alan little’s weblog – music archive

german sonata

4th August 2008 permanent link

Sarah quotes me on something I don’t remember saying – but can well imagine I might have said – to the effect that:

German-speakers plan their speeches more carefully than we do. Before you launch into one of those long sentences with the verb at the end you have to know where you’re going!

This doesn’t mean you have to have every word planned out in detail before you launch into a German sentence, but you do have to be confident that you can somehow or other make your way back around to that trailing verb. Something like Sonata Form in music, where eventually, whatever you do in between, you have to make your way back to a recapitulation of the original theme. As I was about to comment on Sarah’s blog, when it struck me “Hey! And Sonata Form is a quintessentially German art. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven”.

So: Sonata Form mirrors the grammatical structure of a German sentence? Why not? People talk about Janacek’s music as mirroring the spoken rhythms of the Czech language. Don’t take my views on musical structure & history too seriously though. I’m the guy for whom Alex Ross's http://www.amazon.com/Rest-Noise-Listening-Twentieth-Century/dp/0374249393/ was too technical.

Somebody who really wanted to push this “argument” to absurd limits could surely also find some analogy to the ideas of (German speaking philosopher) Hegel. Which would be silly.

buskers

22nd May 2008 permanent link

Genuinely good buskers are rare, and a great pleasure when you do find them. I found these guys today on my way from the U-Bahn to the art gallery. They were playing the Usual Suspects for classical busking - Eine kleine Nachtmusik, bits of the Four Seasons – and playing them well and with enthusiasm. I enjoyed them a lot.

And of course I had my new carry-around camera with me. This isn’t the world’s best or sharpest picture, sure – but I’m beginning to understand what people mean when they say the Olympus DSLRs produce subtly nice colours in their in-camera jpeg processing.

in spite of the gods

9th April 2008 permanent link

Currently reading …

One aspect of India’s economic growth and transformation in recent years is rising prices. English language books, which a few years ago were much cheaper than they were in the west, are now about half the price or more. Nevertheless I spent a happy half hour in Landmark Books in Pune last week.

Part of the loot was Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (the cover photo is of the English edition; the American one looks boring). Edward Luce knows far more about India than I do, having lived there for years rather than months and being married to an Indian lady. He is impatient with dewy-eyed hippies who imagine India is some kind of mystical-metaphysical paradise, and rightly so. I personally think yoga is a huge contribution to world culture – I hope this won’t surprise anybody – but India isn’t only yoga, any more than Europe is only Beethoven. If you want an affectionate but clear-eyed outsider’s look at what’s really going on there these days, this looks like it’s probably the book to read.

I’m not far into the book yet; I hope I don’t end up agreeing with the amazon reviewer who thinks it starts well but is ultimately disappointing.

“Without question the best book yet written on the New India”, says William Dalrymple, and Mark Tully rates it highly too, so why should you care what I think? Go ahead and read it, if you’re at all interested in the subject.

So, do I only recommend books about India written by Brits? Nope. I talked about Vikram Chandra’s hugely enjoyable Mumbai gangster novel Sacred Games last year. I also read Edward Luce’s friend Ramanchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy last year. I found it dry and overly political (one can’t complain that this isn’t clear from the subtitle), but nevertheless, it's informative and makes it clear just what a fragile miracle India’s democracy is.

currently listening to ...

1st February 2008 permanent link

My son is taking his own musical education in hand by picking CDs from the shelves at random and insisting that they be played. (Brian Micklethwait approves) He’s old enough now that I can let him do that without having to worry too much about the fate of the CDs, and in any case I have backups. (Although I suppose admitting to those backups in public might not be such a great idea these days. Fair Use, people, Fair Use)

Today’s choice was Public Image Limited’s Greatest Hits, So Far. “Er”, I ventured to suggest, “you might not like this”. Turns out I was wrong. I underestimated the boy.

Perhaps I should try him on some Joy Division next. Or perhaps not – his mother could come home from her yoga class at any moment.

the rest is noise

26th December 2007 permanent link

What was the favorite thing you gave this year? asks Steven Barnes.

That would be Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Tyler Cowen recommends it highly.

Personally I’m struggling with it. I don’t have enough grasp of technical musical terminology to make any sense of Alex Ross’s descriptions of pieces of music I’m not familiar with – and that, sadly, would seem be most of them. But the very dear friend I gave it to as a Christmas present, a jazz player and erstwhile classical composer, says he’s finding it “unputdownable” and “will definitely have to read it more than once to get the most out of it.”

Bullseye.

seven people

19th June 2007 permanent link

OK. Another list to add to Cara’s eight. Eight again? Turns out to be seven, corresponding coincidentally [?] to the seven main chakras etc.

Seven people I have encountered in my life who I would regard as authentic masters/geniuses.

Three yoga masters:

1. Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
2. Dharma Mittra
3. Bryan Kest

The ayurdevic masseur who healed my knee:

4. P. Vijayan

Two musicians I have heard play live, one in an arena, one in a bar; one extremely famous, one somewhat less so:

5. Neil Young
6. Steve Lafleur

Most Talented Rock Climber Of His Generation, all round mad genius, and the only person on this list I ever knew personally at all well:

7. Johnny Dawes

anecdotal acoustics

17th June 2007 permanent link

Brian Micklethwait links to Norman Lebrecht on the improved acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall in London. This was going to be a comment on Brian’s blog, until I remembered that writing one’s own blog in the form of excessively long comments on other peoples’ is rude.

The acoustics of concert halls really matter to the people who play in them for a living. Presumably they would to real classical music listeners like Brian too, if Brian didn’t these days prefer listening to recording to going to concerts. Dilettantes like me don’t really have enough experience to know the difference, but we know people who do.

When I told my freelance classical musician brother that I was going to a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London, about ten years ago, he asked me very anxiously to tell him what the acoustic was like. Apparently the building had had something major done to it, and everybody in the trade was worried that they might have completely screwed up London’s famously best-sounding chamber music venue. Something about digging a new cellar underneath it? Which seemed like a utterly strange thing to contemplate doing to any building, let alone a concert hall. I was unable to help him, having never been there before. It didn’t sound obviously terrible.

Then there was the wind playing friend who told me, when the Bridgewater Hall opened in Manchester, that the stage acoustic is so forward-projecting that the wind players at the back of the orchestra could barely hear what the strings were up to at the front. She didn’t appear to regard this as an unmitigated disaster.

Currently listening to: Wilhelm Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic through Brahms’s Haydn Variations. Beautiful. Recorded in 1950 and presumably not in the current Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which looks like a yellow lego spaceship and therefore can’t possibly have existed in 1950. I have no idea what it sounds like, I’ve just seen the outside of it whilst visiting the art gallery next door.

[Cara: still haven’t forgotten. It was “respond within eight weeks”, wasn’t it?]

what was i thinking?

30th April 2007 permanent link

A random email, from somebody who thought I was somebody else, led me to have a look back through my music blogging archive. There among other things I noticed a top ten list from three years ago of my then-favourite classical recordings.

We all grow up, hopefully, and sometimes our tastes change and mature with time. But I’ve listened to quite a bit more classical music in the last three years than I had before, and quite a few of the things on that list now jump out at me as signs that when you’re just starting to get interested in something, your ideas and opinions might not be quite as well informed as you think they are. (Under-experienced yoga teachers also take note)

Piece	Then	Now
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 "Eroica"	Furtwängler/Vienna Philharmonic 1944 recording	I haven’t been listening to Beethoven symphonies much lately. If I did, these would still be the ones I would listen to.
Beethoven: Symphony no.7	Carlos Kleiber / Vienna Philharmonic (their recording of no. 5 on the same CD is more famous but I prefer the 7th)
Beethoven: complete string quartets	Hungarian Quartet 1950s mono recordings	The Hungarian Quartet mono recordings would still be a decent choice for a complete set, supposing they were still available, which I believe they’re not. I’m sure there are also plenty of very good performances by modern ensembles available in state of the art recorded sound, but I havt listene to them (and, to be honest, don’t feel any great need to). As always with sets of recordings, you can find better version of the individual pieces. That fantastic Smetana Quartet Rasumovsky 3, for example, but it’s only available on a very obscure German label and absurdly difficult to get hold of. As are their 1960s recordings of the late quartets, which overenthusiastic people can get hold of by importing them from Japan. This is just absurd. There are people who want these things, and there’s just no need any more to get into all the costs of burning hundreds of funny little plastic disks and shipping them around the place. Just put the damn things on a server somewhere already, and charge enough to cover the bandwidth costs plus a reasonable profit margin. Free money. what could be simpler? A slightly unfashionable choice: The Italian Quartet. Lots of people find their style too smooth and pretty for Beethoven, but I personally find their opus 132 Heiliger Dankgesang (Pinnacle Of Western Culture?) astounding. On a par with that Smetana Quartet Rasumovsky 3, even.
Beethoven: String Quartet no.9, Rasumovsky 3	Smetana Quartet 1960s recording
Mozart piano concertos	Alfred Brendel /  Neville Marriner / Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields	These are quite good as a cheap starter set of some of the best known concertos. There are better recordings of individual pieces – Martha Argerich’s wild Number 20, for example
Mozart Requiem Mass.	Neville Marriner / Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields	That was a typo in the first place, I meant Hogwood / Academy of Ancient Music
Schubert String Quintet	Stern / Katim / Schneider / Casals / Tortellier	Another one I haven’t listened to for quite a while, but if I did, this is still a very fine performance of a very fine piece of music. Also good: the Hungrarian Quartet
Brahms Violin Concerto	Kremer / Bernstein /  Vienna Philharmonic	There are other Brahms Violin Concerto recordings I would prefer now, Oistrakh/Klemperer for example. But these days when I want to listen to a Big Romantic Concerto it’s generally the Dvorak Cello Concerto, for which Fournier/Celibidache (1948) is definitive.
Shostakovich String Quartets.	Original Borodin Quartet recordings	Yep. There’s a BBC live recording of number eight from an early 1960s Edinburgh Festival that’s even better than the slightly later studio recording. The orginal Borodin Quartet only recorded the first thirteen; number fifteen is also wonderful and the Mark II Borodin Quartet, in which Mikhail Kopelman replaced Rostislav Dubinsky as first violin, did that stunningly too.
Bach Cello Suites	Since we might as well have ten, I have the feeling there must be a recording of the Bach cello suites out there somewhere that I would really, really love but I haven’t found it yet. I’ve listened to Casals, Fournier and Tortellier and they haven’t blown me away	What was I thinking? Not blown away by Casals? Clearly I can’t have been listening properly. Pau is Da Man. I also again and again find myself pleasantly surprised by an obscure recording by Yehuda Hanani (pupil of Casals, apparently) for which I have to thank emusic. Pieter Wispelwey – seemingly regarded by quite a few people as Greatest Cellist Of His Generation, etc. – somehow doesn’t do a whole lot for me in this or in quite a few other things.
Elgar cello concerto	du Pré / Barbirolli)
Haydn Seven Last Words	Borodin Quartet
Smetana String Quartet  no. 1.	Juilliard Quartet	Having so many CDs that if you listened to one a day, you’d listen to each one about once every couple of years, has its disadvantages. On the other hand, you can be pleased when you dig out something that you used to like a lot but haven’t listened to for a while, and find that you still like it a lot.
Mussorgsky: Pictures At An Exhibition	Fritz Reiner / Chicago Symphony Orchestra	Not a profound utterance from the depths of somebody's soul, but who ever said everything has to be? Great Fun. If you’re used to Ravel’s famous orchestral version, [Alan now recommends Toscanini, not that there’s anything noticeably wrong with Reiner] then Mussorgsky’s original for solo piano takes a little bit of getting used to. Richter was the undisputed master of it; Pletnev is good too, especially if you want a modern recording with decent sound instead of Richter’s accompaniment by the collective coughing of Bulgaria’s Stalinist nomenklatura in his most famous live recording.

