Hooray!

Thanks to Alex Ross for the link! I was excited to get a sneak preview of the truly impressive collection of info and audio links he's put together to accompany his new book. If by some unfathomable set of circumstances you're visiting this page without visiting his first, I highly recommend the new addition to his already-essential website.

...and introducing Nico Muhly as Ian Curtis

Let's Not and Say We Did

Geez, I've been watching a lot of opera on DVD lately. Don Giovanni, directed by Peter Sellars, is as great as you might expect, which is to say it might make you sick to your stomach. I felt that way about his Così fan tutte, which doesn't even have any raping in it. Boris Godunov, conducted by Gergiev (again), in the Andrei Tarkovsky production, is really sublime theatre. Even Inferno by Dario Argento has a little bit of opera in it, but that's a whole 'nother post. Anyways, all of this is at least worth watching, at best great. One video NOT to watch is the Peter Weigl DVD of Let's Make an Opera by Benjamin Britten. Anyone who has seen Weigl's somewhat crappy videos of The Turn of the Screw or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk might have suspected that Weigl had the potential to accomplish something profoundly wretched. His Let's Make an Opera is not only worse than Mtsensk, worse than Screw, it is--I say this totally without hyperbole--worse than murder. Seriously, it is worse than a human body lying facedown in a ditch. Now, I'm not one to be over-critical of opera DVDs. I reallyh tend to be thankful for whatever I can get. But I'm sad to say that the video adaptation of Let's Make an Opera is far worse than no adaptation at all. The piece itself is a wonder of concision, with a tiny cast, brief action, and an "orchestra" made up of just a string quartet plus two pianists and percussionist. (How tiny is the cast? So tiny that the audience has to double as the chorus--the opera's second part doubles as their rehearsal for the finale. See? Concision!) Confronted with the problem of how to translate near-perfect economy to the small screen, Weigl has devised a brilliant solution: lard it up with a bunch of totally irrelevant bullshit. Watch this.

Discerning viewers may have noticed that the above has absolutely nothing to do with Let's Make an Opera by Benjamin Britten. Almost none of the characters are from the original piece, none of the action is in the original stage directions, and most horrifyingly, none of the music is from the original score. Which wouldn't be quite so offensive if it weren't so bad. It's as if Weigl realized just before filming that the piece was too short for feature-length treatment and hurriedly engaged the cast and crew of the Bel Ami production filming next door--hairless Czech beefcake, cheap synths, and ludicrously asynchronous lip-synching of the spoken dialogue. And people, there is SO MUCH MORE of this garbage on the DVD. I've posted only half of the prologue above, and literally every other scene in the video is one more embarrassing, cobbled-together interpolation.

Avoid at all costs.

Glaring Omissions

Hey look, they've posted my New Haven season classical music preview here. I'm not sure how long that link will last, but I thought it was worth pointing out. Just for space, I had to cut some of my very favorite events and series from the preview: Alvin Lucier and Ingram Marshall do New Music/New Haven! So Percussion reunites with Yale Percussion Ensemble! Apologies to everyone who was left out.

Motetten, Mo' Problems

Next time you want to stir up a whole pot of crazy, just start talking "performance practice" with a roomful of Bach queens. Sure, it might start out as a civil, intellectual conversation, but before you know it, they're all shouting Authentic This, and Authentic That, Correct This, and then the hair-pulling starts. Of course, by Bach queens, I mean those other Bach queens. JoJo and I may have a dozen different Goldberg Variationses or so, despite living in a hovel, but we are ideologically pure. Completely. To show you what I mean, let's first watch this YouTube video, posted a little under one year ago, of period-instrument veteran Ton Koopman playing Bach's "little fugue" in G minor:

Wow! Pretty exciting, right? Koopman adds a few subtle ornaments, and takes the fugue at a breakneck speed (but not so fast you can't tell what's going on); elegant, but with plenty of gusto--in other words, some of the best musicianship that the current fashion in historically informed performance has to offer.

And now let's take just a glance at the YouTube viewer comments. Go ahead, click here.

Did you see that? There are THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE COMMENTS on that video, as of this writing, most of them weighing in on an absurdly vitriolic argument between just a handful of commenters. (I'm especially pleased to note the dude who, to cement his Bach cred, cites his first-name-basis relationship with organ virtuoso Virgil Fox, pictured above. Another glimpse into Virj's unorthodox Bach performance practice may be had here.) Why the hysterics? Why does everybody have so much invested in this shouting match? What's so great about making "correct" music?

