Awards 2010: Living composer - Vocal

Rorem: "On an echoing road"
The Prince Consort
Linn

Ned Rorem, we are informed by Raymond S Tuttle in International Record Review, "has composed more than 600 songs over more than six decades... His taste in poets is excellent... [his] songs sound just as natural as the poems sound when they are simply spoken - in both senses of 'simply'! There are never too many notes; the music fits the texts like a second skin". This collection "is one of the most elegant releases of recent memory", says Philip Greenfield in American Record Guide. "Musical elements are delectably in balance every step of the way; youthful, attractive voices, and poetic but superbly controlled piano accompaniments at the service of an art-song composer whose melodic phrases talk through the words of a poem with Astaire-like balance and control... the sound places you in the middle of a salon with singers surrounding you with songs they truly love. How do you turn that down?"
Here we have solo voices plus piano, while our runners-up comprise two choral collections and a pair of operas - one conducted by the conductor of last year's Recording of the Year, Marin Alsop.

Runners-up:
MacMillan: The Sacrifice. Christopher Purves, et al; Orchestra of Welsh National Opera/Anthony Negus [Chandos]
Briggs: Mass for Notre Dame & other choral works. Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge/Stephen Layton [Hyperion]
Adams: Nixon in China. Robert Orth, et al; Colorado Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop [Naxos]
Rautavaara: Choral works. Schola Cantorum of Oxford/James Burton [Hyperion]

Suddenly... nothing happened

OMFG a new post on Les Introuvables de Nereffid! Sadly, it's just a meta sort of post pointing out the bleedin obvious that my blogging activity has been terrible of late, an apology for same, and a vague attempt at an excuse. Perhaps I could say that a lot of my spare time (I mean the spare time I have left over after my spare time gets used doing other things) has been largely devoted to getting the 4th Nereffid's Guide Awards in order for its sometime-near-the-end-of-January announcement right here on this very site. Then again, I find I haven't been very engaged with teh internets lately and I've gotten out of the blog mentality. Could this be the end of Les Introuvables? Hopefully not, but I will say that listening to classical music is currently way more fun than writing anything about it, and why should I do things like upload tracks to 8tracks when I could be transferring my CDs to my new external hard drive? So that really useful Samuel Barber mix I had planned never materialised, but hopefully there will be a multitude of mixes to accompany the Awards. I'll try, I really will!
In the meanwhilst, Merry &c.

I was wrong about Qobuz

I was intemperate in my previous complaint about how qobuz.com had started restricting access for people living in this benighted country of mine. Oh yes. I misunderstood. See, they said I couldn't download such-and-such if I lived in Ireland. If I lived in Ireland... Hypothetically speaking, I might live in France, in which case I would type in my French address and post code and they would let me download.
Hmmm... where would I live if I were living in France?
Hey, the Qobuz offices sound interesting, and look, there's their address right on the bottom of every page.
What a shame I don't live in France, eh?

Bach's complete organ works for a tenner

A big thank you to eMusic subscriber Dvorak9NW, who alerted me (and the rest of the world) to the fact that iTunes has Peter Hurford's Decca set of Bach's complete organ works for a teenchy €9.99. That's right, a tenner for 17 discs worth of music in acclaimed performances. Go get it. I did: took all morning to download.
(Price on Amazon, were I allowed to get it there: £99.99)

I solve the Classics Today France problem

Progress towards the 4th Nereffid's Guide Awards continues apace, as we move past the "closing date" of September - discs released after then aren't included in this year's awards, so we're just waiting on the various publications to catch up with earlier releases. But this year the number of potential winners in a couple of categories has been disappointingly small, more through a lack of reviews rather than a lack of quality. What to do? There are some review sources on the web that I haven't tapped yet, and I occasionally toy with the idea of including them. But they have desultory coverage or aren't in English, both of which reduce their overall utility to me. Still, I can't help feeling there must be some way I can make use of them.
Classics Today France is a case in point. I use the US version all the time, but my French isn't good so I don't generally read the CTF reviews. CTF does provide a score for each review, so I don't have to read the review per se; but is it fair when compiling the Awards data to give equal weight to "just a number" from CTF and a thorough review from, say, Fanfare? Hence the "Classics Today France problem". Anyway, I've worked out what to do, which is to take a CTF review under serious consideration if it's of a disc not covered by the US version; otherwise, the CTF review has less importance than one from the US or my six other main sources. Complicated? Not in practice.
So then I turned my eye to Klassik Heute and Audiophile Audition, two more sites that don't compete with the main sources but can be of use in highlighting discs that don't get much coverage elsewhere. The German site is particularly good for BIS and CPO, for example, two labels that I don't think get enough attention from the UK publications at least.
Anyway, all this looking at reviews and fiddling with spreadsheets means (a) the Awards will be "bigger and better" (whatever that means), and (b) I haven't been doing much blogging of late. In fact I'm wondering whether I may solve (b) by changing the direction of this blog to reflect (a). But more on that anon, perhaps.

