. So maybe we all need to stop thinking in terms of marketing success and just enjoy the music and, like a good book, share it with a few friends.

Now read about Peak Melody

The marginal images are slices of Miro. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)

Roberto Magris Europlane - - Il Bello del Jazz

Soul Note The work of Italian pianist Roberto Magris is new to me; I undertook investigation only after I heard that he would be releasing a disc with the incomparable Arthur Davis, apparently due to drop sometime later this...

Originally from Bagatellen, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

Aesthetics Under the Palm Trees

I'm basking in the February sunlight of Florida's east coast as I write this, enjoying a free morning at the...

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

Piece by Piece, a Festival Takes Shape

Allan Kozinn, New York Times, 2/19/2007

Originally from Classical Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

bandrm - epetition response

Originally posted by Tim Rutherford-Johnson from The Rambler, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

Jarrett, Thibaudet

Awhile back, there were news reports that the CIA and FBI were using computer software to analyze people's gaits in an attempt to stop terrorists from blowing up buildings. The argument ran that terrorists tends to walk nervously, hunched over, and in such a way that announced to a detailed computer program that they had a bomb strapped to them. Predicting what sort of music a performer will create based on how they walk onstage doesn't seem quite so outlandish when I remember that our hard-working government has people doing something similiar to ensure the future of western civilization.

Keith Jarrett moves from offstage to center stage as easily as walking down the sidewalk, sometimes so at ease that his his hands are stuffed in his pockets. He began his improvised solo concert Saturday night at Orchestra Hall with a breezy chromatic dash that covered all the piano's octaves, softly. This grew into a tightly focused left-hand ostinato, with boppish lines laid on top of it. His second number was gospel waltz, the third a Ligeti-esque tinkler, and the fourth was a simple song. That slow song contained the sadness of a lifetime. Leisurely, pensively, gracefully, that song unfolded, its minor key resolving in the major every so often, the major chords sounding even more wistfully than the minor. His first half closed with another Ligeti-sounding exercise.

The days of epic, 45-minute uninterrupted stretches of the solo concerts are gone, I think it's safe to conclude. The concerts that have found their way to commercial recordings, from Tokyo and Carnegie Hall, are broken up into smaller sections of 10 to 15 minutes, and that formula, if it is a formula, prevailed Saturday night. Some listeners were irked by that, some think he's sold out, and while the applause was deafening, it's still clear that not everyone likes this new direction.

The first rule of criticism is that you don't criticize something for not being what it is. Landscape painters aren't trashed because they aren't Jackson Pollock, Ned Rorem isn't tossed aside for not being Pierre Boulez, and, in this case, Keith Jarrett circa 2007 shouldn't be listened to as if he's Keith Jarrett circa 1975. The sections of Friday night's concert added up to something as powerful as the totality of the Cologne concert, but achieved that in different ways, in different amounts of time.

The fourth song from the first half, its bass line descending downward step by step, its atomized melody letting each note be torn from it, had in its power to reduce 2,200 people to silence. That Jarrett did that in five minutes instead of over 45 shouldn't be that important. He pulled that trick off again a few times in the second half, most often in his five encores. An ebullient stride improvisation over rhythm changes did it, as did his last selection, "When I Fall in Love," the only non-improvised portion of the concert.

Jarrett 1975 and Jarrett 2007 both moan and sing along and writhe and gyrate at the keyboard, and everyone's got an opinion on whether it's distracting or integral, and I'll take integral. I'm also not put off by his request that no one cough, but just say that if he's concerned enough to make the request, maybe he shouldn't play in Chicago in February. We're all much healthier in spring and summer. One denizen of the upper balcony came down with a coughing fit , and he actually stopped playing, raised his hand, and asked the person to cough once more, because he said he knew there was one more. Once more they coughed, then he picked back up.

He finally left the stage with the same droll assurance with which he walked on two hours earlier, but the audience left buzzing.

In stark contrast is Jean-Yves Thibaudet, whose birdlike legs appear to cover the ground from the stage door to the piano parked at center stage in two strides. Once there, he's burdened with music that must be released.

The collection of six Chopin pieces he began his Sunday afternoon recital with at Orchestra Hall hit the intellectual median of his program, with headier works by Debussy, Messiaen and Liszt on one side and humorous Satie on the other. Through it all, his spidery fingers etched out the fine lines of each differently inspired composer.

Most surprising was Liszt's Dante sonata, which Thibaudet brought a booming sound to and no lack of drama or technique apparent. Some may approach achieve a richer tone with the pedal, but he knows his technique and how best to deploy it. I've heard him give a riveting performance of Liszt's Totentanz, but was still pleasantly surprised with the Frenchman's idiomatic exuberance in the Dante sonata.

Thibaudet is, of course, one of the most renowned pianists of the French rep. The first and seventh  Gnossienes contained revelations in the inner voices, even in the supremely well-known first (which I was heard with a backbeat while in a taxi). His three Debussy etudes were models of clarity, although I would've liked a little more warmth in No. 11, Pour les arpeges composees.

But the he ended with a supremely gorgeous final regard from Messian's Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jesus, the Regard de l'Eglise d'amour. It's almost impossible to convey the release that has accumulated by that regard when the complete, two-hour cycle is performed, but his outsize performance came as close as is possible. If he ever performs the entire work, I'll make sure to attend.

