The Most Extraordinary Recording of Beethoven 9

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Truly extraordinary, but far from perfect. No recording is perfect. But this is the recording, for all its bizarre touches, which comes closest to my own conception. But the fact that I prefer this recording to just about all others troubles me very deeply. It comes from Nazi-era Netherlands, and the one quality, the only important quality, which this recording lacks is perhaps the most important quality of all - that final humanist glow which makes the 9th feel like a statement of love rather than coercion. I have no idea if the politics of a performance matter matter, there are Nazi-era recordings which have that glow in spades (for one, Furtwangler's famous 1942 performance of the Ninth, a conductor with far more conflicted feelings about the Nazi party than Mengelberg). The first three movements are beyond compare, and so is the last movement, but the tone of the performance is so utterly regimented, so commanding and dynamic, that it feels like a Beethoven 9 for Nuremberg, not humanity. 

800 Words: The Parallels and Paradoxes of Daniel Barenboim (part 1 of 2)

1.



A spell of fatigue and dizziness barred me from tonight’s Beethoven’s 9th at the Proms. Nothing else could have, and certainly no suspicions that some nut would use the appearance of an Orchestra uniting native Israelis and Arabs at the Proms as an excuse to stage a political protest (or far worse) on the night of the Opening Olympic Ceremonies.

I wanted to go desperately. Not because I thought the performance would have been so wonderful, or because it’s an Israeli-Arab orchestra. Rather, it’s Beethoven, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Proms, three subjects I’m as fascinated by as anything in my life. If there ever were a concert tailor-made for me to go, tonight was it.

It certainly wasn’t Daniel Barenboim that pulled me there. Daniel Barenboim’s view of Beethoven is as fascinating as it is dogmatic. Whereas most other musicians of our day pay heed to the advice of musicologists to play close heed to Beethoven’s metronome marks and a chamber-orchestra complement of strings, Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven as though it’s still 1932 - huge orchestras, broad and flexible tempos, weighty bass-heavy sound. There is no attempt made to play Beethoven as he saw himself, this is Beethoven as he was played accumulated after a century of accumulated performance tradition - with (nearly) all the moss and ivy unstripped from the varnish. It is neither Beethoven for the age of Beethoven nor Bjork, it is Beethoven for the age of Wagner.

2.



No conductor in the world - not Thielemann, not Runnicles, not Gergiev, and certainly not any of the other major opera house directors - makes Wagner as exciting as Daniel Barenboim. With Barenboim, those inevitable forty minutes at a time of boredom and bombast can be cut down to twenty or fifteen. No conductor has ever made Wagner sound like every note counts, but Barenboim usually comes closer than any living conductor and closer even than most from more fruitful ages of Wagner performance.

There is clearly something in Barenboim’s temperament: a mixture of showman and intellectual, that responds very deeply to Wagner. Many musicians clearly have such affinities with particular composers; Bernstein had it with Mahler, Schnabel with Beethoven, Casals with Bach. In each case, it manifested itself not only in a desire to play the music extremely well, but to explain the composer himself - to put the composer within the context of his time, of music history in its entirety, and his relevance to our contemporary world.

It should then follow that a conductor who has such a deep affinity for a composer should want to perform it in his homeland. As it happens, that homeland is unfortunately Israel. To perform it there is to ask to become an outcast, and that is precisely what Barenboim has become in his homeland.

3.



As so few Jews found themselves throughout history, Barenboim was uniquely situated to privilege. As a child, he lived in Israel full-time for only two years. His father was a great piano teacher in Argentina and close friend to Arthur Rubinstein, and Barenboim’s gift was nurtured as few others are from the cradle. At different points he found himself mentored by Rubinstein, Igor Markevitch, Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, Nadia Boulanger, Otto Klemperer, Isaac Stern, Gregor Piatagorsky, Edwin Fischer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and even that twice-over Nazi party member Herbert von Karajan. Did any other Israeli of his years generation that level of privilege in any other field? Any at all?

Barenboim is widely reviled in the country he still thinks of as home. He brought the opera orchestra he’s lead since 1992, The Berlin State Opera Orchestra, to Israel for the express purpose of breaking the Wagner taboo. He has not only criticized Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the most strident possible terms, but also made statements to the effect that Israeli society has become sick and rotten at its core. As it happens, I agree with most every gesture and statement he’s made. And yet there’s still something about it that sits very wrongly with me.