Coldplay or Mozart? Yawn

(via BBC Music Magazine's web site)
Press release from Travelodge:

Alternative rock band Coldplay, the Canadian crooner Michael Buble and the Indie group Snow Patrol are sending Britons to the land of nod - according to findings from a new kip report issued today
The sleep study conducted by Travelodge surveyed 6,000 British adults to investigate which musicians Britons tune into at bedtime, to help them nod off. ...
Listed below are the top ten musicians that help Britons nod off
1. Coldplay
2. Michael Buble
3. Snow Patrol
4. Alicia Keys
5. Jack Johnson
6. Taylor Swift
7. Mozart
8. Barry White
9. Leona Lewis
10. Radiohead
... Twenty per cent of adults reported they love listening to classical music at bedtime, with the most popular sleep inducing composers being Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.

I suppose the main question this, er, highly interesting survey throws out is, who the hell is Jack Johnson?
So I Wikipedia him and discover "His highest–selling album is Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George, with 4 million albums shipped worldwide, due to the success of the 2006 Curious George film".

Oh, him. Now I have to stop this post before it turns into a rant about how much I hate that film.

Not a Player hater

So I bitched a while back about Gramophone dropping its cover CD in favour of the web-based Gramophone Player, but having used the Player for a couple of weeks now I have to say it's rather good. It's not too cluttered, the sound quality is good, and the musical excerpts are nice and long. And the presence of video extracts is handy, too. It was a sensible move, timing the player's launch to go with the Awards issue - video of the winners' speeches are there, plus of course excerpts from all the winning discs, so there's plenty to attract the curious.
In terms of what it actually does, then, the Player's an improvement over the cover disc and can be welcomed as a good thing. But my concern over how it will fit my listening habits still stands. With a cover disc, I could come home, slump on the sofa, and listen to the disc while leafing through the magazine. Conversely, though, I'm more likely to listen to the music while doing things such as writing this blog entry. So I think the net result may be that, although the Player does a better job than a CD of supporting the magazine's content, the change in my listening will mean the music nevertheless becomes less an integral part of the magazine.

Incidentally, having noted that last year's Gramophone Awards gave not even a nomination to the 2009 Nereffid's Guide Awards recording of the year, I should point out that Lenny's Mass picked up the Editor's Choice award this year.

"Not to sound over-dramatic, but..."

Oh, I'm against illegal downloading and music piracy generally of course, but you can always rely on someone from the record industry to make me want to change my mind. Here's Paul McGuinness in the Irish Times:

Mr McGuinness, one of the music industry's most vocal critics of illegal downloading, said internet service providers (ISPs) such as UPC were being "utterly disingenuous" in stating that they were "mere conduits" and could not be responsible for the behaviour of their customers.

The record industry lost a High Court case earlier this week in which it sought an injunction against UPC to force it to deal with illegal filesharers...

In an interview with The Irish Times , Mr McGuinness said the defence of "mere conduit" was "not an excuse when there are questions of national security, child pornography or terrorism".

Nice move, pivoting from music piracy to raping children.

Oh wait! There's more:

"Not to sound over-dramatic, but frankly it has got to do with the future of civilisation and a culture within our society. If we allow it to become accepted that writers and artists and musicians are not entitled to get paid for their work and they are, in some kind of daft way, pursuing hobbies where we will be in the future? We will get news from Google search and the telcos (telecommunications companies) and the ISPs will dominate the horrible new world".

You hear that, music pirates? If you don't stop, you'll destroy civilization and produce a world run by paedophiles, terrorists, and... uh... Google.

Dogs and cats living together!

