Friday November 21 2008
Best of British ... Sir Colin Davis rehearsing the London Symphony Orchestra at LSO St Luke's. Photograph: Graham Turner
Well, to get one inside the top five isn't bad: the London Symphony Orchestra has been acclaimed the fourth best orchestra in the world. Not my words, but those of Gramophone magazine, whose December edition is out today and contains a chart of the 20 finest symphony orchestras in the world - have a look at the complete list here.
There's a self-consciously international feel to the list, as well as the panel, with critics from the US, China, Korea and Europe. Alas, there is no other British representative in this pointless-but-fun pantheon. Should we be worried? Not really. Inevitably the list is as subjective as the panel's proclivities. The Saito Kinen Orchestra is at 19th, but no place for the resurgent London Philharmonic? The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra is 18th, but the Royal Opera House Orchestra - at least as good on its day - is nowhere.
On the international stage, the questions go on: is the Dresden Staatskapelle really almost twice as good as the Leipzig Gewandhaus (10th v 17th)? Should the New York Philharmonic be more highly-ranked than the San Francisco Symphony when Michael Tilson Thomas's reign in San Francisco has been infinitely more interesting than Lorin Maazel's at Lincoln Centre? And there's a definite American bias in the mid-range, as three US orchestras beat three Russian orchestras. Maybe that's just because there wasn't a Russian critic on the panel. Continue reading...
Thursday November 20 2008
Stravinsky's house, Los Angeles. Photograph: Tom Service
Another quick postcard from LA: this is Igor Stravinsky's house at North Wetherly Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, where he lived from the late 1940s. It's a weird place: you turn off the glitz and glamour of Sunset, up a steep, winding street, to find a world of quiet, expansive, and expensive houses. I don't know who owns 1260 now, but behind its genteel, European-style wooden facade, Stravinsky made the most surprising compositional turn of his life, when he adopted his own interpretation of serialism. Arnold Schoenberg, who discovered the 12-note system, lived not far away in LA, but these two oppositional poles of 20th-century music never met. Stravinsky only became a full-scale 12-tonalist after Schoenberg's death in 1951. Continue reading...
Tuesday November 18 2008
Poor relations ... Even Star Wars fans can't find it in their hearts to love the Holiday Special. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Off topic, strictly speaking, but when in LA – Donald Liebenson's story in the LA Times alerted me to a cultural anniversary that really is worth celebrating: 30 years ago today, on November 17 1978, CBS broadcast the world's most mind-boggling movie spin-off: the Star Wars Holiday Special. Continue reading...
Monday November 17 2008
Plastic fantastic ... The bag celebrating the tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Photograph: Tom Service
I like this. A humble plastic bag, from Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles – but one that celebrates the reign of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the outgoing music director of the LA Phil. I'm in California to cover, inter alia, a concert that Thomas Adès is conducting with the orchestra this weekend, more of which anon. The only other city I've been to where the conductor is feted like a civic star is Berlin, where posters of Simon Rattle adorn billboards, streetlamps, and merchandise.
Salonen has been in charge here since 1992, and his replacement is classical music's hottest property du jour, Gustavo Dudamel. If any city knows how to hype someone, it's LA. But it says something that even in a place more internationally famous for its silicon implants than its orchestral music, they can really put out the bunting – literally, since Salonen's mugshot is all over downtown LA – for their music director. The Philharmonia notably did not provide celebratory bags, mugs, badges, or bunting for Christoph von Dohnanyi's last season at the helm, before Salonen took over from him earlier this year. Continue reading...
Tuesday November 11 2008
In happier times ... the Queen visits Riccardo Muti in his offices at La Scala in 2000. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA
Here is a wonderful story, proving that old-school conductor tantrums and aristocratic patronage are still alive and well in the 21st century. Riccardo Muti, one of the world's most expensive and sought-after conductors – and certainly the sexagenerian maestro with the best hair - has cancelled his engagement with the Philharmonia to play at Prince Charles's 60th birthday bash. The event at Buckingham Palace on Thursday is expected to have 450 royals, politicians, dignitaries and hangers-on in attendance.
The Philharmonia is Charles's house band: he is their patron (and "incredibly supportive", according to the Philharmonia), and the orchestra provided the music for his wedding to Camilla at St George's Chapel. Must be nice to have your own orchestra to play for you.
But it looks like the Queen and Charles were upset with Muti over the musical content of the programme – it was too long, "complicated" and "inappropriate", according to the Mail on Sunday's source. ("Logistical difficulties" is what the official statement from the Philharmonia and Buckingham Palace says.) Alas, each side in the argument has been unwilling to give an inch. Continue reading...
Monday November 10 2008
Having a brainwave ... Mick Grierson demonstrates his brain-computer-music interface. Photograph: YouTube
Not a Jedi mind trick, but musical creation via the medium of brain waves. Raymond Scott - unwitting composer of Warner Bros cartoon soundtracks (they co-opted his tunes for the Raymond Scott Quintet), electronic music pioneer and, latterly, inventor-cum-hermit - had the following dream in 1949:
"In the music of the future, the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealised conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channelled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea."
Music and politics: no, this is not about Barack Obama's iPod, but an uncompromising Englishman. Few composers in 20th-century musical history are more controversial than Cornelius Cardew. Reading pianist John Tilbury's comprehensive and revelatory new biography of Cardew – 1,100 pages, 25 years in the writing - you're faced with as much political theory as musical biography. That's because Cardew's journey as a composer took him from the avant garde to the political vanguard. Continue reading...
