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)
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.
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?
Copenhagen's "Ring": Why "Eurotrash" Isn't the Whole Story
Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Regietheater Bomb. I sympathize with people who spend hundreds of bucks on tickets and end up with a two-headed Wotan, an Alberich who’s a gaudy pimp or Supreme Court Justice Fricka. But consider this: you can stage these things in your mind, and I don’t just mean closing your eyes in the theater.
Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Regietheater Bomb.
I’m always up for a Ring with Viking suits, if there are any left today. It works fine – better than fine – because it’s wholly consonant with the original choreographic and semantic nature of the cycle.
I sympathize with people who spend hundreds of bucks on tickets to a live performance and end up with a two-headed Wotan, an Alberich who’s a gaudy pimp or Supreme Court Justice Fricka. But consider this: you can stage these things in your mind, and I don’t just mean closing your eyes in the theater. We have the Ring as a permanent endowment. The theater of imagination in recordings or at the piano (if anyone still plays) can provide the traditional underpinnings that establish the work’s bona fides. At this point, I even see something sentimental and nostalgic in Viking helmets, but I don’t see anything regressive about desiring such a representation. The specific locus of the cycle in Northern European mythology has a deep importance for the work. Let that be said and never gainsaid. To rebut this is to rebut the place of art in history.
I once had a professor who taught Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, who wholly disputed the primacy of the relation between Arthurian legends and Tennyson’s contemporary world. Understanding that work as even primarily metaphorical does not allow us to disregard the garb the work wears. Such is the case with Wagner’s Ring. I surely don’t recommend reading the Icelandic saga Edda, or the risible Nibelungenlied with its Amazonian Krimhild (Brünnhilde) winning feats of strength. I don’t recommend that everyong go out and buy Wolfram von Eschenbach’s wierdly erotic medievalisms.
With apologies to Tolkien fans, that stuff is boring. Viking suits can become boring, too.
That’s why I love (or at least cheerfully tolerate) Eurotrash. My “personal Wagner” is impregnable, like some Pentecostalist’s “personal savior.”
Which brings us to the Copenhagen Ring, the so-called Feminist Ring production by Kasper Bech Holten. (Read about the production at the Royal Danish Theater’s website.)
Firstly, it’s a good sign that the Michael Schønwandt, conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra, is a musician of obvious discernment who cares about subtlety, nuance and real musical value. Schønwandt, known to me through an excellent set of DVDs of the Nielsen symphonies, has proven himself again with a thoughtful, vibrant, fresh and surely learned approach to these well-known if enormously complex scores. He doesn’t try to prove himself through irreverence, or chamber music textures, or grotesque exaggeration, or strangely self-identifying tempo extravagances. His magic fire music glitters and glows. Hagen’s watch glowers. The forest murmurs place you under a tree in your favorite park.
The smokin’ good Brünnhilde, (Iréne Theorin) was a new discovery to me. (Apparently she’s owned the Wagner soprano roles in Copenhagen for years, and her Bayreuth debut as Isolde opposite Robert Dean Smith’s Tristan took place this past summer.) Theorin’s Brünnhilde is not some cruel heridan when a Valkyrie. Neither is she some majestic sage-woman as a mortal; she’s simply a woman, sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate (in ways both sweet and profound), but always human and vital.
More importantly for collectors, Theorin handles Brünnhilde’s taxing role not just with aplomb but with an almost casual technical ease, allowing the listener to focus on what her character is and not whether she can handle this or that technical stretch. An exceptional artist, indeed. I don’t bandy these words lightly. For, although, Wagnerian tenors are as rare as cheap tickets to Bayreuth, good Brünnhildes are still a find. By the way, I wouldn’t normally comment on such a topic, but I will do so now to avoid confusion. In recent photos, such as some of the ones on the Copenhagen site, Theorin is thin. In this Ring DVD (from 2006) she is heavy. She’s lost considerably weight in the past couple of years.