brian on bach

21st April 2007 permanent link

Brian Mickethwait on Johann Sebastian Bach:

Bach was making his music for God, who hears everything and remembers everything and who has no need of his own personal score. And, Bach was composing to bring his contemporaries closer to God. He pretty much assumed that future musicians attempting the same would do it with music that they had themselves composed, rather than with music composed by a dead person.

so, currently listening to …

25th September 2006 permanent link

Shostakovich’s first violin concerto, played by David Oistrakh with Yevgeniy Mravinsky conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

Tyler finds Shostakovich’s concerti unconvincing. I don’t.

Happy birthday Dmitry.

UPDATE: Shostakovich Night continues with one of Rostropovich’s recordings of the first Cello Concerto – admittedly less convincing, though still well worth listening to – and Shostakovich’s own recording of five of his Twenty Four Preludes And Fugues for solo piano. Beautiful in, as Tyler says, a very different way from the more familiar orchestral works.

tyler on shostakovich

24th September 2006 permanent link

Tyler Cowen – and, in his comments section, Alan Little among others – recommend Shostakovich’s music on the occasion of the imminent hundredth anniversary of the great man’s birth.

Tyler likes some of the symphonies, the string quartets and the piano trio. I said:

Wot no Piano Quintet? Various versions of the Borodin Quartet recorded it with various great pianists such as Richter & Leonskaja. For a complete set of the symphonies, Shostakovich's close friend Barshai's set on ultra-cheap label Brilliant is a sound bargain introduction; alternatively, a couple of weeks ago in Moscow I paid not very much for a set of Melodiya reissues of Mravinsky's 5,6,7,8,10,11,12,15, which I haven't had time to listen to yet and am looking forward to.

(Tyler - next time you're on a family trip to Russia, the CD shop in Sheremetyevo airport has lots on interesting Melodiya reissues by greats like Mravinsky, Richter & Oistrakh. Not at the kind of absurdly low prices you see in the pirate CD shops outside airports, but reasonably priced by western standards - I think I paid 30 Euros for that 6-disk Shostakovich box. And the ultra-cheap pirate shops are generally disappointing for classical, in that they have cheap knock-offs of stuff that is readily available in the west, but not any of the kind of obscure Soviet archive stuff that I always go there really hoping to find)

Getting back to the point: my favourite string quartets are #8 & #15. There is an amazing Borodin Quartet live recording of #8 from an early 1960s Edinburgh festival on BBC Legends that is even better than their studio recording from around the same time. And there's a very, very good #15 coupled with their recording of the Piano Quintet with Leonskaja on Teldec, making the disk very, very worth buying. On ultra-bargain labels for those looking for an introduction on the cheap, the Eder Quartet on Naxos and the Rubio Quartet on Brilliant are also perfectly decent.

I wonder if Brian will have anything to add? UPDATE: he does have something to say, albeit a few days after the actual anniversary.

baroque bach?

1st May 2006 permanent link

“How anybody can possibly use the same term to describe this and the lean, elegant, logical beauty of Bach’s music is beyond me” was my reaction when I visited the Baroque church at Andechs a few months ago.

It appears to be beyond Mstislav Rostropovich too, and he knows a great deal more about these things than I ever will. He explains why he chose to record the Bach cello suites in a twelfth century Romanesque church at Vézelay and not in some baroque monstrosity like Andechs:

When I first entered this church I saw the rhythm of the internal architecture shorn of all superfluity, with none of the gilt and ornamental trimmings of the baroque style. I saw the severity of line and the rhythm of this vaulted construction, which reminds me so powerfully of the rhythm of Bach’s music. It seemed to me that I had found the right place.

upgrading your iPod

19th February 2006 permanent link

I got my wife an iPod for her birthday, then spent a little while showing her how to copy Björk and Kate Bush songs onto it. First I explained a bit about compressed music and the difference between low and high bitrates (minimal-to-none, if you’re our age).

My wife isn’t any kind of audiophile or technical enthusiast. She nevertheless asks why I don’t use the standard white earbuds that came with my iPod Mini, and can she have a go with my Sennheisers? Immediately says they make the white earbuds sound “miserabel”, thus proving the point somebody well-informed made (wouldn’t surprise me if it were Steve Crandall, but I can’t track the link down just now), that above a reasonable minimum bitrate – around 160 AAC – upgrading your headphones makes a heck of a lot more difference than higher bitrates.

She can buy her own Sennheisers.

joachim’s violin

5th January 2006 permanent link

I held Joseph Joachim’s violin.

Just home from an entirely Internet-free two weeks visiting family & friends. Lots of good times had, but this was easily the most remarkable happening – my tenuous and indirect music connections are more illustrious than I ever imagined. Joseph Joachim was the top violin soloist of the late nineteenth century. He is the man Brahms wrote his violin concerto for, and the subject of this fascinating article by Peter Gutmann on early recordings.

He is also the x-times-great-grandfather, or -uncle, or something, of a friend of my brother, who still has in her possession the child-sized violin on which Joachim first performed in public circa 1850.

I’m catching up on my online reading, of which while we’re on the subject of classical music I strongly recommend Brian Micklethwait’s latest.

currently listening to …

16th December 2005 permanent link

White face,
black shirt,
white socks,
black shoes,
black hair,
white Strat,
bled white,
dyed black

For no apparent reason, Ian Dury’s Sweet Gene Vincent has been stuck in my mind every time I’ve been anywhere near a record shop for a while now, even though I think I probably last heard it circa 1978. Ian Dury’s work, dating as it does from the pre-CD era and he now being no longer alive and not quite as famous as some of his contemporaries who are, seems to be hard to find on CD. (iTunes Music Store? Don’t be silly)

Maria disapproves of me buying CDs, on the [entirely legitimate] grounds that I have hundreds already, most of which I hardly ever listen to. But yesterday Jack and I were in town shopping for her Christmas present and Jack fell asleep in his pushchair (shopping for Girl Stuff is exhausting). Going into the subway would have woken him up, so my clear duty as a responsible father was to keep shopping.

As luck would have it we were near musicandbooks.de, my current favourite second hand CD shop, and they had a copy of The Best Of Ian Dury And The Blockheads with Sweet Gene Vincent at Track Three. They wanted ten euros for it. I thought about whether it was really worth it for a song I remember fondly from a quarter of a century ago? I might not even like it now. On the other hand, ten euros just to stop the bloody thing jumping into my mind whenever I go anywhere near a shop might be a good investment. If I find I really don’t like it any more I can always sell it on ebay.

So? Worth every f*cking penny! We got both kinds of music, rock and roll!

sandow on cynicism

29th November 2005 permanent link

Greg Sandow has a book in progress about the decline of classical music, especially orchestral classical music, and what if anything can or should be done about it. One of the problems he puts his finger on is a lack of any passion, any unpredictability in yet another run-through of something like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – fine piece of music though it is.

I wrote to him pointing out a couple of counter-examples:

I'm following your online book with great interest, and was struck by your comments about the musicians' (orchestral musicians at any rate) lack of involvement in what they're playing.

My brother is a freelance orchestral string player, and your book isn't going to tell me anything I haven't already heard from him about disillusionment in the orchestral music business. Mostly. But once he got me tickets to hear him playing Mahler in the Liverpool Philharmonic. It turned out to be the day Michael Tippett died; they didn't have anything by him rehearsed, so instead they added Elgar's Nimrod to the program because apparently he loved it. It was an absolutely glorious, performance-of-the-century moment. When my brother met us in the bar afterwards he was glowing, and wanted to know immediately if that had sounded anywhere near as good as it felt. We told him it had.

So here you have a decent but not great orchestra, and a totally overexposed piece of music that any English orchestral musician has performed a thousand times and could play in their sleep. Surely a recipe for tedium. But, given a reason to play it that they care about - plenty of them had probably met Tippett - and an audience to whom it has been explained that this is what we are playing and this is why we are playing it, it turned into a moment of absolutely transcendent wonder. Art, even. I will remember it all my life.

Another example: last year I went to hear a local amateur orchestra perform the Eroica at a charity concert. It was great fun. They had hired a professional conductor, and he and they were clearly determined that they were damn well going to *perform* the thing, not just get through the score without falling apart. They damn near did fall apart, but I admired them and enjoyed the concert far more for that than if they had played it safe. The Eroica is so great it can survive a lot of abuse, and nobody was expecting them to be the Vienna Philharmonic. (On the other hand, what does it do to the Vienna Philharmonic, knowing that everybody *is* expecting them to be the Vienna Philharmonic? Does the pressure of all that expectation to be perfect stop them taking enough risks?)

Of course, for members of that amateur orchestra, this might have been the only chance of their lives to be in a public performance of one of the greatest pieces of orchestral music ever written – and in front of an audience that probably contained large numbers of their friends, relatives and colleagues. Whereas an orchestral professional might acknowledge in an abstract sense how great and wonderful the Eroica is – but how big a deal is any given performance of it?

Another example occurs to me: Arild Remmereit’s amazing Tchaikovsky performance with the Munich Philharmonic that I heard last winter. The band might have thought they were up for just another run through of a too-familiar piece they’ve played a hundred times before – but for the conductor it was his chance to make a splash with a big-name orchestra, and by god he did.