Wednesday November 5 2008
A toast ... pints of beer and other drinks are allowed in the auditorium for OAE's Night Shift concerts. Photo: Brian Harris/Rex Features
There's a lot of talk about how classical music has to rethink the concert experience in order to find new, younger audiences. To be honest, most of the efforts to energise the concert hall with limp lighting effects or video screens are either buttock-clenchingly embarrassing or plain patronising. So could the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's Night Shift get it right where so many others have failed? Continue reading...
Friday October 31 2008
Supreme technical sophistication: Finnish heavy metal band Lordi. Photograph: Kimmo Mantyla/AFP
News that heavy metal is to receive serious scholarly attention in Salzburg has raised some eyebrows elsewhere in these pages. So is it heretical that the city of Mozart should be putting Metallica and Slayer centre stage? Continue reading...
Wednesday October 29 2008
Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/PA
Something of an epiphany at the Royal Festival Hall last night: Vladimir Jurowski's concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, part of his Revealing Tchaikovsky festival. They performed Romeo and Juliet in the first half – no novelty there, you would have thought – except that Jurowski played it twice: in the familiar 1880 version we know and love today, and the 1869 original. The differences are shocking. Tchaikovsky wrote a completely different introduction in 1869, and he even included a disastrous attempt at a fugue in the middle section of the tone-poem; a passage of leaden scholasticism, as if the two lovers were taking a counterpoint class instead of consummating their union. Continue reading...
Friday October 24 2008
Photograph: PR
An amazing story from Urbana, Ohio, originally from the Springfield News-Sun:
Andrew Vactor was facing a $150 fine for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
Vactor, 24, lasted only about 15 minutes, a probation officer said.
It wasn't the music, Vactor said, he just needed to be at practice with the rest of the Urbana University basketball team.
"I didn't have the time to deal with that," he said. "I just decided to pay the fine."
Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott says the idea was to force Vactor to listen to something he might not prefer, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music. Continue reading...
Wednesday October 22 2008
Jorg Widmann ... his brilliant music deserves better than jargon-choked criticism. Photograph: Felix Broede
And people wonder why new music sometimes has a hard time: before I met Jörg Widmann, 35-year-old German composer and clarinet virtuoso, for Music Matters, I came across this joyous little nugget in the entry about him in Grove Music Online: "Although the colours may be novel and fascinating, and the concomitant intervallic valencies original, their non-periodicity raises formal issues not yet dealt with by the composer."
Lovely stuff. Really makes you want to hear the music, doesn't it? Continue reading...
Monday October 20 2008
The leading member of the Mighty Handful ... Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Photograph: Michael Nicholson / Corbis
It's the forgotten classical music anniversary this year: not Vaughan Williams (50 years since his death in 1958) or Olivier Messiaen (100 years since his birth) - both of whom have been firm fixtures of festivals, orchestras, and even opera houses this year - but Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who died in 1908. It's pretty pathetic that the world of classical music needs anniversaries to focus on the music of VW or Messiaen, who ought to be "celebrated" throughout the year. (And what's so special about 50 or 100 years anyway? Why not 57th or 195th anniversaries of notable births and deaths? - Schoenberg's death and Wagner's birth this year, in case you were wondering.) But given that the only excuse for classical music's fetishisation of big round numbers is to reveal music that wouldn't otherwise get the chance to be heard, the almost complete lack of fanfare for Rimsky-Korsakov has been lamentable. And I'd take Rimsky's Russian Easter Festival Overture over yet another Lark Ascending any day of the week. Continue reading...
Friday October 17 2008
Dutch courage ... Mariss Jansons conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Photograph: Dieter Nagl/AFP
I have a couple of highlights from various web trawls this week.
Worth going over to Dutch Radio 4 site for their free offer, celebrating the 120th birthday of the Concertgebouw Orchestra: every day until October 24, they're giving away a complete, Concertgebouw performance of a symphony. They will all stay available until November 24. There are some tasty things on offer: I'm currently enjoying Mariss Jansons's Beethoven's 2nd Symphony – in high-quality mp3, too. But then, with this orchestra, the quality of playing and conducting is guaranteed: they began with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's performance of Schubert's Unfinished a couple of days ago, and today's offering was Kirill Kondrashin in Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Tomorrow, Franck's D minor symphony is on the menu, and after symphonies by Mahler, Dvorak, and Sibelius, there's Brahms 2 and Bruckner 8 to look forward to next week. Good idea this, and Dutch Radio 4, the equivalent of British Radio 3, is a huge resource – as well as their broadcast schedule, they have seven web-radio stations, all of which you can hear in this country, from non-stop Baroque to film music. Have a listen, look at their website, and improve your Dutch, as well as your musical horizons. Continue reading...
Wednesday October 15 2008
Inspiring and creative: Nigel Osborne at the Neolithic rock gongs of Lolui Island. Photograph: PR
"Interdisciplinary" is one of the words bandied around any number of pretentious arts nights and academic courses, but which only rarely means anything beyond an ultra-PC confusion of multimedia collaboration. So it was refreshing to experience a mix of art forms and performance events that really did work at the weekend: the London Sinfonietta's Saturday evening concert at Kings Place. Rock Music, Rock Art was the theme - no, not some buttock-clenching fusion of guitar bands with contemporary classical, but music inspired by, and composed with, the Neolithic rock gongs of the Lolui Island on Lake Victoria, in Uganda, which you play simply by hitting gigantic rocky outcrops. Continue reading...
