On a Pacific Aisle

Bomp Bomp Bomp, Bomp Bomp

2008-06-03T10:31:00.001-07:00

“You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like. You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!” — Bo Diddley (1928-2008)

Separated at Birth

2008-05-31T08:17:00.001-07:00

This Magic Moment (one in a series)

2008-05-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

Brahms, A German Requiem, first movement, nine measures after B

This one snuck up on me during last night's San Francisco Symphony concert, I suppose because I hadn't listened to or thought much about the German Requiem in a few years. My autonomic nervous system knew what was coming, though. About ten seconds before this passage, I suddenly got a little Pavlovian telegram from deep inside that said, "Something you love is about to happen"; a few seconds later I remembered what it was, and sat upright in gleeful anticipation.

On one level, the effect here is fairly standard word-painting. The psalm text shifts from Tränen to Freuden, and Brahms dutifully injects a note of joy into the music; Schütz, the presiding spirit throughout so much of the German Requiem, would have understood and approved.

But what I find particularly moving about this passage is the method Brahms uses to convey a sense of exaltation: He quickens the rhythmic pulse of the music, without changing the tempo or the meter at all. This is a characteristically Brahmsian trick (I'm pretty sure he does something similar in the Second Piano Concerto, although I can't put my finger on it at the moment), adapted from the Renaissance polyphonists he knew and loved so well. And it's a contrast to Wagner, say, who when he wants a change in tempo simply indicates a change in tempo.

What Brahms does here, it seems to me, carries rich metaphorical weight: It's a musical image of locating joy in the mundane. The surrounding structures remain constant, but within the constraints they establish, there's room for the sublime. And the effect is only heightened by its being so temporary — within a few measures the feeling of exaltation has passed, and we're back to the steady, thrumming quarter-note pulse of the opening. But during those few short moments, we had a little glimpse of heaven. Nothing changed, and everything changed.

Der fliehender Holland

2008-05-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

I was just sitting down to write something about Bernard Holland's strange review of Paul Lewis's piano recital when La Cieca brought word that Holland has taken a buyout and is on his way out. So let me return to Paul Lewis another day, and instead take the opportunity to say a word or two about the former chief music critic of the New York Times.

Holland's work has come in for a good share of bashing around the blögôsphère over the years, and today's news will probably unleash more. But on the old Latin principle of de exemptis nil nisi bonum (speak no ill of the bought-out), I'd rather laud his virtues. For me, three in particular stand out.

• Holland has a remarkable ability to conjure up the essence of a composer or a piece of music in a few deftly chosen words. He is, I think, an aphorist of unparalleled virtuosity. I remember as though it were yesterday — and good Lord, it's been 11 years! — the awe and envy I felt on encountering over my morning coffee this passage about Giacinto Scelsi:

The music, with its emphasis on single tones or at least the implication of a single tone, exchanges one dimension for another. Beethoven has length; Scelsi has depth. A Beethoven sonata begins at the front door, takes a trip, meets new friends, goes home. A Scelsi piece closes the front door and digs in the basement.

That paragraph is both beautiful and true. But even when Holland's notions about a particular piece or about music history in general are wrong-headed — which, let's face it, they often are — they're expressed with wonderful efficiency. He can pack more into a couple of allusive sentences than many of us can into a painstakingly argued paragraph.

• At his best, Holland has been a fearless critic. It's hard to recall now, after so many years during which his anti-modernist bent has hardened into unexamined shtick, replete with reflexive, ill-considered sneers at everyone from Schoenberg on down.

But there was a time when that position was both better argued (on his part) and presented in the context of a more fraught cultural environment. The emperor's-new-clothes argument put forth by Andrew Porter and his ilk — "you'd love Elliott Carter's music as much as I do if only you were as smart as I am" — carried a certain coercive force, and it took real courage to face that down.

