Les Introuvables de Nereffid

Rise of the Masters!

2012-02-11T09:09:00.004Z

A series of really cheap downloads from X5 Music Group, actually very good value, and oh look at the covers:

"Great news, darling! A Swedish record company has seen my work in that sporting goods catalogue, and they've asked me to pose as Beethoven!"
"But you look nothing like Beethoven".
"Well, they give me a wig. Here, look..."
"Wait, did you say Beethoven or Michael Heseltine?"

They don't seem to have a Dvorak collection, but when they do produce one, they can save a bit of money because they don't need anyone to pose this time - all they need to do is change the title on the Debussy one:

Seriously. These composers are actually going to fight crime. Tonight on CBS!

8tracks mix: Nereffid's Guide Awards 2011

2012-02-04T16:08:00.003Z

Here's a single mix created on 8tracks: one track from each of the 16 category winners.

Nereffid's Guide Awards 2011 from nereffid on 8tracks.

Nereffid's Guide Awards 2011: Classical Albums of the Year

2012-01-28T00:43:00.006Z

Somehow I have managed to bring you The 5th annual Nereffid's Guide Awards, celebrating the best-reviewed classical albums of the year.

The Nereffid's Guide Awards are created by reading an awful lot of reviews, in print and online, and turning the reviewers' opinions into numbers that can be crunched to reflect some sort of critical consensus and reveal which albums found most favour. This year things are bigger than ever: not only do we have our old favourites - the magazines Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, International Record Review, American Record Guide and Fanfare and the online sources MusicWeb International and Classics Today, plus Klassik Heute, Audiophile Audition, and Classics Today France - but I've also made use of several more online sources that at least provide information about which albums they rated highly: the foreign-language magazines Diapason (France), Luister (Netherlands), Scherzo (Spain), and Pizzicato (Luxembourg), plus the online Resmusica and Muse Baroque, and the Preis der Deutsche Schallplatten Kritik (the German Critics' Prize to you). Not only that, but this year there are two new categories: Archive and Reissue cover all those not-new albums that nevertheless have an impact.

Such attempts to turn a bunch of people's opinions into some sort of statistical fact must of course be taken with a grain of salt, and yet... these may very well be the best-reviewed albums of 2011.
Scroll down the page to see each award in turn, or click on the following links:
Medieval & Renaissance
Baroque - Instrumental
Baroque - Vocal
Solo instrumental
Chamber
Concerto
Symphony
Orchestral
Solo vocal
Choral
Opera
Opera recital
Living composer - Instrumental
Living composer - Vocal
Archive
Reissue

As always, my gratitude goes out to the musicians, record labels, and composers whose endeavours have added value to the universe, and of course I urge you to buy and enjoy their albums. If you keep scrolling down you'll find a post in which I attempt to regale you with fascinating facts about the process through which I created these Awards. And tune in later for some 8tracks mixes that reveal how good these albums are.

Awards 2011 - Medieval & Renaissance

2012-01-28T00:40:00.011Z

"Puer natus est: Tudor music for Advent and Christmas"
Stile Antico
Harmonia Mundi

If you haven't heard of Stile Antico by now, then you really haven't been paying attention to the Nereffid's Guide Awards, because this is their third appearance in a row, and their second time winning this category. They must be pretty good, huh? Here's John Quinn on MusicWeb: "The group produces a lovely, even sound and throughout this disc tuning, ensemble and blend seemed impeccable to me. They also sing with great clarity – every line is crystal clear – and the balance between the voices and parts is superb – and this is all the more remarkable when you consider that they don’t have a conductor to regulate the performances as they proceed." Praise, too, for the music itself: in IRR, Christopher Price comments on Tallis's "sublime masterpiece" Videte miraculum and his "astonishingly complex and beautiful" Missa "Puer natus est", not to mention Byrd's "masterpieces of subtle polyphonic writing", White's "glorious" Magnificat and Sheppard's "typically exuberant, wide-ranging, harmonically daring and structurally complex Verbum caro".

Runners-up:
Striggio: Mass in 40 Parts, etc
I Fagiolini/Robert Hollingworth
Decca

Byrd: Complete consort music
Phantasm
Linn

"Dinastia Borgia"
La Capella Reial de Catalunya; Hesperion XXI/Jordi Savall
Alia Vox

Victoria: Requiem 1605; Lobo: Lamentationes
Tenebrae/Nigel Short
Signum

I suppose I should note my disappointment, though not my surprise, that this category is far more Renaissance than Medieval. That's just the nature of things - medieval music is very much a niche. Perhaps another "Feather on the Breath of God" is just around the corner. At least we have Jordi Savall to span the centuries. What else to note? Well, it's somewhat unusual to see Decca in the early music field. In fact this is the only one of 32 entries on this category's long list to be from a major label. Yes, it received a lot of hype, but clearly it was also very good. There were a handful of Victoria discs pottering about the list, as you might hope seeing as he was an "anniversary composer", but Tenebrae's album was definitely the one that stood out.

Awards 2011 - Baroque - Instrumental

2012-01-28T00:31:00.009Z

"Venezia" - music of Rosenmüller, Legrenzi, Stradella
The Rare Fruits Council/Manfredo Kraemer
Ambronay

Here's some string sonatas from three composers who found themselves in Venice in the 1670s. As Catherine Moore explains in American Record Guide, "Their writing for strings drew on different traditions, advanced the evolution of string chamber music, and further cemented the violin's ascendant position as a solo and ensemble instrument". Of the disc itself she says "This is excellent in all ways", and you can rest assured that "Venezia" is not simply a history lesson. As Gary Higginson says on MusicWeb, "By its exemplary musicianship with often breath-taking virtuosity (listen especially to Stradella's Sinfonia XI), superb presentation, beautifully balanced sound-picture and sheer musical pleasure this is a disc for any lover of the baroque or of chamber music."

Runners-up:
Telemann: Tafelmusik
Freiburger Barockorchester/Petra Müllejans, Gottfried von der Goltz
Harmonia Mundi

Rameau: Orchestral suites
Le Concert des Nations/Jordi Savall
Alia Vox

Jones: Sets of Lessons for the Harpsichord
Mitzi Meyerson
Glossa

Biber: Rosary sonatas
Daniel Sepec; Hille Perl; Lee Santana; Michael Behringer
Coviello

The Rare Fruits Council won this one on a technical decision over the Freiburgers. Their scores were the same - to three decimal places! I decided to go with the album that had the most 5s, which turned out to be "Venezia". So if you're gutted that Telemann didn't make the big time, well, tough luck. Take it up with the US Supreme Court. Meanwhile let us note a second appearance in this year's awards for Jordi Savall, as well as first appearances (ever!) for the labels Ambronay and Coviello.

Awards 2011 - Baroque - Vocal

2012-01-28T00:28:00.011Z

Bach: Easter Oratorio; Ascension Oratorio
Retrospect Ensemble/Matthew Halls
Linn

David Vernier on Classics Today calls these performances "as fine as - or better than - any in the catalog", while on MusicWeb John Quinn describes the album as "one of the most effervescent discs of Bach's vocal music to have come my way in a long time". Both writers note the joyfulness in the music, so I suppose we shall add a Huzzah! for the Retrospect Ensemble, founded only a couple of years ago and managing to triumph over some very well-established groups. Incidentally, more than one reviewer draws attention to Nia Lewis's extensive booklet note, which spends some time discussing the artistic complications raised by the fact that these are "parody" works based on secular originals. Can you really convert profane music to proper religious music just by changing the words? Steven Ritter on Audiophile Audition gets as profound as perhaps the topic needs: "ultimately I wonder if it matters a hoot... I think that first and foremost Bach was a man trying to put dinner on the table".

Runners-up:
Melani: Motets
Concerto Italiano/Rinaldo Alessandrini
Naive

Caldara in Vienna: Forgotten castrato arias
Philippe Jaroussky; Concerto Köln/Emmanuelle Haïm
Virgin

Vivaldi: Ottone in Villa
Sonia Prina, etc; Il Giardino Armonico/Giovanni Antonini
Naive

Johann Ludwig Bach: Trauermusik
soloists; RIAS Kammerchor; Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/Hans-Christoph Rademann
Harmonia Mundi

As I said, some big names here in terms of ensembles, if not necessarily of composers. Melani is Rome-based composer Alessandro Melani (1639-1703), while Johann Ludwig Bach (1677-1731) was Sebastian's cousin - Wikipedia says second cousin, but I think it was more distant than that. As for Antonio Caldara (c1671-1736) and what he did in Vienna, all Wikipedia can tell us is that he obtained a post there with the Imperial court in 1716 "and there he remained until his death". Philippe Jaroussky gives us rather more insight than that. Finally, Vivaldi. You may have heard of him.

Awards 2011 - Solo instrumental

2012-01-28T00:27:00.011Z

Ravel: Complete solo piano music
Steven Osborne
Hyperion

Christopher Dingle in BBC Music Magazine points out that "A complete survey of Ravel's piano music is an especially challenging prospect for any pianist", but fortunately "Osborne is more than up to the task... Throughout, Osborne repeatedly demonstrates not merely that these performances stand with the best, but also that comparisons are superfluous in the face of such a compelling vision". Nicholas Salwey in IRR confirms: "there is phenomenal competition in this repertoire... but Osborne's accounts can hold their own with any of these". In fact, "Osborne may have set a new benchmark". Meanwhile, Alan Becker in ARG draws attention to various other performers too, but advises "purchase this one first".

Runners-up:
Schumann: Humoreske; 6 Studies in Canon Form; Gesänge der Frühe
Piotr Anderszewski
Virgin

Brahms: Handel variations; Rhapsodies op.79; Piano pieces opp.118 & 119
Murray Perahia
Sony

Liszt: "Harmonies du soir"
Nelson Freire
Decca

Scarlatti: Piano sonatas
Alexandre Tharaud
Virgin

The winner didn't seem to be in much doubt here, though as I compiled the results from foreign-language sources I wondered if Nelson Freire (who won the chamber award last year with Martha Argerich) might sneak it, but in the end he was sunk by a disappointed ARG reviewer. I must point out here one long-standing rule for the Awards: baroque music played on a modern piano isn't counted as baroque. And of course it's worth reflecting on whether we should have a separate award for solo instrumentalists who play something other than a piano - but then again, this year any potential candidates were quite some distance from the top of the list.

Awards 2011 - Chamber

2012-01-28T00:24:00.010Z

Mozart: String quartets nos.4, 17, 22
Jerusalem Quartet
Harmonia Mundi

"Acquire this CD at once", Jerry Dubins demands in his Fanfare review, and who are we to resist? "the Jerusalem's players believe strongly enough in Mozart to know instinctively that his music needs no help in expressing itself, and that the highest respect one can pay it is to play the written notes as perfectly as possible. The result is not, as you might expect, performances that are bland and characterless, but sound instead as if they are coming straight from the mind of the creator to our ears". On Classics Today, Victor Carr Jr opines "Even if you don't think you like Mozart string quartets, this exceptional disc will make you think again", while in ARG David Jacobsen says "This one is a necessity... These pieces are so popular that I often hear them played very unimaginatively and standardized. The Jerusalem Quartet does not do that, but they do not try to reinvent the wheel either. Rather, they reintroduce us to the profound simplicity and even plainness of Mozart's genius".

Runners-up:
Beethoven: String quartets nos.12-16
Tokyo Quartet
Harmonia Mundi

Schubert: Piano duets
Paul Lewis; Steven Osborne
Hyperion

"Rapsodia"
Patricia Kopatchinskaja and others
Naive

Bacewicz: Piano quintets nos.1 & 2; Piano sonata no.2
Krystian Zimerman; Kaja Danczowska; Agata Szymczewska; Ryszard Groblewski; Rafal Kwiatkowski
DG

The Jerusalm Quartet won this one by quite a big margin. Perhaps that was a little surprising, though I think it was because a few likely competitors didn't quite catch fire the way I thought they might. But a good field of runners-up none the less, and I'm glad to see the not-so-well-known Grazyna Bacewicz rubbing shoulders with Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and also to see attention paid to Patricia Kopatchinskaja's quirky collection.

Awards 2011 - Concerto

2012-01-28T00:22:00.008Z

Bruch: Violin concerto no.1; Piano quintet; Romance
Vadim Gluzman with chamber musicians; Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Litton
BIS

Whoa - sounds like Christopher Fifield of MusicWeb is pulling rank on us here: "An understandable reaction to yet another performance of Bruch's first violin concerto would surely have elicited much eye-rolling and a lot of invective from the composer, who always exhorted violinists to play one of the other eight concerted works for the instrument. As his biographer I can guarantee that". Yikes! Is there any hope for Vadim Gluzman? Yes there is: "Yet I would be surprised if he did not like what he hears here. Vadim Gluzman, with a finely attentive accompanist in Andrew Litton and his responsive Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, plays it superbly - it's quite the finest performance I have ever heard, including Kreisler's famous 1925 recording". And if you're wondering whether a disc that is 40% chamber music is entitled to be considered as a Concerto disc, rest assured that in the quintet, as Fifield puts it, "the first violin is the virtuoso while its four colleagues (including a second viola) take on a comparatively subsidiary role".

Runners up:
Hindemith: Works for viola and orchestra
Lawrence Power; BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/David Atherton
Hyperion

CPE Bach: Harpsichord concertos
Andreas Staier; Freiburger Barockorchester/Petra Müllejans
Harmonia Mundi

Martinů, Hindemith, Honegger: Cello concertos
Johannes Moser; Deutsche Radio Philharmonie/Christoph Poppen
Hänssler

Sarasate: Music for violin and orchestra, volume 3
Tianwa Yang; Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra/Ernest Martínez Izquierdo
Naxos

Why is an album of harpsichord concertos not in the Baroque section, you may well ask. The answer is simply that they were written in the early 1770s, which I don't think we can reasonably call the Baroque period. An interesting fact about this category is that the scores from the foreign-language sources made a big impact - enthusiasm from France and Spain helped Gluzman's album overcome ARG's negative review. Actually it's the only one of the 16 award winners that a reviewer truly disliked. But it triumphed: someone should make a movie about it.

Awards 2011 - Symphony

2012-01-28T00:21:00.012Z

Suk: Asrael
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Charles Mackerras
Supraphon

Was there an element of sentiment involved in Charles Mackerras's win here? He had died a little less than a year before reviewers got to listen to this album, so perhaps they allowed their judgement to be clouded a tiny bit. But it's clear the disc won on its own merits: Fanfare's Jonathan Woolf calls it "a performance of grip, precision, structural acuity, and expressive power". In Gramophone, Rob Cowan notes that "It's always problematical when a new recording has to confront rivalry from an almost impossibly great benchmark... in this particular context, Václav Talich's 1952 Czech Philharmonic recording". But, he points out, "Mackerras actually learnt Asrael from Talich and this performance... betrays an almost symbiotic identification with the music". Jan Smaczny in BBC Music Magazine calls this recording "the closest to the definitive version we have".

Runners-up:
Korngold: Symphony; Much Ado about Nothing
Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg/Marc Albrecht
PentaTone

Walton: Symphonies nos.1 & 2
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins
Hyperion

Borodin: Symphonies nos.1-3
Seattle Symphony/Gerard Schwarz
Naxos

Shostakovich: Symphony no.10
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko
Naxos

I completely failed to predict this one. I was pretty sure Petrenko had it: his Shostakovich won the Symphony Award in 2009 and was runner-up in 2010 - and in fact under 2011's rules he would have won it then because he was pipped by what I would now classify as an Archive recording, Mahler from Klaus Tennstedt. But ARG wasn't so keen. Is it always ARG that's the downer? Not always. This year was clearly a good one for a particular kind of symphony - ones a classical enthusiast probably knows already but that are not necessarily counted among the elite.

Awards 2011 - Orchestral

2012-01-28T00:20:00.009Z

Britten: Cello Symphony; Gloriana - Symphonic Suite; Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
BBC Philharmonic/Edward Gardner; Paul Watkins
Chandos

Two Britten discs from Edward Gardner in this category, and he wins with what David Hurwitz on Classics Today calls "outstanding performances, as good or better than the composer's own... In short, this release is a major entry in the Britten discography". For Helen Wallace in BBC Music Magazine, "Three elements stand out: firstly, the dramatic intensity of purpose he finds in all pieces; secondly, the sizzling soloistic detail he draws from the BBC Philharmonic and, thirdly, the depth and scope of the recorded sound". There's little to add, as other reviewers say pretty much the same things.

Runners-up:
Halvorsen: Orchestral works, volume 2
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi; Marianne Thorsen
Chandos

Britten: Phaedra; A Charm of Lullabies; Lachrymae; Sinfonietta; Two Portraits
BBC Philharmonic/Edward Gardner; Sarah Connolly; Maxim Rysanov
Chandos

Respighi: Pines of Rome; Fountains of Rome; Roman Festivals
São Paulo Symphony Orchestra/John Neschling
BIS

Fuchs: Serenades nos.1 & 2; Andante grazioso and Capriccio
Cologne Chamber Orchestra/Christian Ludwig
Naxos

So, a good year for Chandos, then. Occasionally I question the wisdom of splitting off Symphony from Orchestral (especially when a disc is half-filled with a symphony and half-filled with other orchestral music) but it seems to work well. If we put the two together, then this year there'd be 3 symphony albums and 2 others, and Suk's Asrael would be the narrow winner. But you're not really comparing like with like.

Awards 2011 - Solo vocal

2012-01-28T00:19:00.009Z

Strauss: Lieder
Diana Damrau; Münchner Philharmoniker/Christian Thielemann
Virgin

Why did this album get top marks from David Nice in BBC Music Magazine? "What wins this disc the five stars are the facts that Damrau, singing in her native German, is poised ideally between dreamy haze and Schwarzkopfian fussiness... and that her hallowed pianissimos allow the exquisite detail Thielemann draws from his Muncih players to shine". In IRR, Christopher Cook, too, is enthusiastic: "Here are 22 of Strauss's songs in their orchestral settings - the best-known and the less familiar - that ought to be on the shelves of anyone who cannot imagine a day without listening to this great German composer, admires musicians who have his music in their bones and yearns for committed singing that is as expressive as it is beautiful. Damrau possesses these virtues in abundance". As Bill White puts it in Fanfare, "Diana Damrau is one of the leading lyric coloratura sopranos in the opera world, so what is she doing recording Strauss Lieder? She's doing very well, thank you".

Runners-up:

Pfitzner: Orchestral songs
Hans Christoph Begemann; Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie/Otto Tausk
CPO

"Fête Galante"
Karina Gauvin; Marc-André Hamelin
ATMA

Loewe: Songs & Ballads
Florian Boesch; Roger Vignoles
Hyperion

Schubert: "Nacht und Träume"
Matthias Goerne; Alexander Schmalcz
Harmonia Mundi

Quite a few German Romantics here this year, and it's interesting that the top two are orchestral lieder rather than piano-accompanied. As it happens, Karina Gauvin's French recital is actually a reissue, which prompted a lot of soul-searching round here. There are a handful of albums that are reissues but not in the same sense as a box set or a budget-priced repackaging - if anything, they're an upgrade, bringing to attention something that might not have been properly noticed the first time round. So I made an exception for those few albums, and here's one of them.

