Some people work for a living, some people work for fun

After too long a delay, I'm back with more rambling over at NewMusicBox. This is what happens when I get told I can't like what I like one too many times.

Also, some Boston Globe catch-up:

Some CD reviews: part one (scroll down), part two.
Reviewing Garrick Ohlsson.
Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The book is nearing an end. But I could use some help on something. I was writing up my bit on Landsberg 6—the sketchbook that contains the first inklings of Beethoven's Fifth. Now, there isn't much, if anything, left to say about Landsberg 6, which musicologists have pretty well picked over since Nottebohm first wrote about it back in 1880. But, my brain being what it is, I ended up spending all of yesterday banging my head against the wall over the paucity of information on the sketchbook's namesake, Ludwig Landsberg. Born in Breslau (in 1804, 1805, or 1807, depending on who you believe), a tenor in the Berlin Opera chorus, also a violinist, he ended up living in Rome for twenty-some years, hosting soirees and promoting German music (most scholarly mentions surround one such salon at which the guest of honor was Fanny Mendelssohn). But he also owned a trove of manuscripts—not only Beethoven, but also Schubert, and Chopin, and scads of early music. My question: where did he get the money to amass that collection? Sure, manuscripts were cheaper back then, but they weren't free, and Landsberg's collecting was on a scale I would not expect on an expat violinist's salary. Was he well-connected? Did he have family money? (Apparently his brother back in Breslau was a banker, according to Thayer, who didn't bother mentioning his brother's first name.) My spidey sense is going crazy thinking that there has to be something more interesting going on with Landsberg that indicated in his Grove blurb, but every lead hits a brick wall.

Follow the Fleet

All kinds of recent business, including this hefty bit of concision:

Reviewing the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
Boston Globe, August 19, 2010.

A couple of other reviews:

Reviewing the Monadnock Music Festival.
Boston Globe, August 10, 2010.

Reviewing Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Boston Globe, August 12, 2010.

Oh, and this bit of goofiness over at The Faster Times.

And, since I'm trying to finish a book, and writers always drink to excess, I've been dipping back into the greatest cocktail book of all time, that being the second volume of Charles H. Baker, Jr.'s The Gentleman's Companion. On page 110, Baker trots out something called "Admiral Schley Punch," named for Winfield Scott Schley, troublemaking hero/loose cannon of the Spanish-American War. Take it away, Mr. Baker:

ADMIRAL SCHLEY PUNCH

This is supposed to have been named after the American admiral, and we shouldn't mind such a pleasant piece of business being named after us.

St. Croix or Barbados rum, ½ jigger
Bourbon, ½ jigger
Sugar, 1 tsp
Lime, peel and juice, 1

Shake with fine ice, and turn into goblet—ice and all. Garnish with sprigs of mint, a stick of ripe pineapple, and so on.

Holy mother of pearl, this might just be the best summer drink ever concocted. We salute you, Admiral Schley!

Wish I Was Here

I've been terribly remiss on linking to Globe stuff, so here's a month's catch-up:

Classical Notes.
Boston Globe, July 23, 2010.

Subbing for David Weininger with my usual terminal obliqueness. (Yes, I did play a lot of deep left field during my brief and thoroughly undistinguished career as a Little Leaguer. Why do you ask?)

Reviewing Audra McDonald.
Boston Globe, July 20, 2010.

Damn, this was a good recital.

Reviewing the SICPP Iditarod.
Boston Globe, June 22, 2010.

Summer doesn't really start for me until the Iditarod. Tricks of the trade: how do you make it through a seven-hour concert? You smuggle in iced coffee and gummi bears.

Reviewing the Boston Trio.
Boston Globe, June 19, 2010.

Joe Barron sent me a nice note wondering why the Ives Trio doesn't get more love, and I'm inclined to agree with him. It might be the perfect Ives piece for people who think they don't like Ives—he does all his usual Ivesianisms, but the context makes the connections to his recurring underlying worldview unusually clear. (The new Rockport hall really is as gorgeous as everyone says.)

Reviewing Blue Heron Renaissance Choir.
Boston Globe, June 15, 2010.

An unusually smart program, this one, one of the only musicological-connection-type early-music concerts I've heard where the connections were all absolutely audible.

Anyway, it's still going to be bare-bones links for another couple of months around here, but the end of the book is in sight. I'm currently in a tag-team wrestling match with, alternately, August Röckel and Walter Murphy. Funny, I don't remember them making it into Grout and Palisca.

See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.

