Classical Boulder

Starting a new year

2012-01-26T20:59:00.005-07:00

Okay, 2012 has to be better politically than last year. Troglodite republicans have destroyed the evening meal time when I listen to the news. It used to be music but the local station now only plays snatches of tracks so hogwash is better than garbage. What me worry?

January hasn't been bad. A decent Boulder Philharmonic performance of Howard Hanson's "Romantic" Symphony preceeded by the Takac String Quartet featuring Britten's String Quartet No 2 was a good start for the year. I was over-confident in my musical knowledge and bet Gerry Walther that Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" was based on a theme by Frank Bridge, the composer she featured in a small mini-concert. Wrong! She won $5 knowing, as I should have, that it was a Purcell theme, not Bridge. I'm glad I don't bet on the stock market.

A young friend invited me to a BBQ. Not what you think but a Boulder Bassoon Quartet performance. This instrument is a bit of a loner, not exactly a featured instrument or one that you want your kids to aspire to, but a solid and interesting one. This quartet performed an actual bassoon quartet written by Marjan Mozetich, a contemporary Canadian. I've heard other bassoon music by Mozetich and have always enjoyed it. He has a sound -- if you've heard him once you can recognize him again, kind of like some lesser known composer like Hovhaness and Martinu. A true mark of genius?

Two University of Colorado faculty performances were also enjoyable, though my current cold prevented me from completely enjoying them. Paul Erhard performed on two different double bass instruments in an evening of mixed classical and jazz. I have a friend playing double bass who once explained to me that there are several options on the instruments. Most only have 4 strings but some have 5. The principal bassist at the Colorado Music Festival was playing one, though the rest of his colleagues were playing one 4 stringed instruments. Based on first impressions, I though Erhard was switching from 5 to 4, but n0 -- both were 4 stringed. What do I know?

David Korevaar thrilled a large Tuesday night audience with 4 Bach Partitas. He always packs the house. My cold and cough forced me to leave at intermission. Oh, if only I had seen a doctor earlier.

Yesterday was a two-fer: a symposium on the future of the orchestra and Pendulum. Pendulum has student performances of faculty, visiting faculty and student composers. This was no different and, while well received, was problematic. Hsing-Ay Hsu accompanied Patrick Mason in a 20 minute piece by Ben-Amot. The music was fine but following Judeo-Spanish poetry with unpredictable breaks was really, really hard. Pendulum's highlight for me and some friends as Raechel Sherwood's "BOSS" performed by the Tesla Quartet. Though only two movements, it never lost interest and when it ended, I wanted more. Not bad for a young student composer. The Tesla continues to impress me with their playing and confidence on stage. This is their second year at CU and it will be a shamed to see them move on.

The musical entrepreneurial program, run by Jeffrey Nytch, sponsored a discussion on the future of orchestra. The panel included 2 representatives from the Colorado Symphony (I didn't write down their names), Gary Lewis from CU and conductor of the Midland Texas Orchestra, and Kevin Schuck, executive director of the Boulder Philharmonic. The discussion focused on the changing environment for classical orchestra and the challenges they face. I go to concerts at all of them (forget Texas) and I can understand the problems. The CSO is facing declining attendance and funding support and a complex board situation. My wife and I and friends would go the the CSO, but the traffic, parking, dinner and concerts ended with to much frustration. We've pretty much stopped going to Denver. I'm glad that the plans include the CSO coming to us, rather than the other way around. We'd love to hear them closer, perhaps at Mackey.

An interesting observation by one of the panelists struck true to me -- we've lost a generation of music lovers when school music programs were cut in the last decader or two. It's no wonder pop music is so horrid but profitable and covered by attorneys. The younger generation missed out and grasped what they could and it wasn't much.

The symposium was a good first step. I've suggested to Nytch that more follow with possible topics like:

* Orchestral/Union relationships. The musicians need them and I support them, but are they having a negative effect?

* Intellectual property rights and copyright. Are they limiting ourmusic experience? Are lawyers desecrating art?

* The missing generation. How do we get back our children's lost musical experience? Is music in pre-college education dead?

* Programming and familiarity. Are the "classics" limiting the reach to audiences and is some programming overplayed and chasing away audiences?

* Pensions. Can't musicians just die without them?

Okay, enough for tonight. January was pretty good. If only I could shake this cold.

Nirvana Boulder

2011-11-07T12:08:00.003-07:00

It's wonderful to live in Boulder and have so much access to classical music. Lots and lots and lots of live classical music. Granted, two performances were live broadcasts of the Metropolitan opera, live classical music is alive and well in Boulder, Colorado. In the past two weeks I've seen 3 operas, one requiem, a Beethoven symphony and chamber music galore, 11 performances in all, and, yes, I'm a glutton when it comes to classical music.

Starting out on a Sunday afternoon, the University of Colorado's School of Music put on a very solid "Marriage of Figaro". Two singers stood out: Wei Wu as Figaro and Meagan Mahlberg as the countess. Each opera performance demonstrates the rising quality of the singers being attracted to Boulder.

Leon Fleischer played Prokofiev's 4th piano concerto with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. This is the first time I've heard that concerto live and never understood that it was for the left hand only. I never realized how many left-hand only piano pieces there were. Wikipedia lists 41, including compositions by Strauss, Hindemith, Martinů, Britten and a raft of others. For reasons known only to pianists, there don't appear to be any written for the right hand. I wonder why?

The university's Pendulum series was up next. A monthly concert of music written by faculty and graduate students, it's always appealed to me. The music is varied, some accessible, some not, but always worth the short trip to the music school. One particular piece, a piano quintet by Steve Sachse, was the best of the lot.

I went from Mozart's "Marriage" on Sunday to the Met's "Don Giovanni" on Saturday. While it's not fair to compare a university performance to the Met, there's something about a live performance that's hard to beat. Musically and vocally the Met is hard to beat. The Met had just been forced to replace the ailing Gary Lehman in their upcoming "Siegfried" with a young Jay Hunter Morris from Paris, Texas. He was interviewed by Rene Fleming at the "Don Giovanni" intermission and had a wonderful observation. When asked if he was wary or star-struck by a role at the Met, particularly one as difficult as that of Siegfried, he replied with something like "When the lights go down and I get into character, I don't know if it's the Met or a high school gym". Great response. The next Saturday he sang his heart out and was a Siegfried to remember.

More Mozart was on the agenda that Saturday. After listening to "Don Giovanni", my wife and I went with friends to a performance of the Boulder Chamber Orchestra's Mozart "Requiem". The Ars Nova Singers and soloists provided the vocals for a packed house. It was a solid performance and got a rousing ovation. Interestingly, after we left the church we saw a flash mob dance to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on the Pearl Street Mall. From the religiosity of Mozart to strangely dressed dancers and zombies in a short block's walk. Only in Boulder.

Next up was a performance by the Takács String Quartet. Janacek's "Kreutzer" and Ravel's only quartet preceded a Dvorak String Quintet with Paul Erhard on String Bass. I particularly like the quintet. Erhard's instrument looked larger than any I had seen before, probably an illusion.

The next night I attended one of the Tuesday Colorado faculty performances, this time featuring music written by Carter Pann, composition and theory professor. It's hard to select a favorite here. Janet Harriman played a delightful harp piece "Emerald's on Artemis" and Joel Hastings, coming to Boulder from Florida State University, played 8 selections from Pann's "The Piano's 12 Sides ... for Joe Hastings". I had a great view and found it interesting to watch Hasting's facial expressions as he played. Back in high school I had a good friend who went to Julliard for keyboard studies. My friend and Joel both showed the same concentration and intensity and passion. It's a piano thing that I'll never understand. The graduate student quartet studying with the Takács this year, the Tesla Quartet, played Pann's 1st String Quartet. This was my favorite for the evening. I liked the quartet so much that I came back and ordered a recording the next day. I hope this recording is as good as the Tesla's performance though a live performance always wins out.

After attending a graduate student viola recital on Wednesday, we went to the Cantabile Singers performance later that night. The featured work was Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Flos Campi". The violist was Gerry Walther from the Takács String Quartet. This was a first for me, both for the piece and for the soloist stopping shortly into the work with a technical problem on her viola. With the problem fixed, Gerry finished the work flawlessly and got a standing ovation.

Following the endurance test of Wagner's "Siegfried" on Saturday, my wife and I attended a performance of a new group of 13 string musicians, Sphere. Founded this past spring, this time they granted me an earlier wish: another performance of Jeffrey Nytch's "Epilogue". I had heard it performed in September by the Tesla Quartet and now a performance by a small string ensemble. While the composer said he favors the ensemble version, I'm a bit partial to the string quartet version. The Sphere's performance of the young Shostakovitch's "Prelude and Scherzo" was dazzling.

Finally, yesterday afternoon I heard the Clavier Trio (Arkady Fomin, Jesus Castro-Balbi and David Korevaar) perform works by Haydn, Paul Schoenfeld and Brahms. I had convinced myself that I would recognize the Brahms Opus 8 Trio in D Major, but I was very wrong. This was completely new to me and I really responded as they played the scherzo.

Enough for now. Classical music is abundantly available here in Nirvana, a.k.a Boulder, Colorado.

