The last of Daniel Poulin’s fascinating contributions for 2021.

More, we hope, next year.

Daniel writes:

In great secrecy Gould and the Hamilton Philarmonic met to run through Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto. A young Juillard student, Jon Klibonoff was hired by Gould to stand for himself. Gould took a slow tempo for the first movement and even a much slower one for the second movement, always a favourite of his “the magnificent, glowing Adagio” he would often say. He told the orchestra he wanted… “to treat it almost like a Wesleyan hymn” and to conduct it not with three slow beats to the bar, but with twelve moderate beats. The experience was not successful; Gould lacked the technique to convey his idiosyncratic intentions clearly and to maintain ensemble and continuity. Finally, Gould was not happy with the session.

UPDATE from Mark Childs:
I was principal viola for these sessions with the Hamilton Philharmonic.

The problem with the second movement was that Glenn was subdividing the quarter notes into THREE beats, effectively making it 9/8 time rather than 3/4 time. This was causing great confusion in the orchestra, where most of the subdivisions were 16th or 32nd notes.

At a pause in the rehearsal I approached him to advise him of this. It didn’t seem to help.

You can hear Mark at 6:45 trying to reason with Gould.

The Berliner Philharmoniker has advertised an immediate vacancy for principal flute.

We have been informed that Mathieu Dufour has left the orchestra ‘at his own request for personal reasons.’

Dufour, 48, was appointed principal flute of the Chicago Symphony by Daniel Barenboim in 1999. After a brief spell with Gustavo Dudamel in the LA Phil he returned to Chicago until 2015 when he won the Berlin audition to succeed Andreas Blau, sharing principal duties with Emmanuel Pahud.

It is highly unusual for a principal player to leave the Berlin Phil in mid-career. Colleagues say that Dufour’s ‘personal reasons’ involve a degree of dissatisfaction with some aspects of the orchestra’s Covid precautions.

Auditions for a replacement are scheduled for the last week in May.

This is the Young Israel Philharmonic Orchestra playing out of their socks at Heichal Hatarbut, Tel Aviv.

The conductor, Yi-An Xu, is a Shanghai-born Israeli citizen who teaches at the Buchmann-Mehta School.

Some absolutely breathtaking woodwind solos.

The pianist and activist Luca Ciammarughi has published a book about the gay lives of great composers.

Starting with Handel and Schubert – both cases disputed by established scholars – he adds Chopin to the gay list, arguing that George Sand was not his lover but his cover. Ciammarughi further contends that a composer’s sexuality is buried in the music he writes.

Britten, for one, would have furiously denied that.

But the debate continues.

An outstandingly dull press conference for the New Year’s Day concert yielded one worthwhile item of information.

The Vienna Philharmonic chairman Daniel Froschauer recalled the Danel Barenboim, who is conducting New Years Day for the third time, made his debut with the orchestra in Salzburg as a pianist in 1965.

Although he became a full-time conductor a decade later, Vienna did not invite him to conduct them until 1989 – by which time he had been music director in Paris and was now in Berlin.

What took them so long?

The venerable conductor, 94 years old, now relies on his hands.

He explains why in an interview with Markus Thiel:

‘I once had a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg. And after a break from rehearsals I forgot my baton in the conductor’s room. Then you stand in front of a Bruckner symphony and think to yourself: run back quickly? Or ask someone to do it? So I went on. Such orchestras do not need a beat or a metronome, but a musician. And since then I have done without the baton.’

Asked what he will do on his 95th birthday, next July 11:

‘The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic have competed for it. The request from the Gewandhausorchester came a little earlier, so the Viennese are on my 100th. As you can see, I am optimistic here too. On July 11th, that is a Monday, there will be a special thanksgiving service in the Thomaskirche. No sermon, the music will speak.’ 

The Lithuanian opera star has posted pictures of herself jumping into a hole in a frozen lake.

She’ll be fit for 2022.

 

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The Nutcracker and the Mouse King – Ballett Zurich 
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You didn’t think you were going to get through Christmas without a Nutcracker ballet, did you? This, however, is a rather different, expressionistic, Nutcracker or, to give it its full name, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, from the Zurich Opera House. One of the most popular works of the ballet repertoire. Nutcracker, both the popular version and this new one, is based on a novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of the most famous writers of German Romanticism. In Hoffmann’s 1816 original dark romantic fantasy, the story jumps back and forth from a dream to reality as it does here. When Alexandre Dumas and Marius Petipa adapted it as a ballet libretto in 1892, it lost much of its mystery and became the dancing snowflakes, pink tutus, and waltz of the flowers that we know today.

In The Nutcracker and the Mouse King choreographer Christian Spuck has distanced himself from the Dumas/Petipa version and put the literary origin at the heart of his ballet, emphasizing the fantastical nature of the original story.

In Rufus Didwiszus’ stage setting, the workshop of the godfather Drosselmeier turns into an old revue-theater, where the characters of the ballet come to life. Spucks’ choreography plays with the richness of characters in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narrative cosmos, the absurdity and overwrought humour that inhabit them while at the same time looking down into the dark abyss of Romanticism.

Most of the excellent cast will be new to you. It is led by William Moore (The Nutcracker), Dominik Slavkovsky (Herr Drosselmeyer) Cohen Aitchison-Dugas (Mouse King), Mélissa Ligurgo (Mouse Queen),Michelle Willems (Marie), and Giulia Tonelli (Princess Pirlipat).

This is decidedly not The Nutcracker as you know it, although the music remains recognisably Tchaikowsky’s, played beautifully by the OpernZurich Orchestra conducted by Paul Connelly.

Read more

Message from the ROH:

Due to ongoing travel restrictions across Europe, soprano Anna Netrebko has withdrawn from singing the role of Abigaille in the remaining performances of Nabucco on 14, 17, 20 and 23 January 2022.

Soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska will replace her.

Amartuvshin Enkhbat sings Nabucco, Daniel Oren conducts.

The Bulgarian statistician Ivailo Partchev has sent us his detailed analysis of the votes cast in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition that was won by the American Van Cliburn.

Enjoy!

A facsimile of the votes in the second round of the First Tchaikovsky Competition (1958) has surfaced, stirring up memories and rumours.

The votes

Someone has highlighted the row with the marks given by Sviatoslav Richter in yellow, the column with the marks given to Lev Vlassenko, winner of the second round, in green, and the average marks of the three other laureates, Van Cliburn, Liu Shikun, and Shtarkman in blue. There are three empty cells as Lev Oborin did not vote for his two students, Eduard Miansarov and Natalia Yuzbasheva, and similarly Neuhaus did not vote for Julian Guttman.

The table is not a novelty, really, being reproduced in Isacoff (2017). Still, to see it in original form has a lot to stimulate the imagination: music, politics, intrigue, effort, victory, defeat, differences in national and personal taste. While most publicity goes to the victor, I am interested in the others. Isacoff (2017) says a bit about the prospective careers of some of them, but it is very brief and quite incomplete. We all know about Roger Boutry or Norman Shetler. In Bulgaria, Anton Dikov became a leading national pianist, outshining Milena Mollova – at 18, she had been the youngest participant, she must have played wonderfully and warmed the heart of Pancho Vladigerov by playing one of his compositions. The biographies of Naum Shtarkman and Liu Shikun read like (horror) novels. But what about those remaining behind the Iron Curtain? What do we know about Lev Vlassenko, Eduard Miansarov, Alexei Skavronski or Inna Malinina? And who was the Alexander Ikharev to whom Neuhaus took care to award a mere 1, something that even Richter would not do?

Another attraction of this little paper is a rough attempt at a statistical analysis to reveal details in the data not visible to the naked eye. I have typed in the data to my best ability; in case of doubt, I have resorted to the numbers in Isacoff (2017). The three missing cells have been filled in with an established statistical method to avoid data loss. If we imagine the table as an image with the numbers 0 to 25 describing the relative luminance of each cell, what I do to the data is similar to the techniques used to denoise a blurry image. Because, unlike in a real-life image, the sequence of the rows and the columns is arbitrary, they are both reordered to facilitate interpretation.

We end up with two graphs. The first one includes the first four `components’ and removes the remaining 13, treating the latter as noise.

The graph cleanly separates the finalists from the rest. Cutting the jurors into 6 groups is an arbitrary decision but whatever number we choose, the result is always thought provoking. Richter and Neuhaus stand out from all the others, strikingly similar and yet different. They both contributed the most to the success of the triumvirate. Richter’s contribution to Van Cliburn’s victory and his slighting of Matsuura are largely due to his very own voting system (25-24-23, 15, 3).

Other ‘dissenters’ are Vladigerov, of whom I will speak later, Sir Arthur Bliss, who gave somewhat similar marks to all participants, and the Portuguese-speaking Sequeira Costa and Camargo Guarnieri. Among the group of the big consensus, it is probably worth noticing the similarity between Gilels and Kabalevsky.

This plot contains the first component, which is related to the overall strength of the candidates and the consensus thereon. The next step is to remove the first component in order to concentrate on the more intimate differences in personal and, perhaps, national taste.

Again, Richter’s and Neuhaus’ judgment are far apart from the others’ but generally similar. Even accounting for the overall level, Richter’s preference for Van Cliburn and slighting for Maatsura are even more visible. A stranger to Moscow Conservatory internal politics, Vladigerov gave relatively higher marks to Oborin’s students, and a shoulder to the two Bulgarian contestants. The specific preferences of Costa and Guarnieri are more clearly outlined (they appreciated Japanese Maatsura and all Soviet pianists disliked by Richter and Neuhaus), and the group of the big consensus is split into big and bigger consensus.

Software used: R (R Development Core Team 2005) and packages missMDA (Josse and Husson 2016) and pheatmap (Kolde 2019).

Afrikaans media have reported the death of the noted South African composer Peter Klatzow.

He was head of the music college and professor of composition at the University of Capetown.

Apart from a period of study in London and Paris (with Nadia Boulanger), he spent his whole creative life in South Africa.

The award-winning Stuttgart composer Conny Conrad died on Tuesday in hospital after a two-week Covid coma.

He was 63.

Conrad’s day job was in criminal investigation. He became widely known as the detective who exposed the forgeries of the ‘Hitler diaries’ creator Konrad Kujau.

Report here.