Music

The long, sad road to soprano Anne-Sophie von Otter's latest album began with a chance meeting in the corridor of a railroad sleeper traveling from Warsaw to Berlin in 1942. On that train, the singer's father, Baron Goran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat, was approached by a young SS officer. As von Otter related to Norman Lebrecht in La Scene Musicale:

'With beads of sweat on his forehead and tears in his eyes' (as von Otter reported to his superiors), Gerstein explained that he was head of a Waffen-SS Technical Disinfection unit, responsible for supplying poisons and gas equipment. 'Yesterday,' he told von Otter, weeping uncontrollably, 'I saw something appalling.' 'Is it about the Jews?' said the diplomat.

Six decades later, Anne-Sophie von Otter has released "Terezin-Theresienstadt," a eulogy to Gerstein, the father whose troubled and guilt-ridden life she recounted to Lebrecht, and the doomed prisoners of the Terezin concentration camp located north of Prague. Anne-Sophie's sad yet fascinating album opens with the ballad "Ich Wandre Durch Theresienstadt" (I Wander Through Theresienstadt), which Ilse Weber wrote for the son she shipped out of Prague prior to the Nazis' arrival. Weber, a nurse, was eventually sent to Auschwitz along with the children she sang to sleep in Terezin. In addition to other songs by Weber, von Otter's album contains a selection of classical songs by Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Ervin Schulhoff, and others, which were performed by camp musicians in order to mislead official visitors. "Terezin-Theresienstadt" is as somber and haunted an album as its origins portend.

Century-old classical-recordings company Deutsche Grammophon opened its online store, the DG Web Shop, yesterday, with some 2,500 albums in its inventory. The site's music has been encoded at an audiophile-delighting bitrate of 320 kilobits per second (compare to iTunes's 128 kilobits-per-second encoding). Pricing is flexible, and, unlike iTunes, encourages the purchase of entire albums. The CD featuring Hélène Grimaud's "Emperor" piano concerto, for example, costs $11.99 in its entirety (including a booklet file), with separate movements ranging from $1.99 for the eight-minute Adagio to $4.69 for the 20-minute Allegro. And Anne-Sophie Mutter's "Simply Anne-Sophie" costs nearly twice as much when purchased as individual tracks rather than as a single $11.99 album (with a booklet). Be careful when signing up for the site's newsletter, though. The checkout process ate my voucher and ended up charging me for the free track I was promised in exchange for my e-mail address.

It's a rather long piece divided into 24 pages (click on "print" to get it all at once), but you'll want to slow down and savor all 12,000 words of "The Musical Mystique," Richard Taruskin's defense of classical music against its advocates, in The New Republic. The University of Southern California-Berkeley professor and author of "The Oxford History of Western Music" feels that three recent books—such as Julian Johnson's "Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value," Joshua Fineberg's "Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears," and Lawrence Kramer's "Why Classical Music Still Matters"—overstate the alleged crisis in classical music; he writes:

As with rising gorge I consumed these books, the question that throbbed and pounded in my head was whether it was still possible to defend my beloved repertoire without recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery.

As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it—and why not?—as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.

In January, Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten took acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell into Washington's Metro to find out how large an audience Bell would draw while performing incognito on his priceless Stradivarius. The results were disappointing, to say the least. Only a single person recognized Bell during his busking experiment, and he was ignored totally by thousands. Weingarten wrote: "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that—then what else are we missing?"

Commuters and passersby have been given a second chance. On June 9, violinist David Juritz, London Mozart Players concertmaster and guest leader of the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, began an international busking experiment of his own. Juritz has been performing on the streets of cities on all five continents to raise money for Musequality, the charity he founded to offer music education to some of the world's poorest children. He has raised more than $13,000 busking for Musequality during his "Around the World and Bach" tour. But it hasn't been easy, and he'll soon shift his attention to more lucrative corporate sponsors. The New York Times caught up with him:

"Busking is really time-consuming and it feels chaotic," he said, adding, "You have days where you feel shattered." During a brief stop in London at the end of June, after the European leg of his tour, he said, the prospect of going back out on the road for almost four months seemed "pretty grim."

Watch Juritz perform Bach's Prelude in E Major, in Madrid, here.