Students

2011-09-27T15:53:00.002-06:00

The other night I attended the opening concert of the University of Colorado's Symphony Orchestra. Gary Lewis again enthusiastically leads the orchestra and programmed three works: Beethoven's Leonore No 3, Strauss's Don Juan and Brahm's Violin Concerto.

First an observation. It appears that some students are now required to attend a number of concerts as part of their class work. The students click-in and click-out with their cell phones and their 'clickers'. They do this to confirm attendance and convince their professors of their participation. I believe this was started last year and it seems to have a positive effect on students. Or at least I've convinced myself of that based on their reactions.

Gary Lewis's opening for the Beethoven was spot on -- bright and clear and very professional. The students sitting in front of me commented at the end something to the effect "Hey, they are really good! Surprisingly good!"

But what really got me was the young violinist Ross Snyder's Brahms. Snyder, the first violin with the Tesla Quartet, the student quartet studying directly under CU's famous Takács Quartet, was outstanding. Here for all the students was a different representative of CU. Not an athlete, not someone hyped on the sports page, but a quiet skilled musician. Classical music probably does not top most student's preferences, but that night the audience, again mostly students, erupted with genuine enthusiam to Ross's talent and to the orchestra's performance.

I suspect that the kids at CU that heard that performance will remember it for a long time, and perhaps classical music gained some converts.

Resuming in the fall

2011-09-27T15:08:00.003-06:00

Restarting after a long absense is always tough. I'm lazy when writing about music, but active in trying to avail myself as much as possible to music.

The summer saw some concerts at the Music Festival. Michael Christie's programming was again not much to my liking, but I attended several concerts. As usual, the orchestra was in top form, but it seemed that something wasn't quite there. The Mahler 6th seemed lackluster and long; Schubert's "Unfinished" should remain incomplete, and the ending Berlioz was mismatched with a jazzy string trio. Enough said.

With the University of Colorado back in session, the school of music has begun to offer the standard fare:faculty performances, student recitals and the school orchestra. The school of music, under dean Dan Scher, continues to improve and the students certainly show it. The Tesla Quartet (Ross Snyder, Michelle Lie, Megan Mason and Kimberly Patterson) played crisp and certain Haydn, (G Major, Op 76 No 1) following the lead of their mentors, the Takács String Quartet. Takács also opened their season with Haydn (D Major No 53 "The Lark"). Clearly the students are learning well from their teachers. Takács also did Benjamin Britten's Quartet No 1 in D Major, the highlight of the evening for me: new and calm and clearly very British -- wish dashes and sprinkles of "Peter Grimes".

The faculty concerts got off with a bang with Elizabeth Farr doing double duty. In early September she performed on harpsichord some Bach's preludes and fugues from from the Well-tempered Clavier. Then nearing the end of September she played on organ Bach's Leipzig Chorale Preludes. As a non-musician, I find her stamina and attention to detail amazing. She writes her own program notes which I find very technical, but she also provides supplementary observations on the individual pieces that helped the listening. Keep it up.

CU celebrated the 10th anniversary of September 11th with a memorial concert that was packed. Gerry Walther, violist with the Takács, performed a very appropriate and somber excerpt from Shostakovich's last work, the Sonata for Viola and Piano. A young Canadian violist lived with us for two years and performed the whole sonata for her degree requirements -- it's a lovely piece with quotations from Beethoven's "Moonlight". For me, the highlight of this concert was a performance by 10 string players of Jeffrey Nytch's "Epilogue". Nytch, who is Director of the Entrepreneurship Center for Music at CU, pointed me to his web site (jeffreynytch.com) where
I was able to access a orchestral version of "Epilogue". I really like this piece and hope others will get a chance to hear it.

I can't forget the Boulder Phil and Michael Butterman. The season opened with Hsing-ay Hsu playing the Bach Keyboard Concerto No 1 in D minor. The program notes omitted that this was a transcription by Busoni, so Hsing-ay worked her magic on the audience hearing slightly different Bach. The Phil's Mahler's First symphony was quite as successful, but Mahler is always good.

A fun swing of the Pendulum

2011-03-31T13:19:00.002-06:00

It was another interesting Pendulum series concert last night at the University of Colorado. This series is a venue for student composers to show their works, along with tried and true works from known composers.

This is the second (or third?) time that I've heard music by Elisabeth Anne Comninellis. Last night's "flight" for 8 performers was quite nice. She explained who the movements were named for, introducing me to someone I'd never hear of, Sir William Cayley. As it turns out, after a few blind alleys on Google, it was Sir GEORGE Cayley she was composing about. Regardless, the music was fine and ended with the performers disappearing ala Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony with the solo trumpet, Greg Simon, serenading the audience. If my memory serves correctly, at an earlier Pendulum series she had string quartet members move to different locations on the stage and exit individually. Must be her thing, I guess.

Hunter Ewan, a very frequent contributing composer for Pendulum, premiered his "Red River Folk Tales", a choral piece set to his own poem about growing up. Ewan has done some nice electronic music before and had an interesting "live" electronic piece done at the CU Black Box Theater with Terry Sawchuck on "processed trumpet". Here in "Tales" Ewan displayed a nice touch for choral composing. The University Choir, under Jeffrey Gemmell, sang and enunciated well, though reading along helped. I enjoyed it and thought it reminded me of the current choral superstar, Eric Whitacre. Perhaps it would have sounded better without the electronics in the background, completely a capella.

A piece by Steve Reich for 4 violins, "Violin Phase", illustrated sound shifting. The ending was amusing with the violinists ending simultaneously, as planned, and then looking at the audience with a strong sense of relief.

The concert ended with Warren Benson's "Passing Bell" with the CU Wind Symphony. It was, to say the least, loud, almost overwhelming the auditorium. I enjoyed it but was amused watching some in the audience hold their ears during the crescendos. I felt sorry for the poor harpist, plucking away for all she was worth and still being completely drowned out by the winds. For some reason I never considered the harp a wind instrument -- live and learn.

Oh Susannah

2011-03-12T14:14:00.002-07:00

Since someone wondered if I was going to Susannah, I'll make some comments.

No, Susannah was not a Stephen Foster retrospective. Don't go expecting to hear "Camptown Races", "Old Black Joe" or "Beautiful Dreamer". This is one of America's most performed operas, written in 1955 by Carlisle Floyd. It was done several years ago at Central City, but this is the first time it was done at the University of Colorado. The setting is the evangelical hills of Tennessee and it's pretty bleak.

My wife and I went last night and we both had similar reactions. I don't like to knock the home team, but I want to be honest about all this. It was less than sterling entertainment. That doesn't mean the singers were bad, they weren't. The music was accessible and pleasant and the staging well done. What was missing was comprehension. I kept asking my wife if she could understand what was just sung and the answer was always no. The orchestra, some 44 musicians, sounded fine but too often covered the singers. Some of the cast, particularly Wei Wu and Emily Martin, had the volume, but the diction in most cases just wasn't clear. I could hear some sung words, but too often they were muffled or insufficiently loud enough. Clearly this was an opera that begs for super-titles. We are used to reading the words for operas sung in other languages, but it seems to me that sung English can often be even more unintelligible than French, Italian or German. Without comprehension the art suffers.

Should Susannah have been done in Macky Auditorium? With over 2000 seats, it was disappointing to see so many empty seats, though I've been told there were more upstairs than I would have guessed. Performing it in the Music Theatre might have been a better choice, though the large orchestra might not have fit in the pit. My gut tells me that this opera would be more accessible with smaller orchestration and a smaller venue.

Was Susannah a good opera for CU? I think not. I suspect the decision of what to perform is a function of the current crop of singers, the budget and the artistic vision of Leigh Holman. Susannah might have been a good opera for CU in concept, but compared to some other recent ones, "Dead Man Walking" comes to mind, it wasn't so hot.

A friend's question

2011-02-15T16:16:00.003-07:00

A good friend, after a concert, posed a question to me: "How is it that you do not listen to other types: (jazz- there are all varieties, oldies - 40's through the 70s, modern contemporary, new age, religious, country and blues, etc. etc.)? It seems to me that these various genres include many selections that overlap parts of the classical music spectrum." In a nutshell, why classical above all else?

Like all things, we start somewhere and live on through it -- such was the case with music. In recalling my early musical experiences, I'm reminded of three things: symphonic music shorts at the movies; accordion lessons and my teacher Mr. Williams. When I went alone to movies for the first time, way back in the 50's, theaters showed short clips other than ads for popcorn and coming attractions. There were cartoons, news reels, and sometimes concert performances. They weren't long, but I distinctly remember watching the magnificence of a conductor in front of a large orchestra and the final amazing clash of the cymbals. I really liked that. My parents cleverly decided that the cymbals weren't the way to go, so off to Keyboard Studios where I took accordion lessons for many years. I learned to read music, perform it poorly, and develop a sense of what went where. Fast music was more fun, slow was sad, loud didn't go with slow and the right hand needed to cooperate with left. Then along came Mr. Williams, our music teacher in high school. A somewhat strange looking fellow that some kids teased, he exposed us to the classics, choral music, "musicals" and band. Since playing the accordion in the band was frowned on, I skipped that part now wishing I hadn't. He was dedicated and with a passion for what was "art" and what was "right" -- not just classical music, but singing on key and acting the role properly - no messing around. He was devoted, as best I can remember, to the 3 B's, and that became my first real exposure to the giants. I've always held Grieg and Khachaturian close because I played "In the hall of the Mountain King" and "Sabre Dance" fairly well, but fast, on the accordion.

