While it's certain that if there were ever a B-Movie version made of Wagner's Ring libretto, Christopher Lee would have played Hagen, this is not going to replace Greindl, Frick or Salminen in haunted parts of anyone's imagination. This sounds like a decent but rusty singer had a few drinks and sang something from memory at a bar, which I suppose is a large part of the point of this. On the other hand, let's also realize that Lee was already in his mid-70's when he sang this. In his defense, it does sound like perfect B-movie horror - not particularly scary, but comically macabre. The sloppy, ok....really bad.... execution is entirely intentional. It makes me wonder, could the Ring Cycle be done successfully as a sort of melodramatic folk opera (not that it isn't already..)? Heavily cut, lighter voices (perhaps not even operatic), and an orchestra as electronic as it is acoustic. It would have to be rethought from the very ground up and require the audacity of a director who goes against a century and a half of established tradition. But I can't help thinking that if any work of art needs a facelift....
Monday, January 16, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
800 Words: Where To Go From Here Pt. I
I. The Canned Outrage of Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan likes to say that the great strength of blogging is the impermanence of thought it requires. On blogs, thoughts and facts are reinterpreted every day, and constantly reinterpreted through a process of merciless criticism - both from others and from oneself. To his thinking, blogs are the best catalogue of which we humans have yet thought to record what we feel at any moment. That way, when enough ephemeral moments go recorded, a composite picture of lasting truth comes into focus. To be a good blogger, at least according to the Sullivan worldview, would require a process of merciless introspection simultaneously to possessing an endless reservoir of self-righteousness. It requires a blogger to have a desire to seek out his/her own faults as burning as it is to find fault in others. It requires a rare combination of theorist and streetfighter who views ideas as something to be debated rather than developed. It requires a limitless vitality that enables the writer to be constantly confident, even if (s)he knows that what appears 100% true at the moment might be 100% false in an hour. It requires the ability to post an endless series of speculations that might seem ridiculous, pretentious, and downright offensive within a few minutes, and to do so without shame.
From the moment I started reading Sullivan’s blog, I had two reactions to it:
1. What an idiot.
2. Sign me the f-ck up.
Now let’s be clear, in his way Andrew Sullivan is nothing short of a genius. This is the person who invented blogging as we currently know it. But like many geniuses, he also is yet another in the world’s endless variety of brilliant idiots. As a political thinker, Sullivan was always second-rate; he’s never found an extreme he couldn’t endorse at some point, yet he never seems to arrive at that extreme a second before conventional wisdom blows there first. In 2002 he was lock-step with the Bush administration, by 2009 he was lock-step with the Obamas, yet in both years he found himself in the exact mainstream of the ‘zeitgeist.’ Whether the issue was gay marriage, health care, or torture, he’s always had an uncanny ability to wait until the most risk-free moment to endorse a principled stand, yet he’s still lauded as courageous in each instance. You simply can’t change opinions so quickly on so many issues as Sullivan has without either being a toady to figures of authority, which he criticizes far too often to ever be considered; or having a screw loose, which he clearly does.
I’m hard on Sullivan, yet over the same seven years, I had a similarly screwy leftward journey. Mine was milder, yet it was still weirder than his. I arrived in college just in time for 9/11: upon leaving high school I considered myself a lock-step leftist, yet within fourteen months of college I’d convinced myself that the Iraq War was absolutely necessary, that the Israeli Palestinian conflict could never be solved by negotiation, and that the Iraqi Invasion was simply a necessary first layover in a larger plan to reconstruct the Middle East according to a more Western image. It wasn’t until late 2006 in which I came to realize that only a lunatic could believe all of this. Believe it or not, I still considered myself left-of-center all the way through these years, and I still think I was correct to do so. But if I was, what was I but just another delusional leftist who had dreams far too big of what the world can achieve? Whether the dream is a social democracy or a worker’s paradise, it can never be done without lots of means that some people are going to consider imperialist. In order to make an omlette...
Perhaps this thinking is exactly as crazy as it probably seems to most people who read this. But then again, I’m not claiming to be a great thinker. I’m not held to as high a standard as Andrew Sullivan, nor should I be. Andrew Sullivan is an extremely successful person, and therefore is obbligated to be held to a higher standard. So far, I’m a failure as a musician, writer, actor, journalist, music critic, international affairs student, and tipper. In the six months I’ve done these 800-Word things, I’m read by 50 people on a good day. Not a single entry of mine ever got more than 216 pageviews, and that was for a playlist. I know that my thinking is second-rate at best. If there were ever any points in my life in which I had delusions of being smarter than I am, life showed me otherwise far too many times to not accept it. I know my track record, so I have no doubt I’ll entertain such delusions again in the not-too-distant future, and if there is one thing about life in which I retain no doubt, it is that life will put my hubris in place just as it always has.
And therein lies the problem for today’s bloggers. There is still no mechanism to punish hubris like mine. Just because the internet lets me state anything with complete certainty does not mean that I should. And yet I often do. And once a piece of false information is committed to print, it cannot be rescinded - some people will think it's true, and will not be around to read the (hopefully) inevitable self-correction that follows. One day, a famous blogger will get sued for something (s)he wrote, and that will change blogging forever.
But for the moment, the blogging world we know is in many ways a world of whomever has the audacity to commit the most flagrant misinformation to print. Sometimes the medium becomes your message, and the inflammatory invariably rises above the well-considered. And because of that, there is something about the flat simplicity about the world as Sullivan would have us blog it that can never allow for the truly composite picture which blogs are supposed to capture. Where is the room in this for doubt? If you read a blog, how often do you read “I wonder if...” or “I still can’t make up my mind...”? Surely, statements of that nature can be found anywhere in a place as large as the internets, but you and I both know the awful truth....:
Nuance is either on blogs we don’t read, or in the posts we skip over. In order to be read by a wide public while thinking out loud, bloggers require an absolute surety of conviction that their first thoughts are worth preserving. And these thoughts have to be uncomplicated enough that people can read them in far less time than it takes to read an essay. Whatever the subject, how else can you articulate a coherent view of it in less than 500 words? Many bloggers would rebut that they allow for nuance by hyperlinking to other sources. But even if we allow for the possibility that these hyperlinks are any more complex than the original text, how many people actually read the hyperlinks? After a certain point, an old fashioned coherent essay that is cogently argued will teach you much more than a discombobulated series of simple links that take the same amount of time to read. So let’s face it, blogs as we currently know them are designed for intellectual second-raters like me who can fulminate to their heart’s content and weigh in with opinions more entertaining than they are substantial. The internet is supposed to make us more connected than ever before, and for a truly inquisitive mind, that’s exactly what it is. By its very meaning, the Internet can let us soak up more information from more sources than any library. But most minds are not inquisitive most of the time, and most of us simply want to read their own opinions confirmed most of the time. And with the internet, the echo chamber we crave like chocolate is louder than ever. A victory like Barack Obama’s could not have been possible before the Internet Age, but neither could the Birther movement. Unlike the age of television news in which the majority of people received world information from the same three sources, we can now receive our information from whomever we like to have our every opinion confirmed, and if somebody writes something with which we disagree, we can simply ignore them. There used to be a famous saying from a New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” How very 20th century that now sounds. Even if the facts which newspapers reported were wrong, they were accepted as correct - and to diverge from them was considered a conspiracy theory. But conspiracy theories are the lingua franca of contemporary discourse - be they birther conspiracies or election-tampering conspiracies, they involve the assumption that a group of people colluded to withhold the truth from the public. Perhaps some of these conspiracies are correct. Hell, perhaps all of them are. But assuming that others conspire to withhold the truth from us is the de facto bedrock of what many Americans now believe, and this trait only shows signs of growing.