One of the most important shapers of modern Bach performance practice was Wanda Landowska, the first star harpsichordist of the twentieth century. Bach queens that we are, we've just bought a DVD documentary about her, basically just for the performance footage:

If I may quote a pair of Koopman Kommenters,

Too bad the camera kept on cutting away RIGHT when I wanted to see how something was done Yes, this is typical almost all classical music films (as well as pornos :-) )

But these frustrations aside, I hope you can see why JoJo & I had to have a DVD of Landowska. Look at those fingers! Even if she had not been such a pioneer, she would still have been one of the last century's greatest keyboardists. But what's interesting about Landowska's greatness, for the purposes of this blog, is that she was neither "authentic" nor "correct" in her performance practice. She was certainly sure of herself--"You play Bach your way," she famously joked, "and I'll play him his way"--but her custom-built harpsichord was enormous, with a steel frame and a penetrating tone, dwarfing in size and sound anything that Bach would have used. And if memory serves, her Bach-his-way mot referred not to the use of harpsichord but to her strange, square, and almost certainly mistaken rhythms in the first fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier (big giant mp3 available here).

Still, I say that she was a superior artist not just despite but, in part, because of these peccadilloes. Landowska's iconoclastic approach to interpretation is one of the reasons her recordings are still worth listening to so many decades and performance-fads later.

Her harpsichord may not resemble 18th-century (or 21st-century) specimens, but it is a gorgeous machine and makes a rich, tremendous sound. Poulenc wrote his Concert Champêtre for it and for her; Ton Koopman's recording, on an "authentic" Baroque instrument, is a hilarious botch--the solo is practically inaudible.

Thanks to our friend Don--and to the lovely gentlemen then executing the estate of Denise Restout, Landowska's widow--here's a color photo of that same harpsichord from the video above, taken in that same living room, but this time with JoJo at the controls. (Not pictured: JoJo's inexpressibly intense glee.) It was more than a little out of tune, but still a spectacular work of art, from the impossibly elegant lid over its keyboard to its ranks and ranks of crisscrossing strings. If you ever get the chance to see and hear a Pleyel harpsichord in person, dude, take it.

What's got me thinking about all of this is the new Hilliard Ensemble CD of Bach motets. Martin Geck's liner notes summarize what is probably the most heated debate of Bach performance practice, the controversy over the size of the choir that should be used--musicologist Joshua Rifkin having discovered late last century that Bach's music was probably written not for a "choir" in the traditional sense, but for a small ensemble of vocal soloists. This revelation has, not surprisingly, gone down pretty poorly with Bach traditionalists, but is finally managing to gain some traction these many years later, resulting in some exquisite recordings by the Hilliards, Paul McCreesh and Konrad Junghänel, in addition to Rifkin's own. And keep in mind, this is all based in some pretty solid scholarship. But here's where I get off the bus:

"Rifkin feels that Bach feels that Bach proceeded so economically not because of the evident shortage of virtuoso boys' voices, (a shortage of which he himself complained), but for artistic reasons." Well, Bach complained about a lot of things. One of them was that his choir was just too small--he wanted, at minimum, three voices on a part. His ideal choir and the choir he was stuck with were two different things. Richard Taruskin snipes, in his Oxford History, "One often daydreams about what the music heard today sounded like when first performed. It would seem that in the case of Bach, it might be better not to know."

So on the one hand, Bach was probably writing his music for a choir many times smaller than is commonly used nowadays, but on the other hand, he probably wished he was writing for a choir just a few times larger than the one he was using. But on the other other hand, for all of our idealization of Bach as a creator of abstract music, was an imminently practical composer. His vocal music, even at its most difficult, sits quite easily in the voice--of all the motets recorded here, it is worth noting that the most spurious, BWV 230 (though brilliant, lovely, etc.) is also the most likely to cause vocal strain. And to pick up where I left off with Geck, the motets' "intricate counterpoint would, [Rifkin] argues, be heard to better effect when sung one voice to a part. In other words, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied requires a different kind of choral body than the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah." But on the other, other, other hand, what happens in those moments when Bach reaches for a Handelian grandeur that the four- or eight-person choir just can't achieve so convincingly?

