Rock-and-roll is here to stay

Previewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, May 18, 2007.

Some bits that didn't make it into the article:

Anthony De Ritis on quoting Ravel's Bolero in his concerto for DJ, Devolution:

I actually had finished the piece before I found out [Bolero] wasn't in the public domain. Luckily, many thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees later, I was able to use it.

Steven Mackey on the origin of his patriotism:

I remember, I was England for a time as a kid—my father worked for the government—and people would find out we were American, and they'd come up to us and say, "Congratulations on your John Glenn!" or, "Congratulations on winning World War II!" That probably wouldn't happen today.

Mackey on rehearsals for the 2003 premiere of Dreamhouse, during which the orchestra found out it was being disbanded:

It was literally, the manager came up and said "I just have to make a couple announcements before we start" and then he gets up in front and says, "Um, you're all fired. Oh, and here's your guest conductor for the week, Gil Rose." It was insane.

Excerpt of my interview with Evan Ziporyn:

EZ: There's rock music in [Hard Drive], but it's kind of a narrow segment of that, because it's the music I listened to as a kid, you know? And it's not always what you expect. I liked prog rock—I liked King Crimson, I liked the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But I was also listening to Barry White.

MG: You know, I was a closet Barry White fan for years, and then one day it was like all of a sudden it was cool to be a Barry White fan.

EZ: His time has come!

MG: I've noticed these days that people are pretty shameless about what they like. They don't care if it's cool anymore; the nerdier the better. It's like they wear it as a badge of honor.

EZ: Well, that's a positive development for the human condition, isn't it?

(It's new-music day in the Globe: also check out David Weininger on Harold Shapero's new song cycle.)

Sing for your supper

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) loved music, but he thought the joys of harmony paled next to the pleasures of the table. The famed author of Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste) and the honoree of Brillat-Savarin cheese (a triple-crême, 75% butterfat masterpiece), was a lawyer by trade, but also a musician—during a brief exile to the Untied States during the Reign of Terror, he taught violin and was good enough himself to play first violin in a New York theater orchestra. In his book, Brillat-Savarin regarded hearing a more subtle mechanism than taste:

Taste is not so richly endowed as hearing; the latter can appreciate and compare many sounds at the same time; but taste, on the other hand, is actually simple—that is to say, that two flavours at one are equally inappreciable.

But it may be doubled and multipled in succession—that is to say, that in one act of deglutition we may experience successively a second and even a third sensation, each of which gradually becomes more weak, and which are described by the words after-taste, bouquet, or fragrance. So, when a chord is struck, a skilful ear may distinguish one or many series of consonances, of which the number is as yet imperfectly known.

But the complete satisfaction of the gourmand is superior, and has superior side-benefits.

A married pair of gourmands have at least once a day a pleasant opportunity of meeting, for even those who have separate bedrooms—and in France there are a great number who have—eat at least at the same table, and have a subject of conversation which is always new; they speak not only of what they eat, but also of what they have eaten, what they will eat, what they have seen elsewhere, of fashionable dishes, new inventions, and so forth. Everyone knows that such a familiar chit-chat is delightful.

Music, no doubt, has powerful attractions for those who love it; but one must set about it:—it is an exertion.

Besides, sometimes one has a cold, our music is mislaid, the instruments are out of tune, we may have a headache:—there is a strike.

On the other hand, a common want brings the couple to table; the same inclination retains them there; they naturally show each other those trifling attentions which denote a wish to oblige, and their behavior at meal-time has a great share in the happiness of their lives.

Still, it was music that saved his life. Brillat-Savarin had to travel to see one citoyen Prôt, in order to obtain a passport, "which, probably, might save me from prison or the scaffold."

I am not one of those persons who are rendered cruel from fear, and I think that M. Prôt was not exactly a bad man; but he was not very intelligent, and he did not know how to employ the formidable power put in his hands; he was like a child armed with the club of Hercules.
...
I was a little better received by Madame Prôt, to whom I went to pay my repects; for the circumstances under which I presented myself interested at least her feelings of curiosity.

The first words she said were to ask me if I loved music. What an unexpected happiness! She was passionately fond of it, and as I am myself a very fair musician, out hearts beat in unison from that very moment.
...
After supper, she sent for some of her music-books. She sang, I sang, we sang. I never used my voice to greater advantage, and I never enjoyed it more. M. Prôt had already several times said he was going, but she took no notice of it, and we were giving in grand style the duet from [Grétry's] opera la Fausse Magie,

"Vous souvient-il de cette fête?"

when he told her he really must insist upon her leaving.

We had to finish; but at the moment of parting, Madame Prôt sait to me, "Citizen, a man who cultivates the fine arts as you have done, does not betray his country. I know you have asked some favor from my husband; it shall be granted; it is I who promise you."
...
Thus the object of my journey was accomplished. I returned home with my head erect; and, thanks to Harmony, charming daughter of Heaven, my ascension was for a good many years postponed.

Having saved his neck in a most quintessentially French manner, Brillat-Savarin survived the Terror, returned to France, and wrote the book for which he became justly famous. In addition to that delectable cheese, he also lent his name to a cake: a savarin nowadays refers to any liqueur-soaked yeast cake without raisins (which would turn it into a baba au rhum). Eat well.

Homage to Walter Busterkeys

We don't usually do birthdays on this blog, but we'll make an exception for Liberace, who would have turned the exquisitely appropriate age of 88 today. I'm not sure that anyone who wasn't alive during Liberace's heyday realizes just how big a star he was—headlining his own TV show at various times throughout his career, guest-starring on every show imaginable (Batman! Kojak! The Monkees!), even venturing into movies now and again. (He's memorably good in his one non-piano role, as the casket salesman in Tony Richardson's The Loved One.) In the 1980s, he sold out two famous runs of shows at Radio City Music Hall, and was pulling down $300,000 a week in Vegas. For playing the piano.

Well, more than that, obviously: the outfits, the jewelry, the mirror-mosaic piano cases, the Rolls-Royce that drove him onstage—the spectacle always in effective counterpoint to his relaxed and easy stage demeanor, fully enjoying the absurdity of his flamboyance with coy self-deprecation. But the man could play. Liberace honed his technique with Florence Bettray-Kelly (herself a student of Moriz Rosenthal), and was good enough to solo with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock as a 14-year-old. This clip shows his way with Chopin—the arrangement, combining the "Minute" Waltz and the A-flat Polonaise, is an abomination, but it's Chopin's notes, for the most part, and Liberace shows some nice limpid fingerwork as well as a real feel for the style. (Had he not opted for glitz, Liberace probably would have been a Chopin specialist in the tradition of Paderewski, his childhood idol; family legend has the old master personally encouraging the young Liberace during a visit to Milwaukee.)

Here's a couple more clips: this performance of "Mack the Knife," from a 60s episode of the Dean Martin Show, is shameless and scintillating in equal measure, and you get to see just what a good time he's having putting the tune through its paces. (The mash-up of Weill with Strauss is a superb musical pun.) And here he is in Vegas, in unusually fine technical form, spinning a surrealistically-juxtaposed medley—"As Time Goes By," "Chopsticks," and "Send In the Clowns."

I sometimes wonder if, had he been born a century earlier, Liberace would have been grouped in with such Romantic virtuosi as Liszt and Alkan. I would imagine that an actual Liszt recital was probably closer to a Liberace show than we think. (Ken Russell thought so, too: his gleefully anachronistic, over-the-top version of the composer in Lisztomania [warning: NSFW backstage toplessness—concert starts at 4:28 mark] owes as much to Liberace as it does to psychedelic-rock excess.)