Hey, it's Bloomsday. Yes I said yes I will Yes! I'm celebrating by plowing through a little more of the book at a protracted, Joyce-like pace. Today's assignment: Karl Marx and History. I love that song!



As far as I know, Marx only gets one mention in Ulysses, as Bloom taunts the anti-Semitic "Citizen" in a pub:

Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

Anyway, back to work corralling my insatiable appetite for tangent. But I could talk about leftist punk rock and Joyce and Lacanian psychoanalysis and somehow tie in Stalin's "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics"! No, no you can't. Now write that damn transition into that discussion of Nietzsche's concept of Eternal Recurrence already!

Through restful waters and deep commotion

It's Robert Schumann's 200th birthday today. Happy birthday! Over at The Faster Times, there's some more celebratory rambling, in which I propose that Schumann was, among other things, the first great classical-music fan. One bit of evidence: as far as I can tell, Schumann is the first composer to use the B-A-C-H motive as a tribute, in his six op. 60 Fugues. (Beethoven, apparently, did toss around the idea of a B-A-C-H overture, but never actually wrote it.) Here's Silvio Celeghin playing the second of Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues on one of Schumann's favorite instruments, the incredibly cool pedal piano:



Incidentally, the more I think about it, the more the comparison I make between Schumann and Brian Wilson holds up. One other parallel: they both love repetition, taking comfort and sustenance in particularly nourishing harmonic or melodic loops. When you think about it, both musically and biographically, "Sail On Sailor" might be the most Schumannesque rock song ever written.

Large and in charge [plus an Ivesian ramble]

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, May 31, 2010.

Also, I forgot to link to this one over the Memorial Day weekend:

Hailing the 54th With Monumental Works. The joined Civil War memorials of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Charles Ives.
Boston Globe, May 28, 2010.

Ives's original proposed context for his "St.-Gaudens" movement is a little mysterious. It was to have been the third movement of a triptych—the second being his Wendell Phillips piece, the piano study known as "The Anti-Abolitionist Riots." It's the first movement that's a puzzle. Ives's memos refer to something called "The Common (Largo) (Emerson & Park Ch)" (scroll down here to x683). Most Ives biographers have taken this to mean "Emerson and Park Church," a reference to Park Street Church, across the street from Boston Common—but that doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense, Park Street Church having been (and still being) an outpost of rather conservative Congregationalism, and one that, in the 19th century, was not very sympathetic to abolitionists. The best possibility of an Emerson-Park Street Church connection would be the 1846 funeral of Charles Turner Torrey, an early anti-slavery activist who died in a Maryland penitentiary; Park Street Church withdrew their permission to host Torrey's funeral, after which it was moved to Tremont Temple (Emerson attended the funeral but did not speak at it). James Sinclair raises the possibility that Ives really meant Park Square, not Park Church—and Boston's Park Square does still have its copy of Thomas Ball's Freedman's Memorial, the original of which is in Washington, D.C. One other far-fetched possibility—well, maybe not so far-fetched, given the way Ives abbreviated names in his memos—is that "Park Ch" refers to a pair of Emerson's fellow abolitionists: Theodore Parker and William Henry Channing. That reading could circle back to Torrey as well: Channing did speak at Torrey's funeral, and Emerson's subsequent "Ode to W. H. Channing"—

Virtue palters, right is hence,
Freedom praised but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid

—has often been interpreted as a reaction to that event.

It's All True

Sorry it's been quiet around here, but I've been busy gearing up to respond to the new standards for history textbooks imposed by the Texas School Board. Like all good Americans, I want a piece of that action—textbooks are high-margin! So I've been coming up with a music history text that'll reorient a thousand years of Western music away from liberal brainwashing and towards divinely-sanctioned American exceptionalism. Here goes:

Jazz was invented by Paul Whiteman as a musical expression of his love for traditional values.

THE END

Oh, and George Gershwin borrowed from the blues a lot because he was sad he wasn't a Christian. Yeah, that'll work. (And I agree that textbooks always overlook Joe McCarthy's achievements. For example, the man could drink like a fish.)

In other news, I've been horribly remiss about linking to Globe reviews. Here's a couple recent ones:

Reviewing Michael Maniaci and Boston Baroque. (May 10, 2010)

Reviewing the Back Bay Chorale. (May 17, 2010)

In the Maniaci review, I talk about speculation that Venanzio Rauzzini, Mozart's favorite castrato, wasn't a castrato at all, but a natural male soprano. (More detailed speculation here.) I don't know if I buy it, though, especially after reading this contemporary description, from the April, 1807 issue of a magazine called The Monthly Mirror:

SIGNOR VENANZIO RAUZZINI, the subject of our present memoir, is by birth a Roman, and at a very early period of life evinced a fondness for music, which induced his parents to devote him, as it were, entirely to the study of that enchanting science.

