In the last few years my music has completely fallen off the map. Except for a small frisson that “Hyperchromatica” seems to have created among young microtonalists, interest in my music has settled around zero. There are many plausible reasons: I’m a white male in an identity-politics era, my approach to microtonality is too baffling, everyone ignores composers who haven’t become brand names by a certain age, I live in the boondocks, I’m not a “people person.” For the first time since the 1980s I have just gone 14 months without composing anything. At the moment I can’t stand the thought of putting energy into something no one will perform. Perhaps this will change again.
This interview will appear in the forthcoming book “What Musicians Really
Think” along with 29 other interviews with composers and performers.
It can be a little difficult to read the subtleties of the person on the other side of the screen when you’re teaching on Skype. You can tell the basics – tired, excited – you may have just put your kids to sleep as the other person is having their first sip of morning coffee. But when I saw Y (not his real name) last week, his usual chatter, the buoyancy of a teenage boy – his flair and interest in sharing stories of our different cultures – these were all muted. He lives in a city of 12 million, quite far from the epicenter of WuHan that we hear so much about. After some time, after the Sevcik and the Sibelius – I asked how school was. Maybe it’s the narrow focus of the media – I try to cast a net – the Guardian and NYT are daily reads – but somehow it didn’t occur to me that Y, and his entire city was on lock-down.
The planned Chinese New Year trip to the ancestral mountain village had been cancelled. In fact, there had been no school, no violin lessons, no outside for 14 year old Y and his family for weeks. He said – “everyone is sick, we are afraid when we run out of food – someone has to go out there and get more….“. What he left unsaid showed clearly on his face. He was afraid – I noticed their small apartment looked different – not the tidy place I am used to seeing on the rectangle of my iPad. And Y hadn’t prepared his lesson in his usual diligence.
Y is one of a large handful of online students – some from remote areas who need some kind of input (I have one student from India), old students or new friends who want audition prep, things like this. When I met Y, and his Dad saw us work together, a new Skype relationship was born. I know how goofy he is, how he loves to show off with his breakneck technique and toss of his teenager hair. And so after we hung up, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his family. The psychological toll, the isolation and fear.
And so, I devised a Coronavirus Daily Bootcamp Workout for Y, and proposed it to his father. 2 new videos every day into our Skype – a new devilishly hard Sevcik scale with metronome, and a new page of his new concerto. Every day. And very very good. They thought for 2 days about it, and now, I already have a veritable library of videos. I watch them, send comments, ask him to re-do – and add new assignments. We will continue this every day until he can go outside again. I can see him smile sometimes, now, as he careens through a new page of Symphony Espagnole or a Bach Fugue. He complains a little at the pace, but I say – “I need you to work hard, Y – I want you to come out of this as a new violinist“. We have a pretty big pile of emojis that land in our chat space, and he gives me a wink and a smile, and says – “ok I can do this!“
Musicians are a world-wide community. As I see countries closing down their live concerts, people being isolated, I wonder what we can do to help our friends as they struggle through dark thoughts and tragedy. I hope that Y will emerge from his home soon, with something new to share with his friends and teachers. Or, at least, with new tools to try to work through his own demons.
The marvellous Italian soprano died today at her home in Modena. She was 84.
A close ally of Luciano Pavarotti, they were raised by the same nurse as their mothers worked at the tobacco factory in Modena. Fregni (she soon dropped the ‘g’) made her debut at 19 in Modena, as Micaela in Carmen. She married her voice teacher, the conductor Leone Magiera, and made her international breakthrough in 1960 at Glyndebourne, where she sang Adina in Franco Zeffirelli’s staging of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Within a couple of years, she was Herbert von Karajan’s favourite Italian soprano and Pavarotti’s frequent partner. After her divorce from Magiera, she married the bass Nicolai Ghiaurov in 1978.
She sang for 40 years at the Met, one of its all-time favourites. The director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle said of Freni that she was ‘a real, concrete woman with great poesia. Everything she does is absolutely real.’
I feel ready now to share a very sad piece of news. It happened ten days ago, and has been such a shock to me that I didn’t immediately want to share it with the world. For the moment I will just write this, and not comment further. At the end of my most recent CD recording sessions (Beethoven Variations in Berlin), when I was so happy with the results and feeling elated, the piano movers came into the control room (where I was finishing up with my producer) to say they had dropped my precious Fazioli concert grand piano. My very own that I have used for all of my CD recordings done in Europe since 2003 (and of course for many concerts). I couldn’t believe it. Well yes, it happened, and unfortunately the piano, now that it has been inspected by Ing. Fazioli and his staff, is not salvageable. The iron frame is broken, as well as much else in the structure and action (not to mention the lid and other parts of the case). It makes no sense, financially or artistically, to rebuild this piano from scratch. It’s kaputt. The movers of course were mortified. In 35 years of doing their job, this had never happened before. At least nobody was hurt.
I adored this piano. It was my best friend, best companion. I loved how it felt when I was recording–giving me the possibility to do anything I wanted. It was also the only F278 Fazioli in the world to have the 4-pedal mechanism (normally reserved for the F308 model). And It only recently had new hammers and strings put on it. You will hear on the Beethoven Variations CD (when it comes out in November, I hope) that it was in top form. Now it is no longer.
For my festival this summer in Umbria, of course we will still have Faziolis–that goes without saying. And at least I have no recording scheduled in the next few months. But now there is all the insurance saga (hopefully this won’t take long), and then I can choose a new one in Sacile when Mr. Fazioli has three of them ready for me. But what with his production schedule, and my touring around the world, this will take some months, I imagine.
You can hear this piano on my most recent recording–the Six Partitas of Bach (BBC Music Magazine’s Record of the Month, by the way), but also on so many others. One of my favourites for the sheer quality of sound and colour from my Fazioli is the Debussy CD, of which you can hear extracts here. I hope my piano will be happy in piano heaven…..
The international coloratura Margareta Hallin died today, aged 88.
After several years at the Royal Swedish Opera, she sang at Glyndebourne, Florence, Vienna, Hamburg, Moscow, Covent Garden and Copenhagen. Her last appearance was in Faust at Gävle, in 2015.
In later years she composed song-cycles, a chamber opera and incidental music for the theatre.
The latest Slippedisc review from the CBSO100 season spotlights a welcome new trend:
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★
Six years ago the San Francisco orchestra came here and gave us a Symphonie Fantastique which was as perfectly honed and smooth as a well-oiled machine, every surface polished and buffed to a dazzling shine. It was also about as intoxicating as a cold alcohol-free beer.
Klaus Mäkelä and the CBSO gave us the real thing, music with the visceral kick of grain spirit followed by several double espressos. The young Finn channelled his inner angst-ridden romantic hero and inspired the orchestra to a magnificent performance. Here was young Berlioz’s masterpiece in toto, its depths plumbed and heights soared to, rocketing from languorous debilitating ennui to hair-tearing frenzy, from passages of utmost quiet and tenderness to a raucous, brazen, grotesque finale. Memorable details abounded: Rachael Pankhurst’s dolorous cor anglais and the fiddles’ accompanying blanched desolation; a corps of energized timpani that made heads crane to get a glimpse of them; and convincing off-stage bells too.
“I want to make visit this my template”, Nicola Benedetti told us after a sparkling performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Instead of the usual soloist’s hasty hotel-platform-airport routine she gave a masterclass at Birmingham Conservatoire and an inspiring meeting with a hundred of the city’s young string players and their music teachers, in between two packed concerts. Oh yes, her playing was pretty nifty too: an opening movement that flowed with no self-indulgent dreaminess; a really spontaneous-sounding cadenza; a singing Andante – sweetly characterful wind playing – and a finale as vivacious as one could wish for.
Norman Stinchcombe
The international violinist Anastasia Chebotareva has been arrested in Moscow on embezzlement charges.
Chebotareva shared second prize at the 1994 International Tchaikovsky Competition with the US violinist Jennifer Koh. No first prize was given that year.
