Hmm . . . The Kennedy Center Honors. Always forget about these things until December. Always find them exasperating and inspiring at the same time. Be nice to get one someday . . . Ah – there’s Zubin Mehta. Bet most viewers haven’t even heard of him; geez, I hope the awards continue to pay tribute to classical musicians in the future . . . Ug, couldn’t they have come up with something other than Fritz Kreisler for the tribute? Sigh. Suppose beggars can’t be choosers . . . Wouldn’t it be nice if the Kennedy Center honored Steve Reich or Elliott Carter or John Adams someday? Instead we get . . . Andrew Lloyd Webber. How many crescendos and cymbal crashes can one man pack into two minutes? Eee gads! Question: How does one explain to his fans that his music SUCKS???? “Well, but look how much money he makes!” Be nice to have that much money someday. But writing trash is no guarantee of financial success; gotta satisfy first the artist within. Ah – there’s Dolly Parton. Now these songs are nice. Unpretentious, heartfelt, lovely. (Wonder if Lloyd Webber’s listening . . . ) And the country folks are doing a nice job: Allison Krauss, Vince Gill, Kenny Rogers and so forth. And finally Steven Spielberg. Wonder if he remembers the nice little note he wrote for me years ago: “To David: Hope to hear your music on one of our films.” Be nice if he did.
Yes, you read that right. 2007 brings the fiftieth anniversary of Jean Sibelius’ death, and his tone poem Finlandia was written as a protest against Russian influence in Finland at the end of the 19th century. Joan Baez sung her own a cappella version on Michael Moore’s 2004 Slacker’s Uprising Tour, and in anticipation of the composer’s anniversary year On An Overgrown Path has the full story and an audio file in Sibelius – his genius remains unrecognised.
Our friend Marvin Rosen will be airing the entire 6 hour seven minute version of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, by the Flux Quartet, beginning at 11 am, EST on Friday, December 29, as part of a special 9 hour Classical Discoveries program devoted to American contemporary music.
Two members of Flux–Tom Chiu and Dave Eggar–will join Marvin to discuss the work after the performance.
I believe it is safe to say that Marvin is the only broadcaster in America who both can and would undertake such a mission.
Classical Discoveries is broadcast via WPRB 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ. and over the internet here.
The Russian composer Galina Ustvoskaya died yesterday. Alex Ross has the details and the (appropriately) terse, German notice from her publisher, Sikorski.
I don’t have time now to write much about Ustvolskaya’s music, but my encounter with it was one of the determining events of my own musical evolution, and I still can’t quite believe that I performed all six of her piano sonatas spaced out during an all-night new music marathon concert as an undergraduate. (By the time I got to the last of them, round about 4 AM, I was pretty spaced out myself.)
If you don’t have this disc, correct that about yourself. This is the music Shostakovich could have written but didn’t.
Update: WordPress is eating my links for breakfast. Go over to http://www.therestisnoise.com for more details, and the CD you are to buy is Frank Denyer’s recording of the complete piano sonatas on Conifer.(I haven’t heard Oleg Malov’s on Megadisc, a label that has also released several other discs of Ustvolskaya’s hieratic chamber music.)
Well, you’re too late for the $550 Center Parterre Premium seats or the $350 Orchestra Premium seats for tonight’s premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Met but if you hurry it looks like you can still grab one of the bargain $250 orchestra seats. (I have a couple of mere $80 seats in the alpine section later.)
In the meantime, us poor people can read about the Mr. Tan’s opera foo young in the Met blog or perhaps lurk at the stage door for a glimpse of Placido Domingo or Elizabeth Futral or maybe even the great film director Zhang Yimou (To Live, Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, House of Flying Daggers), making his Met debut. Maybe he’s made up with Gong Li. Maybe she’ll be there. Hey, I may go and stand outside myself.
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the city
The critics were trying their best to be witty;
They printed their lists of the past year’s best fare,
In hopes that their trendy young readers would care;
But the readers were nestled all snug in their beds,
While vacuous pop idols danced in their heads;
And the Maestro in PJs, and I in my drawers,
Had just settled in to examine some scores,
When out on the lawn, such cacaphonous sound,
I sprang from my desk thinking Zorn was in town. (more…)
A while back, Stephen Colbert made fun of John Zorn on the Colbert Report, and I’m pleased to report that tonight he referred, if not by name, to La Monte Young. At the beginning of a segment on Art, he talked about feeding hay to a piano, which as you know clearly refers to Young’s 1960 piece “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1.”
The piece is one of several text instruction pieces from 1960 and its instructions read: “Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to.”
Tom Johnson reviewed a September 1973 performance of the piece in The Village Voice, saying “I have always thought of the piece as conceptual art and never expected it to come off in an actual performance, but I discover that I was wrong. The way Jim Burton interprets the score, the piano really starts to look like a horse, and the audience is delighted with the absurdity of the situation. So much for any theories about La Monte Young as a conceptual artist.”
Two questions: Does anybody know of any more recent or upcoming performances? And which piano companies make the hungriest pianos?