Barenboim says that Israel has lost the sense of mission and moral purpose which he loved as a child in the 50’s. Does Barenboim have any memory what happened in Israel between 1952 and 1954? Israel had no more (or less) sense of mission nor moral purpose even then - the sole difference was that the country’s survival was far less guaranteed. Israel was in such fiscal danger that they had to take $3 billion in reparations from West Germany. Even then there were nearly a dozen lethal incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some were government-sponsored, some civilian. Right-wing Israeli militants not only threatened violence against the government as they do today, they attempted to carry it out - like the 1953 attempt to bomb the Department of Education by the terrorist organization Brit HaKanaim.

Life in a tough neighborhood is always hard. It’s very easy to sentimentalize the scrappy underdog country which finds itself beset by problems on all sides yet still manages to pull through. But Barenboim himself lived in this underdog country for only two years, and since then has been able to look on Israel from the perspective of a Citizen of the World - welcome in every first-world country in precisely the way nearly all other Jews would not be (still). Israel has been faced with threats to its very existence from before it was even a country. Even if he doesn’t agree with every decision the Israeli government made, why should Barenboim begrudge Israelis for wanting a small portion of the security which he takes for granted?

4.



There is a similar question which besets the biography of Barenboim’s now deceased bff, Edward Said. Said is, still, the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual voice - and like Barenboim combined the role of intellectual with a showman’s flair for activism and agitation. But in Said’s case, as in Barenboim’s, there is a troubling question of how such well-off people can claim to speak for those less fortunate than they. How can a son of wealth who could simply live in his parents’ Cairo house after Israel took away his Jerusalem home have any idea what true exile from a homeland means? It not only discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Israeli violence, it discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Palestinian violence too.

The West-East Divan Orchestra may yet prove to be the cornerstone of both their achievements. I will never forget the tears in my eyes when I first heard their wind soloists in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K. 333. It literally felt to me as though they were describing a dream of a better world, a longing for the balance which still eludes everyone who lives in that region. Anyone who doubts that music cannot express concrete things must hear that recording.

Yet people as well-educated as Said and Barenboim must know that there is absolutely nothing which the West-East Divan Orchestra can do except make a futile, sentimental gesture toward the peace which the Middle-East clearly eludes. If it accomplishes so little for peace, then is there any point to it but self-aggrandizement - a kind of exploitative posturing that makes Barenboim taken more seriously as an intellectual and political, perhaps even musical, figure, but brings the conflict no closer to resolution. And if such an orchestra does not bring our world closer to peace, does it then mean that it brings us farther away?

But maybe, just maybe, on that 1% of 1% of 1% chance that some leaders will be so moved by the sight of Arab and Israeli musicians playing together in perfect harmony that they can imagine a better solution to the Middle East conflicts, it will have been an entirely worthwhile project. And if it is so, then even if the entire point of the orchestra is to massage Daniel Barenboim’s ego, it will have been entirely worth doing.

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?

Jurowski/Beethoven

Right on the metronome mark for nearly ten minutes, almost all the little details emerging with crystal clarity. No rubato, no 'artificial' excitement from accelerations or an overly fast tempo, only one unfortunate unmarked dip to piano for a crescendo. All that's left is an incredible amount of excitement, pure unadulterated Beethoven. I don't know if Jurowski will be the greatest conductor of his generation, but he has to be the most talented.

Klemperer/Barenboim/Beethoven

The great classic master of Beethoven with the great modern master.



I am not generally a proponent of slow Beethoven. Much as I often love Furtwangler's recordings, I find many of his Beethoven performances overvalued to the point of absurdity - Furtwangler simply does not find the lightness or the humor in Beethoven, his performances are almost unrelentingly grim. But when masters like Klemperer and Barenboim present Beethoven with a complete understanding of all his facets, they can take whatever tempo they like. And in this case, here is a complete understanding of the facets of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto.



The greatest music can take all sorts of interpretations. Another of the very finest recordings of this work is Robert Levin's period instrument performance with John Eliot Gardiner conducting his Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra. If Barenboim/Klemperer tends toward the solid, dramatic and massive, then Gardiner/Levin tends toward the intimate, spontaneous and limpid. But both retain within them qualities of the other. In their ways, both of them deserve the moniker 'great performances.'

Thielemann Doing Beethoven, I eat crow...

I hate to admit this....


(Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Hugely exciting, enormous sound, dangerously fast, extreme tempo changes, more a philosophical speculation of what Beethoven 5 can sound like than a mathematical proof of what it does sound like.)