He left the stage after his two encores, by Debussy and Shura Cherkassky, as quickly as he arrived, with more pressing matters to attend to elsewhere, it seemed. Oh, and he also did indeed look very gay, as another Chicagoan noticed.

Originally posted by MarcGeelhoed from Marc Geelhoed: Deceptively Simple, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

Lessons for Rufus: Debussy cuts in

[Email sent to M. Rufus Wainwright from M. Claude Debussy; 19 February 2007]

Mon cher,

Do not listen to that macho cowboy Ives about changing your name. He is an idiot.

I was assigned to oversee your work on your new opera, but told not to interfere. I have been in correspondence with Ms. Brown about my insistence on passing on some advice to you directly. I’ve tried to send it to you psychically but you are not getting it, so I’ve asked for, and been granted an intervention.

Your work is really quite good for your first attempt (although I can not say that I was ever a master of that form myself). Your melodies are terrific. There are still some elements that many of us are concerned about, so we will try our best to pass on what we can for your further education while you are working on the opera. Most of us see you as a ray of hope in this bleak horizon of so-called “contemporary music.” There are others who see you as a modern day Karen Carpenter, which in their eyes is not a compliment. Don’t listen to them: they are just jealous. Composers: a touchy lot. The bottom line is to NOT write for them. Write for yourself and if it is your fancy, your audience. But don’t fall into the trap of writing for composers.

Rufus, when you compose, you tend to lay down a chord as a starting point and begin from there, roving from chord to chord via your lovely melodies. This may be because of how musicians have been trained and still are.

When analyzing music, it is common for musicians to refer to “chord progressions” meaning, a series of chords that follow each other. We teach students to be able to hear and take down as dictation these chord progressions.

As music becomes more contrapuntal, or melodically elaborate, using chordal analysis to describe the texture becomes less effective to describe what is going on harmonically. Listen to the opening of my La Mer. Screw trying to analyze the chord progression, realize that these are mode progressions. I have very consciously chosen modes that govern all of my harmony, all of my texture, and all of my melody. But instead of moving to a new chord, I move to a new mode. In the opening 3 minutes of the first movement I go through the pentatonic mode, the Rimksii scale, Mixolydian, and Lydian flat-7.

If I were able to materialize and land a teaching job in some University, I would retrain my theory students to hear in MODES instead of only chords. For instance, we look at an opening of a random Mozart piano sonata. Rarely is it just chords. With my appellation recommendations, we will refer to the area that is governed by the tonic chord, or “I” will be I/Ionian. The IV will be IV/Lydian. We look at Bach counterpoint, and if we try to think of it harmonically, there are “in” notes and “out” notes. We rationalize the “out” notes as passing tones or non-harmonic accented passing tones and so forth. Referring to harmonic regions MODALLY makes ALL of the notes “in.” The “out” notes would be, in the case of traditional Western music, chromatic neighbors.

Students would learn the difference of a chord progression that goes from:

I/Ionian - IV/Lydian

to

I/Mixolydian - IV/Mixolydian

The first harmonic progression is typical of diatonic “classical” harmony. The second is typical of 20th Century and after blues inspired chord progression. Traditional choral analysis would call this:

I - IV

and

I flat-7 - IV flat-7

In terms of information and the endless possibilities alone, the first option seems a far richer way of explaining musical passages harmonically. Yes, when we are sitting on a subdominant IV chord in a classical work in C major, the most stable notes of the collection are F, A, and C, but the JUICIEST notes are the B, and D and E, and G, and why exclude them and call them “out” notes?

Before you nod off, let me make my point: set a MODE in motion to fire your inspiration. A chord is limiting. I know that you know how to do this, as I’ve heard it in your “Agnus Dei” and in “Bloom.”

Rufus, my boy, you can invent your own modes. Sit down at the piano and find 6 notes that make you horny to write music. Or 7 notes, or 8 notes. Write them down. Name them. I hate the modern trend of set theory appellation where pitch collections are referred to as numbers. I prefer names that come from history or at least the moods they evoke. I just wrote a mode yesterday that I called “Sappho.” I found that is had a slight patchouli aroma!

I have been limited to this one email until much later. Embrace modes Rufus. Learn the power of mode progressions.

Keep up the good work, and learn from Charles, even though he can be an impossible man from time to time. He has a good heart, he is just biochemically unbalanced.

Astral hugs,

C. Debussy

[Kisses to Kate.]

Originally posted by Roger Bourland from rogerbourland.com, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

Smoothing the way for Glass

Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun, 2/18/2007

Originally from Classical Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

"Turned On" Post-mortem

Originally from Atlanta Composers Blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

Acocella night

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I will be appearing at Housing Works Used Book Café with New Yorker dance critic and cultural observer Joan Acocella, discussing her objectively splendid new book Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

Helix on the beach

Esa-Pekka Salonen appeared last Thursday at the Apple Store in Santa Monica, California, to discuss his orchestral piece Helix. Salonen demonstrated his composing methods at a pre-Intel PowerBook, holding a large crowd mesmerized. Another day in the non-death of classical music. 

