Borg Cube Vignette

My boss, who has a sideline in the CD/vinyl aftermarket, brings in a box for me to pick through of CDs he hasn't been able to unload anywhere else. "They're not worth anything," sez he. One stack of twenty-five CDs later: Mahler, Janáček, Sibelius, Duruflé...Hanson Conducts Hanson (with a sticker that says "Tranquil" on it. It really isn't)... Havergal Brian, ffs... One entitled "East German Revolution" from 1990 that is all Bach cantatas (not secular ones) done by the Gewandhaus under Masur, with a big DDR flag plastered across the cover -- even if it sucks, it can't not be awesome... And a cartoon soundtrack by Dmitri Shostakovich. Srsly. I'm pretty sure they're worth something.

weekend agenda

The Old Songs Festival.

once again with steroids

Eight Step Waltz / Lisa / Stukka Gruppa from Blowzabella on Myspace.

BEMF posting from the Ministrie of Noyse

Guerrilla period street piping at BEMF, courtesy of Pastimes.

posted with permission

Sunday Night Posting from the Ministry of Noise

Woes in the Dead of Night: Atalante @ BEMF, 6/13/13

The ensemble Atalante was formed by lironist Erin Headley as part of a life-long exploration of the lirone and its repertoire. The lirone, one could be forgiven for not knowing, is a stringed instrument in the cello or bass gamba vein, only with a big flat headstock and a much wider fretboard to accommodate its many more strings.  The instrument had about a 200 year heyday, and was particularly popular among 17th century Italian composers following in the footsteps of Monteverdi. Several of these were based in Rome -- Rossi, Marazzoli, et al. -- and it is around their work that Atalante's first album, Lamentarium, is focused.

And it was with a program centered around Lamentarium that Atalante made its BEMF debut on Thursday night of the festival at Boston's Emmanuel Church, in an exploration of the baroque lament as form. On this night -- it was the late slot at 11pm -- the ensemble consisted of singers Theodora Baka (mezzo) and Nadine Balbeisi (soprano), Siobhan Armstrong's triple harp, Elizabeth Kenny on chitarrone, and Kristian Bezuidenhout on harpsichord and organ. Erin Headley should of course have been there, but sadly had suffered a mishap earlier in the week and was placed on the dl (as they say in baseball) for the remainder of the festival. Bass gambist David Morris was enlisted to fill her place, and although the lirone's particular resonances were surely missed, the glass half full was that at this festival (and perhaps only at this one) such a fine replacement, let alone any at all, could be improvised on short notice.

Being something of a Gesamtkunstwerk in and of itself, the ensemble performed the material semi-staged, with singers in costume. Baka and Balbeisi wore 17th century-style satin gowns purposely reminiscent of women in Caravaggio paintings, and accessorized according to character: a mirror for the aging Helen, a cup/urn for Artemisia, period-specific notion of oriental headgear for the bereft  Zaida. (Having ornately-carved ecclesiastical furniture on hand was an additional bonus.) The singers entered black-hooded, and began with Misereris omnium, Domine, part of a larger work by Domenico Mazzocchi, which set the tone at appropriately goth and nicely displayed the singers' individually lovely and well-matched voices. In the works that followed, whether solo or two-hander with both character and narration, Baka's approach proved more dramatic while Balbeisi's was more rhetorical -- though this could have had something to do with the characters they were portraying. Baka had Artemisia, after all, and a lengthy externalized consideration of drinking one's beloved's ashes...well...let's just say that's a journey.

Vocal works were interspersed with instrumentals. The playing on these seemed tight despite the roster change, and the standout, for me, was Luigi Rossi's Passacaglia dell' Seigneur Louigi, which opens the Lamentarium album as a lirone showcase but here featured Armstrong's triple harp and Bezuidenhout's harpsichord. If that was also an improvised fix, then it was beautifully done.

Some of the pieces on the program, it seems, have yet to be recorded, so we'll hope for another CD release down the line, and for Atalante's return at BEMF 2015.

sundry items

arte liveweb has Bayreuth's RW 200 concert with Eva Maria Westbroek, Johan Botha, Kwangchul Youn, and the Bayreuth orchestra all dressed up in their winter gig clothes, under the direction of Christian Thielemann.

Paul O'Dette discusses his new album of lute tunes of Francesco da Milano on the Gramophone Mag podcast.  I particularly like the tidbit of information he imparts about period payscale for Brilliant Lutenists, and think we would do well to emulate.

And speaking of, it's two weeks to Boston Early Music Festival, a whole week of staged opera, semi-staged opera, official concerts, fringe concerts, master classes, lec-dems, petting zoo, and guerrilla sidewalk period bagpiping. If you've dreamed of dropping a fiver in a busker's theorbo case, there may be no better opportunity.

Sunday posting from the Ministry of Gardens

Check out that hedge! The NYT reports on William Christie's garden.

preservation versus McMansion

An update from the Wall Street Journal here.

flogging

I wasn't going to post about this, in hopes that it would go away, but then the ante was upped.

Syntax is everything, editors:

"NEW YORK, July 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMI Classics has released 50 Shades of Classical Music, a digital compilation containing 50 pieces of classical music inspired by the bestselling 'Fifty Shades of Grey' novels..."
 
What pieces would those be, one wonders?

Read the rest here, and do visit the website, it's all about the Dark Side of Classical Music™. Evidently. Which is to say, a lot of baroque standards (= evil) and not every opera aria cliché imaginable, but certainly the ones ad agencies love the most.

And yes, apparently O mio babbino caro is the Dark Side. In your face, Rob Zombie.

Oh but wait, now you'll have to take my word for it, because some force of Market or the Law (50 Shades of ©) is at work, like the Nothing, making it all vanish before our eyes. Oh well. It was fun watching Thomas Tallis, that Monster of the Id, shoot up the charts.

The Work of Art in the Age of...

Digital Reproduction, wherein the FT goes all Benjaminian on the concept of HDcasting from the opera house, and

Historical Reproduction, wherein the FT talks technical on the record industry's new-found interest in shellac. Which in Benjaminian terms is pretty funny, since the medium -- and its mechanical reproduction -- is now a component of the art itself.

Late addition: Over at the NYT, Jonas Kaufmann talks to Peter G Davis about the tyranny of Fach.

It's Record Store Day!

the things you get to keep

When I used to stand around in the record store, trying to decide between Klemperer Conducts Wagner and Plastic Surgery Disasters, my long-suffering mother would roll her eyes and say "Live a little!". (She did that a lot, and she was buying.) Then she would patiently explain that music is something you will always have, so money spent on it is never wasted.

So to prove Ma's thesis in a way she may not have imagined, here's an article from the Guardian on the issue of music and dementia, and here's an interesting project in the US which gives people something useful to do with their old iPods that's way better than packing them off to a landfill in West Africa.

Whatever they find to put on mine, they are going to need the 160G one...

Händel versus Horse Brawl

So let's revisit this:



(and here is the relevant myspace page)


in light of Händel's muzak phase: