Chopin and Monk

I heard a great report by Sara Fishko on WNYC yesterday about the great Polish composer Frederic Chopin. The pianist Garrick Ohlsson describes how Chopin was an inveterate improviser, who spent weeks working on how to make his pieces sound as though they were made up on the spot. Ohlsson "opens the hood" of the pieces in the interview, which is really fascinating. Coming at this from my comparitively poor classical background, the spontaneity and openness of Chopin reminds me of Thelonious Monk's compositions and playing, in an odd way.

Cross-posted to A Jeremiad.

Brahms for sale and The Nose

This week I received two great leads:

1) William Kentridge’s set design for the Shostakovich Opera “The Nose” will be at The Metropolitan Opera in February
2) Amazon.com was having a sale on a collection called “The 99 Most Essential Brahms Masterpieces” for 1.99 (Now that it is OFF sale it is a bank-breaking $5.99)

I have already lined up nearly the worst seats in the house for a performance of The Nose. I know that the $20 dollar tickets aren’t ideal, but this is my first Opera experience and I am excited for it!

The Brahms collection is actually excellent. At 6 dollars I think it is still a very smart buy! The more I listen the more I find themes that I have heard throughout my life. After Beethoven, it is a welcome change to have the broad sweeping romantic tones of Brahms.

Having started with Bach, then to Beethoven now Brahms, I now feel like I am getting at least a broad sense of the lineage of these towering figures.

Bloginess: Placido Domingo/Mozart/Kimchi

My friend Katie talks Opera(a little) and lecherous old men, which I just always assumed went together!

Kimchi Making from Jeremy, Parts 1 and 2

A few notes on Mozart from Ain't Baroque

Classical Listening Resources

If you are following this blog, I thought you might like to use a few of the same resources I am, and hopefully suggest a few I don’t know about.

Pandora
User-friendly free (40hrs or less per month) online music service. Select a piece of music for more accurate suggestions and you can thumbs up or down something. It also gives you the opportunity to add other songs or artists for variety. The classical selection is not as strong as last.fm

Last.fm
A free radio service that plays music based on your interest in artists or songs similar to Pandora. It has significantly better research on the artists and music. Its Clkassical selection is good.

Instant Encore
A recently developed website to build an audience for classical music. They have a wonderful variety of live performances from all over the world. You can search for music, conductors or performers and make your own queue of music to listen to for free.

Live streaming NPR Stations

NPR Classical 50
“Critic Ted Libbey and host Fred Child recommend 50 essential recordings for everyone from first-timers to fanatics.“

If you have other ideas for me, please let me know!

Revelation in 9 discs: Wilhelm Kempff Beethoven Piano Sonatas

Up until this point I haven’t felt deeply connected with much of the music I have been listening to as part of Year of Classical. I enjoy it, I embrace it, but I am still at a distance from its power. That is until I got my hands on the 9 Disc set of Wilhelm Kempff’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. They truly are a revelation. In each I find more texture and personality. Still, as a newbie to all this and someone with no music training, it is difficult for me to hear the composers voice and the pianists choices.
I have only had the opportunity to pay close attention to the first 12, which are from his early period. In each piece, I can find things to get excited about. Some are fanciful and some are sad and all seem to be written for a master.
As my Beethoven Introduction/Indoctrination continues, I will say that I longed for some soul music while watching the PBS documentary Sam Cooke: Crossing Over this past weekend. Luckily the hour show gave me enough Sam Cooke for a bit, but I am certain I will need to listen to some more soon. I would absolutely recommend the documentary and the whole Sam Cooke catalog. No song has ever affected me as much as A Change is Gonna Come.

Beethoven and breaking rules

All Beethoven is maybe too much.

It seems I have found that my commute could benefit from all Beethoven on the way in and no Beethoven out. In the evenings, instead of Beethoven I have been listening to something starkly different. Satie, Glass and Feldman have been the modern composers that my overworked brain retreats to in the evening.

For my Beethoven focus I have started with the 4^th, 5^th, 7^th and 9^th Symphonies and a variety of other pieces, most engaging of which was the 5^th Piano Concerto, the so-called The Emperor Concerto. It’s a vibrant piece of music and I hear something new each time. I have been listening to a recording with Seiji Ozawa of the BSO and Rudolf Serkin on Concord/TELARC. Unfortunately, Ozawa has been ill and I wish him a speedy recovery.

The fact is that my exposure to classical music has been so haphazard in the past that all this music is essentially new to me. With each listening session, I gain something new. I hear another instrument, or the conductors influence.

Also, I am dying to listen to a few new pop records. Spoon has a new one that should be great. What are everyone’s thoughts on this? If I maintain my 2 hours a day of classical can I listen to a new record?