You can't quite miss it:

IMPORTANT NEWS FOR MEMBERS! In November 2010, eMusic paves the way for more music with a new pricing system.
Oh no they didn't!
Well... no, they didn't. At least, not for European subscribers. They're shifting from "today’s credit-per-track system to monetary pricing", which means that instead of 1 track costing 1 credit, 1 track will cost €0.49. But seeing as I'm currently paying much less than that, eMusic will basically fund the difference. Jolly nice of them. And this will continue for the foreseeable future, until the day when eMusic can give us Europeans some unspecified amount of music that we don't yet have access to, at which point we will see "variable pricing", which is another way of saying "more than €0.49 per track".
I can live with this, very happily; I was expecting a price hike. The "bonus" money they're adding to my subscriptions is greater than the cost of those subscriptions, and when they put it in real terms like that, it brings home just how good a deal I've been getting. When the price hike does eventually come, I'll be okay with it - I mean, I'll drastically cut the amount of music I get from eMusic, but I'll be able to accept that.
But in the U.S., well, it's a different story. The price increase is happening in November, and it's like last year's Sony debacle all over again. The customer response isn't as vociferous - I suppose most of those who'd be most angered left last year. The complaints this time around are more along the lines of "this is definitely the last straw", plus a number that are regretful rather than angry. That's the response I can relate to. Ten years ago, eMusic had a great niche pretty much all to itself, but things have changed too much in the download world since then. The new changes mark the final - well, probably penultimate - step in eMusic's gradual transformation into "just another download store".

Then again, perhaps the outraged should pause a second and ask themselves this question: if eMusic had never existed, and you learned today of a new download service that, for a monthly subscription fee, allowed you to download albums that were a little cheaper than its main competitors, would you say "hey, that's a pretty good idea - I spend X amount of money on music every month anyway, so I might as well spend a set amount at this one place"? In other words, is eMusic really that bad compared with its rivals, or is it that it's bad compared with what it used to be?

8tracks mixes: Celebrating Hyperion

Here are two 8tracks mixes: 20 selections from some of my favourite Hyperion albums.





Hmmm... 8tracks has changed the appearance of its embedded player. Doesn't look so nice, does it?

Quite agree, quite agree, too silly, far too silly

The world of classical music has been rocked - rocked, I say! - by this quote from Jonathan Harvey:

'Young people don't like concert halls... and wouldn't normally go to one except for amplified music. There is a big divide between amplified and non-amplified music... The future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music in an atmosphere where people can come and go and even talk perhaps.. and certainly leave in the middle of a movement if they feel like it. Nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by silly conventions.'

(from On An Overgrown Path; ellipses not mine).
I'm not much of a concert-goer, or a believer in the concept of blasphemy for that matter, and at first glance this struck me as a sensible idea. But the more I think about it, the less I like it. If you're putting on, say, a Bruckner symphony, and you're happy to encourage the audience to "come and go and even talk perhaps", just what exactly is it that you think you're offering? If you're going to pander to that extent, then surely the battle's already lost. Harvey acknowledges that "It is, of course, not expecting as much of music as those of us who are musicians would want". Too bloody right it's not expecting as much. Have you really heard that Bruckner symphony if during the slow movement you nip out to get a cup of tea and then come back to the hall to have a chat about last night's X Factor? More pertinently, have I really heard it if I have to also listen to you slurping and yammering on beside me?
OK, try this. I confess to not having seen any of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, and I'm reluctant to go see one because they sound rather staid and quiet and perhaps a bit boring. Do you (a) suggest that I rent an Ozu movie, preferably a colorized version, and just leave the DVD running if ever I need to leave the room to use the toilet or make a sandwich or whatever, or (b) tell me not to be an idiot, and go see the damn thing in a cinema, quietly sitting down for two hours like everyone does when they're in the cinema, and if I don't like it then I can just fucking get over it.
Who are these "young people" Harvey is talking about? The ones who are being "deprived" of classical music? Could we not just take them aside and explain to them that there are such things as "recordings" which they can use to expose themselves to lots of classical music, and that if they should develop a wish to see such music performed live, then they can go to a concert hall as long as they're aware that, just like when you listen to a recording, you have to be quiet and pay attention?

This just in: leading artist recommends that, to deal with the short attention spans of today's young people, galleries should mount paintings on those rotating advertising billboards so viewers don't have to look at the same picture for more than twenty seconds...

