'Classical' music from the last 50 years (or so)

[David Ayers]

Seems Amsterdam's Concertgebouw does present contemporary music with regularity and success. 2000 persons every saturday afternoon ... not sure if the Dutch are all masochists or what, but some premises here are definitely proven wrong.

German article from a few days back on this, just in case:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/neue-musik-in-amsterdam-das-glueck-ist-mit-den-furchtlosen-12785242.html

True and much here in London too. But this wasn't about contemporary music, just a question about how much there is in Weinberg, and whether existing recordings justify the wave of hype.

[David Ayers]

FWIW the Spotify holdings I have been working through are here Weinberg

[A Lark Ascending]

Just listened again to this which sounded as delightful as I remember it:

Couple of reviews here:

http://www.classicalmusicsentinel.com/THRONE/throne-weinberg-concertos.html

http://www.classical.net/music/recs/reviews/c/cha05064a.php

First is glowing, the second more even handed on strengths and weaknesses. Neither seems to show any concern about the quality of 'interpretation'. Yes, they are just 'interpretations' themselves and could have got it all 'wrong'.

Had to smile at this line:

Gunnarsson, Jonhäll, and Claesson do the orchestra's reputation justice with performances that are polished and that seem to get to the core of the music's meaning.

So all is well.

Edited February 9, 2014 by A Lark Ascending

[David Ayers]

In fact the first says the disc 'is full of first class interpretations'. Put those reading-glasses on!

[A Lark Ascending]

Review-speak. Orwell would have understood.

[David Ayers]

Well, we'll see whether a real platform for Weinberg develops outside of Russia and, I guess, Poland. My guess is not, based on what I have heard. That's all I am trying to assess. We'll see. His opera The Passenger deals with Auschwitz. See Alex Ross's discussion here http://www.therestisnoise.com/2010/09/weinbergs-the-passenger.html . Maybe too much extra-musical meaning for you, Bev. Ross asks the right questions and wonders whether, despite his sense of Weinberg's epigonism and the less than inspired nature of many works, there is a counter-narrative yet to emerge in which Weinberg's ideas were being adapted by Shostakovich.

[A Lark Ascending]

I don't have any problem with 'meaning' where it is made explicit (or even handled with some ambiguity) by the composer via libretto, titles or accompanying notes. If the composer intended it thus then it is only right to take note.

'Meaning' read onto it by other observers - well, in some cases it can convince. Often, however, I feel the 'interpretation' (using the word to mean what the piece means rather than how it is performed) is more about the observer than the composer.

If you go back to my initial comments on Weinberg I made quite clear that I was not suggesting him as a 'great' composer and felt he seemed to be derivative of Shostakovich (though the counter-narrative you mention is interesting). I certainly don't find him as compelling as Shostakovich.

But then I don't have a need to narrow down to only the most compelling. If I like music in a particular style/genre/whatever then I enjoy exploring the sidetracks as well as the main causeways. Thus all those second (or third, I'm not judging!) division English composers I enjoy.

It's back to cathedrals and country churches. Much as I like a trip round Salisbury I think I prefer stumbling upon a little gem on a country walk. I'd never try to big it up as better than Salisbury. But there's something very pleasurable about those little discoveries in an area of music you've come to enjoy.

That is where Weinberg sits for me.

[Just read the Ross piece. Very interesting. Though I think you misinterpret (sorry!) him on the level of inspiration in Weinberg's music. He doesn't comment on the 'less than inspired nature of many works' but actually says "Even when Weinberg’s music is less inspired, it is expertly made, and you get the feeling that he could meet any challenge. Like many Soviet composers, he earned a living from film scores, cartoon scores, and circus pieces." I take that as a reference to the suites like 'The Golden Key' ballet suite that I mentioned earlier - Shostakovich did much the same in things like the jazz suites.]

Edited February 9, 2014 by A Lark Ascending

[David Ayers]

Bev - we know, it's fine. That is why I have been 'doing' Weinberg - because several recording labels are proposing him to me, so I take that seriously. I am hoping to find something really outstanding which will justify all the recording activity - I yet may. But. You are mistaken about the questions of collective imagination which are involved in the development of interpretation - modern scores really need a great deal to be brought to them, and that is a matter of imaginative investment, not only by the interpreters - and there is only so much time, and so many claims on the collective attention..