Beethoven: Deep end of the pool

By diving into the Olympic-sized swimming pool of Beethoven, I think I am trying to begin to demystify one of the Biggies. I am devoting all this week to various recordings of Beethoven. I have many good Deutsche Grammophon recordings on deck and would be happy to take suggestions. This is in no way to say that I think a week will be sufficient, but I think listening to only Beethoven for some period of time, a week or longer, will have its own rewards.

It was odd for me to listen to the 5^th Symphony today. Since it is such a loaded and often referenced piece of music, I just tried to listen and give it the same attention as everything else. As a Visual Arts person, I think of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I see the image often at MOMA, and even more often its reproduction. Without getting into an entire Walter Benjamin conversation, the more often we see and in this case hear something, its meaning can change. Whether this extra exposure enhances or detracts, well that’s for you to decide. But hearing the first booming notes of the 5^th Symphony shakes my mental Etch-A-Sketch and sets me back to a blank canvas. It is still a wakeup call, and a command to attention no matter how many times I have heard it.

As I wade a bit deeper into the pool, we will see what else Beethoven has up his sleeves.

Paganini: Down to the Crossroads

I am realizing that I am immediately drawn to solo pieces whether they are contemporary or 100’s of years old. Somehow much of what I have started off listening to has been solo music. Yo-Yo Ma, Glenn Gould and some Erik Satie. My father recommended Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices performed by Itzhak Perlman.

Reading up on Paganini I learned that he was a native of Genoa and that Mandolin was his first instrument. More interestingly, he had refused the Last Rites and as Wikipedia puts it: It was on these grounds, and his widely rumored association with the devil, that his body was denied a Catholic burial in Genoa. It took four years, and an appeal to the Pope, before the body was allowed to be transported to Genoa, but was still not buried. His remains were finally put to rest in 1876 in a cemetery in Parma. I like to think of this like as a Faustian tale, where Paganini’s virtuoso skills were acquired just like Robert Johnson down at the crossroads. The Devil went down to Georgia 200 years after he did some business in Genoa.

As with Yo-Yo Ma, I can hear the intense execution of each note. This sometimes sounds like gun-to-the-temple stopwatch execution. If you could film it and play back in slow motion, we would be dazzled and amazed at the lightening fast reflexes of Itzhak Perlman. Still, I find it all a bit exhausting. Maybe it’s too much to try and listen to or take in all at once. I feel I can draw a direct comparison to a jazz improvisation like a Max Roach solo, where the musical mind drives the machine. Point and counterpoint are hammered home, and each note clear whether it has a full second or 1/1,000^th to make itself heard. I imagine Paganini with his fathers mandolin, plucking the tunes his father taught him fits at 1 and ½ speed, then two and three times faster, then backwards, or moving all the notes several octaves lower. A virtuoso, bored with convention and preparing for his deal with the devil.

Week 1: Boosters, Playlist and Goldberg Variations

The experiment has been well received in its early days and I believe there will be more and more guest posts as the year goes on.

The Hampshire College Alum office was nice enough to throw me a Facebook post and tweeting has been useful as well.

While I am thinking of it a list of composers and pieces I focused on in the first week

Glenn Gould and Simone Dinnerstein (Thanks Jer) performing Bach: Goldberg Variations

Now, hearing the name Goldberg Variations on Bach I never would have thought that this could refer to a performer from the late 1700's. When I hear Goldberg Variation (I am Jewish and much of my humor is as well, please follow this link if you are interested in where I am coming from) I think of my Fathers jokes or some sort of modern accounting terminology, not 18th Century pianists.

It was important for me to hear Gould's 1955 recording versus Dinnerstein's 2007 recording. Both are beautiful but the subtle differences are just as interesting as the less subtle ones. I truly enjoyed the music and am enjoying compositions for solo piano.

Martín Codax Cantiga de Amigo (Performances available via last.fm)

Yo-Yo Ma performing Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello

Perlman performing Paganini 24 Caprices

Various pieces by Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Dvorák, Mahler, Prokofiev, Ravel, Satie and Shostakovitch

Pandora and Last.FM have been really useful. I recommend both services for exploring Classical music!

Thanks for all the support - Jeff

Day 2, 3 & 4- Thoughts on Film and Wascally Wabbits

The role that classical music has played in my life up until now has been to score films, cartoons and television (shows/ads). At times, I have clearly remembered these snippets of music but never sought them out.
I hope to extract the music like Rambo would some do-gooder missionaries and take it somewhere safe and far from Elmer Fudd. Ok, I am mixing my examples a bit.
My father loves Disney's Fantasia. Walt Disney wanted to bring the kids some classical music and sell some tickets to their parents as well. It was a good idea and mostly became famous for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. To me, it was and is a wondrous example of film and music together but in my mind there is still none greater than Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Now don't think I want to go out and banish John Williams. He has taken orchestral music to places few composers could have, a truly mass audience. I love what he and other composers do to create a rich world in film (and rarely, TV). But for me, I need to be able to hear the music and not see the closing credits to Rocky.