Awards 2011 - Choral

2012-01-28T00:17:00.011Z

Rossini: Stabat Mater
soloists; Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano
EMI

A lament from Richard Osborne in Gramophone: "We have down the years been rather clutching at straws where recordings of Rossini's two great choral works are concerned. The Petite Messe solennelle has had just one memorable recording; the Stabat mater has had none... [dramatic pause] Until now". (ellipsis and dramatic pause added for gratuitous effect). Yes, Richard Osborne is impressed all right: "This is one of the great choral recordings". Let's turn to Ian Julier in IRR, who begins: "Given its patchy and complicated composition history, extending over a decade and outlined with the clarity and precision of a detective novel's denourment in Richard Osborne's excellent note, the cohesive and unified achievement of this much-loved choral work is" - wait, what? Did he just say Richard Osborne wrote the booklet note? The same Richard Osborne who reviewed the album in Gramophone? Oh dear oh dear. Fortunately, other reviewers liked it too, such as Simon Thompson on MusicWeb: "If you want the Stabat Mater as a prayer then look somewhere else, but I found this disc absolutely enthralling: after the final bars had stormed out of my speakers I even found myself letting out an involuntary "bravo"!"

Delius: Appalachia; The Song of the High Hills
soloists; BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/Andrew Davis
Chandos

"Ikon II"
Holst Singers/Stephen Layton
Hyperion

Cherubini: Requiem in C minor
Kammerchor Stuttgart; Hofkapelle Stuttgart/Frieder Bernius
Carus

Howells: The Winchester Service and other works
Winchester Cathedral Choir/Andrew Lumsden
Hyperion

Despite Richard Osborne's ethical lapse, the Rossini earned its place, though Andrew Davis's Delius wasn't far behind. I think this is the first appearance in the Nereffid's Guide Awards for the Carus label. This seemed to be a stronger year for choral albums than usual - at least, there seemed to be more discs that reviewers were consistently enthusiastic about. Maybe that's just a vague perception on my part. I don't know. Leave me alone.

Awards 2011 - Opera

2012-01-28T00:16:00.010Z

Donizetti: Linda di Chamounix
Eglise Gutiérrez et al; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden/Mark Elder
Opera Rara

Mark Elder conducted last year's Opera winner, the Hallé's Götterdämmerung, and he returns with an opera that, according to Joel Kasow in Fanfare, "has far too long been relegated to minor status". Also in Fanfare, Henry Fogel notes that "This is a very tricky opera to get right, because it has elements of serious and comic operas blended into a form known as opera semiseria. If either element is blown out of proportion or minimized, the opera loses its balance... Elder is just about perfect". Fogel describes lead soprano Eglise Gutiérrez's work as "a truly sensational performance in every way". In BBC Music Magazine, Michael Tanner tells us that "All the singers are up to their roles, and the playing of the orchestra is bold; even the most conventional passages sweep you along... It's hard to imagine this set ever being replaced, or even rivalled".

Runners-up:
Martin: Der Sturm
Robert Holl et al; Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/Thierry Fischer
Hyperion

Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle
Laszló Polgár; Ildikó Komlósi; Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer
Channel Classics

Rossini: Ermione
Carmen Giannattasio et al; London Philharmonic Orchestra/David Parry
Opera Rara

Beethoven: Fidelio
Nina Stemme et al; Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
DG

A second appearance for Opera Rara in this category, and Hyperion scores a success with a rare venture into opera. DG is, for the third year in a row, the sole major label presence, but then the majors do have those massive back catalogues. The Bartók is another one of those reissues-that-kind-of-aren't-reissues, having first been released by Philips. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this category is an absence: René Jacobs's recording of The Magic Flute got the highest bonus scores from foreign-language press - which is to say, continental Europe adored it - but neither IRR nor Classics Today was impressed. Of course this brings up the fact that if I had a slightly different way of calculating scores, it might have even won the Award. But it feels "right" that it should place just outside the top 5, which is essentially what these Awards are trying to reflect - a general feeling about how the year's reviews went, rather than a scientific description.

Awards 2011 - Opera recital

2012-01-28T00:15:00.011Z

"Diva Divo"
Joyce DiDonato; Orchestre De L'Opéra National De Lyon/Kazuko Ono
Virgin

Clearly it wasn't enough for Joyce DiDonato to win last year's Award for Opera recital, because here she is again. And obviously that wasn't enough either, because she also appears as a soloist on this year's winning Choral album. Oh and that still wasn't enough, because "Diva Divo" - a selection of "trouser roles" and, uh, "skirt roles" - is also the Recording of the Year, the best-reviewed of them all. "Joyce DiDonato is surely one of the best American opera singers to emerge in recent years. Hers is a rich yet smooth lyrical mezzo... She is also as fine a vocal actress as you'll find in opera today", says Kurt Moses in ARG. "Perhaps the best thing about this recital", Robert Levine tells us on Classics Today, "is that everything DiDonato sings sounds spontaneous, as if the character - her- or himself - were actually experiencing it for the first time. Being an American, I'd like to chalk this up to her Yankee pluckiness, but it's really something else: She's a great artist".

Runners-up:
"Verismo Arias"
Jonas Kaufmann; Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano
Decca

"The Italian Tenor"
Vittorio Grigolo; Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Parma/Pier Giorgio Morandi
Sony

"The Maltese Tenor"
Joseph Calleja; L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande/Marco Armiliato
Decca

"Great Baritone Arias"
Peter Mattei; Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Lawrence Renes
BIS

There were only 17 entries in this category, compared with about 110 in Orchestral, about 75 in Solo vocal, and over 40 in Opera. So is it that opera aria discs are a small niche market, or that there aren't very many singers out there willing and/or able to record a recital? Hardly the former, seeing as there's plenty of money to be made in a well-marketed star singer. What's also interesting is that you don't have to go very far down the list of entries before you find an album that's regarded, on balance, as a bit meh. Opera critics are a critical bunch indeed, with very particular standards. They say things like "I haven't heard Berlioz's "Premiers transports" sung this beautifully since Gladys Swarthout did it with Toscanini back in 1947" (which is how Lynn René Bayley praised Joyce DiDonato in Fanfare).

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Instrumental

2012-01-28T00:14:00.012Z

"Chinese Recorder Concertos: East Meets West"
Michala Petri; Copenhagen Philharmonic/Lan Shui
OUR Recordings

A warm welcome please to OUR Recordings, the label created 5 years ago by Danish musicians Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal. Fanfare's Raymond Tuttle says this "is, to enlist a perhaps overused word, delightful, and deserves to be brought to the attention of a broad audience". ARG's Todd Gorman tells us "This music speaks a language that communicates like little else I have heard lately". Tuttle: "If you don't believe me, try the opening work by Tang Jianping... This will go to the top of my list of musical pick-me-ups". Gorman: "Tang's piece ranks with the most interesting music I have ever heard". Tuttle: "If anyone still doubts the recorder's place as an instrument worthy of the same attention as its cousin the flute, Petri's playing here should put that to rest". Gorman: "As for Petri's playing, pick the superlatives of your choice; they should all apply". Classics Today's David Hurwitz: "This is beautiful music, often astoundingly so... an absolute joy from start to finish".

Runners-up:
Tiensuu: Vie; Missa; False Memories I-III
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds; Kari Kriikku
Ondine

"Sound the Bells! American Premieres for Brass"
The Bay Brass
Harmonia Mundi

Frank: Hilos and other works
ALIAS Chamber Ensemble; Gabriela Lena Frank
Naxos

Gallagher: Orchestral music
London Symphony Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta
Naxos

This is one of the least predictable of all the categories, given the sometimes haphazard coverage of contemporary music by our review sources. Aside from any editorial considerations about how much of such music to include, there's also some regional bias - American music's not so often reviewed in the British publications, or perhaps another way of saying this is that ARG and Fanfare tend to have better coverage of contemporary music. They and Classics Today reviewed all 5 of our discs here; Gramophone and IRR managed 2 each, and BBC Music Magazine did 1. And then, of course, because the music is unfamiliar, the reviewer must offer an opinion on the music more than the performances, which isn't a situation you find with, say, Beethoven - "this Fifth Symphony is quite an uninteresting work, but at least the performers seem committed...". So the unfortunate reviewer must usually start from square one as regards knowing what to think about the album at hand. One occasion where an earlier recording of the music was available possibly the most divisive album of the year: the Chandos release of Steve Reich's Desert Music and Three Movements got top marks from both BBC Music Magazine and Fanfare, but bottom marks from both Gramophone and ARG.

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Vocal

2012-01-28T00:01:00.011Z

Sven-David Sandström: "Nordic Sounds"
Swedish Radio Choir/Peter Dijkstra
Channel Classics

"The title of this superb disc is the only banal thing about it", says Martin Anderson in IRR. "the music, performances and recording are all phenomenally good. Happy the composer that has this kind of choir at his disposal... The singing... will leave you slack-jawed in amazement: control of pitch, dynamic, rhyth, blend, you name it, is perfect". On Classics Today, David Vernier calls Sandstrom an "original composer uninhibited by conventional views on what singers can or can't do. Of course, when you have a virtuoso ensemble like the Swedish Radio Choir performing your music, what's to worry?" He also notes "Although there are many moments that will stretch the familiar boundaries of comfort for a casual listener, there's nothing here that's gratuituously irritating, and there are some pieces - Es ist genug; A new song of love; Agnus Dei - that will literally prime you with the familiar while launching you headlong into the experience of choral music's newest frontier".

Runners-up:
Miškinis: "Time is Endless"
Royal Holloway Choir/Rupert Gough
Hyperion

Penderecki: Credo; Cantata for Jagellonian University
Soloists' Warsaw Boys' Choir; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir/Antoni Wit
Naxos

"Beyond All Mortal Dreams: American A Cappella"
Trinity College Choir, Cambridge/Stephen Layton
Hyperion

Dennehy: Grá agus Bás; That the Night Come
Iarla O’Lionáird; Dawn Upshaw; Crash Ensemble/Alan Pierson
Nonesuch

This category had fewer than half as many entries as its instrumental counterpart, but noticeably better coverage by the British magazines. Again, a hard one always to predict, but it would be an odd Awards indeed if there wasn't at least one entry from Hyperion. Nice this year to see some Irish representation.

Awards 2011 - Archive

2012-01-27T23:58:00.017Z

Mahler: Symphony no.10 - 1960 BBC broadcast (including lecture) & 1964 Proms premiere
Deryck Cooke; Philharmonia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra/Bertholdt Goldschmidt
Testament

"This is more than just a performance", Gramophone's James Inverne explains. "... It is a historic document and a fascinating insight into a major work's excavation". His colleague David Gutman warns of "plenty of rough moments" but these "may or may not matter to you given the obvious fervour of the music-making". In IRR, Robert Matthew-Walker, noting that the 1960 performance came "in the days when the BBC was the BBC", says that "The result is akin to being witness to the first performance of The Rite of Spring, of Elgar's First Symphony, or of Verklärte Nacht: this is an issue of major importance, the significance of which could not be exaggerated. I cannot recommend it too highly". Well, actually, Robert, you could have given it an IRR Outstanding accolade. Meanwhile, Fanfare's Christopher Abbot calls it "the Dead Sea Scrolls for Mahlerites".

Runners-up:
Wagner, Strauss: Lieder and scenes
Kirsten Flagstad; Orchestra of the Städtische Oper Berlin/Georges Sebastian (1952)
Audite

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen
Hans Hotter et al; Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele/Clemens Krauss (1953)
Orfeo

Berlioz: Les nuits d'été; Handel: Arias
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Nicholas McGegan (1995, 1991)
Philharmonia Baroque

Mahler: Symphony no.8
soloists; choirs; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Klaus Tennstedt (1991)
LPO

You'll notice I've avoided the term "Historical" in this category to allow for performances of more recent vintage, though I haven't yet figured out where exactly is the line between an archive release and an ordinary release that happens to be a few years old. The original thinking for not including historical releases was that I didn't have much interest in them myself, but by expanding the definition to "archive" generally, things get more interesting, though I can't imagine I'll ever be the sort of person who must have every Toscanini performance ever. With the addition of this category and the next, the awards pretty much cover anything that gets released. Maybe soon I'll start to include DVD and Blu-ray.

Awards 2011 - Reissue

2012-01-27T23:57:00.010Z

Liszt: Complete piano music
Leslie Howard
Hyperion

It would be nice to think that it was a foregone conclusion that Leslie Howard's immense and, let's face it, slightly insane project to record all of Liszt's piano music would win this award, but of course it's the nature of the Nereffid's Guide Awards that each release is judged in isolation on its own merits rather than on the basis of whether it is more deserving than others. But we needn't have worried. Noting that "Howard's abilities as a writer and investigative musicologist were essential to the series", James Harrington in ARG says "If all Liszt performances were as meticulously prepared as Howard's, we would cease to have Liszt detractors". What, do we still have Liszt detractors? I pity the fools. If you can't afford the 99-disc box you can pick and choose tracks on Hyperion's web site, which prompts the somewhat disturbing reflection that the first album in the series was released in 1985, a good 5 years before Tim Berners-Lee mooted the idea of the World Wide Web.

Runners-up:
"French Music"
various orchestras/Thomas Beecham
EMI

Lou Harrison: Music for orchestra, ensemble and gamelan
various artists; Gamelan Si Betty; Brooklyn Philharmonic/Dennis Russell Davies
Nimbus

"Complete EMI Recordings"
Alicia de Larrocha
EMI

"Complete 78-rpm Solo Recordings"
Percy Grainger
APR

OK, that answers that question then: when I created this category I wasn't at all sure what I'd end up with - would it be dominated by labels like Newton and Australian Eloquence, or what? Clearly box sets are the ones that find favour. Part of this is because of the somewhat haphazard way in which what you might call "mainstream" rereleases - things like Hyperion's budget Helios label and the major labels' opera repackagings - are treated by the review sources. Impressively proportioned box sets are more likely to get reviewed. It's nice to see Percy Grainger making an appearance in his anniversary year (and Chandos's Grainger Edition wasn't far off the pace), and as someone who's only now dipping a toe in the "focus on the performer, not the music" side of collecting, I'm glad to acknowledge EMI's churning out of large chunks of its archives. The Lou Harrison release sticks out a bit from this crowd: it's a straight reissue of four albums originally on the MusicMasters label.

Awards 2011 - What it all means

2012-01-27T23:56:00.007Z

How it's made

For the 7 major review sources - as mentioned above - each disc gets a score out of 5 based on either the review's own provided score or my interpretation of the review; when MusicWeb and Fanfare provide multiple reviews of one release, I go with the best review, though the other reviews do figure in the final calculation of the overall score. The average is weighted to reflect the fact that the number of reviews varies from album to album (for my purposes, I've assumed that not being reviewed is very slightly worse than getting an average review). Then I do the same for the 3 minor sources - Klassik Heute, Audiophile Audition, and Classics Today France - all of which have a numerical score to make things easier for me (and avoid me struggling with foreign languages). And finally, bonus points go to those albums that are given a "discs-of-the-month" equivalent in the various continental magazines (obtained via their web sites) and the quarterly German Critics' Prize. Any release that was reviewed by 3 or more of the 7 major review sources goes on the long list, at which point I assign categories and eliminate anything released too late or too early. This year, the release period was from August 2010 to July 2011. There's a big lull in releases in July so it makes a natural cutoff point. Unfortunately I have to wait till January to ensure full coverage from Fanfare and ARG.

Some statistics
The long list (albums reviewed by 3 out of 7 major sources) comprised 1,542 albums and involved 7,967 different opinions. There were about 7,700 other albums not in consideration! (This is rather more than a year's worth of reviews - it stretches from September 2010 magazine issues to January 2012 issues).
The average score for an album on the long list was 4.09, which essentially means that, among releases that gain attention from several sources, the average album is a good album.
Gramophone, IRR, ARG, Fanfare, and MusicWeb each reviewed roughly 1,000-1,100 of the 1,542 long-list albums; BBC Music Mag managed nearly 700, while Classics Today covered just 388. You might wonder why the latter qualifies as a "major review source" in that case; well, record labels do like to make use of the "10/10" symbol.
78 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources; 7 of the 16 Award winners were.
3 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources plus all 3 minor sources and got at least 3 bonus accolades: Vadim Gluzman's Bruch, Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Ravel concertos album, and Gustavo Dudamel's "Tchaikovsky Shakespeare", although the latter 2 were not in contention, having each received at least one negative review (yes, from ARG in both cases!).
Some 38 albums received a top accolade from one source and a wholly negative (score of 1) review from another. In 16 cases, ARG provided the negative, while Fanfare accounted for 11. Classics Today France accounted for 8. The other sources tend not to give scores of 1.
Actually Dudamel is an interesting case. From the 7 major sources he got 8 reviews (2 in Fanfare): one 4.5, one 4, two 3s, two 2s, and two 1s. But he also got top scores from Luister and Scherzo as well as the German Critics' Prize.

The labels
Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, and Virgin each won 2 awards.
Hyperion had an impressive 11 winners or runners-up, while Harmonia Mundi had 8. Universal (ie, Decca and DG) had 6; EMI (including Virgin) had 8; Sony had 2; Warner had 1 (on Nonesuch). Equally impressive, Hyperion appeared in 9 of the 16 categories, and Harmonia Mundi in 7. So perhaps for classical music we should redefine the term "major label".

And in conclusion
This year I made as much effort as possible to keep myself in the dark about what the final results might be. Perhaps this extra intrigue contributed to my feeling that this year's field was an impressive one. In all categories (except for Opera recital) we could produce a very convincing top 10, or 15, or even 20.
Adding the foreign-language "bonus points" proved very instructive, not just in sometimes highlighting differences or blind spots but also in sometimes providing reinforcement for my main review sources. As always, the ultimate point of the exercise is to provide some sort of quantitative impression of one person's qualitative experience of trying to find out what classical albums are really worth buying.
You should never trust a single critic, but put a bunch of 'em together and they seem to make sense.
Now go buy stuff.

Meanwhile, at 36,000 feet...

2012-01-19T17:27:00.004Z

Where can you hear Saariaho's L'amour de loin, Ligeti's string quartets, the viola music of Quincy Porter, Philippe Jaroussky singing Caldara, Stephen Hough playing Chopin, Tennstedt's Nereffid's Guide Award-winning Mahler 2, and many, many more? On an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to New York, as it happens. I discovered this last month, and hadn't flown for a year and a half before that, so I don't know how long it's been going on. But hurrah! When they first introduced individual in-flight entertainment the classical selection wasn't much good - a few generic "Best of Beethoven" sort of things. Those are still there, but there's now about fifty "proper" classical albums available too. I don't know how often they change them, though most of the albums seemed to be at most a couple of years old, many of them less than that. One little obscurity I was delighted to find was an album of Fritz Reizenstein's piano music played by Philip Martin, which included his Variations on the Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Now, I must point out that my joy at discovering so much high-quality and/or interesting music on the flight does not mean that I endorse the concept of flying. But I will concede that any mode of transport that allows one to listen to Joan Sutherland and Steve Reich, not to mention play (and, ahem, win) Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and watch Game of Thrones, can't be all bad.

Nereffid accidentally selects the wrong album.

Who'd be a pianist?

2012-01-19T08:06:00.002Z

From Jeremy Nicholas's review in Gramophone a few months ago of a recital by Francesco Piemontesi on Avanti:

[the Bach/Liszt Fantasia and Fugue is] efficiently executed, cogently voiced but pallid compared with Percy Grainger's exuberance and sonority in 1931.

Who would want a job where, every so often when you've completed some work, someone leans over your shoulder and says, "Not bad, but this other person did a much better job eighty years ago"?

Arnold con moto

2012-01-08T15:24:00.003Z

On a whim I'm listening to just those tracks in my music library that have a "con moto" marking.
Turns out Malcolm Arnold used that a lot.

This should have been posted on Facebook or something, shouldn't it?

