The Horn

Concert Etiquette - It's A More Controversial Issue Than You Might Think

2010-03-12T13:46:00Z

When you go to a concert by a symphony orchestra , it's a totally different experience from a Rock or pop music concert . If you're new to classical concerts , don't expect the audience to behave the same way as ar a Rock concert , with all its raucous noise and rowdiness .

It's actually more like going to the movies in some ways , because the audience is trying to concentrate on music which is much more complex than popular music or Rock . No one who goes to the movies likes others in the audience to make noise and behave in a distracting manner . It's the same at concerts .

But lately , some classical music critics and commentators have been criticizing the way classical concerts are organized , claiming that they're much too "stuffy" and wishing that audiences would applaud more often , instead of the usual way they reserve it for the end of a work . They cite the fact that in the past , it was the norm for audiences to applaud inbetween movements of a symphony or concerto , and that composers expected this .

They claim that concerts today are tooo staid , and even boring to the point of being funereal in atmosphere , which I personlly think is more than a slight exaggeration . There's an interesting recent article by Alex Ross , music critic of the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed book "The Rest Is Noise " in which he explains how differently they behaved at concerts in the past . You can read it online at the New Yorker website .

In Mozart's day , audiences were even known to applaud in the middle of a symphony if they really liked a passage in a new one , and there is a letter which Mozart wrote to his father Leopold mentioning the first performance of one of his symphonies where this happened , to the delight of the composer .

Composers in the 19th century were unhappy if there was no applause after the first movement of one of their new symphonies or concertos , because this meant that the audience reaction to the work was less than enthusiastic . This happened to Johannes Brahms at the first performance of his piano concerto no 1 and he felt very discouraged at the time . But this did not stop the work from becoming a cornerstone of the repertoire in the long run .

All this may have been true in the past , but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is something "wrong " with concerts today . There are indications, however , that this may be changing . Unfortunately , sometimes newcomers to concerts are very enthusiastic and start applauding between movements, and sometimes more experienced concertgoers shush them, which can be very embarassing to them . This has even caused some of these newcomers to give up going to live concerts .

However , some instrumentalists who play concertos with an orchestra or give recitals say that applause between movements is unnerving , because it distracts them and breaks their concentration .

Of course , with opera , things have always been different , and it's still customary for the audience to applaud after arias . The operas of Wagner are highly continuous in structure and there are no arias as such and the action is nonstop between acts .

So if you're new to attending orchestral concerts , or are bringing any friends or relatives to them , be aware that the norm is to applaud all you want at the end of a work . Don't worry about how the other people are behaving , or let the fact that the musicians may be wearing black tie , which is off-putting for some reason to some concertgoers and all that . You there to listen to the music , and try to concentrate on the music and nothing but the music . After a piece is over , feel free to applaud and yell "bravo " if you really enjoyed the music and the performance . It's the music that matters .

The New York City Opera Announces Its Next Season - Unconventional But Intriguing

2010-03-10T13:47:00Z

The New York City opera has just released details of its next season , and the Big Apple's second opera company appears to be recovering from the financial and other difficulties which have threatened its existence for so long . Like the current season , the next one will have to have only a limited number of productions and performances , but the repertoire will be as interesting as it is unconventional . General manager George Steel , who recently assumed leadership of the troubled company is optimistic and enthusiastic about the upcoming season , and every one is delighted with the newly improved acoustics of the Koch theater, formerly the New York State Theater .

The only opera from the standard repertoire will be L'Elisir D'Amore ,or the elixir of love by Gaetano Donizetti , a charming bucolic comedy about a lovesick young man , his beloved and a traveling quack doctor . But the production moves the action from early 19th century rural Italy to 1950s America . The production may be updated , but Donizetti's lilting and melodious music remains untouched .

A Quiet Place , the only full length opera by Leonard Bernstein , will have its New York premiere . This is the sequel to the composer's brief one act opera Trouble in Tahiti , which deals with the marital problems of a yuppie couple . A Quiet Place deals with the aftermath of the death of the woman , and the difficult relationship of the father with his now grown children . There is a Deutsche Grammophon recording of the opera led by the composer , which you might want to check out first .

There will be a triple bill of three short operas by three different composers , only one still living ,namely John Zorn , and one by the late Morton Feldman , plus Arnold Schoenberg's disturbing monodrama "Erwartung" (expecation ) about a woman who may have discovered the corpse of her lover in the woods .

Stephen Schwartz, best known for his broadway shows Wicked , Godspell and Pippin , has written a new opera which will have its premiere ; Seance on a Wet Afternoon . There will be a revival of the rarely performed autobiographical opera "Intermezzo" by Richard Strauss , which is based on an incident from the composer's life in which his wife mistakenly accused him of being unfaithful until the whole mess is explained . In the opera , the names of the composer , his wife and the other characters are changed .

In addition , there will be a concert performance of "Where the Wild Things Are" , based on Maurice Sendak's famous paintings , by the distinguished English composer and conductor Oliver Knussen , plus some gala concerts . Despite the crisises it has faced in recent years , the New York City opera appears to be alive and kicking , and that is cause for rejoicing .

Beethoven The Old-Fashioned Way From A Once Famous Dutch Conductor

2010-03-09T13:36:00Z

In my last post I discussed a recording of the Beethoven 9th which follows all the latest research on how to perform Beethoven's music "authentically " . This post will discuss a CD of Beethoven's 5th and 6th symphonies from as far back as 1937 , long before the so-called HIP movement came into existence .