The Rheingold Wotan (Johann Reuter) was appropriately cruel, with the facile callousness of youthful power. It’s amusing that Scene 4 devolved into a weird and grotesque simile of the Hostel movie franchise. (Chaining Alberich in a white subway-tiled room next to a tray or surgical instruments was not a good sign.) I like horror movies, I must admit, and although I’m staring at my toes, nervously shuffling my feet, I like Hostel. It pushes the envelope as horror movies have done since Jason and Freddie shredded their first teenagers. Does this belong in Wagner? Just read the libretto, you!
As Wotan in DieWalküre and Der Wanderer in Siegfried, the American bass-baritone James Johnson was often very moving, and always commanding. This, itself, is not unusual (there are many moving Wotans) but it seemed to stand out in the context of this cruel Ring. When he was onstage, the production never lost me.
Fasolt. Here he have the greatest Fasolt in DVD history. A man (giant) so consumed by the fires of love and jealousy and possessiveness and sentimentality. A crude, cruel man who doesn’t understand his own impulses of tenderness and violence, erotic malaise and grotesque pseudo masculinity. And ultimately, he generates genuine pathos. This was the greatest portrayal of Fasolt that I’ve ever heard; and, in fact, Stephan Milling has reinvented Fasolt as a major figure to be reckoned with for all future Rings. This revelatory performance sets the standard; incredibly moving and equally disturbing, Rheingold profoundly benefits from this unprecedented incursion of human pathos. Bravo!
This is billed as the Feminist Ring, for reasons that weren’t always obvious to me as I watched. I was full of questions: What kind of division (or possibly politics) separates a feminist Ring from another kind of Ring? How can one gender score at the expense of the other? Well, of course it cannot. Wagner knew this and it is impossible to disentangle the author’s gender bias from his work. It’s all fruitless surmise. But Brünnhilde with apologies to Siegmund, is the single positive figure in the Ring. And wanting justice isn’t the same as claiming unwarranted privilege.
As a partial answer, this Ring is depicted as a flashback from Brünnhilde’s point of view. Kasper Bech Holten (blog) believes that each of us “writes” a personal mythology, and it’s Brünnhilde’s personal mythology that he dramatizes in this Ring. Her mythology centers on freeing herself from what Bech (in the liner notes) describes as an Electra complex via her break from Wotan.
In this sense, the Copenhagen Ring is a tremendous success. The greatest and most human operas, by which I mean The Marriage of Figaro, Fidelio, and Die Walkure, abandon utterly the traditional male hegemony implicit in Teutonic culture, although all these works are, in fact, Teutonic. Wagner’s awareness of the plight of women and his gentleness in expressing essentially feminine problems extant in his society is an under-studied topic.
This Ring doesn’t pursue these issues in particularly coherent ways. On the contrary, it is full of knee-jerk, hysterical political talking points that sometimes detract from the potential of a feminist Ring. But it’s a step, if not in the right direction, or even one endorsed by Wagner, that points to an underrated part of what the Wagnerian ethos is. I’m fully aware that there are so-called scholarly works that attempt to portray Wagner as a feminine figure. But the reality in most Ring productions is that Siegfried and Wotan dominate except for the immolation. This flawed, peculiar, and often immature production takes a firm step in a promising direction.
Are Viking suits better than feminist deconstruction and the grisliness of Hostel? Of course. But I can always reconstruct the literal Ring in my mind as I listen to innumerable recordings or probe my past fixations. This Ring, often silly and rarely profound, offers the potential of newly exeriencing not just a well-worn favorite but probably the essential work of my musical life. And for that, I say “Bravo!”
The Copenhagen Ring: The Complete DVD Set starring Stig Andersen, Irenie Theorin, Gitta-Maria Sjoberg, Johan Reuter, Stephen Milling
Update
on 2013-06-19 20:19 by John Gibbons
Originally posted Mar 24, 2009. Reposted for the Ring Cycle class.
Is Rachmaninov a Waste of Time?
I recently read, generally with pleasure, Alfred Brendel’s book Me of All People. In passing, I’d like to remark that Brendel’s book Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out are among the admittedly large number of musical commentaries I return to with considerable frequency. This book, Me of All People (Cornell University Press 2001) pleased me less than Brendel’s other books, but probably because it’s a series of conversations in contrast to the exceptionally erudite books of his I had earlier read. (Alfred Brendel on Music is a compilation of essays from his earlier two books.)