Happy birthday, Hyperion

It says here, that Saturn's moon Hyperion is "a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface."
Oh, wait.
This post is supposed to be about the British record label Hyperion, 30 years old this month. Well, speaking of remarkable worlds...

Back in the days before downloads, or before Nereffid's Guide, neither of which is that long ago really, I sat down with a Gramophone Good CD Guide and made a list of all the Hyperion entries. It was a long list, and more to the point it was an intriguing one. I don't think I've lost my fascination, though I still haven't made much of a dent in the list in terms of actually hearing the recordings. As for browsing through the printed Hyperion catalogue, well that's a special pleasure, with page after page of unfamiliar repertoire in performances you just know are going to be wonderful. Along the bottom of each page there's a ticker tape-style running commentary from the label's fans (best quote: 'My wife said to me as I sat studying the pages of your supplement: "I remember when you used to look at me like that"!!!'). Is there another label quite as reliable, that inspires quite as much enthusiasm? Remember, 5 years ago the company faced legal bills of £1 million over a disastrous copyright case and was bailed out in part by donations from the record-buying public (me included; I think I paid for a couple of seconds of Robert King's Monteverdi Vespers).
Unfamiliar repertoire might be one of Hyperion's strengths, along with the occasional highly ambitious project - the complete Schubert songs, for all love - but take a look at Hyperion's "30th Anniversary Series", mid-price rereleases of 30 "landmark titles": Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Fauré, Mozart, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Schumann, Vivaldi... There's not much there that could be called "obscure", which leads us to our thought experiment of the day...

Imagine a world where no recording made by one of the 4 major record labels, or by any company now owned by a major, does not exist. We lose a lot, of course; in fact we lose almost everything recorded before Hyperion's founding in 1980 (Harmonia Mundi, BIS, and Chandos are older than that). Obviously this would be a bad thing. But what are we left with? Could classical music enthusiasts survive in this terrifying world, barren as it is of so many of the great performers and orchestras? Would a new generation of listeners realise that something was missing, or would they be perfectly happy with the independent labels' take on the basic repertoire?
Such thoughts spring partly from what I wrote the other day about the perils of comparative listening, rather than from any case of "indie snobbery". In many cases we can easily say Somebody Already Did It Better, but history can have a very heavy weight at times.
What if Hyperion were the only label in the world?
I think we'd do OK.

So: Hip-hip-Hyperion!

Nereffid vs Mahler 6: Philosophical Interlude

It's been quite a while since I did one of these. My simple excuse is that I have been listening to Mahler's music instead of writing about it, which I think we can agree is a better use of my time. But the original idea had been to blog my impressions of the many (many) recordings pretty much as I listened to them, rather than (as has now happened) listen to a huge amount of music and then somehow marshall my thoughts on the whole lot. It wasn't my intention to produce anything resembling Tony Duggan's very useful "synoptic survey" of the Mahler symphonies ("Mrs Kensington, we've performed a synoptic survey of your husband's liver and I'm afraid the results are not good...").

But what this delay in writing about the music has achieved is to give me a chance to consider the nature of what I'm trying to do, why I'm doing it, and what the end result could be. I've never been one to worry about whether recording A is better than recording B, except on the basic practical level of "will I enjoy this as I listen to it?" I trust the critics en masse if not necessarily individually to point me in the direction of excellence but by and large, assuming the performers are technically up to the task, I don't fret over whether my recording of a particular work is "the best", or, if I like a recording, whether I might enjoy another one more. So it's not in my nature to sit down and listen to many (many) recordings of the same piece of music and judge them against each other. That, however, is exactly what I'm doing with Mahler.

It's been fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes baffling. Of course comparing and contrasting recordings isn't just about picking a favourite, but also about learning more about the music. One conductor chooses this tempo, another chooses that tempo, and the question isn't so much which is the right tempo, but does this tempo make sense? Or one conductor's brass is prominent, another focuses on the strings, and the result for me is that I learn more about the work as a whole. Perhaps some sort of Platonic ideal of the music exists in my mind, constantly being subtly refined. The problem there is that it becomes easy to fall into the trap of thinking the music "should" sound a certain way, and if it doesn't then it's "wrong". The best critics don't think that way, but still I suppose everyone has their "did you even listen to the same CD?" moment. The question I'm learning to ask myself at this stage is, "so this recording doesn't necessarily match my concept of the music, but can it be a valid alternative?" And yet... ultimately it all comes down to personal preference, and some alternatives get rejected. Some time ago I formulated Nereffid's First Law of Music Criticism, which is that there does not, nor will there ever, exist a Mahler recording that every Mahler fan will like. From my own listening so far, I know this is true. I'm certainly out of step with Tony Duggan on a few things, and while I will defer to him and any other respectable critic (define "respectable"!) on matters technical and musicological, well, there it is: we disagree.

