Sounds past and future

Time become space. Jeremy Denk, Ives and Bach

2011-04-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

"Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”

A few weeks ago I went to New York ostensibly to hear Maurizo Pollini play the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier at Carnegie Hall. Alas, he was taken ill and canceled. His replacement was Jeremy Denk a young (early 40s) American pianist with a rising reputation and a blogger.. His program: the Ives Concord Sonata and the Bach Goldberg Variations; about as strong a statement of serious intent as would be possible, especially for a Carnegie debut.

But still,not Pollini, who is about as august a presence as can be found in the piano world. But I had the ticket and had the reservations, so off I went.

The Concord made up the first half of the program. Forty-five minutes, four movements. Extremely and unrewardingly difficult.   Unrewarding because some of the difficulties are gratituious, caused by Ives not being a pianist and thickly scored. So there are passages that are very difficult that don't actually sound that difficult and none of it is intended to show off the pianist's brilliance. I suppose one could call it rebarbative.

It also isn't in any key or meter. Most of it doesn't have bar lines. There are no recognizable structural sign-posts for the performer or the listener (at least not in the traditional sense). It is highly discontinuous, in a way that seems post-modern. It is absurdist, ironic, mocking, pious, pompous, bombastic, redundant, endless, repetitive and banal. It is also elegiac, tragic and possessing a kind of transcendent grandeur won from it's own self-doubt and struggle and refusal to avoid the very problems that it raises and refuses to solve.

Why anyone would program it is beyond me. I was going to say the Denk dispatched it with ease, but that's not quite right. He possesses seeming limitless technical and tonal resources, not something usually associated with "intellectual" pianists. To say that he played it with ease would deny the physicality of the performance, of a human body working hard and with grace. That and the feeling of risk being taken, of something if not moral that at least ethical being at stake, of someone trying hard to come to terms with whatever it was that Ives was trying to say about music and being an American composer.

I was familiar with the Concord from recordings and had not been won over. Hearing it live in a masterful performance, I now regard as one of the signal achievements of the last century.

Above is a screen capture of the score. You can find the whole thing here.   It's worth looking at for the score; in addition to the music, you'll find all of Ives' discussion of the piece and it's inspiration in the New England transcendentalists.

Then the Goldberg Variations for the second half. It's often the only piece on a program. There are 32 variations and each is written to be repeated. If all the repeats are taken, it's maybe 70 minutes long - there are no or few tempo marking in Bach so you can play it as fast or as slow as you like. Denk took maybe half the repeats so his performance lasted maybe 50 minutes.

It can be hard to tell if a variation is repeated, by the way. First, a good performer will add additional ornaments the second time through. But Bach's counterpoint is so rich and his ability to suspend musical voces above one another is so great that one listening cannot grasp all that's going one, so the second seems as new, as it were, as the first.

Whereas Ives is inchoate Bach logical, as it were, but just as mysterious. infinite in craftsmanship and attention to detail, limitless in invention, lapidary, elegant, clear without being obvious or pedantic; considerable depths always transparent. At least in Denk's hands. And the piece is not easy, being , it seems to me, at the technical limits of Bach's keyboard writing. It rewards the performer with passage work of sparking virtuosity and animal good spirits, leaps and hand-crossing (especially difficult on the piano rather than the two keyboard harpsichord for which was written).

It is also, as far as I know, the only instance of the variation form in all of Bach's music.

About mid-way through, I realized that I was starting to fade. I was becoming tired. I wondered about the pianist. I wasn't worried about his physical technique, but the mental demands of such a program must be considerable. So I pulled myself upright and then leaned over the balcony railing and relaxed and started listening more closely.

Sometimes we talk about the "long line" in music, the quality of breath, real or metaphoric, that keeps all the parts of a piece in in order, that keeps it from becoming episodic. It is, I think, generally a matter of dynamics and tempo, but especially dynamics, and it's very hard to achieve. You can tell it's happening when the music continues during silences and at full stops. At many places, Denk finished one variation and pounced directly into the next. But at others, especially after the slow ones, he paused and held the pause. So in my opinion, he maintained the a continuous thread from the beginning to the end of the Variations. A very considerable achievement.

Then, for an encore, although one would not be expected after such a demanding program, he repeated the third movement of the Ives, the most subdued and reflective and the circle was closed.

So, a serious program asking a lot of the audience and more of the performer. By the time the Variations were
underway, you could have heard a pin drop.

Here's another piece by Ives, one of his most beautiful songs. The piano part is not that difficult. Try it.

On Glen Gould

2011-03-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

I rented Michele Hozer's and Peter Raymont's documentary Genius Within: the Inner Life of Glen Gould.

I'd been skeptical about it, fearing either pure hagiography or lurid expose. It appears to be a balanced and clear eyed view of major musical talent. Gould was loquacious, talking, engagingly and with great warmth, insight and humor.

There seems to be endless footage of him walking: on the beach, in the snow, at night on the sidewalks of Toronto.

Also included are extensive interviews with Cornelia Foss, who left her husband, the composer Lucas Foss for Gould in 1967, and the two Foss children, who have warm memories of him. Jamie Lorado makes frequent appearances along with Fred Sherry. In addition, childhood friends and producers and engineers from Columbia and the CBC. Of special interest to me were the comments of a classmate of his from the Toronto Conservatory on his piano technique.

As with most music documentaries, there is not one piece played in its entirety: a few bars and then voice-over. But Gould's playing, at it's best, was so transcendent that what we do hear completely overshadows the movie. Who would want to listen to talk when one could witness such playing?

The famous conflict with Leonard Bernstein over Gould's approach to the Brahms D-minor is recounted and we get to hear a bit of the first movement. I must say, it's dreadful. Gould's playing was all in his fingers and his detached attack and crystalline fleetness were unsuited to Brahms. Later we hear him playing one of the early Brahms ballades (as an accompaniment to moody pacing around in supposed response to Cornelia's having returned to her husband). The playing is fussy and unconvincing.