Here is an array of seven-note scales and chords from which the musical material of Helix is generated:

Chad Smith, the LA Philharmonic's Vice President of Artistic Planning, who is not to be confused with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, moderated the discussion:

Salonen seldom appears in public without his fearsome security contingent:

Salonen's new Piano Concerto can be heard at the New York Philharmonic website through March 2.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

Now...

...The Telegraph has an article in which William Barrington-Coupe says that his wife Joyce Hatto's recordings were genuine. He 'can't explain some of the things they say are there'. He also points out wryly that if he'd wanted to make a lot more money, he'd have used a Russian name for the pianist.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

AAJ Reviews

From AAJ:

20-Feb-07 Taylor Ho Bynum & Tomas Fujiwara
True Events (482 Music)

20-Feb-07 Joe Zawinul
Brown Street (Heads Up International)

20-Feb-07 Uri Caine
Plays Mozart (Winter & Winter)

20-Feb-07 Ami Yoshida / Christof Kurzmann
ASO (Erstwhile Records)

19-Feb-07 Enrico Rava
The Words and the Days (ECM Records)

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Review: Hamid Drake at the Sons d’hiver Festival

This latest Hamid Drake ensemble is reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Miami Subtropics Festival

This long-running experimental music fest begins again this week.

MIAMI, AUGUST 16, 2006 - EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC IN MIAMI (save the dates): The 19th Annual Subtropics Experimental Music & Sound Arts Festival (ST-19), produced by the interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop (iSAW), will feature a series of musical performances and events in conjunction with Merce In Miami, a two-week citywide celebration of dance, music and art at Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. Subtropics 19 will feature the music of John Cage, founding musical director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as well as concerts with Merce Cunningham composer-musicians Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, John King and David Behrman.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Musique Machine Reviews

From Musique Machine:

Reuber - Südpol
Südpol( South Pole) is a wonderful rich, melodic and tone dense exploration into eletronic moodscapes. This is Reuber Forth album and follows on some of the spacey electronic tendency shown by his label mates Rafael Toral’s Space, but in a lot more approachable and accessible form.

Dog - A Grisly Tablea of Carnage
Dog make a lo-fi grimy and murky take on noise, that seems to hum and burn of cities sound discharged, All the sound elements are muddy together, runing like cold grey vomit down the audio canvas. Dog formed in 1991 Osaka Japan as a solo noise project of Steve Davis, this is projects 12 full length album along with many eps,etc.

Christening Black Death With The Devourm - S/T
Christening Black Death With The Devourment Of The Worm is a bit of a mouthful of a project name. So what does such a name have to offer?, well they submerge the listener in 40 minutes of maggot crawling dead for a few weeks, Subterranean drones. A ghastly flesh ripping mix of black ambience, noise of soured horrific grimness, with some slight nods towards metallic tendencies.

Charalambides - Glowing Raw
Glowing Raw is the first in a series of three archival disks that document an aborted album for Siltbreeze Records recorded between 1995-1998. The sounds here do fit in with the sounds of Market Square and Houston, the two albums that this would have been recorded between. Not to say that the music is exactly similar to either of those albums.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

A Season of Sizzle: Electroacoustic Improv Reviews

Dusted features a long article on recent releases of this sort.

While it’s impossible to keep up with all the developments in electroacoustic improvisation and related sub-genres, Jason Bivins surveys some of the more notable releases from the past several months.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

The piano lessons worked One more photo related t...

The piano lessons worked

One more photo related to the Grammy Award the Cleveland Chamber Symphony won for recording a Messiaen piece: Here is another photo of Angelin Chang, taken when she was getting piano lessons in France. The woman behind Chang is Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, her teacher. The old guy with the glasses? Olivier Messiaen.


The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a nice article Sunday on the Grammy. The paper's Chang interview is here.

Originally from Modernclassical, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Our juicy scandal Classical music has a new scand...

Our juicy scandal

Classical music has a new scandal, and believe it or not, it's almost as good as the astronaut with the diaper. Have you heard about Joyce Hatto? Despite struggling with terminal cancer, she was able somehow to record "the complete solo keyboard works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Prokofiev, not to mention virtually complete runs of Chopin and Liszt, as well as all of Brahms', Saint-Saäns', and Rachmaninoff's piano concertos," as Stereophile explains. Then again, maybe she got a little help from all of the other recordings of the same pieces her husband apparently stole for his record label. Hiperhip is all over this, including the wonderfully-named if mysterious "National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra" which shares co-credit with Hatto on one disc.