Andrew Sullivan likes to say that the great strength of blogging is the impermanence of thought it requires. On blogs, thoughts and facts are reinterpreted every day, and constantly reinterpreted through a process of merciless criticism - both from others and from oneself. To his thinking, blogs are the best catalogue of which we humans have yet thought to record what we feel at any moment. That way, when enough ephemeral moments go recorded, a composite picture of lasting truth comes into focus. To be a good blogger, at least according to the Sullivan worldview, would require a process of merciless introspection simultaneously to possessing an endless reservoir of self-righteousness. It requires a blogger to have a desire to seek out his/her own faults as burning as it is to find fault in others. It requires a rare combination of theorist and streetfighter who views ideas as something to be debated rather than developed. It requires a limitless vitality that enables the writer to be constantly confident, even if (s)he knows that what appears 100% true at the moment might be 100% false in an hour. It requires the ability to post an endless series of speculations that might seem ridiculous, pretentious, and downright offensive within a few minutes, and to do so without shame.
From the moment I started reading Sullivan’s blog, I had two reactions to it:
1. What an idiot.
2. Sign me the f-ck up.
Now let’s be clear, in his way Andrew Sullivan is nothing short of a genius. This is the person who invented blogging as we currently know it. But like many geniuses, he also is yet another in the world’s endless variety of brilliant idiots. As a political thinker, Sullivan was always second-rate; he’s never found an extreme he couldn’t endorse at some point, yet he never seems to arrive at that extreme a second before conventional wisdom blows there first. In 2002 he was lock-step with the Bush administration, by 2009 he was lock-step with the Obamas, yet in both years he found himself in the exact mainstream of the ‘zeitgeist.’ Whether the issue was gay marriage, health care, or torture, he’s always had an uncanny ability to wait until the most risk-free moment to endorse a principled stand, yet he’s still lauded as courageous in each instance. You simply can’t change opinions so quickly on so many issues as Sullivan has without either being a toady to figures of authority, which he criticizes far too often to ever be considered; or having a screw loose, which he clearly does.
I’m hard on Sullivan, yet over the same seven years, I had a similarly screwy leftward journey. Mine was milder, yet it was still weirder than his. I arrived in college just in time for 9/11: upon leaving high school I considered myself a lock-step leftist, yet within fourteen months of college I’d convinced myself that the Iraq War was absolutely necessary, that the Israeli Palestinian conflict could never be solved by negotiation, and that the Iraqi Invasion was simply a necessary first layover in a larger plan to reconstruct the Middle East according to a more Western image. It wasn’t until late 2006 in which I came to realize that only a lunatic could believe all of this. Believe it or not, I still considered myself left-of-center all the way through these years, and I still think I was correct to do so. But if I was, what was I but just another delusional leftist who had dreams far too big of what the world can achieve? Whether the dream is a social democracy or a worker’s paradise, it can never be done without lots of means that some people are going to consider imperialist. In order to make an omlette...
Perhaps this thinking is exactly as crazy as it probably seems to most people who read this. But then again, I’m not claiming to be a great thinker. I’m not held to as high a standard as Andrew Sullivan, nor should I be. Andrew Sullivan is an extremely successful person, and therefore is obbligated to be held to a higher standard. So far, I’m a failure as a musician, writer, actor, journalist, music critic, international affairs student, and tipper. In the six months I’ve done these 800-Word things, I’m read by 50 people on a good day. Not a single entry of mine ever got more than 216 pageviews, and that was for a playlist. I know that my thinking is second-rate at best. If there were ever any points in my life in which I had delusions of being smarter than I am, life showed me otherwise far too many times to not accept it. I know my track record, so I have no doubt I’ll entertain such delusions again in the not-too-distant future, and if there is one thing about life in which I retain no doubt, it is that life will put my hubris in place just as it always has.
And therein lies the problem for today’s bloggers. There is still no mechanism to punish hubris like mine. Just because the internet lets me state anything with complete certainty does not mean that I should. And yet I often do. And once a piece of false information is committed to print, it cannot be rescinded - some people will think it's true, and will not be around to read the (hopefully) inevitable self-correction that follows. One day, a famous blogger will get sued for something (s)he wrote, and that will change blogging forever.