And why do my first posts after a long break tend to be really trivial?

I am making history

2011-12-10T19:57:00.003Z

Part 1 of A History of Classical Music through Recordings is now up on musicisgood.org. It's about Gregorian chant. The introductory post in which I attempt to justify my existence is also up.
I'm currently working on part 2, which brings in polyphony, and parts 3 to 5 have been mapped out. In the introduction I note that 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die doesn't cover early music very well. I'm pleased to note that their (chronologically) first album, of the (original) Carmina Burana, corresponds to my nineteenth. And still I occasionally feel bad about only scratching the surface.
I know way more about early music than I did a few weeks ago. Maybe you will too!
8tracks mix to follow soon, hopefully. It's my ambition to own all the recordings I discuss (makes it easier to discuss them, eh?), so there could be a steady stream of mixes. I intend this to be something I'm very proud of.

A Gramophone review survey

2011-12-01T16:37:00.002Z

Got an email from Gramophone telling me they want to improve their online review archive. No surprise there. The old Gramofile was very useful, but the new version, which relies on accurate OCR'ing of scanned issues, is haphazard, and removing the ability to browse the PDFs didn't help either. If they can get the thing working properly it will be a great resource.
So the accompanying survey seems interesting. One question asks,

If you were looking to read a review of a specific recording on the Gramophone.co.uk Reviews Archive, how would you go about searching for it? Which criteria would you look for first? What would you look for next?

And then I get to pick various criteria from a list (Composer, Conductor, Date of recording, and so forth) and arrange them in a suitable order. Then there's

The following is a list of information which could appear alongside a classical music review. In your view, which of these are essential, which are nice to have and which are not required?

and we get things like "More from this composer", "Reader rating", "Playing time", "Reviewer name" and many more besides.
Some thought went into this, obviously. So much better than seems to be the usual approach (see eMusic for example), which is "Dear customer, We have just completely fucked up our web site. Isn't it great?!"

The integrity of Fanfare

2011-11-28T19:40:00.005Z

Lately, Norman Lebrecht flung a cat among the pigeons with an article titled "How to buy a record review", in which he offered an exposé of unethical goings-on at Fanfare:

When Fanfare receives a copy of your CD, it asks you to take an advert ‘at special rates’. The bigger the ad, the larger the coverage. No ad, no guaranteed review. Simple as that.

This is accompanied by a copy of the letter that Fanfare editor Joel Flegler sends to the artists or labels. You can read some of the responses from Fanfare readers and contributors, as well as some labels and artists, and some outraged voices, below Lebrecht's article and also on the Classical Music Guide Forums.
Seeing as the Nereffid's Guide Awards, and my CD buying habits, depend on Fanfare and all other review sources having some integrity, am I shocked/disturbed/etc? Not really. You don't have to be an investigative journalist of Lebrecht's calibre (ahem) to notice that Fanfare's features section tends to have lots of adverts for the CDs whose artists are interviewed. I'd always assumed there was some sort of relationship between the interviews/reviews and the ads but didn't know exactly what it was. And of course the artists or labels tended to be toward the obscure or lesser-known end of the scale - it's not like they were chatting to a Gergiev or Domingo every issue - so, again, I figured the editorial decisions weren't based on how much of a draw the interviewees would be to readers. But, yes, I had noticed that the reviews accompanying the interviews were generally very positive. The ethical problem basically hinges on this sentence from Flegler's letter:

If you decide to accept the proposal, I won’t proceed with any aspect of it unless I find a critic who’s receptive to your CD.

To those opposed to the practice, this constitutes clear evidence that Fanfare is selling good reviews. But nobody seems prepared to go that step further and accuse its reviewers of being crooks, presumably because nobody actually believes that they are. My own thoughts on the whole affair are that it's an unfortunate practice but one that's probably necessary for the magazine's survival. As I said, the fact that the interviewees are also the advertisers is blindingly obvious, seeing as both are coralled in the same part of the magazine, which can be safely ignored if you wish (I for one rarely read the interviews). It might be appropriate if a brief editorial note made it clear what was going on. There's no indication that anything in the main reviews section is "for sale".
And now for the bit where we use science to address ethical dilemmas. Sam Harris would be so proud! Seeing as I keep records of all the reviews, I can tell you exactly how morally dubious Advertgate is. Every review I read gets a score from 1 to 5, where 5 is "outstanding" (the equivalent of a Gramophone Editor's Choice or a Classics Today 10/10) and 1 is garbage; 4.5 is "very good"; 4 is "good"; 3.5 is "good but..."; 3 is "OK, bad points roughly balanced with good"; 2 is "poor but...". Obviously these are based on my subjective assessment, but I try to be consistent in my interpretations.
Overall, if you discount "Hall of Fame" articles, Fanfare gives a CD an average score of 3.95 (that's based on the last 6 issues). But the average for "paid for" feature reviews is 4.18, while the average for reviews in the main section is 3.92. So there's a significant difference all right. In those 6 issues there were 312 reviews in the features section (in many cases, the same disc was reviewed by 2 or more people), while there were 2,388 reviews in the main section. Interestingly, I've marked 3 apparently paid-for reviews that gave a score of 1, meaning the reviewer regarded the album as rubbish, plus 2 that gave a 2; in these cases, there was either another, more positive, review or a positive review of another disc by the same artist. So not every reviewer is receptive. But, as you might expect, the reviews are largely positive: about 50% have a score of 4; 35% have 4.5; and 7% get a 5, meaning a rave. The comparative figures for the main reviews section are, respectively, 44%, 27%, and 3%. I wasn't actually expecting that last one to be so small compared with the "paid-for" figure: it shows a clear benefit of going with a "receptive" reviewer, as such reviewers seem far more likely to be wildly enthusiastic about a release. But Jerry Dubins, one of Fanfare's most distinctive voices, sheds more light on this in a response to Lebrecht and moves things further out of the ethical grey area:

The review is written first, and if it happens to be an especially glowing one, only then is the artitst offered the opportunity to advertise and be interviewed. If the artist accepts, great; then the magazine makes some money, and the artitst gets extra exposure in the form of an interview to go along with the already positive review. If the artist declines…and this is the notion it’s really important for readers to be dsabused of…the glowing review, which was already written, still gets published.

I can also compare Fanfare's average review scores with other sources that don't use star ratings or marks out of 5 or 10. Its 3.95 compares with 3.85 for American Record Guide and 4.1 for International Record Review; unfortunately I don't have Gramophone figures yet. So you might say that, on average, an album will be slightly more favourably received in IRR than in Fanfare. But of course IRR reviews far fewer discs than Fanfare - about 1,500 in the past year - so there has to be rather more editorial winnowing-out. An editor deciding that a disc isn't worth reviewing is a whole other kettle of ethical fish, and Divine Art's Stephen Sutton had this to say as part of his response to Lebrecht:

Without checking and from the top of my head I reckon that around 75% of our releases (averaging 40 a year) are reviewed in Fanfare, and only about 5% in BBC Music and Gramophone; we are lucky to get one review a year in BBC Music – and our advertising budget for all three is about the same

So I'm not worried that the Nereffid's Guide Awards are being corrupted by Joel Flegler's attempts to keep his magazine going. If anything, we can be thankful that Fanfare is bringing attention to new releases and artists that might otherwise be ignored. And of course albums that are otherwise ignored won't be making an appearance in the final shortlist anyway!

Montserrat Figueras

2011-11-23T13:09:00.003Z

Montserrat Figueras has died aged 69 years. She and husband Jordi Savall have enriched the world of early music for a long time.
The music below is the Portuguese song "Senhora del Mundo", recorded as part of their album Francisco Javier: Route to the Orient, one of my favourite albums of recent years.

Added, Nov 24:
Blimey. Site traffic increased 16-fold because of this post. Hello new visitor!

A redesign of Gramophone

2011-11-23T12:13:00.003Z

Back in May 2010 I posted these words:

The thing about Gramophone is, if it didn't exist, would it be necessary to invent it? Reputation aside, the answer has to be no, largely because of the existence of BBC Music Magazine, upon whose general style Gramophone has been gradually converging in recent years.

And now: a "new look" Gramophone! Obviously I am the only person in the world to have had the above thoughts, so you can thank me for single-handedly prompting the magazine's changes. All that bothers me is it took them more than a year to do exactly as I told them.
Actually it hasn't changed hugely, but Gramophone does seem to have refocused itself. Gone is the news section, which was increasingly indistinguishable from its equivalent in BBC Music Magazine, and the letters have been shoved to the back out of the way. Gone too are the columnists, which were at best a hit-and-miss business. And hurrah, "The Trial" has been adjourned; it always seemed an odd idea, that a magazine trading on its reputation for excellent reviewers would run a monthly feature highlighting the possibility that any one of them could be monstrously wrong. Unfortunately the invariably dull "My Music" remains (though hopefully it will never return to last issue's nadir, in which Beethoven fan Jon Voight moaned about how the civil rights movement was a cover for thugs and commies). The artist-related news/bumf in the front section remains, but it will be interesting to see how the features section progresses: this time, we get a decently long article on Naive's Vivaldi Edition and a reasonably substantial one on Jordi Savall. No "composers and their dogs" nonsense here.
Then come the reviews, which we are told "can run to greater length if needed", although they often seem rather too short, especially for those of us who plough through Fanfare every couple of months. And we are also informed that the "esteemed panel of reviewers are even more central", which appears to mean nothing other than the fact that the header of each review section is accompanied by some staggeringly unflattering images of a pair of reviewers. It's like the sketch artist's just come back from the trial of a paedophile ring.
Next comes "The Specialist's Guide To...", which is a good excuse to highlight some niche areas (this month, rare French operas; next month, pianist Paul Jacobs). Finally comes The Gramophone Collection, which is still the same as ever. Oh, no, not finally, there's the Musical Journeys thing and the hi-fi section. No "Tune surfing": a nation weeps.
So, is it an improvement? Yes, it's an improvement, if only in terms of Gramophone no longer being BBC Music Magazine's pompous uncle. It does feel rather different from that magazine again, and I appreciate the direction James Inverne seems to be trying to take. We'll wait and see how future issues go.

Almost the return of Nereffid's Guide

2011-11-22T08:05:00.003Z

My contributions to musicisgood.org now number two, both of them filed under "Classical highlights". The first provides short quotes excerpted from the reviews of the best-received discs in the September/October 2011 issue of Fanfare, while the second does the same for American Record Guide. I intend to do this for all future issues, and for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and International Record Review.
So, the venue and the format may have changed, but I seem to be back where I started five years ago, when I first created an eMusic List highlighting what was in the latest issue of Gramophone. Some good things sprang from that initial attempt - not least of them the Nereffid's Guide Awards, soon to make its fifth appearance - so who knows what might emerge from musicisgood?
It's ironic, too, that this harking back to the olden days comes when it does: I fell out of love with eMusic when the site drew down the ire of its customers over adding Sony products; and at the moment there's yet more rage, this time as the company rolls out a completely new design that it seems to have forgotten to beta-test, or perhaps even alpha-test. This is all to "enhance your music discovery", apparently, although it seems to have involved removing pretty much all the tools that people used to find music and replacing them with adverts for editorial content. In the past I would say "ah well, at least the downloads are cheap" but at the moment I'm afraid to download anything because chances are it won't work but I could still be charged. At the moment eMusic seems to be nothing but a good-looking corpse, and even the "good-looking" bit is arguable.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part VII

2011-11-15T15:45:00.002Z

November? Seriously? Ah well, here it is at last - the two Living Composer categories. Refresh your memory of the awards here. Now sit tight and wait for the 2011 awards!

The EMI takeover by Universal

2011-11-14T18:55:00.002Z

So, what does it mean for classical music that Universal now owns EMI's catalogue? Well, the first thing is that the regulators may get involved, given the market share that Universal could have in some countries - it would be close to 40 percent worldwide, and much higher in certain places. But let's say Universal gets to keep the full classical catalogue it's acquired. There's two aspects here - reissues and new recordings. At present, Universal seems happy to keep Decca and DG as separate units, so perhaps the same will hold true for EMI and Virgin and there won't be much impact on artist signings or releases. The reissues situation may be rather different though, both good and bad. Efforts such as DG's recent Mahler edition show the value of pooling catalogues, but on the other hand, how many recordings of identical repertoire will Universal want to keep in circulation? And now the recent copyright extension comes into play, because nothing's going to out of copyright for another twenty years, and Universal is sitting on 40 percent of it all. (Wow! It's almost as if European lawmakers didn't properly think of the consequences of their actions!)
So there's a massive opportunity here for consumers to get royally shafted. My guess is that there probably won't be much change overall and we'll continue to experience the exasparating mix of great bargain box sets and completely unavailable recordings. But oh, the potential for something wonderful is so great. If it were up to me, I'd just go completely bananas on downloads and put every damn thing online. Get World Heritage status for it, even.

Incidentally, a quick look at my own collection indicates that, combined, Universal and EMI account for 25 percent of the total. Sony and Warner together make up another 8 percent. This is, I imagine, rather low for a typical classical collection and reflects how my purchasing has been shaped by cheap downloads from independent labels on eMusic.

Introducing Stephen J. Nereffid

2011-11-12T17:27:00.002Z

So, musicisgood.org is now up and running, and the honour of writing the first post (after the original "welcome" notice) falls to one Stephen J. Nereffid.
Who? Well there was some discussion about what names we would be writing under. After all, we tend to know each other by our emusers or emusic nicknames, but these aren't necessarily appropriate for a blog that wants to be taken seriously. So we seem to have settled on real names or name-like pseudonyms. I thought about using my real name but by now the name Nereffid is so wedded to that part of my life that I couldn't part with it. Things like the Nereffid's Guide Awards would no longer make sense (and yes, I'll be writing about them on musicisgood as well as here next year). So Nereffid needed a first name, or maybe a pair of initials. Somehow the name "Stephen J. Nereffid" appeared in my brain early on in the thought process and refused to leave. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was a subconscious homage to Stephen J. Cannell. Maybe now I will have to finish every blog post by casting a sheet of paper into the air.

Thoughts for a history of classical music

2011-10-22T16:20:00.002+01:00

So the suggestion that participants on the emusers.org message board should create a collective music blog prompts me to wonder about what I might contribute. Inevitably, grandiose schemes push small practical ideas out of the way. But which folly to embrace? Certainly it has to involve recommending recordings, but I run the risk of just repeating the Penguin Guide and similar publications. I want the recommendations to be pointers rather than definitive "best recordings", but what exactly would they be pointing to? Perhaps this could be aimed at the novice, or those with idle curiosity about music they've never heard before.
So it's some sort of Classical Music 101, but how to organise it? As I look at my shelves I see I have two kinds of books for exploring: CD guides, and histories or encyclopedias of music. What I don't have is something that combines the two. Well, I do have one book: the slightly oddly titled Music and Western Man, which arose from a series of radio programmes produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1955. The book comprises 49 chapters over about 320 pages, a chronology of music that begins with a pair of hymns to Apollo and ends with Shostakovich's tenth symphony; each chapter corresponds to the contents of each programme, with - and this is the crucial bit from my point of view - references to the recordings played.
The idea, then, is some kind of history of classical music - although reading the introduction to Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music I am admonished that it would be a mere survey, not an actual history - with plenty of appropriate suggestions for recordings. Because the medium is a blog, it can be done in a modular fashion, going as specific or as broad as I feel the need at any point. So part 1 could be chant, part 2 Hildegard of Bingen, part 3 the troubadours, and so on. The text doesn't have to be too detailed - why compete with Wikipedia? Each bit would come with maybe five or six suggestions for recordings, drawn either from my own ideas or from other sources. Perhaps there could even be an 8tracks mix.
Now to the drawing board.

Tarantino and Westlake

2011-10-15T15:09:00.002+01:00

Apparently the title Reservoir Dogs comes from a mix of Straw Dogs and Au revoir les enfants, which Tarantino called "the reservoir film" because he couldn't pronounce the title.
Well, here's an amusing coincidence: two years before Reservoir Dogs was released, Donald Westlake - whom Tarantino acknowledges as an inspiration - published his novel Drowned Hopes. The plot basically involves John Dortmunder helping an ex-cellmate recover some buried money that is now under 50 feet of water following the construction of a reservoir. And here we are in Chapter 2, in Dortmunder's thoughts:

And thinking beyond that to the amount of money itself, and the hassle he'd just gone through tonight for petty cash out of a check-cashing place with a bad-tempered dog. He didn't know exactly how you went about digging up a casket from fifty feet down in the bottom of a reservoir but let's just say he had to bring in two or three other guys, say three other guys; that still left nearly a hundred thousand apiece. And there are no dogs in a reservoir.

Speak for yourself

2011-09-22T17:36:00.003+01:00

Another rule for critics to follow. There may be a manifesto in this, or at least a doctoral thesis.
Our naughty reviewer this time is Robert Levine in International Record Review, who takes on Claudio Abbado's new recording of Fidelio on Decca:

I fear I could be in the minority when I state that I find this performance almost clinical.

and, later,

As I said, I suspect some colleagues will adore this clean, unaffected, almost bel canto-like reading but I think that, at its core, it misreads Beethoven's intentions.

It's good for a critic to be aware of what others might think - and good for the reader, too, who may be able to judge which side they might be on. It's a well-written review in that sense, giving the reader plenty of information to make up their own mind rather than accept the review as divine writ. But Levine blots his copybook a bit with this:

The entire 'Er sterbe' sequence is, as mentioned above, unimpeachably delivered, but that's just what it does not need: this is a moment of mania, surprise, intensity and horror, and we find ourselves being amazed at its clarity and not at its emotional content.

Wait a minute, what's this "we" business? By switching from "I" to "we" he's pulling the reader over to his side. More than that, he's shifted from personal subjectivity to something closer to universal objectivity. Surely the "some colleagues" are not to be counted among the "we"?
And again:

the final scene is joyous and gloriously played and sung, but it doesn't drive the listener wild, as it should and invariably does.

(Let's be sufficiently pedantic to bring up his use of "invariably", but not belabour it any more than that) He means, obviously, "this particular listener". Doesn't he?
Trivial points, you might argue. And in fact in the case of this review, I'd agree, but it does illustrate how even the conscientious critic can slip into omniscient mode. Yes, it would waste rather a lot of ink for every "This is rubbish" to be replaced with "I think this is rubbish", but it would be nice if reviewers were in general more aware that, ultimately, this is just some guy's opinion.
Maybe I've been a scientist too long.

Public domain now less public

2011-09-17T09:20:00.002+01:00

So the EU has extended copyright protection on recordings from 50 to 70 years. If this were a hundred years ago I would have a cartoon in which a young woman representing the public domain is ravished from behind by a leering Paul McCartney. You know the sort of thing.
Gramophone reports on the story with a typical rhetorical subtitle, "But is it good news for classical music fans?" Careful, Gramophone! Don't want to upset the majors! (But try asking this: was it bad news that the recordings of 1960 went out of copyright this year?)
It's pointless now to rehash all the many arguments against the new law, but it's nice to see the Guardian elaborate on a key point that the lawmakers seemed wholly blind to: the law's supposed to be of great benefit to musicians, but they're not usually the copyright holders.
Next question: now that for a 20-year period no recordings will enter the public domain, do you think illegal file-sharing will increase or decrease? Anyone?

ArkivMusic.eu is stupid

2011-09-02T10:43:00.002+01:00

Let me quote you from ArkivMusic.com:

The design for ArkivMusic emphasizes the ability to quickly and intuitively find classical music recordings. The peculiarities of classical music do not always lend themselves to standard search tools used on the Web. Spelling inconsistencies, differing search syntax designs, and databases not specifically oriented to the parameters of classical music can often lead to very confusing results. At ArkivMusic, we take a lot of the guesswork out of finding music by letting you click down a logical and well-categorized path to the works and recordings that you want.