As I am in the process of preparing a Rachmaninov/Prokofiev class, a comment from Me of All People caught my eye:
“…I am not a Rachmaninov fan. The piano repertoire is vast, and Rachmaninov to me seems a waste of time.”
This comment isn’t interesting in itself. Not my view, but Brendel is not here to be a Rachmaninov fan. His specialty is German masters from Haydn to Liszt. Paradoxically, what is interesting about his comment is that it’s boring. And it’s boring because it’s the old tune of the German pedant or would-be pedant.
It might be the necessary opinion for an artist like Brendel to hold — and if I comment that the president of the Rachmaninov Society, Vladimr Ashkenazy, is at once a more versatile and technically gifted pianist, doesn’t invalidate the point. And I’ve never heard Ashkenazy play Schubert the way Brendel is able to play Schubert.
But Brendel’s cool. Just don’t go to him to learn about Rachmaninov. There is no problem with Brendel’s comment, but it is unlikely to teach us anything about Rachmaninov. In fact, I don’t even question the legitimacy of Brendel’s statement, I just find it boring, because it’s just what you would expect from a Germanic specialist. And generally, the classical music world is extricating itself from the doctrines of 18th and 19th-century Teutonic specialists.
So, for the purposes of this article, I want to consider if there are valid reasons to find Rachmaninov worthwhile.
One of the ignorant claptraps about Rachmaninov is that he’s a sentimental Slavic melodist. Some of us would only prefer that he really was! Not me, however. In fact, in the corpus of Rachmaninov’s piano works, there are reasonably few memorable melodies. And most of those are in the concertos or, in fact, borrowed from other composers or that inestimable reservoir of pseudo-folk Russianness that, likewise, inhabits the music of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev if not Scriabin or Shostakovich.
Preparing for my class, I have had occasion to play most of Rachmaninov’s piano music, and naturally I’ve heard the great interpreters of this oeuvre from Richter to Horrowitz to Ashkenazy — and, especially, Rachmaninov himself: The best pianist I’ve heard in person or on record.
Brendel shows an ignorance (which he acknowledges) when he writes that he doesn’t know the late works of Rachmaninov. He doesn’t specify which works he’s missed, but if they include the Etudes Tableaux, shame on him for commenting in a public forum on Rachmaninov en general.
I’d like to enumerate the especial strength of the two sets of Preludes, Op. 23 and 32 and the Etudes Tableaux Op. 33 and 39, with occasional reservations:
These works rely more on texture and counterpoint than on melody — an essentially sound strategy for piano music (as opposed to vocal or string music).
Oddly, there’s tons of Bach in Rachmaninov. Consider the figurations in the minuet pastiche of Op. 23 No. 3, and the Corelli Variations, for example. And the C Minor Prelude Op. 23 No. 7 sounds like a fantastical updating of C.P.E. Bach’s famous (or infamous) Solfegietto. I could go on — Rachmaninov was a devotee of the Baroque.
And I will go on: inner voice canonic imitation is de rigeur in Rachmaninov’s piano style. Don’t believe me? I ain’t got the time, pal. It’s everywhere.
Does this make Rachmaninov an honorary German that Brendel ought to admire? No. Like more than a few romantics and post-romantics (Schumann and Brahms, for example — not to mention Schoenberg) Bach was probably his most significant master. There’s more Bach than Tchaikovsky in these works.
There are those who consider Rachmaninov a reactionary because he didn’t use fancy (au courant) harmonies. Why should he? Contemporaries like Scriabin and Szymanowski et al, were doing plenty of that without him. And the piano isn’t a fundamentally harmonic idiom — if only because its homogeneity of tone renders spicy dissonances less important than textural and dynamic contrasts (which Rachmaninov excelled at).
Like Chopin, Rachmaninov combined the principles of the etude and the characteristics of the prelude seamlessly. Naturally, not all are equally successful. The A flat prelude Op. 23 No. 8, is a stinker. The E flat minor prelude, Op. 23 No. 9 is an etude-esque masterpiece.
Brendel loves Liszt: why doesn’t he love the C Major prelude Op. 32 No. 1, which invokes the opening essay in Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes?
