Category Archives: music
Finding Bruno S., star of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek.
Wagner, Rheingold Act 4; Schoenberg, Cham Sym 1; Berg, Violin concerto; Adams, Harmonielehre; Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
I heard part of Desert Island Discs with Professor Hugh Pennington. He seems to have great taste in music. I really liked an old Hungarian tune he picked, called When the cabbage is served.
Kirsty Young may have made fun of it, but Ivor Cutler said that this sort of music made him drunk with happiness. It makes me feel the same way.
The CD is available. The name to remember is Zoltán Kallós:
Since the 1960s Zoltan Kallos has been researching and recording the traditional music and folklore of the multi-ethnic villages in Transylvania – a region where Romanian and Hungarian culture is mixed. His work has helped to preserve the musical heritage of these people and with these CD releases we can now have a taste of the best of these musical traditions.
Born in Válaszút (Kolozs country, in Transylvania) in 1926, Zoltán Kallós follows in the tradition of Bartok and Kodaly researching and collecting folk music from within the region known as the Carpathian Basin.
Radio 3 have been playing their way through all of Haydn’s symphonies, 2 a week, since the start of the year. Thanks to the iPlayer I have been able to listen to them as long as I remember to do it in less than 7 days.
Today they had his 13th symphony played by the Bolzano Haydn Orchestra. The presenter said it was the conductor’s only Haydn recording, an LP that had never been reissued. He was a pupil of Respighi named Antonio Pedrotti. Not very surprising that I had not heard of it.
This morning I got an email from the Gramophone magazine promoting their new website, which claims to be a complete archive that goes back to 1923. It looks great. Anyway, this afternoon I searched for “Pedrotti Haydn” and immediately found my way to this review of the exact LP from when it was released in 1967. Hard not to be impressed.
I was just rereading an old Norman Lebrecht post entitled Why We’re Still Afraid of Schoenberg. It contains much useful info, but also the following statement:
His role models were Moses and Napoleon; he wrote an opera on one, an ode to the other.
Leaving Moses aside, Lebrecht must never have heard Schoenberg’s Ode To Napoleon. It is a setting of a poem by Byron which satirically attacks the Corsican.
On Friday evening, I was sad to hear of the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
I was led to Stockhausen’s music by following back through the influence of bands I was listening to at the time. The Fall led me back to Can, a couple of members of which had studied with the great man.
Stockhausen not only fundamentally challenged my idea of music, but in seeking to understand him I was led back in turn to Webern, Schoenberg and their classical predecessors.
I consider myself very fortunate to have attended a weekend of concerts in Belfast, back in April 2004. Stockhausen visited the city to oversee and introduce these. (He was also honoured by Queen’s University.)
I was able to sit quite near the mixing desk where Stockhausen operated the controls each evening. I don’t expect ever to be in such close proximity to a major composer again.
I acknowledge that there was something of the showman about Stockhausen and that he was eccentric to say the least. But for me his work Kontakte has a quality of total reinvention which music hasn’t had since JS Bach.
Ivan Hewett catches this in his obituary when he writes:
What he has in abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen’s music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Take for example the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalyptic brass chords are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener’s head; or the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses.
Stockhausen explained such effects. He said he had discovered that according to the laws of physics, pitch and rhythm were not separate aspects of music as we had once thought, but part of the same phenomenon. Slow a pitch down and it becomes a rhythm. Grappling with the laws of sound in such a fundamental way to create a new form of beauty: this can only remind us of Bach’s mastery of equal temperament.
I would like to repost links to notes on these concerts I attended in 2004, which I made on a blog I had at the time:
I was doing a play in Chicago a few years ago and a friend said, “I’m sorry I haven’t seen the play, I just can’t go to the theater because I find my mind wanders.” And I said, “What does that have to do with it? My mind wanders the whole time.” And not just when I’m sitting there. When I’m acting, my mind wanders.
I don’t go to see plays, but when I go to a concert, my mind wanders.
If it’s music I don’t know, I can’t tell why my mind wandered. It could be:
- my lack of attention or understanding
- a weak performance
- uninvolving music
I hate not being able to tell. I suppose a professional critic would have to bluff it.
In the Malkovich interview above, he goes on to say that if his acting makes your mind wander, then that’s OK.
That’s what theater’s for. To reflect. To contemplate.
But most mind wandering is nothing of the sort.
I have a CD of Rigoletto
Both of these pieces of work have strong plots. I didn’t have to ponder either of them to reach this conclusion. In both cases it was just an obvious fact. It was so blindingly obvious in both cases, I realised that most other fiction must be weakly plotted. Most fiction of any kind, including even quite good fiction, gets along on plots which in comparison are low on drama and scarcely believable, but for some reason, no-one notices and it doesn’t matter.
(The Chekhov story was in this book