Chebotareva, now 47, went on to play with major orchestras worldwide.
She married a man called Andrei Popov, who became known as ‘God Kuzya’, leader of a religious cult.
Chebotereva was placed on the police wanted list. Arrested this week, it was claimed in court that she is suffering from a brain tumour and epilepsy. She was remanded in custody until March for further investigation. Popov is reported to have disowned her.
There has been a huge amount of chatter about a tweet from Sony Classical which confused John Williams, the film composer, with John Williams, the guitar virtuoso.
Some kindly souls have ascribed the howler to a lowly intern.
Wrong. On two counts.
First, never blame the mouse if the house caves in.
Second, it is symptomatic of a label that, under present management, treats artists as product.
Sony is not driven by editorial objectives and aesthetic taste, allied to acute commercial nous. It no longer identifies talent and nurtures it to stardom. Nor does it lead any intelligent issue or talking point in classical music, with the possible exception of Igor Levit’s Beethoven piano sonaata cycle.
Sony is just there.
Not a leader, not a nurturer, not an entity that engages meaningfully with music.
If it were not there, one would hardly notice.
In such circumstances, one artist is just the same as another, the more so if they happen to share the same name.
No regret has been expressed for the error.
Argerich called Annie Fischer the female pianist she liked best.
Choral Fantasy, opus 80 (1808), Ah, perfido! (1796)
The Vienna concert that Beethoven gave on December 22, 1808 was the richest and craziest in the history of music. It contained the premieres of both fifth and sixth symphonies, as well as the fourth piano concerto and excerpts from the Mass in C-major, plus the concert aria Ah, perfido! (see below) and a solo piano extemporization. In the days before the concert, Beethoven got worried that he had not written enough music so he composed a final piece, a 20-minute fantasy for piano, chorus and orchestra.
The concert lasted four hours, with Beethoven as both piano soloist and conductor. He had no more than a couple of days of rehearsal and he could never be sure from one session to the next if key players would turn up. The result, in a freezing hall, was a complete mess, with Beethoven calling for corrections during the course of the concert. That anyone emerged alive was a miracle. A member of the Esterhazy family gave Beethoven a hundred gold pieces afterwards to make sure he was not out of pocket.
The crowning glory of the concert – the choral fantasy – was an embarrassment. It still sounds that way. There is no obvious justification for a piano soloist to introduce a chorus and orchestra and then keep interrupting them. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the Choral Fantasy was a dry run for the finale of the Ninth Symphony more than a decade later.
The first criterion for any performance of the work is that it should be sane and stable. Alfred Brendel and Bernard Haitink tick those boxes. Their 1977 LPO extravaganza was recorded in a municipal wedding hall and ripples with witty piano riffs.
Arturo Toscanini in 1938 New York gets through the work about three minutes faster than anyone else, as if he can’t be bothered to waste more time on such nonsense. The sound is NBC’s boxiest.
Daniel Barenboim, the pianist, with Otto Klemperer in 1968, plays the introduction as if it contains the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, while the conductor drags the orchestra along as if by the scruff of their collars. It’s almost a caricature and, as such, unexpectedly illuminating
I admire the nobility of Alicia de Larrocha with Riccardo Chailly in Berlin 1986 and the reticence of Menahem Pressler with Kurt Masur in Leipzig, 1994. Pierre-Laurent Aimard feels rather leaden with Nikolaus Harnoncourt (2003). But a much younger Frenchman, Bertrand Chamayou, goes at it all fingers blazing in an altogether more light-hearted French performance by Laurence Equilbey and her chorus and orchestra. This was freshly minted in 2019 and it feels like a performance of this monstrosity that was made for our time.
Recordings of the concert aria Ah perfido are more numerous. Bear in mind that this is the only time you will hear Maria Callas singing Beethoven. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it.
Described by Beethoven as ‘an Italian scena written by Beethoven for Madame Duschek’ (who was one of Mozart’s favourite singers), it’s an ode to a perfidious lover who walks out just as his beloved is planning the wedding. She is not pleased. The words, by the opera librettist Metastasio, are pretty trite. What Beethoven makes of them is something else altogether.