Sometimes I wonder should anyone even dare to compare one recording or performance against another. Is that what music is for, at all? Obviously if you hear a piece of music you already know well, you can't help but compare it to your previous listening experiences. But maybe we hear music too often, and can no longer live in the moment when we listen. After all, I've heard 13 different conductors and 12 different orchestras in recordings of Mahler's 1st symphony over the last few months. How many different performances did Mahler himself, or anyone living at that time, hear? It would be nice to be able to reset the switch before listening to another, and feel the music anew.

But then I put another recording in the player, and that mysterious seven-octave A shines forth on the strings, and I'm there again...

Passionato finally gets something right

Okay, that is a rather begrudging title, but I've never been fond of Passionato.com. Hailed in some quarters as a wonderful classical download site, Passionato's always struck me as annoying to browse and usually overpriced. But credit where it's due, the site's current offer of 50% off Virgin Classics does have some good deals, and I have finally bought something from them. Basically it's €5.99 for a single album, €11.99 for a double. Of course this in itself highlights the major flaw in Passionato's pricing scheme, which like other sites is a one-size-fits-all model: many of those €11.99 double albums are reissues in the Veritas series, and they can be bought on CD for less than that - and that's Passionato's half price.
Or take some of the non-sale items displayed on Passionato's "Chart": among them are a pair of EMI triples - a 3-disc set of Stephen Kovacevich playing Beethoven, and another of James Conlon conducting Zemlinsky. €34.99 for MP3, €41.99 for FLAC. Why pay that when you can go to MDT and, at today's exchange rate, pay a smidgen over €11 for each on CD? Even with postage added, that's still less than a third of Passionato's FLAC price.
If these are indeed the sorts of things that Passionato's customers are buying the most - and not a completely arbitrary list made to look like a Top 30 - then I have to say, shame on you, Passionato customers! Your willingness to pay ridiculous prices is what's encouraging them to charge those prices!
Bah. Rant over.

A last look at 1948: And the winners are...

You know, of course, that I've been making plenty of hay from The Year in American Music: 1948. Before I go on, I should say a word of thanks to the book's previous owner, without whom etc. Stamped on the inside cover is the name of Eddie Hatrak, with an address in Trenton, New Jersey. Google reveals that Mr Hatrak, friend and colleague of pioneering comedian Eddie Kovacs, died in April of this year, about 3 months before I bought the book. Had it been out of his possession for a while, or did it somehow make it to a church fair in Connecticut within those three months? We'll never know.
This last bit deals with one of Les Introuvables' favourite topics... awards!

March 26, 1948
For the second consecutive year, fourteen music critics have singled out for recognition the outstanding recordings of the preceding twelve-month period. The announcement of selections for 1947 was made today at a luncheon held at the "21" Club in New York City. The presentation was made by the Review of Recorded Music which, together with two hundred music stores throughout the country, sponsors the annual awards.
The winners were:
Symphony: Berlioz - Romeo et Juliette; NBC Symphony/Toscanini
Concerto: Bartok - Violin concerto; Menuhin, Dallas Symphony/Dorati
Ballet: Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé suites 1 & 2; Paris Conservatoire/Munch
Overture: Wagner - Die Meistersinger; NBC Symphony/Toscanini
Chamber music: Beethoven - "Razumovsky" quartets; Paganini Quartet
Choral music: Bach - Mass in B minor; RCA Victor Chorale and Orchestra/Shaw
Operatic music: Rossini - arias; Tourel, Met/Cimara
Operatic music - single record: Arias from Orfeo and Rodelinda; Ferrier, LSO/Sargent
Enterprising repertory: Berg - Wozzeck excerpts; Charlotte Boerner, Wener Janssen Symphony/Janssen
Program music: Thomson - The Plow that Broke the Plains; Hollywood Bowl Symphony/Stokowski
Special orchestral music: Britten - Young Person's Guide; Liverpool PO/Sargent
Chamber-orchestral music: Handel - Concerti grossi; Busch Chamber Players/Busch
Instrumental music - keyboard: Debussy - Preludes book 2; Casadesus
Instrumental music - string: Hindemith - Violin sonatas; Ricci
Children's recording: Young People's Record Club Series
Vocal music: Italian art songs; de Luca
Folk music: Disc Ethnic Series
Drama: Henry V; Olivier, London Philharmonic/Walton