It's bloody wonderful, a marvellous resource that's of huge value when you want to examine the options for buying a particular work. My List Of Compositions That I Still Have To Get On Disc would have been impossible without it. I love it.
So now ArkivMusic launches in the EU and they have done a very good job of fucking it up. Yes, they still have the click-down system but the look of the site is just ugly. On the US site, if I click on, say, Handel, I'm immediately greeted by a (granted, unnecessary to me) portrait and biography, beneath which are 2 lists, one of Composition Types, the other of Most Popular Works; there's also links to New Releases, Recommended, and other such things. On the EU site, though, my first reaction is huh? because all I see is an ever-increasing list of recordings in no immediately apparent order. It took me a while to notice that there are also links to Composition Types, Conductors, and so forth. So I click on Composition Types, get a pop-up window listing those, I click on one - Keyboard Works - and ... well, nothing's happening actually. It's taking quite a while. Ah, there we go.
Now. On the US site, which goes at normal speed, it gives me a link saying "See all recordings available (185)" and I can see 20 works listed on my screen. In the EU I don't get that link, and I can see 12 works because for some reason they've put plenty of blank space between items in the list. And in the US it tells me how many recordings there are of each work, and in the EU it doesn't. All right, click on something: in the US I get another "See all recordings" and a list of Performers and a list of Labels, while in the EU I get a list of recordings in release-date order (newest first) plus a link for a pop-up of Performers or Labels (or irrelevant Conductors or Ensembles).
So basically the US site is a single-minded drill-down system that lets you instead look at "all recordings" at any point, whereas the EU site thinks you might prefer "all recordings" but gives you a cumbersome option of using the drill-down system. In other words ArkivMusic has decided to partially hide its USP in favour of something that looks much clunkier than most of its competitors.
And a quick comparison of ArkivMusic.eu with Presto reveals that if I were to buy the first two Handel items I saw, it would be about €7 cheaper via Presto - and Presto's not the cheapest site around, either.
So I can't see myself shopping at ArkivMusic, though I'll still be using the US site to help me plan my purchases elsewhere.

At last, Zumsteeg

2011-09-02T09:43:00.002+01:00

I browse through the latest International Record Review, fresh in my postbox today, and I come across a review that makes me smile. Many years ago, when I first began to get properly interested in classical music (and had plenty of time on my hands) I built up a database of composers and their works, with dates of composition, thanks largely to the Collins Encyclopedia of Music. Ultimately there were close to 10,000 entries in it. This was before teh internets of course.
So I got a very warm and fuzzy feeling to discover that conductor Frieder Bernius has gone right to the alphabetical end of that list and given us a recording of Die Geisterinsel by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest first performed in 1798. IRR's Mark Pullinger says "Zumsteeg's opera may not quite be 'such stuff that dreams are made on', but it passes a pleasant two hours, in an assured, lively performance".
And now I notice that the Collins Encyclopedia of Music called it Der Geisterinsel.

Copyright extension uh-oh

2011-08-31T09:47:00.002+01:00

Official silence, plus rumours, according to Christian Engström.

The interpretation of the various rules of procedure in the EU are pretty much a mystery even to people who have spent years trying to understand them, and I am certainly not one of those people.

Pass the salt

2011-08-31T08:28:00.003+01:00

In the latest American Record Guide, Steven J Haller reviews a reissue from Regis:

This Dukas program from Jean Fournet and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic was originally a Denon CD (Nov/Dec 1993) and comes with its own review on the back, courtesy of the Penguin Guide: "amongst the best... second to none... marvellously expansive yet well-focused recording... deserves a strong recommendation".
That's why you need to take so many Penguin Guide huzzahs with a grain of salt.

And there it is: the Science of criticism. The Penguin Guide really liked this CD; Haller did not; therefore we must not trust the Penguin Guide. And the basis for this argument is... uh, I dunno. The implication is that the means by which Haller assesses the worth of a CD is more objective or empirical than that used by the Penguin Guide. We saw this a couple of posts below with Dudamel's Mahler 2 - one guy liked it and the other didn't, so clearly the one guy had a hidden agenda.
Obviously I don't object to the differences of opinion. It's when "I liked it and you didn't" gets mutated into "I'm right and you're wrong" that I start to shake my head sadly. Yes, if one party is an expert and the other's clueless (eg, Ebert vs Transformers fans), then one can be righter than the other, but that's not the scenario we've got here.
And it doesn't take long to find an example to illustrate the silliness of the situation. Haller included on his 2010 Critics' Choice list a Chandos release of Johan Halvorsen's Symphony no.1 and other orchestral works, conducted by Neeme Jarvi. He described the symphony as "a warm-hearted and sweeping performance that will have you wondering "Where has this symphony been all my life?"" Whereas over at Fanfare, James A Altena listened to the same disc and said of the symphony "It is pleasantly tuneful, thoroughly undemanding, and decidedly inconsequential throughout its 35-minute compass, and nothing more need be said of it". Of course, what he did not say was "That's why you need to take so many Steven J Haller huzzahs with a grain of salt".
"But Nereffid", I hear you thunder, "you have to admit the Penguin Guide isn't all it's cracked up to be, and we really do need to take their reviews with a grain of salt".
Well, quite. We need to take everyone's reviews with a grain of salt.
Including our own.

Don't buy Katherine Jenkins's new album! (Really!)

2011-08-26T15:25:00.004+01:00

She says so herself:

Katherine Jenkins has urged fans not to buy her new album.
The classical singer claims her former record label Universal has put together a compilation of old material and doesn't want her loyal followers to purchase songs they already have.
Katherine - who quit the label in 2008 to sign a huge £5.8 million deal with rivals Warner Brothers - tweeted: "Universal Records are putting out YET ANOTHER compilation album of my music.
"Considering I haven't recorded for them since 2008 it's stuff you already have."
She later told fans: "Don't want you to feel conned."
Katherine instead urged her fans to buy Warner album 'Daydream' as it features "all newly-recorded tracks".
She added: "Make sure you get the right one!"

Just to be on the safe side, I'll buy neither.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part VI

2011-08-25T15:07:00.003+01:00

8tracks has been screwing around with its embedding process again, it seems. Anyway, here's the Opera and Opera Recital winners and runners-up from way back in January.

Did you even attend the same concert?

2011-08-25T09:28:00.002+01:00

I can't remember now why it was that I decided I didn't want to watch Gustavo Dudamel's Mahler 2 with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra when it was on TV. I just wasn't in the mood at the time. Oh, I wish I had seen it now, just so I could have an opinion about it. Yes, I am late to this story but I was on holidays for a couple of weeks. I think BBC Four might be showing it again on Sunday, but how can I approach it objectively now, seeing as I already know it was rubbish or brilliant, depending on who I believe.
This is a great one for the whole debate over the value of criticism. Dudamel seems to divide critics, as there is a lot of media enthusiasm about him that some feel may not be justified, but at the same time it may be drawing new audiences into classical music, which is good, but then again maybe it's at the expense of other more talented musicians, but then again maybe Dudamel is actually a cut above the rest and... It's quite a dilemma, I'm sure you'll agree. So you can adopt any one of several stances regarding Dudamel. Not just "he's totally overhyped" but "he shows great promise that hasn't yet been fulfilled", or "he's doing too much too soon", or "OMG he's so wonderful I want his babies and he makes me want to MAMBO!!1!" From a Nereffid's Guide point of view, perhaps in terms of reviews of his recordings he doesn't fare any better or worse than any other young conductor, but he seems to be scrutinized that little bit more, by both supporters and detractors, and so opinions are a little stronger. Anything you say about Dudamel has to be done in the context of justifying your opinion of him. So if you don't like his new CD, this supports your claim that he's overhyped, or explains why you're ambivalent about his success; if you like it, well, that proves you were right to think he's a great conductor, or helps to resolve some of your ambivalence. What it boils down to for Dudamel is that he's unlikely to win a Nereffid's Guide Award anytime soon.
Anyway, back to the Mahler concert at the Proms. The Guardian's Guy Dammann gave the performance five stars, prompting accusations of editorial bias from Pliable at On An Overgrown Path, who cited Geoff Brown's "curate's egg" review as a more accurate reflection of reality. (Incidentally, when claiming "consensus", are you allowed cite just one thing? And can you claim to be "at" a concert if you were in fact listening to it at home on the radio?) Me, I'm a little suspicious of both reviews, not being familiar with either reviewer: Dammann's a little too gushy, Brown's rather too smug. Dammann acquitted himself well in response to Pliable, though:

Finally, you ask in your last comment for balanced Guardian articles about Dudamel. I would argue that my article is balanced, but I think what you mean is an article expressing only moderate enthusiasm.

Indeed. If only everyone thought exactly the same way I do, there would be no bias!
As you might expect from comments about an opinion expressed on the Internet, the comments on Dammann's review generate plenty heat and sod-all light, but I love this one:

Well, I enjoyed it anyway - just as well I know nothing about music, otherwise I guess, from comments above, I might not have enjoyed it half as much.

That is pretty much the official Les Introuvables de Nereffid policy on responding to all musical performances.

They're listening

2011-08-01T10:10:00.003+01:00

In my inbox this morning, from EMI Classics:

We're Listening!

The BPI (British Phonographic Industry) is conducting a consumer survey on behalf of UK classical recorded music companies which will help us understand more about our customers and classical music lovers in general.

The survey should take you no longer than 10 minutes to complete and you can enter a competition to win an iPod Touch.

[After a few preliminary personal questions such as age we get to the meaty stuff]

5. How often do you buy classical recordings on either CD or download?
Usually 5 times a month or more
Usually 3 or 4 times a month
Usually 1 or 2 times a month
A few times a year
Once or twice a year
Never

6. When buying classical recordings, which of the following factors do you consider the MOST important
Record label
Artwork
Artist(s)/performers
Price
Repertoire
Other (please specify)

7. Which retailers do you buy classical music from?
(Please tick all that apply)
Specialist independent music shops
HMV
Online CD store (Amazon, Play, MDT, Presto etc)
Digital download store (iTunes, eMusic, Amazon MP3 etc)
eBay
Amazon Marketplace
Supermarkets
CDs from record label websites
Downloads from record label websites
Other (please specify)

8. In the past year have you bought classical music as a gift for someone else on any of these occasions?
(Please tick all that apply)
Mother's Day
Father's Day
Christmas
None
Valentine's Day
Birthday
Wedding Anniversary
Other Religious Festivals
Other (please specify)

9. How do you buy your classical music?
Digital downloads only
CDs only
CDs and digital downloads

10. What proportion of your classical music spending is accounted for by digital downloads?
0-25%
26-50%
51-75%
76-99%

11. Which digital download stores do you buy classical music from?
(Please tick all that apply)
iTunes
Amazon MP3
Play.com
HMV Digital
Record label sites
Passionato
Napster
TheClassicalShop.net
eMusic
Other (please specify)

12. Please look at these statements about digital music and tell us how strongly you agree or disagree with each
Digital downloads are convenient to buy
Digital downloads are good value for money
I like to create my own playlists
I buy fewer classical compilation albums since I started downloading music
I would like to get better digital artwork and sleevenotes when buying downloads
The sound quality of recordings is important to me
The sound quality of downloads are usually very good

13. Have you ever downloaded an album in a 'high quality' digital format such as FLAC or AIFF?
Yes
No
Don't know

14. Please look at these statements about high quality digital formats and say whether you agree or disagree
I always try to buy downloads on 'high quality' formats
The sound quality is noticably better than other downloads
I wish high quality formats were available for all classical music
I am more likely to buy a high-quality format for classical music than I am for other types of music
It is worth spending a bit more money for 'high quality' formats

15. Which radio stations do you listen to? (tick all that apply)

16. Do you use any of the following social networking sites?

17. Please tell us which of these devices you own, or have access to in your household (please tick all that apply)
[iPhones, iPads, HDTV, that sort of thing]

18. Please indicate which, if any of the following online services you use to listen to classical music (please tick all that apply)
Last FM
Naxos Music Library
Spotify
Napster
we7
YouTube
Vevo
None of these
Other (please specify)

19. You say that you use streaming services to listen to classical music. [No I didn't, I said I used YouTube] Please take a look at these statements and let us know how strongly you agree or disagree with each one.
I think the selection of classical music on streaming services is good
I often find it difficult to find the classical music I want to listen to on streaming services
Streaming services help me to discover new classical artists and recordings I am unfamiliar with
Using streaming services means I don’t spend as much money on classical recordings as I used to
If there was a streaming service that specialised in classical music, I would be interested in paying a monthly subscription fee to use it

20. Do you listen to music on your mobile phone through apps or services such as Spotify?

21. On average, how many classical music concerts do you attend per year (including ballet and opera)?
None
1-4
5-9
10-15
16-19
20-29
30+

22. Do you ever buy CDs of the performing artist or the music performed when attending classical concerts?
Yes, I often buy CDs when at classical music concerts
Yes, I occasionally buy CDs when at classical music concerts
I have only bought CDs at classical music concerts on one or two occasions
No, I choose not to buy CDs when at a classical music concert
No, but I would be interested if they were available

23. In the past year, have you attended any of the following?
(Please tick all that apply)
An outdoor concert of classical music
An opera screened at a cinema
A school concert of classical music
Glyndebourne
BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall
Glastonbury festival
Any other non-classical music festival (eg Reading, V, Latitude, Cambridge Folk Festival)
None of these

24. Which of these television programmes have you watched in the last 12 months? (Please tick all that apply)
Classic BRITs
Popstar to Operastar
New Years Day Concert From Vienna
Classical music TV programmes on BBC 3
The Culture Show
BBC Proms
BBC Cardiff Singer of the Year
Classical music on Sky Arts
None of them

25. Would you like to see more classical music programmes on TV?

26. What sort of classical music programmes would you like to see more of?
Please tick all that apply
Concerts and recitals
Ballet
Opera
Documentaries / interviews
Review programmes
Broad based arts programmes
Other (please specify)

27. What type of classical music do you prefer to listen to most?
Choral
Opera
Chamber
Orchestral
Vocal
Contemporary
Piano
Popular/crossover
Early
Other (please specify)

28. Which period of music is your favourite
Baroque (examples of composers include Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann, Purcell)
Classical (examples of composers include Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn)
Romantic (examples of composers include Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Bruch)
Contemporary (examples of composers include John Cage, Philip Glass, Stravinsky, Walton)
Don't know

29. Which other types of music do you listen to?
Which other types of music do you listen to?
Alternative
Rock
Easy Listening
Reggae
Blues
Country/folk
Electronic
Rap
Jazz
Soul/R&B
Rock/Pop
Soundtracks
World
None - I just listen to Classical music

30. Which of these publications, websites and radio shows do you find useful in finding out about classical music releases?
(Please tick all that apply)
BBC Music Magazine
BBC Music website
BBC Radio 3 CD Review programme
BBC Radio 3 In Tune Classical Chart programme
Broadsheet newspapers
Classic FM Chart show
Classic FM magazine
Classic FM website
Classic FM's New CD Show
From online retailer websites
Gramophone Magazine
Gramophone website
Review websites
Other (please specify)

31. .....and which of these publications, websites and radio shows do you find the MOST USEFUL of all in finding out about classical music releases?
(Please tick only one)
[Same list as above]

32. Please tell us who your favourite classical composer is
Bach, C P E
Bach, J S
Barber
Bartók
Bax
Beethoven
Berlioz
Bizet
Brahms
Britten
Bruch
Bruckner
Byrd
Chopin
Debussy
Dvorak
Elgar
Fauré
Franck, C
Gershwin
Grieg
Handel
Haydn
Howells
Janacek
Liszt
Mahler
Mendelssohn
Monteverdi
Mozart
Palestrina
Prokofiev
Puccini
Purcell
Rachmaninov
Ravel
Rimsky Korsakov
Rossini
Saint-Saëns
Schubert
Schumann
Shostakovich
Sibelius
Strauss, J, II
Strauss, R
Stravinsky
Tallis
Tchaikovsky
Telemann
Vaughan Williams
Verdi
Vivaldi
Wagner
Walton
Other (please specify)

And that's it. Staggeringly, on those questions where they provided the option "Other (please specify)", they didn't provide a button to tick, so if your preferred answer was a write-in one, you first had to choose a "wrong" answer". How stupid is that? I berated them in one of the "please specify" boxes.
What of the questions themselves? The technology- and purchasing-related questions are sensible enough, and no doubt will be used to justify some future decisions. Given that they don't know how to properly design a survey, can we be hopeful that they understand that participant recruitment via email produces an inherent bias in any of the questions that relate to the web?
Leaving aside the "Other (please specify)" snafu, questions 27 and 28 are pretty stupid (are you allowed call it "borderline retarded"?). Undoubtedly there are people who prefer opera above all else, but could the survey designers not countenance the possibility that I might like two or more genres equally? If I say I prefer Chamber music, what does this say about my interest in Piano music? Yes, I know the British are "first past the post" people, but still. And why give Early music as an option of the kind of music you prefer, but omit it from the list of musical periods you prefer? And you've got to love that catch-all "Contemporary", haven't you? Of the, erm, highly disparate Cage, Stravinsky, Glass and Walton, Glass is the only one who's been alive for the last 19 years.
Will the BPI learn anything useful from this survey, ultimately? It would be nice to think that a large majority of respondents will disagree with the statement "Digital downloads are good value for money" and that the industry will act accordingly. It would be even better if a large majority of respondents chose Telemann as their favourite composer. Think of the implications!

From dusk till... Don?

2011-07-26T07:47:00.003+01:00

From Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat:

To me, a native New Yorker, "dawn" rhymes with "lawn" and "gone" with "on." When I worked with Leonard Bernstein, who was born near Boston, he insisted, to my horror, that all four words rhymed with each other. For a musical version of "The Boston Strangler," that might have been acceptable. For a show about New York street gangs, it was not.

Skips

2011-07-25T20:44:00.003+01:00

If I were somewhat more sensitive I would say that my faith in humanity has been shattered - shattered! Last night was one of those nothing-on-the-telly-and-I-don't-feel-like-putting-on-a-CD sort of times, so the inevitable response was to put on Classic FM. We heard something that turned out to be Delius's piano concerto, and as the presenter (David Mellor, as it happens) was telling us about it... his voice skipped. Like a scratched CD. And then suddenly music started playing, and it skipped like a scratched CD for a moment, and then everything went back to normal. And after that piece of music had handed, David Mellor didn't say oops, sorry about that track skipping because he wasn't bloody there, was he? The program was recorded earlier.
I don't know why I should have been naively thinking that radio shows such as this one should be live. After all, surely David Mellor has better things to be doing on a Sunday evening than sitting in a radio studio for a couple of hours. I think the thing is that the show is presented in a manner that attempts the appearance of being live. This is the sort of illusion that doesn't work quite so well on television, but when it's just one voice speaking between pieces of music it's rather easier to fake.
Christ, I've now just realised that I'm naively thinking that there is some two-hour period in which David Mellor records an entire radio show. He presumably just comes in at his convenience, records whatever script he needs to read from, and some producer puts it together with the music for later broadcast.
What a lazy fucker. I hate him.