Willem Mengelberg (1871 -1951 ) , was an eminent Dutch conductor who led Amsterdam's great Concertgebouw orchestra for many years as well as the New York Philharmonic during the 1920s and left many recordings ,live and studio , some still considered classics , even though there are not too many people alive today who actually remember his live performances .

Purists today are scandalized by his free-wheeling old-fashioned approach to interpreting Beethoven and other composers such as Schubert and Bach . His ideas on interpretation fly in the face of everything they advocate , such as strict adherence to the written score and scrupulous use of printed editions of the music edited by musicologists who aim to know the "composers's intentions ".

But Mengelberg was actually closer than we are to Beethoven's era than we are ; he was born only 44 years after Beethoven died in 1827 and knew and studied with musicians who were steeped in the performing traditions of the past .

In the performance of the fifth , with its famous Da-da-da daaaah , for example , he is much freer with tempo than "politically correct" performances .He starts the first movement at a slower tempo than the main part of the movement - that's a no-no by today's purist notions of authenticity , and plays fast and loose with the tempi throughout the symphony .

He also retouches Beethoven's orchestration in an attempt to make it sound more impressive at times , another no-no . To Mengelberg , the score is not absolutely sacrosanct ; he felt ,like other musicians of his time, that he had not only the right but the duty to use his own discretion in interpreting the music . The conductors detractors sometimes called him "Mangleberg".

Was Mengelberg right , and are today's conductors and other musicians wrong , or was he merely being presumptuous and distorting the music because of his own ego ? Who knows? This is an endless debate, and unfortunately Beethoven has been dead since 1827 , so we'll never know with any certainty .

Check arkivmusic.com for recordings by this great but still controversial conductor .

A Recording Attempts To Perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony As It Was Nearly Two Centuries Ago

2010-03-08T13:53:00Z

I've been listening to a CD of Beethoven's immortal and world-famous 9th symphony , the so-called "Choral" symphony with the famous "ode to joy" last movement with chorus and vocal soloists . It's a work which has been performed and recorded countless times .

But this is one of those performances using the instruments of Beethoven's day , or replicas thereof , which were in many ways quite different from those of today . It also follows research on how to interpret the music in a manner which conforms to how musicologists believe the music may have been performed in the 1820s , when the work was premiered in Vienna .

Of course , we don't have a time machine , so we can never be absolutely sure of how close such performances are to the way the music actually sounded in the past , or whether the composer would have approved of the interpretation . But orchestras attempting to recreate the sounds of the past are now an established part of the classical music world , and they have made many recordings in recent years .

They are part of the so-called "HIP" movement in classical music , or historically informed practice , as the rather pompous-sounding term is known . This movement is a kind of musical religion ; it has its true believers ; conductors , instrumentalists ,musicologists and critics who have embraced the period instrument phenomeon whole-heartedly and who often sneer patronizingly at musicians who use modern instruments and ignore the latest research .

Then there are the atheists , musicians and critics who pour scorn on these politically correct performances and think the whole movement is either a total sham or questionable at best , and the agnostics , who don't dismiss the performances altogether but are somewhat skeptical as to how "authentic" these performances are . I count myself as one of the agnostics .

The recording I've been listening to is a fine one . The conductor is the eminent English scholar, harpsichordist and conductor Christopher Hogwood , and the orchestra is London's Academy of Ancient Music , one of the various period instrument groups in that musically rich and diverse city . The London Symphony chorus and soloists Arleen Auger , Catherine Robbin , Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Gregory Reinhart can be heard in the last movement .

Hogwoood tries ,among other things , to follow Beethoven's metronome markings as closely as possible . This is a highly controversial matter ; as is well-known , Beethoven was deaf at the time and it's not certain how accurate these metronome markings are. Typically, a metronome marking will indicate how many beats per minute a particular movement of a work, or even a section the composers wants .

But conductors often disregard them and use their own discretion . And furthermore , composers have been known to disregard those markings themselves when conducting there works years after writing them . There are so many different variables .

The liner notes , by the eminent Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper are full of insteresting information about circumstances of the first performance of this great symphony in Vienna in 1824 . The work was the longest and most complex symphony that had ever been written , and was extremely difficult for the musicians to play , and the vocal parts , both for the chorus and soloists , were equally difficult , and are still difficult for singers today .

Of course, orchestras today could almost play the music in their sleep . The orchestra was unusually large for the day ; four horns instead of the usual two, trrombones , piccolo and contra-bassoon in the finale in addition to the usuall woodwinds, and even cymbalas triangle and bass drum in the finale in addition to the usual tympany or kettle drums . More strings were used than normal for the first performance of the 9th .

The woodwinds were doubled in the first performance and so they are on the recording, and even the horns are doubled, making a total of eight of them ! The instruments of the 18th and early 19th century were quite different from those of today ; the violins, violas, cellos and double basses used strings made of sheep gut instead of the steel strings of the present day . The woodwinds were simpler and had fewer keys ; the horns and trumpets had no valves and used different lengths of tubing to play in different keys, although by the 1820s , valved horns and trumpets were starting to appear and before too long made the valveless instruments obsolete .

Are the period instrument performances "better" than those on modern instruments ? Not every one agrees . I would say that they are insterestingly different . But they in no way invalidate the supposedly "inauthentic" ones .