As it were. On the other hand, the story about Haydn composing a setting of the epitaph for Rauzzini's dog is totally true.

As long as we're housecleaning, I found this on my hard drive. I have no idea why I originally made it. So here it is to haunt your dreams for no reason:

The Efficiency Expert

Reviewing Maurizio Pollini.
Boston Globe, April 28, 2010.

If my ears weren't deceiving me (always a possibility), whether by design or accident, Pollini hit a Picardy third in the final chord of the B-flat-minor Sonata. Interestingly, it kind of works.

Escapism

Reviewing Shirish Korde's "Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen."
Boston Globe, April 26, 2010.

His clothes are loud, but never square

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, April 14, 2010.

Arnie's Army

Reviewing the Chameleon Arts Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 29, 2010.

The weather started getting rough—the tiny ship was toss'd

Reviewing the Stephen Petronio Company's "I Drink the Air Before Me."
Boston Globe, March 22, 2010.

Rake leaves during dinner? He does what he pleases (3,8)

Reviewing New England Conservatory's Don Giovanni.
Boston Globe, March 16, 2010.

Prior engagement

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, March 16, 2010.

I'll buy a top hat to brighten up my lonely life

Reviewing Max Raabe & Palast Orchester.
Boston Globe, March 9, 2010.

Rosin the Beau

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, March 9, 2010.

"Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily"

Is this thing still on? Apologies to anyone still checking this channel and only finding a desultory string of Globe review links. As might be obvious, the book has now completely colonized my time and headspace (my physical space, too—from where I'm sitting, I can see nine research books. And this is in the kitchen.)

The latest chapter was, in part, a hefty digression from Beethoven's Fifth into general anti-German sentiment during World War I, when everybody in America seems to have lost their minds on the subject of the abominable Hun. The book's focus is Karl Muck, the Boston Symphony composer who was arrested and deported under circumstances that would be hilarious if they hadn't actually happened. Another performer who got swept up in the hysteria was the violinist Fritz Kreisler. To be fair, Kreisler did time in the Austrian army, and made no secret of his financial support of Austrian war relief; but when an assortment of wealthy wives in Pittsburgh forced the cancellation of a scheduled Kreisler recital in Pittsburgh, there began to be the sense that things were getting a little out of hand. From the November 15, 1917 issue of Life magazine:

By all means let him fiddle.... It does no harm, but quite the contrary. If it is true, as was reported, that he lost a lot of money going short on Bethlehem Steel at the wrong time two years ago, and is now trying to pay it back, it cannot be true as the Pittsburg ladies supposed, that he is shipping vast sums of concert money home to Austria.

Keep in mind that Life had pushed as hard as anyone for an American entry into the war. And I like the implication that Fritz Kreisler was a pioneering victim of globalization.

The other aspect of this chapter that's been chewing up a lot of time is that Oscar Wilde was right: seemingly every single novel written during the Victorian era was, in fact, three volumes long. I must have plowed through a couple dozen of these, at least. Some are surprisingly good—I'm now something of a fan of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, for example. But it's remarkable how many of these novels were enormously popular in their day and are now completely—and I mean completely—forgotten. I would guess that not many people outside of English departments have made it through Augusta Evans's 1866 St. Elmo, for instance, in the past century—but it was an enormous hit. Towns were named after it, for gosh sakes. St. Elmo is not my favorite nineteenth-century three-volume novel, but it did earn some sympathy from me on the strength of a catty review in The New York Times, September 23, 1899. "We can hardly understand a generation that took these books seriously," the reviewer wonders:

Miss Evans's novels combine impossible characters with the most naïvely preposterous pedantries. One thinks of her as a literary Van Amburgh, who

Goes into the lion's cage
And tells you all she knows.

Hey, wait a minute, that's pretty much my entire m.o.!

It's Oh So Quiet

Reviewing Vittorio Ghielmi and Luca Pianca.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2010.

Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas

Reviewing the Claremont Trio and the Setzer-Finckel-Han Trio.
Boston Globe, February 23, 2010.

I made it from a 1:30 concert at the Gardner Museum to a 3:00 concert at Jordan Hall by running a nine-minute mile. Not bad for an overweight critic! Two days later, my knees still hurt.

It's Nice to Go Trav'ling

Reviewing Continuum at Harvard.
Boston Globe, February 22, 2010.