Rescuing von Otter

2011-07-24T19:12:00.003+01:00

Who knows what exciting journeys my copy of Anne Sofie von Otter's "Watercolours" album has been on? "Watercolors", I should say, for it is the US edition of the 2003 release. We shall never know the circumstances under which it travelled from the USA to end up in a County Waterford branch of Game Stop, nestled among the unloved McFly and Alannah Myles CDs (poetic licence - I can't remember what the hell else was in the racks), with not just an eye-catching "€3.99" sticker but also a somewhat demeaning "Buy one get one free".
So buying it was an act of liberation, really. Sort of like going to the animal shelter and saving a dog, or in this case an otter.
As for the "Buy one get one free", that involved a bat, a cat, and a penguin, as it happens.

Word Police Squad!

2011-07-19T14:57:00.003+01:00

I love the little "Word Police" boxes that crop up around American Record Guide. I suppose the title "Misguided Word Fascist" was already taken. The latest issue, for example, tells us this:

Target is not a verb, but a noun. You aim at a target or goal; you don't "target" it.

Hmm. Let me check Merriam-Webster's.

target vt (1837) 1 : to make a target of; esp : to set as a goal

Fancy that! First documented use in 1837, you say?

The performer as portrait painter

2011-07-12T11:02:00.005+01:00

Which of these images depicts Pope Innocent X? They both do. The painting is of course Diego Velazquez's portrait. The sculpture is by Alessandro Algardi. If you think "Innocent X", the Velazquez is probably the image you have in your head. Would you have known who the one on the left was if I hadn't told you? Which one is the more accurate? Does that question even make sense?

Yes, I'm still puzzling over why Calum MacDonald chided pianist Khatia Buniatishvili for what she wrote in her notes for her Liszt recital album:

'I was always aware that my first recording had to be a portrait of Liszt,' says Khatia Buniatishvili in her stupefying booklet note. 'Only he would enable me to present as a unity the many aspects of my soul.' Well, pardon my ignorance: I always thought a performer's prime duty was to convey the essence of the composer, not of themselves.

In my last post I pointed out that he was criticising her for saying something she didn't say, so the whole discussion is moot anyway. But it did get me thinking about what this means, "to convey the essence of the composer, not of themselves". What is this "essence of composer", and how can it be distilled out from "essence of performer"? Of course, if you are performing Liszt's music then it should sound like his music. But why can't it also sound like yours? Are all the great pianists great because they are ego-free and give us just the composer's intentions? If so, why don't they all sound the same? Obviously they bring themselves into the equation. Calum MacDonald complains about "the self-regarding aspects" of Buniatishvili's disc, but is it possible to be any more than vague about where the dividing line between objectivity and subjectivity should be? On the same page of the magazine, Malcolm Hayes praises Garrick Ohlsson's "objective immensity" in Busoni's version of Liszt's "Ad nos" fantasia, and again this notion of "objective" makes me uneasy.
I found this apparently anonymous sculpture online and it too depicts Pope Innocent X. The eyebrows are more obvious, the face gaunter, and I even suspect this man might have a higher-pitched voice than the two above. He's quite different from Velazquez's pope. Is this because the sculptor was more objective or less objective? It seems a pointless question, doesn't it? Are Algardi's sculpture and/or Velazquez's portrait objective? Doesn't the portrait look a bit too Velazquez-y? Surely the answer is that Velazquez's painting isn't just "a portrait of Pope Innocent X", and it isn't just "a painting by Velazquez" - it's both, and we're fine with that.
And I think a lot of the time, critics are fine with that concept too. When it suits them, that is. For instance, a quick Google search gives us a quote from an Amazon review: "Once you hear Argerich's Liszt, nothing else will sound adequate". You may nod at such a sage assessment. Or you may grumble, paraphrasing Rosalyn Tureck, "Argerich can play Liszt her way; I play it Liszt's way". Alas, I fear the notion of "objective" performances is just one of those clichéd critical rules that get dragged into play after the critic has already made up his mind about what he's heard. Until I see evidence otherwise, I shall assume "objective" is shorthand for "the way I think it should go".

What does Calum MacDonald mean?

2011-07-12T08:04:00.006+01:00

BBC Music's Calum MacDonald gets snotty while reviewing Khatia Buniatishvili's new Liszt disc:

'I was always aware that my first recording had to be a portrait of Liszt,' says Khatia Buniatishvili in her stupefying booklet note. 'Only he would enable me to present as a unity the many aspects of my soul.' Well, pardon my ignorance: I always thought a performer's prime duty was to convey the essence of the composer, not of themselves.

Unless he's omitted some context from the Buniatishvili quote, MacDonald's arguing against a straw man here: she never said it was the performer's prime duty to convey the essence of themselves. I read this quote as "My first recording had to be a portrait of Liszt because he's the composer that speaks so closely to me personally". If there's a "me" in there, it's because, well, it's her recital, and pianos don't play themselves. So why did MacDonald bring the point up, especially since he goes on to give the performance 4 stars out of 5, thereby endorsing her approach?
Welcome to a special edition of "Did you even listen to the same CD?" with only one reviewer.
You see, we have "focused intensity" for the Liebestraum no.3, and we have a "mesmeric sense of inwardness" in the transcription of Bach's Prelude and fugue in A minor, and we have an "eloquently desolate account" of Lugubre gondola no.2.
But! "There's not a trace in this recital of Liszt's philosophical depth".
He can't seem to get past what he calls "the self-regarding aspects of the exercise". While conceding that "there's some dumbfounding playing", he contrasts this recital's "deranged conviction" with the "magisterial perfection" of Nelson Freire's new Liszt disc. But he does admit that "this is probably how they played in the 19th century".
Wait a second, didn't Liszt live in the 19th century?

More not enough information

2011-07-10T08:41:00.002+01:00

How nice! An email from Amazon.co.uk especially for me!

Since you like classical music, we thought you might be interested in the free EMI Classics MP3 sampler we have available until the end of July.

Hey wow, I do like classical music! But of course I live in Ireland so I can't follow through on this like by actually paying to download some of it from Amazon. This post isn't about geographical restrictions, though. This is about:
Oh noes! The track listing does not provide the names of the composers!
This is indeed very shoddy, but unfortunately par for the course for sites that don't specialise in classical. Three outraged Amazon customers have dragged the sampler's average rating down to 2 stars, which is quite impressive for a freebie featuring good musicians in critically well-received performances.

This is absolutely unprofessional and absolutely useless. Who is the target audience? Those who know nothing about music? This will not help them.

says reviewer Tatiana Rybina.
So our reviewers helpfully provide full composer details. Oh, no, wait, they don't. "This will not help them" cuts both ways, I suppose.
Beethoven. Handel. JS Bach. Beethoven. Schumann. Brahms. Chopin. Grieg.
How hard was that?

Not enough information

2011-07-09T08:38:00.002+01:00

Why do record companies do this? I was in Tower Records yesterday, browsing the new releases, and came across a 10-disc box set of French baroque from Warner called "Court of the Sun King". Looks interesting, but who's performing on it? They do not say. At all. Is this not useful, or even essential, information? Or are we, because it's a cheap box set, not expected to care? The blurb accompanying the disc (on Presto's site) is rather more helpful: "classic [Erato] recordings from the 1960s and 70s, featuring French musicians and ensembles such as Jean-François Paillard, Louis Martini and Marie-Claire Alain". How hard would it have been to stick this information somewhere on the box?
Meanwhile, countertenor Daniel Taylor has a new album out called "Shakespeare: Come again sweet love", which as you might expect gives us English songs and madrigals. The track listing does not provide the names of the composers. We are told this is music by "some of the great masters of the Renaissance period, including Purcell, Dowland and Gibbons". The knowledgeable buyer will probably have a reasonable idea of what's what, but wouldn't it be nice to know exactly what you're buying before you buy it?

Won't someone not think of the children?

2011-07-06T13:15:00.003+01:00

Allow me to weigh in on the ongoing furore over the cancellation of the community opera Beached, which, according to a BBC News report, "featured a gay character and 400 school children". That is not a full description of the opera, but in news terms it is all that counts. In fact Beached is described by its librettist Lee Hall as "a comedy about tolerance and inclusiveness". Bay Primary School, Bridlington, head teacher Emma Hobbs is showing her tolerance and inclusivity by withdrawing 300 performers at the last minute because of "the language and the tone of the scene in question", and most certainly not because the main character is gay. What is Hobbs' only concern in this matter? Why, "The emotional wellbeing of our children", of course. Phew, thank goodness for that.
She clarifies: "I have made the decision that our 4 to 11-year-old children have the right to be protected from offensive language and to be able to learn about the impact of upsetting insults in the appropriate manner". I'm not sure what sort of 4- to 11-year-old children they've got in Bridlington, but if they're like ordinary children then probably the best way to protect them from offensive language is to gag them. The offensive language in question is, apparently, "queer". You will be relieved (if that's the word) to hear that Lee Hall was already persuaded to remove the word "pee-pee" from the libretto. What the hell sort of head teacher is concerned about the emotional wellbeing of children but won't let them hear the word "pee-pee"? That would make a four-year-old's night, for goodness' sake!
But what about learning "about the impact of upsetting insults in the appropriate manner"? I believe Head Teacher Hobbs is saying that it is inappropriate for children to see a sympathetic character deal maturely with verbal abuse. Maybe that's not what she's saying. What is she saying? I notice that there is a scene in the opera where the protagonist's son is swept out to sea. Is an opera the appropriate manner in which to learn about safe swimming? Let me stress that I am not hydrophobic, and my comments should not be interpreted as such.

Fricsay's Beethoven 5

2011-06-30T10:15:00.007+01:00

I've been listening to Ferenc Fricsay's 1961 recording of Beethoven's Fifth with the Berlin Phil, and by gosh it is slow. How slow is it? The second movement is more than 13 minutes long, is how slow. It's common to see it done in less than 9.
Let's bring in someone with more expertise. Here's Edward Greenfield's review in the February 1963 issue of Gramophone:

I can only assume DGG have decided to issue this now just to show how superbly responsive the Berlin Philharmonic is to the most hair-raisingly contrasted demands. Where Karajan in the new complete cycle is all strength and light, Fricsay is slow and heavy. Klemperer for one can make such speeds as these sound convincing and even inevitable. But even Klemperer comes nowhere near Fricsay in his speed for the slow movement.
To illustrate with statistics, Fricsay takes no less than 87 seconds by my reckoning for the first subject to bar 22. Karajan in his new version takes 53 seconds for the same passage, and both Klemperer's versions come closer to Karajan than Fricsay-60 seconds and 62 seconds respectively. Fricsay's speed is just grotesque, with no thought for the marking con mote, and so it is again in the Scherzo. The double-bass passage at the beginning of the Trio has been likened to the lumbering of elephants, but under Fricsay that is the movement's most impressive passage, and it is the rest which is elephantine. The outer movements, too, are very much on the slow side, but there simple massiveness and orchestral efficiency help to make some amends. But not only are the basic speeds slow, Fricsay tends to drag still further with exaggerated rallentandos and pauses. The recording is dim and cloudy by comparison with that given to Karajan. A depressing issue, though for once there can be little complaint about the Fifth taking two whole sides: this must be quite the longest version ever put out.

So yes, it's slow. Very slow. But depressing? I disagree. What the slow movement has a lot of is sadness, and I also hear a dignified stoicism. Perhaps Edward Greenfield didn't know when he was writing his review that Fricsay was dying of cancer (he died on February 20, 1963, aged 48). Perhaps the nature of the slow movement has nothing to do with Fricsay's illness, but it's hard now not to make a connection. Certainly the performance makes more sense that way, if not as the conductor's personal tragedy then something more universal, to see it more in the mould of the Eroica's slow movement - or, in places, prefiguring the rapt nature of the Ninth's. Otherwise, the symphony doesn't really have a slow movement, only a "relatively slow" movement.
The Scherzo is rather slow too. It's not a Scherzo. But if we're already accepting the darkness of this reading of the symphony, well then here's more of the dark. The Trio is certainly lighter, but that doesn't last especially long. Dubbing the rest of the movement "elephantine" rather misses the tensile strength of the music that comes after the Trio.
Ironically, the last movement is shorter than usual, but that's because he's left out the repeat. Whereas in your typical reading the battle's been won by the time the fourth movement starts, with Fricsay there seems to be some lingering doubt - not much, but the triumph's not quite as clearcut. The climactic bit before the return to the third-movement material has more than a hint of menace about it. But we do win out in the end; again, the rest of the Finale is a bit slower than others, and you might at this stage hope for a little more release. But there's glory here, and the payoff is worth it, because by dragging out the final chords Fricsay makes the ending not just fun but funny, really emphasising the "I'm finished - no, I'm not finished!" aspect. I doubt if he conducted this with a twinkle in his eye, yet there's a suggestion that he's just daring you to applaud too soon.
I must point out here that I came to this recording with no preconceptions at all about it or Fricsay; I was instantly struck by its slowness, and yet also very quickly convinced that this all made sense. Perhaps I was caught on a good day; maybe a week earlier I'd have dismissed it as "grotesque". But that is part of a larger thesis about criticism and perception that can be saved for some other time. Our thoughts for today are two: first, Fricsay's Beethoven 5 is really different but really good, and second, I wonder what he'd have sounded like in Mahler's symphonies?

(The above image, by the way, is from one of those here-are-lots-of-recordings blogs, Sentidos. If the transfer is from the original 1961 LP, then next year it will be perfectly legal in Europe to download the transfer.)

About Cardiff

2011-06-24T10:39:00.002+01:00

Valentina Naforniţă won the Cardiff Singer of the World last Sunday, so she had better get used to people spelling her name without those diacritics at the end. I admit to being a bit disappointed she won it, or rather that somebody else didn't win it, but I realised subsequently that what put me off her somewhat was her acting style, with arms and face in constant motion. When I just listen, I'm much more impressed. Andrei Bondarenko, who won the Song Prize and was my favourite, does most of his expression with his eyes; actually in comic arias he's reminiscent of a young Michael Palin. His final piece in the Song Prize final - the last song in Sviridov's Russia Cast Adrift - was a real discovery for me, a right barnstormer for the pianist.

Other favourites for me were Máire Flavin - I expect to be seeing her name show up in recordings of baroque operas and the like - and Olesya Petrova, who I thought might win in the final. A couple of other highlights were Wang Lifu's impassioned, despairing performance of Mahler's "Der Tamboursg'sell" and Hye Jung Lee's spectacular "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung" from Adams's Nixon in China, which starts at about the 7-minute mark below:

This just really annoys me

2011-06-21T18:42:00.002+01:00

We interrupt normal Les Introuvables de Nereffid programming to bring you some casual bigotry. Over on Bloomberg View, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about a retired airline pilot who died when he tried to save his son from drowning in an 8-foot-deep septic tank. It was a post for Father's Day, you understand. As it happens, the man was a devout Catholic. So far, all very human-interest and a touching story of what a parent will do to protect their child. Then Goldberg tosses this out:

I’m reasonably sure an atheist would sacrifice his life for his child. But I also don’t doubt that Thomas Vander Woude’s powerful faith cleared the path into the tank. A person who has an articulated calling, who believes in something larger than himself, could more immediately accept the gravity of the moment.

For fuck's sake. He's reasonably sure an atheist would sacrifice his life for his child? He's not certain, of course. I mean, atheists, you know... it takes them that little bit longer to accept the gravity of the moment.
Leaving aside the absurdity of this last claim - might not an atheist regard death as rather more significant if there's no happy-ever-after afterlife? - what we have here is the implication that atheists are pretty much by definition lacking a certain morality, or as Cardinal Murphy O'Connor so obnoxiously put it recently, "not fully human".
A subtle piece of hate-speech. I don't know if Goldberg or others who use this kind of language even realise how contemptible it is. Or am I giving too much benefit-of-doubt? Commenting on Goldberg's post, I suggested that the atheist/religious comparison could be replaced with (as an example) a Jew/Christian one, to clarify how unpleasant it sounds.
As for whether atheists make good parents... I'm reasonably sure an atheist wouldn't have his son tortured and executed in order to save the world from a punishment that he himself devised.

A spelling error

2011-06-17T16:44:00.004+01:00

I do apologize. In the previous post I misspelled Petroc Trelawny's name. And in the course of confirming this, I discovered that the first couple of pages of a Google Image search for "Trelawney" will give you nothing but variations of the one here.
Oh dear. Now I have contributed to the hype over the final Harry Potter film.

Drama in Cardiff

2011-06-16T07:01:00.003+01:00

I've been making a proper effort to catch this year's Cardiff Singer of the World - sorry, BBC Cardiff Singer of the World - on TV and radio.
On BBC Four, they've made the decision that this is a sort of highbrow X Factor, while accepting that you can't really do anything to interfere with the performances themselves. So in the thrilling buildup we get things like shots of the singers in a group, with a slow zoom followed by a sudden, rapid zoom. You know the one - achieved not with a camera but in the editing room afterwards, so it's jerky. They even add a "whoosh" sound effect so that the visually impaired will know the editor is doing amazing things. And they get each of the contestants and judges to pose so they can swirl the camera at them while they look menacing, lovable, or just perplexed, all the while accompanied by extremely dramatic music, so dramatic that you're half expecting one of them to be Russell Crowe. So dramatic that you might think that at some point in the program David Warner's going to get decapitated by a sheet of glass. I suppose the program makers do have to commission new music for the occasion, but if you want operatic-sounding music for a song contest, well, you could do worse than model yourself on Wagner. He could tell the difference between a song contest and the siege of Minas Tirith.
Elsewhere, presentation descends to the banal. In an effort to, I don't know, make the contestants seem more human or something, we get little vignettes in which presenter Josie d'Arby hangs around with each singer and asks them complicated questions like whether winning the competition would be important for them. This kind of interviewing, or perhaps more accurately this way of editing and presenting an interview, seems to be aimed at viewers who lack all empathy with the person being interviewed and need to hear the bleeding obvious spelled out. It also tends to infect Petroc Trelawney's brief conversations with judges.
Trelawney: Reknowned Swedish baritone Håkan Hagegård, do the judges have to make tough choices when deciding whom to declare the winner?
Hagegård: What do you think, you gobshite?
Then there's the awful bit where, after the singer has walked off and Trelawney asks one of his guests something, we quickly go backstage to where d'Arby finds out how the singer is feeling. You may be fascinated to know that their feelings tend towards being pleased with how it went, some relief, perhaps a few little things went wrong but overall they're happy. As you would imagine, but it's nice to be told directly, isn't it? Otherwise you'd go to bed that night wondering about it. In fairness the singers haven't yet told d'Arby to fuck off and leave them alone, not even Olga Kindler of Switzerland, who forgot where she was in her aria from Aida.
You just know that somewhere in the BBC was a producer desperate to get footage of Kiri Te Kanawa swearing at Kindler and saying "You're fired!"
Are there any good things about the show? Yes. The music, and the singing.

Let's Televise the Proms!

2011-06-13T12:13:00.005+01:00

I have sent in a patent application for a FUN new game called "Let's Televise the Proms!"

Each player is provided with a full Proms schedule and must allocate a specified number of concerts for showing on BBC television. Players agree in advance how many concerts are broadcast and how many of those can be live. Once the broadcast schedule is complete, players judge each others' work, awarding points based on pre-agreed criteria. Players must try to promote classical music to a wider audience while also satisfying the existing population of classical lovers. Customise the game to prioritise one over the other! In one version, give extra points for managing to show a Prom on BBC One or BBC Three; in another, take them away! Appearances by Wolfgang Rihm and Petroc Trelawney can be scored accordingly.
For two or more players. Age 8 and up, as in "Jesus, who designed this schedule? An eight year old?"