There is considerable fascinating footage of Gould at work in the recording studio. He quite famously gave up public performance for recording early in his career. It's strange to remember a point in time when a classical pianist would be treated as a recording star by a major conglomerate.

There's also see tour of Russia and a still photo of him with Richter (who thought Gould could be absolutely brilliant, but correctly criticized his failure to take the repeats in Bach). There's quite a bit about the Cold War era. A lost world, one that I remember.

Cornelia Foss left Gould over his drug use - apparently all pharmaceuticals. The only drugs mentioned are anti-depressants and drugs for anxiety. I'd like to know more. I've always felt that there's a certain speed vibe in his sense of time with it's elasticity and incredible control. He had certain sonic similarities with Dylan, the high clear amphetamine sound in Blonde on Blonde especially.

Most of the footage used in the movie is from the earlier part of this life. According to Foss, he became increasingly paranoid and controlling. Details are not provided.

He died of a stroke shortly after his 50th birthday, in 1982, seven years before the fall of the Berlin wall. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, support for the arts in the U.S. began to decline: we no longer had to prove to the world that we could compete with the Communists in all areas of culture.

Gould lived in to the early days of the digital revolution that would destroy the recording industry that sustained his career and his retreat from the stage.

His hypochondria is discussed: like Duke Ellington, he was afraid to shake hands.

Why Nature Has Reasons

2011-03-01T17:18:00.000-08:00

Lui Chi: The Terror

I worry that my ink well
   may run dry,
that right words
   cannot be found.
I want to respond to each
   moment's inspiration.
Work with what is given;
   that which passes cannot be detained.
Things move into shadows and vanish;
   memory returns in an echo.
When Spring arrives,
   we understand why Nature has reasons.
Thoughts rise form the heart on breezes
   and language finds its speaker.
Yesterday's buds are this morning's blossoms
   we draw with a brush on silk.
Every eye knows a pattern;
   every hear hears distant music.

Lui Chi's Wen Fu

Translated by Sam Hamill

The Wen Fu, from the 3rd century, is the earliest work on the poetic arts in Chinese. However, no distinction seems be be made between poetry and music, or at least, poetry and song, so it is a guide for musicians as well. It's published by Milkweed Editions under the name The Art of Writing.

If you're interested what tradition might mean, where it comes from and how it abides, read this little book. It is from a world and time almost inconceivably remote. It is ironic that classical Chinese poetry became the touchstone for so much of modernism in American letters, with it's own rejection of the 19th century poetic canon.

This encounter can be explored in detail in the Eliot Weinberger edited New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, which includes translations by Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and David Hinton. It also includes what appears to be a fantastical translation of the Wen Fu by Achilles Fang and essays and reviews of each others' work by Williams and Snyder.

New blog added

2011-02-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

Iron Tongue of Midnight - this one form San Fransisco. The author, Lisa Hirsch is to be commended for subjecting music journalism to pretty close scrutiny.

Mark Alexander Boyd

2011-01-30T19:40:00.000-08:00

Sonet

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,
Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

Twa gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,
Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throw the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

Scotland 1570

Boulder Symphony

2011-01-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

Saturday, January 15th, I attended a concert by the Boulder Symphony at the Mountain View United Methodist. I'm just a blogger, and an intermittent one at that, not a journalist under the obligation cover the local scene. But a friend of mine was playing and they had the Schoenberg 1st Chamber Symphony on the program -- not something one expects from a community orchestra.

I know and admire the work from two recordings -- admire, but not love. It's a work of formidable density -- a kind of cubist view of the 19th century symphonic tradition with the four movements of the standard symphony more or less played at the same time in one intense, twenty minute span. Quite a stunning feat and by far the most advanced work of the pre WWI second Vieniesse school. All of the standard techniques and gestures of the tradition are subverted and frustrated. Yet it's an very much an example of the "constant variation" technique developed by Brahms. It couldn't possible be easy to play and not something one would want to hear butchered.

(The composer was also a painter, although an "expressionist" not a cubist.)

The church is one of those giant A-frames that were so popular in the 70's, quite large with very high ceilings. Not a promising acoustic environment. So I plopped myself down in the front row, right next to the conductor's podium. Besides, the place was full and I'd arrived only ten minutes early.

The first piece, for the full orchestra, was Mozart's Overture for La Clemenza di Tito. Well played.

Then the Schoenberg.   Reduced forces - a chamber symphony, after all, just sixteen instraments. Associate conductor Alejandro Gomez-Guillen delivered some illuminating introductory remarks with examples played by the orchestra. And then off they went: a performance more than competent: committed, engaged, sure footed, with accurate intonation and moments real power.

Gomez-Guillen conducted with dispatch, accuracy and authority. He must really know how to rehearse. The orchestra, generally quite young, played beautifully together with remarkable coherence and communication: humility, musicianship and loyalty.

Subsequent research (Google!) reveals that Gomez-Guillen, is a violinist and PhD candidate in conducting at the CU College of Music. The web site lists the orchestra members, a number of whom have web sites and many of whom are graduate students on their instruments at local schools . The clarinet chair for the Schoenberg was held by the wonderful Deborah Goretity recently returned to the US after years free lancing in Europe.

The second half started with the R. Strauss Serinade for Winds, written when he was a student. Also well played and also impressive - woodwinds are hard, btw. Then two concerto movements, one form Hydan and one Mozart played by two local compeittion winners, Andrea Lin, perhaps ten years old, and Sonya Walker, thirteen. Both played musically and did themselves proud.   Appaently there's quite a competition scene for young musicians. I'm not sure this is healthy.

But the Boulder Symphony is clearly in excellent health. Visit their web site. And attend the upcoming concerts.

Here's a review of an earlier performance.   Note that the Strauss Serenade was played then as well, which suggests limited rehearsal time.

