The Philharmonia Baroque is in the download game. You can listen for free or buy at your own price, ranging from $5 to $18 ("We love you!"). Their live Handel Atalanta is excellent.
Links
Orgy of narcissism
I am flattered and slightly stunned to be receiving a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center. I doubt whether I deserve such a thing, particularly in the vicinity of Milton Babbitt, but I will gratefully accept it. Incidentally, the ever-buoyant Babbitt, who celebrates his ninetieth birthday on May 10, was the first famous composer I met (after Leonard Bernstein, in childhood). I talked to him for thirty seconds or so at WHRB in 1988. When, some years later, I met him again, he remembered our encounter with uncanny precision, down to the diseased color of the rug in the room we talked in.
I'm giving a few out-of-town lectures in coming weeks. Next Thursday, I will speak on the sinister topic "Stalin and Hitler as 'Music-Lovers'"
at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Having become aware that April 20
used to be Hitler's birthday, I wish to assure potential attendees that
it will not be a particularly pro-Hitler presentation. The kind of love
we are talking about is that which Oscar Wilde described in "The Ballad
of Reading Gaol" — "Each man kills the thing he loves." Much of the
material comes from the central section of my book
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century — chapters on music in Stalin's Soviet Union, FDR's America, and Hitler's
Germany in the 30s and 40s. It's the best work I've done, I think.
On April 28, I will be in Seattle to talk at On the Boards, and the next day I will give a paper at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference.
At On the Boards I will hazardously attempt to sum up, with the aid of
an iPod, the entire twentieth century in about an hour. We'll
see how far I get. I can guarantee that Hanns Eisler's
"Heimliche Aufmarsch" will bring the house down (if played at
ear-splitting, bourgeoisie-annihilating volume). As in the book, my aim
is to map out the sheer dizzying diversity of music of the
last hundred years — the extremes of pure beauty and pure noise to
which composers lunged, both in imitation and defiance of the
times in which they lived.
As for the book itself, I am beginning to see a flicker of light at the end of the "profound dull tunnel" (War Requiem). I have now cut a full 100,000 words from the manuscript, and I am getting somewhere close to publishable length.
Happy Passover and "Easter" (actual Easter is April 23).
Full fathom nine
"Poignance Measured in Digits"
by Hans Fantel
New York Times, July 16, 1989
Normally the phonograph plays a casual accompaniment to our lives. We think of it, quite rightly, as a means of entertainment. Yet there are times when the machine suddenly shows a deeper aspect of its character, and the miraculous nature of the instrument stands revealed.
So it was for me last week. The mail brought a new CD for review. I opened the parcel and suddenly found myself holding a piece of my past — as remote as a previous incarnation yet as present as my heartbeat. The recording was made at a concert I attended more than 50 years ago.
At first memory refused to fill in the details. But soon they crowded into me, in a chaos of remembrance, as the phonograph asserted its power of putting the past into the present.
The recorded concert took place at the Musikverein in Vienna. The liner notes confirmed the date: Jan. 16, 1938. Bruno Walter, the great conductor then in his prime, led the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Since this epochal work had never before been put on disks, a British record company then known as His Master's Voice (now EMI) had hauled its cumbersome recording apparatus to Austria for the occasion — a rare and complicated undertaking before the age of tape.
My father was a subscriber to the Philharmonic and had taken me along in the mistaken belief that, being a rather precocious teen-ager, I might be ready for the vigors of Mahler. Because almost none of Mahler's works were then available on records, my father probably looked on this concert as a welcome opportunity to acquaint me with a composer he deeply admired and had known personally. [He sang in the Vienna Court Opera Chorus under Mahler around 1906, Mr. Fantel added in a letter.]
The brand-new CD in my hand seemed strangely incongruous. Its curiously abstract digital concepts were unthinkable at the time the original recording was cut into soft, palpable wax. Here, in the latest technical guise, were echoes of a lost world. While I inwardly grappled with this, my recall sharpened, and I remembered the occasion of the recording with startling accuracy.
Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days because Mahler's city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler's music was loathsome — a product of "Jewish decadence." To put Mahler's music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.
We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich. The music, captured that day by the bulky old microphones I remember strung across the stage, was the last to be heard from many of the musicians in the orchestra. They and their country vanished.
I put on the record. To hear that music again, after so long a time and in so distant a place, was a strange reprise. I now lived on another continent and even spoke another language. And I had become an adult.