Alex Ross's hefty and wonderful new book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," begins with an almost literal cliff-hanger: Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler visiting a waterfall and enjoying lunch prior to Strauss conducting his opera "Salome" that evening in the Austrian city of Granz. That bucolic scene sets the stage for a wild, densely plotted ride through a century's worth of creative jousting among the (gotta say it) exclusively white and male titans of classical music. The New Yorker magazine's music critic has a brilliant knack for distilling entire careers into elegant portraits, which he etches into the epic context of a world descending into war and fascism before reemerging into something new and strange and yet to be resolved. This passage about Béla Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra" (1942-45) offers a nice example of how Ross illuminates a specific work within a much larger exhibition:

The Concerto might be a tribute to the pluralism that Roosevelt's America in its ideal form embodied. There are folk melodies of the Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech peasant traditions, Gypsy dances, North African rhythms, echoes of both the impressionism of Debussy and the expressionism of Schoenberg (they are unified in the Elegy movement), Stravinsky's Rite, and, riding high above, pealing fanfares of all-American brass. Ridicule aside, the Shostakovich quotation adds to the polyglot diversity of the piece. Almost every instrument in the orchestra has a solo role, even as the collective emotion swells. Bartók's parting gift to his adopted country—he died on September 26, 1945—is a portrait of democracy in action.

Ross also has a nice piece in this week's New Yorker about blogging and the online world of classical music. "Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music," he writes in "The Well-Tempered Web," a piece linking to loads of interesting sites. He continues, "Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away."

The news that Ludwig van Beethoven may have died on March 26, 1827, from accidental lead poisoning caused by his own doctor is fascinating, but not only because it allows us to fantasize about what he might have composed if he had lived beyond his fifty-seven years. Two more string quartets? A tenth symphony? No, the most interesting part of Viennese forensic scientist Christian Reiter's article, published last week in Beethoven Journal, is that merely several strands of hair clued analysts to dramatic spikes in lead concentrations over the course of five medical treatments the composer underwent toward the end of his life, months he reportedly spent miserably in unclean conditions. Reiter theorizes that Beethoven's physician, Andreas Wawruch, may have been treating Beethoven's pneumonia with a medicine containing lead. Beethoven's overindulgence in wine containing lead may also have led, as it were, to liver cirrhosis. Unfinished works or not, Beethoven seemed to be in your basic downward artistic spiral.

The science delivering us these historical details, on the other hand, is virtuosic. Researchers have been analyzing Beethoven's hair since 2000. Their research material is part of the so-called Guevara Lock, 582 strands of hair a young musician named Ferdinand Miller yanked from Beethoven's corpse the day after his death and gave to his son as a birthday present in 1883. Four members of the Beethoven Society, including principal investor Dr. Alfred Guevara, eventually paid $7,300 for the lock at a Sotheby's auction in 1994. Guevara donated part of his portion to San Jose State University's Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, who have put it on display and provided it for analysis. It's a weird and amazing story, and the website for the 2005 documentary Beethoven's Hair (based on Russell Martin's book Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved) makes it stranger still.

Twenty-six-year-old future Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel's BBC Proms appearance leading the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is being celebrated as "the most outstanding orchestral concert in Britain this year," among other accolades. Dudamel and the orchestra performed Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony (available in its entirety here) before returning for a half-hour's worth of encores. And costume change: Dudamel & Co. switched from orchestral black to jackets fashioned after Venezuela's yellow, blue, and red flag. Among other works, they performed the most exciting version of the mambo dance from Bernstein's West Side Story you may ever see—complete with choregraphy. [via Sounds and Fury]

Jamie Walton earns about $50,000 per year as a respected thirty-three-year-old concert cellist. His fine 300-year-old Guarneri instrument, however, cost $1.7 million. Portfolio magazine reports on the dozen or so major stakeholders in this rare and beautiful instrument, whom Walton enlisted when donations from friends and family turned out not to be enough. The co-owners range from an anonymous investor who read about Walton in a magazine to a writer enthralled by a live performance. [via Opera Chic]

We'd love to have seen the four Orpheus operas being presented by Cooperstown, New York's Glimmerglass Opera, but it's not going to happen, alas. However, there are still about four more occasions to catch all four productions—Philip Glass' s Orphée, Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, and Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld—before the end of their summer run, so feel free.

The series' jewel turned out to be Glass's 1993 Orphée, the first of three operas the seventy-year-old minimalist composer based on the films of Jean Cocteau. Anthony Tommasini's New York Times review of the series was mixed overall, but he loved Orphée:

Mr. Glass may follow the film slavishly, but his hypnotically repetitive music has the effect of ritualizing the story, making it mythic. I often find his music formulaic, but not this score. It is run through with honky-tonk, jazzy bits and ancient modal lyricism, percolating with rhythmic riffs that often break into asymmetrical patterns and keep you off guard. The vocal writing is sometimes like pitched speech. But that only enhances the austere ritualism of the music.

The strengths and appeal of the production lie in its unsentimental, organic, unforgiving, and edgy direction. The synthesis of Glass's music/libretto and Cocteau's inspired screenplay create a perfect atmosphere of delicious tension, questioning life and death and the afterlife. The characters are haunted by their own doppelgangers, hovering to remind them of their own bad decisions. There was nothing fussy or overworked, and the singing was allowed to weave over Glass's ambient score.

The New York Times takes Philip Glass's seventieth birthday year as an opportunity to sum up "the Minimalist achievement" with key recordings selected by its critics.

The original manuscript of Beethoven's piano arrangement, four hands, for Grosse Fugue was purchased in December 2005 for $1.95 million by an unnamed buyer. The purchaser turned out to be hedge-fund jillionaire Bruce Kovner, board chairman of the Juilliard School. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, who has been totally on top of these transactions and their worth, called the work "a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications. It is the most radical work by the most formidable composer in history, and, for composers who had to follow in Beethoven's wake, it became a kind of political object."

Kovner subsequently donated the manuscript, along with 137 other more or less priceless works, to the Juilliard Library. They include the lost manuscript (from its 1725 premiere) of the transposed continuo part of Bach's cantata BWV 176; Beethoven's first sketches for the opening to his ninth symphony; the first manuscript page of Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, inscribed to Benny Goodman; a heavily annotated early piano version of Stravinsky's Firebird; Leonard Bernstein's autographed manuscript of Copland's El Salón México, with marginal caricatures of Copland by the conductor; and Toscanini's marked-up copy of Wagner's imposing Die Walküre.

In addition to being on view at The Julliard School in Manhattan, this treasure trove is now available online. You can search each manuscript, sketch, proof, and edition with a zoom function at this elegant and easy-to-use site, providing intimate and unprecedented glimpses into the working methods of forty-two classic composers. [via The Rest Is Noise]

As I type this, I'm listening to the Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists perform the French baroque dance music of Jean-Philippe Rameau with the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble live from London's Royal Albert Hall via BBC online. The music is part of Prom 3, i.e., the third night of the eight-week summer series of daily Royal Albert Hall concerts known as The Proms or, more formally, The BBC Proms, or, even more formally, as The Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC. You can hear them live on the BBC online and for seven days after broadcast via the BBC Radio Player.

This is, needless to say, a wonderful thing for classical music fans. The Proms began in 1895 as a way to use the hall during the off-season summer months and to develop an audience not used to attending classical concerts (sound familiar?). They became known as promenade concerts when audiences began strolling around the lower-priced standing areas of the hall.

The BBC Proms Guide offers the complete schedule of the season's seventy concerts. This year's focus is on Sibelius, Elgar, and "words and music" (including Shakespeare songs and Auden poetry set to music by the likes of Stravinsky and jazz composer John Dankworth). Yes, the lineup is a deep tried and true roster of "great composers," with only occasional examples of music written by the living. And of course at least one critic finds the BBC Proms overly conservative, focused on white males, and globally homogenized thanks to the Internet. At the same time, the BBC Proms has for several years sponsored competition for composers twelve to eighteen years old and it offers a robust outreach program to young listeners and, they hope, future Proms attendees. Listen in and judge for yourself.

Beverly Sills, who died of cancer Monday at age seventy-eight, was the second American opera singer to also be something of a pop star. And since Enrico Caruso was born too early to enjoy the benefits of multimedia overload, it's safe to say the soprano formerly known as Belle Miriam Silverman surpassed him, as well as other less accessible divas, in mass appeal thanks to her television specials, multiple talk-show appearances, and as host of thirteen episodes of "Live From Lincoln Center" beginning in 1976.

Born in Brooklyn, Sills made opera accessible by being no larger than life herself. Opera's Cinderella ("Bubbles" to her friends) lived a rather all-too-human real life. She also did her best to democratize the New York City Opera, where she worked as general director beginning in 1980 after performing ninety roles there since 1955. She then went on to become Chairman of Lincoln Center and, in 20002, of the Metropolitan Opera. Relive the Sills myth in this somewhat hypey yet still fascinating 1971 Time magazine profile:

Has Beverly Sills left Bubbles Silverman behind? Far from it. What might be called the Bubbles dimension in Beverly Sills is the leaven that, added to her enormous talents, makes her the extraordinary personality and professional that she is. It keeps her the least pretentious of prima donnas -- earthy, quick-witted, a little bit kooky. It gives her a natural, womanly radiance that suffuses any room or opera house she is in. Moreover, it generates a zest and determination in the face of suffering, and she has known deep suffering. Her generous, open nature is also a vulnerable one; she has had to learn to steel it with stoicism. "People plan and God laughs," she says. But she laughs too -- a billowing, enfolding laugh that is all the more warming because it is born not of frivolity but of grit. Beverly habitually arrives at rehearsals with her part fully memorized, her score shut and her mind open.