But for the moment, the blogging world we know is in many ways a world of whomever has the audacity to commit the most flagrant misinformation to print. Sometimes the medium becomes your message, and the inflammatory invariably rises above the well-considered. And because of that, there is something about the flat simplicity about the world as Sullivan would have us blog it that can never allow for the truly composite picture which blogs are supposed to capture. Where is the room in this for doubt? If you read a blog, how often do you read “I wonder if...” or “I still can’t make up my mind...”? Surely, statements of that nature can be found anywhere in a place as large as the internets, but you and I both know the awful truth....:
Nuance is either on blogs we don’t read, or in the posts we skip over. In order to be read by a wide public while thinking out loud, bloggers require an absolute surety of conviction that their first thoughts are worth preserving. And these thoughts have to be uncomplicated enough that people can read them in far less time than it takes to read an essay. Whatever the subject, how else can you articulate a coherent view of it in less than 500 words? Many bloggers would rebut that they allow for nuance by hyperlinking to other sources. But even if we allow for the possibility that these hyperlinks are any more complex than the original text, how many people actually read the hyperlinks? After a certain point, an old fashioned coherent essay that is cogently argued will teach you much more than a discombobulated series of simple links that take the same amount of time to read. So let’s face it, blogs as we currently know them are designed for intellectual second-raters like me who can fulminate to their heart’s content and weigh in with opinions more entertaining than they are substantial. The internet is supposed to make us more connected than ever before, and for a truly inquisitive mind, that’s exactly what it is. By its very meaning, the Internet can let us soak up more information from more sources than any library. But most minds are not inquisitive most of the time, and most of us simply want to read their own opinions confirmed most of the time. And with the internet, the echo chamber we crave like chocolate is louder than ever. A victory like Barack Obama’s could not have been possible before the Internet Age, but neither could the Birther movement. Unlike the age of television news in which the majority of people received world information from the same three sources, we can now receive our information from whomever we like to have our every opinion confirmed, and if somebody writes something with which we disagree, we can simply ignore them. There used to be a famous saying from a New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” How very 20th century that now sounds. Even if the facts which newspapers reported were wrong, they were accepted as correct - and to diverge from them was considered a conspiracy theory. But conspiracy theories are the lingua franca of contemporary discourse - be they birther conspiracies or election-tampering conspiracies, they involve the assumption that a group of people colluded to withhold the truth from the public. Perhaps some of these conspiracies are correct. Hell, perhaps all of them are. But assuming that others conspire to withhold the truth from us is the de facto bedrock of what many Americans now believe, and this trait only shows signs of growing.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
800 Words: Lebewohl Thomas Quasthoff
(Singing Schubert with Daniel Barenboim)
It’s official. Thomas Quasthoff has not only cancelled all future concert engagements, he’s also officially retired from the stage due to persistent laryngitis - and he's only 52. And thus ends one of the most remarkable careers in music history. For any dyed-in-the-wool classical vocal fan, this should be an event nearly equivalent to the breakup of The Beatles or Cobain’s suicide. Even in his fifties, it still felt as though Quasthoff was only wrapping up the first act of his career - too many opera roles left to tackle, too much repertoire still unexplored, and far too few people having heard of him. Has there ever been a classical performer who has bridged the gap to do justice to non-classical genres so successfully? Has there ever been a performer whose on-stage persona was as welcoming? It’s just not fair, not to Quasthoff, not to us. If the world were a fair place, Thomas Quasthoff would be as famous as Andrea Bocelli, and Andrea Bocelli as famous as Thomas Quasthoff. Then again, if the world were a fair place, neither would be handicapped.
(Bach with the Staatskapelle Dresden and Vladimir Jurowski)
Millions of people go to see Andrea Bocelli concerts because they think it amazing that a handsome blind man can be a decent singer. But classical music fans have annoyed all these millions by pointing out that Andrea Bocelli is not an actual opera singer. Few, even in the classical world, would doubt that Bocelli’s actual voice is pleasing. The problem is not that Bocelli doesn’t sing nicely. The problem is that Bocelli doesn’t sing opera. Bocelli posesses a fundamentally untutored, undeveloped, quasi-pop voice that bears only a superficial resemblance to actual opera singing. Bocelli’s voice could never be heard without a microphone. He clearly never mastered any technique and like all talented but undeveloped singers has a only a few notes which ring out and many more which sound ennervated and pinched. He then puts this untutored voice to the service of a ‘greatest hits’ vision of opera so bland and boring that only boring people could enjoy it. This is focus group opera, guaranteed to offend nobody and therefore offensive to everyone. What he sings is not even light opera or opera light, his singing is semi-opera, quasi-opera, pseudo-opera, popera. It combines all the most boring qualities of pop and opera into a package that only people who hate life can enjoy. I know, I know, Pavarotti did it too. And as someone who’s sat through many more Pavarotti and Friends PBS telecasts than you have, let me assure you. It was just as boring when Pavarotti did it.
(Beatboxing and scatting with Bobby McFerrin)
But then there’s Quasthoff - a person so remarkable that the story of how he became the world’s most acclaimed classical singer has to be told in detail to do it any justice. The story begins before his birth. Quasthoff is what Billy Joel would call one of the Children of Thalidomyde. Before his birth in 1959, his mother would take the drug Thalidomyde as a way to combat morning sickness. It was only a few years later that the results of pregnant women taking Thalidomyde was published - of which Quasthoff is a typical result. He suffers from phocolemia of the upper extremities - which in plain English means that he has no arms. Rather, he has hands which are connected to his shoulders with the faintest nub in between. His lower body possesses shortened legs which cause him to stand at no more than 4’4. For her troubles, the German government paid Quasthoff’s mother 25,000 Deutsche Marks.
(Teaching)
During his young years, he was forced to undergo surgery after painful surgery to make adjustments to his growing limbs. He was born with one of his feet backwards, and he spent a year and a half in bed with a permanent cast. The German authorities, not knowing what else to do with him, committed him first to a pediatric ward, then to a home for sufferers of Cerebral Palsy. It was only at the age of ten that he began to experience any sort of normalcy when his father took him to see a vocal teacher who proclaimed an extraordinary gift. Unfortunately, regardless of his talent, he could never be accepted to music college. Due to the fact that he basically has no arms, it’s rendered him unable to take the required piano courses, and was told by the Music School in Detmold that he could never attend music college - a college at which he's now a full professor.
(Crooning Moon River)
And so Quasthoff studied music in Hanover, privately and intensively, with cult favorite soprano Charlotte Lehman for seventeen years, and did so without the benefit of any official higher musical education. In his spare time, he went to university to study law. After college, he worked at a bank for six years. For extra money, he sang in cabarets and jazz clubs. The combined stress of being a bank teller and music studies saddled him with a serious illness which made him bedridden yet again and forced him to give up the bank job completely. When he was sufficiently well again, he went to work as a radio presenter, and achieved some eminence in that field - not only for his voice or physical condition, but also for his erudition. He was often used on air not only to introduce the music but also to recite poetry on air. It was during these years as a radio presenter that Quasthoff finally achieved some notoriety as a singer. In 1988, still not yet 30, he won recognition at a vocal competition in Munich for which 315 people entered, and was praised by no less than the greatest Baritone (perhaps singer) of the 20th century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as having a beautiful voice. When the chief of the jury presented him with first prize, he said: 'You can be absolutely sure you didn't win the competition because of your disability. If you hadn't earned it, that would be a much bigger problem for you.'
(Quasthoff easily sailing over an entire orchestra, playing four different characters, and almost making you think that orchestrating Schubert lieder is a good idea.)