Here's Holland, writing in 1988 about Carter's Piano Concerto:

I believe I share with the large majority of musical audiences — trained and otherwise — an utter defeat before most of Mr. Carter's music. Full of energy, power and impressive sophistication though it may be, it occupies a world remote from my senses. The cognoscenti who extol his genius ask us to try harder so that we, too, may leave the ranks of the unwashed and join the anointed.

Posterity, furthermore, fills us with dread; for none of us wish to join the philistines of history who sneered at Schumann and made Berlioz's life a misery. We are in effect buyers in a futures market. The recognition of greatness is the commodity, and none of us want to miss a chance to get in on the ground floor. . .

My broker says, ''Buy.'' My heart says, ''Don't.''

• Finally, Holland has a delightful willingness to get weird, to do the quirky and unexpected thing. I understand that's what drives his detractors crazy — it often drives me crazy too — but when it works, he comes up with stuff no one else could ever have thought of. Who can forget his mad decision to include Count Basie in a roundup of minimalist CDs?

But the best Holland moment ever — and for years I used to bring up this episode whenever anyone said a word against him — happened sometime in the early '80s. (I suppose I could now confirm the details of this story in the Times archives, but I prefer to cling to my memories of it — as the late great Herb Caen used to say about a good yarn, "check it and lose it.")

Holland got sent to Fort Worth to cover the Van Cliburn Competition, and he dutifully filed the necessary reports on all the subsidiary rounds and on the eventual winner. But then, before he packed up and came home, he filed one last report. It was a scene-setter about Dallas nightlife, and in particular about the hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble milieu in a cowboy bar of the sort depicted in the John Travolta/Debra Winger flick Urban Cowboy — mechanical bull and all.

And because it was all done in the best New York Times third-person style — completely straight-faced, completely impersonal — I was two-thirds of the way through the article before it dawned on me what he'd done. He'd gone out and got shit-faced after the competition, and then turned it into a feature for the Times.

Seriously, how can you not admire that kind of journalistic enterprise? Ten to one he put his whole bar tab on his expense report.

Update: Aah, I couldn't resist (sorry, Herb). Turns out the bar was in Fort Worth, not Dallas; it was in 1989, not the early '80s; and there was no bull. Otherwise, though, I'd say my recollection of Holland's brief stint as the Hunter Thompson of classical music criticism wasn't far off the mark.

Mi chiamano Meme

2008-05-07T12:14:00.001-07:00

When Lisa Hirsch first tagged me with the latest blog meme, I was inclined to let the whole thing pass, partly because I didn't (and still don't) quite grok the point of the exercise and partly because, like Matthew Guerrieri, I had a suspicion I'd seen this one come around before. But when I got double-teamed by the Detritus boys, I figured it was time to hunker down and do as I'd been told (acknowledging that in the meantime, Patrick V. had definitively whupped my ass in the punning-blog-post-title sweepstakes).

So to reiterate, the assignment is like this:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book to hand these days is The Vicar of Bullhampton, the 36th leg of my life-nourishing pilgrimage through all 46 novels of Anthony Trollope, and the relevant passage looks like this:

"My lord, his father's house is his own, to entertain whom he may please, as much as is yours. And were I to suggest to you to turn out your daughters, it would be no worse an offence than your suggesting to Mr. Brattle that he should turn out his son."

"My daughters!"

"Yes, your daughters, my lord."

Taken out of context like that, this exchange probably sounds a little Pythonesque. You'll have to take my word for it that the processes of chance have actually coughed up a rather exquisite little moment (Cage would've been delighted), as the fearless and dry-witted title character deftly punctures the hauteur of the odious Marquis of Trowbridge by daring to speak of his wizened spinster daughters in the same breath as young Sam Brattle. The vicar's offense is so grave, in fact, that later, after stewing about it all the way home, the marquis will write an outraged letter of complaint to the bishop, which that wise clergyman will duly laugh off.

But rather than dwelling on this passage, let me take the opportunity to don my fanatic's hat and proselytize for the splendors of Trollope's work. He's the Heinrich Schütz of English literature, the greatest creative artist whose work the average educated Joe doesn't know at all. (Years ago, I ran into a local arts writer on the street while toting a volume of Trollope under my arm. He was intrigued and nonplussed. Trollope's was a new name to him, he said, adding fatuously, "and I'm very well-read!")