Those works of Schoenberg that made it into the general repertory are early ones, Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot lunaire. The piano music turns up, in part because all of it is short and therefore easy to program. There is a wonderful recording of the Gurre-Lieder by Pierre Boulez which is completely sui generis -- if anything, it sounds like Debussy. Which makes me want to listen to the Austrian's Pellas.

His later works have met with much less acceptance, although there is an absolutely wonderful recording of the Violin Concerto by Hillary Hahn with Essa Pekka Salonen. It's coupled with the Sebilus. The Schoenberg is passionate and exciting. The Sibelus indifferent.

There's also a wonderful recording of the Piano Poncerto with Uchida and Boulez which includes all the solo piano music as well as the Berg sonata and the Webern Variations.

As I Went Out One Evening

2010-12-31T19:09:00.000-08:00

New Years is about the past and the future. So here's simple lyric poem by W.H. Auden. The link below is to a reading by none other than Dylan Thomas. It's sounds old-fashioned, as I suppose it is. The poem itself is old fashioned, as old in its sentiments at least as Plutarch or the Provençal Troubadours. But modern too, a recognizable 20th Century city-scape. The near rhymes, hold/world and is/kiss are themselves like the crack in the teacup in the 10th stanza.

Dylan Thomas reads Auden

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T16:02:00.000-08:00

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

Of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun

And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.

It is an easy thing to talk of prudence to the afflicted,

To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,

To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season

When the red blood is fill’d with wine and with the marrow of lambs.

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,

To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;

To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast;

To hear sounds of love in the thunder-storm and destroys our enemies’ house;

To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field

When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:

Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

William Blake "The For Zoas - Night the Second pages 32 and 33.

Mind grown venerable in the unreal

2010-11-14T15:50:00.000-08:00

Goodbye to summer. Blake, King James, Wallace Stevens, Bingham Hill, south east of La Porte, Colorado.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:7 - King James

The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through

The sky. It is the visible announced,

It is the more than visible, the more

Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries

This is the successor of the invisible.

This is its substitute in stratagems

Of the spirit. This, in sight and memory,

Must take its place, as what is possible

replaces what is not. The resounding cry

Is like ten thousand tumblers, tumbling down

To share the day. The Trumpet supposes that

A mind exists, aware of division, aware

Of its cry as clarion, its diction's way

As that of a personage in a multitude:

Man's mind grown venerable in the unreal.

Credences of Summer - Canto VII Wallace Stevens

Narcissist's America - The Divine Sarah

2010-11-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the former half-term governor of Alaska and for some reason the concept of narcissism came to mind. You can look it up! Then I ran across Terry Castle's great essay on the long dead actress Sarah Berhnhardt.

Any discussion about "Hysterical Exhibitionism" and "Narcissistic Wish-Fulfillment" and "Sartorial Perversions" can't help but remind one of our Divine Sarah. Alas, the essay is behind their pay wall, that is, it's for subscribers only. However, you can read her great post about Georgia O'Keefe for free. Since it's also about her mom, it might make good reading for holiday travels.

Beethoven, Takacs and the Genetic Fallacy

2010-11-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 31st the following took place at CU:

"Quartet
by David Lawrence Morse

In this exciting new drama, brought to the stage by the Takacs Quartet and Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Beethoven rises above illness and tortured relationships to compose his most sublime music. The drama explores the circumstances surrounding Beethoven's composition of the late quartets, integrating musical examples performed by the Takács. Following the drama, the quartet performs Beethoven's
& nbsp;
String Quartet in A-Minor, Op. 132."

What this meant in practice was that for almost an hour and a half four actors narrated the story of Beethoven's last years and the circumstances surrounding his final compositions. This was done in excessive detail, including, for example, the composers arguments with his copyists. Mainly, however, it concerned his unhappy relations with his nephew and his vexed business dealings. Plus his deafness, health problems, general cantankerousness and apparently squalid hygiene. At various points, snippets of the compositions being discussed were played.

The volume of biographical detail was numbing and, as far as I can remember, seemed accurate enough. It became, alas, interminable. The portrait that emerged was of a very unhappy man, incapable of taking care of himself, desperately lonely, abandoned to live in filth, his music the expression of a kind of inspired mania verging on madness.

Assuming that this was true -- and there are reasons to doubt it -- how does knowing these details help us "understand" his music? It certainly doesn't constitute music criticism. Rather, its voyeurism.

In fact, it diminishes the music, turning it into a kind of soundtrack for pathologies or of some sort of aesthetic of triumph over the sufferings of life through art.

But the outer circumstances tell us almost nothing about the work. The late quartets are exceptional on every possible level, but I especially admire a craftsmanship which has very little to do with "inspiration" and "genius", much less "the sublime", and everything to do with knowledge and diligence and hard work. The shear elegance and ease of the part writing is amazing. Even watching it being played, it's hard to understand how so much could be brought of four instruments with sixteen strings and four bows.

For an artist like Beethoven, the work was the life. We should no more look his diet (or anything else) to explain his music than we should look to Liebniz' arthritis to explain the calculus.

This is of course not to say the music is the same as mathematics. The A minor Quartet is personal and stunningly intimate, but it's also bardic and mythic. There are many ways music conveys meaning. It's capable of irony, e.g., the little minuet that stage band plays in Don Giovanni. It's also capable of literal mimesis. After all imitation is an essential formal tool and the essence of counterpoint. But it's also capable of literal mimesis, as in the Pastoral Symphony with its bird calls and thunder storms.

One could argue the the Molto Adagio, played with great restraint and delicacy the the Takscs, incarnates in it's simple ABABA form the an alternation between the timeless - the Lydian chorale - and personal historic time -- the D major second subject.

D major is of course the key of the 6th Symphony. Maynard Solomon in his Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, argues the the seeds of the late style are to be found in Beethoven's pastoral and rustic works, not in the major works of his heroic style. He singles out the 7th Symphony, the Op 96 Violin Sonata and the Archduke Trio as examples - one might also mention any number of the less famous piano sonatas. The late works should be seen not as examples of some triumph of the will but as contemplations of musical expression, meditations on form, the animal delight of virtuosity, the joke, the dance, the elegy , ineluctable fate and the nature of time: human, divine and musical.

Goodman Woodman and Humiliation Scratcher

2010-10-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

Being a contrarian and something of a miserabilist my summer reading tends towards the weighty and obscure. This summer it included Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America a 900 page cultural history of English speaking colonial America by David Hackett Fisher. The four folkways are chronologically the Puritians, what he calls the "Cavaliers" in Virginia and the Chesapeake/Virginia tidewaters, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the Scots-Irish in Appalachia. For each group he discusses speech, building, family, marriage, gender, sex, child rearing, naming, aging, death, religion, magic, learning, food, dress, sports, work, time, wealth, rank, social practice, government, power and freedom.

It's a huge undertaking. Plus, it's a real book. All the scholarly material is in actual footnotes which sometimes go on for pages and contain charts and graphs. And there are maps -detailed demographic maps - and drawings of people and their clothes and their houses.

In some ways, all this work reinforces regional stereotypes and traces them back to their origins in 17th century England. One thing is quite clear: these people hated each other in England and hated each other after they got here. Since reading Hackett I've started to think of the American Civil War as a continuation of the English one: the English aristocracy came to Virginia explicitly to escape the Puritans in England just as the Puritans had come to the New World to escape them. Puritans in Massachusetts went back to England to fight alongside Cromwell against the Anglicans. So civil war seemed built into America's cultural DNA far before the rise of slavery and race-based ideologies, its roots being both religious and cultural.

Further, if you want to understand the Tea Party, don't think about the original one in Boston. The New England Puritans certainly weren't anti-government and anti-tax. Think of the Whiskey Rebellion. If you want to understand Sarah Palin, think of Andrew Jackson.

I especially liked the Puritan onomastics (systems of naming). Referring to Sussex England, source of many Puritan families, Hackett writes:

"Sussex Puritans made heavy use of hortatory names such as Be-courteous Cole... Safely-on-high Snat, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White... Humiliation Scratcher... and Mortify Hicks. A classic example was an unfortunate young woman name I-fly-fornication Bull of Hailsham, Sussex, who was made pregnant in the shop of a yeoman improbably called Goodman Woodman."

This was rather specific to Sussex and didn't really take in New England, which I think is a shame. However, they did use necronyms: if a child died the next child of the same sex was given its name.

In any case, he then traces internal migration in the US over the past 300 years and voting patterns associated with each group. Well into the 19th century, European visitors commented that the regional differences in the US were greater than those in any one European country. The disparities in per capita income between New England and the mountain South were greater than those between Germany and Russia as late as the 1880s.

In addition, every president except two has come from one of these groups. Although one could argue the Roosevelt doesn't fit because his name is Dutch. The two presidents? Kennedy - Irish Catholic, and the current occupant of the White House.

Colorado Music Festival 2010

2010-06-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Colorado Music Festival starts June 27^th and concludes on August 6^th. The web site is here and is an unattractive mess.

This year we get: Pictures at an Exhibition, The Grand Canyon Suite, a “New Year’s Style Night in Vienna,” “A Symphonic Tribute to Great American Pops Composers,” a tango concert and five evenings of “world music.”

In the middle, there’s a “Brahms Festival.” Over eight days you can hear all four symphonies, two of the serenades and all of the concertos, including the Double Concerto.

The soloist in the D-minor concerto will be Peter Serkin, a major international artist -- absolutely worth hearing, although we did just have an outstanding performance of the work by Christopher Taylor with the Boulder Philharmonic. Valentina Listisa is playing the B-flat concerto, and she seems to be a rising star.

On July 29^th and 30^th, Jane Eaglen will sing the Liebestod followed by Loren Maazel’s Wagner arrangement “The Ring Without Words.” Jane Eaglen has had vocal problems lately, but hopefully she’s doing well now. If so, why fly her out to sing for ten minutes?

On August 1^st, we can hear Golijov’s klezmer-flavored Dreams of Issac the Blind and the Bruckner D minor Requiem -- which might not be as incongruous as it sounds.

It all winds up on August 5^th and 6^th with Mahler’s Fifth, prefaced by something involving didgeridoo and electric guitar. (I would have programmed the klezmer with the Mahler, naturally.)

So it’s another strange season for the CMF: ADHD programming, probably 50% pops or straight out pop. Apparently this works for them in terms of ticket sales.

2008’s Beethoven festival drew well, although the performances were inconsistent and inconsistently prepared. So this year, we get a five all Brahms concerts in a row.

This is of course the bicentenary for both Schuman and Chopin. Schumann is represented on the Vienna New Year’s program with the “Konzertstuck for Four Horns and Orchestra”, but that’s because it was Michael Christie’s premier piece with the CMF. Otherwise, nothing from either. Given the close relationship between Brahms and Schumann, perhaps an evening representing both of them would have been in order.

In the early days of the CMF, Tuesday nights were given over to chamber performances featuring members of the orchestra and occasional guest artists. This has been completely eliminated, although there are two Wednesday “Chamber Music at the Yard” programs. No details available.

You can view schedule of this puzzling season here.

Wagner and the Munchkins

2010-05-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon and Siruis Met radio is playing a wonderful 1995 Meistersinger: Levine; Weikl, Heppner, Matilla. Rene Papa was the Night Watchman. So he would have been 31.

Anyway, we're not at the start of Act III, Scene 2, where all the various guilds make their entrance. And it strikes me how very much like the scene with the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz. I wonder if Harburg and Arlen were conscious of this.

Die Meistersinger is very long. When I saw it at the Met over Thanksgiving weekend right after 9/11, many people left immediately after the great quintet at the end of the first scene of the last act. I hadn't anticipated how overwhelming all the stuff about "holy German art" would be.

