On hearing that the Italian pair are about to release their first duets, a former DG employee has shared with us this wild reminiscence of classical recording in its heyday:
Over twenty years ago, I recorded a Duet with Cecilia and Andrea – I Believe by Eric Levy – for an album called Hymn for the World. We recorded it in Rome at Santa Cecilia with Myung Whun Chubg. This had to be done secretly as Bocelli’s management was opposed, so the orchestra we pre-recorded. In the middle of it – Bocelli’s management came into the hall screaming that this was not allowed and we would all be fired or worse. Chung said calmly that if the artists want to sing and record, why couldn’t they. The other issues could be resolved later. Cecilia sat on stage quietly, looking somewhat bemused. Andrea sat in silence. (He had already made up his mind to drop the management that was taking nearly everything he earned. He shaved his head before publicity shots they wanted in protest not long after.)
I still have a DAT of the duet, never released. It was the first time Cecilia sang in English.
France 2 were filming it. No idea what happened to the video but it was also blocked. ‘I Believe’ was written for Pope JP2’s visit to a huge youth conference in Paris and it was somehow important to Myung Whun. The solo version with Bocelli was released. We used the orchestra track and recorded a pair of Korean singers doing the duet version for the Korean release of HFTW. And I later heard it on the BBC on a singing contest.
The tenor will sing three Rodolfos in Munich on November 22, 27, and December 9.
He sang the role first in 2004 in Stuttgart and last in Zurich in 2011.
But I guess it’s what’s available right now.
Rachel Willis-Sørensen sing Mimi. Bertrand de Billy conducts.
Our recent posts of songs by Gurney and Warlock has prompted several requests for something by the pipe-smoking E J Moeran. Who knew such loveliness lay behind that lugubrious exterior?
The Barcelona concertmaster Vlad Stanculeasa has been snapped up by Sinfonie Orchester Basel, where the music director is Ivor Bolton.
We have reached the last three posts in this six-month survey, sponsored by Idagio.com, of the complete works of Beethoven as reflected through their recorded history. The survey has accompanied us through a time of plague and death. There was a complete cessation of live musical activity around the world. For the first time in memory, we became dependent on recordings as the lone source of musical satisfaction. This unforseen development changed atittudes to the value of recording and to the relation of recording to live performance, though I suspect many years will pass before we appreciate the full implications of that perceptual shift. We are no longer the same as we were before the coronavirus breached our walls. In some ways, isolation may have rendered us more sensitive to music and, especially, to the tragic situation of Beethoven who could hear no music at all in his final years.
The 15th string quartet, his penultimate complete work, was actually composed before the 14th quartet, opus 131, and shares that work’s preoccupation with mortality and its indifference to difficulty. It is, first and foremost, an introspective work. As such, it presents the four players in the group with tough questions as to how they communicate with each other, before they begin to think about how to convey the work to an audience. To give one example, the third movement climaxes with all four players bowing half notes together sforzando, with sudden emphasis. How’s that supposed to be done, and how do they proceed to the next note?
The Emerson Quartet, nowadays the senior US string quartet, have a technique they call ‘park and go’ – almost stopping the bow after the sfz, and then speeding up the bowing motion towards the next change. Does that sounds hard? It is. The Emersons, as you’d expect, achieve exemplary clarity with this effect and an awe inspiring performance of tise work as a whole.
The central movement (of five) is titled Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an der Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart, ‘a holy song of thanks to God from a convalescent, (composed) in the Lydian mode’. The Lydian mode is a seven-tone scale used in 16th century church music, most vividly by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1994), whose ingenuity supposedly rescued music from the enforced return of Gregorian monody. Is Beethoven hinting here that he is saving the string quartet from regression to Haydn-like simplicities and Mozart frippery? More likely, he is reverting to the devotional music associated in his mind with Palestrina and Johann Sebastian Bach. He opens the quartet with a homage-to-Bach fugue.