Even those who know of Trollope may not realize what a treasure lies here undiscovered. One reason is that too many readers are introduced to him through The Warden or Barchester Towers, two of his dullest and least successful novels. A related problem is the likelihood of coming to Trollope from Dickens, who is admittedly zestier, broader in scope and of course far funnier. If you pick up The Warden while under the impression that Dickens represents the summa of Victorian literature — as I originally did, all those years ago — you could easily conclude that Trollope's writing is wan, flavorless stuff.

But start somewhere else and you will soon find a writer keenly alive to the moral and interpersonal struggles that all of us go through daily, and able to render them with both vividness and subtlety. Trollope's great party trick is to get his characters into moral quandaries that are brought about through no one's fault, but from which there is really no virtuous way out. Sometimes the plotting required is, in its quiet way, worthy of Feydeau. In He Knew He Was Right, for instance, a young clergyman who is a little dull-witted but not at all malicious manages to let each of two sisters believe she is engaged to marry him; yet if you go back through their conversations it's nearly impossible to find the moment when he could have acted otherwise than as he did.

Another of Trollope's great themes is the politics of personal strength, the quality that determines the winner in a battle of wills. The Way We Live Now features, among other things, a young man who can't break up with the American divorcée he's seeing and marry the girl he loves because — well, because she won't let him, that's all. And like any Victorian novelist, Trollope is fantastically good on the question of how to decide what to do with your life (even if the distaff version of that question is, inevitably, "whom shall I marry?").

As I say, Trollope lacks Dickens' verbal flair, but he also completely lacks Dickens' taste for bathos; there's no Little Nell dying laughably within his pages. He also boasts a degree of moral nuance that Dickens — whose characters are almost all clad in big black or white hats — sorely lacks (and by the way, read Richard Russo's Straight Man for the definitive moral takedown of David Copperfield). The one danger in taking up Trollope, in fact, is that you may find your love of Dickens sorely tested.

So where to begin, then? Well, despite what I said earlier, Trollope's greatest achievements are the two six-book series, the Barchester and Palliser novels. The catch is that each of those really must be read in a single stretch; themes and characters recur throughout, and in each series, the last novel only attains its full grandeur with specific reference to the first.

The best single novels, in my opinion, are He Knew He Was Right, as heartbreaking a portrait of obsession and marital dysfunction as was ever written; The Way We Live Now, Trollope's bold, slightly overambitious attempt to take in the entire sweep of Victorian culture in a single book; and The Bertrams, which Tolstoy specially admired.

Those are enough to let you know whether Trollope is your cup of tea. If he is, then other joys await — not only the two great series, but also obscure and no less wonderful gems: Lady Anna, an unusually frank (for Trollope) examination of the class system; the dark morality tale An Eye for an Eye; John Caldigate and Rachel Ray, twin indictments of religious fanaticism; the fresh-faced comedy of The Belton Estate; or the autumnal sweetness of Trollope's last novel, An Old Man's Love.

And more, and more, and more. Because here's the clincher: Trollope wrote 46 novels, most of them in the 500-800 page range. He published, on average, two or three a year, writing for four hours every morning before trooping off to his day job with the Post Office (in addition to his literary accomplishments, he also came up with the idea of the street-corner mailbox). And with one or two exceptions (avoid The Fixed Period at all costs), they're all good.

So once you join the cult, you can be sure that you will never go hungry again. In this respect, Trollope-lovers are the happiest people on the planet. We smile benevolently upon the Jane Austeners, rereading the same six dog-eared books over and over and over; but in our hearts we pity them, and feel grateful to have escaped their fate.

Time now to tag others. Since this meme has bounced around the classical blögôsphère pretty comprehensively, I think I'll pass the torch to some literary, non-musical blogger friends: Cowboy Dave Dickerson (no, he ain't a fer-real cowboy, but he is one helluva stud), Eric Berlin, and Francis Heaney. We'll see what they come up with.

Chicago Pinstripes

2008-05-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

The news on the rialto today is that the Chicago Symphony has signed Riccardo Muti as its next music director, effective in 2010. Bloggers are passing the news from site to site, but I haven't seen any commentary yet on what it all means, or whether or not this is a good call, and why. Big Marc? Andrew? How say you both?

I'd speculate myself, if I knew a damn thing on the subject. My own experience with Muti live has been sparse and inconclusive, and in any case, the issue is not about this performance or that, but the day-to-day operations, both musical and non-. I accept the maestro's testimony, and that of orchestra president Deborah Card, that his recent collaborations with the orchestra have been all kinds of wonderful. But I'm curious about his stated commitment to doing all the grunt work — the auditioning, the fund-raising, the administrative stuff — that comes with an American music directorship. This was the sticking point for Barenboim, and supposedly in Muti's negotiations with the New York Phil. What changed his mind?

The more interesting point, though, is the direction that the orchestra has chosen to go with this appointment. In general, I think there are deep and revealing parallels to be drawn between the building of a sports franchise — a baseball team, say — and an orchestra, and I live in hope that someone who actually knows something about sports (why not Matthew?) will lay out the analogy in detail.

Yet even with my spotty knowledge of baseball, I grasp that, roughly speaking, you can try to win a pennant either by a) attracting proven, high-performing (and therefore expensive) talent — that's the George Steinbrenner method — or b) building a team out of young and still-developing players. The same sorts of options present themselves to orchestra managers.

The problem with the second plan is that it takes time — as well as a good nose for talent. The Pittsburgh and Dallas Symphonies, for instance, have both committed themselves to young, little-known Europeans (Manfred Honeck and Jaap van Zweden, respectively). That means a period of a few years in which those orchestras' reputations and achievements will be more or less put on hold while everybody gets used to each other. And at the end of that time, the leadership is going to look like geniuses or jackasses, depending on how things work out.

To hire Muti, on the other hand, is like signing — well, whoever stepped into Reggie Jackson's cleats after I stopped following baseball. Let's assume that, as with the Yankees, money is no object for the CSO, and figure that, like Jackson, Muti can hit the symphonic long ball. Still, the catch here is that you're grabbing today's glory at the potential expense of tomorrow's. I'm not saying that's a bad decision — who else deserves a conductor like Muti if not the CSO? — only that it's got a comparatively short-term payoff horizon. (Is that a real phrase? If not, I'm proud to have invented it.)

To see the risk of this kind of strategy, you only have to look at our friends the New York Phil, always the poster child for bass-ackwards game-theory decisions. They wanted a big-name music director and couldn't get one; they bought time with Maazel; they bought more time; they wound up back where they started. Taking the long view when it mattered could have helped them avoid that embarrassment (by which I don't mean either the appointment of Maazel or Gilbert, but rather the fumfering and flailing that accompanied them).

On the other hand, there's something smart and self-fulfilling about refusing to settle for anyone but a proven, older, A-list conductor (for as long as there are any around). It makes your orchestra seem consequential, as indeed it should. "We're the Chicago Symphony, dammit!" There's something kinda thrilling about an attitude like that.

Saint-Exupéry justifié

2008-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

I first read The Little Prince at 7, and when I was through I wept with such unbridled, full-throated abandon that my mother speaks of the incident to this day. When I reread it last week in preparation for tonight's opening of the Rachel Portman opera, the book turned out to be twee, smug and sentimental. Who knew?

Not until last night did it occur to me that the problem lay not in the text, but in the reader. Just as Saint-Exupéry had predicted, I've lost the ability to appreciate his little fable. I've become that most benighted of beings, a grownup. How sad.

On the other hand, I can drink scotch now. On balance, I think I got the better end of that bargain.