It took Quasthoff another eight years to establish a full-time music career. It would seem that he appeared on the classical music scene one day, fully formed - giving regular recitals in Carnagie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw, the Musikvereinsaal or La Scala. He seemed to become the favoured Baritone of Berlin’s ‘big three’ conductors - Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, and Simon Rattle - who almost seemed in competition with one another for who could engage his services most often. His recital programs were filled with the standard Schubert, Bach, Brahms, and Strauss. But just as often you were as likely to hear a late 20th century work - and the contemporary work was as likely to be by The Beatles or from the Great American Songbook as it was by Penderecki or Reimann.
(Singing Georgia, On My Mind)
It goes without saying that Quasthoff has a wonderful, almost infinitely malleable voice - nearly as comfortable in English as German (though not quite...), and far larger than average for a full-size singer but particularly enormous considering that it emanates from a 4 ft. body. It’s lower-lying than most baritones, yet with a ringing quality that has all the sharp overtones of a tenor yet also capable of summoning all the stentorian chest power of a basso profundo (there used to be a video on youtube of him singing a tenor aria, then a baritone, then a bass). Is it more beautiful (or even as beautiful) as Terfel, Fischer-Dieskau, Hrovotovsky? Probably not, though at his vocal best he can recall all the great singers of days past. But like all truly great singers, one tends to forget the beauty of the voice after a few minutes. All that remains is that communicative quality, the ability to draw a listener into a personal world of the music from which you never leave you so long as you’re still able to remember what you’ve heard. Whether it’s the spiritual darkness of late Schubert, the hearty joy of Bach Cantatas, or the brash breeziness of Harold Arlen, Quasthoff sets the mood of the piece more perfectly than perhaps any singer of our lifetime. It’s a quality that takes a number of talents in itself - not just the intelligence to meaningfully shape a phrase but also the stage presence put that shape into action. Very few opera singers possessed that quality to Quasthoff’s extent - doubly a shame, since Quasthoff rarely performed opera.
(A more than usual German-accented Copland. Believe me, it’s worth it...)
It’s often been commented that we’re living in a particularly good era for baritones. It used to be that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau dominated the baritone repertoire (and everyone else’s too) , and he was such a reliable recreative genius that no other Baritone on the recital circuit ever stood a chance. But if DFD was a King with no equal, then Quasthoff was a chairman of the board. Even after Quasthoff goes, we still have Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, Dimitri Hrovotovsky, Sergei Leiferkus, Simon Keenlyside, Gerald Finley, and Rod Gilfry. Most of them probably have a good fifteen years left in them. But it can’t be denied, we’ve lost the giant among them. This is a singer whose disabilities caused him to operate at a higher, not lower, level. The way we thought about music was never the same before him, and it will never be the same afterward.
...I’m very happy I’ve resisted the temptation to link to his rendition of ‘Short People’ by Randy Newman.
...oops....
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Schlomo Mintz Plays Bach
To me, one of the only performances I've ever heard that does approximate justice to the Chaconne...and I've heard many.
Monday, January 9, 2012
The Unanswered Question
Perfect for a long late Sunday night, particularly when the question becomes 'Why is the playback on your Sibelius music software not working?'
Also,...one of the absolute, perfect masterpieces of music ever created....just saying...
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
This Moment in Dragnet - The first in an ongoing series.
Dragnet monologues. My new favorite hobby, and something that's gone totally out of my generation's cultural frame of reference.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
800 Words: I am an Iowan (and so can you)
For the purposes of this blogpost, I, Evan Tucker, am 47 years old. I’m blond and almost totally bald, so I wear a giant blonde toupee with more hair than I ever had in real life. I’m a foot taller than I am currently and a hundred-fifty pounds heavier. I smoke two packs a day, live on a steady diet of cheeseburgers and corn whiskey, and possess a mighty pot belly thrice the size of my chest cavity (rather than the twice it already is). Every Sunday morning, I pile my five kids into our family-size SUV and drive them three-and-a-half hours to a Pentecostal Megachurch in Western Missouri so that I can wrest them free of the evil Catholic and Methodist influences which my ex-wife and her husband lays on them for five days every week. I work in the back office of an ethanol and ethanol accessories store somewhere around the town square of Mount Ayre in Ringgold County, somewhere deep into Southern Iowa. I drive an hour and a half to work in my pickup truck and regularly enter my beard in facial hair competitions. I haven’t seen a doctor in three years, because the last time he saw me he told me I was in grave danger of a heart attack. I watch sports at least eight hours every day, but I haven’t had the energy to play any in roughly fifteen years, and I routinely feel pins and needle pains throughout the left side of my upper body. Even so, for all I can tell, my health is perfect.
I get out of the car. Waiting for me is Mitt Romney, as he does at least once a week in my parking lot. He follows me as he does every time, awaiting a chance to convince me that he's the perfect candidate for me, the perfect Iowan.
Mitt Romney: Sir or Madame, my Ringgold County primer sheet informs me that you must be a White Male or Female, probably age 18-49 who regularly attends church, loves University of Iowa Football and whose last name is likely to be Smith.
Evan: I’m a couple of those things.
Mitt: Well you can be assured Mr or Mrs Smith that we both love and fear the same God. or Gods if you happen to be Catholic, that I want to lower taxes for your boss’s boss so that he won’t fire you, and that I’ve been a Hawkeye fan since I was a year old.
Evan: Well, you are from Massechussets, Michigan, California, and Utah simultanously. But who couldn’t love the Hawkeyes?
(Rick Santorum is waiting for me at the door to the store. This is the first time we’ve met.)
Rick Santorum: Hello Evan! In light of the fact that you are a Pentacostal, I can assure you beyond reasonable doubt that you’ll go to Hell. In spite of this, I know that we believe in many of the same things - particularly that the right to privacy does not exist and that your sister-in-law is a Baptist whore. And since we both know that you’ll be fired by next January, I would strongly advise you to vote for me so that as your President I can find you a new job that pays you lower than the minimum wage I plan on abolishing so that I might make your time on Earth a sweeter one than the breads of affliction which await you in eternal perdition.
Evan: This makes a certain degree of sense.
(Evan, Mitt and Rick walk into the store, only to find Ron Paul waiting there)
Ron Paul: Don’t you wish these jerkoffs would get the fuck out of here and just leave you be?
Mitt: You’re here too Ron.
Ron Paul: Just to save this poor soul from the hands of wicked people like you and Rick who would do him ill. The poor guy can make his own decisions.
Rick: Not if he doesn’t have a job.
Ron: The market will give him a job, it performs many miracles. If every one of them were written down, even the whole world would not have room for the books that are written.
Evan: Isn’t that from John 21:25 except in reference to Jesus?
Rick: Aren’t John and Jesus characters from the Bible?
Ron: The market is the light of the world. Who ever follows its dictates will never walk in darkness.
