Get into the Elevator with Webern

What We Hate Now, apparently, and some fairly dodgy assertions as to why:



One could say a lot about the fundamental assumptions underlying this study, but for now let's just say that if they're going to do studies like this, they really need to do them in Sociology Departments that actually know something about music.

Questionable notions resulting in the conflation of "folk" (whatever that is) and "country" (whenever that is) aside, one thing orchestra marketing departments might learn from this odd little exercise is to ditch this absurd idea that classical music can and should be marketed as "relaxing". Market it as what it is -- complex and awesome and all over the map -- and maybe you'll still have an audience in thirty years.

Mrs Pankhurst pwns your number

I'm supposed to be at Glimmerglass right now, but the bug that kept me out of Old Songs back in June has devolved into an annoyingly persistent cough and so, yeah, no. So yay the 'Glass for being willing to do a ticket swap. Now it's off to the Medical/Industrial Complex to see if I can ditch this thing, because




is next on the agenda. Apart from the obvious attractions of the work, I confess I'm really interested to see how Leon threads the needle on this one, because remember that panel discussion a few years back when he argued that women writers in the 19th century didn't suffer discrimination in publishing because, look, Mary Wollstonecraft! Jane Austen! George Eliot! and one was all like Um...? So either Dame Ethel has afforded him a Come to Jesus moment, so to speak, on the Woman Question (i.e. that there actually was one) or I've (more likely) missed some nuance of his argument all along. Panel discussion! Bring it on!

an idea whose time has

Me: Just saw branagh's cinderella flick. It's like trollope, only disney LOL

ETF: I don't know if I can see Branagh as Cinderella. When do we get Trollope World tho?

"Scotland is not for the squeamish": La Donna del Lago Encore at OperaMall Millionplex

So, let me get this straight:

There's the first guy, a complete stranger whom she invites hame tae her wee croft cuz she's leal like that, and he proceeds to get all up in her personal space the whole time he's there except when her chica Albina is ostentatiously waving a wedding veil and then resorting to the Death Ray (both utterly ineffectual due to his self-evident density supernatural yet unseen Jacobean aura).*

Then there's the second guy, her main squeeze as it happens, who finds the lady not at home, but whose default mode when she's not there is apparently to raid the liquor cabinet...question mark mark mark

Then there's the third guy, who has weird, hairy friends who like to gather on hilltops at night to tub-thump and, uh, burn crosses, yeah... I can understand her being least enthusiastic about that one. With a subset that is evidently into shrooms, interpretive dance, and woad. (Not as cool as it sounds.)

Okay, go with the second guy if you have to, at least he has the benefit of being a girl, but I have to say, given these options, the obvious choice is to blow town with chica Albina and go start a B&B in the Hebrides.

*Can we just point out that if this were another Walter Scott-based gig, say Heart of Midlothian: the Opera, her girlfriends would already be making up scurrilous traditional songs about her around the fulling table by the next scene.

You all know by now the singing was brilliant, of course it was. And since that's really all this opera is about, everything else, even King Giacomo's soulful disquisition on love in the presence of heads on pikes, is just gravy.

undelivered

One of the UK's great songwriters, Steve Tilston, gets an interview in the NYT, if only to talk about someone else's work. Oh well. Some days we're really glad life isn't a movie where your favorite people are mutated into some dude played by Al Pacino.

The things Steve Tilston gets up to here and here.

Annals of Pop Culture Opera Reference

night of the living dead

If the protest outside attracts a Who's Who of the Empire State's own Political Graveyard, then surely goings on inside must be worth checking out. And since the Met seems to have caved to censorship demands on the SiriusXM front as well as the HDcast, La Cieca has posted audio of the 1991 premiere of The Death of Klinghoffer. Check it out here, and the libretto here, if you are so inclined. Or don't, if you are not. Your choice.