So my youthful experience lead to me thinking more about music. I grew up in the 50 and 60's, so I heard Elvis, Rickie Nelson, Fats Domino and the Beatles. I listened and danced to folk and rock 'n roll stations like other normal kids. But one night, on a date, a rock announcer completely mispronounced Wagner's name and "Siegfried's Idyll". I knew better, so why ever trust them again? Rock's credibility was blown. I made money delivering papers and saved enough to buy a used component stereo system, so next the challenge was to buy records. My first purchase was Stravinsky's "Petrouchka", though I can't now imagine why. I would stand in the middle of my small narrow bedroom and blare it out and pretend to conduct it. That was, I believe, the start of my continuing kinetic reaction to music -- absorb it but play it and conduct it and feel it. Over time I collected many records, mostly "classical", but a sprinkling of the Kingston Trio, Joni Mitchell, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, the Beatles, Ahmad Jamal, Harry Belafonte, Ramsey Lewis and many others, some known and some not. This small writing exercise somehow makes me want to listen again to some, but old scratchy LP's are all I've got. When I google some I find them, but it's not satisfying. I found Ahmad Jamal's Trio performing "Poinciana", but it's definitely not what I remember. It is why I don't appreciate about jazz -- the lack of repeatability and dependence. To me much of what I tend of ignore in music is improvisational and not repeatable. Composers composed. They wrote down what they wanted to say and offered the performers guidelines. For me the art and the emotion and the reaction is in the performance of well composed music. That's not to say that jazz and rock and folk and country isn't well-done, to me it's just not what I like.

In remembering Mr Williams, it occurs to me that I can be influenced by other's suggestions. My college music instructor, Larry McIlvain, introduced me to a lot of new music: German lied, Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen and string quartets. I've enjoyed books by the current critic for The New Yorker, Alex Ross. His latest, "Listen to This" had some interesting chapters on musicians that I ignored. He writes about Radiohead and about Björk. Okay, I said, if he found them interesting I'll try them. Our resident violist, Rachael Gibson, shared some Radiohead and also recommended Sigur Rós. YouTube had some Björk. I guess I can see why some people (make that many of people) like them, but they really don't appeal to me. Listen once or twice, then forget. Listen once to Mahler or Beethoven or "The Ring" or even Arvo Pärt and you don't want to forget. You want to hear it again and again and again.

I'm not sure that fully answers the question, but it's a start.

Restarting in 2011

2011-01-12T11:05:00.003-07:00

Silence is golden. Actually here it's been activity and lethargy, running hot and cold, and finally motivation. I haven't written anything since early October and I'm overdue.

It's not that I've been missing concerts. During the fall and early winter I continued to do my thing and listen to the Boulder Philharmonic, the Colorado Symphony, the CU Faculty Tuesdays, the CU Pendulum concerts, the Takacs String Quartet, the Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera simulcasts, a few student recitals and an occasional single performance here in Boulder. I just never wrote about any of them because I was busy, busy, busy. At least that's my excuse.

So the new year is here and I'll start afresh. I recently attended the CSO's performance of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony with Michael Daugherty's “Time Machine”. The later was fun watching 3 separate orchestras respond to 3 different conductors, simultaneously synchronized together. While normally a fan of contemporary compositions, the first movement didn't do much for me, but “Future”, the second movement got me going.

Takacs kicked off 2011 with 2 Haydn quartets and Smetana's “From My Life”. Haydn's “Apponyi” quartets were fairly late (1793) but didn't send me into ecstasy. The Smetana did!

Last night Erika Eckert, Associate Professor of Viola at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus, mesmerized the audience with her “The True Nature of Things” faculty performance. Playing sometimes with others, sometime with electronics and computer synthesis and finally with an overtone singer, the program was extremely entertaining. Kudos to Erika for providing such an entertaining evening.

Two pieces in particular stood out: “At Rome around Jovian Moons” a collaboration between Erika and Paul Rudy and “Down the Stream” another cooperative effort with “throat singer” Paul Fowler. The combination of the viola with Fowler's harmonic singing/whistling, with visual cues and student percussions and rain sticks made for an enjoyable end to a fun concert. Coincidentally I recently bought Shostakovich's “Odna (Alone)” film music which features an overtone singer in one section.

I also want to mention a TV program on Glenn Gould that I saw a few weeks back. Gould, a favorite of mine, was featured in depth with many interviews and a lot of Bach. I was surprised at the program's end that the cover music for the credits wasn't Bach but instead Wagner's “Siegfried's Idyll”. I was curious and tracked down on Amazon two versions of “Idyll” involving Gould: one with him conducting and one playing a transcription. The TV special emphasized that Gould did things “his way” and this carried over into the “Idyll”. His "Idyll" is 24:31 minutes long with orchestra, and a gorgeous 23:35 on piano. As a comparison, Bahman Saless conducted the Boulder Chamber Orchestra in a speedier 20:21, but slow compared to a version by Roger Norrington who zips along at 16:19. a mere 10 seconds slower than Toscanini's 16:09. I've listened to them all repeatedly one afternoon and it's the piano transcription hands down.

Some past concerts

2010-10-11T09:11:00.002-06:00

This is just a quick comment on some concerts past, including one last night.

I only went to 2 performances by the Colorado Music Festival. Their programming hasn't appealed to me since they switched focus to world music. Their Wagner evening, essentially "The Ring without Words" with some Tristan, featured Jane Eaglen. It was fine though the audience was surprisingly small for such a great singer. I heard her sing Brunnhilde at the Seattle Opera's Ring in 2000 and 2005. The CMF season ended with Mahler's 5th, well played but strangely paired with a piece of aboriginal chant, electric guitar and didgeridoo. World music, indeed.

The University of Colorado has cut back on it's summer music offerings this year, probably for budgetary reasons. However, that didn't prevent them from two operatic offerings, one of which I missed. The one I did attend though, "The Autumn Orchard" by Dan Kellogg with words by Michael Martinez, was very good. This is apparently Kellogg's first venture into opera. I've heard a bunch of his vocal music including "Arise my love" and some selections from Ben, but I wasn't sure how he would handle the solo voice. He did fine. It's a chamber opera, with 5 singers accompanied by piano, in this case Robert Spillman. It's nicely packaged and was well sung. One thing did strike me as odd. When the lovers are physically together, they didn't sing together -- they sing to each other. However, when they are separated, he in jail and she at home, they sing a duet. A spiritual thing, I guess.

When the university resumed the fall session, I started back into my weekly trips to the newly renovated Grusin Hall in the Imig music building for the Faculty Tuesdays. My first exposure to the changes was a concert of bassoon and piano. I thought the sound was a bit harsh to my ears, but later concerts, have changed my mind. While the cover for this year's programs features the new stage with drapes across the back, it's always been barren, so I've nothing to compare it with. Other listeners that I've talked to are quite satisfied, so I'm not going to worry.

Over the past few weeks I've heard the Boulder Philharmonic do an okay Beethoven's 3rd Symphony; heard the University of Colorado's Symphony Orchestra also do Beethoven's 3rd; and heard the Boulder Chamber Orchestra with Andrew Cooperstock perform Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto. Lot's of Thirds. Attendance at the CU student performances is up this year now that music appreciation students must attend a certain number of concerts and proving their attendance electronically with a "clicker". With the exception of one rude student texting through a whole symphony, the young audience was well behaved, and, hopefully, appreciated the performance.

The Takács quartet started their season with the welcome return of Karoly Schranz, just recovered from shoulder surgery. Their performance of Shostakovich's 2nd Quartet sent shivers through the audience. Ed Dusinberre's violin sang plaintively against the other's drone-like lament. I had prepared for this concert with a cursory listening to the Shostakovich, but nothing prepared me for the real thing. This has been my musical highlight of the fall thus far.

Margaret McDonald is Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano at CU. So we had a collaborative pianist collaborating with a collaborative pianist from UC-Santa Barbara, Natasha Kislenko. Piano 6 hands, piano 4 hands and two pianos -- such great fun, particularly the Poulenc Sonata for Two Pianos.

The night after McDonald's concert the Stockhausen 2010 series started the CU Pendulum New Music program. I wrote about it earlier and I'm still scratching my head over it.

Last night a young and attractive Chinese pianist Di Wu re-introduced me to the French Impressionists: Debussy and Ravel. Each year the Takács programming introduces other artists, mostly other young string quartets. This year it was Di Wu, a pianist with amazing technique. I was seated forward and on the far left and had a great view of her hands flying over the keyboard. She performed Debussy's Preludes, Book 2 and, for comparison, Ravel's "Miroirs". I've always favored DeBussy's piano composition versus Ravel's piano music, though Ravel's is the better orchestrator. Now I'm not sure. Wu's "Le vale de cloches" ending the Ravel was phenomenal. Her fingers flew so quickly and surely it amazed me. Great concert.

