Friday Miscellanea

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Here is a really interesting piece. Raga Piloo, one of the very first East/West collaborations written by Ravi Shankar for himself and Yehudi Menuhin. Here played by Shankar's daughter Anoushka and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The last time I saw Patricia she was sprechgesinging Schoenberg!

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And since last week I was kicking Ted Gioia for his methodology, it is only fair to mention a quite good piece he just did on Bach: Having Fun with Bach Cantatas. I find myself agreeing with quite a lot he has to say.

But the more deeply you probe into the aspirations and attitudes of this composer, the larger these works loom in his oeuvre. Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has argued that they stand out as the “most ambitious of all compositional projects”—especially the second cantata cycle of 1724-25. “The cantatas represent an almost superhuman artistic and spiritual achievement,” claims Mark Ringer in his new book Bach’s Operas of the Soul, adding that “they are at the absolute center of Bach’s creative life.” Yet, he notes sadly, “they are a closed book to a majority of serious listeners.”

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Lea Desandre's new album is on my to-buy list, but still out of stock at Amazon. The Guardian has a nice review: Classical home listening: Lea Desandre’s Amazone; Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle.

This is a concept album, a “hymn to Mother Nature… a poetic, universal and timeless message”, with pictures of Desandre standing in yogic dancer pose. Don’t be put off. The music is beautifully performed, vivacious, and intelligently programmed. Desandre flies weightlessly around elaborate ornamentation, expressive and precise. The Jupiter players and Dunford excel. And hearing contributions from Desandre’s French and Italian senior star colleagues Véronique Gens and Cecilia Bartoli is a bonus.

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Europe is going through a terrible resurgence of Covid right now: THREE SALZBURG PRODUCTIONS ARE SHUT BY COVID.

Following a number of Corona cases in the ensemble Salzburg Landestheater has cancelled Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos, as well as a play, Blood on My Hands, by Shlomo Moskovitz.
Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings, due this weekend, has been postponed.

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As a reminder of the world pre-Covid, here is a chamber music concert by Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang from January 2020:

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Here's something amusing: LEONARD COHEN INTERVIEWS GLENN GOULD.

Cohen gave an account of interviewing Gould for Holiday magazine in the “late 1950s or early 1960s.” The pianist, having “apparently heard of a little book I [Cohen] had written, … accepted the interview.”
Cautioned not to shake his hand,Cohen met Gould in the lobby of Gould’s apartment building in Toronto.
This was before the days of tape recorders. ‘[I became] so engrossed by what [Gould] was saying, I stopped taking notes.’
The interview, scheduled for only a few minutes, lasted for a “couple of hours.” Cohen thanked Gould and returned to his Montreal home to write the article, at which time those words he thought “were burned into my soul” dissipated. As Leonard Cohen put it,
‘I couldn’t remember a word that he said.’
After stalling his editors over the phone for some time, Cohen ‘finally stopped answering the phone.’

Leonard Cohen and Glenn Gould between them constitute over 50% of interesting Canadian cultural figures.

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No, this doesn't remind me of Lenin's propaganda vilifying "hoarders and wreckers" at all: Diversify the world of classical music? Some key players are digging in their heels.

Because this is a day ending in y, it’s time once again to take up the question of the classical music repertoire. Specifically, how long can an artistic culture survive and thrive on the work of the same circumscribed set of a dozen or so dead white European men?
Or, to put it another way: What is so damn terrifying about the possibility that exploring new and diverse musical sources — living composers, women, creators of color — might prove rewarding?

Of course, this is a straw man: the fact that a lot of performing organizations offer a lot of repertoire that much of their audience enjoys and is familiar with does not at all mean that they are resisting new and diverse musical sources. You can certainly do both. And refrain from being terrified as well. This over-hyping of a predetermined narrative is a sin committed by both the left and the right of course. Here the non-persons resisting the inevitable march of progress are cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han. I especially enjoyed the all-out assault on poor Joseph Haydn.

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Here is a nice sample from the Lea Desandre album mentioned above: