DFD Sings Der Kreuzzug

One of life's great joys.

800 Words: Pop Schubertiade

(Letitia Vansant - this clip doesn't do her justice)

On Saturday night I went to a private concert at the beautiful Lake Montebello house of La Cohen. The quality of the music was variable, it always is at these things; ranging from a performer too drunk to hold his guitar to Letitia Vansant - the WTMD darling herself whose final song reduced the guy sitting next to me to tears. But the atmosphere was just right. Thirty or forty of us sat on the floor of an enormous basement while acoustic, and relatively mild electric, performers entertained us for well over five hours. This is almost inevitably the way the musical experiences we remember on our deathbeds are presented. Most music shows are a mass performance, in which you’re indistinguishable as an audience member from hundreds and thousands of others - an anonymous face in a hive which processes music interchangeably. But in the ‘drawing room’ atmosphere of a small gathering frees up both good performers and good listeners to engage one another like a musical conversation. I’ve had many great experiences in concert halls and rock venues, but the musical experiences which inevitably mean the most to me are the ones in which I was listening alone to a recording or playing violin with a few friends.

(Wintereisse - Winter's Journey) 

It was somewhere in the middle of Letitia Vansant’s set that I realized that we were sitting in the modern equivalent of the Schubertiade. I’ve been to private house concerts before, but never had the setting felt so appropriate to the music to which we were listening. I was instantly put in mind of what those original Schubertiades must have been like.

Perhaps Schubert was the original musical bohemian, spending his twenties sleeping on friends couches and living upon their generosity so he could write as many as eight songs in a single day. His friends were well aware that this 4’11 chubster was a divine genius who happened to live in their midst, and they circulated his works among themselves even though nearly all of them were rejected by every publisher in town. Every so often, they would gather in their living rooms to listen to and play Schubert’s latest compositions.

Shortly before Beethoven’s death, he looked through Schubert’s work and realized that Vienna housed another genius. But Schubert never had opportunity to call on Beethoven, and shortly thereafter, Schubert was dead himself. In his barely thirty years, Schubert may or may not have become the greatest of all composers (probably not, but he was damn close). And if he wasn’t the greatest, then he was certainly the most human in the same way that Chekhov is perhaps the most human writer, and Rafael the human Renaissance painter. There was something too fragile about all three of them to live past their youths. It’s often said about Schubert that we’re listening to his most private thoughts expressed in sound - no composer ever made himself more vulnerable. Schubert was a fine symphonist, sometimes a great one, he had a sure way with grand choral music, and had he lived longer he doubtless would have written some cosmically wonderful operas. But it was in music of a small scale that Schubert revealed his true magic. No composer, not even Mozart or Beethoven, demonstrated greater genius in the intimate forms - art songs, song cycles, short piano pieces, piano sonatas, four-handed piano pieces, piano trios, string quartets, quintets, octets, vocal ensembles, and works for all sorts of odd instrumental combinations.

It is a shame that people so well disposed to the sort of environment where Schubert most thrives will never experience his music in such an atmosphere. I’ve been to a number of classical house concerts in my life, and inevitably, I find that there’s something about doing classical musicale in one’s house that feels entirely too stuffy, too 19th century, almost pathetic - as though we’re taking classical music’s pretense to the bygone era still far further than we usually do.

But Schubert’s music remains with us, and its fragile expression is made of far more durable stuff than we are. An Die Musik and Standchen will be alive long after we all are dead - and people will still listen to him with understanding even if most Americans don’t.

But maybe all is not lost for us. Schubert is so direct, so easily assimilated, that perhaps there’s another way. The intelligent, music-loving public is as large as it’s ever been in world history, yet a smaller percentage of them care about the ‘classical tradition’ than at any point in the tradition’s history. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to pull off a Schubertiade for today’s Indie Rock audiences, without them even knowing it.

What if somebody made an English translation of a bunch of Schubert songs, perhaps even one of the song cycles - Wintereisse or Die Schoene Mullerin. to sound like old English/Irish folk songs. Tell them that these were songs written by an anonymous medieval bard, perhaps a recent discovery made by some amateur musicologist in the North of England who works as a tax collector by day. Perhaps you could then transcribe the piano part for a classical guitarist to play acoustic. When the singer performs it, don’t sing it with an operatic lieder voice, just sing it the way an older Irishman would sing a folk song in a pub. You’d be pulling a fast one on an indie rock crowd who’d walk across the street to avoid even Fischer-Dieskau himself busking with the Erlkonig. And they would love every minute of it.

800 Words: The ABC's of the Marriage of Figaro - B5 Part 2

B5: Cervantes and Schubert Part 2

I finally read the end of Don Quixote on Saturday. Before we go any further, I should probably clarify that ‘reading the end’ is not the same as finishing. There’s probably an entire half of the book that I’ve not read even once, there are also chapters I’ve probably read half a dozen times. Such is the life of an ADHD reader, constantly dabbling in books before another comes along to steal your attention. Perhaps the reason movies and opera appeal to me more than other genres is that there’s a guaranteed beginning and ending that simply involves you sitting in your seat and paying attention to whatever you like at whatever pace other people set.

I’m an autodidact who only earned a college degree by enrolling in a tenth-rate music program, and I’m hardly a natural bookworm. The act of getting through long books involves a methodical efficiency which I’ve always lacked. I’ve started thousands of ‘important’ books, and probably finished a few hundred at most. If I live another fifty years, I’m sure I’ll finish most of them. But for someone who keeps a blog which bloviates endlessly about intellectual topics, this is a terrifying thing to admit – no matter how many times I admit it on here. There’s an old joke which says that C-students become artists, the A-students become their critics – a different version of it is A-students in Law School become academics, B-students become judges, C-students become rich. But what happens when a D-student still demands entrance into the field?...

What I’m describing is why Don Quixote (at least what I’ve read of it) is still funny, sometimes hilariously so. Most of us (arguably all) are hopelessly stuck longing for things which we are absolutely ill-suited – be it in work, love, or the general state of our lives. There will always jobs we long for that we could never do, loves for which we pine that could only end in disaster, lives we ache to live that are completely ill-suited to who we are. We’re all hopelessly trapped, trying to make things happen for ourselves that rarely happen for anyone, and would be cataclysmic if they ever did. Life is the longing to achieve a state of Schubert, and ending up in a state of John Tesh.

As a young man, Miguel de Cervantes may or may not have fled Castille to the Spanish navy after wounding another student in a duel. He was wounded in battle himself at the age of twenty four – he demanded to fight while experiencing a fever and was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the left hand, permanently losing use of it. At thirty-eight, he was captured by pirates and was a slave in Algiers for the next five years. During his time in Algiers, he organized atttempts to escape four times, and we can only imagine how he was punished for that. He only left Algiers when his family successfully ransomed him. After a stint in Portugal as a Spanish spy, he returned to Madrid with dreams of being a dramatist. He wrote twenty plays, every one of which is reported to have bombed. He then became a tax collector, only to be jailed twice for discrepancies in his accounting. Legend has it that it was during his second stint in jail that he began work on Don Quixote.

We have no idea how much of Cervantes’s personal experience inspired the book, though many people have alleged that the criminal ‘mastermind’: Gines de Pasamonte who keeps fooling the Don and Sancho to be a stand in for Cervantes himself. What we do know is that a quick glance at the details of the author’s personal life would indicate that he was well prepared to write a story about a person who aspires to greatness, only to fail so miserably that he could only be a figure of fun to others. Whether or not we choose to admit it, we’re all either that person or are terrified of becoming him.

Whether or not Don Quixote was crazy by force or choice, he followed the inner voice which told him how life must be lived so that it can be truly lived – and he paid dearly for it. If this book has a message, it is not that we should cower in fear against our deepest aspirations; it’s only that we’re powerless against them. Whatever our reality, we’re doomed to pursue happiness in whatever way we see fit for however long we’re capable. Even with all evidence pointing to the fact that we will never accomplish our dreams, we’re still doomed to follow them. We shall persist in our lunacies until our dying days, and everybody will think us an idiot for our troubles.

Don Quixote has been called both a wise book and a cruel book – as though the former state could exist without the latter. The reason it is wise is that Don Quixote acknowledges that truth which too many hallowed works pieces of art would never admit; cruelty can be really, really funny. Every time we laugh at Don Quixote’s good nature getting swindled, and the following mayhem in which Sancho Panza gets still more teeth knocked out, we are complicit in the violence done to them. Does this mean that we’d all be capable of laughing if we saw similarly awful things happen to strangers (or even friends) in real life? Quite possibly. Does this mean that any of us would visit the same violence on people if given the chance? Again, it’s quite possible. Laughter is not a benevolent sentiment; if it don’t hurt, it ain’t funny. Every time we laugh at an offensive joke, every time we play a prank, every time we make fun of a friend, we’re contributing to the potential damage of another person. Yet we all do it – the alternative is no fun at all, and therefore we’re probably having our fun at a more ethical person’s expense. We can either be an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, or we can take our share in life from others so that they’re unable to take it from us. Anyone who has ever experienced depression or addiction, even if only for a few days, would know that there is nothing a person in the throes of it would not do in order to stop it – yet it cannot be stopped. The self becomes divided by forces larger than our control, and we experience revulsion for our compulsions, even as we cannot help indulging them.
Like so many of us, Alonso Quixano became addicted to his pleasure – which was reading chivalric Romances. Was there true love in what these books made him feel, or was it simply infatuation? The romances told him of a world that exists with greater rewards, virtues, and excitements than anything that could exist for a shy retired gentleman of leisure like himself. Now fifty years old, his wits seem to atrophy, and he goes out into the world with the sole intent of being a knight-errant – playing at knightly adventure much as boys a tenth his age might pretend to be an action superhero. When kids do it, it’s supposed to indicate a healthy imagination, but when adults do it, it’s supposed to indicate insanity. Is Alonso Quixano insane?

If one can boil the power of a book so famous down to a single sentence, it would probably lie within the tension between what Don Quixote (as a standin for us all) would like the world to be against what the world really is. When Don Quixote sees a pretty farm wench, he transforms her in his mind into a princess. When he sees windmills with his eyes, he sees terrifying giants in his mind. When he sees monks accompanying a noble lady on a road, he believes them to be enchanters who have ensnared the lady – in the author's own time 'enchanters' would be equated automatically with paganism, ergo Men of God become Men of the Devil. In Don Quixote’s mind, every banal notion of what the world really is stood on its head so that the world can become a more exciting place in which the way by which a person can prove his virtue is simple.

And then there’s Sancho Panza, who is as stupid as Don Quixote is crazy. If Don Quixote is every dreamer who sees the world as something it’s not, then Sancho Panza is every hyper-realist who sees the world so close to what it truly is that he believes every single thing he’s told without thinking of whether or not it can be true. These two types need one another, there is a Quixote and a Sancho within every friendship, every partnership, every marriage, and every person. There always has to be a Quixote to tell us what the world is, and a Sancho to believe it.

Every person who’s ever made fun of another must often ask himself what it would be like to be that other person. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t feel the need to make fun of him. The reason Don Quixote is so funny is because we all dread being him – a person so out of touch with reality that we attract misery as magnets attract metal. Yet he’s so over the top in his grandiose aspirations that none of us can possibly be as awfully out of touch as he is. Yet we all fear that we’re far closer than we think we are – and how could it be any other way. We can either be mired in a Schubertian hopelessness, or we can aspire to something better. Perhaps such aspirations will make us feel more miserable in the long run, but we can’t help ourselves. The only alternative is to surrender to misery’s inevitability, and no person on earth would willingly do such a thing.

Just as one can make a comparison and say that Mozart is a better composer than Shakespeare is a writer, I can say with (not nearly) as much certainty that Cervantes was a better writer than Schubert was a composer. Schubert’s music, great as it is, seems like a dead end. Schubert’s music seems to accept the indignities of life as inevitable, and it feels as though he merely waits for death to carry him off. Cervantes may have lived a life of much misery, and he portrayed two characters who probably experienced more combined misery than any characters from ‘Great Literature’ short of a Dostoevsky novel. But both Cervantes and Don Quixote are testimony to the fact that there is a possibility that life, with all its bitter indignities and humiliations, is worth sticking around for until a ripe old age.
Cervantes also had more influence than Schubert on the history of the arts. Beethoven’s rough equivalent figure in literature – Christopher Marlowe – died when he was 29. In his absence, the idea that the author could be as important to a volume’s character and still portray characters of Shakespearean depth fell to Cervantes. Shakespeare and Cervantes lived their lives on calendars that were ten days apart, which created the illusion that they both died on the same day, April 23rd 1616, and together they make the twin poles of literature. Shakespeare, like Mozart, is virtually anonymous in his work – nobody could have much idea of either’s personality from their writing. But like Beethoven, Schubert, and Marlowe, Don Quixote is scrawled with the author’s commentary and force of personality on every page. In Shakespeare, like Mozart, the tragicomedy is in the characters. Mozart’s operas, like Shakespeare plays, teem with living, breathing characters. In Cervantes, like in Beethoven, the tragicomedy is in the author’s personality itself. Beethoven wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is more about ideals than characters. Cervantes’s novel has only two characters that matter, and the rest is simply carried along by the author’s grandiloquent personality. Shakespeare and Mozart seemed to draw characters out of thin air, but Cervantes and Beethoven couldn’t seem to create personalities outside of their own outsize ones, reflecting all their delusional aspirations. Who can doubt that when Don Quixote charged the Windmills, he was hearing the finale of Beethoven’s 5th in his head?

Late Night Schubert

After today, I deserve some Schubert. After finishing listening, I shall continue to work on this arrangement for Kol Rinah that I had planned on finishing last Wednesday.


....though one last thought for the night. We often tend to think of the center of the 'canon' in classical music as revolving around Mozart and Beethoven the way literature revolves around Shakespeare and Cervantes (or the novel around Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), with Bach as the artist who codified what music meant in its golden age much as Dante codified 'modern' literature. But the comparison fails in part because Mozart and Beethoven were separated by a generation. But perhaps the comparison would do much better if we thought (as I sometimes do) that along with Beethoven, the center of everything by which we define music is not in fact Mozart but Schubert. The arguments themselves can wait, but if we think of the of music as either being something epic/dramatic (for which Beethoven would obviously be the prime representative), or something lyric/poetic, then it would be at best difficult to decide whether the best representative is Mozart or Schubert. It was not Beethoven but Schubert who sounded the final notes of Golden Age classicism in 1828. After Schubert, the world was ready for Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and the full-blown romanticism that went with it.

Im Walde

One of Schubert's finest. h/t to the wonderful Classical Iconoclast for planting the seed in my head.

Schubertiana: by Tomas Transtromer

Today's Nobel Prize winner talking in English and reading his poem Schubertiana. Bad sound but absolutely beautiful.

“Schubertiana”
by Tomas Transtromer. (Trans. Kalle Raisanen)
I.
In the evening-dark of a place outside New York, a look-out point
where one glance can encompass eight million people’s homes.
The giant city over there is a long, flickering snow-drift, a spiral
galaxy on its side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are slid over the counter, store-fronts
beg with passers-by, a crowd of shoes that leave no traces.
The climbing fire-escapes, the elevator doors gliding shut, behind
locked doors a constant swell of voices.
Sunken bodies half-sleep in the subway cars, the rushing cata-
combs.
I know, also — statistics aside — that right now Schubert is
being played in some room over there and that to someone
those sounds are more important than all those other things.
I I.
The human brain’s endless expanse crumpled into the size of a
fist.
In April, the swallow returns to its last-year’s-nest under the roof
of that very barn in that very parish.
She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks
over two continents, steers toward this dissappearing point in
the land-mass.
And the man who captures the signals of a whole life in some
fairly ordinary chords by five strings
the man who makes a river run through the eye of a needle
is a fat young man from Vienna, called “Little Mushroom” by his
friends, who slept with his glasses on
and got punctually behind his writing desk each morning.
At which the wonderful centipedes of music were set in motion.
1
“Schubertiana” Tomas Transtr¨omer. (Trans. Kalle R¨ais¨anen)
I I I.
The five strings play. I walk home through tepid forests with the
ground springing under me
crawl up like an unborn, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future,
suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts.
IV.
So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day
without sinking through the earth!
Trust the snow clinging to the mountain slope over the village.
Trust the promises of silence and smiles of understanding,
trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden
axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the wheel-axles that carry us on the highway in the middle
of the three-hundred-times magnified bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else.
Trust what? Something else, and they follow us part of the way
there.
As when the lights turn off in the stair-well and the hand follows
— with confidence — the blind handrail that finds its way in
the dark.
V.
We crowd in front of the piano and play four-handed in F-minor,
two coachmen on the same carriage, it looks slightly ridicu-
lous.
Our hands seem to move clanging weights back and forth, as if
we were touching the counter-weights
in attempt at disturbing the terrible balance of the great scales:
joy and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie said, “This music is so heroic,” and it’s true.
But those who glance enviously at the men of action, those who
secretely despise themselves for not being murderers
they don’t recognise themselves here.
And those many who buy and sell people and think that everyone
can be bought, they don’t recognise themselves here.
2

Not their music. The long melody that remains itself through all
changes, sometimes glittering and weak, sometimes rough and
strong, snail-trails and steel wire.
The insistant humming that follows us right now
up the
depths.

30 Days of Classical Music Challenge - A More Considered Answer (String Edition)

9. Best String Writing

I’m pretty sure that I have no idea how to answer this question. The question of the ‘best writing’ is both so subjective and so dry that the mere act of entertaining the question runs the risk of boring yourself to death. I don’t think there is a way to answer the next four questions without dividing them into all sorts of separate categories. And since I grew up playing all sorts of violin music, the string instrument categories will take far longer than any other (also since there’s far more music for strings). So in the interests of (relative) brevity, let’s get started and you’ll get the hang of it as we go along.

Solo Writing: Bach d-minor Chaccone


(Josef Szigeti. Bartok’s favorite violinist.)

Duh. Bach, Bach and more Bach. The Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, and the Cello Suites, are in a class of their own. And within unaccompanied Bach string writing, the Chaccone from the d-minor partita is its own class. Brahms considered the d-minor Chaccone to be the greatest piece of music ever written and made a fantastic piano transcription for the left hand only. One of my fondest memories of being a violin student was the moment my teacher opened up the Bach Partitas for the first time. She described the Chaccone as a violin being used as a full choir - and I can never listen to the piece without thinking of that analogy. Just a few years ago, a startling discovery was made. It was discovered that Bach had encoded the harmonies of no less than four different Lutheran chorales into the Chaconne - a feat for which Bach had to be particularly ingenious, considering the Chaconne is a dance in which the same eight measures of harmony are repeated from beginning until end. But Bach had a particularly important reason for stretching his art to its very limits. He wrote the Chaconne almost directly after returning home from a business trip to discover that his first wife was dead and buried. This is the music of his grief, a monument to his wife that still lives today.

With Piano Accompaniment: Franck: Violin Sonata in A



For most of his life, the Belgian composer Cesar Franck dwelled in obscurity as a modest church organist. It was only in his last two decades of his life that he revealed himself as a composer of startling vision, and only in the last three years of his life that his works received any acclaim. Like all his great works, the Franck violin sonata seems to have a cascading fountain of melody, some deliriously suggestive harmonies and an incredible, almost excessive sense of drama. But in this work, Franck practically re-invented the violin sonata. There had been plenty of other four movement sonatas before the Franck violin sonata, but few of them aspired to the epic sweep of a symphony. Don’t let the small size or the sunny demeanor fool you, Franck’s Violin Sonata might be the greatest French Symphony of the 19th century, and all it takes is two musicians.