For the Anti-Ligeti League

2008-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Let's imagine that for your own twisted, philistine reasons you really, really hate the Poème symphonique. This is what you do about it.

h/t Eric Berlin

Public Displays of Aggression

2008-04-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

This isn't really the place for this conversation, but ACD over at Sounds & Fury doesn't allow commenting in his house, presumably out of fear that the "proles" — which is to say, you and I — might scribble on the walls with crayons. So, faute de mieux en effet, here we be.

Mr. D has his knickers in a twist over my suggestion that Alan Rich's vile 2006 bitch-slapping of music critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles might not have been, y'know, his finest hour. Yet in one of those wonderfully self-refuting moments of which he is himself a connoisseur, ACD makes my point for me by adding "(whoever they might be)." The fact that Baer and Pasles cast such comparatively small shadows upon the musical-critical landscape is precisely what makes the act of going after them — and doing it in such a bloodthirsty fashion — so small, and so unworthy.

Bernheimer, now — Bernheimer is another story. Whatever your views on the merits of Rich's 100-year crusade against Bernheimer, there's no denying that the powerful, Pulitzer Prize-winning chief music critic of the Los Angeles Times was at any rate a target worthy of his efforts. Bernheimer had an enormous influence on the cultural life of Southern California for a very long time. If you felt, as Alan did — and felt passionately, as only Alan can — that that influence was malign, then it became a moral imperative (and, let's face it, probably a pleasure as well) to combat it tooth and nail. But Adam Baer, the young freelancer? You've gotta be kidding me.

The inability to distinguish between those two kinds of aggressiveness has always been a flaw in Rich's writing, and it's a flaw that ACD's chest-beating paeans to "courage" and "hair-mussing" and "offensiveness" share in spades. To put it another way, Alan's willingness to say whatever is on his mind, regardless of consequences, comes in two flavors (both in print and in person). One is courage, properly understood; the other is merely thuggishness. I think it's important to celebrate the first while deploring the second.

Rich

2008-04-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

Like all right-thinking people, I join the chorus of deploration (is that a word? Evidently not, unless you're Josquin) over the news that Alan Rich has been ousted from the pages of the LA Weekly. Perhaps the surprise is that they let him hang around as long as they did, given the longstanding and almost explicitly stated commitment of Village Voice Media honcho Michael Lacey and his troupe of flunkies to Lack of Quality at all costs. I'm not intimately conversant with the LA Weekly, but the SF Weekly up here where I live certainly carries the banner for all that is smug, fatuous, and thought-deadening. Alan's columns must have seemed defiantly, definitively out of place.

The good news, of course, is that he is still among us (note to bloggers: never title an item about an 83-year-old widely beloved legend "Bad news from LA" unless your express intention is to give your readers a nasty shock), and that he will continue to post his columns on the internet. I for one couldn't do without them — not so much for the window they provide onto Los Angeles' musical life as for the entree they offer into Alan's amazing musical consciousness.

It was reading his reviews in New York throughout the 1970s that first made me want to get into this game. Imagine what an eye-opener those articles were — the smart, pugnacious prose style, the insatiable curiosity, the breadth of knowledge, and best of all, the passion for music (it's a fortunate critic who loves and hates as keenly as Alan does). They opened up whole new worlds, and continue to do so, week after week.

Not, of course, that there haven't been missteps. In a post from Bizarro World, ACD singles out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode, his shameful tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles. True Richophiles would prefer to blot out the memory of that one; it was, in the memorable words of Tibor Fischer on Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, "not-knowing-where-to-look bad. . .like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."

I wish I could counter with an extended quotation of Alan at his best, but my copy of his recent published collection seems to have absquatulated. And in any case, as I say, the Richerei I savor most dates from the old New York period, and lives on in my memory in bits and pieces — a glorious Mozart's Birthday essay (an annual staple in those days) connecting "Porgi amor" with the slow movement of the Bassoon Concerto, an unforgettable excoriation of George Rochberg's (in)famous Third String Quartet, a sidelong self-outing in something like 1970 (!).