This is fantastic Beethoven from Christian Thielemann. No surprise, this is Beethoven defiantly of the Old School. But few conductors, if any, have ever successfully channeled the Furtwangler style like this. Judging by the Beethoven 9 symphonies you can currently find Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic do on youtube, this is absolutely fantastic in so many ways. Though I wouldn't quite put this in the very first rank of Beethoven recordings. Thielemann is a bit more in love with the old style of Beethoven playing than the music itself, but this is still absolutely wonderful in its way.


(A very different Beethoven 5 from Thielemann's mentor, Herbert von Karajan. Ultra-disciplined, uncomfortably martial, still more enormous sound, but extremely fiery. Thielemann is Beethoven through the ears of Hegel, Karajan is Beethoven through the ears of Napoleon.)

It's all the more painful to admit, because while back, I wrote about Christian Thielemann in rather apocalyptic terms. I don't regret what I said. Christian Thielemann really is bad news for classical music, an infusion of reverence for tradition during a period when more reverence is the last thing classical music needs. But part of the reason he's so dangerous is because his performances really can be as great as people say.


(Beautiful.)

For Kurt Sanderling (1912-2011)

(Shostakovich's 10th Symphony)

He was the last remnant of the generations of conductors for whom classical music was music itself. He was a Jew who survived Hitler and a German who survived Stalin. He was Shostakovich's closest friend among conductors and offered a warmer interpretation of Shostakovich's music than the chilly shocks of Mravinsky.


(Rachmaninov's 1st Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic. Dunno why it's accompanying this video...)

From the time he was thirty years old, he was the co-conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic with Yevgeny Mravinsky. The arrangement lasted for eighteen years, until the Soviets ordered him to East Berlin to lead the Berlin Symphony - designed to be the Communist answer to the Berlin Philharmonic. Sanderling was much beloved wherever he lead orchestras and was named conductor emeritus of both the Madrid Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London.


(The Berlin Symphony led by Sanderling. Playing the opening of Sibelius's 4th Symphony)

When he was 90 years old, Sanderling shocked the world by doing something hardly any other conductor had ever done: he retired. Not that he needed to, Sanderling was still doing fabulous work. But it was particularly shocking because Kurt Sanderling was the last giant in a generation of conductors that had all too many giants. But perhaps all people needed to understand his decision was there in his music-making.


(The Final movement of Mahler's 10th - beginning. Sanderling was perhaps the most important early champion of this unfinished work.)

He did not conduct with the outsize interpretive personality of a Bernstein or Celibidache. Sanderling's music-making was every bit as personally involved as theirs, but he never seemed to impose it. If you could tell that a performance was Sanderling's, it was because of their complete faith in patience. The tempos were always relaxed, the sound was always warm, yet you still found yourself utterly absorbed by the drama.


(Slow Beethoven with Klemperer's Philharmonia...)

Like his hero, Otto Klemperer, Sanderling was in no hurry. He had an emphatically 19th century view of structure, giving huge works by Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich all the time they needed and more to unfurl and absorbing the listener totally. What might seem boring at minute 5 seems utterly mesmerizing by minute 50.


(Der Abschied from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde)

There are some musicians who simply view music in grand terms, taking the grandest, most weighty possible approach even when it's not completely warranted. Sanderling was a musician who leant himself well to music on a gigantic scale. For composers who aimed for the epic scale like Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich, it was a perfect approach (what might a Sanderling Ring Cycle have sounded like?). For composers like Beethoven, Brahms and Sibelius, whose tendencies leaned toward something slightly more intimate, Sanderling blew them up to his grand scale. It wasn't always right, but it was always interesting.


(Just in case people thought Sanderling was all darkness and ultraseverity...)

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.

The Best Beethoven 9?

Unfortunately, I don't have time to listen to it all today. But just judging from the first movement, this performance by the nearly-forgotten Hermann Abendroth and the Czech Philharmonic very well may be the greatest I've ever heard. It has all the flexibility which German music needs without the Wagner/Furtwangler type sanctimoniousness masquerading as depth which disfigures so many performances of this piece - music's all-time sacred cow - into a monumental zzzzzzzzzzzzzz-fest. In its place is all the fire that a great Beethoven performance needs. I'm not sure I've ever heard the first movement played with this much excitement. Ever. Not by Mengelberg or Karajan or Wand or Blomstedt or Weingartner or Norrington or Bernstein or Szell or Horenstein or Tennstedt or Gardiner or anybody else I'm forgetting from my personal pantheon of great Beethoven 9 recordings.

Top 5 Beethoven 9 First Movements:

1. Abendroth
2. Wand
3. Mengelberg
4. Blomstedt
5. Tennstedt

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.