Last night I saw An Education, in which a young cellist becomes entwined in an affair with an older man. They go to see a performance of Ravel and I thought "Ah Ha, an opportunity to learn!" So I spent some time with Maurice Ravel. I found a beautiful performance of A.B. Michelangeli playing the Adagio of Ravel's Piano Concerto.
I let Pandora dance me through some things as well. Pandora is a free service on the web (as long as you listen less than 40hrs per month) that allows you to name a song or artist or several of each and then it builds you a "station" of music. It gave me Debussy (very recognizable from Film), Prokofiev and Shostakovich to start with. I think with Pandora you get a variety and if you use it's functions well, get a strong grouping of music.
So, that is a long winded way of saying I hope to find inspiration in life for new avenues to approach Classical music...I will let you know how it goes.

Simone Dinnerstein

I listened to Simone Dinnerstein's interpretation of The Goldberg Variations yesterday. Dinnerstein lives in Park Slope, and her husband teaches at PS 321. When this CD came out, it knocked the White Stripes off the #1 position on Amazon, and went to #1 on the Billboard charts. I grew up listening to the Glenn Gould recordings, which I love. I think Dinnerstein's recording is moving and sharp, but I don't trust my classical filter- it's outside my comfort zone. The Goldberg Variations are a super punk 2 album rock opera, so maybe a good introduction for classical newbies.

An essay from the New Yorker archive

This article was passed along to me by Anne-Marie, my co-conspirators spouse and a supporter of the Year of Classical. She says it is her one of her favorite essays on music ever. I loved it! Please enjoy!

A classical kid learns to love pop-and wonders why he has to make a choice.

by Alex Ross

I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”

For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre élitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider some of the rival names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious; but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. This morning, for me, it was Sibelius’s Fifth; late last night, Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; tomorrow, it may be something entirely new. I can’t rank my favorite music any more than I can rank my memories. Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. They say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. If it is worth loving, it must be great; no more need be said.

When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.”

Read more of this article at TheNewYorker.com

Day 1 with Yo-Yo Ma

I decided to spend a little down time today after much eating and Wii researching some of the suggestions I have received for this so called Year of Classical.

My father spoke very highly of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suite in G. Part of the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Rather than think of Bach or music history, this was more of a chance to hear Yo-Yo Ma.

First impressions: I know of Yo-Yo Ma and his status as a virtuoso. I can hear the musical hurtles he has to jump through. At times all the mastery and skill fades into the background and the feeling seeps through with every bit of the music. I didn't want to overthink it, so I listened to both albums once through. Overall I loved it for it's quiet strength. Bold and groaning lines of music making strong bass vibrations in everything. A very good Day 1.

Album information from Amazon below:

Bach: The Cello Suites Inspired By Bach, From The Six-Part Film Series / Yo-Yo Ma Though they were long misunderstood as mere technical hurdles, Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello are among those rare works of music that offer inexhaustible rewards for performer and listener alike. Yo-Yo Ma gave a pathbreaking account of the suites back in the '80s (Suites for Unaccompanied Cello ) but returns to them here impelled by a unique and interdisciplinary approach. For this project, Ma engaged the talents of artists in different fields--ranging from a landscape artist to a Kabuki actor and figure skaters--to produce six short films as a visual correlative for the highly distinctive character of each suite. While the success of the films in illuminating Bach's creativity is decidedly uneven, Ma brings the music itself to life with a searing, quasi-vocal eloquence. His interpretations are probing, characterized by imaginative bowing and attention to the spacious architecture of Bach's score. This is especially clear in Ma's preference for broad, expansive tempos and patient spinning of filigreed detail. True, the generally Romantic cast of his conception can seem overdone and exaggerated in statement, as if Ma is more intent on overlaying his own personality on the discipline of the music. But the prayerful, meditative concentration he brings to the Sarabandes--listen to the single-lined, anguished tone painting in Suite 5--is utterly convincing. There is a sense of profound introspection here, while in the Sarabande of Suite 6 Ma's phrasing suggests we are in the same spiritual terrain as Beethoven's late quartets. Yet there is no lack of blistering energy and extroverted high spirits in some of the more overtly dance-oriented movements. While purists may complain of distortion in these accounts, Ma once again proves he has something vital to say with this music. --Thomas May