Mitt: Do you have some polling numbers on that statement?
Evan: Wait. Why do you believe so fervently in the free market Mr. Paul?
Ron: Because like all of you, I am not particularly fond of persons of color.
(long silence)
Mitt:...well....that was unexpected...
Ron: We should be free to conduct ourselves in any way we see fit. Particularly when it comes to discriminating against minorities.
Rick: Using the free market as a way to oppress minorities. Thats...that’s...genius! Why did I never think of that?!
Ron: Are you going to change your platform now?
Rick: No thanks. I just like repression too much.
Mitt: Hold on, I gotta make a call..... Hey Tagg, can you get me a data sampling on using the Free Market as a way to discriminate against people. I want samplings of self-identified Protestants, Catholics, and Libertarians. Then I want sub-samplings on whom they’d most like to discriminate against.
(Enter Newt Gingrich)
Newt Gingrich: Mr. Tucker, I know exactly what these guys have said to you. I’ve heard them say it a million times before. Frankly, I came up with every one of their ideas before they did and before this paragraph is over I’ll have another half dozen bad ideas you’ll love. I’d have even enacted them too if I couldn’t have skimmed so many millions of dollars by letting America stay a decent country for people we can’t stand.
Mitt: (holding up camera phone) Yes. That will work very nicely for the negative campaign ad against you we’re introducing in an hour.
Newt: (face goes red) Why do you hate America Mitt???!!!!
Mitt: It’s not personal Newt, this is strictly business.
Newt: Just you wait. I was dead, but I shall reign forever and ever!
Evan: Isn’t that from the Book of Revelations about Jesus?
Newt: No, it’s Handel’s Messiah. I heard my wife singing it in the shower yesterday.
Rick: Is Messiah a book in the Bible?
(Enter Rick Perry. Rather than shake my hand, he takes a charred steak out of his pocket),
Rick Perry: Hey buddy, have a free steak, cuz I’m folksy. Here’s some Tabasco sauce (takes it out of his other pocket) and I’ve actually got a free pair of boots out back from the same cow.
Rick S.: I’m surprised you’re still out here.
Rick P: Well, you know what they say. You can lead a cow to wa....wait, how does it go?
Mitt: I can’t believe I was scared of you.
Rick P.: You should be. I’m a regular guy, don’t lie Evan, you want a President just as dumb as you. So here are some buzzwords I wrote on my hand: Freedom! Victory! Change! Flat Tax! Washington Corruption! Founding Fathers! Life! Liberty! Pursu...oh come on I can’t forget another word, that would just be cliche.
(enter Evan’s boss.)
Boss: Hey Evan, Mitt, Rick, Ron, Newt, Rick.
All: How’s it going Mordechai?
Boss: So Evan, who are you going to vote for?
Evan: Actually I’m a Democrat. My dad’s kinda senile and he’s from Missouri. So if I ever turned Republican he’d drop dead of a heart attack because he thinks the Draft George Wallace movement will start gaining traction any day now.
(enter Herman Cain)
Herman: Did I hear someone mention a Wallace supporter?
I get out of the car. Waiting for me is Mitt Romney, as he does at least once a week in my parking lot. He follows me as he does every time, awaiting a chance to convince me that he's the perfect candidate for me, the perfect Iowan.
Mitt Romney: Sir or Madame, my Ringgold County primer sheet informs me that you must be a White Male or Female, probably age 18-49 who regularly attends church, loves University of Iowa Football and whose last name is likely to be Smith.
Evan: I’m a couple of those things.
Mitt: Well you can be assured Mr or Mrs Smith that we both love and fear the same God. or Gods if you happen to be Catholic, that I want to lower taxes for your boss’s boss so that he won’t fire you, and that I’ve been a Hawkeye fan since I was a year old.
Evan: Well, you are from Massechussets, Michigan, California, and Utah simultanously. But who couldn’t love the Hawkeyes?
(Rick Santorum is waiting for me at the door to the store. This is the first time we’ve met.)
Rick Santorum: Hello Evan! In light of the fact that you are a Pentacostal, I can assure you beyond reasonable doubt that you’ll go to Hell. In spite of this, I know that we believe in many of the same things - particularly that the right to privacy does not exist and that your sister-in-law is a Baptist whore. And since we both know that you’ll be fired by next January, I would strongly advise you to vote for me so that as your President I can find you a new job that pays you lower than the minimum wage I plan on abolishing so that I might make your time on Earth a sweeter one than the breads of affliction which await you in eternal perdition.
Evan: This makes a certain degree of sense.
(Evan, Mitt and Rick walk into the store, only to find Ron Paul waiting there)
Ron Paul: Don’t you wish these jerkoffs would get the fuck out of here and just leave you be?
Mitt: You’re here too Ron.
Ron Paul: Just to save this poor soul from the hands of wicked people like you and Rick who would do him ill. The poor guy can make his own decisions.
Rick: Not if he doesn’t have a job.
Ron: The market will give him a job, it performs many miracles. If every one of them were written down, even the whole world would not have room for the books that are written.
Evan: Isn’t that from John 21:25 except in reference to Jesus?
Rick: Aren’t John and Jesus characters from the Bible?
Ron: The market is the light of the world. Who ever follows its dictates will never walk in darkness.
Mitt: Do you have some polling numbers on that statement?
Evan: Wait. Why do you believe so fervently in the free market Mr. Paul?
Ron: Because like all of you, I am not particularly fond of persons of color.
(long silence)
Mitt:...well....that was unexpected...
Ron: We should be free to conduct ourselves in any way we see fit. Particularly when it comes to discriminating against minorities.
Rick: Using the free market as a way to oppress minorities. Thats...that’s...genius! Why did I never think of that?!
Ron: Are you going to change your platform now?
Rick: No thanks. I just like repression too much.
Mitt: Hold on, I gotta make a call..... Hey Tagg, can you get me a data sampling on using the Free Market as a way to discriminate against people. I want samplings of self-identified Protestants, Catholics, and Libertarians. Then I want sub-samplings on whom they’d most like to discriminate against.
(Enter Newt Gingrich)
Newt Gingrich: Mr. Tucker, I know exactly what these guys have said to you. I’ve heard them say it a million times before. Frankly, I came up with every one of their ideas before they did and before this paragraph is over I’ll have another half dozen bad ideas you’ll love. I’d have even enacted them too if I couldn’t have skimmed so many millions of dollars by letting America stay a decent country for people we can’t stand.
Mitt: (holding up camera phone) Yes. That will work very nicely for the negative campaign ad against you we’re introducing in an hour.