So many great conductors have recorded Beethoven's 9th , many as part of sets of all nine Beethoven symphonies , and there are many differences in approach . Some are broad and majestic , and others are swift , urgent and even agressive , and others fall somewhere inbetween .

Some conductors take considerable leeway in flexibility of tempo , and others are much more strict , even metronomic at times . There will never be one "definitive" recording or live performance of Beethoven's ninth .

Here is a more or less alphabetical list of some of the eminent conductors who have recorded Beethoven's ninth : Claudio Abbado , Leonard Bernstein , Karl Bohm , Daniel Barenboim , Herbert Blomstedt , Andre Cluytens, Sir Colin Davis, Christoph von Dohnanyi , Wilhelm Furtwangler , Sir John Eliot Gardiner , Nikolaus Harnoncourt , Bernard Haitink , Christopher Hogwood (the recording under discussion) , Eugen Jochum, Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajajn , Rafael Kubelik ,Josef Krips , Erich Leinsdorf, Lorin Maazel , Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur , Pierre Monteux , Sir Roger Norrington , Eugene Ormandy , Mikhail Pletnev, Andre previn , Sir Simon Rattle, Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti , George Szell, Leopold Stokowski , Arturo Toscanini , Bruno Walter, Gunter Wand , Felix Weingartner and David Zinman . Some have made more than one recording of it ; Karajan made no fewer than five !

The orchestras include such august ensembles as the Vienna Philharmonic , Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam , Berlin Philhamonic , London Symphony , Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra , Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, the Staatskapelle, Dresden , and many other world-famous orchestras , as well as ones on period instruments such as the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique , the London Classical Players, etc. Check arkivmusic.com for recordings .

March Opera News Magazine - The Met Revives An Opera Based On Shakespeare's Hamlet After Well Over A Century

2010-03-03T13:58:00Z

The handsome and charismatic English baritone Simon Keenlyside , who sings Hamlet in the Met's revival of the opera Hamlet by the once famous 19th century French composer Ambroise Thomas is on the cover of the March issue of Opera News magazine , and there's an interesting interview with him .

Writer Matthew Gurewitsch , who frequently contributes articles on opera and classical music to Opera News , the New York Times and elsewhere , also has an interesting article on this once popular but now seldom-heard opera , which takes considerable liberties with Shakespeare's original plot , including an optional alternate ending in which Hamlet survives and is proclaimed the king !

Musicologist Laurel E. Fay , who has written a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich , has written a highly informative article about the bizarre opera "The Nose " by this composer , which I discussed recently on this blog , and which premieres at the Met on March 5th, and there is also an article on the designer and director of the production, the South-African born artist William Kentridge .

You can also find the lists of the plots, casts , conductors , designers and directors of the four operas being broadcast by WQXR this month , Attila , The Nose , From The House Of The Dead and Hamlet , plus photos of the sets and pictures of costume sketches , as usual . Plus brief profiles of the singers and conductors . If you can't get WQXR on your radio , you can hear the broadcasts on the radio station's website , WQXR.org .

Opera News correspondants have reviews of performances from the Met , Chicago, Milan , Paris , Vienna , Zurich , and London , including the Met's new production of The Tales Of Hoffmann . Recordings of New opera CDs include the Naxos recording of John Adams' "Nixon in China" conducted by Marin Alsop , recorded in Denver , and the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pietro Mascagni's pastoral romance "L'Amico Fritz " with Angela Gheorghiu and her husband (soon to be ex) Roberto Alagna . This is the first recording of this charming work in about 40 years .

DVD reviews include Debussy's "Pelleas & Melisande" from Vienna , "Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk District ", the other opera by Shostakovich from Florence , a Wagner's Ring from Weimar , Germany , all live performances .

There are book reviews of a new biography of the obscure Italian composer Franco Alfano (1875 - 1954) , who completed Puccini's Turandot after the composer died in 1924 , but whose operas , especially Cyrano De Bergerac , have been revived recently and can now be heard on CD and seen on DVD , and a book by Derek Katz on the highly original music of Leos Janacek , whose From The House Of The Dead is currently in the Met's repertoire . No one who enjoys opera should ever miss Opera News magazine !

The Ne York Times Is At It Again , Finding Fault With The New York Philharmonic's Programming For Next Season

2010-03-02T13:53:00Z

In yesterday's New York Times , chief music critic Anthony Tommasini chides the New York Philharmonic for supposedly not having enough music by American composers scheduled for next season . But how much should the orchestra do each season ? You can't please every one when it comes to the vexed question of orchestral programming .

Tommasini acknowledged that the Philharmonic does indeed have a number of new works by American composers scheduled for next season , but wished there were more . There is also a fair amount of music by living European composers such as the Philharmonic's recently appointed composer in residence Magnus Lindberg , one of Finland's leading composers , and others .

Of course , if the Philharmonic had an even larger amount of new American works on tap for next season , critics would complain that the orchestra was neglecting music by European composers . You can't win for losing .

The Philharmonic's new music director Alan Gilbert , an American who succeeded the veteran Lorin Maazel at the Philharmonic this past September , also an American , is known as a committed advocate of new music in general , and Tommasini and other critics have welcomed his arrival enthusiastically , saying that at last , the orchestra will be brought into the present , which is ridiculous , considering the fact that under previous music directors Maazel, Kurt Masur , Zubin Mehta and guest conductors , the Philharmonic has already given its audience a steady stream of new works by a wide variety of living or recently deceased composers , far more, in fact than many other orchestras in America , Europe and elsewhere .