April 5, 1948
A poll conducted by radio station WQXR, in New York, among 4,600 members of its advisory committee [that's quite a committee!] to determine their favorite musical works revealed that Beethoven was the top-ranking composer.
The 10 most popular symphonies were
1. Beethoven 5
2. Beethoven 9
3. Brahms 1
4. Tchaikovsky 6
5. Beethoven 3
6. Franck
7. Beethoven 6
8. Beethoven 7
9. Brahms 4
10. Tchaikovsky 5
The 10 most popular concertos:
1. Beethoven piano 5
2. Beethoven violin
3. Rachmaninov piano 2
4. Mendelssohn violin
5. Grieg piano
6. Tchaikovsky piano 1
7. Beethoven piano 4
8. Brahms violin
9. Brahms piano 2
10. Paganini violin (that's what it says - just "Paganini's Violin Concerto". Is it safe to assume the first?)
And the 10 most popular operas:
1. Carmen
2. Don Giovanni
3. La Traviata
4. Tristan und Isolde
5. Aida
6. La Boheme
7. Die Meistersinger
8. Faust
9. The Marriage of Figaro
10. Madama Butterfly

May 1, 1947
The magazine Musical America announced today the results of its fifth radio poll conducted among six hundred newspaper music critics and editors in the United States and Canada.
Voted the outstanding radio event of the year was the performance of Verdi's Otello by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini on consecutive Saturday afternoons of December 6 and 13.
Indeed, go back to the book's entry for December 6, 1947, and you get this:
Olin Downes spoke the rhapsodic enthusiasm of all critics when he wrote in the new York Times: "This was not the best Otello interpretation we have encountered. It was the only one. It serves to accentuate the tragical fact that with Mr. Toscanini in our midst the only opera performances that he gives, which in themselves will not survive him, are in concert form... A performance like yesterday's should be preserved on record. Otherwise, the secret dies with him, in which case future generations may never know the entire secret of Otello."
(Fortunately, this Otello is indeed preserved on record)

And finally, from September 11, 1947:
Today the American Music Conference, an organization founded for the purpose of bringing "more music to more Americans," received its charter...
As a prelude to its activity in propagandizing music, the Conference set out to make a national survey of the role that music is playing in everyday life. This study, entitled "National Survey of Public Interest in Music" was released several months later, in March 1948...
Church music is the favored form among most Americans, with popular dance music second. Others in order of their preference: old favorites, folk tunes, operettas, classical music, cowboy songs, and hillbilly songs.
Six out of every ten adults wished that they had learned to play an instrument.

How do you say "Fuck the record industry" in French?

So, farewell then, qobuz.com. It was nice to have, for a while, a viable alternative to iTunes. My French isn't good enough to warrant spending much time on the editorial content, but it's a nice site, with good ideas like 20% off new releases for the first 10 days.
Alas, many, many attempts to buy music from qobuz are now ending in:
Cet article n'est pas encore disponible en téléchargement dans votre pays (Ireland)
which the site helpfully translates:
This article is not available in your country yet (Ireland)
or, more essentially:
The record industry does not approve of your country (Ireland)
Yes, it's the 4 major labels, of course, who have decided that Irish euros are unacceptable. But it's not just the majors - some of the independents don't like us either. I'm not sufficiently interested to explore which ones still consider me kosher. Still, I'm used to it at this stage - no Amazon, no Spotify, no Guvera, no Lala. It's a great shame to have one of the few classical download avenues closed off.
Oh well. In the immortal words of gary.ramsey (in-joke for eMusic stalwarts), I'm going back to iTunes.