The BBC loses major points for not showing the September 2 Prom, Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra performing Mahler and Liszt. It is my birthday. I demand Mahler and Liszt on the telly for my birthday. I pay the TV license, you know. OK, maybe not the British one. (Yes, obviously we can listen to the radio transmission. It's not the same though.) They are showing Roger Norrington's Mahler 9, though. I'm sure BBC switchboard personnel are to be taught how to respond to the anticipated tens of thousands of complaints about the orchestra's lack of vibrato. What else? Ooh, Tim Minchin in a Comedy Prom. No doubt it'll be broadcast while I'm on my holidays, like the Sondheim one last year. And I'll miss the Grainger one also, buggerit. See? This is why we need board games that allow us to control the universe.

Still scratching your head over the picture above? Simple! It's a shot from Apocalypse Now, with Chief Phillips played by Albert Hall.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part V

2011-06-09T10:48:00.002+01:00

You never know, I might get these done in time for next year's awards.

This is the Solo Vocal and Choral categories - same as before, one winner and four runners-up in each.

Two ways of serving breakfast

2011-06-02T19:23:00.003+01:00

I found myself listening to breakfast-time radio for the first time in a long time this morning, and by coincidence in a short space of time both BBC Radio 3 and RTÉ Lyric FM played excerpts from Orff's Carmina Burana.
Wait, let's break off there for another pun, this time courtesy of Victor Lewis Smith on the telly many years ago:

You say Carm-ee-na, I say Carm-eye-na,
You say Bur-ah-na, I say Bur-ay-na,
Carm-ee-na Bur-ah-na,
Carm-eye-na Bur-ay-na,
Let's call the whole thing Orff.

Anyway, over on BBC Radio 3, Rob Cowan played us the orchestra-only "Tanz" followed by "Floret silva nobilis", then informed us it was the Eugen Jochum/Deutsche Oper Berlin recording. Perfectly normal classical radio presenter behavior. Not long before that, Marty Whelan on Lyric had given us "O Fortuna" prior to noting how it gets used a lot on X Factor and how some people say Simon Cowell has had work done and... that was the point I switched over to BBC, actually.
Radio 3 may have dumbed down in recent years but if you want really dumb, then Marty's your man.

A Sibelius pun

2011-06-02T16:08:00.006+01:00

A nice one from Richard A. Kaplan in Fanfare. Reviewing a recording of Sibelius's String quartet and a Piano quintet in G minor from 1890 by Martin Roscoe and the Coull Quartet (on Somm), he remarks that the quintet, a student work, shows how Sibelius hadn't yet mastered large-scale musical form:

It's a long way to Tapiola.

Alert: Weinberg's The Portrait

2011-05-30T17:56:00.002+01:00

Having enthused about Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Third Symphony, I'm obliged to remark that his opera The Portrait was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday, in a performance by Opera North. You have five days left to listen again. I shall be doing something involving my computer's phones and mic sockets, in order to listen at my leisure.

BRITs out!

2011-05-30T14:57:00.003+01:00

We watched this year's Classical BRIT Awards - oops, sorry, the Classic BRIT Awards - last night, which is always good for a bout of head scratching. It is, of course, an industry shindig, so it makes for a fascinating clash of quantity and quality. We turned on during a performance from Les Misérables, and no, I don't mean Arthur Honegger's score for the 1934 film version. How much value you get out of the Classic BRIT Awards really depends on your definition of "classical" (or "classic"). For instance, how many self-respecting readers of Gramophone would be able to identify the four highly patriotic (or is it disrespectful?) women in the picture here? (Answers on a postcard please to "Nereffid's Identify A Photo Of The Group All Angels Competition".) Alternatively, how many self-respecting listeners to Classic FM would have been able to identify Manfred Eicher among the assembled guests? (It was pretty easy actually - the ECM table was placed in the far distance, sillhouetted against a cloudy dusk sky.)
Yes, a splendid event, capped by the Duchess of Cornwall and Virginia McKenna OBE accepting the posthumous award for John Barry OBE, before Dame Shirley Bassey sang one of his songs. We unlettered commoners looked on in awe. What else? Arvo Pärt won Composer of the Year, but he was trumped by Il Divo, who won Artist of the Decade. Katherine Jenkins showed that she's a little too nice to sing the Chanson bohème from Carmen. Ann-Sophie Mutter played the least Baroque-sounding Vivaldi ever. John Suchet called Eric Whitacre a cunt. André Rieu won something. I made up one of those. You know what, the most interesting portion of the night was when I turned the sound off and spent a few minutes telling Mrs Nereffid what happened in last week's The Shadow Line.
"Now. Call him now."
Jesus Christ.

Another bullet dodged

2011-05-21T08:00:00.002+01:00

So now eMusic welcomes EMI to its bosom. But only in the USA. Phew! The days of ridiculously cheap music are not yet over. Customer Service is apologetic:

Another thing to point out this addition is for members that reside in the US. I know members in the UK, EU or Canada reading this are not happy to read this part. I understand how frustrating this is that the US is getting all the content you may want. I can confirm eMusic is working hard to bring the majors outside of the US. It’s not an easy task to achieve, but we are making some progress.

Uh, yeah, thanks guys. Knock yourselves out trying to double or triple the price I pay for music.

Ewig... Ewig...

2011-05-18T10:42:00.004+01:00

I took this photo in late May 2001. Visiting Mahler's grave wasn't a "pilgrimage", more a way of paying my respects to an individual who, more than anyone else I've never met, has had a profound positive impact on my well-being. Around the world today (or at least in those parts of it that care about Western art music) there will be concerts and other events in honour of this man who for many was a genius and for others just the composer of a bunch of overlong and overwrought symphonies. I don't do reverence very well, and I'm uncomfortable about the cult of Mahler. There's a lesson to be learned from his grave: he's not in the Central Cemetry of Vienna with a monument next to Beethoven, Schubert et al. Instead you must go to a quiet suburb and find this unassuming stone - "Any who come to look for me will know who I was, and the rest do not need to know", to quote from Alma Mahler's book. There's no reason to stand in awe; there's not much room for many people to gather there. Perhaps Mahler's symphonies contain the world, but they speak to me on a personal level. So tonight when others are partaking in communal celebrations that for some may very well border on an act of worship, I'll be doing what I did in Grinzing a decade ago: pause for a while, listen privately to Mahler's music, say a quiet thank you, and move on.

He alighted from his horse and offered his friend the drink of farewell.
He asked him where he was going
And why it had to be so.
He spoke, his voice was muffled:
My friend,
Fortune has not been kind to me in this world!
Where do I go? I go to wander in the mountains.
I seek rest for my lonely heart!
I wander to my homeland, my resting-place.
I will never again roam in the far distance.
My heart is still and awaits its hour!

Everywhere the dear earth
Blossoms in spring and grows green again!
Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright blue!
Forever... forever...

Azerbaijan's Eurovision

2011-05-15T07:24:00.002+01:00

I'm not saying Jedward should have won the competition, in fact I'm not saying anyone should have won it. Well, okay, maybe the Moldovan ska-rap coneheads. But I've heard Azerbaijan's winning entry three times now, and I still can't remember a single note. That's not a good sign.

Alina and Cédric

2011-05-14T07:44:00.001+01:00

Alina Ibragimova just seems to be saying to us, "I know! He does, doesn't he?"

Some rules for buying CDs

2011-05-12T12:27:00.000+01:00

So I have this list, several hundred items long, of significant or noticeable gaps in my music collection. Things I somehow never got round to; lots of full operas, for example, and Mozart piano concertos, and Dvorak symphonies, and many many bits and pieces such as - picking the first one I set my eyes on - Holst's St Paul's Suite. The list is of CDs, not compositions, though, as I've painstakingly picked out just a single recording in each case. This means that when I go on a buying trip I'll be eliminating the fretting about "is this version a good one?" and also I'll be focusing on the list and that should eliminate excessive spending. In theory.
The easiest way to get everything on the list is to download it all illegally, but obviously that's a non-starter for ethical reasons. Other strategies that involve money changing hands also have some personal ethical aspects to consider. For instance, I still prefer CDs to downloads, blinkered conservative that I am, so if I can buy a CD instead of a download I'll do that. Moreover, I still like to browse CD shelves, so if I can buy from an actual high-street shop, all the better. And I prefer to buy from people who care about what they're selling. I'm not vastly rich, though, so the relative costs come into play. So there are some ground rules.
- Give the high-street retailer a chance first. If you live on the island of Ireland this means Tower Records in Dublin. As far as I'm aware there isn't any other shop that makes a genuine effort to stock classical CDs. Unfortunately Tower's prices are kinda high.
- Then there's the second-hand places, of which there's a small number in Dublin. Well, OK, only Chapters, which doesn't have very much; the other places might occasionally get a good classical disc in. I regard buying CDs in these shops as an act of liberation, saving the album from years of gathering dust. Of course the artists and labels don't get any money if you buy a second-hand CD, but on the plus side you're not supporting terrorists, either. Or have I misunderstood the thrust of anti-piracy adverts?
- Now let's go with the mail-order sites, like MDT, Presto, Crotchet, and Europadisc. Go with these specialist stores over Amazon if you can, though Amazon is tempting. Amazon Marketplace can be very tempting, especially with second-hand discs, although the price wars make you stop and think. A firm called Zoverstock undercuts the cheapest by one penny, no matter what the cheapest is. Good business practice for Zoverstock, but it's like buying from Tesco then. Give some others a chance.
- Download sites. iTunes doesn't need my money. Amazon doesn't want my money (well, it probably does, but it's not allowed take it). Qobuz takes my money but probably shouldn't. 7digital wants my money but it's usually more expensive than Qobuz and doesn't even list "classical" as one of its genre tags, the bollixes. Passionato wants way more of my money than I'm prepared to part with. If the record label offers competitive prices (Hyperion, for instance) then go with the label's site.
- Oh yes, I forgot eMusic. Tracks still cost me less than 20 cents each, which means it's extremely rare for me to find anything on eMusic that could be obtained cheaper elsewhere.

When I have bought everything on the list, what will happen then? I will make another list.

Weinberg's Third Symphony

2011-05-11T12:01:00.002+01:00

Weinberg: Symphony no.3; The Golden Key suite no.4
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Thord Svedlund
[Chandos]

Out of nowhere appears a symphony that I am happy to describe immediately as one of my all-time favourites. I've heard and liked a few Weinberg releases, not least of which was the recent CPO album of piano music performed by Elisaveta Blumina - the 3 Children's Notebooks and first piano sonata. Svedlund and Gothenburg have previously recorded 2 other Weinberg discs for Chandos; I've heard the one with several concertos on it, and really liked that too. The official shorthand description of Weinberg is "he's kind-of a Polish Shostakovich, but it's not that straightforward because they influenced each other". So I am predisposed to think that any given Weinberg album could be a good 'un, but I wasn't prepared for how much I'd like his Symphony no.3. It didn't take long: the opening bars are reminiscent of Schubert's 8th with their scurrying strings, overlaid by a sinuous, yes, kind-of-Shostakovich-like, melody in the winds. It's an instant hook, I think, actually rather like you might get in the theme music for some superior thriller: it promises a lot. Then, when you think the music might turn into a, yes, kind-of-Shostakovich-like, extended slow introduction, it quickly becomes something else entirely, and we're given a rather balmy tune of the sort you might expect from Malcolm Arnold, then after a few minutes there's some rather martial music; and so on. This is the sort of symphony I love - full of incident, little hooks and quirks, clever and just-right bits of odd or unexpected orchestration, some sort of narrative. I should point out here that the symphony was originally composed in 1949-50, at a time when Weinberg and all other Soviet composers were under strict orders to Not Be Formalist; Weinberg took this imposition as an opportunity to explore the use of folk music in a symphony. The work nevertheless didn't get performed, possibly because of official pressure, and Weinberg revised it a decade later so that it received its premiere in 1960. (So Weinberg's 3rd was composed between Shostakovich's 9th and 10th symphonies, and revised between his 11th and 12th.)
The second movement is marked Allegro giocoso and that's a good description of it, a jolly affair with lots of dancing. If we're playing spot-the-things-it-reminds-me-of (very different from spot-the-influences, you understand) then I'd put this closer to Mahler's bumptious scherzos than to Shostakovich's more blackly humourous ones. The third movement is an Adagio, and were it somehow to become known to the world as "Weinberg's Adagio" this would be no bad thing; it's another folk-inflected movement, sedate and beautiful but building to a dark climax. Will I hear anything lovelier this year? And finally the finale, which kicks off with swaggering, martial music that's, oh all right, kind-of-Shostakovich-like but again wanders off into Mahler territory, such as the shaky and possibly drunken dance episode about two minutes in. Things build to a near-cataclysm but then there's an amazing interruption when the winds take over and we drift off into reverie - before the martial swagger returns and the symphony comes to a slightly unexpectedly quick end that somehow manages to suggest "To be continued".
The album also comes with the last of the 4 suites of music Weinberg produced from his 1954-55 ballet The Golden Key. This is light stuff, what you might expect from a mid-century Russian fairy-tale ballet, I suppose. Nicely done, but very much eclipsed by the symphony. If you pay an album price, as opposed to per-track like I did via eMusic, then you might be annoyed to discover you've got less than 50 minutes of music on the disc. But I would say the symphony's worth it. "Want List material", as they say in Fanfare.

Nereffid vs Mahler 8: More Wayfaring

2011-05-08T16:54:00.006+01:00

On, at last, to the orchestral recordings of Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen. The first one I listened to was Brigitte Fassbaender, Deutsches SO Berlin/Riccardo Chailly (Decca), and hearing it right after several piano versions required quite an adjustment. In fact I had a few doubts about whether the orchestral version was a good idea. Those stemmed, essentially, from the fact that your orchestra obviously has a much broader sound palette than your piano and I initially felt there was a little too much contrast between songs to produce a fully coherent cycle. Nonsense, of course, and nothing more than a reminder to have one's correct listening ears on. That said, this particular performance is high on contrast anyway, thanks to the high drama of Fassbaender's reading; even in the first song, the cheerful second verse is a world away from the sorrowful first - and then the third comes back to the start. I noted at the time "You wonder how she could go on, frankly", but on she goes to a joyful "Ging heut' morgen" that eventually sinks into sadness, and then a variously harsh, mysterious, and sinister "Ich hab' ein gluhend Messer". As for the final song, Fassbaender doesn't seem as accepting of her fate as the singers I've listened to earlier. In the end she goes peacefully, but with a sense of resignation - a much darker ending than I've heard before. Overall, Fassbaender and Chailly's approach to the cycle doesn't quite match what I like to get out of it, but it still impresses.
Second is Thomas Allen, English Chamber Orchestra/Jeffrey Tate (EMI). My first impression here was that there was a rather Wotanish sound to Allen's performance (though he hasn't done much Wagner, as far as I know) - which is to say, quite a bit of dramatic heft, and I felt there was a certain sense of detachment in the third verse (somewhat like Christoph Pregardien's performance) that in this case came across as a sort of godlike commentator on the situation rather than one personally involved. The music flows well here, but the sound of the recording isn't great, and in the second verse Allen's voice rather disappears, like he's up a tree! Again in the pastoral second song I hear a patriarchal quality to the voice, making the song sound like something from Haydn's Creation. But I noted "He does a lovely 'nimmer'" towards the end. There's a big dramatic contrast as we go to the third song, but the transition works well. Mrs Nereffid described the overall feeling of this one as "futile anger", while I heard Wotan returning for the last line. "Die zwei blauen Augen" has a valedictory start, and the second verse has a touch of hope as he sets off on his journey. Later he's quite sad but not despairing, and he drifts off at the end, like he has no more say in the matter. The orchestral coda is wistful. It's a shame about the recorded sound in this performance (I have it on a HMV Classics release; maybe there's another issue that sounds better), because Allen seems in fine voice; in fairness, though, interpretively I would wish for more.
Unfortunately Bernadette Greevy, NSO Ireland/János Fürst don't provide a huge amount of interpretation either. Not that I don't like the performance - I like her voice - but I could do with more characterization. The second song feels too slow, the third seems a little tepid, and I'm not convinced by the ending of the fourth, which seems more like enunciation of the words rather than anything deeper. In the olden days before cheap downloads, you could say that this was good value at the Naxos price without committing yourself to an actual recommendation. But Fassbaender wins easily in a direct comparison.
To be continued...

It was 102 years ago, for heaven's sake!

2011-05-08T08:38:00.006+01:00

I do try to broaden my musical horizons when I can, but I must admit that in the absence of tonality this can often end in disappointment. Perhaps I should some day sit down and work out what exactly it is that I respond to, but I suppose ultimately it's just basic ideas like pattern, progression, sound-world, emotion. Tonality provides an anchor that makes it easier to appreciate the first two of those. This week I've set myself the task of listening to, and hopefully getting some sort of handle on, Arnold Schoenberg's piano music, as performed on a DG disc by Maurizio Pollini. If I fail to get anything out of it, well, perhaps I'm in good company, following Gregor Willmes' sleeve note:

It is a conspicuous fact that the majority of 20th-century pianists rarely if ever played the music of their time. Most members of their guild could not come to grips with Arnold Schoenberg's break with tonality - the culminating point heralded by his Three Piano Pieces op.11. Of the two handfuls of pianists who achieved world fame in the last century, hardly a single one ventured an approach to Schoenberg's music. Who would ever think to associate the names of Horowitz, Rubinstein or Argerich with the Second Viennese School?... Only two major pianists committed to disc Schoenberg's entire output for solo piano: Glenn Gould and Maurizio Pollini.

Schoenberg's op.11 was written in 1909 and yet we still use the phrase "modern music" to describe, or indeed dismiss, such compositions. That was also the year of Mahler's 9th symphony, Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto, and Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony. Yes, I will take RVW over Schoenberg, thank you. But I have made some progress: here's Pollini playing the second of Schoenberg's op.11 pieces, as the composer waves bye-bye to tonality but throws us a lifeline in the form of a bass ostinato.

O fearful crags...

2011-05-05T20:56:00.002+01:00

Getting a lot of play this week: Boris Christoff sings the Song of the Viking Guest (or the Varangian Guest, if you like) from Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko.

Our cultural frames of reference are different

2011-05-01T10:29:00.006+01:00

One man's à propos comparison is another man's pretentious twaddle, I suppose.

From Stephen Pruslin's review in International Record Review of the new Claudio Abbado/Orchestra Mozart recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos:

For me, Abbado's treatment of all six concertos evokes the three Eumenides who give the final tragedy of Aeschylus's Oresteia its name, and whose fearsome, destructive presence is transformed, reconciled with, and absorbed into the overall body politic at the very end of the trilogy. In those terms, Abbado's art here is one of inclusiveness and the synthesis of opposites.

To which my only response is:

Big in Taiwan

2011-04-27T15:17:00.003+01:00

Well, hello to all the users of Plurk.com! A sudden spike in page views can be traced to a bunch of people having a look at my "Did you even listen to the same CD?" series.
But I have no idea why.
Anyone out there want to let me know? Comments are open...