I’m not saying – and nor is Greg, I assume – that it’s all cynicism, all the time with professional orchestras. I used to vaguely know the lead trumpet of the BBC Philharmonic (friend of a friend), and he would get excited and go around drumming up support in the pub whenever they had a big brass showpiece like Mussorgsky’s Pictures or Beethoven’s Fifth coming up. My brother, too, waxes lyrical about the times when he’s been involved in great performances like that Elgar, or when he has heard really great orchestras like the Vienna Philharmonic.

While we’re on the subject of music that is heard and played too often, don’t forget to go and read Brian Micklethwait’s magnificent piece on the Eroica:

It is one thing to hear the first two chords of the Eroica for the hundredth time, in an age of stadium rock and hi-fi volume knobs on our CD players; quite another to hear these two explosions when they were the loudest and most bad-mannered musical noises that anyone had, until then, ever heard indoors.

dealing with idiots

25th November 2005 permanent link

The continuing saga of trying to get iTunes to handle classical music in a half-sensible manner. Andy Baker convinced me that there is actually a case for putting the composer instead of the performer in the “Artist” field – at least for people who for whatever reason choose to use benighted software that doesn’t recognise the standard ID3 Composer tag. This one is quick and easy to fix in iTunes anyway. I really can’t begin to imagine what the people who came up with the other common anti-pattern were thinking. (Achtung! wide picture)

Here we have “Song” used for the title of the work and “Artist” (!) holding the names of the movements. Composer might be embedded in the album title if you’re lucky, and you have to guess the performer. <unahimsic>The idiot(s) responsible for this should be shot</unahimsic>. This nonsense is so widespread that I suspect the idiot responsible is the author of some widely used piece of crap software – my naïve faith in the human race is such that I have difficulty bringing myself to believe in a large number of people all choosing to do the same utterly stupid thing in exactly the same way. This one is much more of a pain to fix – iTunes doesn’t let you bulk edit the movement names from “artist” across into “song name”, you have to cut and paste them one by one.

Which is of course a time-wasting pain in the arse, and after you’ve done it too many times (because it’s still marginally better than typing everything from scratch) you realise that it might be worth spending half an hour learning Applescript. A quick search for “itunes classical applescript” reveals nothing that directly does the job, but a huge library of other scripts for doing things with iTunes which we can easily borrow & adapt. Applescript turns out to be quite a cute little scripting language, and a few minutes’ work produces this:

(*
"Artist to Song Name" for iTunes
fixes one of the most common problems with CDDB classical data, 
where movement names are idiotically placed in the "Artist" field
written by Alan Little
contact@alanlittle.org

based on
"Track Number to Song Name Prefix" for iTunes
by Doug Adams
*)

tell application "iTunes"
	
	if selection is not {} or view of front window is not library playlist 1 then
		if selection is not {} then -- use selection
			set theseTracks to selection
		else -- use whole playlist (this doesn't work)
			set theseTracks to every file track of view of front window
		end if
	else
		display dialog "Select some tracks or a Playlist..." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 with icon 2
	end if
	
	display dialog "Overwrite Song Name with Artist, or append?" buttons {"Overwrite", "Append"} default button 2
	if the button returned of the result is "Append" then
		set myAppend to true
	else
		set myAppend to false
	end if
	
	display dialog "Artist" default answer "" buttons {"OK"} default button 1
	set newArtist to text returned of result
	
	set fixed indexing to true
	
	with timeout of 30000 seconds
		repeat with aTr in theseTracks
			set newName to artist of aTr
			if myAppend then
				set newName to name of aTr & " " & newName
			end if
			set name of aTr to newName
			set artist of aTr to newArtist
		end repeat
	end timeout
	
	set fixed indexing to false
	
end tell

… which works.

better on record?

12th November 2005 permanent link

You just don’t necessarily want to be sitting confined in a chair, surrounded by strangers, as those intermittent waves of sound wash over you.
Kyle Gann

… on hearing the premier of John Luther Adams’ For Lou Harrison, and wondering whether it isn’t music that would be better heard recorded than live.

beethoven plays mozart

11th November 2005 permanent link

Not a “currently listening to …” entry, although wouldn’t it be lovely if it were.

Apparently Beethoven once performed Mozart’s D minor piano concerto (K466) at a benefit concert for Mozart’s widow and children. That must have been something to hear. This information from an interesting biographical sketch of Constanze Mozart by Jane Glover, which I just pulled out of my to_read pile where it had been sitting for a few weeks.

(If you want a recording of the piece that you can actually listen to now, Martha Argerich’s is pretty damn fine)

Ms Glover, like many other serious Mozart fans, dislikes Elizabeth Berridge’s breathtakingly sexy performance as Constanze in Amadeus. I don’t.

currently listening to …

18th October 2005 permanent link

Amazon took nearly three weeks to find me a copy of the Smetana Quartet recording of Schubert’s String Quintet, and when they finally do it turns out to be certainly good, and well worth listening to, but not obviously a must-have compared to a couple of the very good recordings of the piece I already have. It comes on the same disk, however, as a Brahms string quartet (opus 67) which I wasn’t really interested in, but which turns out to be stunning and the first time I have ever really enjoyed a piece of Brahms chamber music.

I also decided to order myself the Smetana Quartet’s late Beethoven recordings from HMV in Japan (early Christmas present). Shipping was expensive but the CDs themselves were cheap, so I ended up paying about the same for them as if I had bought them full price in Europe or the States. HMV, unlike Amazon, shipped within two days – but then they spent two days in Customs at Frankfurt airport last week, and when I checked the Fedex website again this evening I discovered that they tried to deliver them yesterday and again today but nobody was in. I hope they don’t send them back to Japan before I phone tomorrow.

record collections

18th October 2005 permanent link

Eric Grunin says he only has 334 recordings of the Eroica, not the “nearly four hundred” I attributed to him. This is barely a tenth of his total collection of CDs and vinyl though. Kyle Gann’s seven thousandish mp3 files are just a tenth of his music collection too, whereas my seven thousand “songs” in iTunes are nearly the whole of mine.

It seems my record collection isn’t going to be getting much bigger. My wife, impeccably yogically, has decreed that we have More Than Enough Stuff in general, and in particular that for every classical CD I buy I have to sell one. Ebay here I come.

baby’s first gig

12th October 2005 permanent link

A Wednesday Family Life Vignette.

Jack and I went into town to buy Jack shoes. (At least this time he actually managed to wear the old ones out in the three months it took him to also grow out of them)

Outside the shoe shop was a quartet (double bass, violin, flute, oboe) playing light classics – William Tell Overture, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the usual suspects. They were no great shakes, but not terrible either, and Jack was interested so I thought we’d stop for a few minutes. It’s very important for him to understand that music is something people do, not something that comes out of a box; but I would never dream of taking a two year old to a concert, even a kids’ one, for fear of him getting bored. Listening to buskers, you can just move on when he loses interest. Except he didn’t – he was absolutely riveted, grinning from ear to ear and conducting with the two balloons he acquired in the shoe shop, for half an hour until the musicians took a break.

We didn’t have any change, and we got a good deal on the shoes, so the guys got five bucks out of us.

insider perspective

11th October 2005 permanent link

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra is coming to Munich, so I called my brother to ask his professional opinion on whether they’re likely to be worth the price of tickets and a babysitter – and got interesting insights into the perspectives and priorities of the working musician. Oh absolutely, he says, there’s only a handful of really top flight orchestras in the world and the New York Phil is one of them. (The others, folks, are Berlin, Vienna, Chicago and maybe, marginally, the London Symphony Orchestra). Who’s conducting and what are they playing? Maazel, Mahler 5. Oh, then definitely go – he pulls great faces when he’s conducting Mahler, he should get an Oscar.

Lest you think it’s all professional cynicism, though, he then goes into raptures about the time he heard the Vienna Philharmonic. Especially their brass section: “they’ve got so much power they bounce the sound off the back wall of the hall and it hits you on the back of the head and you think wow, where did that come from?”

a step in the right direction

8th October 2005 permanent link

“I want to be able to get anything that is currently or has ever been released. I don’t care whether I get things from individual record labels or some kind of distributor …” I said last week. Today, via rec.music.classical.recordings I discover that British classical label Chandos has all its no longer available CDs available for download as MP3s.

“Now everything Chandos has ever recorded is available either as a CD or Mp3” appears to mean things that are currently available on CD aren’t there for download. It also doesn’t appear to include things Chandos have reissued but didn’t originally record, such as the Borodin Quartet’s amazing 1960s Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. Seems to be a better deal than Apple. Pricing is somewhat cheaper: £0.40 (about US$0.70 ) per five minutes or part thereof. Format is 192kbps mp3 – roughly comparable to 128 AAC. No DRM.

Every record label should do this. Supraphon and whoever owns RCA these days, please start with your early 1960s Smetana and Juilliard Quartet Beethoven recordings. Thank you.

mo’ shopping blues

1st October 2005 permanent link

I buy quite a lot of CDs – probably about a hundred a year, although I haven’t been doing it for very long so I “only” have a total collection of about six or seven hundred CDs. That’s not a big collection by some people’s standards. Music critic and blogger Alex Ross thinks he has about ten thousand CDs. My friend Charlie told me he has about two thousand CDs and considerably more vinyl LPs. Eric Grunin has nearly four hundred recordings just of the Eroica. Brian Micklethwait doesn’t give an exact number for his “pathologically gigantic CD collection”, but I recall he once posted a picture of some of it. I can’t find the picture just now but it, too, definitely looked much bigger than mine. Nevertheless I suspect I’m probably still in the top few percent of spenders of money on recorded music. The lady on the cash desk at Ludwig Beck knows me.

Here we finally get to the point of my ramblings about R.L. Burnside and the Smetana Quartet: the number of people in the world who are shopping for music by R.L. Burnside and the Smetana Quartet at any given time probably fluctuates between zero and one. But there are lots and lots of people looking for other things of that sort, and these are precisely the people who buy a lot of recorded music. Or would if they could actually find it, except that actually finding any given piece of even-slightly-outside-the-mainstream music, especially classical, is hopeless and getting worse.

It must be hard-verging-on-impossible for a specialist record shop to be a viable business these days. My guess is that the Ludwig Beck record department is Herr Beck’s personal hobby and subsidised by the clothing store. Zweitausendeins seems to have found a viable bottom-feeder niche. I have no idea what could possibly be going on bei Müller. The cost of carrying huge amounts of slow moving and rapidly depreciating stock must be immense. Even if you do bear that cost, you still can’t possibly have every obscure item that everybody looking for R.L. Burnside and the Smetana Quartet wants; but if you don’t have it right there they’re not going to order it from you any more, they’re going to go to Amazon. Where there’s a pretty good chance of it being available, but good luck finding it with Amazon’s crap search facilities.