Eminent composers such as John Adams , Elliott Carter , Hans Werner Henze , Pierre Boulez , Christopher Rouse , Magnus Lindberg , Kaaia Saariaho , Wolfganfg Rihm , William Bolcom , Osvaldo Golijov , Alfred Schnittke , Krzystof Penderecki , Thomas Ades , Tan Dun , Philip Glass , to name only some . A virtual Who's Who of contemporary composers . Not only the same old familiar masterpieces . And the programming has been multicultural ; not "eurocentric " but works by American ,Asian and Latin American composers .

But orchestras and conductors are damned if they do , and damned if they don't . No matter what a music director of an orchestra chooses to do , or guest conductors , some one , either a critic or an audience member , will complain . Critics are always complaining that orchestras don't play enough new or recent music , but many audiences are very conservative in their tastes and want orchestras to keep on playing their beloved familar masterpieces by Beethoven , Brahms , Tchaikovsky , Rachmaninov , and other popular composers of the past .

If a conductor prograns an extremely complex esoteric work by say , Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez , many people in the audience will complain bitterly , saying "how can this conductor subject us poor listeners to such horrible stuff ? It's worse than being waterboarded !".

But if a conductor plays a more audience-friendly piece by a living composer who writes more accessible music , critics will blast him or her for pandering to audiences with "easy listening ". And the most conservative members of the audience are reluctant even to hear this kind of music , preferrring their beloved Beethoven .

If a conductor concentrates on staples of the repertoire , critics will complain about the neglect of new music . Those who program a substantial amount of new music are blasted for not doing the music audiences know and love . It's a no win situation .

But one thing is certain . Orchestras MUST play new music , or the repertoire will stagnate . Let history determine which new works achieve a lasting place in the repertoire . Only time will tell which works will last . But fortunately , there's absolutely no lack of new music today ; it co-exists with older music, as it should .

Recent Scientific Research Attempts To Explain Why So Many People Can't Stand Modern Music

2010-03-01T14:07:00Z

Richard Gray , science correspondant for The Telegraph in England (telegraph.co.uk) , has recently written an interesting article on why so many people find the complex atonal music of the 20th century so difficult to grasp and therefore reject and dislike it .

He cites recent research by a number of neuroscientists on people's reaction to this kind of classical music , which is so vastly different from the familiar masterpieces of Bach , Mozart and other great composers of the past which audiences know and love . The brain is a pattern-seeking organ ; the traditional music of the past follows realtively strict patterns which the brain processes in order to make sense of it .

Gray explains that the extremely negative reaction of so many listeners to atonal music does not necessarily mean that they are philistines or lacking in intelligence , but that such music is simply much more demanding on the brain to grasp . The music of Schoenberg , Webern and other 20th century composers is far less predictable in its patterns than than the works of Mozart and Bach et al .

He's right . When you listen to the music of Schoenberg and other atonal composers , the melodic lines (if you can call them melodic ) are extremely jagged and irregular in rhythm; the intervals between the notes are not smooth and predicatable . There are often wide leaps between the notes that would be difficult to sing if one were to try this; intervals such as the tritone, or leap of the augmented fourth (c- f sharp), the so-called Diabolus in Musica, (devil in music) are common . The music also does not follow the usual regular metric patterns rhthmically , such as march or waltz patterns , and sounds very fragmented .

But Gray doesn not mention another factor in learning to grasp atonal music , or music which is not in any key at all . This is giving the music repeated hearings on recordings and allowing it to become more coherent and make more sense . Of course , when attend a concert and hear challenging music for the first time , it can often seem puzzling .

This is true even of complex music which is not atonal , such as the expansive and monumental symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, or even the late string quartets of Beethoven . But with recordings , the listener has the luxury of allowing the music to become graspable with repeated hearings. This has happened to me with so many works by so many different composers .

In classical music , it's not familiarity which breeds contempt , but unfamiliarity !

Maestro James Levine To Celebrate 40 Years At The Metropolitan Opera Next Season

2010-02-25T13:56:00Z

In 1971 , an up-and -coming young American conductor named James Levine made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera conducting Puccini's Tosca , and as they say, the rest is history . He was only 28 years old , but had impressive credentials , and had already been conducting many of the top American symphony orchestras and some of the opera companies , was a virtuoso pianist who might have made a solo career ,had studied at Juilliard , and the great Hungarian conductor George Szell , who had died the previous year ,had been his mentor and appointed him assistant conductor of the renowned Cleveland Orchestra .

Born in Cincinnati in 1943 , Levine was enjoying a meteoric career as a fast-rising young conductor, and returned to the Met regularly , soon becoming its first principal conductor , then music director and artistic director . Levine's name became synonymous with the Met , although he continued to appear regularly with such great orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic , the Staatskapelle, Dresden and the Vienna Philharmonic in Europe and at the world-famous Salzburg festival in Austria , and conducted Wagner at the legendary Bayreuth festival .

Levine also spent many years as music director of the Ravinia festival near Chicago , Summer home of the Chicago Symphony orchestra , and conducted numerous concerts with the orchestra there and making recordings .