You can't blink.

2010-10-03T20:57:00.003-06:00

After a summer's slumber, I've finally gotten back to my blog. I'm taking a leap forward to the present and will later comment on some earlier concerts, but today I finished my attendance at the University of Colorado's Pendulum series “Stockhausen 2010”. I missed one concert and a colloquium, but attended three events, all surprisingly fun.

Stockhausen isn't in my music collection anywhere. I've known about him and Varese and Cage and others like them, but never had an affinity for them. Alex Ross, in “The Rest is Noise” relates him to the Darmstadt's hypermodern musical scene and comments on Gruppen and Licht and generally views him as important.

I went to the first concert not really knowing what to expect. A Stockhausen piano specialist, Frank Gutschmidt, played two pieces from 2005/6, “Natürliche Dauern” 10 and 15, the first played with 4 bells on his right hand, tinkling along wonderfully on all the high fast notes. Then a John Cage piece was performed (twisted, cranked, turned) on 12 radios by 24 performers. By pure coincidence, Alex Ross just this week had an article in the New Yorker, "Searching for Silence" on John Cage and commented on “Imaginary Landscapes No. 4”, the self-same piece. Talking of Cage's development, Ross says “As randomness took over, so did noise.” He'll get no argument for me on that.

The first concert ended with a 16 minute Stockhausen piece “Komet” performed by percussionist Stuart Gerber, striking a variety of instruments and somehow summoning various tracks he had earlier sampled. Fun but perplexing, I guess.

I missed one concert when I succumbed to Beethoven and Mozart, but more on that at another time.

I set aside Sunday afternoon for in-depth Stockhausen. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died in 2007, used Bryan Wolf for 10 years as his personal sound engineer. Wolf, in his spatialization demonstration, described the technical content of the works for the later concert, explaining the evolution of the sounds and technology and playing short bursts of samples. I was puzzled by the comments of the “taped” sounds, but after the concert asked Wolf who clarified that all the sounds were from 24-bit WAV files.

Then the concert. Since much of it, attended by 150 people, was performed by the electronic music in the dark, we all quickly learned about the unintended consequences of the law. Exit signs must be lighted at all times, even if it destroys the environment for art – I had to shut my eyes to avoid the glare. In the dark, a small moonlike projection up front should have been the only thing to focus on, as Alex Ross's New Yorker article mentions that Cage used too. Oh well.

A small ensemble played “Kreuzspiel”, an early Stockhausen piece. Christina Jennings performed “Flautina” from 1989 on flute, piccolo and alto flute, commendably of course. The final work, all 32 minutes of it, was “Cosmic Pulses” from 2007, a selection from Stockhausen's unfinished Klang cycle. As explained by Wolf at the earlier lecture it had 241 musical loops of sound circling the audience on 8 high tech speakers in the Atlas Black Box auditorium. Loud, complex and appealing with a final coda of high and low frequencies ending in silence.

So what does all of this amount to musically? I'm not sure. Generally it seemed unemotional and without consequence, just pure sound. Interesting? Yes. Would I want to hear it again? Yes, I've actually just listened to “Cosmic Pulses” again, after a few clicks on Last.fm. My wife came down, listened for a few minutes and then scurried away, so I guess it wasn't to her liking. While listening during the concert I noticed something about my reaction to this music. I'm a kinetic listener – my foot bounces, my fingers play along, my head bobs and weaves. With Stockhausen, I was frozen and still -- that has to say something.

As to this blog's title, again while sitting in the dark and absorbing all these loud and strange and changing sounds, it dawned on me that you can't blink. When the sun shines brightly in your eyes, you blink. There nothing physically equivalent when you listen. I think Stockhausen makes you blink.

Shared denouements

2010-06-07T14:44:00.005-06:00

Mahler's 5th Symphony, for some reason, seems to be a favorite final piece for a conductor leaving his post. This past Sunday my wife and I heard Jeffrey Kahane lead the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in rousing and emotional performance of the 5th. While the CSO had performed it on Friday and Saturday, Sunday's was Kahane's valedictory performance as the Music Director for the CSO. At the end, the large crowd sprang to their feet, cheering, whistling and applauding Kahane's tenure.

In the summer of 1999, Giora Bernstein also chose to end his career as the Music Director of Colorado Music Festival, in Boulder, with a performance of Mahler's 5th. Giora was the founder of CMF and it's conductor and music director for over 20 years. He was a fan of Mahler and Brahms, Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. Giora was adventuresome, once programming the long Bruckner's 8th, Chavez's 1st Symphony, and George Crumb's "Ancient Voices of Children". I was always mystified as to why Giora chose to end with Mahler's 5th.

Mahler's 5th is a long piece, with a beautiful and familiar "Adagietto", with a glorious and happy ending. But it's the ending that puzzles me the most. It's not as grand or as overwhelming as the 2nd or 3rd. The strings slide upward to a brass minor chord and bass drum thump, then a full orchestral chord and another thump. I don't know why, but that last 15 seconds always seems to me as if Mahler was thumbing his nose. I hope neither Giora or Jeffrey Kahane felt that way.

In mentioning the "Adagietto" I'm also reminded of my growing displeasure with our local "classical" music station, KVOD. Many months ago they switched frequencies and lost most of Boulder listeners who couldn't receive their signal. Now, KVOD is also broadcasting on another frequency that comes in stronger, sometimes. But it's not their signal I'm concerned about but the content. Colorado Public Radio, CPR, was always somewhat of a "kitch" classical music provider. Play popular and short, ignore the challenging and long. Now, I've noticed that they are at times only broadcasting individual movements of longer works of art. They would broadcast Mahler's "Adagietto" but not the whole 5th symphony. A few weeks back they played one movement from Elgar's "Enigma Variations". So would it really be a variation? You couldn't say "Enigma Variation" (singular) since a variation assumes a base for comparison. No base, no comparison, no variation. I guess it should have been announced as Elgar's "Interesting piece of music". Bah!

I wonder if there has been some change of commercial broadcasting rights? Perhaps copyright enforcers now limit over-the-air transmissions to individual tracks, as they do on internet radio stations. If so, this is desceration of art, legally enforced.

Since I'm complaining, I'll also return to an annoyance about the Colorado Music Festival and their web site. The site is decent enough but I was unable to find any reference to Giora Bernstein, their founder and music director for over 20 years. A shameful omission.

Boulder MahlerFest XXII

2010-05-24T11:21:00.003-06:00

The Boulder MahlerFest has just concluded its 22nd festival, a remarkable achievement. Congratulations to the festival board and good luck to the new president, Barry Knapp.

This past Wednesday night Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson and Patrick Mason collaborated with Mutsumi Motoki in a selection of late Romantic songs, two by Mahler. I heard Bird-Arvidsson earlier this year at one of the university faculty concerts and she is just wonderful, a great addition to CU. Her rendition of Mahler's "Ging heut morger übers Feld" was perfect. Mason, too, was in top form. I had to laugh with him singing Hansel in a duet from Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera, normally sung by a mezzo. The final Delius "Prelude and Idyll", though, was a bit tedious.

On Saturday night and again on Sunday afternoon, the full Mahlerfest Orchestra, all 102 members strong, performed the Third Symphony, . I've always like the third a bit less than the second, "Resurrection", but now I'm not so sure. Robert Olson conducted with a pace and passion that sometimes brought me upright in my seat, particularly in the middle of the 6th movement. Julie Simpson's "O Mensch!" was spot on. The Boulder Chorale was very good, along with the combined Boulder Children's Chorale and Niwot Treble Choir with their bells of "Bimm, Bamm".

In both performances I was drawn to the trombonist John Neurohr. He's a big fellow and was in complete control of his phrasing and intonation. I was very impressed as was the audience who responded noticeably louder when Olson pointed to him during the applause. We also liked the principal trumpet, Doug Reneau, beautifully playing off-stage solos in the third movement. Maestro Olson brought both players to the front to share the standing ovation, something you rarely see. Annamarie Karacson (violin), Charles Lee (cello) and all the horns also deserve special notice.

Mahler used off-stage bands in the second symphony and here in the third, a single trumpet. Only a live performance can give the listener an appreciation of these subtle little performance enhancements. Recorded music just fails to do this, I'm afraid.

My wife and I heard the evening performance down on the main floor of the auditorium. Sunday I went up into the balcony and had a better, more complete view of the orchestra and choirs. Since I could see better, for some reason I seem to hear better. I guess it's me but when I can see a musician play, I seem to receive the sound better. Sunday's overall performance was better, to me.

I've got tickets to more Mahler this summer, in Denver with the CSO and the Colorado Music Festival here in Boulder. Both are Mahler's 5th Symphony, a bit of musical redundancy. Too bad local orchestras ignore what others schedule.

I ended to soon!

2010-05-03T09:32:00.002-06:00

In my last post I commented about the end of the University of Colorado student year and the wealth of music that each semester brings. I guess I hurried to much and forgot some. Since one student observed that I missed a good one, I thought it best to "catch up" and correct my mistake.