In all fairness, rhythmic ostinati are all too prevelent in Rachmaninov’s oeuvre. The dotted rhythm of Op. 32 No. 2 is maddening in its insistency.
Purely subjectively: Rachmaninov’s greatest gift is in combining voluptuousness with morbidity. (Not that kind of voluptuousness, you!)
The Etudes Tableaux are a brand new form. Naturally, they are related to Nikolai Medtner’s Skazki (Tales). While they fully retain the Skazki’s storytelling connotation, they do not rely on a specific narrative.
There’s precious little virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake in Liszt. That element in Liszt’s style is too often exaggerated (by players as well as critics) in his major works. And Rachmaninov has very little as well. The works are hard because they’re hard: delineation of inner voices, careful climax-building, etc. provide the difficulty. I personally have often struggled more with awesomely great composers like Gottschalk and Thallberg than I have with Rachmaninov — which is convenient for us “spiritual players” who value soul over fingers( ‘cause our fingers can’t move fast enough). But I admit that unlike Chopin, the difficult pieces in Rachmaninov don’t generally correspond with the best pieces.
There is a manufactured quality to the preludes and etudes. This is a tribute to great craftsmanship; Rachmaninov wasn’t Chopin,whose music almost never betrays the laborious process of creation in the finished product. But doesn’t craftsmanship count? Even Rachmaninov’s more reasonable detractors don’t argue with the craftsmanship of works like the second and third concerti — only with their popularity!
To call Rachmaninov a reactionary is a historical prejudice. Hindemith, Respighi, Ravel could earn the same sobriquet. Even, occasionally, Haydn, Mozart and Brahms could be tagged thusly. Rachmaninov was the living continuation and culmination of the Tchaikovsky - Rubenstein - Taneyev strain of Russian lyricism. Rachmaninov didn’t have his finger to the wind, like certain notorious contemporaries (Stravinsky, I’m looking in your direction…) but it is unassailibly true that music history would have taken its evident course if Rachmaninov had never lived. He’s not Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner or Schoenberg. But certain contemporaries equally can be described by poindexter-types as cul-de-sacs (Scriabin, Medtner and Miaskovsky, for example).
Waste of time? If it’s a “waste of time” to have Rachmaninov instead of more Schubert and Beethoven, then it’s a waste of time to read any Turgenev or Chekhov, as opposed to Gogol and Tolstoy. Theoretically, you can fill your time only with the greatest of the great. But you can never do them sufficient justice, anyway, and you compromise a lively adaptability to individual voices.
Update on 2013-06-19 20:16 by John Gibbons
Originally posted Aug 24, 2008. Reposted for the Great Pianists class’s enjoyment.
Friday Links
An 8-year-old piano student takes on Anthony Tommasini's Top 10 Composers. His wonderful letter (with hand-drawn portaits intended to be Schumann and Tchaikovsky) lists the kid's "greatest" list, plus the ten he likes best. He's sorry if his departures from Tommasini's pick's hurt the critic's feelings.
Reviews of Covent Garden's Anna Nicole production are out. (Composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage, Librettist: Richard Thomas) The Independent, The Telegraph, NY Times.
Last week, the Boston Lyric Opera Annex presented Viktor Ullmann's opera The Emperor of Atlantis (Der Kaiser von Atlantis). Like its better-known counterpart Brundibar, this opera was composed and rehearsed in Theriesienstadt (the Nazi's "model camp" near Prague) and everyone involved in the opera was soon on a train to Auschwitz. Kaiser is a barely-disguised study on Hitler, war and totalitarianism (libretto by Pietr Kien) that may have hastened Ullmann's gassing. Consequently, a professional production inevitably lots of press coverage and reviews.
Decca is launching a new classical label designed to be "more relevant." Meanwhile, the topic of discussion on social media has been Alex Ross's "Why do we hate modern classical music?" from back in November and Michael Fedo's recent follow-up "Why does contemporary classical music spurn melody?" By no means is the classical twitterverse conceding that modern classical music even does spurn melody, while others are defending the place in the world for "ugly" music and debating ways to help people acquire the taste. We hope to find the time to join in the debate. Normally I'd say we missed the window, but if Fedo can respond to a November post in February...