Later , he became music director of the Munich Philharmonic , succeeding the brilliant but eccentric Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache , and in 2004 succeeded Seiji Ozawa as music director of the Boston Symphony , becoming the renowned orchestra's first American-born music director .

Levine's accomplishments with the Metropolitan Opera have become legendary ; he built its orchestra into one of the world's finest and transformed it into an orchestra which also played symphonic concerts , appearing for several concerts every year at Carnegie Hall and on tour .

He broadened the Met's repertoire greatly , conducting not only such repertoire staples as the operas of Mozart , Verdi , Puccini , Rossini , and Wagner etc, but many important operas which the Met had never done before or not performed for many ,many years , such as Benvenuto Cellini by Berlioz , I Vespri Siciliani, I Lombardi and Stiffelio by Verdi , Alban Berg's Lulu , Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok , Francesca Da Rimini by Riccardo Zandonai , and the world premieres of The Ghosts of Versailes by John Corigliano and The Great Gatsby by John Harbison, Mozart's Idomeneo and La Clemenza Di Tito , to name only some .

Other notable operas new to the Met but conducted by other maestros have included Busoni's Doktor Faust , War and Peace and The Gambler by Prokofiev , Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District by Shostakovich , Dvorak's Russalka , Capriccio by Richard Strauss , Doctor Atomic by John Adams , The Last Emperor by Tan Dun , Bellini's Il Pirata , Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa , Janacek's Katya Kabanova, The Makropoulos Case and From The House Of The Dead , and others .

Under Levine , the Met introduced English translations of the operas performed by placing electronic writing on the back of each seat and began to offer High Definition broadcasts of live performances in movie theaters around America only a few years ago .

Levine has brought such eminent conductors as Carlos Kleiber , Riccardo Muti , Esa-Pekka Salonen , Christoph Eschenbach , Giuseppe Sinopoli , Valery Gergiev , Bernard Haitink , Klaus Tennstedt , Lorin Maazel , Seiji Ozawa , Christian Thielemann and others to the Met , and worked tirelessly to foster the development of talented young opera singers , and worked regularly with so many great opera singers , such as Placido Domingo ,Renee Fleming , Luciano Pavarotti , Karita Mattila, Thomas Hampson , James Morris , to name only a few .

Levine also brought the Metropolitan Opera back to the recording studio , recording operas by Mozart , Verdi, Puccini and Wagner , including the first complete recording of Wagner's monumental Ring of the Nibelungen to be made in America after many years .

Therefore , it's only natural that the Met will be celebrating Levine's 40 years of great accomplishments with America's oldest and most prestigious opera house next season , and the company will issue special CDs and DVDs of performances conducted by him . In addition , the award-winning director Susan Froemke will be making a documentary about this towering figure in American classical music . Long may he reign at the Met !

The Nose By Shostakovich Comes To The Met - Sheer Operatic Lunacy !

2010-02-23T13:58:00Z

On March 5th , the Metropolitan Opera will premiere its new production of what is without a doubt the weirdest and looniest comic opera of all time - "The Nose " , by the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 -1975 ). This is like no other opera the Met has ever done in its venerable 125 year history . Who knows what opera fans who are accustomed to their beloved operas by Verdi , Puccini , Mozart and Rossini will think of this crazy masterpiece ? That's right . It's an opera about some one's nose . I'm not kidding !

The Nose is one of the composer's earliest notable works , and was premiered in Leningrad (now St.Petersburg ) in 1930 , when Shostakovich was only 24 years old, and is the first of his two operas . The second, the grim , sordid and tragic "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District" , which came about six years later earned the extreme displeasure of Joseph Stalin .

The Nose is based on an absurd surrealistic short story by the 19th century Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol , and deals with one Major Kovalyov , a minor civil servant in St.Petersburg whose nose mysteriously disappears from his face after drunken barber cuts it off by accident .

The barber discovers the nose to his horror in the bread his wife has just baked , and she furiously orders him out of the house . Meanwhile, Kovalyov discovers to his own horror that the nose is missing , and goes out looking for it . He tries to contact the police and even tries to get a newspaper to print an ad for his missing proboscis , but his request is denied .

Later Kovalyov goes to a cathdral and notices his nose dressed as a state councilor , but it refuses to have anything to do with him ! The nose later goes all over town creating havoc , and all St. Petersburg wants to see it ! Eventually the troublesome schozola returns to his face , and every one shrugs the whole absurd affair off !

The orchestra features an extral large percussion section which has a whole interlude to itself between scenes , plus traditional Russian instruments such as Balaliakas and Domras ; it makes all manner of bizarre rude noises with contrabasson solos , sliding tombones etc, and the vocal lines are highly jagged and declamatory . The whole score is raucous , chaotic and brilliantly inventive .

The large cast will feature the Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot (shot) , making his Met debut as the unfortunate Kovalyov , and tenor Gordon Gietz will sing the high -lying and difficult role of the nose , which also requires falsetto , and the great Ossetian conductor Valery Gergiev will conduct .

The brilliant South-African born artist William Kentridge makes his Met debut both as set designer and director . The production will feature all manner of moving projections across the stage , consisting of newpaper articles in Russian and all manner of bizarre images . The radio brooadcast will be on March 13, and if you are unable to get it on your radio , you can listen on the internet at WQXR.org .

