The Rolls-Royce Treatment

John Gibbons
Reviews

I like boxes. You know, compendiums of classical music consisting of 30 or more cds, at prices averaging under $2/disc.  I don’t listen to ‘em, necessarily, but I pile them on the piano and look at them from time to time. There are amazing deals out there, incl. Bayreuth’s old Sawallisch (what a Lohengrin!) and Bohm (What a Tristan!) records…33 cds in a pretty box.  Or “Berlin Alexanderplatz”; a deluxe Criterion 7 disc set of the greatest film ever made, with a book included as well. And a very pretty box.

Nobody with any sense is gonna dispute the above purchases. You’re probably no longer reading this, because you’re madly scrambling to order these items for yourself. But now for the insane part of this narrative. Cue the ominous music, let’s say Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” or Weber’s Wolfglen music. Or on second thought, don’t bother. The facts are scary enough. Joining Bayreuth and Fassbinder on the piano is the 37-disc set of Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil. in complete editions of Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Met “Tosca” Booed: Luc Bondy vs. Franco Zeffirelli

Bonnie Gibbons
Culture, Favorites: Bonnie
Pre-emptively trashing the Tosca production that was replacing his wasn’t exactly sporting of “F-Zeff,” but his thesis matches one that John has advanced in this pages: Puccini’s original settings are too much fun to sacrifice on the altar of Regietheater. That’s why Puccini seems rarely subjected to directorial intrusion, and perhaps why messing with Tosca at the expense of the Zeffirelli production seems a particular affront to some members of the audience.  Add the fact that this opening was the season’s Gala (with an audience self-selected for perhaps a greater conservative tendency) and we have ourselves a big, fat “Boooooo…”

Is Tchaikovsky an 18th Century Composer?

John Gibbons
Class: Tchaikovsky, Reviews

From tchaikovsky-research.orgSome comments concerning my rereading of Richard Taruskin’s chapter “Tchaikovsky and the Human” from his book Defining Russia Musically. Taruskin’s contention is that Tchaikovsky’s explicit advocacy of autocratic rule and its social structure, coupled with his determination to provide musical entertainment rather than dragoon a listener into the creator’s private egotistical orbit makes Tchaikovsky’s agenda an 18th century one.

Taruskin’s claim that Tchaikovsky is essentially an 18th century composer needs to be taken seriously; not because of his (neoclassic) pastisches, not because of his adoration of Mozart, and certainly not because of some similarity of technical means or stylistic profile — but because Tchaikovsky’s explicit aims and vision of the prupose of art is so consonent with Mozart and his colleagues’ musical aims. But what a composer wants to accomplish isn’t necessarily what he does accomplish.

YouTube Symphony Mashup

Bonnie Gibbons

The “Global Mashup” is ready for your viewing pleasure right now. This part of the YouTube Symphony project is a video performance of Tan Dun’s “Eroica” (composed for this project) spliced together from the audition videos.

Good Friday, April 10, 1868

Bonnie Gibbons
Video

Starting from an unused funeral march he’d written years before, Brahms began his requiem after the death of his mother in 1865, an event that added timely weight to his longstanding desire to memorialize his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. It all tied together, at least for writers, when Brahms bumped into Clara Schumann (widow to Robert and friend to Brahms’s mother — and around when Brahms had thought up the funeral march while trying to write piano music) outside the Bremen cathedral on the way into that first performance.

Written on a personal impetus during the romantic period (virtually defined by the concept of personal narrative), the Requiem is not liturgical. Its full title translates as “A German Requiem, after words of the Holy Scriptures.” There are only two soloists: a soprano singing of consolation on behalf of Brahms’s mother, and a baritone whose “Behold, I tell you a mystery” solo anchors a movement so searching, emotional and yet historically learned that it simply must be a musical conversation with Schumann.

Prokofiev, Bartok Interviews

Bonnie Gibbons
Class: Rachmaninov & Prokofiev, Composers Playing, Interviews, Video

(Via Jessica Duchen, British music writer and Korngold biographer.)

In this 1944 radio interview in English, Bela Bartok discusses the pieces in an upcoming recital by his wife. At this time, he was suffering from leukemia and had a little over a year to live. Bartok’s English is fluent, but his accent charmingly has a little Peter Lorre flavor (make that “Peter Lorre impersonator” flavor, since the real Lorre had an additional Viennese sound that Mel Blanc et al. missed.) Bartok speaks in some detail about forms and folk influences of these pieces.

And here’s a short video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and talking about what he’s composing. The excerpt is from Scene 5 of his opera War and Peace, which had just had a partial concert performance in Leningrad. At that moment (the middle section of the waltz), Anatole Kuragin has been going after the engage Natasha, and he gets her alone to kiss her and hand her a love letter. The entire scene IS the waltz, except for Natasha’s interjections in her own musical style, which wane in strength as the scene goes on.

Load More