Is what I want so very far-fetched? I want to be able to get anything that is currently or has ever been released. I don’t care whether I get things from individual record labels or some kind of distributor, as long as I have a search engine that can easily and reliably find them. I don’t mind compressed digital files as long as they have at least CD-quality sound, minimal DRM, and are substantially cheaper than CDs to fairly reflect their far lower distribution costs (I know bandwidth isn’t free). I don’t mind CDs either, as long as I don’t have to wait weeks to get them shipped from some other country. They take up too much space but in some ways they’re still more convenient: it’s a lot easier to carry a CD into the kitchen than it is to open up my laptop and fire up iTunes. We’re not far off: Amazon has a huge selection of music but weak search; Apple’s online music store has decent search but a pitiful selection.

Meanwhile (says the CD junkie) can anybody point me to where I can find a copy of Yevgeny Mravinsky’s recording of Sibelius’ seventh symphony?

steve on compression

30th September 2005 permanent link

Steve Crandall, who knows a great deal more about these things than I do, has some interesting thoughts on acceptable bitrates for digital music:

If you have space lossless is good, but not always detectable. Some very serious double blind tests suggest 128kbps AAC is probably good enough for any ears over 40 years old and many younger ears. 160kbps AAC fools serious ears very well.

Being of a nervous disposition, I back my CDs up using Apple Lossless. But the 250 GB hard disk I put them on is rapidly filling up, and maintaining two copies of things – a slightly compressed archive copy, and a much smaller copy to go on my iPod – is a pain in the ass.

It is a different matter if you are using something recorded at better than CD rate. We did some work with AAC compression on very high bit rate input audio and had much better than CD sound with files much smaller than CD files. A problem is very little is prepared for sale at high quality. A larger problem is most people just don't care. Regular mp3s seem good enough for most people and few people have the $300 headphones or $3000 speakers you really need if you want to focus on the differences.

It’s laughable that people sill regard the quarter of a century old CD standard, or compressed formats that are indistinguishable from it, as some kind of benchmark of sonic excellence. But it’s Good Enough for most people for most purposes, and for the foreseeable future anything better is likely to be so heavily DRM’d it will be useless.

I have a pair of $200 headphones. I bought them used on ebay for nowhere near $200.

(I'd rather put that sort of money into live music...)

Of course Steve’s right in principle. But I have a small child and don’t get out much, and in the evening after I’ve put my small child to bed I like to sit down in the living room and listen to some recorded music (on my $200 headphones). There’s also the They Don’t Make Musicians Like That Any More problem: if giants like the Smetana Quartet still walk the earth, I don’t know who or where they are.

currently listening to …

28th September 2005 permanent link

Schubert’s magnificent String Quintet in C Major, of which I have four recordings: Hollywood Quartet, Hungarian Quartet, Borodin Quartet and Casals, Stern & friends. They’re all good: the Hollywood Quartet and Casals, Stern & co. are almost always near the top of “best recordings” lists for this piece, and I personally think the Hungarian Quartet are even better. All of them (Note To Music Industry) are on CDs I bought legally – three new (two even at full price in England: and if you come from somewhere else and think CDs are expensive, just try buying them in England) and one used on ebay.

Anyway, despite already having four perfectly good recordings of the piece, two of which are wonderful, I decided I felt like getting another one[*]. Browsing rec.music.classical.recordings I discover that there’s a controversial 1960s version by the Smetana Quartet, with a wierd not-very-slow slow movement that people seem to either love or hate. That sounds promising – more so, anyway, than the kind of bland technical perfection I’d be likely to get from modern ensembles.

It’s on Testament, a British record label that specialises in re-releasing legendary performances from the classical recording golden age in the 1950s and 60s. There’s at least a fifty-fifty chance Ludwig Beck would have it, but I don’t feel like going shopping again at the moment; it’s Oktoberfest time and town is full of drunk tourists.

So, Amazon. Amazon has a vast classical music catalogue, but its search is useless. The Smetana Quartet – one of the top ten chamber music ensembles of the last half century – isn’t listed under “browse performers”. Searching for "Smetana Quartet” brings up all five hundred recordings of the string quartets the composer Bedrich Smetana wrote, with no option to sort them by anything useful like performer or recording date. I trawl down the list until I eventually find one performed by the Smetana Quartet, open it and click on Performer. Back to the same list of five hundred recordings by other people.

I spend at least as much time on amazon.de and amazon.co.uk as I would otherwise have spent making a side trip to Ludwig Beck on my way home from work, without success. Eventually I find the CD on amazon.com, but getting Amazon orders shipped from the States is too slow and expensive. It occurs to me to try cutting and pasting the ASIN from the amazon.com url to amazon.de and voila! My CD is there, it’s just that you can only find it if you already know its Amazon item number. Ordered.

The Smetana Quartet also recorded most of Beethoven’s string quartets in the 1960s. These recordings are legendary. I have heard one of them, and it is one of the most inspiring performances I have ever heard of any piece of music by anybody. I’d love to hear the rest, but they’re absurdly difficult to get hold of.

They were recorded by Czech record label Supraphon – who, however, haven’t seen fit to re-release them on CD. Supraphon had/have some kind of joint recording and marketing deal with Denon, the Japanese hi-fi equipment maker who also have their own record label. And as far as I have been able to find out, the complete Smetana Quartet 60s Beethoven is currently available on CD, with “Supraphon” even written on the labels, but actually only on Denon and only in Japan. Japanese online music stores charge reasonable prices for CDs, but their shipping rates outside Japan are expensive. Denon CDs occasionally show up in Europe on ebay or in second hand shops, where they fetch high prices as cult rarities. Note To Denon: just how incompetent are your marketing people? Get a frigging distributor for christ’s sake! The very concept of “cult rarities” in a digital medium is absurd.

So Amazon’s classical music search is useless, and some record companies don’t choose to sell their stuff where Alan lives. Another big so what? Is there in fact going to be a point to all this? I’m getting there.

[*] “It’s not necessary to own 50 Beethoven cycles, 46 of which you never play, when you can be just as happy with 20 of them, 16 of which you never play” – David Hurwitz

record shoppin’ blues

27th September 2005 permanent link

Go and listen to (recently deceased Mississippi bluesman) R.L. Burnside, said Michael Blowhard. So, he [*] having bought me lunch a couple of weeks ago ’n’ all, I did. I found some samples among amazon's free music downloads, and some bits and pieces on allofmp3, listened to them, and was much impressed. So I thought I would go out and buy a CD or two. Note To Music Industry: people who download music and find they like it often then go out and buy CDs.

Or try to.

There are three record shops I go in in Munich. Ludwig Beck is an upmarket clothing store – everything from dirndls and lederhosen to designer jeans – right on Marienplatz in the middle of town. Except that, lurking on the top floor where you would never suspect it, is the biggest specialist classical and jazz record shop I have ever seen. Beck is a pretty good place for a comprehensive selection of obscure stuff, although the prices are high.

Just down the road from Beck is a branch of the German drugstore chain Müller – but this particular branch, for no obvious reason, just happens to have Munich’s second best toyshop downstairs and a big record shop upstairs. Müller’s classical selection is nowhere near as comprehensive as Beck’s, but it’s decent and angled more towards budget labels, so it’s often worth a look too.

Then there is zweitausendeins, a strange little place that specialises in the ultra-budget Brilliant Classics label, and also has odds end ends of remaindered stuff from other labels at very cheap prices. Not the place to go to look for something specific, but good for serendipitous browsing from time to time. Last time I was there I scored a ten-cd box of 1950s and 60s soviet recordings by legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich for 17 euros, some of which turned out to be wonderful.

Ludwig Beck’s jazz section seemed like the obvious place to start looking for R.L. Burnside, but no. Disappointing. There were only a couple of sheves of blues, and no R.L. Müller is just down the road so I checked there too. I had never looked at jazz or blues in Müller before, but it turns out they have quite a big blues section, in which R.L. and his Fat Possum label mates are present in large numbers. Hurrah.

Big wow. Alan had to look in two shops before he found the CD he wanted. Is there actually some kind of point he’s meandering towards making here? Bear with me.

[*] Michael, not R.L.

commercial policy

20th July 2005 permanent link

It seems to be quite the thing lately for bloggers to complain about being “spammed” by marketing and PR people. I have mixed views on this.

I get a lot of requests for links from commercial yoga sites. These I generally ignore or politely decline – the latter if the people concerned have made the effort to write personally rather than just indiscriminately spamming me. I make exceptions for sites like Purple Valley Yoga, where they have yoga interests very close to my own and I know from other sources that they have a good reputation.

I would gladly prostitute myself for photographic toys, but sadly nobody has ever taken me up on my offer to do so.

And the other day I got a mail from Ross Stensrud of Fortuna Classical, whose company apparently makes an audiophile-grade hard disk jukebox that comes preloaded with classical music metadata. As Ross says, this is exactly what I described last year:

Somebody who is willing to spend … thousands of dollars for a … digital jukebox might well also want it to come with some decent metadata  (i.e. not the crap that is in CDDB) pre-loaded rather than having to key everything in themselves from scratch.

I’ve never used Fortuna’s products, and the only piece of audio gear I might personally be in the market for right now is an Airport Express. But since Ross has made the effort to search for websites that might be relevant to his products, actually read them (this is the crucial step, folks) and send individual emails, I wish him every success.

мелодия

21st June 2005 permanent link

So I go into town to see if any of the local record shops have Han-na Chang’s recording of the Haydn cello concertos. They don’t; I pick up one by Anner Bylsma instead. The folks on rec.music.classical.recordings don’t think much of it, but I like nearly all the things I’ve heard by him very much, including ones other people don’t. I decide to trust my own opinion for a change and risk the eight euros.

UPDATE: Public opinion was right and this time I would have done well to listen to it. For once I’m not at all impressed by a record by Anner Bylsma.

While I’m there I notice that Munich’s classical record departments are suddenly flooded with CDs from Melodiya, the old soviet state record company. They’re mostly labelled in Russian. Aha – this gives me a competitive advantage over the other shoppers(*). I can read cyrillic script fairly fluently. I rarely understand much of what I’m reading, even in Jack’s picturebooks, but I can do names of composers and musicians (ya bolshoi kulturniy) and this is wall-to-wall Greatest Musicians Of The Twentieth Century – Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels … – in probably amazing 1950s and 60s live recordings. Thankfully no early Borodin Quartet, because it already looks like my wallet could be in for a severe beating here. In the end I manage to get away with only one CD: Oistrakh and Richter playing violin sonatas by Bartok and Shostakovich.