Maestro Gergiev recently recorded The Nose with the forces of the Maryiinsky opera in St. Petersburg , where he has long served as music director , and this is on the company's own newly formed record label . Check arkivmusic.com or amazon.com for it .

To paraphrase Saturday Night Live , this is one wild and crazy opera !

The New York Philharmonic Has Announced Details Of Its Exciting 2010- 2011 Season

2010-02-22T13:50:00Z

The New York Philharmonic has recently announced details of its next season, which will begin this September with a new work by the renowned Jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis which will combine the orchestra with the Lincoln Center Jazz orchestra . Music director Alan Gilbert , in his second season as head of America's oldest symphony orchestra , will conduct , and the program will also include more traditional fare with music by Paul Hindemith and Richard Strauss .

Marsalis has also been involved with classical music and has performed and recorded numerous trumpet concertos with leading orchestras and conductors . As usual , the next Philharmonic season will feature a stimulating mix of new and recent works , staples of the orchestral repertoire and revivals of long-neglected but interesting works from the past .

The world's most distinguished conductors will appear as guests , as well as the world's greatest pianists, violinists, cellist and other instrumentalists playing concertos , and great singers for vocal works with orchestra will be there as usual , and promising young conductors will make their Philharmonic debuts .

The distinguished Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg will begin his second season as composer in residence , and the New York premiere of his new orchestral work "Kraft" , which combines electronic music and acoustical instruments will take place , among other new or recent works by a variety of today's leading composers .

Among the renowned instrumental soloists will be violinists Anne-Sopie Mutter, who will be artist-in-residence, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman , Joshua Bell and Gil Shaham , and pianists Emmanuel Ax , Yefim Bronfman , Radu Lupu and Jean-Pierre Aimard .

Alan Gilbert will conduct a staged performance of Leos Janacek's fascinating opera "The Cunning Little Vixen " , the story of the animals of a Czech forest and their relationship with humans , featuring a fox as the protagonist ! The distinguished Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, , former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic , will conduct a three week festival with the theme of Hungarian music , with works by the great Bela Bartok, the late Gyorgy Ligeti , and Joseph Haydn, who though an Austrian and not Hungarian , spent much of his life in what is now Hungary .

The gifted but controversial young Chinese pianist Lang Lang will play the familiar Tchaikovsky piano concerto no 1 as part of an all Tchaikovsky new year's eve concert , showing that the Philharmonic is not ababndoning the most popular works of the orchestral repertoire .

You will be able to hear some of the Philharmonic's concert over the internet and the radio , as well as see them on PBS boradcasts . Check out the orchestra's website, newyorkphilharmonic.org for more information .

February Opera News Magazine - Maestro Riccardo Muti Finally Makes His Met Debut

2010-02-18T13:45:00Z

The February issue of Opera News has the eminent Italian conductor Riccardo Muti on the cover, and editor in chief F. Paul Driscoll interviews the fiery and uncompromising conductor , who will conduct the Met's first production of Verdi's Atilla at the Met next week .( I profiled the opera in a recent post here.)

Writer Patrick Dillon has an interesting article on the historical background of the opera , and the Russian (actually ethnic Tatar ) bass Ildar Abrdrazakov , who sings the juicy role of the infamous "scourge of God", is interviewed by Matthew Gurewitsch , who frequently writes about classical music for the New York Times .

Renowned New Zealand -born soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, now at the end of her long and distinguished career , talks about teaching gifted young vocal students who may be tomorrow's top opera singers , and Driscoll has an appreciation of the great Swedish soprano Eliseabeth Soderstrom , who passed this past November at the age of 82 .

Writer Barry Singer has an interesting article on the operas of two American composers, Samuel Barber , who would have turned 100 this year , and the African-American composer William Grant Still , (1895 -1968 ), whose music has been receiving increased attention after many years of neglect . Still was one of the first African-American classical composers to make a reputation in the field .

As usual during the Saturday radio boradcast season , this months broadcast operas are profiled , with lists of cast , conductors etc and brief profiles of them and their current activities .

Opera news critics have reviews of the New York City Opera's new production of Don Giovanni and the revival of Hugo Weisgall's Biblical opera Esther , the Met's acclaimed new production of Janacek's From The House Of The Dead , and various opera productions in London and Berlin .

The CD reviews include recordings of the recently premeiered opera L'Amour Du Loin "(love fram afar) by the Finnish composer Kaaia Saariaho , and the operetta Tom Jones , based on the famous novel by Henry Fielding by the now obscure English composer Edward German , albums of assorted opera arias by sopranos Diana Damrau , Sandine Piau and Viveca Genaux and Verdi's great requiem by conductor Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera in London .

There are also reviews of live opera performances on DVD including Rossini's La Cenerentola(Cinderella) from Barcelona , Puccini's rarely performed early opera Edgar from Turin, Italy , and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin from the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow .

Even if you're an opera newbie , Opera News is always great reading ! Check their website operanews.com .

New York Times Music Critic Anthony Tommasini On Musical Pluralism

2010-02-16T13:57:00Z

The Sunday New York Times arts and leisure section has another very interesting and thought-provoking article by its chief music critic Anthony Tommasini . In it he discusses the many divergent musical styles of different 20 th and 21st century composers , and how he has come to reject dogmatic insistence on one right compositional style .

