A Note from John About Spring Classes Moving Online
To my Graham School students and prospective students,
In these stressful times, I am writing to encourage continuity for those who enjoy my courses, and to whom I am deeply grateful.
My three Graham School courses are moving online for the spring semester. This remote learning effort is part of a UChicago-wide policy during the Covid-19 virus crisis. I truly believe the University could make no other choice. Your health and safety mean more than anything else.
Your satisfaction with my work is also paramount. So I make this commitment to provide an enjoyable learning experience, and help you adjust to the online format in any way I can.
Remote learning can be surprisingly convenient and engaging. I’ve taught online successfully before – and I’m no tech wizard. My wife, Bonnie, will be with us during class time – and Bonnie IS a tech wizard.
The Graham School will be contacting you directly with the technical details and customer service options. Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns – before and after we receive those details.
I look forward to providing a rich educational experience (and a fun time!) to help fill the gap while so few cultural resources are open and functioning. Let’s make the history of music and the poetic splendors of romanticism a good, fine thing in navigating these times. I look forward to continuing existing friendships and forging new ones.
I am grateful for your patronage. It means a lot to me.
Changing an Amazon Ad's Music Reveal's Christmas Shopping Hellscape
This will be a little treat for my film score class students! A very witty filmmaker named Omar Najam has remixed one of year’s Amazon holiday season commercials with an menacing film score, transforming Amazon’s warehouse, delivery infrastructure, and customer base into some kind of yuletide dystopia. (I realize this sounds like an impossible feat.)
Najam’s brilliant choice for a replacement score is the main theme music from Captain America: The Winter Soldier itself a conspiracy storyline.
In the ensuing Twitter thread, Najam states that the happy faces on the warehouse workers didn’t sit right with him — to great acclaim from some self-identified Amazon workers.
Here’s the original ad featuring a cover of the song “Can you feel it?” originally by the Jacksons.
Notes on the Spring semester's Tuesday class: Italian opera from The Barber of Seville to Turandot.
Two Italian opera classes in a row? How repetitive will they be?
This course is intended to be complementary to "Verdi and Puccini", and in order to minimize any duplication of the current course, I have made several minor adjustments to the published description.
Mozart's Italian operas will be included, and the institutional history of Italian opera will be considered. There will be considerable attention paid to the bel canto masters. With regard to Verdi, some operas we have more or less skipped in this class will be considered in detail, with video, etc. Puccini's contemporaries will be considered, and time will be allotted to listening and comparing great singers in archival recordings. When it comes to Puccini, different scenes will be examined from what we used in this class. Also, instead of a broad survey of all operas by the relevant composers, fewer works will be examined, but in greater detail.
I highly recommend "A History of Opera" by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. It is not only deeply well informed, it is eminently readable and a lot of fun.
Principal operas considered:
Mozart: Cosi fan Tutte
Rossini: Barber of Seville and Semiramide
Bellini: Norma and I Puritani
Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor and Elixir of Love
Verdi: Il Trovatore and La Forza del Destino.
From Puccini's contempories:
Leoncavallo Pagliacci
Catalani: La Wally
Ponchielli: La Gioconda
Giordano's: either Andrea Chenier or Fedora
Picks for Beethoven's 9th
Some recordings we like, and a app.
It's Week 2 for the Late Beethoven class, and coverage begins of his Symphony No. 9.
For those of you on iPads, there is an app called Beethoven's 9th symphony. This is from Touch Press, makers of the excellent app The Orchestra. It costs $14 for the full piece, but a full-featured preview of the first two minutes of the second movement is free. From the official description:
Four legendary performances of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony including Ferenc Fricsay’s first stereo recording of this work from 1958 with the Berliner Philharmoniker; Herbert von Karajan’s famous 1962 recording with the same orchestra; the widely loved and charismatic maestro Leonard Bernstein’s video recording from 1979 with the Wiener Philharmoniker; and the ground-breaking 1992 recording on period instruments conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
Switch between these recordings anywhere on-the-fly without missing a beat.
Typeset score, simplified score and the hypnotic BeatMap precisely synchronised to all performances.
Specially commissioned synchronised commentary, book and in-depth musical analysis by David Owen Norris.
Over 90 minutes of specially filmed video insights from experts including John Eliot Gardiner, Gustavo Dudamel and several musicians from the Berliner Philharmoniker.
John especially recommends the Karajan recording (one of two very worthwhile recordings under his baton) and the Gardiner. His other picks include Chailly. All can be purchased below from Amazon:
Tributes to Claudio Abbado
He also had amazing eyes and once said, “you can do much with your eyes, in music and in life." With those eyes he communicated love for music and for musicians. He knew every score from memory so, musicians always remarked, he could spend more time looking at them and communicating more deeply with them.
The great, great conductor Claudio Abbado died yesterday at the age of 80.