The image at the top is the cover of a collection I found at Bookman's Alley a while back, and the arrangements are a cut above similar folios I have by the likes of Frankie Carle and Eddy Duchin, who tended to dilute the technical challenges of their style for the popular sheet-music market. Not Liberace: these versions are lush and tricky, with some sweet harmonic substitutions and effective use of 19th-century textures and flourishes. Here's Liberace's arrangement of the Jack Lawrence-Walter Gross standard "Tenderly" (click on each page to enlarge):


Here's my rendition of it. I'm no Liberace; for one thing, he kept his pianos tuned. But, yes, it's as much fun to play as it sounds.

Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene

So there's this website called MyHeritage.com, and they've got this face recognition program, word of which has been going around the Internet. Basically, you're supposed to plug in your picture, and they'll tell you which celebrities you most resemble. I'm not sure how accurate it is—one of my top matches was Jacky Cheung. Flattering, but, um, no. Still, I figured I'd let it take a whack at casting the big-budget Hollywood musical about the Second Viennese School I've always dreamed of. Here's what it came up with. No fooling.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Arnold Schoenberg

Felicity Huffman as Alban Berg

Billie Joe Armstrong as Anton Webern

I'd definitely pay—what is it now? Nine-fifty?—to see that. I can't wait for the scene where, after the disastrous test screening of Pierrot Lunaire, Webern saves the day by coming up with the idea of having Berg dub Jean Hagen's vocals.

Negotiations and Love Songs

Reviewing Intermezzo Opera.
Boston Globe, May 15, 2007.

You're not getting any work done today

Other Minds, the epitome of Left Coast new-music fun, has launched radiOM, an online clearing-house for archival recordings from Other Minds-produced concerts and experimental programs from Berkley's KPFA radio. (The announcement was timed to coincide with Lou Harrison's 90th birthday, of course.) As I write, I'm grooving to a 1965 John Cage-David Tudor performance of Christian Wolff's "For 1, 2, or 3 people, any instruments" recorded at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Hours of entertainment for the whole family—4,500 hours, to be exact. That's enough listening to get you to Thanksgiving.

Off to see the Wizard

I had a good idea for a post over the weekend. I still have it; I sat down to write it last night and ended up spending the entire evening surfing for Harold Arlen songs. Well, that's a good idea for a post, too.

Here's a 1950s Arlen song, "I Never Has Seen Snow," from a criminally obscure Broadway show called House of Flowers that he co-wrote with a young Truman Capote. (This is from a Boston Pops telecast; even if you're not a Vanessa Williams fan, Martha Babcock's cello solo makes it all worthwhile.)



My favorite Arlen songs are the blues- and gospel-flavored numbers he primarily produced with lyricists Ted Koehler and Johnny Mercer. Arlen and Mercer penned a drawerful of gems for a World War II cinematic revue called Star-Spangled Rhythm—the only one to achieve standard status was "That Old Black Magic" (choreographed for the film by George Balanchine; Hollywood used to be a classy place), but some more military-themed songs are priceless, including the brilliant "I'm Doing It For Defense" and the deliciously-titled "He Loved Me Till the All Clear Came." Here's a clip from the movie: sit through 30 seconds of clumsy framing story featuring a Preston Sturges cameo, and you'll be rewarded with Dick Powell and Mary Martin easing their way through "Hit the Road to Dreamland." Those singing waiters? That's the one-and-only Golden Gate Quartet, one of the greatest gospel groups of all time.



Arlen and Koehler achieved immortality with "Stormy Weather," one of dozens of songs they wrote throughout the 30s for such revues as the Cotton Club Parade and Earl Carroll's Vanities. "When the Sun Comes Out" dates from 1940, and it's a beauty. The late, great Barbara McNair just plain sings the hell out of it.



Arlen is a composer I didn't really appreciate until I started accompanying musical theater students. I think you have to physically get your hands on the music before you discover how creative and audacious he is—he's constantly toying with odd phrase lengths, tricky polyrhythmic syncopations, and slippery harmonies that you don't notice as a listener because his feel for the overall style is so suave. That might be why, even though so much of his musical vocabulary is immediately recognizable, he never had as high a profile as some of his more publicly celebrated colleagues. The more I get to know the songs, though, the more I'm convinced that he and Gershwin are in a class by themselves.

Careless Talk

Quotes for the day:

Munger also spoke of bright people with streaks of "nuttiness". He gave Mozart as an example. Mozart was a brilliant composer but did nutty things like spend all of his money.

That's Charles T. Munger, Chairman of Wesco Financial, as quoted in a report on Wesco's annual shareholder meeting. Munger sounds like he knows from whence he speaks: "Irish Alzheimer's"? I also love his take on global warming: "If Florida is flooded because it is a low elevation, people will have time to move."

Last Tuesday, Garvey was asked to move for the second time this season and got into an exchange with police. In a report of the incident, police said Garvey became heated and "left the area holding his permit, which he believes gives him the right to disturb citizens' peace and quiet."

Street musician Jack Garvey, a longtime fixture of downtown Salem, Massachusetts, has been running into trouble with some persnickety condo owners, in spite of his license from the city. The cops got it wrong: you don't need a permit to disturb citizens' peace and quiet—musicians are born with that right. Get used to it.

Her favorite flute composers include Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich. Her least favorite is modern American composer John Adams.

"I sometimes wish he’d date a flute player just so he’d find out how hard his music is to play," Helcher said.

Charleston Symphony Orchestra flutist Regina Helcher accidentally lets slip the way most composers really learn orchestration. Shhhhh!

Story of the day, as of 9:20 AM

And they weren't even playing Rite of Spring. Maybe disgruntled Fiedler supporters aren't as docile as they look.

Via Geoff Edgers, who has a picture.

The bustle in a house

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of what gets posted here is only tangentially related to classical music. But, then again, there's a lot of things going on in the world that only seem tangential. Here's an example: subprime mortgages.

Subprime lenders offer mortgages to borrowers with poor credit, typically financing the risk with higher interest rates, penalties for early repayment, and such practices as balloon payments (at the end of a fixed period, the balance of the loan has to be repaid or refinanced). The subprime market has been in trouble lately, with a host of companies going bankrupt in the wake of a rash of foreclosures on adjustable-rate mortgages too freely given out during the housing boom a few years back.

Yesterday, Toll Brothers, the country's largest builder of luxury homes, announced that it would not meet earnings expectations this year. You might wonder why a luxury home builder, whose clients presumably have good credit, would be affected by the subprime implosion. It turns out that the crisis has rippled throughout the entire mortgage industry, with lenders tightening up credit and income restrictions across the board, making it harder for anybody to buy. There's also a domino effect: most people buying luxury homes are upgrading, which means there has to be a middle-class buyer for their previous home, which means that home needs a buyer, and so on down to the base of the pyramid. If first-time home buyers can't get into the market, the owners already in the market can't move up.

Now, if you're wondering where you've seen the Toll Brothers name (and their ubiquitously trademarked America's Luxury Home Builder™ slogan) before, they're the company that took over as lead corporate sponsor of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts in 2005. The initial agreement only guaranteed support through 2009, however; think the mortgage market will recover by then? Or will Peter Gelb have to start passing the hat like Joe Volpe did after Texaco bailed?

In the grand scheme of things, this is just a blip, and you could certainly make the case that the future of the Met broadcasts is on satellite radio and the Web anyway. But it's a reminder that, no matter how far away an issue may seem from the everyday work of music-making, there's often a more direct connection than there first seems.

Smiles of a Summer Night

Probably as a result of seeing one too many late night broadcasts of The Train as an impressionable pre-teen, my attention is always diverted by the intersection of Nazi-looted art and famous composers (as you may have noticed). Well, the gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline here at Soho the Dog HQ lit up this morning with the news that the Austrian government had returned Edvard Munch's "Summer Night at the Beach" (seen above) to Marina Fistoulari-Mahler, Alma and Gustav Mahler's granddaughter, and Alma's sole heir (that must be a fun attic full of birthday cards and old party invitations). The decision was made by the government last November, but the actual transfer took place this week.