*well, okay, David Paterson is now chair of the Democratic Machine Party in NY, but I'm not sure that's much of a status change.

de nube

Alex Ross weighs in on getting your music from the Cloud.

I had this conversation at the concert the other day, picking up an Andy May CD, which I was doing because these things are much harder to come by than they used to be, and you have to seize the opportunities where you find them. The album is Happy Hours (Fellside 224), you can download it from iTunes where it's filed under Singer/Songwriter, even though there's only one song on the album and Andy May himself neither sings it nor wrote it.

You can download it from Amazon, where at least it's filed under the largely meaningless but not un- useful catchall of Folk. You can also buy the CD from them, for $22 direct or via third parties new (starting at $11) or used (starting at $20).

You'll find it on Spotify for free. You have to sort through the albums of another guy with the same name, but okay. Once you find it, all the tracks are there in order. (And track order does matter if you're listening to more than one track.)

I'm not going to get all wistful and blather on about the good old days when you could and did spend several  hours browsing bins and shelves in record stores, and one or two of those stores might even have had a section dedicated not just to bagpipes, but to Northumbrian smallpipes. But if you click on the Related Artists button on Spotify, you end up in a pretty big ballpark of vaguely related celtic-y folk records, which might be a highland pipe rock band or a solo singer of muckle sangs or an Irish fiddler from Brooklyn or a band from Belfast. Never mind that the Actually Related Artists are all up on Spotify, too: Jez Lowe, Kathryn Tickell, High Level Ranters, Cut and Dry...

So okay, basically you end up in the old shop circa 1998. Only if it was run by people who had no idea what anything was.

So much for efficiency. Spotify should probably read the liner notes. Or at least look at a map.

lessons from Section 18

What you learn from the rear-shed jumbotrons at Tanglewood during the Mahler 2nd:

 1) Choristers' friends and family sit back there so they can shoot phone pix of their peeps on-screen during their close-ups.

 2) The BSO violins really like playing that pizzicato section of the Ländler, and you can see them collectively dreaming about forming a ukulele orchestra.

 3) The audience is every bit as fidgety during the slow bits with the action in their face as when our sad lack of multi-media technology left us solely at the mercy of our ears.

And yes, dude sitting next to me, yes! the horns of Judgement are blowing in the distance! now is the time to crack your knuckles!

curtain calls as more of a sports bar experience

sundry items

So the final free audio-only webcast from the Met is I Puritani this Tuesday, April 29 at 7:30 ET here. That's Peretyatko, Brownlee, Kwiecien, Pertusi.

Arte has this series about Juilliard starting tomorrow. The excerpts they've posted are US-accessible, so maybe the rest of it will be as well, who knows.

BBC 3 Composer of the Week was Handel in London all week long, so you know that means lots of opera bits. These episodes tap out soon on iPlayer, so jump in quick if you wish to begin at the beginning.

Back in February Sting tried out material from The Last Ship, his theater piece about the (demise of the) shipbuilding industry in the north of England, at the Public Theater in NYC, and PBS has posted up the video. The cranks in the Trad Office at the Noise Ministry say Haven't there been songs on that topic around since forever and didn't Louis Killen pretty much sing them all? But really this is all about Kathryn Tickell there in the wayback lending the smallpipes and fiddle action.

April showers bring May...um...

offered without comment

So, as part of their Master Plan for World Domination...uh, I mean their entrepreneurial drive to develop new revenue streams, Amazon would like to present for your consideration the pilot episode of their (proposed) new web series, Mozart in the Jungle. (Click on the Full Episode link on the lower left.) Based on the book, and fairly NSFW.

update: You should be able to watch by just signing in to a regular Amazon account, in spite of the Amazon Prime prompt.

amps to 11

And since we're on the subject of audibility, singers at the Met (or anywhere else) wearing body mics for broadcasts and HDcasts seems sort of a given. Not sure why that rates an article. The concern is, and long has been, the wearing of mics when the only audience is in the house. And the way you tell whether that has happened is by doing a survey of NYT reviews for the last thirty years, and determining when (and how often) critics complained about inaudible singers and when they didn't.