Meistersinger is an exceptional work of art, but like others, I too wish it had ended without all the bombast.

The normal thing would be embed the terrifying 1924 Furtwangler Prelude to Act I. Instead, here's the cast I saw that evening in New York - Pape, who was Pogner in this production is not in this scene:

Monk

2010-03-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

I recently read “Thelonious Monk, the Life and Times of an American Original” by Robin D.G. Kelley. At 588 pages, a hundred of them end notes, it will likely remain the definitive work about the composer and pianist.

I found the chapters on Monk’s ancestors and the pre-war years in New York the most interesting. The following concerns Rubie Richardson – of “Ruby My Dear” – Monk’s first love:

“Rubie was undeniably one of the most desirable young women in San Juan Hill… Rubie and her younger sister Linnett were members of a social group called the ‘Brown Snapperettes.’… Her family was ‘up there’ they were uppity…,Skippy [the sister of the later-to-be Nellie Monk] used to say the Rubie was “such a much.”

Monk himself never really comes into focus. Perhaps he was unknowable. In retrospect, it’s amazing that he ever became successful and famous, not just because of his music, which was uncompromising.. He never had professional management, either artistic or business. His record labels didn’t produce him well

Perhaps he was unmanageable. He was chronically late to gigs. He started exhibiting serious mental health problems relatively early. In 1957 he was in a minor automobile accident. Appearing to be catatonic, he was taken to Bellevue for three weeks.

It would appear that Monk was bi-polar. One has to think that he received dreadful medical car. He was treated with large doses of Thorazine, but was also given special “vitamin shots” of Benzedrine by a “society doctor” favored by socialites and musicians. He also smoked a lot of dope and drank a lot. So from about 1958 on, he couldn’t be left alone.

During the last years of his life, when he had pretty much quit performing and was living in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater’s place in N.J., he was incontinent owing to prostrate problems and would rarely leave the house. He died at the age of 65.

Musically, it’s clear that he was hard to work with. Some of his tunes are quite difficult but many of them are really pretty simple. However, the way he played them and the way he wanted them played was not. There were rarely, if ever, any charts. There were no set lists. There were no rehearsals. Monk was both demanding and non-communicative. His piano playing was enormously forceful and he didn’t subordinate himself when the other musicians were soloing. Unless, he dropped out entirely, wondered of the stage or started dancing. The money was not terribly good. Once he became popular, in the early ‘60s, the touring was endless.

“The Unique Thelonious Monk” a Riverside LP of Monk in trio format with Art Blakey and Oscar Pettiford was the first jazz record I ever purchased, back round 1958. It's standards: Richard Rogers, Jimmy van Heusen, George Gershwin, and it’s absolutely astounding. It’s also very well recorded. The sheer brilliance and character of his piano sound, its depth and the complexity of the sound is unmatched

Jazz has had a history of instrumental stars with vivid, immediately recognizable sound signatures. Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman and Lee Konitz all play the alto saxophone. All are instantly recognizable within a few measures. If you hear eight bars of Ben Webster you want to hear more, it’s automatic. It’s much harder to impose one’s will on the piano, one of the most mechanical of instruments. He is perhaps the most immediately recognizable pianist in the history of jazz, a phenomenal technical and expressive achievement.

His solos, at their best, had both logical inevitability and unexpected surprises. As an improviser, he is in a class with Lester Young, Miles Davis and a few others.

Many recording has been released since his death, including quite a few live ones from the ‘60s. Touring took its toll and not all of them should have been released. There are also releases from the Riverside and Columbia years the include rejected takes and mis-queues. Monk, according Kelley, was a perfectionist, who worked very hard to get what he wanted. The principle Prestige, Riverside and most of the Columbia release constitute his true recorded legacy.

The fact that he achieved such a high level of artistic and commercial success is a testament to his character, talent and dedication. That he did it in the face of such personal trials as a testament to his humanity.

“On the 27^th December 1971 (Monk and Nellie) went to the Rainbow Grill at Rockefeller Center to hear Duke Ellington’s Orchestra…. As soon as they walked towards their table, Duke stopped the band mid song and announced ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr. Thelonious Monk… A few days later, Thelonious reverted into a catatonic state and had to be hospitalized again.”

Boulder Pianists in Review!

2010-02-02T16:58:00.000-08:00

Larry Graham began the program notes for his generally estimable all Chopin recital at the Boulder Public Library last Sunday thus: “Among musicians, in general, Chopin is rarely ranked in the top echelon of composers.” Of course, he then went on to explain whey this is wrong.

As I posted a while ago, this anxiety about Chopin’s status among pianists is strange. Perhaps pianists are just wary of other musicians’ jealousy. What other instrument has such a vast solo repertory? What other instrumentalists have, at least historically, risen to such international acclaim? And made so much money? Perhaps they think we’re just narcissists?

In any case Chopin is pretty much all solo piano and Graham’s polished technique and splendid sound more than made the case for him. The program was ambitious and perhaps unreasonably long. The first half consisted of ten short works: five Mazurkas, a Waltz, the A-flat Polonaise, two Etudes and a Nocturne, seven being dance forms. The second half was the four Ballades.

Graham was suffering from some sort of injury to his left hand and had problems with a band-aid. This probably accounted for some small technical lapses. Interestingly, the most demanding passages – e.g., the coda from the 4^th Ballade – were handled with great security. The second Ballade was especially fine.

Graham’s sound is remarkably integrated across all the registers. A student of Rosina Lhevinne – who won the Gold Medal in piano when she graduated from the Moscow conservatory in 1898 – Larry Graham is an exponent of the finest traditions of what some call the golden age of pianism.