Newt: (face goes red) Why do you hate America Mitt???!!!!
Mitt: It’s not personal Newt, this is strictly business.
Newt: Just you wait. I was dead, but I shall reign forever and ever!
Evan: Isn’t that from the Book of Revelations about Jesus?
Newt: No, it’s Handel’s Messiah. I heard my wife singing it in the shower yesterday.
Rick: Is Messiah a book in the Bible?
(Enter Rick Perry. Rather than shake my hand, he takes a charred steak out of his pocket),
Rick Perry: Hey buddy, have a free steak, cuz I’m folksy. Here’s some Tabasco sauce (takes it out of his other pocket) and I’ve actually got a free pair of boots out back from the same cow.
Rick S.: I’m surprised you’re still out here.
Rick P: Well, you know what they say. You can lead a cow to wa....wait, how does it go?
Mitt: I can’t believe I was scared of you.
Rick P.: You should be. I’m a regular guy, don’t lie Evan, you want a President just as dumb as you. So here are some buzzwords I wrote on my hand: Freedom! Victory! Change! Flat Tax! Washington Corruption! Founding Fathers! Life! Liberty! Pursu...oh come on I can’t forget another word, that would just be cliche.
(enter Evan’s boss.)
Boss: Hey Evan, Mitt, Rick, Ron, Newt, Rick.
All: How’s it going Mordechai?
Boss: So Evan, who are you going to vote for?
Evan: Actually I’m a Democrat. My dad’s kinda senile and he’s from Missouri. So if I ever turned Republican he’d drop dead of a heart attack because he thinks the Draft George Wallace movement will start gaining traction any day now.
(enter Herman Cain)
Herman: Did I hear someone mention a Wallace supporter?
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Quote of the Night:
Le Malon: i think he (Mitt Romney) believes he should win and he is willing to say anything to do so
so if polling data says he should copulate with a goat on stage, well then someones going to procure him a goat
so if polling data says he should copulate with a goat on stage, well then someones going to procure him a goat
Saturday, December 31, 2011
800 Words: I Don't Hate Messiah Part 2 - The Long Performing Tradition
I wanted to rant about Messiah, but now I realize that any dislike I have of the ‘Messiah epidemic’ is indicative of a much larger problem. We’re a full half-century removed from classical music’s original ‘Early Music’ craze, yet Early Music is still subject to an enormous dose of over-reverence. Whether the undue reverence is for 19th century gigantism or for the composer’s original intentions, neither is particularly deserved - and both probably have led to centuries of extremely boring performances. Let’s just take the example of Handel’s Messiah, the Christmas nightmare, as perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon. Few pieces of music seem to attract stodgy reverence to it like Messiah - the result being thousands of performances that sound almost exactly alike. Most Messiah performances sound either bloated and tired after the manner of 19th century pomp, or brittle and arthritic after the manner of the 20th century’s obsession with recapturing the past. Neither does justice to the Handelean fire which the greatness of this piece requires. So here is a quick history of how this came to be (with enormous help from wikipedia, so any resemblance to scholarship is purely accidental):
Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, 1742 with a chorus of 32 and soloists mostly drawn from the ranks of the chorus. One journalist immediately hailed it as the greatest oratorio ever written: ‘far surpass[ing] anything of that Nature which has been performed in this or any other Kingdom.’ Another declared "...The best Judges allowed it to be the most finished work of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic, and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear..." Yet even this piece, already hailed as the greatest music(k) ever written, was subject to endless re-tinkering by Handel. Handel very much aspired to great art, but he was also a showman and businessman, probably the best combination of those qualities among great composers until Verdi. And as a businessman, he always had one eye upon what was feasible, and as a showman, he always had an ear on how best to achieve effects. When the oratorio had a repeat performance in Dublin two months later, there were substantial revisions made to accommodate different soloists and passages thoroughly recomposed to better tailor to his own satisfaction. For every subsequent performance in Handel’s lifetime, Handel made new emendations, additions and deletions, some of which he made after he went blind, and seem to keep occurring until a performance eight days before his death.
Thirty years after Handel’s death, it was common in London to hear performances of Messiah at Westminster Abbey with an orchestra alone of two-hundred-fifty musicians, including twelve horns, twelve trumpets, six trombones, and three pairs of timpani (that were made larger than average for just such an event). In fact, there is an advertisement from 1787 for a performance at the Abbey which promises "The Band will consist of Eight Hundred Performers."
Messiah performances were still stranger in Europe. In 1788, Johann Adam Hiller conducted a performance in the Berlin Cathedral consisting of 287 performers. Compared to Westminster Abbey, this probably sounds downright reasonable. But if you look at the instrumental composition, it gets still stranger: 87 strings, 10 bassoons, 11 oboes, 8 flutes, 8 horns, 4 clarinets, 4 trombones, 7 trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and organ. By the rules of modern acoustics, an orchestra of 142 could easily drown out a chorus of the same number, especially one with 7 trumpets and 8 natural horns. But even in Handel’s time, it was common to have more instrumentalists than singers. At at least one performance, Handel conducted an orchestra of 37 and a chorus of only 19.
In 1789, none other than Mozart made an arrangement for performance in Vienna. He eliminated the organ continuo, added parts for flutes, clarinets, trombones and horns, simplified the trumpet parts, reorchestrated much of the piece to accommodate larger forces, and thoroughly recomposed some passages. And yet Mozart’s performance used a chorus of twelve.
To make matters still more confusing, many of Mozarts changes were worked back into the standard editions which the English speaking peoples used in the 19th century for their ever larger performances of Messiah. In 1853, New York heard performance of Messiah was given with a chorus of 300. In 1865, Boston heard one with a chorus of 600. In 1857, London heard (or sang) a performance with 2,000 singers and an orchestra of 500. These mass performances became more and more frequent, with choruses numbering 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 singers.
But fashions always change, and lots of music lovers were getting tired of the musical gigantism which Messiah seemed to always ensure. George Bernard Shaw wrote: "The stale wonderment which the great chorus never fails to elicit has already been exhausted" he later wrote, "Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the Messiah in St. James Hall with a chorus of twenty capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die."
Even in 1902, when one of the first scholarly edtions that consulted Handel’s manuscripts was printed, it was taken as a given that Messiah could never again be presented with Handel’s original scoring. Even for a scholarly edition, many of the accumulated changes made by Mozart, Hiller and others were deliberately left in. Its editor, Ebenezer Prout wrote:
“[T]he attempts made from time to time by our musical societies to give Handel's music as he meant it to be given must, however earnest the intention, and however careful the preparation, be foredoomed to failure from the very nature of the case. With our large choral societies, additional accompaniments of some kind are a necessity for an effective performance; and the question is not so much whether, as how they are to be written.”