Tre Bassi; Spark

2011-04-27T09:45:00.004+01:00

A couple of off-the-beaten track releases from my recent listening:

"De Profundis"
Tre Bassi; Hille Perl; Lee Santana; Michel Godard
[Carpe Diem]

The first impressive thing about this album is its opening: you don't know what century you're in, or what continent. This is the sound of the serpent, in fact, as played by Michel Godard, and when a bass voice begins to chant something Latin you might feel we're straying into Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble territory, but we're not quite. Tre Bassi is a group of, well, three basses. How much repertoire there is for this combination I'm not sure, but this collection combines music from rather unknown 17th-century composers (Ebner, Benevolo, Grandi, Mazák, Cazzati, Cifra, Gletle, Eisenheut) with some new compositions by Godard and Lee Santana. It's a rather bizarre mix -- with texts ranging from an Ave Maria to Santana's quirky "Mr. Ed": "Skinner, Hemingway, Ogden Nash/smashing each others' balls on a billiard table/somewhere in your imaginary tropic of cancer/they are ruminating forth in the Devils Triangle/of Mary Tyler Moore/If you can't stand this,/who can?/You can't" -- but somehow it works because the sound-world remains the same throughout. This is the sort of album you can become very fond of. I think the term "Nereffid bait" is necessary. It's also my first exposure to the German label Carpe Diem, which has something of an ECM New Series vibe though without the expectation that you will genuflect in the presence of their awesomeness. Samples of "De Profundis" here.

"Downtown Illusions"
Spark
[Ars Produktion]

This quintet is, according to its own web site, "designing a new classical style, smashing the boundaries between various genres". I suppose the big novelty here is that along with violin, cello, and piano Spark brings two recorders. That in itself requires that the band do a lot of arranging of existing works and commission new music, and that's what we get on their debut album, which is a lot of fun. It kicks off with the hard-driving Harde Puntjes by "Dutch enfant terrible" Chiel Meijering and indeed ends (2 "bonus tracks" aside) the same way, with the piece now accompanied by a human beatbox; along the way we get a couple of pieces from Michael Nyman's Wonderland score, some works by contemporary composers I admit to never having heard of, plus Fauré, Bach, and Vivaldi. "Spark" is a most appropriate name, as there's great vitality and humour all over the album. The group has a bunch of videos up on Youtube so you can hear and see for yourself.
Here they are performing "Jack" by Michael Nyman (have you seen Michael Winterbottom's film Wonderland? You must).

(Those are Paetzold bass recorders, by the way)

That silver moon has never been so unpopular

2011-04-25T19:22:00.003+01:00

This was going to be a thrilling live-blogging event covering the final stages of the Classic FM Hall of Fame, but then I had to cook the dinner and eat it and play several games of Uno and get the kids ready for bed and read Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's The Wolves in the Walls. So instead you get a post-Hall of Fame analysis. Actually as I write this, I'm listening live to the #1 entry, and the first thing I must say is that the audio on Classic FM's Internet radio player is crappy. It doesn't do the music any favours, at any rate.
And the shocking and incredible news is that RVW's lark has finally descended, to be replaced at the top by "Rach 2" as we sophisticated types call it. The same 10 pieces are in the Top 10 as last year, though in a slightly different order. The more interesting story of this year's HoF is how there was a small invasion of the chart by some pieces for brass band, namely Simon Dobson's Penlee (#106), Gustav Holst's A Moorside Suite (#118), Eric Ball's Resurgam (#202), and Ray Steadman-Allen's The Lord is King (#263). I haven't heard (of) any of these except the Holst. These unusual entries were apparently part of a concerted campaign - the sort of thing that got Malcolm Arnold's Padstow Lifeboat into last year's charts (and it vanished without trace this year).
Were there campaigns supporting other pieces, or did they just happen to do better this year than ever before? Is there any significance to Piazzolla's Libertango zooming up to #167? Or Tchaikovsky's Piano concerto no.2 or Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé becoming much more popular than ever before? We could thank the movie Black Swan for the highest-ever position of Swan Lake, but is there any particular reason why Beethoven's Für Elise, Rossini's William Tell overture, or Saint-Saens' Danse macabre are doing better this year?
Why, for that matter, has Dvorak's Rusalka fallen to an all-time low at #237? Beethoven's Romance no.2 was once #62 on the chart; now it's #235. Why? Why? For God's sake, why?

Saucy maid leads to apocalypse

2011-04-25T13:00:00.003+01:00

Here's something I just learned about Bruckner's symphonies: they all have names. I was under the impression that the Fourth went by the nickname "Romantic" and you might designate the Ninth the "Unfinished" but that was as far as it went. I haven't seen any other titles on any of the recordings I own. But no, I'm ripping a recording of the First and here it is in Windows Media Player: "The Saucy Maid". LOL srsly? as Bruckner himself might have said.
Well, it turns out Bruckner did refer to his Symphony no.1 as "das kecke Beserl" which does indeed mean "the saucy maid", but it's not like it's the official title or anything and I don't think anyone's going to mistake this music for Rossini or Offenbach.
Then I try ripping the Second symphony and it turns out this one is called "Symphony of Pauses". Hmm, not bad. As the notes to Daniel Barenboim's recording on Elatus put it, "The orchestra falls silent with highly suspicious frequency".
So obviously now I have to know has everything been given a title? Google leads me to a discussion on Talk Classical, and there they all are:
Saucy Maid; Symphony of Pauses; Wagner; Romantic; Tragic; Philosophic; Lyric; Apocalyptic; Unfinished.
Poor Bruckner. Bad enough that nobody knows which editions of his symphonies to perform, but he also gets lumbered with a bunch of lame titles he didn't ask for. Try doing that to Beethoven and see how long you'd last.

Obligatory Easter-related Youtube video

2011-04-23T15:31:00.006+01:00

Copyright extension watch

2011-04-21T19:35:00.002+01:00

MEP Christian Engström posted on his blog yesterday:

I have just tabled a request signed by 41 Members of the European Parliament to review the Parliament’s previous decision to extend the copyright term for music recordings from 50 to 70 years. The MEPs who signed represented most of the different political groups in the Parliament.
It was the previous Parliament that decided it wanted such an extension in April 2009, but since we now have a new Parliament in place after the June 2009 EU elections, I and my co-signatories think it would make sense for the Parliament to take a new look at the issue, to see if this is really such a good idea.
...There are indications that the request may be opposed on various legalistic grounds depending on how you interpret the Rules of Procedure, but if that happens, we’ll see how to proceed.
Collecting the signatures was just the first hurdle in a rather long and complicated process, but at least we cleared that one.

Selling monody

2011-04-21T08:13:00.005+01:00

I really like this recent release on the Glossa label, performed by Rosa Domínguez, Mónica Pustilnik, and Dolores Costoyas. And you might like it, too. In fact a lot of people might like it, but what are the chances they'll hear it, or even that they'll want to hear it? "Odi Euterpe: Italian monody from the early 17th century" is the sort of title only a specialist could love. The specialist can look at it and say "ah, so it's got at least one selection from Caccini's Le nuove musiche on it" (though then again you could probably say the same about any album of Italian monody from the early 17th century). But for everyone else, well, it sounds forbiddingly academic, doesn't it? You have to know who or what Euterpe is, and as for "Odi", Babelfish unhelpfully translates it as "hatred". And you have to know what monody is. I am deliberately not going to explain any of it to you, because that's the point I'm making.
So in the unlikely event that you are an inexperienced but curious listener of classical music and you've wandered into the classical section of your local record shop and come across this CD, you're probably going to pick it up, look puzzled, and put it down again. But there are so many unlikely events in there that you can't blame Glossa for not making an attempt to appeal to a market that hardly exists. Are there any feasible ways of promoting this kind of music outside its niche? ECM New Series and Alia Vox do seem to be able to attract a certain type of audience that otherwise doesn't go much for classical. But really what you need is someone to draw attention to this particular album, on a blog for example, and say, "hey, I know you don't listen to this sort of thing usually, and the title might be a bit off-putting, but actually really what this boils down to is a woman singing with a guitar-y sort of backing. It's not exactly singer-songwriter or folk music, but... Here, try a couple of samples", and then they listen to it and it turns out they do like it. Or maybe it doesn't sound enough like KT Tunstall for them and they never listen to your advice again.
Maybe the album could have been called "These Are Some Songs".

Whitesnake wins Pullitzer Prize for Music

2011-04-19T08:53:00.003+01:00

It has been a long time coming, but David Coverdale and the guys have finally received the recognition they deserve, having won the Pullitzer Prize for Music. The band received the award for... oh. wait. Start again.

Chinese-born composer Zhou Long has won the 2011 Pullitzer Prize for Music for his opera Madame White Snake, "a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West."
I confess my ignorance of Zhou Long's music, which I shall attempt to rectify. Here I go again...

My father knew Charles Ives, for all the good it did me

2011-04-18T07:49:00.004+01:00

Over at On An Overgrown Path, an intruiging proposal:

The new sciece of epigenetics has identified that the cells that make up our body and determine our wellbeing are not controlled primarily by our genes, but rather by the physical and energetic environment in which we live. It is early days and some of the advocates of epigenetics hover uncomfortably between science and shamanism, while similar approaches such as Alfred Tomatis' Mozart Effect continue to be treated with scepticism. But epigenetics is science rather than quackery, and if a medically proven causal relationship could be established between classical music and wellbeing, the case for live music, music education, music therapy and many other threatened activities would become much stronger. To date there has been little attempt to connect epigenetics and classical music. Surely it is it time to explore new ways of arguing the case for classical music?

I left a comment over there, but it's worth expanding a bit. Well, first of all it's worth addressing Pliable's first sentence, which makes a strong but not accurate case for epigenetics. In essence, epigenetics refers to, as Jerry Coyne puts it in a put-down of the hype surrounding the field, "inheritance not based on coding changes in the DNA". Which is to say that the environment (such as a stressful event like a famine) can affect genetics, causing changes not in the structure of DNA but in gene expression, changes that can be inherited (though only for 1 or 2 generations, it seems). Saying that our cells are "controlled primarily" by the environment is an exaggeration. Some specific epigenetics examples are known, but this doesn't of course mean that every single bloody thing that ever happens will cause a heritable change in gene expression, which is what that BBC Horizon thing linked above seems to imply:

At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.

Reminds me of Alexei Sayle's joke, along the lines of "They say that what you have to worry about isn't what killed your parents but what killed your grandparents. So I should be fine unless I'm attacked by a horde of Cossacks". As for genes having a memory, this is perhaps just a noble attempt to couch something in layman's terms but it invests a stupid mysticality into the process (the article is titled "The Ghost in Your Genes"). Yes, epigenetics means that a gene has a "memory", in the same way that my downstairs bathroom wall has a "memory" of when my son attacked the wall with a chisel - in this case, the "memory" is also known by the scientific term "holes".
The main point I was making in my comment on OAOP was, if you want to prove that listening to classical music has health benefits, then epigenetics seems an unnecessarily complicated way of going about it. We're talking about transgenerational effects, so unless you don't need results until, say, 2050, you can't study it prospectively. So that means you have to get today's adults and find out how much classical music their parents and grandparents listened to, and come up with an appropriate health benefit to study (stress hormone levels? IQ?). The huge difficulty is eliminating all possible confounders. If you're studying the impact of a famine, that's not so hard - people either went hungry for a period or they didn't - but for classical music you're talking about a lifetime of what you might call low-impact experiences that may often go hand-in-hand with other experiences - reading, for example - as well as accounting for the usual things like educational level and socioeconomic status. And of course these conditions apply not only to the grandparents but the grandchildren too. By deciding on an epigenetics approach you're going for an unnecessarily complicated level of study: why investigate the impact of a lifetime of classical music listening on an individual's children or grandchildren, when we don't even know the impact of same on the individual?
That sort of study would be easier to perform, though maybe not easy to produce a convincing conclusion. The so-called Mozart Effect, on the other hand, is much much easier to study: measure baseline levels of whatever property you're studying (stress hormone levels, IQ); play music for the subjects; measure the new levels; and keep measuring them to see how long the effect lasts. Meta-analyses cast doubt on whether there is an effect, though.
The other thing to remember with all of these approaches to showing societal benefits for classical music is - as commenter mrG alluded to on OAOP - that you must also be prepared for other, competing, studies showing the societal benefits of other forms of entertainment. You think that all Justin Bieber fans do all day is stand around screaming and wetting their pants? Hell no. They're in the labs right now. This is a war, people. We need to be ready.

8tracks mixes: Awards 2010, parts III & IV

2011-04-15T14:18:00.003+01:00

At last! Here's the Concerto, Symphony, and Orchestral winners and runners-up, split between two 8-track mixes. As a bonus (well, OK, as a way of making up 16 tracks from 15 albums) there's an extra Gershwin track thrown in.

Twenty more years?

2011-04-14T11:52:00.008+01:00

The record industry's attempt to get EU copyright terms on sound recordings extended from 50 years to 70 has received a big boost with the recent news that Denmark has switched sides. Previously part of a group that was blocking the Parliament-approved proposal at the Council stage, the Danes appear to have received the requisite number of blow-jobs from industry representatives to change their minds. Fortunately the Pirate Party isn't having this, and MEP Christian Engström has found a rule that could send the proposal back to Parliament, if he gets enough support. More details here.
Of course musicians (or, to use the correct term, copyright holders, which isn't necessarily the same thing at all) need a reasonable period in which they have exclusive profit-making rights to their endeavours. But seventy years? Surely fifty is enough. But of course it isn't, because if fifty is enough then in 2014 the first Beatles albums will be out of copyright, and then all those other still-lucrative acts that defined The Sixties will follow. So obviously this would represent a financial threat to the major labels, and apparently that's sufficient to persuade enough European lawmakers to go along with the idea. And in response the anti-extension campaign is highlighting the financial downside to the proposal.
I wonder if part of the problem - I mean the ease with which the 70-year limit is being accepted - is simply a time perception thing. The out-of-copyright Fifties just seem like history, but the still-copyrighted Sixties are still not too far away, musically and socially, and perhaps when a lobbyist says "we must protect this and make sure the artists are supported" it's easier to agree. And it's easier for the lawmaker to look into the future and think "yes, I'm supporting these important artists for another twenty years". But why doesn't the lawmaker look back? If we had a 70-year limit already, then Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" would still be in copyright. What is the argument to support that?

Gold from Westminster

2011-04-13T12:05:00.002+01:00

The latest Gramophone has a feature titled "The record covers from hell". Prominent among the 15 "worst record covers of all time" is the seventies label Westminster Gold.

The winner was this:

But I was rather impressed by this one, which is crying out to be Bill Bailey's new look:

All these images are from westminstergold.com. Sometimes they went for an overly literal depiction of the album contents:

This was the era of Benny Hill, remember:

Did they have a "top shelf" in record shops back in those days?

And finally, perhaps the least subtle of all:

BBC Music Magazine Awards

2011-04-13T10:51:00.002+01:00

They have just been announced.
Orchestral: Prokofiev - Romeo and Juliet (LSO/Gergiev).
Chamber: Franck, Grieg, Janacek violin sonatas (Repin, Lugansky).
Instrumental: Shostakovich - Preludes and Fugues (Melnikov).
Choral: Bach - Motets (Bach Collegium Japan/Suzuki).
Vocal: Schubert - Winterreise (Güra, Berner).
Opera: Mozart - Die Zauberflöte (Jacobs).
DVD: Purcell - The Fairy Queen (Glyndebourne).
Newcomer: Ivana Gavrič (piano).
Premiere Recording: D Matthews - Symphonies 2 & 6 (BBC NOW/Van Steen).
Technical Excellence: Briggs - Messe pour Notre Dame (Hyperion).

Of course I must compare these results with what other review magazines thought. There's nothing surprising here; the only two that got several not-so-good reviews elsewhere were the two I would expect - the Schubert and Mozart. Winterreise's one of those works that's regarded on just too high a level for any recording to be universally acclaimed as a success, and there are some listeners who just don't like Jacobs's way with the Mozart operas.

Tobias and the Angel

2011-04-12T13:28:00.006+01:00

I hadn't given much thought to what had been my favourite album of 2010, which as it turns out is just as well, because I didn't hear my favourite album of 2010 until about a month ago.
Jonathan Dove's Tobias and the Angel is a "church opera" written in 1999, and Chandos's recording is of a subsequent Young Vic touring production. The story is from the Old Testament (not the Apocrypha. The Council of Trent confirmed it to be canonical. Take that, Protestants!) and is set in Nineveh. Tobit is a man who risks severe punishment by arranging proper burials for Jews killed by the king; for his pains, he's rewarded by being blinded by sparrows shitting in his eyes. Now unable to work, he decides to call in a debt from a relative in Ecbatane. His son Tobias, currently something of a waster, offers to make the journey, on which he is accompanied by a mysterious stranger who (spoiler alert for the very slow) eventually turns out to be the titular angel, Raphael. Having had an odd encounter with a giant fish, they arrive at Ecbatane, where Tobias immediately falls in love with Sara, daughter of the man he's to collect the money from. Unbeknownst to Tobias, Sara's already been married multiple times, with all her husbands dying in their sleep - she's actually possessed by a demon named Ashmodeus. I will leave you to anticipate whether the demon gets exorcised, Tobit gets his sight back, or Raphael reveals his true self to general expressions of awe. And whether the giant fish has anything to do with anything.
Of course, the term "church opera" might suggest Britten to you, and certainly Dove's work does have the sort of music-for-the-people nature of Noye's Fludde and the like. Don't think "staid and holy". If there's a spectrum of staged music stretching from Parsifal to We Will Rock You then perhaps Tobias and the Angel is somewhere in the happy middle ground, along with, say, Stephen Sondheim (follow the undergrown path to yesterday's post). Some of the tunes are highly catchy (Jewish folk music style) and some of the music is inordinately beautiful. There are lots of stand-out moments, such as the cheeky children's chorus of sparrows ("Pee-oo! That was good") or the evocative music accompanying Tobias and Raphael as they set out on their journey. "Popular appeal" is rarely this appealing. Everything flows together wonderfully, and at CD-length it's the perfect size for its story - no padding, and no sense of cramming too much in. And the orchestration is spot-on.

Here's a 2-minute audio clip from the final scene, with Raphael sung by countertenor James Laing:

(Incidentally, I also recommend Chandos's previous Dove opera release, Siren Song, the tale of a sailor in love with a woman he's never met).

Someone in a tree

2011-04-11T16:52:00.004+01:00

Yer damn right I bought the new Stephen Sondheim book, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), with attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes. From which we learn, among many other things:

When I'm asked to name my favorite song of those I've written, an understandable but unanswerable request, I often proffer this one. I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyric, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form... Suffice it to say that this song comes the closest to the heart of Pacific Overtures: historical narrative as written by a Japanese who's seen a lot of American musicals.

Right hand/Left hand

2011-04-11T10:56:00.005+01:00

I'm not sure quite what the relationship between the "Building a Library" feature in BBC Music Magazine and the "Building a Library" segment in BBC Radio 3's CD Review show is. The latter used to inform the former but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Anyway, there exist 2 conceptual items from the BBC entitled "Building a Library".

Last month's one in the magazine was Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. The top choice was Karajan/Bergonzi/Cossotto/Guelfi, but what we're interested in here is the one that appears as "One to avoid", about which this month's library-builder Ashutosh Khandekar says

In a field full of great contenders, my caveat goes a set [sic] that has been much praised but has serious flaws. Decca's 1966 version conducted by Silvio Varviso is radiantly recorded and has a great cast, but none of the soloists are caught in their prime. An inexperienced Elena Souliotis makes for a wayward Santuzza. Gobbi has superb dramatic instincts as Alfio, but lacks his finest vocal sheen. And del Monaco has lost the lustrous quality of his early years.

All well and good, but what image did they use to illustrate this "much praised" but flawed release?

Oh dear... does that say "A First Choice Recording from Building A Library"?

Cutlery moment

2011-04-10T10:30:00.002+01:00

Hey, wow, Nereffid's posted a new blog entry! First one in over a month! Bet it's going to be really profound.