This is why my favorite interpreter of the motets is still René Jacobs--the countertenor-cum-conductor best known for his recent Mozart operas--whose sense of drama is a surer guide than any dogma. He augments a chamber choir with the subtle, colla parte accompaniment suggested by historical evidence (NB: the historical evidence is, again, totally self-contradictory) and alternates pragmatically between soloistic and choral textures, and the result is extremely effective. Is the Hilliard Ensemble disc, one-on-a-part, a-cappella, something less? No--it's something different, something purer. When they get to the most emotionally intimate motet, Komm, Jesu, komm, I can hardly imagine a superior performance.

Really, there is hardly a reasonable approach to Bach's scores that would not illuminate another facet of his genius. There are no wrong answers here, only wrong arguments--his music is almost indestructibly elastic. Or as a favorite teacher put it, "The answer to the old question, 'Should Bach be played on harpsichord or piano?' is yes."

Nothing Is Better than Prince Igor

Concert audiences, familiar with Borodin's Prince Igor mostly (if not only) through the famous "Polovtsian Dances," will bring to the opera at least this one burning question: where in the hell is Polovtsia? This, of course, is what Wikipedia is for. According to the Wiki people, the Polovtsians (or Cumans) were apparently a tribe of Turkic nomads, whose wars against Igor--prince of a region now located in the Ukraine--became the basis of a great work of twelfth-century Slavic literature, The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Borodin’s opera, freely adapted from the poem, describes the capture of Igor and his son by the Polovtsians, figured as noble savages from the mysterious East. When I wrote about the Dances this spring in a program note for this fantastic orchestra I was in as a kid (a program note I'm now cannibalizing for this blog), one of the Gregs said that the must-read article on the subject was Richard Taruskin's "'Entoiling the Falconet': Russian Musical Orientalism in Context"--and indeed it's brilliant in the way only Taruskin, among musicologists, can be, without any of the pure unshirted looneytunes he has sometimes been known to talk. The prose is strong, always a pleasant surprise in academic writing, and more importantly, the argument is strong, well-supported by musical examples and close analysis. In a nutshell, he points out that Russia's 19th-century musical identity was defined by the incorporation of exotic, Oriental sounds, noting a handful of clearly recognizable musical features that read as "Oriental"--sinuous melodies, pulsing drones, descending chromatic lines, double-reed timbres, etc.--and tracing them throughout the romantic Russian music, with a special emphasis on Prince Igor. I just wish I'd had space to quote, in my program notes, Taruskin's oblique suggestion that the Russian imperialist project contemporary to Borodin's opera--the political cousin of his musical project--"only came to an end with the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan," as Taruskin put it (in 1992). "Soviet debacle in Afghanistan"? You mean that war against the Taliban? The exact same Taliban we're at war with right now? Hmm. Polovtsia may be closer than it appears. Of course, for Western opera lovers, the Russian repertoire is doubly exotic. The dramatic masterpieces of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and even Tchaikovsky are only now becoming familiar to American audiences--thanks mostly to Valery Gergiev, whose DVD of Prince Igor I netflixted last week. (I wish Philips were better at making his videos available; I hear his Fiery Angel is really something to see.) This Igor is a tremendous production, done up with the strange richness and flatness of 19th-century academic painting, which seems to me exactly right. The Khan's daughter (Olga Borodina!) lounges around on silk-draped ottomans, trying on jewelry.... perfect. The dancing is a hoot, too, reviving Mikhail Fokine's wild choreography with more smokin' abs than the Blond Ambition tour:

And to my delight, the score turns out to be uniformly vivid, melodic and sophisticated, all thundering choruses and noble arias and knock-'em-dead musical effects. I do understand Gergiev made a few cuts toward the end--probably for pacing--along with reshuffling an act or two from their original order. (Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov completed and orchestrated the opera after Borodin's death, so Gergiev probably felt free. Still, cuts always make me a little sad... I suffer from mild Wagnerite Personality Disorder and would always prefer to endure too much opera than too little.) At any rate, by the end, I couldn't understand this piece is so neglected, beyond the well-loved concert excerpts; thank God for DVD. Everybody can, and should, see this weird and brilliant thing.