Originally from Modernclassical, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Two New Articles by Doc Woods

Originally from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2007-02-20

Originally from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

Dispatch from Juilliard: Chinary Ung

One of the many pleasures of the brief (but free) all-Chinary Ung concert given earlier today at Juilliard by the Da Capo Chamber Players was the absence of any blathering about “East meets West.” I’m sure part of the reason for the absence was a simple lack of time for blathering altogether: the performance was given in conjunction with the school’s Composers’ Forum which apparently keeps to a pretty tight schedule. But whatever the reason, such cross-cultural discussion would have been out of place. Ung’s music does not sound eclectic; it does not sound as if it had some agenda of cross-cultural reconciliation. His music sounds like music written by someone from a different musical culture who has found a way to manifest that culture with Western instruments. And the sound of Western instruments in such gifted Eastern hands is disarming, refreshing, and exciting. Ung’s command of extended techniques and his sensitivity to blending instruments must make him (with Tristan Murail) one of the foremost masters of tone color around. Ung’s ability to draw consonant intervals out from dense currents of heterophony, and then to place them back gently into the stream, was amply displayed in “Oracle,” “Luminous Spirals,” “Spiral VI,” and “… Still Life After Death,” the pieces on tonight’s program. While I thought most of the pieces were a little too long, the beautifully tapered endings did not lack impact, and the extra time to savor the sonorities pouring forth from the stage was welcome.  A highlight was the concluding vocal duet from “Still Life” between Lucy Shelton and the violinist (David Bowlin). Ung calls upon the violinist to stand and lowly chant an old Buddhist text while the singer whispers and stammers away into another life. This could have been nonsense, but instead it was the most moving music I’ve heard in months.

P.S. The Da Capos are currently recording a CD of Ung’s works. The label? Bridge. (Of course.)

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21/, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 1

Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 1
Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 1 - Purple Note Radio Network - Spellbound, music for theremin
From Podcast: Spellbound, a brief program of music for theremin.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 2

Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 2
Spellbound radio 2/18/07 hr 2 - Purple Note Radio Network - Spellbound, music for theremin
From Podcast: Spellbound, a brief program of music for theremin.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 20, 2007 at 05:02 AM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2007

Robert Moran

It was a sunny Saturday morning in August 2006 when we went to Robert Moran's house in Philadelphia. Turns out he lives not very far from the Kimmel Center, where I catch lots of concerts, so I know the neighborhood fairly well.

[photo by Andrew Gena]

We had alot of fun discussing music, opera (he has a collection of posters/play bills from European opera houses framed along his staircase), and creativity. Afterwards we went to Monk's Cafe for a bite of lunch.

You can read the original posting here.

Listen to Composing Thoughts every Sunday evening at 7 p.m. on WITF-FM, 89.5.

Originally from Composing Thoughts, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Luis de Pablo, "Chaman"

Originally posted by jodru from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

Multicultural, multimedia, and banned

In 1925 New York bandleader Sam Wooding's all-black jazz revue Chocolate Kiddies toured to Berlin (photo above). Among the audience were composers Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill. Krenek had studied in Vienna under Frank Schreker, and was married Gustav Mahler's daughter Anna for a short while. His compositions include an opera written to a libretto by the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka.

Chocolate Kiddies inspired Ernst Krenek (photo below) to write his jazz influenced opera Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up) which was premiered in Leipzig in January 1927, and opened at the City Opera in Berlin ten months later. Jazz was anathema to the ascendant Nazi party due to its African-American origins, but despite this Jonny Spielt Auf achieved major success with audiences across Europe, and was translated into twelve languages. The Center for Jazz Arts describes the opera as having "jazz-infused harmonies, syncopations, and story-lines; an African-American jazz-artist hero (Jonny); interracial romantic story elements; innovative Expressionist and Bauhaus influenced stage sets; and an unconventional incorporation of modern technology into classical opera, such as telephones, radios, and automobiles."

When Jonny Spielt Auf was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1928 the plot was altered so that the promiscuous black jazz band leader who gives the opera its title could be played by a white. But then in a bizarre twist the title role was actually sung by a 'blacked-up' white singer. This prompted the early civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson to say: 'We have in this country colored singers who could masterfully sing that role. I need only name Jules Bledsoe and Paul Robeson.'

Ernst Krenek's name was put on the Nazis' blacklist in 1933. He was based in Vienna until 1938 but was expelled after the Anschluss. He lived in the US until his death in 1991, although in the last decade of his life he spent summers at the Arnold Schönberg House in Mödling, near Vienna. The year after his death in Palm Springs Krenek's remains were transferred to an honorary grave in Vienna.

* The 1993 Decca recording of Jonny Spielt Auf, with Lothar Zagrosek conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, is available through Amazon Germany. There are some brief audio extracts via this link. The slightly more idiomatic Vanguard recording (left) with the Wiener Staatsopernorchester and Lucia Popp is deleted, but is still available from Amazon resellers. Visit the Ernst Krenek Institute website via this link.

Now read more about contemporary music under the Third Reich in Furtwängler and the forgotten new music
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)

Nothing like a Dame...

Apparently Dame Kiri has pulled out of some concerts with Australian pop star John Farnham because his fans throw their underwear at him. She's in court for breeches of contract. Read all about it here. And get Opera Chic's slightly sassier take on it here.

Heck, why didn't I think of that in time for the JDF show?!? Admittedly Upper Amphitheatre to Stage at Covent Garden is a long way to chuck anything, but maybe if one took along a cricket-playing pal and weighted the lilac silk ever so slightly with non-damaging ball-bearings... For Kiri & John, I suspect there are some lessons about multiculturalism, assimilation and how to reach a fair deal - eg, accept the low-flying pants, then in return get him to try to wow La Scala. Though that isn't fair.