Ahem. About that Grainger Edition... I've finally got round to ripping the CDs and came across this gem on the final disc - volume 3 of the works for solo piano. The CD info from Windows Media Player tells me that track 7 is titled "Spoon River - American Fork Dance".
I think Grainger would have approved.

Normal service might now be resumed.

Arrival platform humlet

2011-02-26T07:27:00.003Z

A brief "Yay!" that my copy of Chandos's 19-disc Grainger Edition finally arrived in the post. Initially out of stock at Amazon, then it took a silly amount of time to get here. So I missed the 50th anniversary of the composer's death, last Sunday.
The disadvantage is that now I must put all this music into my catalogue. It may take some time...

From last week's listening

2011-02-15T20:46:00.004Z

"Divergences" - piano music of Jongen, Reger, Scriabin
Joseph Moog
[Claves]

File under "Who knew?" Well, obviously I know Scriabin, but I didn't know that the 2nd movement of his Piano sonata no.4 from 1903 was at times alarmingly close to being a jazz number. This disc very nearly slipped under the radar but got some very high praise from some quarters as I was putting the final touches to the NGAs; it almost made it as a runner-up. Joseph Moog by all accounts seems to be a pianist to watch. The link between the three composers here is that they were all born around the same time (1872/73) - but in musical terms they diverged. The Belgian Joseph Jongen comes across as a rhapsodic romantic with hints of Debussy in the 3 pieces here. "Soleil à midi" from his op.33 has an especially memorable theme to it. The German Max Reger is well-known (notorious, you might say) for his love of counterpoint and of course his "smallest room in the house" response to a critic. Träume am Kamin is a quite charming set of miniatures, not what I was expecting as I haven't warmed to Reger in the past. This album was an education, and a good one at that.

Hammerschmidt: Sacred works
Weser-Renaissance/Manfred Cordes
[CPO]

And what I learned here - or rather, what I learned before I decided to get this - was that Andreas Hammerschmidt was, as Grove puts it, "the most representative composer of mid-17th-century German church music, of which he was a prolific and extremely popular exponent". To me, he was just a name in a list of composers whose anniversary falls this year. Or next year: he was born in either 1611 or 1612. So, if he's Germany's Most Representative, I should listen to him, shouldn't I? Even if, according to Wikipedia, Manfred Bukofzer (never heard of him, either) said Hammerschmidt "watered down the achievements of Schütz for the multitude". Ah, musicologists are a snobby bunch. I like these pieces, 7 from Hammerschmidt's 1649 collection Motettae unius et duarum vocum and 9 from the 1662 set Kirchen und Tafelmuzik. All the latter pieces are in German, as is one of the earlier pieces, the rest being Latin. There's good variety here in the mixing of works and the range of voices employed. So, get this, unless you don't like the idea of watery Schütz.

"Flights of Fantasy: Early Italian chamber music"
Monica Huggett; Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists
[Avie]

One of those Baroque albums that you know after 15 seconds you're going to enjoy. Full of life and good humour, as I think we are entitled to expect from Monica Huggett. Farina's Capriccio Stravagante is something I haven't heard before, which I now realise from browsing the web makes me a pathetic loser because apparently it's very well known and anyone who knows anything about Baroque music - anything at all - has heard it. Anyway, it's a quarter-of-an-hour piece with various violin effects including animal noises. About 12 minutes in on this recording it goes completely mental, I guess in imitation of yowling cats although the effect strikes me as if the musicians are trying to cope with the score melting before them, notes sliding down staves and onto the floor. Fortunately they recover their poise. And I have heard Biagio Marini's gorgeous Passacaglia before, so there.

So, what changed?

2011-02-11T12:45:00.003Z

American Record Guide's Donald Vroon is very enthusiastic about Naxos's release of Sibelius's Symphonies nos.1 and 3, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Pietari Inkinen:

"...a wonderful conductor... He is Finnish; he understands that Northern icy temperament. But he is young, and he feels the music - it's not old hat to him yet, not just another Sibelius symphony. It's still fresh, and he still enters into it with his whole heart and gives it everything he's got - which is a lot. ... If the strings aren't quite lush enough to bring me to tears, they are still very beautiful - and the same goes for the wind solos... All [Inkinen's] conducting is faultless and admirable on this release."

I read that and thought, wait a minute, I remember something I posted last year... And yes, this is the same New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Pietari Inkinen that recorded a previous Sibelius disc of which the same Donald Vroon said:

"This is a very boring orchestra, with no tonal allure. The conducting is dull as well."

Empty chamber?

2011-02-08T15:37:00.002Z

I'm intrigued by something I read in this month's Editorial in International Record Review:

Of the seven Outstanding nominations this month four are chamber discs. I find this particularly interesting because there now seem to be fewer discs released in this genre than previously and sometimes it's a struggle assembling a 'respectable' section in this category.

That's something I hadn't noticed. Is it true? A quick look at my trusty spreadsheet suggests that of IRR's reviews of new releases, about 35% are Orchestral, about 18% Chamber, about 17% Instrumental, about 19% Vocal, and about 10% Opera. Doesn't sound like chamber music's any worse off than other types of music.
As a comparison, American Record Guide reviews break down as about 36% Orchestral, about 19% chamber, about 20% Instrumental, about about 18% Vocal, and about 7% Opera. Oh, let's do Fanfare as well: about 41% Orchestral, about 23% Chamber, about 18% Instrumental, about 13% Vocal, and about 5% Opera.
So, perhaps there are fewer chamber discs released than there used to be - I don't know - but it looks like it should be no harder to assemble a 'respectable' selection of chamber music discs than one of instrumental or vocal ones.

From the week's listening

2011-02-05T07:42:00.004Z

First I should note that as of this month my music buying habits have changed radically. You'll have noticed that I'm able to provide excerpts from all the Award winners and runners-up for the 8tracks mixes. This is because last year I was basing my buying around the Awards contenders. Given that 70 albums made the final cut, and there were many more actual contenders, such a practice is possible only if you're very wealthy or if you still have an incredibly cheap eMusic subscription. So for the past year I've largely been getting albums that are "supposed to be good" rather than ones I myself might like. It sounds quite an obligation when put like that and towards the end I probably could have done without the self-imposed pressure to immediately fill the gaps, but in fact there's not a single album I'm not glad to have. Some more so than others, of course, and the thing is, the full set is almost literally a selection voted by committee, rather than one person's idiosyncratic choices. So, Awards out of the way, I said enough of that, time for a change. As of February, I'm back to a rigid, self-imposed program of freedom. And the first fruits of this new policy are...

"The Black Dragon"
Cançonièr

And I should point out straight away that I'm still paying close attention to reviews, but on the individual rather than collective level. I doubt very much if this particular release will end up in any putative 2011 Awards, or even be reviewed in more than one of my sources. It's the sort of release that really only Fanfare and ARG cover - self-published, unusual repertoire - and indeed it was in the latest issue of Fanfare that I found an interview with members of this California-based medieval ensemble (web site here). The album has an intriguing premise - music from the time of Vlad ("Dracula") the Impaler. It kicks off with part of the epic anti-Vlad propaganda poem "Von ainem wutrich der hies Trakle waida von der Walachei", and ends with another bit (the whole poem has over a thousand verses, apparently, most of them detailing his various impalings and other real or imagined barbarities), and there's some folk tunes from Hungary, Romania and the like thrown in, but overall it's a wide-ranging recital, covering a lot of ground from Turkey to France. That variety - reflected also in the selection of vocal versus instrumental pieces - stands it in good stead, as it avoids the sameyness that can sometimes affect even the best of these sorts of themed albums. I'm clueless about how medieval music should be performed, but Cançonièr seem to know what they're doing, and it's all thoroughly enjoyable. Dare I say, an album of medieval music for people who are afraid of albums of medieval music.

Liszt: Two Legends; Consolations; etc.
Lilya Zilberstein
[Eloquence]

Of course I've previously mentioned this one's ye-scurvy-dogs cover, but what of the music? Honestly, and this is just me speaking, you understand, if I had a choice between just this one Liszt album and every single album ever recorded of Chopin and Schumann, there wouldn't be much hesitation. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Yes, yes, I know there's a Chopin influence to be heard here anyway, but the simple fact is that Liszt (at least, in works such as the ones here) pushes my "piano" buttons in the same way Mahler pushes my "orchestra" buttons. Warm fuzzy feelings abound on this album. A bloody good start to my Liszt Year.

Whitacre: "Light & Gold"
The Eric Whitacre Singers; Laudibus/Eric Whitacre; and others
[Decca]

Not quite my first exposure to Whitacre's music but very nearly. He's so dishy! I might hate him if his music weren't so lovely. Not everything here is as good as everything else, but the best is very good indeed. There's more variety here than I feared - it's not all serene and beautiful crowd-pleasers like Lux Aurumque and Sleep. I could have done without a rather twee moment in Five Hebrew Love Songs that sounds like it's straight from the worst Franco Zeffirelli film imaginable, but overall the album makes a very favourable impression. Do you know the story of the piece Sleep? Whitacre was commissioned to set Robert Frost's "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening", which he duly did, to much acclaim. Then the Frost estate told him he wasn't allowed to use the poem until it entered the public domain in 2038. Not too keen on waiting that long, Whitacre got his sometime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri to write a new poem with the same structure and some of the same words. End result: a much-loved choral classic, and the Frost estate come across as a bunch of dicks.

Harrison: Gamelan music
Gamelan Si Betty, with various soloists and the Berkeley Chamber Singers
[Music Masters]

Ever since I heard his gorgeous Air for the Poet, Lou Harrison's been one of those composers I keep meaning to hear more of but never get around to. Finally, I get this one, originally on Music Masters but now also part of a 4-disc reissue on Nimbus. The first piece, Philemon and Baukis for gamelan and solo violin, has that flowing lyricism that so attracted me to Air for the Poet. Not all the album is as comfortably beautiful as that, though: in Gending Alexander, the gamelan is perhaps at its most "exotic", reminding the listener that there are some sounds that Western ears must take time to get used to. The longest piece on the album is the multi-movement Homage to Pacifica, which uses a singer, chorus, and speaker to address how America has treated its environment and its original inhabitants. It includes, weirdly, a movement called "In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel", which makes use of a harpist and sounds like a Handelian music-box. In "Litany", the choir and speaker chant the names of various Native American groups, the (marvellously stentorian) speaker concluding with the words "all the fine people on this original, natural land: Screwed".

NvM 7: Songs of a Wayfarer

2011-02-03T19:22:00.003Z

I see that four months have passed since the last "installment" of this series, and it was four months before that that I actually listened to the music under discussion here.
We're talking about Mahler's song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen - Songs of a Wayfarer. Or Songs of a Wayfaring Lad as some translations have it. Or indeed, Songs of a Driving Associate according to Babel Fish. This was his first proper song cycle. He wrote it with piano accompaniment around 1885 and orchestrated it nearly a decade later, but in fact he always had it in mind as an orchestral work. There are 4 songs, and I suppose you could call it a rather compact Winterreise.
The first song - they all have Mahler's words, by the way - is "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" ("When my love becomes a bride"), and it immediately sets a dark tone. It has a folksy feel to it, as does much of the cycle. Here the singer's contemplating his loved one's wedding day - not to him, obviously - and although he seems to find consolation in nature things don't work out that way: "spring is dead and gone./Singing's done for ever now".
By the second song, though, he's cheered up a bit: "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld" he sings, describing the lovely things he saw on his morning jaunt in the countryside - which lasts almost all the way through the song before he realises that his life is still, at bottom, miserable.
"Ich hab' ein glühend Messer" is full of rage and despair, with plenty of "O weh!"s as he sings of the pain and torture he's being put through. It culminates in the singer wishing he were dead.
And does he get his wish? Perhaps. The final song, "Die zwei blauen Augen", sees him appear to pull himself together somewhat, as he leaves town in the dead of night. By and by he finds a linden tree, so beloved of Romantic poets, under which he lies down and... well, it really depends on who you listen to. Perhaps he has embraced death, or maybe it's just that, alone in the great world, he has finally found peace. Either one is possible, and it's fascinating hearing how subtle differences in performance can push it one way or the other.

I decided to start my listening with recordings of the piano version - this was the original version but the orchestral version from the early 1890s is seen as the "definitive" one.
Christian Gerhaher, Gerold Huber (RCA). Hey, this recently won a Nereffid's Guide Award! I was very pleased with that, as it's an excellent album, and Gerhaher's voice is a wonderful thing. I suppose this is a slightly low-key performance, certainly compared to others. In "Ging heut", for instance, he's cheerful rather than exuberant, and then towards the dark end of the song he hangs on to optimism for as long as he can, and there's a sense of sad acceptance in his realisation that happiness won't be coming his way. The third song's opening feels oddly like one of Schubert's "riding" songs - lovely clear piano from Gerold Huber - rather than a personal apocalypse. If this all seems like the performance isn't quite up to scratch, I should be clear that it very much is up to scratch, as it's full of character. The final song promises something valedictory as it opens, and as the wayfarer approaches the linden tree there's a touch of optimism, and the song ends in peace - and yet there's something unsettling about the final piano notes.
Janet Baker, Geoffrey Parsons (Hyperion). There's a tragic quality to Janet Baker's voice right from the start; though the second verse of the first song can have some cheer to it, here she sings plaintively, and there's a weary sadness through the whole thing. This sort of tone doesn't suit the second song, though, I think, and it feels rather undercharacterized. I like the third song, though, and the fourth does have character - but unlike Gerhaher, Baker seems to have given up. This one ends like a lullaby, but again that piano coda throws a spanner in the works - it gives the story an unfinished feel. I'll have more to say about Janet Baker later on.
Christoph Prégardien, Michael Gees (Hänssler). Having had a baritone and mezzo, we now turn to a tenor, which is not usual but isn't something that bothers me. It's possible that Prégardien and Gees's performance would bother some people; right from the start there seems to be a little messing with tempos and rhythms. Perhaps more worrisome might be Prégardien's style in the opening number - I wouldn't quite call it "detached" but he doesn't seem to be living the words. And the second song also appears mannered, as if he's reciting poetry about nature rather than actually being out in it - a touch of the drawing room to the whole thing. Yet I found the clarity of his voice rather made up for this apparent lack of engagement. Ah, but then... the final lines of this song seem to mark a major change, and the emotional level rises immensely - most certainly when they launch into "Ich hab'ein glühend Messer". Perhaps Prégardien did fail to be engaged in the first couple of songs, but it seems to me that the lack of engagement is deliberate. Here's a man who, as the cycle begins, simply doesn't realise what he's in for. Not quite Eugene Onegin, perhaps, but he comes across in the first song as someone who's quite prepared to get over this romantic setback. Song two, it's "See? For example, I can now go and appreciate Nature" - but suddenly everything hits him in the gut, and he's not OK. Song three is his explosion of pain, and song four - well, song four is where he finds a way out. He gathers his dignity but he's no longer the same person. He takes his leave, almost like a soldier (and indeed Gees's accompaniment is rather reminiscent of other of Mahler's songs that have a military component). The singer has embraced his fate, and at the linden tree he finds great peace. But there's a slightly more intense pulse to this than we've heard in the other performance, like he's being dragged willingly forward to his end. Here, the final piano notes sound like a memory. I really like this recording.
Angelika Kirchschlager, Helmut Deutsch (Quinton). Of the four voice-and-piano recordings here, this is by a long way the most beautiful to listen to, as Kirchschlager has a lovely clear voice that really rings out. On eMusic, from which I downloaded this, someone has reviewed the album saying "these songs were created by Mahler and Angelika's singing morphs them into the perfect Lieder", and actually I think that praise highlights something that's unfortunately not quite right about the performance, to my ears at least. In a way, these four songs aren't lieder - the cycle is rather more than the sum of its parts, but my impression of Kirchschlager's performance is that these are, indeed four individual lieder. It doesn't feel like a journey, basically. Everything is pretty much in its right place, but to my mind a lot of it needs a little tweak - darker, usually but not always - if the whole thing is to hang together. I suppose the problem is that it sounds so lovely, but there are moments when less loveliness is required. For all that, though, I do like it. I mean, it is so lovely! But for something more, I must stick with Gerhaher and Prégardien. And... but let's wait for another day before we get to the orchestral versions.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part II

2011-02-03T16:39:00.002Z

Here's the second selection of winners and runners-up in the Nereffid's Guide Awards, this time from the Solo instrumental and Chamber categories.

(side note: I have 21 followers on 8tracks now - yay!)

Review of the year (Mean-spirited category)

2011-02-03T12:48:00.002Z

German musician Ludger Rémy and (two members of) his orchestra Les Amis de Philippe were one of the runners-up in this year's Nereffid's Guide Awards, for their recording of trios by the Graun brothers. Part of the reason for that was a recommendation from Bertil van Boer in Fanfare. Indeed, that magazine's reviewers have been well disposed toward Rémy over the years, with praise going to discs of cantatas by Telemann and CPE Bach, arias by Theile, and concertos by Manfredini. Even Jerry I-hate-period-instruments Dubins was bowled over by a collection of music by Fasch. So when Rémy and his group's latest CPO recording - more CPE Bach cantatas - shows up for review in Fanfare you might have expected more of the same.
Fuck, no.
Here's what self-proclaimed "CPE Bach fan" Lynn René Bayley had to say about it:

Perhaps my reaction to these works would be more positive if the performances were actually good. Unfortunately, they are performed in a clipped, crispy-crunch style where neither the strings nor the chorus phrase in a legato manner. Some of the soloists do sing with a sense of legato, but more so the basses than the sopranos or tenors. Indeed, both the female soloists and the chorus sound as if they were “vocal effects” produced on a MIDI.

Okay, hyperbolic last sentence perhaps, but otherwise not unreasonable criticism. Fair enough, she didn't like the performances.
But then:

It’s rather disappointing to consider that conductor Ludwig Rémy, who appears to be a middle-aged man, could have made it this far in life without the least shred of feeling for music. I would suggest that he find another, nonmusical, line of work. I’m sure he’d make a fine electrical engineer or chartered public accountant.

Jesus.

Well, I think it's just arrogant

2011-02-02T12:34:00.004Z

You would think, wouldn't you, that if you were a publication called BBC Music Magazine you would be quite content with the web address bbcmusicmagazine.com, no? I mean, it makes sense. It describes the purpose of the web site rather well. Perhaps you could quibble that it should be bbcmusicmagazine.co.uk, but other than that it does the job.
But that's not good enough, is it? Because "the world's best-selling classical music magazine" isn't content with just being the world's best-selling classical music magazine - which means what, anyway, just that maybe more people buy it than commit murder. Oh no, so-called B so-called B so-called C so-called Music so-called Magazine has loftier ambitions than that and now the web site is classical-music.com. World domination beckons! Because now the magazine is up there with its unhyphenated brethern: gibberish extravaganza classicalmusic.com and classicalmusic.co.uk, which is apparently home to The Escape Committee: Gamekeeper to the web rhino.
So now when we think of classical music on the intertubes we must think of BBC Music Magazine. This will end in tears, I know it. After all, anyone who believes everything that Universal Music Group tells them will be aware that "Deutsche Grammophon is classical music". Could this be the opening skirmish in a war for the very soul of classical music? I'm absolutely convinced it must be. I think we can safely assume that at some point in the future our corporate overlords will rule that someone somewhere does indeed have the rights to the use of the term "classical music", just as the U.S. Olympic Committee has exclusive ownership of the adjective "Olympic".
In the meantime, let me conclude this ill-conceived diatribe by remarking that on the old bbcmusicmagazine.com you could log in without going to a separate page, and on the new classical-music.com you can't. Swine.