The history of classical music in the 20th century has in many ways been a war between conflicting schools of compositional style ; for example, the doctrinaire serialists who followed in the footsteps of Arnold Schoenberg and the so-called second Viennese school which he started , and those composers who never abandoned tonality and melody .

Tommasini recalls how when he was a graduate music student at Yale in the 60s, how some of his professors turned up their noses at contemporary composers who did not follow avandt-garde techniques and strove to write music which was not puzzling to audiences . And composer/conductor Pierre Boulez declared many years ago that any composer who was not a doctrinaire serialist was "useless". Useless to whom ? Certainly not audiences .

Tommasini reveals how he is open both to the music of diificult composers such as Elliott Carter , Charles Wuorinen and Poulez , and more conservative ones such as Samuel Barber etc, and many different living composers . Rightly , he is willing to judge each work on its individual merits , not by whether it fits into some procrustean bed .

But there are also listeners and critics who go too far in the opposite direction and reject any work which is much more harmonically and rhythmically complex than Brahms, and who are convinced that only tonality is valid , and that Schoenberg and his followers "ruined" music in the 20th century . They are equally wrong .

So if you're realitively new to classical music , listen to a wide variety of works from the 20th century , and make up your own mind . Don't reject the avant-garde merely for being modern , and don't reject conservative composers merely for being more traditional . Judge each work on its individual merits . The world of classical music is big enough for many divergent styles .

What Is A Cadenza ?

2010-02-13T15:17:00Z

You may have heard some famous concertos for instruments such as piano, violin, cello or other instruments and orchestra by such great composers as Mozart , Beethoven , Brahms , Tchaikovsky and others . It's traditional near the end of the first movement for the orchestra to come to a halt , and then, the soloist plays alone for a while in a manner which sounds sort of improvised .

Then , the orchestra resumes playing and the movement soon comes to a close . Why is this done ? It's a tradition which began in the 18th century with composers such as Mozart and his contemporaries . This part of a concerto is called a Cadenza , which is Italian for cadence . Cadenza ultimately comes from the Latin verb cadere, which means to fall .

In music theory , a cadence is where the music seems to come to a close . A cadenza is often a chance for the soloist to show off his or her virtuosity . In the 18th century , a soloist was usually expected to improvise the cadenza on the spot . And the soloist was often the composer himself (women composers rarely got a chance to be heard in the past ).

Mozart, who was one of the greatest pianists of his day , wrote no fewer than 27 concertos for his instrument ; one is for two pianos and one for three . In the last decade of his life, where he had escaped working as more or less a hack for the church and the aristocracy and was living as a fee lance composer and pianist in Vienna , Mozart put on many concerts of his music and hired he orchestra .

When he played his piano concertos , he would improvise the cadenzas . Later, other composers such as Beethoven wrote cadenzas for some of them . In the 19th century , Johannes Brahms wrote his famous violin concerto for his close friend Joseph Joachim, perhaps the greatest violinist of his day .

Joachim gave Brahms advice on writing for the violin and wrote the first movement cadenza, which is still played and has been standard for well over a century . Beethoven wrote cadenzas for his five piano concertos and was a great pianist himself until his tragic deafness forced him to give up playing in public , and these are also still used, but other pianists have used their own .

In the 20th century , the tradition of soloists improvising cadenzas had died out altogether , but there is a growing trend to revive this tradition . Robert Levin and Malcolm Bilson are specialists in performing on old pianos and scholars as well . They have performed and recorded Mozart's piano concertos and have improvised cadenzas of their own .

There is even an example of a modern composer writing an alternate cadenza for Beethoven's great violin concerto , which was premiered a little over 200 years ago in Vienna . The late Alfred Schnittke (1934 -1998 ) , an modernist who combined a variety of compositional techniques from different centuries to create a strange eclectic collage style , wrote a bizarre cadenza for this beloved staple of the repertoire which used atonality and wild dissonance in a deliberately anachronistic manner !

He wrote this weird cadenza for the great Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer (1947-) , who recorded it for Philips records in London back in the 1980s . Check arkivmusic.com to se if it's still available; it may not be. It's absolutely startling . Kremer has also long been a champion of contemporary music for the violin .

If you listen to different recordings of concertos you can hear a wide variety of different cadenzas for them . AS they say , variety is the spice of life !

A New York Times Music Critic Discusses The Interpretation Of Music And "The Composers Intent"

2010-02-11T13:48:00Z

There's a highly interesting article in this past Sunday's Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times by one of its music critics , Allan Kozinn . He was inspired by recent concerts in Carnegie hall by the great Vienna Philharmonic under two of today's leading conductors ; composer/ conductor Pierre Boulez, and pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim , featuring works by the founder of atonality Arnold Schoenberg , and one of his best known pupils and followers , Anton WEbern, whose music I discussed in my last post .

Kozinn discusses how different the interpretations of both conductos were of Schoenberg's music ; yet he points out that neither conductor had a monopoly on the one "right" way to perform the music . According to Kozinn , Boulez emphasized "delicacy and transparency " (transparency in the sense that one could hear all the different things going on in the orchestra clearly, a Boulez trademark), while Barenboim's interpretations featured "raw power and heft".

The interpretation of music is something which has caused an enormous amount of debate for centuries, among composers, scholars, critics and music lovers in general . They argue endlessly over whether a particular musician was "faithful to the composer's intentions". Who is right? Did this or that conductor, pianist or other instrumentalist or singer faithfully observe what was written in the score, or did the performers take unwaranted liberties and distort the music, making a travesty of it ?