Piano Trio: Haydn Trio in G-Major



Haydn is, still, the odd man out among the greatest composers. The fact that he is not considered the full equal of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert is one of the great scandals of music. Serious music lovers distrust fun, and no one has written more fun music (in both senses) than Haydn. Haydn’s fun is very serious, and the seriousness makes him all the more fun. Music neither has a greater master of form or a greater comedian than Haydn. He literally reinvented music for the 18th and 19th centuries as much as Louis Armstrong did for the 20th (and possibly the 21st). Mozart might be the elegant jokes of the parlor room, but Haydn is pure dirty jokes and beer.

String Quartet: The Late Quartets of Beethoven


(Holy Song of Thanks)

There are no more inexhaustible, mysterious works than the Late Quartets of Beethoven. There are also no works of art on which more bull**** has been written, which exerted more dangerous influence, which caused more snobbery on the part of classical musicians than the Late Quartets. But even so, what remains clear about all five (though really six) quartets is that Beethoven has reached the very summit of the human imagination. Just as Mahler’s symphonies bore witness to exactly what the world was in the 1900’s, just as the Beatles later albums bore witness to the world of the late 60’s, Beethoven’s Late Quartets - moreso than any other late period works, including the Ninth Symphony - bear witness to exactly what the world was in the 1820’s. Traces of every scrap of music that ever moved Beethoven are to be found in here - from the Bach preludes he played as a child to tavern songs to Jewish cantilation to country dances to the burlesque hall - and all reprocessed to a point of surreality that could only be thought of by the most powerful musical imagination the world has yet seen. What’s amazes today about the Late Quartets is not how exclusive they are, but how inclusive.

String Quintets: (tie) Mozart String Quintet in g-minor (extra viola), Schubert String Quintet in C (extra cello)



Anyone who thinks of Mozart as an effeminate composer of formulaic classicism needs to hear the g-minor Quintet. No powdered wigs here, no compunctions about writing outside the nine dots either. The first movement is dramatic in the extreme, even by Beethoven’s standards. The last movement begins so slow as to seem enamored in sludge before taking off like a rocket in the major key. Beethoven could have never written the Fifth Symphony without the example Mozart set here.



If the extra viola of Mozart’s quintet allows the ensemble greater agitation, then the extra cello of Schubert’s allows for an unfathomable richness. With the quartet, Schubert wrote perhaps the most purely beautiful piece of music in existence - less a work of chamber music than an hour-long song. Melodies poured out of Schubert as easily as we breath. And just when one melody is over, Schubert moves onto the next with a seamless transition. The whole hour-long work sounds less like a piece for five strings than a piece for five voices.

String Sextet: Brahms Sextet no. 2 in G


(The second sextet’s slow movement.)

No one did full harmonies like Brahms. Many critics call him overstuffed; since George Bernard Shaw they’ve been alleging that he can’t stop himself from adding more gorgeous harmonies, more formal experiments, more hidden musical codes, and all at the expense of the music’s expression. Are they listening? No composer ever wrote more beautiful music than Brahms, all the more beautiful for being emotionally understated. There are no pieces richer in beauty than the Brahms Sextets. Just listen.

String Octet: Mendelssohn String Octet



Among feats of musical prodigies, nobody, not even Mozart, beat Mendelssohn. He wrote the famous Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture at the age of 16. Shortly thereafter followed a String Octet with a level of compositional technique which no composer has yet equalled - including six minutes of 8-part counterpoint(!). The work is simply a miracle - eight musicians are all Mendelssohn required to create a symphony that is fully the equal of any by Beethoven. If Mendelssohn never quite got to this level again, we can forgive him. How could he?

Piano Quartet: Shostakovich Piano Quartet in g-minor



The historian Niall Ferguson once commented that Shostakovich’s Piano Quartet could be the soundtrack of the 20th century. Shostakovich wrote perhaps the finest chamber music of the entire century. But his chamber music is far less known than his symphonies. The symphonies are vast public statements that could never express his deepest feelings (he’d have been shot had he done so). But the chamber music is where Shostakovich reveals all, and his great sequence of chamber music begins with this small piano quartet.