A week earlier, Christopher Taylor, an actual Boulder native, had returned to play the Brahmas D-minor concerto with the Boulder Philharmonic. Taylor is, I think, more active on the concert stage than Graham. They’re very different, although it’s hard to explain how. One might think of Graham as a tenor and Taylor as a baritone, if that makes any sense.

The Brahms is a monumental dialogue between piano and orchestra with thunder, lightening and moments of lyrical introspection, all of which Taylor dispatched with great dynamic range and complete technical command. The Boulder Philharmonic is about as good as one might expect from a small town, semi-professional orchestra, and Taylor’s concentration in the face of some of their problems was remarkable.

This is the third time I’ve heard him and I’m more impressed each time.

The rest of the program consisted of a dispiritingly bad performance of the 3^rd Brandenburg which cruelly exposed the intonation problems of the strings Perhaps music director Michael Butterman thought the extra rehearsal time for the section warranted the pain. Next came a tortured reading of Beethoven’s Fifth.

If marketing really required a “Three Bs” evening, we, and the musicians, would have been better served with one of the smaller Beethoven symphonies. Still, Macky was completely sold out.

It should be said that the woodwinds acquitted themselves very well all evening, at no time better than during the beautiful slow movement of the concerto.

soundcloud - my music - god bless the child

2010-01-07T16:06:00.001-08:00

God bless by user1620611

The above is by me. It's the famous Billie Holiday tune. Last year, I read Donald Clarke's Billie Holiday, Wishing on the Moon a loosely organized biography with extensive interview transcripts from people who knew her, transcripts Clark inherited from someone who had started the interview process shortly after her death. It's a great read, but not a happy one. She was a force of nature, and the world didn't treat her well.

One of the main contributors was Jimmy Rowles, the great pianist. He's probably not much remembered. Here's his picture:

The Death of Rythm and Blues

2010-01-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Bart’s CD Cellar in Boulder is closing. Apparently it hasn’t been independently owned for awhile. Whoever they were sold out so a chain and the chain is having bank problems. Even though Bart’s remains profitable it couldn’t be saved or corporate couldn’t be bothered.

Barnes and Noble moved to its new “super store” but the CD section is maybe 20% of its non-super self. (The department has been cut in half but is still kind of decent.)

There’s a lot that could be said about this and Don Pareles says a lot of it in today’s Times. But I don’t see how anybody can earn a living in the music business – anywhere on the food chain.

_____________________________________________________________

I just read this by Alex Ross. More interesting than the Times and closer to the bone. But I'm less optimistic than is he.

Pleasures of Proust

2010-01-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure I’ve accomplished much, but I am certain that getting three people started on Proust counts for something. I’ve been randomly re-reading and just finished the account on the narrator’s grandmother’s death, which is the first section of Part II of The Guermantes Way. It’s only 31 pages long.

Now Remembrance of Things Past is certainly not an easy read and getting started is something of a long haul. Seemingly hundreds of pages elapse before anything happens, including the famous madeleine. Unfortunate, perhaps, because Swan’s Way is actually the most conventional novel of the group.

In any case, Proust has a reputation for being obscure, hieratic, tenebrous, gloomy, perverted and metaphysical in the worst way. Yet after reading the section on the grandmother’s death, harrowing as it is, the term that came to mind was Mozartian. Or maybe de Ponteian. The ensemble effects and the acute characterization of the different social classes, the telling details, the deftly drawn supporting characters, the phenomenal craftsmanship, the humor and pathos all could come right out of Figaro. As could the exceptional tact and delicacy of sentiment.

Proust, like Wagner, whom he admired, is not generally amenable to being excerpted. The notion of time become space is central both. Likewise, both achieve their greatest effects by making us wait and both are unreasonably demanding of our time.

But if you want to get a sense of the humble, domestic pleasures of classical narrative to be found in Proust’s great work, check out the mere 31 pages I’ve selected for your consideration

The above image is the cover of "Paintings in Proust" which includes reproductions of all the (real) paintings discussed in the book. It went out of print almost immediately - I suspect the London publishing house had financial trouble. But it's available now for around $30. Buy it.

The uninitiated should know Proust knew a great deal about painting and wrote about it extensively in his book. The "unreal" paintings are those painted by his characters.

Avatar!

2009-12-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

I just saw Avatar which I was predisposed to hate. Because James Cameron is such a huge corn ball. While the some of the aesthetics are annoyingly Maxield Parrish, the dialog dreadful and the world-view thuddingly Manichean, I came away marveling and touched. You can read the reviews over at moviereviewintelligence, but I was struck by two comparisons that I haven't seen anybody else make.

First, Hayao Miyazaki. There are many Miyazaki tropes: fantastic flying machines, fully realized imaginary animals, luminous floating seed-pods, ecological apocalypse. The forest reminded me the one in Princess Mononoke. Cameron's film lacks the moral complexity and generosity of the anime masterpiece. But he shares Miyazaki mastery of action and motion. In fact, with Avatar, Cameron joins the ranks of Miyazaki, Peter Jackson and Kurosawa in directing large action sequences.

Second, Wagner. Really, Wagner really can't be staged. If only someone would give Cameron or Jackson or Guilermo del Toro $200 million to produce the Ring, I'd be very happy.

The thing I liked most, in a way, was seeing Segourney Weaver in her Avatar body looking like a 19 year old college student with dreads and a little red "Stanford" t-shirt. The promise of art is deathlessness and this giant popcorn entertainment delivers a strange jolt of rememberence.

It's sexy too.

Sunday Miscellany

2009-12-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

A worthwhile descussion on the state of recorded music but ignores classical and jazz.

Bill Douglas hipped me this analysis of at Lester Young "Do the Math."

I can't tell you how much I admire El Ultimo Trago by Concha Buika and Chu Chu Valdez. Plus, it sounds absolutely sensational.

I've become fascinated by the music of Morten Feldman. The pieces are so long, nothing seems to happen: preeminent modernism but the antithesis of what we think of as modern.