Norman Lebrecht featured music blogging on his Radio 3 programme the other day and it's available to hear online here for the rest of this week. Norman's been called many things in his time, but I think this must be a first for 'juicy awesomeness', again c/o Opera Chic who was special guest star and deservedly so!

Last but not least, here's NL's piece about the BBC's Tchaikovsky bonanza. He tells it like it is. Don't get me started on the Beeb's latest foibles (Jonathan Woss?? £18m of taxpayers' licence fee money when he can't even talk properly!?!) before my third cup of ethical African coffee.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

To Lenny from Solti

A note from David K Israel alerts me to Mentalfloss.com, where he's joined the blogging team. David was Leonard Bernstein's editor and is a fellow novelist, but most significantly he nearly named his cat Solti, then chose Lenny instead. In case you missed my intentionally-very-silly two-part story for Classical Music Magazine around Xmas & New Year, it's called LENNY: THE CAT THAT SHOOK AN ORCHESTRA and you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. As for transatlantic Lenny and my resident Sir Georg 'Ginger Stripes' Solti, they send each other colleagial greetings and compare the mice they've recently killed with their built-in batons.

We named Solti Solti because in a former life he was Tom's favourite conductor. Most orchestral musicians jump out of their skins when we tell them this - one cellist who used to live nearby famously threatened to run our cat over every time he came round - but Tom, being from one of those indomitable central-European pre-War families, is used to larger-than-life personalities and knows how to stand up to them. In one legendary LPO rehearsal, Solti turned to the first fiddles and said "You must play this better, I pay you money if you play this better!" Tom put up his hand and demanded "How much?" Solti exclaimed: "Ah, we discuss it later..."

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

OMG...was Joyce Hatto faked?

Breaking news on Gramophone's website reveals one of the most extraordinary stories to have come our way, ever.

A few years ago, Gramophone's critics began to rave about an unknown British pianist, a lady named Joyce Hatto [above, photo Vivienne of London 1973, reproduced on Musicweb International]. Just look at this review, by one of their leading piano men, from the Awards issue 2006:

Celebrating Hatto's mastery and musicianship

Recorded between 1990 and 2004, these performances are reissued in brilliantly refurbished and clarified sound, forming part of a 100-CD discography. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that no other pianist, male or female, would even have considered such a comprehensive undertaking.

Doubting Thomases, of which there are apparently many, may well wonder how Joyce Hatto achieved such unalloyed mastery and musicianship when tragically beset with ill-health. But others will surely celebrate an awe-inspiring triumph of mind over matter, of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

Even in the most daunting repertoire, her poise in the face of one pianistic storm after another is a source of astonishment. Her warmth, affection, ease and humanity strike you at every turn, her scale and command without a hint of superficial or hard-nosed virtuosity. Here, Liszt's occasional histrionics and theatricality are tempered with the most aristocratic quality.

In Preludio, the dazzling curtain-raiser, Hatto yields nothing to any other pianist in fearless authority, while the notorious difficulties of Feux follets are resolved with a surpassing fluency and vivacity. She is no less gloriously responsive to La ricordanza's heady romanticism (for Busoni, 'like a packet of yellowed love letters') and Etudes Nos 10-12 are natural triumphs of an unswerving vision and poetry, concluding performances that form a rare tribute to their symphonic weight and breadth, the quasi-orchestral might of Liszt's outsize opus.

The same attributes apply to Hatto's Chopin-Godowsky. And whether you consider Godowsky's elaborations delectable or outrageous - or both - you will only hear pure music from this pianist. Listen to her in Ignis fatuus (No 4) where, as Hatto herself ruefully puts it, Godowsky adds a few extra hours to your practice, or in the 'touch of paprika' she notes in the coda of No 7; in No 27 where Godowsky turns innocence into experience and sophistication with a vengeance, or in No 8 in what Hatto calls 'a riot of bravura ingenuity' ' you can only listen and wonder. Amazingly, she has all the time in the world to make her points in the turbulence of No 20 and what gentle sparkle, what unforced brilliance in 'Badinage', where Godowsky so mischievously gives you two Etudes for the price of one.

Joyce Hatto may well be 'the greatest pianist no one has heard of'; her work demands a book rather than just a review.

I heard rumours some time ago querying the authenticity, or otherwise, of Hatto's recordings, but didn't take much notice: British critics are notorious for ignoring home-grown female pianistic talent, so Hatto's lifetime of neglected genius didn't seem unconvincing. But recently another Gramophone piano critic had a strange experience. He popped the Liszt disc into his computer's CD player and iTunes identified it...as a recording on BIS by the Hungarian pianist Laszlo Simon. Gramophone sent off both recordings to have their wavelengths checked. They turned out to be identical - except for two tracks, which were identical with a CD called Nojima Plays Liszt.

The plot thickens. The engineer checking the waves thought the Godowsky, so glowingly reviewed, sounded a little odd. Sure enough, it turned out that the recording had been 'stretched' by 15.112 per cent ("all the time in the world," eh?). When the 'stretch' was undone, the soundwaves proved identical with a recording by Carlo Grante. And her Rachmaninov piano concertos recordings? Yefim Bronfman on Sony.