(*) except the ones who went to school in East Germany

currently listening to …

21st June 2005 permanent link

(actually, was on Sunday evening listening to) … local cellist Johannes Moser, with Ricardo Muti conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, proving that Haydn was capable of writing music just as wonderful as anything by young upstarts Mozart and Beethoven.

Proving it in this case with his first Cello Concerto in C Major, which apparently was lost for years until somebody found a manuscript in an archive in the 1960s. I’d heard recordings of the piece before, and liked it, but hearing it live was stunning. Haydn gets overlooked, or underrated, these days in comparison to his two younger Vienna contemporaries because they, in their later years, largely invented the concept of music as the expression of the divinely gifted artist’s inner struggles and torments; and we these days, still living in the long shadow of romanticism, tend to think that’s what real Art-with-a-capital-A is all about. Haydn just wrote music, and had a great time.(*)

As somebody on rec.music.classical.recordings wrote:

we have come to value tragedy and irony over comedy and romance; that’s just our historical moment. We’ll get over it in time. In the meanwhile … Haydn sits there and smiles, patiently waiting for us.

What recordings would I recommend? I wouldn’t, because I’ve only heard two, by Jacqueline du Pré and Mstislav Rostropovich, and I don’t find either of them completely convincing. They’re ok, but both really too romantic for this music. The folks at rec.music.classical.recordings, on the other hand, have heard lots and have strong opinions on them. Han-na Chang has recorded it. I was very impressed when I heard her playing Prokofiev a few months ago, so that’s clearly one for the shortlist. There are samples of it here, but they don’t work with my version of the RealAudio Player.

Maria is generally unimpressed by all this effete Austrian chamber orchestra stuff, and doesn’t feel she’s had her money’s worth until she’s heard a big romantic orchestra belting something out. Preferably something Russian. But that’s ok because after the interval the Bavarian Radio suddenly swelled to 90-plus musicians (having presumably rounded up half the freelancers in Bavaria) for Scriabin’s Third Symphony. That’s a kind of music I personally find it hard to see the point of, although the big waves of sound were undeniably impressive.

(*) I also read on rec.music.classical.recordings that Haydn – whose music could easily be mistaken for the epitome of genteel respectability (or “aural wallpaper for aristocrats (albeit often superbly well done)”) – was in the habit of going out with his violin to folk music sessions in villages on his patron Count Esterhazy’s estate, “just for a few hours dear”, getting blind drunk and coming back days later claiming little or no recollection of what happened.

currently listening to …

8th June 2005 permanent link

… the always-magnificent L'Archibudelli playing Beethoven’s String Trio opus 9 no.1, in BBC Radio Three’s Beethoven Week.

I had to suffer through an hour of assorted horrible songs and silly wind trios to get to this marvellous piece of music, thus proving that even Beethoven had off days and sometimes scribbled things down because he needed the money – the BBC did say they were going to play all of it, and they clearly meant it.

Radio Three’s internet feed (RealAudio, and sound quality pumping my Powerbook’s headphone output through a proper amp and speakers is just fine) is here. Highly recommended.

bbc beethoven week

7th June 2005 permanent link

Since I’ve been using del.icio.us for links-with-short-comments, I haven’t generally felt the need to link to things here when all I have to say about them is “go and read this”. Go, however, and read Brian Micklethwait’s magnificent piece on Beethoven’s Eroica on samizdata:

It is one thing to hear the first two chords of the Eroica for the hundredth time, in an age of stadium rock and hi-fi volume knobs on our CD players; quite another to hear these two explosions when they were the loudest and most bad-mannered musical noises that anyone had, until then, ever heard indoors.

Beethoven turned music from being the mere supply of aural wallpaper for aristocrats (albeit often superbly well done) into the supreme vehicle of personal artistic expression. Not even Mozart ever went as far as Beethoven did with the Eroica.

… and when you’re done (or, indeed, first) listen to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s utterly amazing December 1944 recording of it with the Vienna Philharmonic. I have nothing to add. Except – Brian, please do something about at least getting the archives on your own website back into working order, even if you don’t want to carry on putting new stuff there.

perfect songs

11th May 2005 permanent link

Michael Blowhard links to Will Duquette’s list of six “perfect songs”. I’m always a sucker for the music list game – especially when nobody in our house has slept for days, thanks to my son’s ear infection; this pretty much rules out any blogging that might involve actual thinking.

So instead, playing by Will’s rules:

What I mean by a Perfect Song is a recording which is so perfectly itself that it couldn't possibly be altered without breaking it. The music and the singing mesh perfectly together, and the whole thing usually has a unique feel to it. Any other recording of the same song is going to have take an entirely different approach, because these recordings can't be beaten at their own game.

These aren't necessarily my favorite songs, mind you

I would nominate:

• Personal Jesus: Johnny Cash’s American IV version of the Depeche Mode song.
• Furry Sings The Blues: Joni Mitchell’s stunning live performance of her own song with The Band, on the extended edition of The Last Waltz.
• Hyperballad: Björk with the Brodsky Quartet.
• Clearly something from the ’70s heyday of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music: Over You would be one of several strong contenders.
• Any Ike & Tina live recording of Proud Mary (I don’t personally rate the Creedence original)

currently listening to …

3rd May 2005 permanent link

… twelve tone music, apparently, although I wasn’t aware that was what it was until a music-knowledgeable friend told me so on the phone this morning.

Kyle Gann regards Schönberg, the originator of the twelve tone concept, as a vastly overrated composer and his and his friends’ and disciples’ work as at best a moderately interesting academic curiosity. Eric Raymond and the Pope blame him for classical music’s slide into elitist obscurity. I have heard hardly anything by him.

There are a couple of pieces by Alban Berg – the Lyric Suite and the violin concerto – that I liked rather a lot when I first heard them, although I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to them all that often.

And recently, whilst trawling through things I had in iTunes but had never listened to – forgotten downloads and odd bits from compilation CDs – I found a couple of things by Anton von Webern that were fun. So I asked around in various places, including on rec.music.classical.recordings, what else of his I should listen to, and as a result I just went out and bought this Naxos CD. Haven’t listened to it yet.

I suppose I was vaguely aware that Berg and Webern were friends/disciples/co-conspirators of Schönberg but I hadn’t thought much about it. Nor, as long as I just want to enjoy listening to their music, do I see why I should care particularly.

music, meditation and catholicism

21st April 2005 permanent link

Alex Ross, on probably the last occasion I will ever quote somebody quoting the Pope, says Herr Ratzinger (the first Bavarian pope for 950 years, and guess how long I have known that factlet?):

has said that rock music styles are incompatible with church liturgy. In 1986 he described rock music as 'the secularized variation' of an age-old type of religion in which man uses music — and drugs and alcohol — to lower 'the barriers of individuality and personality,' to liberate 'himself from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy ... amalgamation with the universe.' This 'is the complete antithesis of the Christian faith in the redemption.'

The description seems fair enough, although the idea that rock music is somehow fundamentally different from where classical music came from seems odd; and since I am not a Christian I have no reason to care about or be bothered by the disapproving tone or the bit about the “antithesis of the Christian faith in the redemption”.

currently listening to …

14th April 2005 permanent link

Kyle Gann’s Private Dances for piano. I find Gann’s weblog sometimes highly informative, sometimes irritating (and what more could one ask of a weblog?) but I hadn’t listened to any of his music before. I’m enjoying it.

arild in pittsburgh

14th April 2005 permanent link

In an email conversation yesterday with Greg Sandow I learned that Arild Remmereit, the Norwegian conductor who hugely impressed me when I heard him with the Munich Philharmonic in January, is playing in Pittsburgh at the weekend. Apparently Remmereit is deputising at short notice for Christoph von Dohnanyi; folks in Pittsburgh have heard he has a rising reputation in Europe, are hugely excited that he’s coming and think this could be his big break in the States. May they be right.

If you’re in Pittsburgh and don’t have plans for the weekend – or even if you do – a concert ticket or two could be a good buy.

UPDATE: the New York Times was impressed.

UPDATED UPDATE: since there’s an email address on Mr Remmereit’s website, I though I’d send him a quick note to say I’m not in the habit of sending fan mail, but I loved the gig in Munich and congratulations on Pittsburgh. He took time out of a Seoul - New York - Seoul week to reply, thus proving that (soon to be known as) great conductors don’t have to be obnoxious prima donna maestros, but can be nice guys too.

long tail

13th April 2005 permanent link

I have been tidying up my classical music collection in iTunes, as a result of which I now know that I have a total of 980 recordings of pieces of classical music by 76 different composers.

What diverse and broadly informed musical tastes I have. Ha! Beethoven single-handedly accounts for almost a quarter of my collection, 224 pieces. The top 5 – Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Haydn, Schubert – account for more than half. At the bottom of the list are twenty composers by whom I have one piece each (hello Bruch, Cherubini, Corelli, Faure, Granados …)

There’s nothing very surprising about any of this. Well, Shostakovich and Dvořák. I like some things by Shostakovich and Dvořák very much, but their presence in places three and six on my list says more about the availability of their works in large cheap boxed sets, and in Dvořák’s case their ubiquity in compilations, than about how often I actually listen to them. (Haydn will leap over Shostakovich and Mozart to second place in a single bound if I ever buy Adam Fischer’s rather good boxed set of all his 106 [?] symphonies. 33 CDs for 50 euros at my local discount CD shop)

I started listening to classical music on a regular basis a few years ago, from the basis of knowing I liked some things by Beethoven and not knowing very much about very much else. I’m working slowly outwards from there; but I’m more interested in finding things I like than in covering anybody’s idea of a balanced musical curriculum. Having said that, I do have a tendency, once I’ve heard something new and interesting, to obsess about finding the best possible recording of it – prefereably dirt cheap on ebay – rather than moving on and finding something else that I might also like. (Current obsession: Mozart’s late symphonies). Perhaps this isn’t good.

Gratuitous graphic: here’s my music collection plotted as one of those oh-so-ubiquitous Zipf distribution curves:

beethoven week

12th April 2005 permanent link

BBC Radio 3 has a Beethoven Week in June, in which they will be playing all hundred-plus hours worth of Beethoven’s published works. I shall be making sure I have plenty of disk space free and giving Audio Hijack a thorough workout.