Trying to get Golijov

I've tried to love the music of Osvaldo Golijov, but it doesn't seem to be working out.
I first came across him before I knew who he was, so to speak, in the form of his La Pasión según San Marcos. I now know that this 2000 work, one of four passions commissioned by Helmut Rilling, was a triumph that helped Golijov on his way to becoming a major name, but at the time it struck me as rather ho-hum. Sure, the use of Latin American rhythms was intriguing, but the whole thing seemed a little too removed from what I would consider a Passion. I had what you might call theological issues with it; there were times when the music seemed a little too joyful considering what was going on. Yes, at bottom the psychological torment, brutal torture, and execution of Jesus are supposed to be a good thing, but I suppose Golijov's La Pasión finally brought home the sheer perversity of celebrating such violence. And although musically the work was entertaining, I just couldn't help thinking the dreaded word "crossover". But then I learned that people who know a lot more about classical music than I do were acclaiming it as a boundary-pushing masterpiece so I thought maybe I better just shut up.
Listening to another Golijov album, a 2007 release with Oceana, Tenebrae, and Three Songs on it, I have to say I'm still bemused by all the acclaim he's received. Oceana (from poetry by Pablo Neruda) picks up where La Pasión leaves off, or rather vice versa: Oceana is what prompted Rilling to commission Golijov's Passion, and it is in the same idiom. It's all very atmospheric, and aside from the Brazilian scat singing I suppose I like it. The final "Chorale of the Reef" is quietly intense but as I was listening - and enjoying it - I was for some reason struck by the idea that what the work really needed was a beautiful instrumental movement. What popped into my head at that point was Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe, and that illustrates very well where I stand with Golijov: he sounds like a really good film composer.
This impression was borne out by the next work on the disc, Tenebrae for string quartet. Again, wonderfully atmospheric; Golijov cites as inspirations his witnessing of violence in Israel, a trip to a planetarium, and Francois Couperin's Tenebrae Lamentations. But now I was thinking of Max Richter, last encountered on the Shutter Island soundtrack helping Leo diCaprio feel morose. Golijov's Tenebrae is beautiful but at the same time there seems to be something missing - a feeling of newness. Too often I'm merely reminded of other music - a generic sad bit in a movie; a Haydn slow movement; French viol music. The problem is that I feel like what I'm responding to is that other music, not Golijov's use of it.
It's the same with "Night of the Flying Horses", the first of the Three Songs - what stands out immediately is how wonderfully ethnic-sounding it is (a ballad in Yiddish followed by Gypsy music). Golijov really knows how to use his tropes. For me, this ultimately is what puts me off his music. Yes, I may enjoy it while I listen to it, but I feel like the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Am I missing something, or is that it? Is the thing that I don't like about Golijov's music exactly the same as the thing that other people do like about it? I have a suspicion that one of the reasons for La Pasión's success was that pointy-headed classical types were happy to finally encounter some "proper" music you could actually tap your feet to, and that its acclaim was perhaps something of an overcompensation. Maybe. In Fanfare in 2006, Robert Carl wrote this: "If anyone has noticed, my response to Osvaldo Golijov’s output so far has been ambivalent—I’ve always admired his imagination, deep musicality, and multicultural grasp, but at the same time the music has seemed variable to me. At times I find it enormously inventive, stunning in the risks taken and met; at others it sounds a little generic, relying too much on easy musical tropes from different ethnic traditions". Carl says all this in a review of Golijov's opera Ainadamar, which he praises to the skies, noting "I’ve finally “got it,” in the sense that until now the whole world has been celebrating the composer while I’ve been standing on the sidelines... Above all, this is the first Golijov piece where I hear not just a deeply talented composer, but a great spirit emerging. I’ll still maintain a certain skepticism in future encounters, but I now know that his music can deserve the praise that’s been showered on it."
So perhaps there's still hope for me and Golijov.

More snippets from 1948

You thought we were done with The Year in American Music: 1948, didn't you? Hell no. Here's a few more bits...

Laura Bolton
The music instructor at the University of California in Los Angeles returned from her ninth expedition to primitive lands of Africa where she recorded little-known native songs and dances, and collected a number of rare musical instruments. "There is no definite African scale," she explained in an interview. "Every melody and every instrument is a law unto itself. Thus there is infinite variety." She added that Africa natives went for boogie-woogie in a big way, but at the same time were "simply crazy about symphonies."