(From 1926, Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder, with a chorus and orchestra of 3,300. Probably a lot louder in person, no less messy though.)
But even as scholarly performances became more frequent, the “Massiah” was still the norm. One of the first recording of Messiah excerpts comes from 1926 at the Chrystal Palace Handel Festival with an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300. Recordings from that period can’t possibly give us the full effect of an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300 and the results were predictably sloppy.
(probably the most dramatic rendering of the Hallelujah chorus I’ve ever heard … save Beecham’s later recording. But this one doesn’t strike you as bizarre.)
The forces with which Messiah was performed were gradually dwindling. A 1922 performance in Handel’s hometown of Halle caused a bit of a a choir of 163 and 64 instrumentalists. In 1927, Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the first virtually complete recording of Messiah. For it’s time, it was considered quite controversial. Beecham aimed closer to the style of Handel’s period, with tempos far faster than what was once the norm. The result was an orchestra, chorus and style that would sound completely at home in a Mendelssohn oratorio. The result is far lither than his infamously exciting but bloated 1959 recording (more on that later). And apparently Beecham made a 1947 recording that is even more musicologically correct. I wish I could find it. In Thomas Beecham’s chosen repertoire, he was absolutely unbeatable, and I can only surmise that both those two recordings must number among the greatest ever set down.
While Sir Thomas was showing us a new vision of Handel’s Messiah, his friend and rival Sir Malcolm Sargent clung obstreperously to the old traditions. Between the 20’s and 50’s, Sargent released four different recordings of Messiah, and at least the last two with the Huddersfield Choral Society - a choir of well over 200 voices. I’m familiar with what I can only guess are their last two recordings. Their 1940’s recording is far better than the stereo remake. There are a few magnificent moments, which almost completely result of good soloists (in the 40’s recording) and from Sargeant preparing his own edition of Messiah for a traditional 19th century orchestra of proportions that probably would have been recognizable to Berlioz. Unfortunately, the chorus is cumbersome and not accomplished technically, which drags both performances down to another iteration of Messiah’s bloated 19th century presentation.
(Go to 4:00. This Amen section must be the slowest performance of the finale on record)
It wasn’t until 1954 that listeners heard Handel’s Messiah in its original orchestration from the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by the always fascinating Hermann Scherchen. Scherchen’s performance is typically eccentric, not always convincing but fantastically provocative. By the standards of today, it’s still quite a large-scale performance, and the ensemble is certainly ragged throughout, but Scherchen channels his own personal vision which makes this a performance that sounds utterly unlike any other. You can also find a performance on youtube of Scherchen performing the Hallelujah Chorus in which he accomplishes a gradual acceleration through the whole piece. What we hear in this recording is the thoughts of a very great (and still underrated) conductor.
(ew)
Far less interesting is the second recording to be done according to the original orchestration. Adrian Boult’s 1961 recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus is far better played than Scherchen’s. It’s also one of the most predictable performances, with no new insights, thoroughly Victorian-era tempos, a well-trained chorus that sounds far too large. What’s the point of using Handel’s orchestration if you’re just going to create a Victorian performance exactly like every other?
(The Hallelujah Chorus, as you’ve never heard it.)
And then,... there's The Beecham Messiah. There are three Beecham Messiah recordings, but when you say 'The Beecham Messiah' to a music lover, they always know about which you're speaking. The Beecham Messiah has got to be one of the most bizarre recordings ever made. For this recording, Beecham got composer/conductor Sir Eugene Goossens to reorchestrate the piece for a 130 piece orchestra that dwarfs anything in Richard Strauss. The chorus alone must have easily numbered 400-strong. In some ways, this may still be the most modern Messiah ever performed - closer to the spirit of the 19th century than virtually any 19th century performance. So far as we know, no 19th century performance had the audacity to reorchestrate Handel with the express intention of making his music sound resemble Elgar. This is Messiah heard through the lenses of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. Passages that once were done with a few singers, strings, and winds are now heard with the full weight of 530 musicians with an overflowing complement of brass and percussion at full volume. Yet what comes through most clearly is the ebullience with which all the players obviously threw themselves into this venture. It comes down to us almost like a statement of defiance against a prevailing fashion, as though they knew that they would never participate in an event quite like this one ever again. Musicological scholarship was already making performances like this one entirely verboten. In no way is this recognizable as Handel in any form we know from today, and it's certainly an acquired taste. The other day, I badmouthed this recording on the excellent Boulezian blog. I immediately regretted writing it, and went back to listen. This is Handel as an Elgar oratorio, with all the pomp and loftiness that implies. Yes, it can make for dreary listening. So can just about every Messiah recording. But when met on its own terms it works more magnificently than nearly any other recording.
Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, 1742 with a chorus of 32 and soloists mostly drawn from the ranks of the chorus. One journalist immediately hailed it as the greatest oratorio ever written: ‘far surpass[ing] anything of that Nature which has been performed in this or any other Kingdom.’ Another declared "...The best Judges allowed it to be the most finished work of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic, and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear..." Yet even this piece, already hailed as the greatest music(k) ever written, was subject to endless re-tinkering by Handel. Handel very much aspired to great art, but he was also a showman and businessman, probably the best combination of those qualities among great composers until Verdi. And as a businessman, he always had one eye upon what was feasible, and as a showman, he always had an ear on how best to achieve effects. When the oratorio had a repeat performance in Dublin two months later, there were substantial revisions made to accommodate different soloists and passages thoroughly recomposed to better tailor to his own satisfaction. For every subsequent performance in Handel’s lifetime, Handel made new emendations, additions and deletions, some of which he made after he went blind, and seem to keep occurring until a performance eight days before his death.
Thirty years after Handel’s death, it was common in London to hear performances of Messiah at Westminster Abbey with an orchestra alone of two-hundred-fifty musicians, including twelve horns, twelve trumpets, six trombones, and three pairs of timpani (that were made larger than average for just such an event). In fact, there is an advertisement from 1787 for a performance at the Abbey which promises "The Band will consist of Eight Hundred Performers."
Messiah performances were still stranger in Europe. In 1788, Johann Adam Hiller conducted a performance in the Berlin Cathedral consisting of 287 performers. Compared to Westminster Abbey, this probably sounds downright reasonable. But if you look at the instrumental composition, it gets still stranger: 87 strings, 10 bassoons, 11 oboes, 8 flutes, 8 horns, 4 clarinets, 4 trombones, 7 trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and organ. By the rules of modern acoustics, an orchestra of 142 could easily drown out a chorus of the same number, especially one with 7 trumpets and 8 natural horns. But even in Handel’s time, it was common to have more instrumentalists than singers. At at least one performance, Handel conducted an orchestra of 37 and a chorus of only 19.