Only a hundred-and-something hours? The entire published output of a man who probably heard music in his head almost every waking moment? A hundred-and-something hours distilled from how many tens of thousands of hours of drafting, improvisation, rehearsals and concerts?

iTunes informs me that my music collection features over two hundred recordings of pieces of music by Beethoven. That doesn’t mean I’ve heard all hundred-plus hours of Beethoven’s published works, by any means. I have several recordings of all the string quartets and most of the piano sonatas and symphonies (including sixteen of the Eroica), and these are all worth hearing played many different ways. Whereas one recording of the Choral Fantasy is arguably one too many – except perhaps as a reminder that Beethoven, despite all the string quartets and most of the piano sonatas and symphonies, was not some kind of god-like infallible genius.

currently listening to ...

1st March 2005 permanent link

Till Fellner’s recording of the piano sonata in B flat minor by Julius Reubke. Julius who? Pupil of Liszt, apparently, and this not half bad piece of music is quite reminiscent of, though not quite as stunning as, Liszt’s own sonata. It seems Reubke wrote his at about the same time, although it wasn’t published until much later. (Thank you, decent liner notes on the Apex label).

I was curious about Till Fellner because music critic and blogger Alex Ross loves his recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. And I was curious about Schumann because I’ve heard very little of him and not been impressed by what I have heard (couple of the symphonies), but people say “ah, but you should hear his piano music”.

So when I saw this disc by Fellner, with Schumann’s Kreisleriana together with a sonata by some guy I had never heard of, it seemed worth gambling 4 euros on it. Good bet.

Update: I notice Brian Micklethwait was ahead of me on this one.

finally made it

22nd February 2005 permanent link

Dear Diary: a couple of weeks ago I walked through a beautiful snow-covered city on my way to a hot date with a beautiful exotic foreign woman, and the hot date consisted of hearing a major league German Symphony Orchestra on top form. This is what I came to Munich for.

Somehow the hot dates have never quite managed to coincide with the picturesque snowfall before. This could be related to the fact that I actually spent two of my German winters in India. The winters when I was in Germany and single, picturesque snowfall meant grab my snowboard and head for the hills. And for the last year and a half dates of any kind have been few and far between for Maria and me.

So I bought Maria concert tickets for Christmas in order to make sure at least one date would happen this winter. An all-Russian programme seemed like a good idea, so I opted for The Munich Philharmonic playing Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra with Han-na Chang, cello, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, conducted by Arild Remmereit. Who? Exactly – but read on.

It was great. I was worried when we arrived at the concert hall and Maria saw a notice on the door saying the planned conductor for the evening, Antonio Pappano, was sick and had been replaced by Mr Remmereit. I had never heard of Signor Pappano before either, but he made a very highly acclaimed recording of the Prokofiev with Ms Chang so I was looking forward to hearing them.

But if the guy’s sick, he’s sick. The first few minutes of the Prokofiev were a little uneasy – Ms Chang glancing over her shoulder a lot as if she wasn’t quite sure if she could trust the orchestra under an unknown deputy conductor and wanted to keep an eye on what they were up to. But it came together quickly, and we loved it.

Ms Chang and Signor Pappano’s CD of the Prokofiev was on sale in the interval; Ms Chang was even signing them in a very cheerful and friendly manner – rather than collapsing exhausted backstage, as I’m sure I would if I had just played something like that. Maria didn’t want to buy one, though, and she convinced me that she was right: music like that is best heard live. It’s a long, complicated and strange piece of music and neither of us could imagine how we would ever find the time, energy and inclination to sit down and listen to it properly without being in a concert hall.

So the concerto went well, given the very good soloist, after she had settled down and decided to trust the orchestra. What about the Tchaikovsky? Orchestra now with unknown deputy conductor and without very good soloist, playing a romantic piece I barely knew? It was stunning. It’s a big, obvious, unsubtle piece of music, but really rather fine if it’s played with enough enthusiasm. Remmereit and the Müncheners did it with real fire and drive – definitely up there with the Suisse Romande’s Mussorgsky last year as one of the most exciting orchestral performances I’ve ever heard. I see the Süddeutsche Zeitung was impressed too.

On a cursory glance through Arild Remmereit’s CV, he’s done a lot of work with relatively unknown orchestras but the Munich appears to be the biggest name band he has worked with. I hope there will be lots more – I would jump at a chance to hear him again.

incoherence

15th February 2005 permanent link

We make audio software, and it rocks. Because we rock.
Behold.

… is the entire content of the home page of omg audio, which is therefore the world’s coolest marketing website.

Link courtesy of Wes Felter’s Hack The Planet.

I have no idea what omg audio’s products do, probably things I don’t understand. But because their website is so cool I’m going to download one of them and find out.

currently listening to …

5th February 2005 permanent link

Caught the end of a Seventies music show on TV this afternoon.

We had Marc Bolan in his pre glam-rock days; some guy called Tom Paxton with a comic talking blues about getting stoned in Vietnam that presumably some people found funny at the time, and Curved Air. I had heard of Curved Air but never actually heard them before, and they weren’t at all bad. They had an electric violin solo (just in case anybody was harbouring any illusions about all hippy era music being great), but the bit before the electric violin solo had a nice bass groove. And finally, Ike and Tina Turner performing River Deep, Mountain High and Proud Mary. Ike and Tina may not have been the world’s happiest couple, but did they rock? Yes.

I’m trying hard not to think They Don’t Make Musicians Like That Any More. They probably do, but they’re certainly not appearing on TV in Germany. I hardly ever, if I happen to stumble across MTV whilst flicking channels, think “ooh, this is good, I’m going to sit and listen to it for a while”. More often “how on earth can anybody possibly listen to this shite?”

currently listening to …

25th December 2004 permanent link

Christmas Day morning: Ronan Keating’s version of Fairytale of New York, on Maria’s Rock Christmas CD. (Rock?). I had to listen to it out of a kind of morbid fascination, and it’s actually not as awful as I expected. Although I still can’t think of any reason at all why anybody would want to listen to it. Especially not when the real thing by the Pogues is sitting on a shelf three feet away – now that’s proper Christmas music.

I imagine Brian Micklethwait would have much the same opinion, with Fritz Werner playing the role of the Pogues, of our other Christmas CD which is Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s 1973 recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. I’m enjoying it though.

Christmas Day evening: not listening to any CDs because we have, coincidentally, Harnoncourt conducting in a performance of Figaro on TV. Once or twice a year cable TV turns out to be worth having.

currently listening to …

14th December 2004 permanent link

Bruckner’s String Quintet played by l’Archibudelli. A little known gem.

I bought the CD full price (€17), which is something I rarely do. I first heard L’Archibudelli playing Mendelssohn’s Octet on the radio about a year ago. I was hugely impressed. I also already had a disk of the Bach Cello Suites that I really like by Anner Bylsma, who when he isn’t being a member of l’Archibudelli is a well known and highly rated soloist. But their CDs are all full price and never seem to appear in my local discount shops. I have bid unsuccessfully for used copies of this particular one a couple of times on ebay, where in any case it always seems to go for well over 10 euros. Plus postage. Sooner or later you realise that for the amount of time you’re wasting trying to save three or four bucks you might as well just buy the bloody thing and be done with it. I don’t regret a penny of it.

It’s interesting that Bruckner had never heard Beethoven’s late string quartets when he composed this, his only major piece of chamber music(*). These days anybody at all who’s seriously interested in European classical music – let alone anybody actually working as a composer – has probably heard these and every other major piece of the Canon, live and recorded, dozens of times. It’s hard for us to realise how different it was in the nineteenth century, when there were professional live performances only in a handful of major cities, chamber music in particular was mainly intended for private rather than public performance, and late Beethoven was incomprehensible avant-garde weirdness. [Note re: Eric Raymond. Was Beethoven, rather than Schönberg, the “deady genius” who killed classical music?] Was Bruckner any the worse for having what many people now would regard as such a huge hole in his musical education?

Compare Brahms, who famously felt himself in Beethoven’s shadow and probably pored for hours over every note Beethoven ever wrote. “Du hast keinen Begriff davon, wie unsereinem zumute ist, wenn er immer so einen Riesen hinter sich marschieren hört” (“You simply do not understand what it’s like to always hear that giant marching behind you”). Did worrying about Beethoven enable Brahms to write better music than Bruckner? Not in my opinion.

(*) This piece of information comes from the liner notes. This CD has very good liner notes – another reason, along with better sound quality and no DRM, why it’s a better deal to pay €17 for a CD, than €10 for the same thing from somewhere like iTunes. This, being a Sony CD, is one of the rare cases where iTunes might actually have music that I want to listen to. (UPDATE: no) Although I haven’t checked, and wouldn’t be in the least surprised to be wrong)

learning tabla

2nd December 2004 permanent link

Tyler Cowen still harbours hopes of learning Indian classical music in this lifetime. I already have more than enough to do this time round, but learning tabla is definitely on my “if there is reincarnation” to-do list.

I mentioned this to an Indian colleague who said “my roommate in Bangalore plays tabla. All the time”. It didn’t sound like he thought this was an entirely positive thing.

gamma synchrony

18th November 2004 permanent link

Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony

Experienced Tibetan Buddhist meditators practicing “unconditional loving-kindness meditation” generate the highest levels of gamma synchrony that have ever been measured in trials of normally-functioning brains, and still have significantly higher base levels before and after meditation than a control group of students with rudimentary meditation training. General discussion; pdf of the technical paper.

So what is “gamma band synchrony” anyway? Google tells us that it is strongly present in musicians listening to music (really listening to music … is actually quite an advanced form of meditation)

It “may reflect one way in which the brain ‘integrates’ activity from the plethora of its ongoing parallel processes”. It “has been related both to gestalt perception and to cognitive functions such as attention, learning, and memory”.

Patients with schizophrenia had significantly reduced gamma phase synchrony.

There is one clear problem with the study, that the authors do partly address: the meditators are mostly middle-aged Tibetan monks; the control group are American college students. So, are the differences they are measuring actually brought about by meditation practice and not by age, by cultural differences between America and Tibet, or by people who already have these characteristics pre-selecting themselves for monastic life? The authors do address these questions, and say no: the difference they measured correlates more strongly with length of meditation training than with age. Clearly more research needed in this area though: it would be reassuring to see a study that compared middle-aged Tibetan monks to a control group of middle-aged Tibetan non-monks, and/or one that followed novice monks at various stages in their training.