Chopin and the Dark Forest of the Self

2009-12-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

Above is a video of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Chopin. It is not, perhaps, the most compelling performance of the first Ballade, but seeing him play is wonderful. As a pianist I can tell you it is technical perfection: the stillness of the upper body, the posture, the position of the hands. Then there's the way he looks: perfectly tailored, impeccably trimmed mustache, the slightly raised eyebrows. The concert artist as matinée idol.

The piece itself is at the core of Polanski's "The Pianist." Adrien Brody's character plays it in the abandoned chateau -- or rather plays most of it, it's slightly abridged. None of the reviews I read comment on the centrality of Chopin to the movie. And Chopin is in a way the first musical exemplar of tragic nationalism.

Jeremy Denk has an illuminating discussion Chopin whom he defends as a "serious" composer. He says "I told Mitsuko Uchida once that I might have trouble choosing between Chopin and Schubert, and the storm that crossed her brow would have shut down the airports for days."

Uchida's a great musician and pianist. Her repertory is the epitome of the serious musician -- with serious meaning Austro-German. She's much more demonstrative -- showy -- than Michelangeli, but recording the Schoenberg piano concerto is about as serious as you can get. I would hate to think or her as a philistine, which is what Denk's report makes her look like.

Of course the discussion "Chopin vs. Schubert" is kind of like "Who would win, Predator or Wolverine?" So maybe her reaction was to how silly the question is.

In any case, Denk then proceeds to a very good analysis of the Polanise-Fantasy with excerpts from the score and sound snippets -- part of a larger argument for the importance of Chopin as a serious composer. It makes me want to hear him play the piece. I once heard Richard Goode, a close colleague of Uchida's at Marlboro and also echt serious, play it at Macky Auditorium in Boulder on a lovely spring afternoon with the sun streaming in and he played it very beautifully.

It does seem that pianists celebrated for their Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert do not excel at Chopin. Brendel, a very sober musician, recorded the Liszt sonata, but no Chopin as far as I know.

In any case, it's possible that today more pianists excel at Schubert than Chopin. Odd, because no composer is kinder to the pianist than Chopin.

Here is an extended quote from Theodore Adorno on Chopin, which makes the case better than anybody:

"Chopin's form is no more concerned with the development of the whole through a series of minute transitions than with the representation of a single free-standing thematic complex. It is as remote from Wagner's dnyamic thrust as from the landscape of Schubert....he (removes) himself , as it were from the flow of the composition and directing it from the outside. He does not high-handedly create the form, nor does he allow it to crumple before the onslaught of the themes. Rather, he conducts the themes in their passage through time. The aristocratic nature of his music may reside less in the psychological tone than in the gesture of knightly melancholy with which the subject renounces the attempt to impose its dynamism and carry it through. With eyes averted, lake a bride, the objective theme is safely guided through the dark forest of the self, through the torrential river of the passions. Nowhere more beautifully than in the A-flat ballade, where the creative idea, once it has made its appearance like a Schubert melody, is taken by the hand and conducted through an infinite vista of inwardness and over abysses of expressive harmonics where it finds its way to its second confirming appearance. In Chopin paraphrase and doubtless every kind of associated virtuosity is the resigned expression of historical tact."

Here's Moritz Rosenthal:

For Susan Edwards April 9, 1943 to November 25, 2008

2009-11-24T15:12:00.001-08:00

Ship of Death - D.H. Lawrence:

Have you built your ship of death, oh have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace and your little ship
Of death, that will carry your soul
On its last journey, on and on, so still
So beautiful, over the last of seas.

When the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.

Oblivion, the last wonder!
When we have trusted ourselves entirely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of death
Into pure oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
With dim calm thoughts and quite hands
Putting its timbers together in the dusk.

Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That will spread in death to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship and its soul to the wonder goal.

Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
Then build your ship of death, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the last of seas.

soundcloud - my music - Wee Small Hours

2009-11-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

It seems that the internet has destroyed music -- well seriously impaired the be ability of musicians to make money. Or at least hurt the ability of the people who used to make money off musicians to make money. Barnes and Noble in Boulder used to have a half-way decent CD section, but now that they've moved and even though they have maybe 50% more space, their selection so small as to be useless. Music in the age of mechanical reproduction, and especially digitally stored music, becomes worthless because it can be perfectly copied almost no cost.

At least once a year, I dream about Frank Sinatra, which is odd because I don't especially like Frank Sinatra. The whole rat pack, booze and mafia, tough guy business gives me the creeps. The depressed Sinatra, post Ava Gardner break-up, I understand and appreciate. I can do without ring-a-ding-ding and the Chairman of Board shtick.

Reading the Gay Talese piece I was struck by Sinatra's childhood in Sicilian ghetto of northern New Jersey. For some reason I couldn't help but think about Jay Z. There's something similar about them: not in their musical aesthetic, but in the posture of aggrieved male narcissism and the threat of violence, and in the image or corporate wealth and dominance. A very substantial achievement on the part of both, no doubt about it: masters of their own fate, when so many of their artistic contemporaries and peers were swallowed whole. But for me, give me Duke Ellington or Quincey Jones.

Of course, as a saloon pianist, I can't escape the Sinatra. I don't think he wrote a note himself, but Julie Styne and Jimmy van Heusen and Michelle Legrand wrote masterpieces with him in mind.

Note: Maybe I have a problem because I was a Protestant proto-geek growing up on Jersey in the '50s in a family that was prejudiced against the Italians. We'd drive up to Red Bank to look at their Christmas lights. My mother always pointed out that "they" drove fancy cars, but used fruit crates for furniture. "Pizzeria, diarrhea" we'd say in our smug Midwestern transplant way.

So here's "In the Wee Small Hours."