And for a perfect example of Sills's opera-goddess genius, enjoy her amazing rendition of Lucia's extremely complicated and challenging mad scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

Monday night I found myself in the Lower East Side's Bowery Ballroom watching a guy who calls himself Panda Bear sing and twirl knobs on an electronic console amid an attentive but subdued crowd. Panda Bear (AKA Noah Lennox) is the Animal Collective member behind my favorite song of the year. "Bros" is a dreamy and endlessly exhilarating quarter-hour plea for emotional space that any Pet Sounds fan could love. It's available on his challenging new solo album, Person Pitch, and you can hear a few minutes of it out on his MySpace page. Panda doesn't romanticize the sixties by any means; his beats and electronics can be dark and disturbing, not unlike Brian Wilson's own breakdown. He also seemed a little fragile alone onstage, his voice wavering uncertainly among the complicated beats and textures emerging from his rig as kaleidoscopic imagery swirled on a screen behind him. It's not easy being a one-man band.

I might not have mentioned Panda's minimalist thing if I hadn't been so struck by the contrast in performances while enjoying the heck out of Charles Gounod's Faust, which the Metropolitan Opera performed last night in the middle of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, my virtual backyard. Enjoying the opera with a few thousand families picnicking in front of a large outdoor stageful of musicians and full chorus was really no less intimate in its way than Panda's vulnerable performance in front of 500 self-conscious New York hipsters.

The Met's facility with Faust may have something to do with the fact that it was the company's first opera; they debuted it in 1883. The music was certainly ambitious and truly modern, in its way. Gounod's score is full of subtle digressions: two or three measures of, say, isolated flutes would convey enormous swaths of feeling. Tenor Fernando de la Mora, terrific as Faust, sang as though he were improvising the words on the spot, like those other great tenors Coltrane and Rollins. And you just can't beat hearing great music performed by top-notch musicians augmented by an incredibly clear sound system on a slightly chilly spring night. If you're around, the Met concludes its free park series with New Jersey performances of Faust and La Boheme this weekend.

Can you hear/see quality classical music between the coasts? New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross catches a plane, rents a car, and, "[t]hanks to generous speed limits," manages to see the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, and Birmingham's Alabama Symphony Orchestra in their native habitats over the course of two days. Condescending characterizations such as "regional" and "second tier" no longer apply, Ross discovers, and he writes: "I learned what touring musicians have been saying for years: that lesser-known orchestras can deliver sure-footed, commanding performances, and that the notion of a stratospheric orchestral élite is something of an illusion." Read Ross's "On the Road" and feel a little better about the state of classical music in the hinterlands.

Moreover, Ross documented his two-day trip photographically on his blog, The Rest Is Noise.

Ringtones pulled in $600 million in 2005 and the New York Philharmonic, being the intelligent high-tone outfit it is, would like a slice of that pie. Which is why you can purchase half a dozen ringtones, at $3 a pop, of Lorin Maazel conducting the symphony. Tired of hearing "My Humps" on your bus, train, or subway commute? Fight back with Brahms's "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," the finale of Mozart's Symphony No. 39, or the scherzo movement from Dvorak's Symphony No. 7. And the world will be a better place.

What happens when one of the world's very finest classical violinists spends a day busking in a busy Washington D.C. subway station? Do crowds develop and everyday life come to a screeching halt thanks to the unassailable beauty of the fiddler's performance on his multimillion-dollar Stradivarius? The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten took Joshua Bell into the Metro to find out, and his story is a stunner. [via The Rest Is Noise]

The Los Angeles Times reports that conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen will leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 after fifteen seasons. His successor will be a twenty-six-year-old (!) Venezuelan, Gustavo Dudamel. The New York Times adds that "[o]ther major American orchestras are in the throes of a conductor search, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the choice of Mr. Dudamel may put pressure on them to come up with daring and youthful choices of their own."