I now had some musical understanding of what I had then heard uncomprehendingly. I could now recognize and appreciate the singular aura of that performance; I could sense its uncanny intensity — a strange inner turmoil quite different from the many other recordings of Mahler's Ninth I had heard since. Knowing now what nobody could have known at the time of the concert, it seemed that perhaps the playing of the music carried within it a foreboding of what was to come. Terror and anguish, not yet experienced but divined, were transformed into song. Was it by chance that Mahler's Ninth — that supreme expression of farewell — was on the program that day?
But it wasn't the music alone that cast a spell over me as I listened to the new CD. Nor was it the memory of the time when the recording was made. It took me a while to discover what so moved me. Finally, I knew what it was: This disk held fast an event I had shared with my father: 71 minutes out of the 16 years we had together. Soon after, as an "enemy of Reich and Führer," my father also disappeared into Hitler's abyss.
That's what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity.
All this seems far from our usual concerns with the hardware of sound reproduction. But then again, speculating on endlessness may be getting at the purposive essence of all this electronic gadgetry — its "telos," as the Greeks would say. In the perennial rebirth of music through recordings, something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.
Feline perspectives: Kaija Saariaho
Writings in exile
I'm still in Paris, awaiting the first performance of Kaija Saariaho's opera Adriana Mater. The premiere was to have taken place at the Opéra de la Bastille last Thursday night, but, as Charles Downey reported at ionarts, a strike in support of part-time performing-arts workers forced a last-minute cancellation. If tonight's performance is cancelled too, I'll have to move on, but I intend to write about Saariaho anyway, damnit. I've gleaned some sense of the new piece from the score, and I can also comment on the riveting new DVD of her first opera, L'Amour de loin. [Update: Saariaho was heard, and she triumphed.] Another nationwide strike, unrelated to the action against the Opéra, has been called for tomorrow. From the barricades of the eternal revolution I salute you.
Through the marvel of digital sound, I am listening in my Paris hotel room to last week's LA Philharmonic concerts, now on iTunes. Mark Swed has the Minimalist Jukebox report; more at The Standing Room, Paul Bailey, and Sequenza21.
Britten notes
A few addenda to my current column about Ian Bostridge's Britten recital. The tenor's recording of Serenade, Nocturne, and Les Illuminations, with Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, was released last year by EMI, and it's a great document. There's also his very fine account of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne and other songs for Hyperion, although he would probably bring more emotional edge to the material if he were to record it again today (which he should, alongside Winter Words). For the more advanced Brittenite, I recommend a Virgin Classics disc of the five Canticles. I haven't heard the Virgin recording of Turn of the Screw with Bostridge as Quint. If Britten is totally new to you, start with Jon Vickers's stupendous recording of Peter Grimes, although unfortunately the latest reissue contains no libretto. A few nights after the Britten recital, Bostridge presented a second, equally gratifying concert, with the expert, extroverted Belcea Quartet: Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge, Fauré's La Bonne chanson, Shostakovich's Third Quartet. (See Charles Downey's lovely review of the DC version.) Two more Perspectives are slated for May.
I begin my column with a brief account of Britten's visit to the
former concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in July, 1945, in the
company of Yehudi Menuhin. A remarkable anecdote about their performance
can be found in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed's edition of Britten's
correspondence and diaries (Letters from a Life, vol. 2, pp.
1273-74). In the notes, the editors quote from a letter that Anita Lasker, a young cellist who had survived the camp,
wrote to her aunt after the recital: "It was a beautiful evening.
Both soloist and accompanist were of a simplicity regarding their
attire which almost bordered on the slovenly, which fitted the local
atmosphere perfectly, No need to mention that Menuhin played
violinistically to perfection.... Concerning the accompanist, I can only
say that I just can not imagine anything more beautiful (wonderful).
Somehow one never noticed that here was any accompanying going on at
all, and yet I had to stare at this man like one transfixed as he sat
seemingly suspended between chair and keyboard, playing so beautifully."
Across the pond, Helen Radice is playing in a performance of Britten's War Requiem in London. She quotes the composer as follows: "It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love." Britten said relatively little about music in public; he once told Joan Peyser of the New York Times that composers talk too much. What he did say counted.
If you read the article online, you'll be missing a masterly portrait of Bostridge by Steve Pyke, who took memorable photographs of Gerald Finley and David Robertson for past articles of mine. I took the above sub-Pykean photo in Britten's home town of Aldeburgh in 1995.