Piano Quintet: Schumann Piano Quintet in E-flat Major



Perhaps it’s thanks to his insanity, but Schumann is still underrated. But even in a generation that includes Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Verdi and Wagner, I still think that Schumann was the finest composer of his time. It was the same mania that eventually drove him insane which weighted nearly everything he wrote with the danger and exuberance which no composer after Beethoven and Schubert could equal. This is the finest of his chamber works, with uncontainable energy and lyricism at every turn, and an excitement that often threatens to burst out of its contours.

Cello Concerto: Dvorak


(Yo-Yo keepin’ it real)

No composer since Haydn had written a great cello concerto. And no one has written greater one since. Dvorak’s Cello Concerto is yet another masterpiece from the period when he lived in America. His homesickness inspired the New World Symphony, the American Quartet and the E-Flat Quintet. But the Cello fit the aching melancholy of Dvorak’s melodies like a glove.

Violin Concerto: Elgar (I’m serious)


(The cadenza....)

Every great composer from Corelli to Thomas Ades has tried their hand at a violin concerto. Not a single one of them dare on the same level as Elgar. Unlike most great composers, Elgar’s first instrument was the violin, and it shows in violin writing far more idiomatic than Beethoven’s or Brahms’s. Unlike most works which put the cadenza at the end of the first movement, Elgar put his at the end of the final movement, and not only that, but he gives the cadenza orchestral accompaniment. Even without this stroke of genius, no violin concerto would feel as personal, as vulnerable, as tragic as Elgar’s. It is, simply, the finest violin concerto ever written. If you don’t believe me, listen to it.

Double Concerto: Bach for Two Violins


(David and Igor Oistrakh. Father and Son.)

Brahms’s Double Concerto gives it a run, but I must stay faithful to one of the pieces I begged my teacher to play when I was a kid. The first and third movement strike unbelievable virtuoso fireworks, at least when played at the proper tempo. But it is the second movement which makes it the greatest of all time. I can do no better than to slightly change around a Norman Lebrecht quote “This is a paragon of musical communication, a piece to be played and listened to in moments of grief and isolation. It tells us that no man is an island, that we can always find a music to touch the ones we know and love, that understanding is but a bow stroke away.”


Viola and Double Bass Concertos: nobody cares:).

String Orchestra: Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss



Richard Strauss’s memorial to the fallen of the Second World War is scored for twenty-three string players - each of whom has his own part to play. It is the culmination of an eighty year career in music and a final exhalation of musical Romanticism, which Strauss carried as far as the late 1940’s. Strauss wrote it while watching the Germany of his lifetime fall to smithereens. Every time I read another story about the London riots, the opening plays in my head.

Full Orchestra: Vaughan Williams Symphoniy no 5


(Andre Previn)

Ralph Vaughan Williams grew up with the full, rich harmonies of the English choral tradition in which there is nary an open chord to be found. The lyrical passages of his symphonies are packed with ten, twelve, even fifteen-part harmonies. But never, not even in the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, did he put his full harmonies to better use. Aaron Copland unfairly described Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony as an experience that felt like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes. But Copland was completely wrong. Vaughan Williams 5 is another beautiful memorial to the dead of World War II. Vaughan Williams borrowed themes from his opera based on John Bunyan’s book, “A Pilgrim’s Progress.” One section is borrwed from the lyric "He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death", and another borrowed from the lyric "Save me! Save me, Lord! My burden is greater than I can bear." Long acquaintance with this piece has taught me that it’s one of the most unbearably moving pieces of music I know.

Best Strings + Other Chamber Music: Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time


(A movement for Cello and Piano only: “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus”)

Olivier Messiaen wrote the Quartet for the End of Time while imprisoned in a German POW camp. He wrote for whatever instruments he had access: a violin and cello with a strings missing, a piano that couldn’t play certain notes, a clarinet with cracked reeds. Legend has it that the Quartet was premiered in extreme cold as 8000 POW’s sat rapt while Messiaen played the quartet with the POW camp’s three other musicians. The result is perhaps the very finest of all World War II memorials in music. Whether due to the story behind the work or not, there is no music which conjures the image of the death camps like this one.