Located directly under Carnegie Hall's main stage, 650-seat Zankel Hall completed the institution's musical triplex in 2003 and has turned out to be one of the most acoustically accommodating venues in New York. I found myself there twice this weekend, enjoying a pair of shows that couldn't have been more different yet provided an unexpected bridge between otherwise distant musical cultures.

Friday night's spectacular performance by Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra began with Fode Lassana Diabate sauntering onstage and hammering out rhythmically complex and melodically enticing patterns on a wooden balafon, West Africa's xylophone. He was soon joined by a djembe drum, a small ngoni guitar, a drum set, electric guitar, bass, and piano, each of which generated radically distinct rhythms that eventually fused into a joyously kinetic whole.

Toumani Diabate let things settle down before seating himself behind his twenty-one-stringed kora, a thumb-plucked combination of lute and harp whose cascading tones and percussive bite resemble an African harpsichord. Diabate's music was ancient at heart, with roots extending back to the consolidation of the Mandinka tribal empire in the thirteenth century. And most of the bandmembers were the latest in long family lines of musicians known as djelis, or griots, whose original function was to praise the rich and powerful through song. Diabate's band does a lot more than that, however. By adding jazz, funk, and salsa to the mix, they create arrangements that rose to remarkable heights again and again as two singers praised the bandleader, their multi-country homeland, and the old ways. Hear them on last year's Boulevard de l'independence and get a rough visual approximation of it here.

After basking in Diabate's kora afterglow for a couple of days, a friend took me back to Zankel Hall last night for what turned out to be an unexpectedly complementary delight: pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's lecture-performance titled "A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years." Where kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate had compressed some 700 years of Mandinka musical history into ten players onstage for ninety minutes, Aimard, alone at a piano, performed thirty-two piano works, either in part or in their entirety, that did much the same for his own percussive stringed instrument. (Aimard discusses the "intensity, meaning, and renewal" he seeks in music in this New York Times interview.) Beginning with Scarlatti and Bach and ending with contemporary composers Marco Stroppa and George Benjamin, Aimard's narrative used the piano to reflect three centuries of Euro-American cultural history. While powerful Africans employed kora-playing griots to enhance their brands, Western composers looked to the piano to convey their best ideas. The mutual bottom line? Africa and the West are almost unimaginable without them.

Aimard continues his Time Signature series at Zankel on May 10 with a program of twentieth-century piano-percussion pieces by Bartok, Ligetic, Reich, Nancarrow, and others.

In what is being called classical music's "scandal of the year" (and there's really no scandal like a classical-music scandal), it turns out that recordings by the late Joyce Hatto, possibly the "greatest [classical] pianist no one has heard of" (according to Gramophone magazine) were allegedly ripped off from recordings by Laszlo Simon, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and others. Indeed, some say that most of her hundred-plus recordings on her husband William Barrington-Coupe's Concert Artist label may be stolen fakes, some of which, Gramophone learned, had been electronically extended. Barrington-Coupe has so far denied the fraud. And the plot thickens.

I've been keeping up with the revelations and rumors on Jessica Duchan's Classical Music Blog.

Remember when a string section was just another part of pop's rich harmonic fabric rather than the syrup singers of a certain age add to their fourth album of standards? Young music director Michael Christie and the Brooklyn Philharmonic apparently do. And they proved it last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during "Four-Scored," a program featuring a quartet of anything-but-staid female singer-songwriters.

Deceptively kittenish Nellie McKay and sultry Joan Osborne took particular advantage of the arrangement(s). The young, beautiful, and rather brilliant McKay plays off the contrast between her fabulous retro imagery and often witheringly witty lyrics that chronicle her urge to transform angst into activism. In "Change the World," from her terrific debut Stay Away From Me, McKay sang, "I listen to some rap, I give myself a slap," and did so, a really hard one, before continuing, "come on and use the pain." Ouch.

Osborne, looking vampishly sexy in a tight light-blue gown, debuted four new songs from an album-in-progress. With the help of the Philharmonic's strings, Osborne's music sounded like countrified Motown even before her sizzling encore version of the Manhattans' 1976 hit "Kiss and Say Goodbye," which songwriter Winfred "Blue" Lovett says he wrote originally for "Glen Campbell, Charley Pride, one of those people."

In between, Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson opted for regulation Manhattan-black attire and mostly eschewed the strings option. Anderson perversely let the strings sit on their hands while playing dark and dirgelike new works (typical lyric: "everything eventually goes crawling home") on her electrified violin. And Vega let the audience, rather than the Phil, provide the memorable duh-duh-duh-dah chorus to "Tom's Diner." She should give herself a slap.