Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Eroica, eroica

Via Seated Ovation.

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"America is a pathetic place where something stupefying must always happen for fear we wake up.”

              — William Carlos Williams, "The Venus"

Chávez and El Sistema

Here is video of Gustavo Dudamel conducting "Mambo" from West Side Story at a rally celebrating the bicentennial of Venezuela last summer. When it's over, at 3:20, you see an image of Hugo Chávez accompanied by the slogan "¡Pa'lante Comandante!" — "Forward, Commander!" Dan Wakin examines the controversy over Chávez's relationship with El Sistema and Dudamel in the New York Times.

In other music-and-politics news, Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev appear on a list of 499 supporters of Vladimir Putin.

Books received: Daniel Cavicchi

Image: Library of Congress.

From Daniel Cavicchi's new book Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum:

Touring European virtuosos outdid everyone else in creating concert spectacle. Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt, among others, had been performing mind-bending displays of technique and showmanship for European audiences throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century; this approach found great success in the music market of the United States . . . At one poorly attended performance by The Havana Opera Troupe in Boston, in 1846, Giovanni Bottesini, the troupe's orchestra leader, and known as the "Paganini of the double bass," "astonished the musicians by his converting a three stringed double bass into a violin, and the prodigies of execution he brought from an instrument so unwieldy to others." Henri Kowalski noted that "Leopold de Meyer played fantasies for the left hand while he ate vanilla ice-cream with his right; Wehli played a military piece; when he wished to imitate the cannons, he sat down on the keys in the lowest bass." Joseph Gungl, the German conductor, reported that "J. L. Hatton, the pianist and composer, at a concert appear[ed] with sleigh bells fastened to his right leg. When he came to the proper place in the piece he was playing, something about a sleigh ride, he shook this leg violently while an assistant made a noise like the cracking of whip."

I looked at a couple of James Wehli pieces in a military mode; alas, I could find no notation of what might be termed a "butt cluster."

The Parsifal ban broken

The first public staged performance of Parsifal outside Bayreuth took place, famously and scandalously, at the Met on Christmas Eve, 1903. Here are some glimpses of the event from the pages of the New York Times. The scene in the boxes, with particular attention paid to the hats, or lack thereof:

Up in the galleries:

The Bayreuth hush is enforced:

The limited allure of Verbier

I've never had a strong interest in attending the Verbier Festival, which strikes me as a gathering-together of well-known classical names to no particular purpose. Since most of these musicians travel through New York on a regular basis, I don't need to cross the ocean in order to see them play more or less the same pieces in more or less the same configuration. Last year, Gidon Kremer denounced the festival's "misguided fixation with glamour and sex appeal," and the brochure for the 2012 edition suggests no change of heart: one sees many ostensibly good-looking stars from so-called major labels, vast quantities of standard nineteenth-century repertory, and an almost total lack of post-World War II or contemporary fare. There are, in fact, two living composers listed in some fifty programs: Charlotte Bray and Vasco Mendonça. The latter's name is misspelled.

Dudamel is not the savior of classical music

In finely measured fashion, Bob Shingleton lodges a protest against the idea that Gustavo Dudamel is, to quote a recent Newsweek article, "saving classical music." Classical music has many saviors, Bob replies; all over the world, musicians, teachers, administrators, and ordinary music-lovers are working to extend a thousand-year tradition that has been tested many times and never been broken. And what is it that classical music needs to be saved from? Among other things, from media outlets that have all but eliminated classical music from their coverage, paying attention to it only on the rare occasion when an artist acquires the weird chemistry of "star value." Stardom in the American mode is a devouring force, and Bob is right to warn Dudamel — a greatly gifted musician, with room to grow — to be wary of the corporate machine that churns behind it. The ultimate elite, as I've pointed out before, resides in pop culture, and classical music is oddly lucky to be on the other side of the great celebrity divide.

CD of the Week: New York Polyphony

"Mem" from Crecquillon's Lamentationes Jeremiae, from New York Polyphony's album endBeginning (BIS-SACD-1949, available 2/28; eClassical download already available).

Two fun facts about New York Polyphony baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert: in his capacity as an observer of Middle Eastern affairs, he has worked for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's Integrated Crisis Early Warning System; and he is Martha Stewart's nephew.

Miscellany: Finckel, Fairouz, Philly, etc.

There's been something of an earthquake in the seldom seismic world of chamber music: David Finckel, the big-toned cellist of the Emerson String Quartet for all but three years of its thirty-six-year existence, will exit the group at the end of the current season. Because his place will be taken by the gifted Welsh cellist Paul Watkins, no one feels great alarm. Still, it's a bit of a shock.... The Opera Company of Philadelphia, evidently bucking the trends that shuttered Opera Boston and nearly brought down New York City Opera, have announced an adventurous 2012-13 season: Britten's Owen Wingrave, Adès's Powder Her Face, and Kevin Puts's Silent Night alongside La Bohème and The Magic Flute. David Patrick Stearns has more.... On Thursday, Miller Theater presents the world premiere of Poems and Prayers, the third symphony of Mohammed Fairouz.... Juilliard's AXIOM give Rihm's Jagden und Formen a spin on Feb. 17. On Feb. 27, Jeffrey Milarsky leads the annual concert of Juilliard student composers. Both shows are free.... In coming days, the Avant Music Festival offers a centenary performance of Pierrot lunaire, a rendition of Eve Beglarian's Songs from the River and Elsewhere, and a Randy Gibson piece with a really long title.... The Electronic Music Foundation presents electronic works of Luigi Nono between Feb. 26 and Feb. 28.... Stucky time in NYC: the Philharmonic plays his Son et lumière Feb. 23-28, the Pittsburgh Symphony his Rachel Carson-inspired Silent Spring on Feb. 26. (The New Yorker published Carson's work just shy of fifty years ago.) ... Notable musicological tomes now in stores: Susan McClary's Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, Christopher Gibbs's one-volume "college edition" of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.... Worth a close read: John Halle's extended essay on new music and Occupy Wall Street. A footnote to the section on Obama and the arts: his FY 2013 budget calls for a slight increase in arts funding.

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"One does not write, luminously, on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone does that.... Man pursues black upon white."

                — Mallarmé