Best String Orchestra + Writing: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta



It is a shame that Bartok would only make this list once. Along with Beethoven, Haydn and Shostakovich he is the very greatest of string quartet writers. Shostakovich may be the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, but he is an end in himself. His entire life existed in a Soviet-imposed artificial 19th century, and because of that, he was able to channel the emotional earnestness of 19th century music. But if Shostakovich’s music was a look backward, Bartok prophesied the 21st century. He might be Schoenberg’s contemporary, but he belonged in the i-pod generation. He is one of the only composers of the early 20th century with a true conception of ‘World Music.’ He traveled as many regions of the world as he could to hear their folk music, and whatever novel techniques he heard he would assimilate into his compositions - would that he lived long enough to travel around North America. The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is a culmination of a lifetime of research into Folk Techniques. No composer has ever used string instruments more imaginatively than Bartok. And no composer was more open to the vast panoply of the world’s music than Bartok. He is a composer more of our time than his own.

...there’s no way I’m doing another seven of these today.

Prom 7 Review

Schubert: Quintet in C major, D956
Belcea Quartet
Valentin Erben (cello).

C+


(The Schubert Gene in action at last year's Proms)

You know it when you hear it. There are certain performers who possess the 'Schubert-gene' and certain performers, great performers, who don't. Alfred Brendel had it, Maurizio Pollini doesn't. Peter Schreier had it, Ian Bostridge doesn't. Sir Charles Mackerras had it, Claudio Abbado doesn't.

If one had to describe the 'Schubert-gene' it would mean that unique ability to remain comfortable in layer-upon-layer of ambiguity. Schubert's music is rarely comic, though it alludes to comedy all the time. It can often be tragic, but hardly ever so much that Schubert blatantly hits you over the head with a foul mood, a la Beethoven. There is no artist in classical music, not even Mozart, who was able to say so much with so few notes. A simple melody, a simpler harmony, and a perfectly placed modulation, modal shift or pause is all Schubert ever needs to take us to infinity. It requires a remarkable comfort in stillness which very few musicians possess.

The second cellist in this performance - the great Valentin Erben, formerly of the Alban Berg Quartet - knows perfectly well how to play great Schubert. This was a performance which sounded as though someone were trying to teach how to play great Schubert to people who never before understood that it was possible. Occasionally, for only a few measures at a time, the players would hit upon that "Schubert sweet-spot" in which music the players stumble into profundity simply by relaxing and playing the music with affection. But through the first two movements fo this piece, perhaps the greatest ever written for chamber ensemble, there was simply too much straining for effect. Phrasing was too self-conscious, rubato was calculated, and the vibrato was so wide as to draw more attention to itself than to the performance.

But something miraculous happened in the third movement. We suddenly stumbled into great Schubert. Rather than trying to capture Schubert, they let Schubert capture them. The result was an incredibly inspiring reading of the Scherzo movement which had both incredible energy and heart-stoppingly dark stillness in the trio.

What a pity that the finale reverted back to the strain of the other movements. They found the right tempo, but rarely the stillness nor the animation which the music requires. Rhythms were too soggy, and every time they captured a quiet mood they would spoil it by being too eager to get to the crescendo.

Is there anything in music more difficult than great Schubert playing? Even a single moment of inspired Schubert is worth a concert's worth of bad Schubert. Just one great moment is enough to tell you whether a musician has the Schubert gene (and one great movement is far more than enough). The Belcea Quartet does, let's hope they let it out to play more often.

Schubert #1?

Did even Mozart or Beethoven write something as original or gripping, or as perfect as this?

A Couple More

Why not?

Dudley Moore Does a pitch-perfect Peter Pears again. This time in Schubert.



Dudley does Beethoven by way of a famous bridge. Painfully accurate.