If her glorious Liszt recordings really are Laszlo Simon's, I think he can open some champagne.

Here is the evidence, from Pristine Classical.

Read more on the Gramophone website here.

Here's her obituary from The Guardian, describing her as 'one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced'...

An interview with her from Musicweb International.

And a fascinating article about her by Ates Orga.

The mind boggles. Updates when I have any.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

More Hatto links

....Why would anyone do a thing like that? Is it perhaps the most brilliant form of revenge ever devised, served stone cold and calling the bluff of the entire recording industry - possibly the whole music business? It may be some time before we know the truth...

Anyone hooked on the Hatto scandal will find interesting reading & discussions at Piano Street, where the latest post from Alistair Hinton (curator & director of the Sorabji Archive) says this:

"I think that we'll really just have to wait and see - and wait and see we will surely be able to do, for this, as I have suggested, is unlikely to go away again now and, given the sheer number of other parties with potential involvement (other artists, other record companies, etc.), it is likely also to run and run when it finally does get to court. Robert von Bahr of BIS in Sweden has so far commented, albeit rather wryly and in a carefully owrded manner that could be taken to imply that he'll not likely be reticent with the ammunition if and when he may believe it becomes necessary to use it. The sheer scale of this fraud - IF it is such (and I do stress the "if") is such as to ensure that the case may well drag on into next year even on its own merits alone, but if it becomes the tip of the iceberg in the industry as a whole (which is not entirely inconceivable), then we could be looking at decades of litigation rather than merely months or years in a massive multiplicity of cases."

There's also a Google group with some good threads.

Thanks to Stephen Pollard, Opera Chic and Lisa for shoutouts.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

OMGOMG...

The stuff out there on the web has to be seen to be believed. The mudslinging has ranged from references to Shakespeare, Betelgeuse, the Nazis and, worst, comments from Hatto's main supporter, a well-known record industry bod, *slagging off another commentator's Semitic origins*. where is this going to go next?!?

Truth is WAY WAY WAY stranger than fiction.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

More...

David Hurwitz has a splendid editorial about the Hatto-trick [sorry, couldn't resist that!] at Classics Today.

Alex Ross makes some astute comments: the recordings are not forgery, but plagiarism.

Soho the Dog, whose blog I' m afraid I hadn't seen before, is sniffing out some interesting angles too.

Pliable of On An Overgrown Path has been trying to get some answers from Hatto's husband and the owner of the Concert Artist record label, William Barrington-Coupe.

A commentator on one of the newsgroups demanded to know when someone would volunteer to write the screenplay. HELLO, OVER HERE!!!

Meanwhile, I've been to hear a very real concert by Marc-Andre Hamelin (and found that I do have to wait to hear him play Op.111 after all, because the programme involved only Op..109 and 110. [only?!?])...The Beethoven was beautifully thought out, the pacing and emotional shape of Op.110 especially so. But it's his exquisite-toned, other-worldly Schubert B flat Sonata that will stay with me forever.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

The real Uchida

So today I had a call asking me to go on BBC Radio 4 to talk about Hattogate. Dropped everything and ran to Broadcasting House...only to discover, when I got there, that the programme also had to fit in Art Garfunkel and Robert de Niro, who were real, so the finer details of how easy or otherwise it is to tell the difference between...well, you get the drift, my spot was off. So to speak. It was nice to have been asked...

But in the Broadcasting House foyer (where, my dears, you see everyone who is anyone), I bumped into Mitsuko Uchida, who was on her way to Radio 3 to appear on In Tune. Now there's one truly great artist - a pianist you couldn't fake if you tried. Her playing could never have been anybody else's. I've often felt that for her, the piano is like a second voice box. It's part of her, indivisible from her personality, indeed her soul, and that's how it ought to be.

She's playing Mozart piano concertos with the LSO and Colin Davis at the Barbican on Wednesday and Thursday. Further details here and here. Thursday is sold out, but tickets are still available for Wednesday which contains (shock horror) a contemporary work, James MacMillan's gobsmacking marvel The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (I was at its world premiere at the Proms and have never forgotten the atmosphere that night, or the impact that the work made on me). Be there or be very sorry.

Originally from Jessica Duchen's classical music blog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

Pentiti, cangia vita / È l'ultimo momento!

"Doing a Mozart"? According to Jordan Tate, author of The Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms, that's slang for a horizontal gavotte of sufficient vigor to leave one's wig askew. According to the book:

It was deemed necessary to have a euphemism named after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, due to his rock-star-like behavior in [the movie Amadeus]. The youth culture of Chicago started using this euphemism as a sign of respect for the somewhat timid or classy music (which was revolutionary in its time) and the juxtaposition of a wild and carnal celebrity.

Which is all nonsense, Tate says in this interview. "I made up all the histories. Every word of it. There was no scholarship. You can't really prove where a euphemism came from. I used whatever I felt was most plausible, and some of the true facts really came together in a way I appreciated."

I haven't read Tate's book, but my taste runs to actual etymologies, not half-baked stereotypes of classical music. (Check out the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang for a book that does it right.) And while Tate claims that the euphemisms themselves are authentic, and only the histories are made up, "doing a Mozart" sounds suspiciously pat to me.