I find studies like these fascinating. From a yoga student point of view, it’s clear that yogis and buddhist meditators for thousands of years have been on to something real that western science is just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding. And from a software point of view(*), we [“we” = neuroscientists] are trying to reverse engineer a system where the software is rewiring the hardware it runs on at runtime, with only the crudest ways of measuring the outward state of the system. This is something like, I don’t know … trying to understand how Photoshop works by measuring the temperature of the cpu and the amount of hard disk activity, guided by a vague second hand description of the picture on the screen. (Or something. Clearly this analogy needs more work). Only the system you’re trying to study is orders of magnitude more complex than (even) Photoshop. It’s amazing that neuroscientists manage to get anywhere at all.

Is a study of Buddhist meditators necessarily relevant to yoga? I think so. I don’t claim to know much about the similarities and differences between Hindu and Buddhist theology & philosophy, but what I’ve read here and elsewhere about Tibetan meditation seems similar enough to what I read in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that I’m fairly confident that the mental states aimed at are similar, even if the techniques used look outwardly very different.

Link from the psychology and neuroscience of religion thread in the ezboard ashtanga yoga discussion group.

(*) My working assumption is that the mind is, at least in principle, explainable in purely material terms as software processes running on hardware – no spirit required. It may be that the complexity of the human mind is beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp; it may be that quantum uncertainty makes it impossible in principle to fully understand it. But ultimately it’s still all just quanta and the laws of physics.

damning with damning

2nd November 2004 permanent link

Greg Sandow sometimes complains that the world of classical music performance and criticism is too closed and cosy; critics don’t criticise. You can never believe you’re hearing somebody’s honest opinion of something; you don’t get to enjoy panning performances as a bloodsport.

Honest opinions and criticism-as-bloodsport abound on the internet, of course.

They haven’t completely died out on Bavarian State Radio either. I was listening to Bayern 4 Klassik’s views on the Bavarian State Opera’s current production of The Magic Flute on my way to work this morning. “It’s a revival of a 25 year old production, but it feels a hundred years old … this is opera for schoolchildren: it may be ok if you’re seeing it for the first time, but it has nothing to offer the serious opera fan”.

So that’s one thing I won’t be needing a babysitter for.

classical music

31st October 2004 permanent link

Further thoughts on Indian classical music, inspired by going to hear Pandit Shiva Kmar Sharma this evening.

The boundaries of what Indians call “classical music” seem to be much more fluid than in the west. This seems healthy to me. The first piece is a formal raga. The second piece Sharma describes as “semi-classical”. Apparently it’s a Himalayan folk tune, played in something like raga style, but it’s more melodic and the improvisation is much freer. It ends in a whirlwind of call and response riffs between Sharma’s accompanists, his son Rahul Sharma also on santoor and Vishnu Sanju Sahai on tabla. Shiva Kumar Sharma sits in the middle, holding it all together, throwing in ideas, looking with his shoulder length mop of grey curly hair for all the world like Johann Sebastian Bach.

I’ve also heard Hariprasad Chaurasia, the most famous classical flute player, start a concert with a formal raga and finish with folk songs and film tunes as encores.

Sharma’s instrument the santoor, say the programme notes, was an obscure Kashmiri folk instrument until Sharma started playing classical music on it in the 1950s. Just imagine – this is as if one of the most famous and respected western classical musicians in the world today played something like banjo or slide guitar. (Of course, Ry Cooder is one of the most respected serious western musicians, but because of arbitrary genre boundaries we don’t regard what he does as “classical”)

When western classical music was healthy, people played with folk tunes, improvised lots, and experimented frantically with new instruments too.

If I had a lifetime or two available to learn a musical instrument (and who knows, perhaps I might) I would learn tabla. Or electric bass.

The concert was organised by Asha for Education, a group of Indians working abroad who organise fundraising events for schools for deprived kids back home. Seems like a thoroughly worthy cause. I didn’t see any of the guys from my office. Will have to give them a hard time about that – they were out in force for Hariprasad Chaurasia last year.

currently listening to …

31st October 2004 permanent link

Tim Bray has been listening to Sly’n’Robbie. Lucky him. And he’s impressed:

There’s this rhythm that’s already out there, everywhere. It’s your mother’s heartbeat that backgrounded the birth of your mind in the womb, though you don’t remember. It’s the creaking in the roots of the world tree, and the secret resonance of the inner heart of the Sun.

All the best music is about getting closer to that rhythm, and anytime you’re in a room with Sly & Robbie, you’re inside it looking out.

I, meanwhile, am going this evening to listen to Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma and Rahul Sharma, father-and-son Indian classical musicians. I have a couple of albums by Rahul Sharma and they’re very fine. Rumour has it dad may be even better. Getting closer to that rhythm.

Lucky me.

gentlemen: start your arguments

16th October 2004 permanent link

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, my favourite English novel of the 90s, can be read as an extended warning against taking music lists seriously. Despite which …

Jim Henley’s local radio station is on 88.5 (that will seem like such a quaint thing to say in a few years’ time). They must be having an anniversary or something, because they’re listing the alleged “All Time 885 Greatest Songs”. So far I’ve only looked at the Top 50.

It’s not a bad list. There’s a lot on there that I really like, and not much I would object to strenuously. Lennon & McCartney are overrepresented for my tastes (I can’t imagine Imagine placing anywhere in my personal top 885, let alone at number 2). I understand why. A lot of their stuff is really good – it’s just that I heard enough of it when I was younger to last a lifetime, and can’t imagine going out of my way to hear it ever again.

Jim finds the Top 50 “just a smidge boomer-heavy”. I don’t have a problem with that as such. I was four when Like A Rolling Stone came out, but would still automatically start any such list with it at the top. But then, I’m also an existence proof for not everybody thinking the music from their college years is the best ever – I was at college in the early 80s, and think the 80s were easily the worst decade in the history of popular music.

If asked to name some more recent songs for a Top 50 list, though, I could come up with a few things from the 90s that I would rate just as highly as any of the Music For Aging Hippies on this list. Björk’s Hyperballad. Pulp’s Common People. Radiohead’s Creep. REM’s Nightswimming. Eminem’s Stan. And – this next one depends on what they mean by “song”. If they mean something where the words in some sense stand apart from the music and are as important/memorable as what it sounds like, then you can forget the entire electronic/techno/dance music scene. If, however, it also includes something with vocals, but where the vocals are just one part of the overall cascade of sound – then I would nominate Underworld’s Born Slippy as my absolute favourite thing of that sort.

(Just to prove I’m not a real Classical Music Blogger, and to enrage those who are: I would take anything in the previous paragraph over any ten baroque flute concertos)

There’s nowhere near enough soul or Motown. One each by Aretha and Marvin. No Otis, no Smokey?

And I’m sure Jim will agree with me that the absence of Oliver’s Army is just bizarre.

UPDATE: I read the whole list. Oliver’s Army and Nightswimming are in there, so is plenty of Motown and classic soul, just not near enough to the top. In all I’ve heard just under half the 885, and I must say almost all of that almost half is really good. There really isn’t much in there that I don’t like.

UPDATE: Oh dear, it’s spreading and I’m a sucker for these things. Patrick Crozier questions the choices made for a “UK Rock Hall of Fame”

recorded music bad?

13th October 2004 permanent link

Maria & I went last night to hear the Orchestre de le Suisse Romande playing the Elgar Violin Concerto and (Ravel’s arrangement of) Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

The Elgar was so-so. The soloist was a young Munich violinist called Julia Fischer. She played well, and so did the orchestra, but the rapport between them was somehow lacking. Big Name touring orchestra comes into town to play concert with up-and-coming young local soloist, not enough rehearsal? I don’t know. The Elgar as a piece has never really grabbed me anyway. Julia Fischer’s encore – a couple of snippets from the Bach partitas for solo violin – was great, so no problem with her ability to play.

Pictures was superb. The Suisse Romande is probably the best orchestra I’ve ever heard live. (The Munich Philharmonic is probably more famous, but I wasn’t that impressed the one or two times I’ve been to see them). Pictures isn’t a profound meditation on the human condition, but who ever said everything has to be? It’s a fantastic orchestral firework display.

Still, I found myself thinking I know the piece too well, and wouldn’t it be amazing to hear it for the first time properly – live, being blasted out by a good orchestra that’s clearly enjoying itself? Unfortunately I have about half a dozen recordings of it, two of which – Sviatoslav Richter’s performance of the original solo piano version, and Toscanini’s recording of the Ravel orchestral arrangement – are stunning. But even a stunning recording isn’t remotely like a good live performance, and over-familiarity takes away from the live experience.

götterdämmerung?

11th October 2004 permanent link

A couple of alternatives to Alan’s Götterdämmerung Theory of why the 1950s was the Golden Decade for recordings of the Eroica.

One is that Furtwängler, Klemperer and Toscanini between them pretty much mapped the outer limits of plausible interpretations of Beethoven, seen through the lens of their High Romantic musical upbringing. Anybody coming after them and playing in big orchestra, modern instruments style was pretty much doomed to be somewhere within the bounds they set – and so seem tame and middle of the road – or so far out as to seem absurd – Celibidache’s parody-of-Klemperer slow motion version, for example. It wasn’t until the period performance movement that people once again had something new to say about it in the 90s.

Simpler theory: classical music fans are ageing fuddy duddies, fixated on the recordings they knew and loved in their youth. This one isn’t true, though – a lot of the regulars on rec.music.classical.recordings get just as excited about genuinely good new recordings as they do about discovering pirate CDs of obscure 1950s live recordings.

eroicae

10th October 2004 permanent link

Brian Micklethwait thinks obsessive classical record collectors are “mad, sad bastards” and life is too short to spend his online time hanging out with them. He may be right. But some of them are mad, sad bastards with encyclopaedic knowledge, and I know a lot less than Brian does about classical music, so I sometimes do find spending time in the rec.music.classical.recordings newsgroup worthwhile when I’m wondering what direction my musical self-education should take next.

One such time was after I have accidentally discovered Wilhelm Furtwängler’s amazing 1944 recording of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, on emusic. This was about the most intense, passionate performance I had ever heard of any piece of music but the sound quality of the recording was pretty bad. I wondered if there might be a recording with equally wonderful playing and decent sound [there isn’t]. So I searched for Eroica recommendations and discovered that if there is one piece of classical music the world doesn’t need another recording of, it’s the Eroica.