Chicago audiences will remember him as the CSO's principle guest conductor in the 80s. A tireless nurturer of young musicians, he founded several youth orchestras: the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (which Bonnie and I once had the pleasure of hearing at the Edinburgh Festival) and the Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart.
NPR's Fred Plotkin, whose books I regularly recommend in my opera classes, offers a very personal tribute that's clearly decades in the making. Recounting personal experiences with Abbado in rehearsal at La Scala, he tells us:
Anyone who worked with him remembers his disarming smile, one that evinced his love of music and for his fellow humans, especially young people. He also had amazing eyes and once said, “you can do much with your eyes, in music and in life." With those eyes he communicated love for music and for musicians. He knew every score from memory so, musicians always remarked, he could spend more time looking at them and communicating more deeply with them.
NPR offers a more standard bio here, and ClassicalFM has a roundup of audio reminisences.
To see Abbado in action, the Berliner Philharmoniker has several free Abbado concerts you can stream online (registration required). Included, among other things, are the Brahms Requiem and the complete Beethoven Symphonies.
Revealed: The 8 Operas That Changed the World
Audio: John Gibbons reveals (and defends) the operas to be covered in his next Graham School course, and discusses some of the works he cosidered, but didn't make the cut. 10-minute audio file.
Barring another epic blast of #Chiberia weather, an intrepid bunch of "Gleacher Creatures" will gather at Chicago's Graham School tomorrow (January 7) for "8 Operas That Changed the World." So, which operas made the elite eight? Some, I presume, will be obvious to opera buffs, and others may surprise you. In this ten-minute audio recording I discuss what drove the selections -- not every choice is a "greatest" opera, or even, necessarily, the favorite from each composer. I also mention some worthy contenders which, for various reasons, were omitted.
Comments are welcome - from students and blog readers equally!
No time to listen? The selected operas are:
- Claudio Monteverdi's last opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (The coronation of Poppea) of 1642.
- Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro, or The Day of Madness) of 1786
- Giuseppe Verdi, Rigoletto (1851)
- Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (1865)
- Modest Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov (1874)
- Georges Bizet, Carmen (1875)
- Richard Strauss, Salome (1905)
- Alban Berg, Wozzeck (1925)
Deryck Cooke’s historic analysis of Mahler 10
Via Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc blog, Deryck Cooke discusses his performing edition of the 10th Symphony, left unfinished by Mahler and completed by Cooke.
It's almost two hours of discussion and played excerpts, and well worth it.
Director Patrice Chereau Dead at 68
"A director should love all of his characters. Even if the character is a murderer or a monster, you have to love them. You have to accept them, and try to understand how they managed to do what they've done."
The French director Patrice Chereau, famed for his 1976 production of Wagner's Ring Cycle for the Bayreuth Festival, has died of lung cancer at 68. Chereau directed for the theater, film and opera and made rare on-screen appearances. (American moviegoers may remember him as the French general in "Last of the Mohicans.")
In a 2009 interview with Ignatiy Vishnavetsky at the Chicago International Film Festival, Chereau said:
A director should love all of his characters. Even if the character is a murderer or a monster, you have to love them. You have to accept them, and try to understand how they managed to do what they've done. Try to understand. You should ask yourself: "Why is it like that? Why does this relationship seem so impossible? Why does he fuck up everything?"
Via Alex Ross. Read his review of Chereau's final production, which can be viewed on the web and will reach the Met in 2016.
Schoenberg Conducting Mahler 2nd
One commenter proclaims that it sounds the way Boulez would do it? Do you agree?
Via Norman Lebrecht:, Arnold Schoenberg conducting the second movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 2.
Mahler: 15 Questions
Has Mahler’s time come and gone? Or are all times Mahler times?
1. Does Waldmaerchen belong in performances of Das Klagende Lied?
2. The conductor Otto Klemperer calls the Finale of the First Symphony weak. Is it?
3. Is the Second Symphony especially indebted to predecessor symphonies (by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, for example)?
4. What’s Mahler’s best song(s)?
5. How important is the program of the Third Symphony? Is the work too heterogenous?
6. I think it was Paul Bekker who said Mahler’s symphonies are “finale symphonies.” How does this apply to the Fourth Symphony?
7. The conductor Erich Leinsdorf says Mahler is easy to conduct because you don’t need a steady tempo and the works are structural potpurris. Is this true?
8. Is it fair to accuse the Fifth Symphony of disunity?
9. What is the proper order of movements in the Sixth Symphony?
10. Is the title (not Mahler’s own) “Song of the Night” appropriate for the Seventh Symphony?
11. What is the significance of the tonalities in the Ninth Symphony?
12. Are the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde really symphonies?
13. How viable and/or necessary is the Tenth Symphony?
14. If I love Mahler, does that mean I’m supposed to love Schoenberg and Berg as well? How about Britten and Shostakovich?
15. Has Mahler’s time come and gone? Or are all times Mahler times?