McVicar in Concrete: an interlude

Can't remember why I missed it the first two times, but just took in the encore encore of 2011's Met Il Trovatore HDcast. I have only two things to add to whatever it was people wrote about it way back then: first, David McVicar's set had me thinking I needed to remember to buy cat litter on the way home. Second, we need a new cliche for the swearing of blood oaths. Gratuitous palm-slashing is so last ten centuries. How about face-stapling? [addendum: Okay, I see nobody's quite getting on the bus with this, but it has the benefit of demonstrating Unhinged Commitment to an Idea and yet being directly referential to the circumstances of first-world existence in the 21st century. Wasn't it the Duke of Wellington who said "Only girls fight with swords these days!"?... What if we say Di quella pira was rock n' roll, and along came the Sex Pistols in the form of... Okay I grant this idea either needs some work or a quick plastic bag over the head. I return to my corner.]

Spring is here!

scraping

With a number of US orchestras undergoing fairly dire labor-relations processes -- the Atlanta Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, among others -- there's been a fair amount of grousing among Oberlin Conservatory graduates on fb. Some are wondering whether it's worth it even to bother auditioning these days. Others point to top-heavy management numbers at some of these institutions. If those numbers are accurate, it's reminiscent of the situation in our state university system, where there's plenty of room in the budget to pay the Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief, but for the actual Educating part of the enterprise they can only afford adjuncts who get paid a dried-peas-and-gravel wage, and one warm body is considered as good as another. Because, you know, money is tight, and the most important thing in a university education is that Management have flexibility.

But as Utah Phillips said about the last baseball strike: "It's the players who create the wealth." Which is to say that in the same way no prospective college student chooses a school because it has a really outstanding Associate Dean of X, nobody buys a ticket to a Yankees game because they love to watch Brian Cashman in action. Neither is anyone drawn to attend a performance of a Beethoven symphony because the back office -- even the Development Office -- has mad administrative skillz. Even though some of those skills are critical to having the event at all, and even though, in this sad privatized system of ours, there is likely no ballgame without the Development Office.

In the end, it's the audiences who get what a given organization pays for. If audiences aren't drawn by what's on offer -- because the top players have of necessity dispersed to other gigs or even professions -- well, the entertainment business (if you'll forgive the term) is a buyer's market. There are plenty of other distractions out there. But more to the point, if there's no way to make a decent living* as an orchestra musician, how many conservatory graduates will even bother to audition?


*in which we include not having to rely on scraping up freelance gigs, which the management of the Minnesota Orchestra, in the spirit of Randian libertarianism and no doubt proudly waving their own 1099's, claim as "one of the benefits of an orchestral career."

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.

sundry items

Addenda: Over at The Nation, Steve Wasserman surveys the state of US publishing in the era of Amazonian conquest, and Michael Naumann explains why the German publishing industry is more or less impervious...for now.

DtO has alerted us that video of the current ROH production of Les Troyens can be found on The Space site here.

The Space is also hosting video of several productions from Globe to Globe, the international Shakespeare festival that was lately up in London. Belarusian King Lear? South African Venus & Adonis?  Throw a dart and begin.

The next Glyndebourne videocast, La Cenerentola from 2005, is up until July 22nd. It's said over at La Cieca's that La Monnaie has Trovatore up tomorrow, and that Bayerische Staatsoper has Götterdämmerung with Nina Stemme on July 15.


Finally, not to be judgemental or anything, but here's an advertising meme that really should have been strangled at birth.

la donna del lago

Francesca Zambello talks to the locals about the strategy behind this year's Glimmerglass season.

Update: Meanwhile, trouble down the pit.

done that

For the argument that the use of projections is a great innovation in the Ring Cycle, ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1972.