[A Lark Ascending]

You are mistaken about the questions of collective imagination...

I like to believe I have a different interpretation.

[David Ayers]

What mortal can resist the yawn of gods?

[JSngry]

'interpretation' (using the word to mean what the piece means rather than how it is performed)...

I would hope that you understand that at some point, far away from the world of social criticism and/or cultural policing, long before the music even/ever gets to that point in its life, that inside the world of composing, practicing, and performing, those two are in fact the same thing, and that unless one blindly (and/or deafly) subscribes/succumbs to the notion of The One True Way of Proper Performance Practice/Rules Of Composition (and, really, even then) that those are the same thing, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but always there, present, driving.

Music has meaning within itself as well as outside of itself, and it is neither wrong nor misguided to ponder that. It is, however, wrong to assume that all such talk is rooted in the desire to control, pigeonhole, whatever. It is not. It is based in and driven by, the need/desire to understand, to have a meaning within and for one's self for what one is doing, be it as composer, player, or, yes, listener.

What happens after that, hey, some days are better than others, ok, but to simply dismiss the concept of "meaning" out of hand as being intrinsically malevolent in impetus strikes me as just...neither right nor correct.

David at one point used the word "judgement", and although I know what he means, I myself would use the word "decision". The whole process of creating and executing, and even experiencing, damn near anything is predicated on decisions being made and then executed at what seems to be an infinite number of levels. At some point, ok, la-di-la-di-dah, but before it gets there, hey, yes. And the closer it is to the beginning of the process, very much so. Decisions made at many different levels, not the least of which is "what is this going to be, why is it going to become this, and not that, and if so, then how?". That decision doesn't get made, then oh well, you have got nothing except, at most, more of what you already have (if even that), and it will keep on coming until that decision does get made.

[Larry Kart]

Have a fair amount of Weinberg. By and large, I prefer him to Shostakovich. There's somewhat less "profile" to Weinberg's music, I would say, but he mostly lacks those negative traits that talented English composer Robin Holloway, for one, finds in Shostakovich's symphonic output:

"battleship-gray in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion, exercises or instructions in communal lament and celebration, rendered by portentous slow music and mirthless fast music, nearly identical from work to work, coarsely if effectively scored, executed with horrifying fluency and competence, kept unflaggingly going long after its natural cut-off point has passed; music to rouse rabbles, to be seen from far away like slogans in letters 30 feet high, music without inner musical necessity....

"But what about the string quartets?.... Here the horrors are different: a rapid degeneration from innocent cheerfulness via terse grimness to the long-drawn-out torture by excruciation and vacancy of the final works. Astonishing that this cycle is now as a matter of routine compared with Beethoven's....

"In fact the fifteen symphonies, for all that they contain the worst of him (outside copious commercial/functional jobs) are far more various in range as well as quality....

"The terrible nature of Shostakovich's circumstances mustn't prevent a balanced response to his actual notes. If it does, emotional blackmail is committed ... a flattering identification with suffering heroism, a holier-than-though priggishness in the rush to empathise with oppression. To deplore this is to risk appearing stony-hearted. But what else is there to go on, in works of art, but their artistic workmanship -- in music, the actual notes? All human experience can be encompassed in music's actual notes, when they show themselves to be capable of containing what's entrusted to them. Chez Shostakovich I submit that the intrinsic quality of most of the oeuvre is not strong enough to carry the weight currently put on it -- which suggests in turn that what is required of it is lightweight too, underneath the heavy appearance to the contrary."

Agree or not, that's quite a rant.

[ejp626]

Agree or not, that's quite a rant.

Quite a rant, but one that I find deeply misguided. And one that makes me completely uninterested in ever looking into Robin Holloway.

[Larry Kart]

A piece by Holloway:

I also recommend, on Spotify, his Third Concerto for Orchestra.

[David Ayers]

Bit of a derailment, but Holloway's essay can be found here http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/26th-august-2000/41/music

[JSngry]

Here's a nice set of podcasts aimed squarely at the theme of this thread: http://www.wwfm.org/webcasts_halfpast.shtml

Playlists available as well.

[Д.Д.]

Here's a nice set of podcasts aimed squarely at the theme of this thread: http://www.wwfm.org/webcasts_halfpast.shtml

Playlists available as well.

Thanks for the tip, will explore this resource.