Over a three night period last weekend I heard 3 performances over at the University: A DMA recital, the CU Opera and the Boulder Phil. Then last week I heard the CU Orchestra reprise of their CU at Boetcher concert and last night I heard the final Takacs String Quartet performance. I really was a bit early in ending the semester.

While I normally don't attend a lot of student solo recitals, I attended this one with my wife and a friend because a young Canadian violist, Rachael Gibson, has been living with us this year. Rachael is a member of the Altamira String Quartet, along with Oscar Soler, violin, Kahyee Lee, violin and Clayton Vaughn, cello. The quartet performed Schumann's E-flat Piano Quintet with Eneida Larti, who was presenting her Doctor of Musical Arts Recital. Ms. Larti also performed two other Schumann pieces. one with cello and one with violin. While normally not a big Schumann fan, all three were performed with great student zest and were well received.

Zest and enthusiasm was about all on display for the Friday night performance of "Our Town". Thorton Wilder wrote this famous stage work back in the 30ths and just recently Ned Rorem wrote an opera based on the play. I remember seeing the play back in college and have a mental image of a blank stage and two stepladders. The CU music school faithfully confirmed that image. My wife had read the play with woman she is tutoring, so I also could check to see the words were faithfully sung unchanged. The student performers were in top form, particularly Sarah Gilbert as Emily and John Lindsey as the Stage Manager. Unfortunately as an opera, though, it did little for me. Perhaps it's lack of familiarity contributed to my reaction, but there just didn't seem to me to have any musical appeal. While I normally enjoy contemporary opera, this one left me cold. A few years ago CU did Poulenc's "Les Mamelles de Tirésias", also somewhat stark and surreal. It, too, just didn't give me much music to latch onto. Oh well, next year we get the musical "Carousel", Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah" and Bernstein's "Mass"; a musical, an opera and a work for stage. I hope this doesn't mean that CU is moving away from an opera repertoire.

This summer, running in its austerity mode, CU has cut the normal musical offerings. When I first came to Colorado in the middle of the eighties, Gilbert and Sullivan ruled. The famous patter tenor John Reed sang and directed many of the famous ones. Wits at the music school "localized" some of the famous songs bringing local Boulder into the middle of Japan or jolly old England. It was all great fun. That said, there will be some "Opera Scenes" offered mid-summer, featuring composers Robert Altridge, Herschel Garfein and Daniel Kellogg.

Daniel Kellogg is on the CU composing faculty and one of his works was opening music for the Boulder Philharmonic's final season concert. Dan spoke a few words about "Rush" from the stage, amusingly commenting it was from his "early" period and detailed his emotions of sitting in a car in big city traffic. That little insight made the music more enjoyable and I could transport myself to those same frustrating emotions.

Following Kellogg's piece was "Rainbow Body" by Christopher Theofanidis, in town from Yale for the performance. Conductor Michael Butterman did a neat thing by broadcasting a short snippet of the main theme of "Rainbow Body" as was originally written by Hildegard von Bingen during the 12th century. This fairly short 6 or 7 note chant stayed in my mind as Theofanidis's work was performed. It returned many times, beautifully orchestrated. I was going to order a CD of it, but Amazon was out of stock. I've got to hear that one again.

The Boulder Phil's performance ended with a rousing "Carima Burana". What more could you ask for? A large orchestra, lots of percussion, a huge chorus, a cute children's choir and 3 distinguished singers. I've heard "Carmina" live eight or ten times now, even in the two-piano version, and it never fails to please. I've got a friend who said "Oh, I've heard that one before so I don't need to hear it again." Sheesh! I've seen the Mona Lisa once, so there's no need to look at it again, I guess. The tenor William Parsons sang the roasted swan, and Dennis Jesse sang the baritone voicewell, but it was soprano Mary Wilson who impressed me most. In the ending, she put down her music and sang beautifully above everyone. The crowd sprang to its feet applauding the singers, the orchestra, the conductor and the end of a good Boulder Phil season.

Mid-week we went to the CU Orchestra's final semester performance. It had been performed the night before in Denver to a decently sized audience at Boettcher. The concert was only two works: Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra" and Mahler's First Symphony, both conducted by Gary Lewis. The large chorus had a minor mishap and a few soprano's left the stage before the singing actually began. David Korevaar played flawlessly but the audience responded strangely with only a luke-warm reception. The Choral Fantasy was where Beethoven first introduced the major theme used to end his Ninth Symphony, so perhaps the audience wasn't expecting to hear it. Maybe the audience expected it to continue, but while they warmly applauded, then didn't stand as had been the case in Denver the night before, as reported to me by Rachael. After intermission, a larger CU orchestra did a fine job on the Mahler. The pace was a little slow at times, but this long early symphony was greeted with a well-deserved reaction from the audience.

Last night the Takacs, with Lina Bahn substituting for the recuperating Karoly Schranz, played late Beethoven. It must have been exhausting for the quartet to play two full concerts hours apart, but their playing was effortless and the audience responded with rousing applause. They played the last quartet, Opus 135 to open the concert and ended it with The B-flat Major, Opus 130. Displaying their virtuosity, the Takacs chose the "Grosse Fuge", the original last movement of the 130. It's often played by itself and is Beethoven as his most complex. I enjoy it yet find my mind often trapped into thinking of the "wrong next note".

Between the Beethoven, the Takacs programmed "A Cool Wind" by the New Zealander John Psathas. Ed Dusinberre commented about the piece from the stage, explaining that Psathas crafted it based on music for the duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument said to be one of the oldest in the world. He explained that it was played with limited intervals, so the string writing does so. Ed humorously said he couldn't really find any "happy sounds" during his searchings on YouTube. The quartet played it fairly soulfully and I wasn't certain if I liked it or not, but as it progressed I changed to favoring it. It's one of those pieces that requires a second hearing. Lina Bahn's solo ending it was wonderful.

Now maybe the spring season of music is over.

Ending the student year

2010-04-19T12:42:00.003-06:00

It's about the end of the school year at the University of Colorado. Within the next few weeks exams start and then they leave, blessing Boulder with a more quiet environment. Unfortunately that also means the end of the faculty and student recitals. Summer will bring the Colorado Music Festival back, but their season, once the highlight of my summer, has been dismally broken with crappy world music and miserable programming.

Last week I heard 3 concerts, two at CU. First was a performance of the Colorado Symphony in Denver with Ralph Kirschbaum in Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1. It was sterling performance and he really drew me into the long cadenza which separates the second and last movements. The CSO admirably played Dvorak's "From the New World", with the anticipated audience reaction. Kirschbaum apparently also held a master class at CU later in the week.

The Pendulum series at CU has always been one of my favorites, where students and faculty have new works introduced by various players from the music school. This time a guest group, "The Playground Ensemble", was featured in two separate works by graduate students Anthony Green and Leanna Kirchoff. A frequent complaint of mine has been the diction of the singers. Even when singing in English and singing something as familiar as the Gettysburg Address, I just have a hard time making out the words. As a result, the art suffers.

What surprised me most at this Pendulum performance was a piece performed by Hunter Ewan. A graduate student and frequent participant in Pendulum, Ewan performed his own composition "Ohi'a and Lehua" on alto saxophone wired into a system which manipulated and synthesized play back. He controlled it with a foot pedal and got very interesting results. I couldn't help but think that music like this would make good movie background music.

Finally, I attended a performance by Oscar Soler, violin and Clayton Vaughn, cello doing their DMA chamber recital. They first performed Ravel's Sonata for Cello and Violin, a work I've never heard. It was very well played. Then they were joined by Kahyee Lee, violin and Rachel Gibson, viola to form the Altamira String Quartet. Rachel has been living with us this past year and I try to follow her performances and her quartet. The quartet did two, now fairly familiar works: Bartok's Second Quartet and Haydn's Op 76 No 1. Somewhat to my surprise I enjoyed the Bartok more. As I told them later, they really hit a home run in the second movement. Crisp, snappy and perfect.

I'll probably not contribute much more to this blog until the fall season starts again. I think I've got a Boulder Phil performance of Carmina Burana coming up, but little else. It's a good thing that I've got a large collection of MP3s to keep me happy.

Some Prokofiev

2010-04-03T16:38:00.002-06:00

Over the year I've really grown fond of Prokofiev. "Kije" and "Nevsky", "Three Oranges", 2 string quartets and 5 wonderful piano concertos. I've put two of his ballets, "Romeo and Juliet" and "Cinderella", on one of my mp3 players and listen to them as I ski -- it's seems to help my rhythm sometimes. So it was a good week when I heard two of his works in two different concerts.

Ending the University of Colorado's "Music Faculty Tuesdays" was Margaret McDonald, the Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano. I guess we used to call them accompanists, but now collaborative pianist is the preferred and more accurate term. Dr. McDonald appears quit frequently with other CU faculty, but this time she was the center of attraction. She performed the "Seven Popular Spanish Song" by de Falla with mezzo Julie Simpson; two Schumann pieces with Michael Thornton, horn and alternating with Dan Silver, clarinet and Judith Glyde, cello. The clarinet and cello took turns collaborating, an interesting idea. Christina Jennings got me going, though, in Prokofiev's "Sonata in D Major". McDonald commented before each work what instruments were paired with the piano. I've heard the Prokofiev with violin, so it was exciting to hear it with flute, which is normally not one of my favorite instruments.