Another composer connection: the painting was a gift to Alma from her second husband, Walter Gropius, upon the birth of their daughter Manon—the "angel" whose death inspired Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. In her autobiography, Alma wrote: “No painting has ever touched me in the way this one has."

I Put a Spell on You

Reviewing the Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 9, 2007.

Cut for space was mention of my favorite movement of Silenzio, the fourth one: whispery notes hammered directly on the strings’ fingerboards with muted accordion clusters. Accordion with strings is such a great combination. (The players for that one were Biliana Voutchkova on violin, sympathetically joined by cellist Agnieszka Dziubak and Cory Pesaturo, playing the bayan part on a Western piano accordion with a deft hand, particularly with the instrument’s finicky delicate registers.)

The lifeblood of democracy

Did you know that ASCAP has a political action committee? (If you're unfamiliar with American politics, PACs are any private group organized to spend money in order to influence elections—most are affiliated with an interest group, corporation, or union.) The ASCAP Legislative Fund for the Arts, to call it by its official title, isn't nearly on par with the big PACs, but they still dished out $157,950 to assorted candidates in the last election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The winners in the House of Representatives:

$5,000 (maximum permitted under law)

Howard Berman (D-CA)

$4,500

John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI)

$4,000

Steve Chabot (R-OH)

Howard Coble (R-NC)

Edward Markey, Jr. (D-MA)

In the Senate:

$4,000

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

Edward Kennedy (D-MA)

$3,500

Kent Conrad (D-ND)

$3,000

Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

$2,500

Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Claire McCaskill (D-MO)

Jon Tester (D-MT)

(See the whole list here.) It's about 2-1 in favor of Democrats, although ASCAP hedges its bets by favoring Republicans on the soft money side, if the last few available cycles are any indication. (Interestingly, BMI, which has a smaller PAC of its own, favors the GOP for both candidates and soft money.)

I was looking into this in the wake of the whole Internet radio royalty mess, wondering if ASCAP had taken a stand one way or another—although, given that a federal court just shot down an ASCAP assertion that a download of a song is a "performance" for royalty purposes, I would guess that they're not on the side of the little guys. Still, not a word on the subject is to be found on ASCAP's website. (Interestingly, no mention of their PAC, either—the one result via a search seems to have been removed from the actual page.) Here's an indication, though: Reps. Jay Inslee (who got $1,000 from the RIAA last year—you bite that hand that feeds you!) and Don Manzullo have introduced H.R. 2060, which, if enacted, would overturn the Copyright Royalty Board's decision; As of this morning, the bill had attracted 51 co-sponsors—of which only four received ASCAP money (and none of whom got anything from BMI). I don't think ASCAP and BMI are actively working against the bill—I don't think they have to. They've been supporting candidates who already are inclined to back up SoundExchange. I'll predict that they'll remain eerily quiet about this whole thing.

I know that composers of what ASCAP somewhat euphemistically calls "Concert Music" make up a comparatively small part of their membership, but if they and BMI were really serious about supporting all their composers, artists, and publishers, they'd be using some of their clout to make sure that the Internet, the best distribution channel to happen to new and avant-garde music in a hundred years, isn't scorched into an arid wasteland of major-label pap by industry organizations who will go after anyone broadcasting your music whether you want them to or not. It's probably asking too much, but when ASCAP president Marilyn Bergman (full disclosure: I rather like "The Way We Were") tells us:

[W]e have to be wary of the well-spoken hucksters out there trying to trick us out of the most fundamental right we have, the right to control the uses of our own work, and the right to be fairly paid for those uses

I hope she's making room in her organization for those of us who count the RIAA as one of those hucksters.

By the way, the most reliable classical supporter of ASCAP's PAC? Philip Glass.