[David Ayers]

I have a few Weinberg CDs, and I was not too impressed by the music - I thought it was Shostakovich-lite, with fewer hooks (and I am not that much of a Shostakovich fan to begin with).

Soviet authorities "destroyed every copy of Shostakovich's 8th they could find"? I don't think so. It was not performed much till after Stalin's death (typical fate of many a works at the time), but not "destroyed".

To unconfirm, though I did read it was destroyed, Fay does not state this, but does mention that it was revived in 1956 after not being performed for '10 years' (p. 205). That said, I did read it somewhere - let's hope it is not another of those ridiculous post-Testimony Shostakovich 'facts' which plague the CD booklets and have wormed their way into all our minds - the fact it is not in Fay makes me now doubt its veracity. However...

[JSngry]

There needs to be a contemporary Bernstein-like conductor who can do for some of the contemporary conductors like he did for Mahler back in the 60s.

Internet radio might have to do the same thing these days...I use this one a fair amount:

http://www.live365.com/stations/20classics

I have it on my Roku, and what I really like is that there's a feature there that will email me the track info of any given thing that they're playing. So if I hear something that sounds like something I want to get more into, I just hit that button, and then at some point, check the email, do the research, and then, if desired, go shopping, all from the same chair.

Putting in another plug for this station and the email track info feature. Have discovered significantly more genuinely new music/composers/performers of interest in any idiom this year through this channel than anywhere else.

The whole setup seems perfect to me, there's no interruption/impediment from initial exposure to final purchase (other than the occasional incident where a recording will be either totally OOP and or prohibitively expensive...but it's usually the other way around, used copies on amazon for very, very little money). Kudos to whoever is programming this thing, very little repetition, and very little fluff, and kudos to Live365 for their concept.

[MomsMobley]

Robin-- NOT the mighty RED-- Holloway is a po' faced crank & like a stereotypical tight-ass Brit (not all are so drearily restrained), sweeps away much that's most interesting about Shosty-- can we presume he's a throbbing "The Nose" fan at least?

preferring Weinberg Vainberg to DSCH, Prokofiev &/or Schnittke is like, i dunno, preferring Paul Quinichette to Lester? not exactly, natch, but... i wish Moishe was better more often & if he's got his moments, so does Kabalevsky... whom I value but in his place & even truncated, someone like Erwin Schulof destroys Weinberg Vainberg in most ways that matter (except living, true.)

re: Hollowway's glazed Goldberg's...

Little Rootie Tootie, jazz meets Bach--

Berlioz et al-- et Beckett-- meet Berio--

Edited December 22, 2014 by MomsMobley

[Larry Kart]

Robin-- NOT the mighty RED-- Holloway is a po' faced crank & like a stereotypical tight-ass Brit (not all are so drearily restrained), sweeps away much that's most interesting about Shosty-- can we presume he's a throbbing "The Nose" fan at least?

preferring Weinberg Vainberg to DSCH, Prokofiev &/or Schnittke is like, i dunno, preferring Paul Quinichette to Lester? not exactly, natch, but... i wish Moishe was better more often & if he's got his moments, so does Kabalevsky... whom I value but in his place & even truncated, someone like Erwin Schulof destroys Weinberg Vainberg in most ways that matter (except living, true.)

re: Hollowway's glazed Goldberg's...

Little Rootie Tootie, jazz meets Bach--

Berlioz et al-- et Beckett-- meet Berio--

If you think that Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs (about which I have mixed feelings) are the work of "a drearily restrained ... stereotypical tight-ass Brit," I can't imagine what you're talking about. In general, despite some semi-neocon works (e.g. the violin and horn concerti) Holloway is about "drearily restrained" and tight-assed a composer as Chabrier or (a particular favorite of his) David Del Tredici. His enthusiasms as a critic are no less wide-ranging or, if you prefer, all over the place -- from Haydn to Glinka, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Chabrier, Faure, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Elgar, Ravel, Poulenc, Janacek, Berg, and Julian Anderson. Not a "tight-ass Brit" list, I think.

As for Vainberg and Prokofiev, I myself don't prefer the former to the latter (for me, it's apples and oranges), and Holloway AFAIK has never uttered a word about Vainberg's music (I expect he wouldn't like it any more than he does Shostakovich's). He certainly abhors Schnittke, and he doesn't like Schulhoff either.