Last night Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto was performed by Lindsay Deutsch with the Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Bahman Saless conducting. I must admit that I was a bit apprehensive about it because it's reputed to be a complicated piece for all involved. Deutsch and Saless pulled it off successfully. I'm tempted to go again tonight, but we have Japanese guests so I can't. Deutsch seemed to play effortlessly and with joy and the larger-than-normal orchestra responded.

The concert began with the premiere of Saless's own "Tango Variations for Violin and Orchestra". Saless apparently wrote the piece with Lindsay Deutsch in mind and it was a success. The audience responded very positively to this new, highly accessible set of variations on an old Nat King Cole theme "Nature Boy". Interestingly, my own reaction to the variations was that it would have been more interesting if it had a different theme. However, I did recognize the theme as it recurred and tangoed. My wife, on the other hand, said she didn't recognize the theme at all, but enjoyed how it all fit together anyway. Let's hope Saless gets his new composition performed again.

Music and murder

2010-03-19T10:59:00.003-06:00

I went to the St. Patrick's day performance of the Boulder Phil the other night. Too bad I had to miss one of the university's Pendulum Series, but Angela Cheng's playing of Chopin's Second Piano Concerto was something I didn't want to miss. She has always been a favorite here and she didn't disappoint. Conductor Michael Butterman also showed great initiative in selecting Andrej Panufnik's "Hommage à Chopin" to precede Ms Cheng. Audiences need to be exposed to more than just the old war horses and this one fit the bill -- accessible and lyrical.

Earlier my wife and I went to the university's performance of "Don Giovanni". The students always amaze me with their professionalism and vocal capabilities. The graduate student Wei Wu, in particular, was outstanding as Leporello.

Something missing in Boulder. though, are reviews and previews of classical music in the local paper, the "Daily Daguerreotype", née "Camera". Granted main stream media is having some difficulties in the Internet age, but if they can pay staff to put together several weeks worth of agonizing detail about a local murderer and his victims, you would hope that management could find a few pennies to promote art locally. Nah! No money in it. Anyway, if the school systems continue to eliminate music in the schools, why worry?

A busy musical week

2010-02-21T13:08:00.003-07:00

Over that last 8 days I've attended 6 concerts -- such is the wealth of music in Boulder and at the University of Colorado.

First was the CU student orchestra under Gary Lewis, with Mozart, the "Three Cornered Hat" and "Til Eulenspiegel". I enjoyed Lewis's quick overview of the themes and settings from "Til", though the violist living with us complained it was like playing the whole thing twice. The concert ended with an interest piece by contemporary composer Arturo Marquez "Danzon No 2".

Next night, Saturday, was a performance by this year's Graduate String Quartet-in-Residence, the Tesla Quartet. They studying with the world famous Takacs Quartet at CU and consist of Ross Snyder, Xian Meng, Kimberly Patterson and Megan Mason. It was a busy two nights for Xian and Megan, who the night before performed the Mozart Symphonia Concertante. This night they did Beethoven's Opus 18, No. 6, Bartok's No. 2 and Smetana's "From My Life". Bartok I can leave or take -- it just doesn't do anything for me. The Smetana was my favorite that night, particularly the sedate second movement.

Sunday night my wife and I went to the Boulder Phil's Spanish Valentines day concert. No Spanish composers, mind you, but a Capriccio, Symphony, and Rhapsody -- all of the "Espagnole" flavor. Music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Lalo and Ravel respectively. The Lalo was wonderfully played by Jennifer Frautschi. Several people commented about the sound she got from her violin, which apparently is a Strad. The conductor, Michael Butterman ended the concert with a 10 -- Ravel's "Bolero". It's a fun piece and the audience responded, but I think that Butterman should have placed the snare drummer in front where the audience could see her (Hiroko Hellyer). I've seen several performances of Bolero and it's been fun watching the performer start with a muffled drum, typically a cloth covering over the head of the drum. As the music progresses, at one point they need to keep cadence but swiftly remove the cloth. It seems hard to do and is easy to miss if you don't know that it's going to happen.

I took a two night break, missing some additional opportunities at CU, but started back up on Wednesday night with the CU Pendulum series of contemporary music. This series has always been a favorite of mine, though it has it's ups and downs. Unfortunately this time was pretty much a down. Perhaps it was the longish jazz piece by Liz Comninellis that got me off on the wrong foot, but nothing that night really appealed to me. During two of the pieces I kept wondering about the distinction between sound and music. The sounds were interesting, but was it music? I'm not sure it was, though the effort was valiant. The new professor of musical entrepreneurism, Jeffry Nytch, performed his own new composition with Michael Dunn on tuba. Nytch is a countertenor, which has always been somewhat off-putting to me. I just couldn't understand the words, so it all went over my head, no pun intended.

The following night I was back at CU at Mackey Auditorium for the Artist Series. Pianist Haochen Zhang absolutely floored the audience. He is not yet 20, but has already won the prestigious Van Cliburn competition. What talent! He tenderly treated Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and Schumann, then savagely attacked Stravinsky's "Petrushka" The orchestral version of "Petrushka" was the very first record I purchased back in the late 50's, with Pierre Monteaux conducting. As a kid I'd stand in the middle of my small bedroom and "conduct" the music, always annoying my mom. I still have the record, but really no way to play it anymore. The piano version just seems to have a lot more notes and Zhang played with a speed and intensity that was amazing. He had to have an extra finger or two on each hand to make that much sound. He's one to watch.

Finally, on Friday night, I attended the Boulder Chamber Orchestra's chamber music mini-concert, the "BCO Musicians and Friends". I was fortunately sitting next to Kelly Dean Hansen, a local music reviewer and PhD student at CU. Kelly had brought the scores for two of the night's pieces, Dvorak's "Five Bagatelles" and the Brahm Piano Quartet No. 3., so I watched both the scores and the performers. What a treat to see the music in all it's complexity and to hear it as happens. I've got several scores at home and I sometime follow a recording of a Beethoven quartet or, choke-choke, one of Wagner's "Ring" operas. If you've never tried it, give it a whirl because you sometime will see something that you hadn't heard before.

I'm really glad all these performances are so easily avaible in Boulder. And they say retirement is boring?

More good music

2010-01-28T13:31:00.004-07:00

A few weeks ago I heard the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in Denver then last weekend I listened to the Boulder Philharmonic. The CSO played Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and the Phil played Beethoven's Fifth. Since both works are so familiar and ingrained in my mind, your ear picks up anything out of the ordinary. The CSO's performance was crisp and clear. The brass seemed extraordinarily strong. The Phil's performance was nearly as crisp, but the first violins seemed a bit reticent and quiet. Still, while I prefer new and unfamiliar music, when the old warhorses are played, your listening is tested.

Two facility performances at the University of Colorado started off the new semester. The first was Lina Bahn, Judith Glyde, Daniel Silver and Alexandra Nguyen performing Paul Moravec's "The Tempest Fantasy" with Alexandra Lewis acting the role of Miranda and Lyndia McGaughey doing interpretive dance. For some reason Moravec's music reminded me of Leonard Bernstein. I don't know what it was, but in the middle of the piece that thought came to me and stayed throughout. The dancing did little for me, but that's normal. The spoken words were delivered well, but one phrase stuck out in my mind, summarizing my reaction to this whole work of art -- "thorns without roses".

The second faculty performance was by pianist David Korevaar. I've always been a fan of his and I have several of his CD's. He played Debussy and a Beethoven sonata "Pastorale" and ended with a favorite of mine, Liszt's "Years of Pilgrimage: Switzerland". Someone commented last night during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera's HD movie performance of "Der Rosenkavalier" that she thought the Liszt was so sad. I agree. On the morning when the Denver airport opened for the first flights after 9/11, I took a Japanese friend to the airport and saw her depart. On the drive back "Années De Pélerinage" was on the radio and it just exaggerated my sadness. Korevaar's playing confirmed that sadness with an excellent performance.

"Der Rosenkavalier" is one of my all time favorites. I've seen it live at Santa Fe and at Opera Colorado, but the music sticks with me mostly from Cd's. Just listening to the music doesn't do it justice, though. This performance with Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Christine Schäfer and Kristinn Sigmundsson was outstanding. I sat fairly close to the huge screen and got drawn into it. My German is rusty so the sub-titles helped me understand more about what was really going on. The Marschallin's sadness at her aging comes out more than you can get from just a musical performance -- and in the end of the first act you could see Fleming's tears on the big screen. Now I wish I had gone to the Saturday morning broadcast a few weeks ago so I would have seen it twice.

UnSilent Pandora and Chumby

2009-12-17T10:14:00.003-07:00

I've been quiet lately. While I've been at a few musical events, nothing really sparkled. I heard two Brahms symphonies: the First by the Colorado Symphony, and the Second by the University of Colorado Orchestra. Neither grabbed my fancy, but it's Brahms, not the performances.