It's all highly subjective. One musician's interpretive freedom and license is considered egotistical distortion and self-indulgence by one critic or fan, and another performer's scrupulous observance of the score's written instructions is considered pedantic literalism and lack of imagination by the same listeners, or vice-versa.

The trouble is that the score cannot tell us everything about how to interpret any given work; performers must use their discretion . The score gives us the notes, and many other guidelines on how to play the music. Some composers provide more information than others depending on the time period in which the music was written.

In general, the earlier a work, the fewer indications there are in a score. Other scores, particularly in 20th century and late 19th century works, contain a great deal of information , some of them written instructions which are highly specific. But performers have often been expected to personalize and customize the music according to their own discretion by composers . And it's always possible to go overboard and take too many liberties . But in many cases, composers have wanted the performers to do more than "just play the notes". That isn't enough.

You don't expect an actor in a Shakespeare play to stand there and speak the lines in a deadpan manner ; that would be ridiculous . There are an infinite number of ways an actor can inflect the lines and add gestures and facial expressions . Gielgud's Hamlet was vastly different from Olivier's . It's very similar in classical music .

For example; there's the thorny question of what is called Rubato, or "robbing" the tempo to slow down or speed up the music , even though it's not written in the score . In some cases, a composer will specifically indicate that the music is to slow down or speed up ; but most do not want the performer to play the music in a metronomic fashion ; they expect the performers to use some rubato .

But while rigidity of tempo is bad, it's equally bad to exaggerate the rubato and slow down and speed up constantly in an arbitrary and chaotic manner . The best performances find a happy medium between these two extremes .

But unfortunately, composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms etc have been dead for a very long time . We will never know for certain what they would have liked or disliked in today's performances and recordings of their music . However, we are fortunate to have recordings of the music of some great composers conducting or playing their music , such as Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland , Leonard Bernstein , Paul Hindemith , Richard Strauss and Sir Edward Elgar .

But these and other composers have been known to perform their music in a different manner on different occaisions , and to use different tempi . Tempo, are rate of speed is another can of worms in the discussion of music . Composers supply written instructions such as the Italian words Allegro, Adagio, Presto, Andante , etc to indicate slow rates of speed or fast ones, and speeds inbetween . The metronome was invented in the early 19th century so that composers could indicate specific rates of speed in mathematical proportions, so that performers could avoid playing the music either too fast or too slow and displease the composer .

But the problem is that composers have been known to disregard their metronome markings years after they wrote them in the score while playing the piano or conducting . They just felt like different tempi at the time . So performers and critics must be wary about exact observance of the metronome markings .

Some conductors have been known for tending to take unusully slow tempi , and others for unusually fast ones . Which are right ? There are no easy answers to this question .

And there are also recordings by certain conductors and other musicians who were trusted interpreters of their music and who are known to have pleased the composers .

But even the composers acknowkedge that their recordings are not the only way to do the music . The composer's intentions are not written in stone .

Is The Audience For Classical Music Really Shrinking And Growing Older ?

2010-02-10T14:14:00Z

Classical music blogger Greg Sandow recently attended a HD broadcast of Verdi's opera Simon Boccanegra by the Metropolitan Opera at a movie theater , and in his latest blog post at artsjournal.com , he is dismayed by the fact that almost every one in the theater audience seemed to be 60 or over . At least the theater was almost full , which is an encouraging sign !

Like many who love classical music , and are involved with it as composers, critics , performers or administrators , he is worried that eventually , the audience for classical music in America may die out altogether . The situation is rather different in Europe and Asia. But is this a genuine risk today , and if so, why is the audience getting older ? Is it the fault of our orchestras and opera companies , or the result of lack of education about classical music in our schools , or the fault of classical music in general ?

There are no easy answers to these questions . But one idea which must be rejected is that our orchestras and opera companies, and other classical groups have failed to make concert and operagoing worthwhile . They offer a quality product , and make it possible for us to listen to a vast amount of wonderful classical music going back from centuries ago to the present day .

Another possible reason for the problem is expensive tickets . Depending on where you sit, you can have to pay up to $250 dollars for a ticket to the Metropolitan opera, although there are much less expensive ones . But expensive tickets can be a discouragement no matter what your age, and tickets to Broadway shows aren't exactly cheap, either .

Is it the supposed "stuffiness" of classical concerts, where audiemces are expected to remain silent until it's time to applaud ? No one complains about silence in movie theaters; in fact, if some one makes a lot a noise there ,people will call for an usher .

And if more public schools offered classes which would introduce kids to classical music, would there be more younger people at concerts ? Who knows ?

I remember the Summer performances by the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera at a park on Long Island near where I used to live . They were free ! But unfortunately budget cuts in Nassau county put an end to these performances in the park some years ago, although the Met and Philharmonic still give free Summer performances at various parks in the five New York boroughs and elsewhere .

Eisenhower park on Long Island was always full for these free performances, and people of all ages came . Parents brought their children , and there were plenty of teenagers and young adults who appladed and cheered as loudly as any one else.

But at least in opera in America, there is a definite presence of younger people at performances today all over the US. More and more young people have been discovering the joys of opera .

But one thing is certain ; classical music will survive and flourish in America in the future no matter what problems it faces . You can't keep a great art form down .