Lousy Books by Fake People Mystifyingly Popular

Back in spring 2005, one of my Gregs went on record saying that camera-shy publicity hound and autobiographical novelist JT LeRoy was, and I quote, "a total fraud, a fake, an elaborate hoax"; "Fake! Fake! Fake!"; "FFFFAAAAAAAAAAKE." As my fellow schadenfreudeholics will recall--especially if you relished this recent profile of the lovable sociopath behind the "literary" phenom--it was not long afterwards that LeRoy was revealed as a phony, a sham, a counterfeit (definitive coverage here). To which Greg said: "When Augusten Burroughs's nice, well-adjusted, middle-class non-abusive parents get interviewed in the Times, I am buying myself a scotch." Close enough, Greg? It's finally official: Augusten Burroughs is a damned fake. Although I'm still waiting for them to make it official that Augusten Burroughs is vapid, smug and unfunny. How I have shuddered, all these years, to find his stupid, ugly books in the "Favorites" lists of otherwise sane and intelligent-seeming people! This latest link is from Gawker.com, naturally, and as always, their reader comments are delicious. Enjoy.

Dan's Labyrinth, Part I

This week, some words on Film. Apologies: our philosopher friend David (pronounced Dah-BEED) has given us a DVD of Slavoj Žižek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a three-part essay for the BBC, and I'm afraid everything I say re: the silver screen is going to be warped by Žižek's manic, self-indulgent mutterings for the foreseeable future. (Please note that this gift does not imply that David in any way endorses the ideas expressed by Slavoj Žižek.) The Pervert's Guide is actually kind of delightful--S/Ž is a very funny guy, sometimes surprises with the effectiveness of his insights, plus the program itself is stylishly and wittily put together. So. Even though this has absolutely nothing to do with anything else I have to say about Pan's Labyrinth (another new DVD acquisition) I feel compelled to deal with the way Žižek's discussion of the fantasy life, the dreamworld, might play out in an analysis of this macabre fairy tale of the Spanish Civil War. My friend Josh complained that the main character's brutal "reality," which she periodically flees for a magical netherworld, is itself a bit too storybookish to make the contrast between her two lives dramatically and politically persuasive; the very real, very complex, and very recent (within living memory, at least) conflict fictionalized in the film has been reduced to a story about the Big Bad Wolf. On the DVD, the director describes this as his exact intention--the scenery in "real life" is devoid of color and detail, according to his explicit instructions, and he admits that the republican resistors hiding in his fictional woods bear less of a resemblance to historical rebels than to the woodsman who dissects aforementioned BBW to rescue Little Red. He does this to more successfully intermesh reality and fantasy, or so he says, so that the one can gradually contaminate the other over the course of the film; Josh wishes that fantasy and reality were much more dissonant, the way that the golly-gee Hollywood ingenue-meets-Nancy Drew daydream of Mulholland Drive runs headlong into agonizingly realistic erotic betrayal, or the way that the Dogme-esque melodrama of Dancer in the Dark periodically bursts into brightly colored song and dance. Well, this is obviously something of a personal-taste question. We can't ask every movie to be Dancer in the Dark or, god forbid, Mulholland Drive. (Let's pause to imagine a Rope with amnesiac Hollywood lesbians in place of the sociopathic preppie gays, or a Philadelphia Story in which WASP divorcée Björk is courted by Joel Grey and David Morse. Okay, never mind, both of those would be kind of awesome.) But I think I see where Josh is coming from on this. To a certain extent, filmmakers take on a moral responsibility when they fictionalize historical events. Using "Nazi" or "Fascist" as shorthand for comic-book style "evil" probably does somehow obscure the more subtle aspects of evil and fascism, and reducing the anti-fascists to knights in shining armor might even do the real anti-fascist heroes a certain disservice. Even so, I'm not sure I buy this argument. For one thing, I think it fails to take into account the strange and nuanced role that fantasy plays in Pan's Labyrinth. Žižek tracks the Lynchian narrative, in films like Mulholland and Lost Highway, as a trip from reality to dream and back again: when the world becomes unbearable in its particulars, the protagonist escapes into his or her dream-life--only to discover that this dream-life, when realized in all its own particulars, is even more unbearable. In Pan's Labyrinth, reality is already infected with this unbearable fantasy. Think of Don Quixote, maybe, that other Spanish tale about a fairy-story addict--we all distort, reimagine reality through the lens of fiction. Every child interprets real life according to the stories she's been told; every child imagines that her stepfather is a monster; Ofelia's stepdad, a Fascist war criminal, just happens to be one. And so her escape is not into a simplified fantasy, like the paranoid universe visited in a Lynch film, but an enriched one: She immediately intuits the Captain's evil; the Faun, on the other hand, is totally ambiguous, his motives unreadable until the last moments of the film. The first fairy she meets isn't quite like the ones she's read about in her books (even though, tellingly, it seems to have model itself after them)--it's hairless, green, eats raw meat, and speaks in an uncanny insect chatter that an edit in the first scene compares to the sinister ticking of the Captain's pocketwatch. While Ofelia is sheltered at home, mostly shielded from the horrific violence that surrounds her at the keep, her fantasy-world is filled with images of viscera, infanticide, and cannibalism, and the choices she faces there are strange, even arbitrary, and difficult. Hence her dream-life isn't about escape, for her--it's a release valve for her terror, ambivalence, and guilt, an ordeal to exorcise her world of the doubt and brutality which she senses all around her but cannot comprehend. Part II comin' soon.