Probably Alan's single greatest gift to me was a column he wrote, God knows when, about his declining ability to listen to and enjoy Brahms' symphonies. Drawing the comparison to a love gone cold, he wrote, "We have grown apart, Brahms and I." I caught my breath on reading that, not because I shared the sentiment — my love for those symphonies continues unabated — but because I hadn't known you were allowed to say things like that. Alan gave me courage, and an example. He still does, LA Weekly or no.

Nobody Listens to Me

2008-04-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Does Bob Dylan Deserve a Pulitzer?
By Gary Shapiro
"I don't think Bob Dylan needs a Pulitzer Prize," said a classical music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman...
— New York Sun, 10/19/04

A Special Citation to Bob Dylan for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.
— Pulitzer Prize Committee, 4/7/08

Note that the Sun headline doesn't reflect what I said, or believe; the quote does, though.

Toward a Typology of Juvenilia

2008-04-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

An interesting concert last week by a dynamite local syndicate of teen composers reminded me that there are two principal ways of being a beginning composer, roughly speaking. (Yes indeed, if you divide the world into those who divide the world into two categories and those who don't, I'm in the former camp.)

One type is the kid who's bursting with weird, distinctive, half-formed ideas and hasn't yet figured out how to get them under control, or how to organize those thoughts in the most effective or coherent way. The other is more interested in doping out and mastering the technical aspects of the game, with the (perhaps) unspoken assumption that the ideas will come along in due time. Maybe another way of saying this is that the motivation for some young composers is to write stuff nobody's ever written before, and for others it's the desire to join the party by imitating the music they love best.

I'll bet there are plenty of (grown-up) folks with a strong preference for one type or another, but personally I have a soft spot for both — or rather, my feelings of indulgence and impatience settle at about the same equilibrium point in both cases. There's something simultaneously charming and frustrating about the reach-exceeds-his-grasp type of composer, just as the work of the skilled-artisan-in-parvo can feel both impressive and limited.

And it isn't clear to me that either predilection is necessarily a better marker for future success. "Give her time, she'll learn how to channel that imagination" seems just as plausible a proposition as "He's accumulating some useful skills; he'll be something to watch when he figures out what to do with them."

As a relentlessly dualist schematizer, I'd also point out that this dichotomy bears a strong family resemblance to one that applies to adult composers. You know the one I mean, as crude and reductive as it undoubtedly is: Lennon/McCartney, Schumann/Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky/Tchaikovsky, Mahler/Strauss, Flansburgh/Linnell, I'm sure there are jazz ones for those who know their jazz (pas moi, hélas).

What I'd be curious to know is whether composers tend to stay on the same side of that divide as they develop. Mendelssohn certainly did, but he's one of the only composers whose juvenilia we hear much (Mozart of course transcends all of this). Who's got access to funding for a longitudinal study?

Start Making Sense

2008-03-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Carl Orff edition.

(h/t Jon Delfin)

Mea Culpa

2008-02-09T18:15:00.000-08:00

Roger Bourland's blog post about bad first impressions provides the nudge I needed to offer him an overdue public apology. Many years ago, when I first started in this gig and was laboring under a variety of misconceptions about how it should be undertaken, I made some regrettable remarks in print about his music; it's one of the handful of things I'm most ashamed of having written, and I trust I would never write something similar today. I'm sorry, Roger.

As he says, many of us neglect to update our first impressions, and I've always figured that if he thinks of me at all, it's with the assumption that I'm still the same old schmuck. Not so. I might still be a schmuck, but I'm not that schmuck.

Why I Love Blogs

2008-02-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Because of things like this, which brought a burst of joy to a largely sorrowful day.

Agree or not, that hardly matters. But take the historical view for a moment. Here's a person who is clearly both wise and smart, plus funny and eloquent and generous and broad-minded and demanding. And until a few years ago, he would have been dispensing these pearls where? Presumably in one-on-one conversations and at dinner parties and salons that I would never have been invited to.