Lorin Maazel
The seventeen-year-old violinist-composer-conductor was accorded a special "Man of the Year" award by the Pittsburgh Junior Chamber of Commerce for outstanding achievement in the field of music.

Igor Stravinsky
The famous modernist made a bid for the juke-box trade by adapting the Berceuse from his Fire Bird Suite as a popular song which he entitled Summer Moon. Before it was turned over to the bobby-soxers, it was given an official concert-stage premiere by Jennie Tourel, mezzo-soprano of the Metropolitan Opera, who included it on her recital program in Lansing, Mich. November 3.

One week after the opening of the new season, on November 18, the Metropolitan Opera Association announced a plan to make sound pictures of opera for exhibition in theaters, schools, and clubs... The project, explained Edward Johnson, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Association, is "one more step in the direction of our ultimate goal - which is, to bring more opera to more people in all parts of the world through world tours, broadcasts, records, and now films."
[Or, as Tom Galley of National CineMedia said, "This Metropolitan Opera series is a unique opportunity for people to experience world-class opera in their local community, plus the movie theatre environment and affordable ticket price make these events something that the entire family can enjoy. If you’ve never had the pleasure of attending a live opera performance before, this is the perfect opportunity to see why this magical art form has captured audiences’ imaginations for generations". Oh, wait, that was 2008...]

January 1
A ban on the making of phonograph records or transcriptions of any kind, by members of the American Federation of Musicians, went into effect today with the expiration of all previous contracts between the union and the recording companies... James Caesar Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, insisted that the prohibition against recording would be permanent. "We are only making our own competition when we make records," he explained. "I know of no other industry that makes the instrument that will destroy that industry... and... records sooner or later will destroy the musicians."
The major recording companies were not caught napping. For the preceding six months they had gone on a feverish twenty-four-hour-a-day recording schedule to create a stockpile that would last them from between two to three years.
[Remember, kids: Studio recording is killing music!]

March 20
Today, between 5:00 and 6:00 P.M., the first symphonic conert ever to be televised was broadcast over the CBS-TV networks; it presented the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy... One half hour after the termination of this concert, still another great musical organization was telecast - the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini over WNBT in New York.
... Howard Taubman wrote as follows in the magazine section of the New York Times: "Once you have seen a conductor, his act, so to speak, remains essentially the same... In fact, watching him on the television screen for a solid hour may interfere with proper attention to the music. Television, it may turn out, may establish for good that conductors, unlike children, should be heard, not seen."

Da/Nyet

Part of an occasional series in which we compare two reviews of the same recording and ask "Did you even listen to the same CD?"

For Dmitri Hvorostovsky's new album "Pushkin Romances" (Delos), BBC Music Magazine's Michael Scott Rohan goes head-to-head with Gramophone's David Fanning...

Rohan: "[Pushkin's] poetry's proverbially musical, but unlike some great verse it both inspires and repays musical settings"

Fanning: "if you want a disc to reinforce your prejudice that Russian song is all cloying self-indulgence, here it is"

Rohan: "featuring less famous but no less impressive figures such as... Sviridov, and Vlasov's elegant 'Fountain at Bakhchisarai'"

Fanning: "the kitsch-mongery of Vlasov and Sviridov"
Rohan: "Bringing them all to life is Hvorostovsky's performance"

Fanning: "a master of self-regarding baritonal syrup"

Rohan: "compelling delivery"

Fanning: " generalised intensity"

Rohan: "passionate, brooding or forceful with Pushkin's flowing lines"

Fanning: "a deadening uniformity of colour and expression across the board"

Rohan: Disc of the Month

Fanning: "Delos have some nerve expecting anyone to part with money for 45 minutes of such indifferent artistry".

Gramophone Award nominees

The nominations for this year's Gramophone Awards intrigue me, from the point of view of my own Nereffid's Guide Awards. The point of my awards is to reflect an overall picture of critical opinion, so it's not strange for the overlap between the two to be relatively low. Same with the BBC Music Magazine Awards. Obviously it's too early to tell how things will shake out in the NGAs, but one thing I notice is that the Gramophone list doesn't include the disc that's a shoo-in to win the NGA recording of the year (title withheld to induce sense of anticipation in reader). Come to think of it, last year's best, Marin Alsop's Bernstein Mass, didn't make an appearance in the Gramophones then, either.
What can we conclude from this?
Nothing.