[MomsMobley]

LK, moreso the 'provocative' blowhard critic/polemicist than the composer, though NOT the mighty RED Hollway's Benny Hill meets P.D.Q. Bach schtick doesn't particularly impress nor "amuse." Anyone curious for more can see the contents here--

http://www.robinholloway.info/rhessays/html/extracts.html

excerpts on Die Frau, with passing mention of Delius' mindblowing Mass of Life especially atuous.

http://www.robinholloway.info/rhessays/html/strauss.html

hmmmm... Hofmannsthal versus Larkin, whom NOT the mighty RED Holloway has set, though not an opera? etc etc

and though I refute the sanctity of DSCH-- and like some of his soundtrack and ballet work very much--- I strongly suspect there's more than musicological consideration in H's dismissal of.

Edited December 23, 2014 by MomsMobley

[Larry Kart]

I don't agree with all of RH's critical views but find him unique and stimulating and also FWIW pretty much on the money about Die Frau. His essay on Haydn is a killer. If you're saying that Hofmannsthal is so far above the level of Larkin that this somehow devalues RH, I would say that the Hofmannsthal of Die Frau is not Hofmannsthal at his best. You might want to check out this excerpt from Holloway's Clarissa:

Harry James?

[David Ayers]

I don't really know Holloway's criticism except for the Shostakovich essay. I do have a view on that essay as I have been thinking about it for a long time. He is surely right at identifying what Shostakovich's works are not - they are not Haydn or Prokofiev, if we want to put it that way. We can't put that in reverse, exactly, by saying that the lack of colour and wit are, say, 'deliberate'. But nearly so. These works are what they are and what they have become, and the frequent harmonic aridity is only one part of their meaning. What they are and how they mean is not part of Holloway's account at all, and probably rightly as the ditchwater dull and intellectually trivial MacDonald-type view had at the time he wrote taken too much hold and it is what Holloway is railing against. For all the things they 'don't have' or - more to the point - eschew, so many of Shostakovich's works are entirely memorable, with every step coming to seem inevitable. That's usually a sign of something. That they make no concession to joy or transcendence, that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper, is a key that Holloway maybe could have spotted but which is hard to make claims for against the rudimentary marketing around 'Shostakovich vs. Stalin.' A comparison of his Eighth to Weinberg's 19th ('Bright May', a 1985 celebration and memorial of the end of the war) gives pretty clear grounds for judgement, I think.

Mind you, that your average Shostakovich symphony in concert is a bit like having your head battered by a piece of 2 x 4 still counts against him

[Larry Kart]

I don't really know Holloway's criticism except for the Shostakovich essay. I do have a view on that essay as I have been thinking about it for a long time. He is surely right at identifying what Shostakovich's works are not - they are not Haydn or Prokofiev, if we want to put it that way. We can't put that in reverse, exactly, by saying that the lack of colour and wit are, say, 'deliberate'. But nearly so. These works are what they are and what they have become, and the frequent harmonic aridity is only one part of their meaning. What they are and how they mean is not part of Holloway's account at all, and probably rightly as the ditchwater dull and intellectually trivial MacDonald-type view had at the time he wrote taken too much hold and it is what Holloway is railing against. For all the things they 'don't have' or - more to the point - eschew, so many of Shostakovich's works are entirely memorable, with every step coming to seem inevitable. That's usually a sign of something. That they make no concession to joy or transcendence, that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper, is a key that Holloway maybe could have spotted but which is hard to make claims for against the rudimentary marketing around 'Shostakovich vs. Stalin.' A comparison of his Eighth to Weinberg's 19th ('Bright May', a 1985 celebration and memorial of the end of the war) gives pretty clear grounds for judgement, I think.

Mind you, that your average Shostakovich symphony in concert is a bit like having your head battered by a piece of 2 x 4 still counts against him

Very interesting post -- "...that the doubts about the consolations of musical discourse are there from quite early and get written in ever deeper..." in particular.

To this RH probably would reply (from his Shostakovich essay): "But what else is there to go on, in works of art, but their artistic workmanship -- in music, the actual notes? All human experience can be encompassed and expressed in music's actual notes, when they show themselves to be capable of containing what's entrusted to them." That is a point of view that has a lot of appeal to me, but I think you're saying "Hey, not so fast."