In 1789, none other than Mozart made an arrangement for performance in Vienna. He eliminated the organ continuo, added parts for flutes, clarinets, trombones and horns, simplified the trumpet parts, reorchestrated much of the piece to accommodate larger forces, and thoroughly recomposed some passages. And yet Mozart’s performance used a chorus of twelve.
To make matters still more confusing, many of Mozarts changes were worked back into the standard editions which the English speaking peoples used in the 19th century for their ever larger performances of Messiah. In 1853, New York heard performance of Messiah was given with a chorus of 300. In 1865, Boston heard one with a chorus of 600. In 1857, London heard (or sang) a performance with 2,000 singers and an orchestra of 500. These mass performances became more and more frequent, with choruses numbering 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 singers.
But fashions always change, and lots of music lovers were getting tired of the musical gigantism which Messiah seemed to always ensure. George Bernard Shaw wrote: "The stale wonderment which the great chorus never fails to elicit has already been exhausted" he later wrote, "Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the Messiah in St. James Hall with a chorus of twenty capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die."
Even in 1902, when one of the first scholarly edtions that consulted Handel’s manuscripts was printed, it was taken as a given that Messiah could never again be presented with Handel’s original scoring. Even for a scholarly edition, many of the accumulated changes made by Mozart, Hiller and others were deliberately left in. Its editor, Ebenezer Prout wrote:
“[T]he attempts made from time to time by our musical societies to give Handel's music as he meant it to be given must, however earnest the intention, and however careful the preparation, be foredoomed to failure from the very nature of the case. With our large choral societies, additional accompaniments of some kind are a necessity for an effective performance; and the question is not so much whether, as how they are to be written.”
(From 1926, Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder, with a chorus and orchestra of 3,300. Probably a lot louder in person, no less messy though.)
But even as scholarly performances became more frequent, the “Massiah” was still the norm. One of the first recording of Messiah excerpts comes from 1926 at the Chrystal Palace Handel Festival with an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300. Recordings from that period can’t possibly give us the full effect of an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300 and the results were predictably sloppy.
(probably the most dramatic rendering of the Hallelujah chorus I’ve ever heard … save Beecham’s later recording. But this one doesn’t strike you as bizarre.)
The forces with which Messiah was performed were gradually dwindling. A 1922 performance in Handel’s hometown of Halle caused a bit of a a choir of 163 and 64 instrumentalists. In 1927, Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the first virtually complete recording of Messiah. For it’s time, it was considered quite controversial. Beecham aimed closer to the style of Handel’s period, with tempos far faster than what was once the norm. The result was an orchestra, chorus and style that would sound completely at home in a Mendelssohn oratorio. The result is far lither than his infamously exciting but bloated 1959 recording (more on that later). And apparently Beecham made a 1947 recording that is even more musicologically correct. I wish I could find it. In Thomas Beecham’s chosen repertoire, he was absolutely unbeatable, and I can only surmise that both those two recordings must number among the greatest ever set down.
While Sir Thomas was showing us a new vision of Handel’s Messiah, his friend and rival Sir Malcolm Sargent clung obstreperously to the old traditions. Between the 20’s and 50’s, Sargent released four different recordings of Messiah, and at least the last two with the Huddersfield Choral Society - a choir of well over 200 voices. I’m familiar with what I can only guess are their last two recordings. Their 1940’s recording is far better than the stereo remake. There are a few magnificent moments, which almost completely result of good soloists (in the 40’s recording) and from Sargeant preparing his own edition of Messiah for a traditional 19th century orchestra of proportions that probably would have been recognizable to Berlioz. Unfortunately, the chorus is cumbersome and not accomplished technically, which drags both performances down to another iteration of Messiah’s bloated 19th century presentation.
(Go to 4:00. This Amen section must be the slowest performance of the finale on record)
It wasn’t until 1954 that listeners heard Handel’s Messiah in its original orchestration from the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by the always fascinating Hermann Scherchen. Scherchen’s performance is typically eccentric, not always convincing but fantastically provocative. By the standards of today, it’s still quite a large-scale performance, and the ensemble is certainly ragged throughout, but Scherchen channels his own personal vision which makes this a performance that sounds utterly unlike any other. You can also find a performance on youtube of Scherchen performing the Hallelujah Chorus in which he accomplishes a gradual acceleration through the whole piece. What we hear in this recording is the thoughts of a very great (and still underrated) conductor.
(ew)
Far less interesting is the second recording to be done according to the original orchestration. Adrian Boult’s 1961 recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus is far better played than Scherchen’s. It’s also one of the most predictable performances, with no new insights, thoroughly Victorian-era tempos, a well-trained chorus that sounds far too large. What’s the point of using Handel’s orchestration if you’re just going to create a Victorian performance exactly like every other?
(The Hallelujah Chorus, as you’ve never heard it.)
And then,... there's The Beecham Messiah. There are three Beecham Messiah recordings, but when you say 'The Beecham Messiah' to a music lover, they always know about which you're speaking. The Beecham Messiah has got to be one of the most bizarre recordings ever made. For this recording, Beecham got composer/conductor Sir Eugene Goossens to reorchestrate the piece for a 130 piece orchestra that dwarfs anything in Richard Strauss. The chorus alone must have easily numbered 400-strong. In some ways, this may still be the most modern Messiah ever performed - closer to the spirit of the 19th century than virtually any 19th century performance. So far as we know, no 19th century performance had the audacity to reorchestrate Handel with the express intention of making his music sound resemble Elgar. This is Messiah heard through the lenses of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. Passages that once were done with a few singers, strings, and winds are now heard with the full weight of 530 musicians with an overflowing complement of brass and percussion at full volume. Yet what comes through most clearly is the ebullience with which all the players obviously threw themselves into this venture. It comes down to us almost like a statement of defiance against a prevailing fashion, as though they knew that they would never participate in an event quite like this one ever again. Musicological scholarship was already making performances like this one entirely verboten. In no way is this recognizable as Handel in any form we know from today, and it's certainly an acquired taste. The other day, I badmouthed this recording on the excellent Boulezian blog. I immediately regretted writing it, and went back to listen. This is Handel as an Elgar oratorio, with all the pomp and loftiness that implies. Yes, it can make for dreary listening. So can just about every Messiah recording. But when met on its own terms it works more magnificently than nearly any other recording.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)