His convalescence was from a life-threatening intestinal illness. Despatched by doctors to an out-of-season spa and denied his favourite comforts of alcohol and liver dumplings, he was in a foul mood, berating his nephew, his friends and all who tried to ease his distress. His recovery was slow, punctuated by bursts of anger and energy. He titled the second part of the middle movement Neue Kraft fühlend, feeling new strength. His thanksgiving is neither gentle nor submissive. It is Beethoven in the raw, striving to the end to alter the future of music.
A quotation of this movement can be heard in Béla Bartók’s third (and last) piano concerto; echoes of it permeate Arnold Schoenberg’s 1946 string trio, written after a near-death cardiac experience. Thomas Mann, in his novel of a tormented composer Doctor Faustus employs Beethoven, and this work in particular, as models of the humanly unattainable. Beethoven, having sent the work to a publisher, posted a short musical sketch to one of his physicians together with a rhyming couplet: Doctor, shut the door against death,
Notes (of music) will help anyone in need.
In his estimation, music was all that stood between Beethoven and his departure from the world.
Among more than 50 recordings, the Emerson Quartet stands out for beauty and the apparent ease of their delivery. Almost at the opposite polarity stand the Moscow-based Borodin Quartet, a group that lived through Stalin’s purges and were still playing when the Soviet Union fell apart, albeit with several changes of personnel. By the time of this 1989 recording, only the cellist Valentin Berlinsky survived from the original lineup, but his growly bass bowing gives their performance a dimension of struggle against great odds. Somehow, as in a Shostakovich quartet, there is more to this than the music you are hearing.
If you listen first to the LaSalle Quartet (1977), you may not turn to any other, so humane and insightful is their reading. Struck by the deep dignity of the thanksgiving movement, it comes as a shock to find that they play it in just quarter of an hour, four minutes faster than others and without ever stinting its internal contraditions. The Quartetto Italiano (1967) take just under twenty minutes over the thanksgiving – almost half the timespan of the entire work – but with such a lilting, singing, integrated manner that it feels entirely natural.
Stand by, then, for a minor jolt when I tell you that in the latest recording, by the Quatuor Ebène (2020), the middle movement eats up fully 21 minutes of their lives and ours and I am uncertain whether this is indulgence or inspiration. The athleticism of this group means there is no loss of tension or intonation and the very slowness brings out baroque dimensions of the Palestrina style that Beethoven many have had in mind. My inner jury is still out on the tempo, but the concluding allegro movement is marvellously supple and affectionate, a kiss on the composer’s troubled brow and a blessing to us all.
The five Texas opera houses are facing Covid from a single waggon. Press release:
October 1, 2020 – Houston Grand Opera (HGO), Austin Opera (AO), The Dallas Opera (TDO), Fort Worth Opera (FWO), and OPERA San Antonio (OSA) are pleased to announce the creation of the Texas Opera Alliance (TOA), a new partnership of the five companies, designed to advance and protect the future of the art form in Texas. Facing the same challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has presented for performing arts organizations across the globe, the five companies have identified this opportunity to give Texans more access to opera through a strategic alliance. The mission of the Texas Opera Alliance is to advance and diversify the operatic art form through innovative production partnerships, audience-building initiatives, and collaborative investments in new works, ensuring that opera continues to thrive in the Lone Star State.
In its first year, in addition to each organization implementing its own unique promotional initiatives, TOA will cross promote digital content and programming while creating unique touchpoints with audience members from all five organizations. In addition to streaming video content, TOA will provide member companies access to an array of publications and online resources, webinars, and supplementary programming. Through this cross promotion, the organizations’ digital content will have a larger reach.
The sought-after Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu has joined AskonasHolt for global management (except Italy).
He was formerly with a Swiss management.
Bell Percussion, one of the world’s leading music hire companies, has decided it cannot cope any longer through Covid. After 30 years, Bell is shutting up shop. Bell is a major supplier to orchestras and musicians with a fantastically knowledgeable and helpful staff.
But with music operating at such low volume, it’s hard for a percussion firm to carry on.