Now everything's changed, and for my benefit (the only relevant metric, in the end). It's as though — to conjure up an image not remotely at random — there are all these digital Boswells running around, making sure no one's sparkling table talk gets lost. And that's why I love blogs.

That, and La Cieca dubbing the forthcoming product of the Schrott-Netrebko double love cadenza Li'l Schrebbs.

See Those Two Little Dots?

2008-01-31T23:41:00.001-08:00

So now we've had two Schubert "Great" C-Major Symphonies in the space of two weeks — led, respectively, by Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco and Kent Nagano in Berkeley — and neither conductor took the exposition repeat in the first movement. What's up with that?

I know there's a line of thought out there that says that repeats, and Schubert's repeats in particular, are kinda sorta optional. (Alfred Brendel wrote something to this effect in an essay in the New York Review of Books a number of years back, and I really ought to try to dig it up, because the argument couldn't possibly be as flimsy as it seemed at the time.) But I'm not buying. What's the thinking, that we're all busy people with someplace else to get to? Wouldn't the default position be to, y'know, play what the composer wrote? Maybe I should just be grateful they did all the movements.

Because look, the narrative in a traditional sonata-form movement isn't "Here's some music, now we'll mess it around, now it all comes out nice in the tonic." It's "Here's some music — wait, you sure you've got it fixed in your mind? OK, now we'll mess it around, etc." Skipping the exposition repeat jettisons a structurally essential part of that narrative. It's like a card trick in which the magician doesn't bother to make certain everyone sees the card that's been drawn.

Not only that, but you can lose some great music in the process (though not, admittedly, in the Schubert C-Major). In my callow youth, I got to know the Brahms First through a recording that omitted the first-movement repeat — and with it, one of the most glorious moments in that movement. I'm talking about the jolting shift from E-flat minor back to C minor by sheer force of compositional fiat, a grandchild of Beethoven's similarly willful move from E-flat to C as he launches the coda to the first movement of the "Eroica." It was years before I heard Brahms' scintillating passage, all because some conductor (Bruno Walter, I think, though I could be wrong) decided to drop it on the floor.

I don't mean to be doctrinaire about this, except that yes I do. As a general rule, the composer knows more than you do, for most values of "you." So play the damn repeat, why don'tcha. Or if you don't think Schubert's music is interesting enough to hold up for two go-rounds, then program, I don't know, Respighi or J. C. Bach instead. Sheesh.

Margaret Truman, R.I.P.

2008-01-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

I think I can speak for all working music critics when I say that the threat of a punch in the snout from a sitting president is the kind of honor most of us can only dream of.

Read It and Weep

2008-01-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

I was sad to have to skip Sunday's Berkeley performance of Messiaen's Vingt Regards by the brilliant Christopher Taylor (called out of town by an unmissable opportunity). Then I read Patrick Vaz's beautiful account of the recital, and was heartbroken.

The Virtual Reviewer

2008-01-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

Innovative as ever, Bernard Holland pioneers the New Music Criticism^® in this morning's New York Times:

Anyone familiar with the reputations of these three singers can imagine the quality of the performances.

Yessss. I think my work life is about to get a whole lot easier.

• Anyone with an internet connection can determine the music on the program and the names of the performers.

• Anyone with access to the New Grove can learn the background and history of these pieces.

• Anyone familiar with my work can imagine my critical reaction to the evening's performances.

Anyone familiar with music criticism can imagine the possibilities.

Modern Music Explained

2008-01-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

During intermission after last night's San Francisco Symphony performance of À l'Île de Gorée, Xenakis' exciting but slightly daunting 1986 harpsichord concerto, I happened to overhear a white-haired subscriber just at the moment of what seemed to be a genuine revelation.

"Oh I see," she said to her friend — "it's weird. Like a Picasso."

Which not only sums it up, as far as I'm concerned, but throws the spotlight, for about the millionth time, on the central problem of 20th-century music. Why is Picasso a useful reference point for understanding Xenakis (or Schoenberg, or Bartók, or Stockhausen) rather than vice versa? Why is there such a vast gap in the rate of acceptance of novelty between music and the other arts (all of them, really)?