We attended a fun happening last Friday night -- the annual Boulder "UnSilent Night" boom-box procession on the Boulder Pearl Street Mall. Over 100 people participated, carrying a variety of music players, all playing one of the four tracks from Phil Kline's Christmas composition. It is a new-age sound that merges chimes and percussion and electronic sounds and choruses. On a crisp, clear night the sounds are wonderful as they merge and reverberate from the buildings. Many thanks to Dan Kellogg from the CU School of Music for starting and coordinating this.

I've been watching Pandora pervade more and more devices. Nightly I listen from my Chumby next to my bed. I can listen to Pandora from my main Linus workstation and from my Mac iBook. My iPod touch has a Pandora App and now I've configured my Roku to stream Pandora's offerings --- Not bad. Still, Pandora is not for serious classical music fans because they only play individual tracks, not complete compositions. A Mahler symphony or a Beethoven string quartet is meant to be digested completely, not in little sips. A curse on the lawyers and executives that force this desecration of art.

While I'm cursing, a pox on the Chumby developers, too. When I'm finished reading at night I like to set the Chumby timer to turn off the music. Clearly no one would ever want to listen for more than 60 minutes! What a silly limitation. Then, when I try to turn the timer on I press and press and press and curse and curse because it just ignores my touch. If I'm lucky I can set it after 5 touches, though sometimes it's many more. I don't know if it's the hardware touch-screen or the software, but most other Chumby features seem to work okay.

Happy holidays to everyone.

Music in a silly movie

2009-11-10T16:29:00.003-07:00

In previous rants, I complained about how the legal profession, supporting the recording and movie industries, is damaging art: limiting internet streamed music to tracks, desecrating music by stopping the composers intent.

Last night I was watching a silly 1994 Coen brothers' movie "The Hudsucker Proxy" on my Roku. The background music often was from ballets by Aram Khachaturian. The romantic theme was the luscious "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia" and at another point I believe they were using "the dance of Gaditanae", both from his "Spartacus". There were other clear quotes from "Gayane" -- the famous sabre dance.

What bothers me is the the lawyers want music to be protected and its use restricted and controlled. However, what's good for the goose isn't apparently good for the gander. As I watched the credits flash by there was only a passing reference to "Themes by Aram Khatchaturian". I guess that's the best creative types can come to giving someone else credit for art. The creator of "themes" is equivalent to a driver, key grip, associate executive assistant or dresser.

Kinetics

2009-10-25T12:58:00.003-06:00

Listening to music is an active thing for me. Ever since I was a little kid I've always listened with my body. My fingers "play" the notes; my head bobs for emphasis; my chest heaves at some endings; feet and legs bounce and bounce and bounce. Nobody has ever complained about it, though sometimes I'm sure I get carried away. Anyway, that's how music affects me -- kinetically.

The reason I bring this up is that the other night I went to a concert of the University of Colorado's student Chamber Orchestra led by Gary Lewis. Conductors move -- that's how they conduct. I don't know why I began looking at the musicians' feet but it dawned on my that there was no motion. Only occasionally would I see some one's foot shift. Not consistently, mind you, but sometimes there was a rhythmic change of the light off the shiny patent-leather shoes. One violinist seemed agonized in wrapping his feet together, almost struggling to stay put on the chair. The pieces were Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony and Prokofiev's "Classical" symphony.

How did they hold back? Weren't they affected by the music? Didn't they get carried away, too? Why were the musicians so still?

As we walked back to the car, I was informed by one of the musicians that tapping toes to keep time is totally forbidden. Music is for the mind and not the body, except where needed to press, pull, pluck or perform a note. Silly me. Of course, it make sense, but I just never thought about it before. Good thing I don't play in an orchestra.

Singing, meaning and art

2009-10-14T15:21:00.002-06:00

Heavy topic here. Skip if it you like. A few recent concerts have me thinking about the relationship of song words to art. How sung words give meaning.

Last week I heard a spinto soprano, Irene VanHam Friedlob, in recital with Mitsumi Moteki on piano. Spinto was a new term to me, but Wikipedia says it's 'a soprano or tenor voice of a weight between lyric and dramatic that is capable of handling large dramatic climaxes at moderate intervals.' She certain fit that description.

While mostly she sang in Italian or French or German, for the final piece she sang in English. The earlier songs had translations, while the last one didn't, of course. Most words were understandable as she sang, but not every one of them. Words would pop out clearly but their associated meaning didn't. She sang well and enunciated well but the vocal gymnastics necessary to produce song hid the meaning. I didn't think it the singer's fault.

Then this past Sunday night Thomas Hampson sang at the University of Colorado's Mackey Auditorium. It was part of his traveling 'Songs of America' series, with Wolfram Rieger on piano. The performance enthralled the audience. Hampson sings and enunciates as well as anyone. His beautiful baritone was crystal clear even at the back of the auditorium. However, to me the meaning of the songs and the cadence of the sentences from poems just weren't clear enough to understand.

An example was his singing of "The Dodger" by Aaron Copland. I've heard this fairly familiar song several times before and it's a fun song reminiscent of any earlier time in America. The stanzas refer to candidates, preachers and lovers, all "dodgers" with "Yes and I'm a dodger too!" In the intervening stanzas the singer tells why each is untrustworthy. It was here in all cases that the meaning got lost. I don't remember clearly enough if the music was different, but there was something that hid the words explaining why these reputable folk weren't so. You couldn't read the words as the singing progressed because of the lighting. But would that have helped?

So was art preserved? Did the combination of piano and singer and words and music yield good art? Entertainment, surely. But did the composer accomplish what he set out to do? I'm confused here.

Last night CU's favorite baritone, Patrick Mason, sang some Rachmaninoff songs in a recital with Alexandra Nguyen on piano. There was no question of understanding anything sung -- it was all in Russian. So was Rachmaninoff's art achieved? I quickly read some of the translations, but the meaning could only be inferred by some chords, vocal lines, facial expressions and timing. Enjoyable, of course. But successful art?

I'll end with a question that's been simmering within me for years. Is vocal musical art almost always failed art? Is opera, the epitomy of vocal musical art by definition failed art?

Two good concerts

2009-10-01T08:52:00.003-06:00

Friday night the University of Colorado Symphony Orchestra, lead by Gary Lewis, offered its first concert for the semester. There were three works on the program, all of which tested this young orchestra and all of which were performed very well. The control and evenness of the strings impressed me. I particularly liked Daniel Kellogg's "Western Skies", musical ruminations on the Colorado landscape. Last year at one of the Pendulum Series programs (I think) another Colorado-inspired Kellogg piece was premiered and I liked it too. This was not a premiere for "Western Skies", as it been played by the National Symphony Orchestra in places as far away as Japan and Korea. It is a full orchestra, fairly loud reflection on the openness of the plains, the crystalline clearness of snowy night and the dramatic jump into the mountains. How big a jump? The lowest point in Boulder County is 4890 feet above sea level, the highest 14,255 at the top of Long's Peak. That is a 9365 feet difference in one county, 1.8 miles! Kellogg is from back east (Yale) where the horizon is always muffled by trees and more trees, so his music reflects his agoraphobic reaction to all this open space. "Western Skies" would sound wonderful if it were performed in the thundering wooden shed of Boulder's Chauttauqua Auditorium with Michael Christie leading the Colorado Music Festival.

The second half of the concert was Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony", enthusiastically played. Lewis was so energetic in his conducting that he poked his baton into the principal cellist's instrument and dropped it from the stage.

The other night a new vocal faculty member at Colorado, soprano Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson, made her local debut as part of the Faculty Tuesdays. What a stunning opening! All her selections were female roles "Speaking Her Mind". Particularly striking were two excerpts from Gounod's "Faust" where first an impressionable Marguerite sings of her beauty into a mirror, and then later pregnant bemoans her abandonment. Bird's voice was wonderful and her facial expressions outstanding. As she got into Frau Fluth's character she shot a glance at the pianist Christopher Zemliauskas that told the audience who was in control. Once again the University of Colorado as snared another terrific singer.

A George Crumb Celebration

2009-09-12T14:23:00.002-06:00

The University of Colorado's Faculty Tuesdays has started up again with the beginning of the fall semester. The first two weeks featured Peter Cooper on oboe, and David Korevaar's Clavier Trio. Both concerts were good starts for the season.

Korevaar chose an interesting transcription of Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht" by Eduard Steuermann. I've always liked this piece but was somewhat taken back by the use of the piano. The violin (Arkady Fomin) and cello (Jesus Castro-Balbi) were too often covered by the piano that it just didn't sit right with me.

And then this week ....... A George Crumb Festival!!

Steve Bruns, Hsing-ay Hsu and Daniel Kellogg, all Colorado faculty members, coordinated four nights of the music of George Crumb to celebrate Crumb's 80Th birthday. Crumb was there each night and was warmly received by the audience, faculty and performers. Some of the scores of some of his music were posted on the walls of a reception room and aren't like anything that I could figure out. Circular staffs, clusters of chords; pointers and arrows; strange inscriptions which must mean something to someone. Typical Crumb, I suppose. At CU there were also afternoon lectures and master classes and recitals that I couldn't make but which, I'm told, were fun.

Crumb began his academic career at Colorado in the early 60s, then taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1999. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1968, among other international prizes. Much of his music is available on 13 CDs from Bridge records.