Regards

Small Hours by user1620611

Free Improv at Naropa

2009-11-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

Last night I attended a performance at Naropa given by Stephen Nachmanovitch, along with Janet Feder, Mark Miller and Art Lande. Nachmanovitch seems like an interesting character. A student of Gregory Bateson, he teaches improvisation to musicians and actors and his his "Free Play: Improvisation and the Art of Life" is in wide use at Naropa.

I went primarily because of Art Lande, a formidable pianist and musical thinker. Alas, at least for me, the performance never caught fire. 100% improvised, it consisted of affable scrapings, noodlings and euphonic digressions: new age sonic wallpaper.

I went and looked as some of Nachmanovitch's writings on his web site and started thinking about free play. I was reminded of Kant's bird of reason, that, he says, flies so well in the air of experience that it imagines it would fly even better in a vacuum.

So what is the air that resists the free play of the improviser? What, for the player is the spirit of gravity? What, in other words, is the matter? The most common body of freely improvised music is from the so-called "free jazz" school: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler: a movement that started in the '60s when the notion of freedom had as great a political significance as an a artistic one. Perhaps in those days, the political and artistic were not that different.

Now if you ask me, these people were using their artistic freedom to dig rather than to soar. The most successful were the most obsessive and the most long winded and the most demanding. Ornette is a great musician, but he's been playing the same solo for forty years.

Of course, all musicians are obsessive -- it's required to master an instrument. But improvisation can be a journey into the known -- or the unknown known -- a return to roots and memory and darkness as much as an Icarus flight to the Sun.

Keith Jarrett is probably the most celebrated and commercially successful free improviser. Yet when he sits down with nothing planned he caries in his head, hands and heart the entire history of keyboard music going back at least to Bach. So he picks up the entire problematic of Western music and is vexed by those things that have vexed his predecessors.

Here's the Wayne Shorter Quartet. Their obsession is the blues, the memory of Miles and the urgency of listening.

soundcloud - my music - blue and green

2009-11-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

Miles Davis: "I wish I could swing like Wynton Kelley."
Jimmy Cobb: "I wish you could too."

The first jazz album I bought was "The Unique Thelonious Monk" which was issued in 1956. I would have been ten, so I probably didn't buy it that year. Maybe a year or two later. One of his few trio albums - Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey. standards like "Lisa" and "Tea for Two" and "Darn the Dream." None of his own compositions. Really a great record.

The next was "Milestones." Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers. It's never gotten the respect it deserves -- just cheap reissues. But I think it's better than "Kind of Blue."

Regarding "Kind of Blue," I, probably perversely, prefer the Wynton Kelley tracks to the Bill Evans ones.

I've been watching "Mad Men" which re-creates a certain part of the late '50s and early '60 with amazing accuracy. The problem is, all the characters are hateful idiots. There was a lot more going on, and you get an occasional hint of it.

I wish I could swing like Wynton Kelley too.

Bluegreen by user1620611

Takacs at Boulder - Review

2009-11-06T20:11:00.000-08:00

I have been attending the Takacs Quartet's programs in Boulder for at least twenty years. Their all Beethoven concert at CU on Nov. 1st was jaw-dropping in its excellence and restorative in its humanity.

They are embarking on a Beethoven cycle at the Southbank Centre in London this year. I suppose that even for an ensamble as well regarded as the Takacs, box office matters and, in these times, nothing is better box office than Beethoven.

My only complaint with their long tenure in Boulder has been the conservative nature of their programming. While they may play Shostakovitch elsewhere, we never hear it here. Nor do they play Schoenberg, Webern, not to mention any of the Carter quartets, works which place him up there with the masters of the form. Indeed, given the Takacs Hungarian roots, one would expect them to program Kurtag, whose exquisite miniatures could be easily included without taking up much space.

This Sunday's program - November 1st - consisted on the Op. 18, No. 1, the Op. 95 and the Op. 131.

The Opus 18 quartets are a little problematic. There is an unhappy tension between the formal, symmetrical elements, e.g., the sonata expositions, and the development sections which are too big and intense in comparison. Balance is sought by repetition, which makes the works seem static. Beethoven didn't work out this technique until the Eroica.

The Op 95 is from the fallow period when Beethoven was obsessed with his nephew. It is seems somehow troubled and a little unsure of itself. And therefore charming.

Op. 131, we are told, was Beethoven's favorite quartet. It is, Maynard Solomon says:

in seven movements to be performed virtually without pause...A contunity of rythmic design adds to the feeling that this is one of the most completely integrated of Beethoven's works. But there are many presures toward discoutinuity at work...six distince main keys, thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than Op. 130), a variety of textures, and a diversity of forms within the movements -- fugue, suite, recitative, variation, scherzo, aria and sonata form -- which makes the achievement of unity all the more miraculous." Maynard Solomon, Beethoven

The notions that the late quartets were the work of someone who had turned his back on the world, of some sort of renunciate mystic who didn't care about his audience, that the works are rebarbative and obscure are nonsense. All five have brilliant endings. The writing for each instrument is generous in its opportunity for virtuoso display. Nor is it the case that they were not performed during Beethoven's lifetime (regardless of what the program notes say). Solomon again:

There were private performances of the quartets in 1826 and 1827. And we know that Schubert was given a private reading of the Quartet, Op. 131 in November 1828, five days before Schubert's death. ("He fell into such a state of excitement and enthusiasm," Holz reported, "that we were all frightened for him.")

Performances of works that as thoughtful and sober a musicologist and critic as Maynard Solomon would describe as "miraculous" almost always disappoint -- like Marcel seeing Berma, the reality is never as good as the expectation.

In this case the Takacs was up to the challenges - mental, physical and emotional, with a performance of extraordinary bravery, refinement, nuance, color and power. Everything was in place, accurate and precise yet felt completely spontaneous, as though the music were coming into existence for the first time.

Almost two hundred yeas later, we can understand exactly how Schubert reacted. Revolutionary art, and late Beethoven is the eternal avant guard, is always new. At least in the hands of the extraordinary members of the Takacs Quartet.