It could be a historical anomaly, since it's more obviously true of the 20th century than earlier periods. It could be a function of inherent differences in the art forms (e.g., musical performances unfolding in real time vs. paintings that can be taken in at a glance), although that dodges other questions. Maybe it's a matter of economic and societal influences, or maybe Picasso was a better painter than Schoenberg was a composer (whatever that might mean, exactly). Hell if I know.

What we need is a cultural version of Jared Diamond's magnificent Guns, Germs, and Steel, explaining how different art forms can start out in the same place and wind up so far apart. I bet it all goes back to crop domestication and food surpluses.

Wälsungs in Shropshire

2008-01-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

The NYT has the story.

A brother and sister who were parted at birth and adopted by different families married without knowing of their biological relationship, and then won an annulment, a leading anti-abortion campaigner, David Alton, said in the House of Lords on Friday.

[snip]

A parliamentary transcript of the peer’s December speech, published this week, quoted him as saying that the couple were never told they had been born as twins. “They met later and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences,” he said.

Discerning

2008-01-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

Baltimore audiences know new music, to judge from this heartening snippet of Alex Ross's article on Marin Alsop's first season:

John Adams drew a sizable house for his concerts; Tan Dun's sold poorly.

Black Wednesday

2007-12-08T08:20:00.000-08:00

Back in the '60s, the deaths used to come in threes, but not on the same day. On Wednesday, the world of music lost three important and irreplaceable figures: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Imbrie and H. Wiley Hitchcock.

December 5 was also the day Mozart died.

Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.

2007-12-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

Stockhausen features in one of my all-time favorite composer-meets-composer stories, but unfortunately not as the hero. Still, I can't resist sharing, and trusting that it takes nothing away from today's well-merited eulogies.

The narrator is Morton Feldman.

Stockhausen asked for my secret, "What's your secret?" And I said, "I don't have any secret, but if I do have a point of view, it's that sounds are very much like people. And if push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: Don't push the sounds around."

Karlheinz leans over to me and says: "Not even a little bit?"

Cruising

2007-10-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

Alex Ross points us to Graham Vick's recent whining about carpetbagger opera directors (i.e., ones with a background in theater and film), and puts in a vote of confidence, or at least open-mindedness, in connection with Woody Allen's planned opera debut, directing Gianni Schicchi for the L.A. Opera next year.

Personally, I don't feel all that optimistic about Allen — he makes the requisite charmingly self-deprecating noises, but history suggests that so-called "high art" can bring out some of his less attractive traits (insecurity, peevishness, a desire to overcompensate).

But some of the best opera directing I've encountered in recent years has indeed been the work of a film director, who as it happens is signed up for the other two-thirds of that L.A. Trittico. That is, of all people, William Friedkin, the auteur of The French Connection, The Exorcist, the underappreciated To Live and Die in L.A. and, most recently, Bug (which I missed in the theater but have moved to the top of my Netflix queue).

In 2002 he directed a double bill of Bluebeard's Castle and Gianni Schicchi in L.A. that was remarkable for the way it joined two disparate works together while giving each one its own identity. He has a wonderful eye, an obvious knowledge of and love for music, and he moved easily between the worlds of tragedy and comedy (and you have to feel for Allen, not only directing opera for the first time but directing a work that Friedkin staged so unforgettably just a few years ago for the same company).

Two years later, Friedkin topped himself with an amazing production of Ariadne auf Naxos, set amid the egomaniacs and power brokers of Hollywood — natch — but done with wit and pathos and visual energy. Best of all, it was genuinely funny. Sure, Ariadne gets billed as a comedy, but I've always taken that in some specialized, Bayerisch, dumpling-laden sense. Until Friedkin's, I'd never encountered a production that was truly comic, in the sense of, you know, making you laugh.

I can't wait to see what he does with Tabarro and Suor Angelica. And if it means fewer gigs for Graham Vick and his ilk, we'll consider that a fringe benefit.