Besides, in Chicago, "Mozart" has another range of reference that's far less cute. No doubt due to the influx of German immigrants in the 1800s, Chicago has a whole row of streets named after German cultural heroes: Schiller, Goethe, Schubert, Mozart. And the intersection of Mozart Street (pronounced with a soft "z," by the way) and Augusta Boulevard, out by Humboldt Park, marks the center of territory controlled by the Insane Dragons street gang (who have their own web page—those Chicago gangs are organized). According to that page, Mozart and Augusta is known as the "Dragon's Pit," and the locale rates its own entry at UrbanDictionary.com. I'm hardly an expert on gangland Chicago, but even I knew that being out around Humboldt Park after dark was liable to leave your wig askew.

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

We needed our own scandal

News of the Joyce Hatto scandal is spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere and is just beginning to permeate the mainstream media. For those of you who don't yet know the story, here isGramophone's overview.Classics Today has this take on the story, including pianist/critic Jed Distler's comments. Interestingly, it was via Jed that I first heard of Joyce Hatto when I ran into him at an Upper West Side Starbucks just last November. He raved about this little known English pianist who had recently died, but who had left an astonishing legacy of recordingsacross a wide spectrum of repertoire. Just three months later, he and many other critics have now learned that these recordings were evidently stolen, copied, plagiarized from other commercial classical recordings, in some cases altered by "stretching" the timings or other means.

There are many aspects to this story, if indeed the fakery is proven. There is the sad, human side to the saga, especially given that the label producing the discs was run by Ms. Hatto's husband, and that Ms. Hatto herself was dying of cancer over the very years these discs were produced. But this story also says something about the nature of the classical music industry. I don't say that to excoriate the critics who raved about the playing on the discs; before this incident,no critic could reasonably have ever been expected to harbor any skepticism about the claimed identity of a given performer on a recording. And the playing on the recordingswas evidently top-notch.

Of the bloggers, Soho the Dog has the most perceptive take on the whole affair, striking close to the real story behind the story:

"What's really intriguing is that no one else (to my knowledge, at least) has tried this before. It would seem to me that classical music recording would provide great opportunities for plagiarism. Why? Because the logistics of performance are pretty close to plagiarism already. Even though there's no attempt at deception, and there's full attribution, a pianist playing the Transcendental Etudes is using notes, rhythms, and dynamics set down by Lisztand, at least textually, nothing else. Any two performances of the same piece are going to be largely the same. Of course, the artistry lies in the slight differences; but what the individual performer brings to the table is a historical anomaly, something that has persisted in music long after the notion of plagiarism erased it from other intellectual pursuits."

Accepting that view (and adding in the fact that there exist today so many recordings of standard repertoire works such as the Liszt), the point is driven home that the classical publicity industry (and its partner, the mainstream music media) has to find another "hook" by which to differentiate a particular recording or performance from the pack. That is because so few people, even regular concertgoers,can actually hear "the slight differences" to which Soho the Dog refers. That hook, then, can be physical attractiveness. It canbe a compelling backstory, such as the very real illness from which Ms. Hatto suffered.

There are two lessons that I hope linger on after this mess is eventually cleared up. One is, that the actual artists whose fine recordings made such a splash when packaged as Joyce Hatto's, get a big boost in positive public recognition from the renewed attention paid to their (purloined) work. After all, their recordings were getting rave reviews, just credited to the wrong pianist.

The other lesson is offered by Pliable at On an Overgrown Path. He remindsus that there is a human being at the other end of this story (Ms. Hatto's husband, William Barrington-Coupe) and that whatever misdeeds have taken place, they probably were spurred by very human motivations: "Mr Barrington-Coupe sounded like somebody who needs some help and understanding, irrespective of the facts behind the story. I can offer no information on the source of the disputed recordings. But perhaps we should all remember compact discs are not the most important things in this world."

Originally posted by Phillip from Mostly Music in the Midlands, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

Mp3 Blog #59: Grido

Helmut Lachenmann:
String Quartet #3 “Grido” (2000-2001 rev. 2002)
Performed by the Arditti Quartet

Not available commercially

* * * * *

I’m not sure I know what Helmut Lachenmann meant when he titled this string quartet “Grido;” however, listening to this work I am reminded of Michaelango Antonioni’s 1957 Neo-Realist masterpiece “Il Grido” (“The Outcry”).

In this movie a mother married to a man who hasn’t lived in the village for years one day suddenly tells her lover that her husband has died and she now cannot continue their relationship. The man is distraught and futilely begs her to reconsider. Right after these failed attempts the man decides to leave town unsure whether he is running from his pain or seeking some new start and form of consolation. While traveling the man meets and stays with a few women – each beautiful and beautifully lonely – who fall or have fallen for him and display their willingness to devote themselves as fully to him as he was devoted to his lover.

In the end when the man returns to the town he left crestfallen the village’s workers have begun to riot. The workers’ seemingly superficial social outcry reflects his unbearable personal outcry. In the final scene, minutes after returning to the town, the man returns to the location of his old job which all of his coworkers refuse to work. His former lover finds out he has returned and runs after him. When she finally desperately reaches him it is to late and the movie ends. His outcry is transformed into her silence.