Hang It Up

Peter Gelb ran another idea up the flagpole last night, with the first "Art for Opera" auction, which raised nearly two million dollars for the Metropolitan Opera. After "cocktails and dinner amidst Allen Moyer's set for the new staging of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice," which might be the most amusing sentence you'll see today—what, every time you turn around, somebody takes your plate away?—guests (who already paid between $750 and $1250 to get in and eat) bid on operatically-themed works by various contemporary artists, including an eight-by-six-foot photorealistic Chuck Close tapestry portrait of Renée Fleming that would probably scare the hell out of me if I was walking around the house at night. (Take a look at some items here.) Critic-at-large Moe's favorite—this William Wegman homage to Hansel and Gretel—went for $50,000. That's a lot of liver treats.

World Wide Web

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, May 7, 2007.

Three-Chord Monte

The other day I came across this excellent, concise history of the Chicago-area punk band Screeching Weasel on the terrifically-named blog Can You See the Sunset From the Southside? This was a straight nostalgia trip for me: the suburb where Weasel and Jughead got their start was where I grew up. I met them a couple of times in the early days, the most memorable being when my friend Nick talked them into visiting the Maine East High School cable access TV studio for an interview. (I think I was technical director for that one.) I had a copy of their self-titled first album; "Murder In the Brady House" was a particular favorite. Nick also turned me on to the Dead Kennedys, and then Jack Miller (who's put in occasional cameos on this blog) dubbed off some Sex Pistols rarities for me, and I was hooked.

I still go through occasional punk phases, and about every eighth piece I start writing, I find myself thinking "now, this one should be just like a punk rock song" (after which it usually comes out nothing like a punk rock song). I did some summer teaching last year, and the overwhelming majority of my students (music ed majors) were horrified to find out that I enjoyed this stuff; on the one hand, I was puzzled, since I've always thought of punk as a late revival of early 1950s rock-and-roll (Eddie Cochran? Punk rocker), and who doesn't like that stuff? On the other hand, I was sardonically pleased that it still had the power to charm, as it were.

Unlike our classmate and one-time Screeching Weasel bassist Johnny Personality, I was always a closet fan—I never had the requisite courage for a mohawk or multiple piercings—but regardless of genre, I'm still attracted to music that gives off a whiff of the style: tight, utilitarian bursts of energy that make no effort to soften any rough edges. More importantly, it's the attitude of being exactly what it is and making no apologies for it. Maybe that's why I go from Arthur Fiedler to Ben Weasel without any cognitive dissonance. I think that's a big difference between the way musicians and non-musicians listen to music: if you're able to empathize with the creator, you start to see that all this stuff, no matter how disparate, is coming from the same place. Ives? Mahler? Beethoven? Josquin? Punks.

Post title stolen from another Chicago punk band, Pegboy.

The Dangling Conversation

Yesterday, Geoff Edgers and Scooter at Unpleasant! were grokking on Arthur Fiedler's "Saturday Night Fiedler" disco album with the Boston Pops, which sent me to the turntable with my own favorite, "Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Play the Music of Paul Simon."



Boston Pops/Fiedler—"Feelin' Groovy" (MP3, 2.2 Mb)

Yes, it's one of the world's leading orchestras playing "Feelin' Groovy." How can you resist? Their version of "Mrs. Robinson" is not bad, either. (All the arrangements on the album are by the legendary Richard Hayman, who would be a hero around these parts just for being a member of Borah Minevitch's Harmonica Rascals. But I digress.)

As a kid, these sorts of arrangements were actually my favorite portions of "Evening at Pops," which perhaps demonstrates both how old and uncool I am. But the willful cognitive dissonance between the source material and the end result always tickled my fancy. Taking a modest little pop song and pumping it up with the grandeur of an orchestra was a great way to get seduced by that sound: the full impact of symphonic glory laced with just enough good-natured absurdity to dissolve any encrusted sanctity.

Whatever happened to those sorts of arrangements? Well, pop music itself gradually expanded to symphonic proportions. In a way, a song like "Born to Run," with its melodramatic orchestration and ambition, is already its own Pops arrangement; the fun of hearing three-chord progressions inflated to Wagnerian scale became redundant.

To me, most symphonic pop music just sounds artificially big. (The only guy I ever thought got it right was Brian Wilson, who used the orchestra as an expanded palette—the exotic instrumental colors function as extensions or reimaginations of the sorts of sounds you'd find in a typical pop combo.) But Pops arrangements, because of the context and the presentation, always existed in a kind of playful limbo, free to pick and choose from both sides of the ledger. Sometimes the results were incongruously grandiose. Sometimes they were just goofy. But often, they were grand and goofy, a terrific combination that's all too rare in any genre. It's the sort of charge you get from an over-the-top yet sincerely skillful Hollywood production number, or a particularly elaborate run of physical comedy, or the highbrow/lowbrow alternating current of the best visual pop art.

If I ever was put in charge of the Pops, the first thing I'd do is commission a whole bunch of those young-gun postminimalist pop-influenced composers out there to do arrangements of their favorite songs—not for the orchestra to back up said acts, but as the sort of stand-alone pieces that Fiedler used to do. (The Pops have commissioned an original piece from Nico Muhly—go on, hit him up for another!) Think of it as cleaning up a fun little playground in a corner of the cultural landscape that's fallen into disuse. Is it for everybody? Nah—lots of people outgrow jungle gyms. But, then again, aren't the ones who don't more fun to hang out with?

Beethoven needs curtains

MY EXCELLENT FRIEND,—

All would go well now if we had only a curtain, without it the Aria will be a failure. I only heard this to-day from S., and it vexes me much: a curtain of any kind will do, even a bed-curtain, or merely a kind of gauze screen, which could be instantly removed. There must be something; for the Aria is in the dramatic style, and better adapted for the stage than for effect in a concert-room. Without a curtain, or something of the sort, the Aria will be devoid of all meaning, and ruined! ruined! ruined!! Devil take it all! The Court will probably be present. Baron Schweitzer requested me earnestly to make the application myself. Archduke Carl granted me an audience and promised to come. The Empress neither promised nor refused.

A hanging curtain!!!! or the Aria and I will both be hanged to-morrow. Farewell! I embrace you as cordially on this new year as in the old one. With or without a curtain! Your

BEETHOVEN.

A letter to Beethoven's longtime Viennese acquaintance Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz, on the eve of the mammoth December 22, 1808 benefit concert at the Theater an der Wien which saw the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Choral Fantasy. (The piece in question here is the concert aria Ah! perfido.)

They Can't Take That Away From Me

Happy Loyalty Day! No kidding. According to the government:

All citizens can express their loyalty to the United States by flying the flag, participating in our democracy, and learning more about our country's grand story of courage and simple dream of dignity.

You want to learn more about simple dreams of dignity? Start here. (I suppose some people might consider it disloyal to point out the cynical coincidence of May Day and "Loyalty Day." Oh, well. Besides, they didn't say which flag.)

I should probably include something musical, right? Go here and listen to the "Eight-Hour Song." (Part of another excellent survey.)

Din and tonic

Reviewing Evgeny Kissin.
Boston Globe, May 1, 2007.

Mention of the sixth of the Brahms op. 118 pieces, the E-flat minor "Intermezzo," was cut for space (and accidentally conflated with the fifth, which was not particularly slow): Kissin took it at a remarkably slow and improvisatory tempo, fascinatingly calling up echoes and portends of late Liszt, Debussy, and early Schoenberg—and making the force of the middle section explosive. It was his most experimental playing of the night. With that command over color and texture, Kissin could actually be one of the all-time great interpreters of the avant-garde repertoire if he wanted—imagine if he ever tackled the Ligeti Etudes or the Barraqué Sonata.

And the coughing? Seriously: I felt like I was in a foley session for The Magic Mountain movie.

Update (5/2): A reader asked about the Horowitz "Carmen Variations" that Kissin played as an encore. Horowitz tinkered with the piece throughout his career; Kissin's performance sounded like either the 1968 Carnegie Hall version or the 1978 White House version (which are fairly similar). The first recorded version (from 1927) was shorter; a version recorded (but never released) in the 1950's is the most elaborate. You can compare transcriptions of the various versions here.