Here’s Mike Perry’s farewell letter:
I’m very sorry to inform you that Bell Music Ltd will be closing at the end of this year. There are a few reasons behind the closure but unsurprisingly the pandemic has had a significant effect on our industry and continues to do so. Without any sign of significant recovery, it just isn’t viable or commercially sensible to blindly continue into an unknown and untested future. In addition, the lockdown has compelled everyone to re-evaluate their lives, priorities and futures. Prior to COVID-19, restructuring the team would have been a challenging process. However, during the pandemic, the most damaging trading shock ever, the length of time, the huge financial uncertainty and the enormous disruption at such an unpredictable time has meant the only option left, is to close. Over the years I’ve tried to imagine every possible scenario that could shape the landscape of our industry and to the most part, have adapted the company accordingly. I just don’t have the answers to this.
If one were to look back to the start of the year, it would have been completely inconceivable that I’d be writing this today. So many people have reframed their lives and thinking – where will they work, how will they work and how they will live for the next few decades. Truly surreal times but one can only hope for a more thoughtful and kinder future. The pandemic has been a devastating blow to our sector and I am incredibly sad that after 30 years, I have to lose all of my staff. My people here are and always have been the life blood of this company and without them, there is no Bell. As a small company, we have always been a family and since the decision was made in July to close, my focus has been on helping everyone with their new futures. As this is not primarily a financial step, the equipment will not be sold but mothballed out of London until a future and unknown date. I am very sorry if our closure causes a short term blip to the industry but as ever, the market will adapt and new faces will inevitably pop up to fill the gaps. The timing of this announcement is to give the industry some months to adapt and whilst the retail and studio departments will continue until the end of the year, the hire department will slowly wind down during the next three months.
The world’s best boutique classical label has a big birthday today.
Here’s the official history: On 1st October 1980 – 40 years ago to the day – an advertisement was placed in Gramophone Magazine. ‘This month sees the introduction of a new label devoted to the presentation of fine, varied, and interesting repertoire, engineered to the highest present-day standards, attractively presented and priced. The first six releases are listed below, and further titles will be issued regularly. We will not specialise…except in good records – and the repertoire will cover all fields and periods, from ‘early’ music to the present day’ A66001 – Finzi and Stanford Clarinet Concertos with Thea King, The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Alun Francis (still available as CDH55101 after 40 years!) A66002 20th century Guitar Music by Alice Artzt A66003 Bushes and Briars and other English Folksongs with the tenor James Griffett and Timothy Walker on guitar A66004 Mussorgsky Pictures at an exhibition – for organ – Arthur Wills on the organ of Ely Cathedral (produced by Simon Perry aged 19 who, on his journey to Ely along the M11 was given a fixed penalty for speeding in his mother’s two-tone MGB GT V8!) A66012 Service High and Anthems Clear – Choir of Ely Cathedral directed by Arthur Wills (available on CDH88006) A66016 The Piano music of Samuel Barber performed by Angela Brownridge. (available on CDH88016)
Hyperion was founded by Ted Perry in 1980 and succeeded by his son Simon Perry following his death in 2003. Now, 40 years later, the label has close to 2,300 recordings in its catalogue and has won many, many awards.
I still have that Thea King first release on my shelves.
A trustworthy source in St Petersburg tells us that 74 out of 140 members of the Mariinsky choir have tested positive with Covid-19, as well as more than 30 members of the orchestra.
Performances are continuing regardless under orders from the music director.
The Norwegian authorities have ordered James Gaffigan to leave the country by Monday after he concludes a quarantine period.
Gaffigan, 41, was accused of breaking Covid rules. He has a Norwegian wife and child and will be separated from them.
Here’s what he tweets:
Well I love this gorgeous country Norway , but the immigration authorities want me out and I have to leave immediately. We thought staying together as a family was the right thing to do , and they are separating us indefinitely, even though my wife and child are Norwegian. Crazy
The conductor has been put in charge of an $11 million renovation programme at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg.
The arrangement was announced by the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko on President Putin’s orders.
Valery Gergiev is already tsar of the two Mariinsky theatres in St Petersburg and one in Vladivostok, as well as a a new theatre complex on Sakhalin Island – not to mention the Munich Philharmonic in occupied Bavaria.
This latterday imperialist will not let the Conservatoire out of his clutches.