Originally posted by Jacob Sudol from Jacob Sudol, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

Yoko Ono: More Than a Beatle's Widow - NPR

NPR	Yoko Ono: More Than a Beatle's Widow NPR - Feb 16, 2007 After moving to New York City against the wishes of her parents in the early '50s, Ono became heavily involved in the flourishing avant-garde art scene, ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

Joyce Hatto unmasked

The riveting music story of the moment is the Joyce Hatto hoax. Gramophone, which also has a major article this month on music in China, has revealed that several recordings attributed to the late, cultishly admired British pianist are identical to discs previously issued on other labels — including, remarkably, Yefim Bronfman and Esa-Pekka Salonen's well-regarded 1990 recording of the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto. The Gracenote database on iTunes exposed the fraud. The possibility arises that many or most of Hatto's hundred-odd releases on her husband's Concert Artist label are stolen property. Not having heard any Hatto discs, I can't begin to judge what's real and what's not, but it's a safe guess that anything conducted by the elusive René Köhler (scroll down this page for Concert Artist's unverified biography) is a fake; in one case he's Salonen, in another he's Bernard Haitink. You have here the beginnings of an excellent case study in how reputations and mythologies affect musical perception. Jessica Duchen links to an internet discussion where one piano expert is quoted as saying that Minoru Nojima's Liszt playing is "too clinical" and expressing a preference for Hatto — not aware that he's discussing the same performance! The same gentleman appears to respond to a detractor with anti-Semitic remarks. I have a feeling the story is only going to get weirder from here on out.

For more (and you know you want it), read Classics Today, On an Overgrown Path, and Soho the Dog. Classics Today has tracked down several more plagiarized recordings: Hatto's complete Ravel set is in fact Roger Muraro's, her Messiaen Vingt Regards is Paul Kim's, her Saint-Saëns Second Concerto is Jean-Philippe Collard's. As someone somewhere has observed, the Hatto scandal may at least do the service of shining a light on a bunch of gifted pianists who have never achieved international celebrity. Here's my review of Muraro's astounding 2003 performance of Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

BEN JOHNSTON

STRING QUARTET NO. 9 (1988)


KEPLER QUARTET




1. Strong, calm, slow

2. Fast, elated

3. Slow, expressive

4. Vigorous and defiant





New World Records 80637-2 (Released January 2006)

Originally posted by ECHO from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

Luis de Pablo, "Visto de Cerca"

Originally posted by jodru from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

more hands on tools - this time from Barcelona

.dolfkamper.org">

Originally posted by dolf from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

Zen (Ch'an) of Water (). David Mingyue Liang

Originally from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

New music and news stories

The graph above shows hits On An Overgrown over the last month, and the peak is the Joyce Hatto story. Wouldn’t it be great if collectively, we could transfer some of that excitement onto some rather more deserving causes? Here, for starters, is a link to seventy-two composers worth exploring.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

Bo Anders Persson, Proteinimperialism

Bo Anders is on the right

Originally posted by jodru from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

new from princeton

w.analogartsensemble.net/blog/dolf.jpg" />

Originally posted by dolf from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

Man of the Week–Lawrence Dillon

It’s a monster week for our gaucho amigo Lawrence Dillon whose music will be showcased at the Music Now Fest 2007, February 21, 22 and 23 at Eastern Michigan University.  This is EMU’s 15th biennial new music festival and it gets underway on Wednesday at 8 pm with a concert of pieces by EMU composers Whitney Prince and Anthony Iannaccone as well as works by Steve Reich, Alberto Ginastera and others. Faculty artists include David Pierce, Willard Zirk, Garik Pedersen, John Dorsey, Kimberly Cole-Luevano, Kristy Meretta, Julie Stone, Kathryn Goodson and guest Cary Kocher.

On Thursday, there will a composer convocation and welcome at 11 AM at Pease Auditorium where Mister Dillon will speak about “Furies and Muses: Composing in the 21st Century.”  (My money’s on the Furies.) The lecture will be followed by open student ensemble rehearsals with Dillon and the EMU Symphony Orchestra and University Choir.  Open rehearsals with the Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band are scheduled for Friday.

On Thursday night at 8 pm, there will be a faculty recital of the chamber music of Lawrence Dillon, including the aforementioned Furies and Muses, Dunigan Variations, Big Brothers and Facade. Winning composition(s) in the New Chamber Works for Horn competition will be premiered by sponsor Willard Zirk.

On Friday, there is a Meet the composer gig in the afternoon followed by the Festival finale a 8 pm–a concert by EMU’s major performing ensembles who will play Dillon’s Blown Away and Amadeus ex machina. Other works include Ogoun Badagris by Christopher Rouse; Spiel by Ernst Toch, Symphonic Band; and a piece by Anthony Iannaccone.

Presumably, on Saturday, Lawrence will go home and take a nap.

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21/, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

David Haney - Blues Royale

CIMP 354 A piano and bass sandwich with extra bass, please. Not the sort of short order readily available from most creative music establishments, but CIMP, ever willing to test out new ensemble recipes, delivers just such a menu...

Originally from Bagatellen, ReBlogged by jeff on Feb 19, 2007 at 05:01 PM |