There’s a guy called Eric Grunin who has catalogued all the recordings of it. There are 368 of them. I’ve heard fourteen (now, a lot less then). It became apparent that the mad, sad bastards on r.m.c.r., most of whom have probably heard a lot more than fourteen, did have clear favourites. In all, about seventy – so almost a fifth of the entire number of extant recordings – were mentioned as a favourite by somebody at some point. The top 20 were:

Conductor/Orchestra	Year	Votes	My comments
Scherchen/Vienna State Opera Orchestra	1958	17	A strong favourite among r.m.c.r regulars. (Kleiber, Klemperer and Furtwängler get more votes, but spread over different recordings). I have listened to it several times but I just don’t get it. I’ve read that the “Vienna State Opera Orchestra” was the members of the Vienna Philharmonic moonlighting outside their official recording contract. I don’t know if this is true.
Klemperer/Philharmonia	1955	12	This is great in Klemperer’s very distinctive way – slow and majestic. But not ponderous. Absolutely not ponderous. A Klemperer fan (mad, sad bastard) jumped down my throat once for even saying the word “ponderous” in same sentence as Klemperer’s name, even though I wasn’t actually saying Klemperer was ponderous at all.
Erich Kleiber/Vienna Philharmonic	1955	12
Furtwängler/Vienna Philharmonic	1944	11	Easily my favourite. Despite its unsavoury provenance this is the version that anybody who loves the Eroica has to have heard. Unbelievable passion and intensity – although because of that, and the fact that the recorded sound is very poor, it’s not one to listen to every day. How far was the Red Army from Vienna in December 1944? Probably not far. I can see how having Marshal Zhukov at the gates could cause people to play like the world was about to end
Monteux/Concertgebouw	1962	11
Bernstein/New York Philharmonic	1966	9	People talk about this having one of the most powerful Funeral Marches of any recording. The Funeral March is good, but the rest of it doesn’t do much for me.
von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic	1962	9	Von Karajan was a vastly overrated conductor and a member of the Nazi party.
Szell/Cleveland	1957	9
Toscanini/NBC Symphony Orchestra	1953	9
Erich Kleiber/Concertgebouw	1950	7	Probably my favourite version with a decent-sounding recording.
Furtwängler/Vienna Philharmonic	1952	7	Furtwängler is responsible for far more than his fair share of the 368 recorded Eroicas. This one is his second most highly rated. I’ve listened to it a few times and didn’t find it remotely as impressive as the 1944 one.
Giulini/Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra	1982		People on r.mc.r were surprised that this was so popular. I haven’t heard it. My local discount CD shop regularly has cheap copies of it, but I have a moratorium on buying any more Eroicas on the grounds that I should broaden my horizons and listen to other things. (But see Toscanini)
Mengelberg/Concertgebouw	1940	7
Toscanini/NBC Symphony Orchestra	1939	7	Apparently, back in the days when these two giants still walked the earth, one either liked Furtwängler or Toscanini. (In order to confuse people who believe in national stereotypes …) Toscanini the Italian was Mr. Precision, this is what is written down so this is what must be played. Furtwängler the German was notorious for taking liberties with the written score for the sake of passionate, lyrical expression. I think they’re both great. I picked up Toscanini’s 1939 Eroica in a second hand shop recently – long after I decided to have a moratorium on buying any more Eroicas, but it was cheap and I have other things by him that I like a lot – and it’s great. Much better sound than the ’44 Furtwängler too.
Klemperer/Philharmonia	1960	6	Klemperer’s stereo recording is good, but not as good as his earlier attempt.
von Matacic/Czech Philharmonic	1959	6
Gardiner/Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique	1993	5
Jochum/Berlin Philharmonic	1954	5	Jochum was a great Bruckner conductor. I haven’t heard his Beethoven.
Savall/Le Concert des Nations	1994	5
Barbirolli/BBC Symphony Orchestra	1967	4

r.m.c.r discussion here.

I find the periods when these things were recorded interesting. All of the top three, and nine out of twenty in total, are from the 1950s. What was going on in the 1950s? Here’s what I think was going on: the last gasp of European High Romantic culture. These orchestras, and these conductors, were only one or two generations removed from the great flowering of European music at the end of the nineteenth century – Klemperer had been Mahler’s assistant; Furtwängler studied with a close friend of Wagner. European high culture committed suicide in the first half of the twentieth century; modernism was part of its suicide note. In the 1950s it was mortally wounded but not quite dead yet, and meanwhile recording technology had progressed to the point where it was possible to capture its last practitioners still in something like their prime, in sound quality that is still perfectly listenable-to by contemporary standards. The earlier top recordings, of which I’ve heard Toscanini and Furtwängler but not Mengelberg, are listenable to because of their astonishing qualities as performances, but you really do have to make allowances for the sound quality.

(Eric Raymond thinks classical music, the literary novel and painting were killed off as vital, relevant art forms by “deadly geniuses” – Schönberg, Joyce and Picasso – who deliberately took them away from conventional forms that were accessible to audiences and less talented practitioners, into rarefied places where hardly anybody could follow. It’s an interesting idea and I have more that I want to say about it; at this point I will just note that the moribund art forms he’s talking about are quintessentially European, and European culture as a whole was underoing some pretty serious upheavals round about the time when modernism came along. This does not, of course, apply to jazz; although American culture was also going through an unsettled spell round about the time Coltrane killed jazz.)

General consensus seems to be that the 60s, 70s and 80s really didn’t have much to add to what had already been done in the previous generation.

Things start to get interesting again in the 90s with the rise of period style performances trying to use using authentic circa-1805 instruments, performance practices and timings. Of these, Gardiner and Savall appear in the Top Twenty; Norrington’s performance with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra is too new to have much of a following yet (2002), but also seems to be highly rated.

I have heard the Eroica properly, performed live, twice in my life. Once by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, and once a couple of weeks ago at a charity gig by a local amateur orchestra. I really enjoyed that one – they were playing their hearts out, and their conductor was pushing them right to, at times beyond, their technical limits in an attempt to produce a real performance and not just get them through the score without falling over. I admired him and them for that even if it did seem at times – the beginning of the finale – like it was all on the verge of going horribly wrong(*). Real people, really in a room in front of you struggling with the music, are almost always better than noise coming out of a box; and the Eroica is such great music it would be hard to ruin it completely (although I have heard a recording by Neville Marriner and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields that makes it sound dull, a quite astonishing achievement)

(*) I mentioned this to my sister, who is principal cello in an amateur orchestra. She says she prefers playing Malcolm Arnold to Beethoven for that very reason – the music’s good, but people don’t know how they expect it to sound so they can’t so easily spot where it all nearly goes off the rails.

music dvds

4th October 2004 permanent link

I was going to post an email about music that I sent to Brian Micklethwait today, pointing him to something Tyler Cowen quoted from the estimable Klaus Heymann of Naxos; but then I noticed I didn’t need to because he did, and said more about it than I was going to say anyway.

Currently listening to …

25th September 2004 permanent link

Holst’s Planets – and remembering that the headmaster at my primary school used to play Jupiter in school assembly, and I loved it. The religious studies teacher at my grammar school favoured Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi – another marvellous piece of music. Thank you, Mr. Oram and Mr. Wallace, for enriching my life in a way I didn’t appreciate at the time.

Teachers these days probably can’t do that sort of thing without being descended upon by record company vultures. Who then wonder why kids grow up less interested in buying recorded music.

emusic classical update

24th September 2004 permanent link

Currently listening to … another emusic classical gem …

• Dvorak Piano Trios: Suk Trio
  Overwhelmingly wonderful. (Josef Suk is Dvorak’s great grandson. Is this relevant? Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure many great grandsons of famous composers aren’t great musicians in their own right. On the other hand, there is some tendency for musical talent to run in families. Beethoven and Mozart were sons of musicians)

emusic classical gems

20th September 2004 permanent link

Tim Bray has been looking at emusic. Kimbro Staken is still bitter about them taking his unlimited downloads away. I haven't changed my original opinion that it’s more an interesting bargain bin than a potential primary source of music; but the classical section, which is the part I've investigated most thoroughly, is a bargain bin with some real gems in it. Here are some recommended picks for anybody who might be interested:

• Elgar Cello Concerto: Casals, Boult, BBC Symphony Orchestra.
  This 1944 recording isn’t as extrovert as Jacqueline du Pré’s famous 1960s one. But marvellous playing. The orchestral accompaniment is outstanding.
• Bach Cello Suites: Yehuda Hanani (vol.2).
  Exuberant and very likeable playing by a pupil of Casals. I have an odd relationship with this music: I really like it and I have a feeling that somewhere out there there must be the ultimate recorded performance, but I haven’t yet found one I’m completely comfortable with. Meanwhile, this is my current favourite version when I’m in the mood for extrovert.
• Tchaikovsky piano concerto no.1: Sviatoslav Richter, Karel Ancerl, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Earth shattering.
• Bartok Violin Concerto: Zoltan Székely, Willem Mengelberg, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
  Fantastic playing, awful 1939 recorded sound.
• Haydn String Quartets “5 & 82” : Hungarian Quartet.
  Székely again. (And they even fixed the title)
• Anthony Watson string quartets: New Zealand String Quartet.
  I haven’t listened to these yet. I know nothing about Anthony Watson; the only thing I have read about the New Zealand String Quartet is that they were pupils of Székely. That’s a good enough recommendation.
• Beethoven Symphony No. 3 “Eroica”: Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Breathtakingly intense and passionate performance of the greatest piece of orchestral music ever written. They have a whole set of Furtwängler’s wartime Beethoven recordings. The Eroica is the only one I've listened to so far; the others are reputedly also quite something. The 1942 Berlin Philharmonic version of the Ninth, for example, is said to be the ultimate in scary intensity.
• Brahms Symphony No. 1: Hollreiser, Bamberg Orchestra.
  The Bamberg are a not particularly famous German regional orchestra, based in a town in northern Bavaria that is otherwise mainly known for its smoked beer(*). This performance rather suggests that they can play(**), and that Hollreiser, who I've otherwise never heard of, can conduct too. Similarities (not entirely accidental on Brahms’ part) to Beethoven's 9th Symphony include the last movement being the Good Bit.
  (*) Yes, really. .
  (**) They can play: musicians' technical term borrowed from my brother, generally used by him as quite high praise.
• Brahms Violin Concerto: Walter Schneiderhan, van Remoortel, Bamberg Orchestra.
  There are dozens of really good recordings of this centrepiece of the violin repertoire. This, in which the Bamberg demonstrate once again that they Can Play, is one of them.
• Frank Bridge String Quartets: Brindisi Quartet.
  Excellent performances of little known twentieth century British masterpieces.
• Mussorgsky arr. Stokowksi, Pictures at an Exhibition: James Sedares, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra..
  Stokowski’s orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky’s piano masterpiece isn’t as dramatic and colourful as Ravel’s better known version, but well worth a listen nevertheless. Really good orchestral playing. As