Cat + Girl = Hilarity

Just to draw the Web of Gregs a little tighter round you-all, let me draw your attention to one of my favorite webcomics, Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell. I've been a faithful reader for some time now, but until this afternoon I never bothered to explore everything that this little website has to offer. Come to find out, it's all incredibly good. In addition to the comics and the inevitable merch table, there's also an elegant blog-cum-travelogue, and best of all, the Donation Derby, a quietly brilliant account of your PayPal dollars at work. I totally want to give her money now, even though I am poor. Everybody go look at it. The only creepy thing is that, yes, I first heard about this comic from one of the Gregs, who went to school with the author--which I guess means that she also went to school with composer Judd Greenstein, bassist Peter Rosenfeld (of Silk Road and NOW Ensembles fame), and one of the Books. That is to say, around fifty percent of the content I've blogged here. Yeesh.

Lives of the Great Composers: György Ligeti

Apropos of the Conlon Nancarrow conversations going on at The Overgrown Path and Sequenza 21, I'm going to steal an anecdote from Ligeti's student Martin Bresnick.

LIGETI: "Martin, who would you say is the greatest living composer?" BRESNICK: "The greatest living composer? Er--other than yourself, of course--" LIGETI: "--yes, of course, other than myself."

Ligeti was fond of such questions; he had a Top Three for the twentieth century, for instance, that went something like

1. Bartók, 2. Janáček, 3. Stravinsky.

And sure enough, Ligeti had his own answer all ready: the greatest living composer, in his opinion, was Conlon Nancarrow.

BRESNICK: "Conlon Nancarrow?" LIGETI: "Conlon Nancarrow. I really think he is the greatest living composer." BRESNICK [polite, but still dubious]: "Nancarrow? I mean, yes, the player-piano studies are great. They represent quite an achievement--but such a narrow achievement! If I had to choose between Schumann and Chopin, for instance, it would be difficult, but I would still choose Schumann every time. For while Schumann offers a great cello concerto, great symphonies, a body of indispensible songs, Chopin's highest masterpieces are limited almost exclusively to a narrow body of work, his pieces for solo piano--and Nancarrow's body of work is narrower still, limited to player piano!" LIGETI [thoughtfully]: "Hmm. Maybe, maybe he is not the greatest living composer."

(NOTE: Be sure and read the comments below to see how I completely screwed this story up when I first posted it. Christ, I do the same thing at parties, too.)

Tell It Again, Again

That's right, I found it! And I've gone ahead and uploaded the whole thing to one of those stupid awful file-download sites, so you can listen to the whole thing as you please. Download Track 1: Favorite Nursery Rhymes Download Track 2: School Days and Learning Songs Download Track 3: Songs of Fun and Nonsense Download Track 4: The Animal World Download Track 5: Bedtime Songs and Lullabies You'll notice there's one fewer track listed here than there is on the official discography--I'm guessing that "Puzzle," the first track on side 2, has been folded into the "Songs of Fun and Nonsense," the last track on side 1. Commentary to come.