Among 30-odd soloists on record, Maria Callas makes this aria absolutely her own. Recording in 1964 with Nicola Rescigno and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris, she chills the blood to zero with her opening cry of ‘Ah, perfido’, instilling such terror in the listener that one feels a faint tweak of sympathy with the rotten defector. She then goes on to reshape the aria into one of those bel canto monologues from Norma or Anna Bolena, where the heroine commands the stage with a kaleidoscope of vocal colours. I had no idea that this recording existed. I am so glad it does. The tenderness in the middle is heart-rending
The antipode to Callas is Birgit Nilsson who, in 1958 with Heinz Wallberg and the Philharmonia Orchestra, turns the aria into Wagnerian drama, full of crime and Rhinemaidens, intimating immolation – a very different kind of terror.
And if you’d imagined this was the only Wagnerian route into the song, listen to Kirsten Flagstad in 1937 for a more prosaic account of the bust-up, as if she was singing the story to an arresting officer who had apprehended the miscreant. Flagstad, the most organic of sopranos, presents a woman who is disappointed in love but by no means broken. You could imagine her agreeing to a date with the cop. Such lovely, unstressed singing.
Passing quickly over Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Gwyneth Jones, the Straussian soprano Inge Borkh takes us into more complicated psychological territory, a Scandi-noir thriller of her own scripting, and gripping to the very end.
You will want to drop in on Frida Leider in 1924, a style of singing that was already on its last legs, and Regine Crespin in the closing pages is profoundly affecting, in a 1967 recording conducted by Thomas Schippers.
But you’ll thank me for detaining you for an extra quarter-hour to listen to a pure contralto, Janet Baker, singing with Raymond Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra. The loss of full-on soprano heft is compensated by a detailed exploration of the jilted woman’s feelings about a man she knows was never right for her. Baker is such a good psychologist of feminine dilemmas and her voice shines here like polished brass. Be overwhelmed, or your money back.
UPDATE: Larry L. Lash has added some very useful context to the Callas recording below:
Callas’ studio recording of “Ah! perfido” was made during sessions at the Salle Wagram in Paris in December 1963 and January 1964 for her EMI album of Beethoven, Mozart, and Weber. Between December 1963 and April 1964 she and Rescigno also recorded arias by Verdi, Rossini, and Donizetti, many of which have never been released.
Callas turned 40 on 4 December 1963.
1963 was a sparse year for live performances: no operas, and only concerts, mostly with the same program, in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, London, Paris, and Copenhagen. The only surprises were some oddities such as “Quando m’en vo’” – Musetta’s aria from Act II of “La bohème,” available on some pirated recordings of the Paris concert.
Aside from studio recordings (many unreleased), 1964 had only a run as Tosca for six performances at Covent Garden (Act II of which is the only video recording of Callas in a fully-staged performance, from 21 January 1964), and eight Normas at the Palais Garnier between 22 May and 24 June.
All that would remain for Callas’ career in staged opera were the final 1965 runs of “Tosca” – nine at the Palais Garnier between 19 February and 13 March; two at the Metropolitan Opera on 19 and 25 March; and her final performance on 5 July at Covent Garden – and “Norma,” of which she attempted a run of five performances at the Palais Garnier in May, but cancelled midway during the last show on 29 May, leaving her final Norma incomplete (it can be heard on pirated recordings).
I find her studio recording of “Ah! perfido” difficult to listen to: it is one of her recordings in which her vocal deterioration robs me of being able to enjoy her interpretation. The stridency and wobble are too much for me to ignore.
The recording was not Callas’ first brush with Beethoven: under her birth name of Maria Kalogeropoulos she sang Leonore in “Fidelio” (apparently in Greek) on 14, 15, and 17 August 1944 at the amphitheatre of Herodes Atticus in Athens (a blurry photo from Act I exists). She was 20, and the glowing reviews helped propel her to a major international career which began on 2 August 1947 as Ponchielli’s Gioconda at the Arena di Verona.