My first exposure to Crumb was back 8 or 9 years ago when Giora Bernstein conducted a performance of "Ancient Voices of Children" at the Colorado Music Festival. In this work a soprano sings Lorca poems into the sound box of the piano with woodwind and percussion accompaniment I liked it enough to get a CD at the time but over the years when I returned to it the sound wasn't the same. When it's a CD compared to a live performance the CD always pales.

What is Crumb's music like? He's hard to categorize but you can recognize him when you hear him -- I think. I bought several of his CDs and I'm listening to some now. While I can't say I really like it, it is mysterious and interesting.

The first night's concert saw David Korevaar perform Crumb's "Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik" on a "well tampered-with clavier", ruminations on 'Round Midnight' by Theolonius Monk. During the week the pianists performed on a "well tampered-with clavier", a Baldwin. It was modified with a "Dampfenader" to control the damper and sustain pedals so the pianists could stand up and reach the piano's insides without worrying about the pedals.

Also on the opening Tuesday, 4 percussionists from the Colorado Symphony, Hsing-ay on piano, Patrick Mason, baritone and Julie Simpson, mezzo all coordinated by Allan McMurray did "Voices from A Forgotten World". The program stated there were over 150 percussion instruments on stage and I believe it. The songs included some familiar tunes abstracted in Crumb's way. Strangest to me was "Beautiful Dreamer" with Mason and Simpson whispering words to each other -- very memorable for some reason.

The next three nights were more Crumb -- lots of percussion; instruments played in peculiar but interesting ways; and voices whispered, shouted and often very beautiful (particularly Kristin Gornstein). While listening I sometimes wrote notes to myself of impressions of what I was hearing. Here are some in no particular order: instrumental abuse; shouts-singing-whispers; long "loud" silences; round-robin piano - 12 hands; minimalism without repeats; stand-alone sounds; missing melodies; sly inserts; lost sounds; unknowable wrong notes; piano inside and out - a real percussion instrument; tippy-tap and slam; unappetizing sounds; make believe music; endings of long silence.

Crumb has an affinity for Lorca and offers musical settings of his poetry. I've no command of Spanish, so whatever was sung meant nothing to me. Others commented to me about the same language issue. Why not have the songs in ancient Phoenician or Esperanto or some lost language from the Amazon? The communication would be the same.

I tried seeing what the Internet music streaming service Pandora "computed" for a George Crumb "station". After seeding Pandora with just George Crumb's name, it broadcast one of Crumb's "Makrokosmos" piano pieces. Pandora proceeded to then play tracks from works by Stockhausen, Bartok, Varese, Shostakovitch, Morton Feldman and Berio. I tuned it on the next night and got similar results. Crumb's music genome clearly computes to the 20Th century, but he has a distinctly voice.

Was the Crumb Festival successful? Most certainly! Concerts were all well attended, performances garnered standing ovations and everyone seemed to be smiling when they left. I'm glad I went and congratulate the school of music at CU for tackling an ambitious project like this.

Right angled tracks

2009-09-08T14:58:00.002-06:00

I was listening to Pandora last night, using it's Quick Mix amalgamation of my play list selections. The apparent legal requirement to play only tracks of unrelated music can lead to horrible results. Pandora selected an orchestral piece by Elliot Carter, an atonal disjointed murky piece of music. Then, without a second's break, an equally dissonant contemporary piece by Gregory Kurtag was next. The mathematical similarity between the two pieces, based on some distance function calculation of music content, was obvious. But the musical clash to the ear was jolting -- I really, really objected to the immediate right angled turn. I wasn't really aware it was Carter and Kurtag, but the abrupt clash forced me to figure it out and to think about it. Yuch! I turned off Pandora.

I switched my "chumby" to listening to WQXR in New York. When I lived in Connecticut it was my favorite station, the "voice of the new york times". listened nightly to good music, played in its entirety with entertaining announcers commenting appropriately. It was a first class operation.

When I first connected to WQXR, Haydn's "Farewell" symphony was about finished. The announcer made a few cute remarks about it and then signed off. And then it was just music -- unannounced music -- complete music -- but unknown music. I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that it was guitar concerto by Rodrigo, but why was nobody saying anything? After about 25 minutes it ended with someone saying "check out our online play list to identify the piece you've just heard". Wonderful. Big media's economic problems manifest themselves on WQXR by eliminating the personal touch. Now, at the stroke of midnight the station seems to go on autopilot, playing music from a play list with occasional recorded fragments telling the listener to go to a web site to check out the play list and figure out what was being played. If that isn't a crock! The city that never sleeps now is entertained by an automaton. So much for the state of classical music on the radio and the Internet.

An observation on Internet streaming music

2009-09-02T11:53:00.004-06:00

With the rise of Internet music, in many ways replacing terrestrial FM radio, I've noticed something that's missing from the experience -- the announcer.

Since the Internet means computers and a user's computer has a keyboard and screen, the Internet music providers assume the listener is in front of a screen and attentive. Not so!

I generally listen to Pandora, Last.FM, Live365 (Contemporary-classical.com) or my own music from my MP3 library. At night I use my "Chumby", an interactive media player which is wirelessly connected to my internal network and thus to the Internet. It's actually a small linux-based touchscreen computer with some neat features. Normally I listen to Pandora while reading then set Chumby's timer to turn off as I go to sleep. I still listen to the music after the lights are turned off. But what I'm hearing is often a puzzle -- I know the piece but can't place the name or I don't think I've ever heard it before and really like it. But what is it? Classical music on FM had an announcer saying something like "Now, Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" and then the announcer would say it again after the piece was broadcast. Stations would also publish their prior day's play lists, so that if I missed the announcer's comments I could go to the web page and figure it out. This doesn't seem possible with Internet classical music streaming today.

When you think about it, the insertion of phrases like "Now Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" and "That was Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" is essentially the same as the insertion of an advertisement inserted on web pages by Google's AdSense -- aural additions versus visual ones. It's actually the insertion of two adjacent phrases "That was" PriorPiece followed by "Now" NextPiece. I've suggested to one of the Internet stations that they provide these announcer tips. It could be optional and possibly an additional revenue stream. Make sense to me. While I'm only interested in classical music from these music streaming services, my son agrees that it would be useful for his music(?) too. I guess no surprise there.

Since the recording industry despises their customer base and forces music streamers to live within the tyranny of tracks the inserted phrases would thus have to something longer like "Sibelius symphony number 6 in D minor, Opus 104, second movement, allegro moderato with the Vienna Philharmonic lead by Lorin Maazel". A bit of a mouthful but better than silence and ignorance.

Restarting at the end of summer

2009-08-25T15:34:00.002-06:00

It's been a slow summer musically for me, just two Colorado Music Festival concerts: Mahler's Fourth and Prokofief's Third piano concerto. Most of the CMF season had little appeal, focusing on "world" music, whatever that is. Fortunately I've got lots of MP3's and CDs along with an Internet radio so it was exactly quiet.

I've just finished an interesting book related to music Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age". It is an interesting history of the decline of an industry I've been purchasing from since I was an eleven year old paper-boy. My first record purchase was Pierre Monteux conducting Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" and the "Firebird Suite", a 1957 RCA LP which I still have. I can remember as a young kid pretending to conduct "Petrouchka" in my bedroom with it blasting away, driving my mother crazy.

Knopper describes the disintegration of the industry that allowed my love of classical music grow, though his focus is primarily on the personalities involved in "pop" music: disco, rock-and-roll, rap, country-and-western, etc. He names weirdly-named performers/bands along with the executives involved in this strange business. Classical music is essentially ignored, with only one reference to anyone I even recognized -- Phillip Glass. "Appetite" traces the introduction of the CD, the war against Napster, the RIAA's attack on their customers, and explains the dreary state of the recording industry today. I concluded that this industry, lead by the RIAA, is why we now have legal desecration of broadcast classical music.

Earlier this summer I communicated with an executive of an Internet radio station. He responded to my complaint about the tyranny of the track -- playing individual tracks from a piece of classical music, rather than the whole work. He said "unfortunately that's a licensing constraint; not something we do by choice." So with the rapid decline of classical music on FM radio, classical fans are left with Internet radio. There we can thank a clump of thoughtless lawyers for demeaning our music.

What gets to me is that some pieces are played in its entirety. The other night I heard a complete performance of "Scheherazade", about 25 minutes worth of music. Then later I heard a single movement of Glass's "Mishima" String Quartet, a whole minute and a half. That's just ludicrous.

The last year has shown the "best and brightest" on Wall Street weren't so talented after all. Recording industry executives and their lawyers clearly are the same.

Another look at internet classical music services

2009-06-29T14:39:00.002-06:00

Last year I began trying out Internet classical music services. I signed up for Last.FM and Pandora and Live365 and I've had varying levels of satisfaction with them all. Initially I had a hard time getting my mind around how these things worked, so I just gave in and allowed the music to play out as they decided. Subsequently I've tried a few other sites including ShoutCast, imeem.com and musicovery.com. With the exception of Live365's Contemporary-Classical.COM all these stations have a serious drawback for serious classical music listeners -- they seem to only play tracks not complete works of music. In a post on January 15Th in 2008 I complained about how some of Bruckner's symphonies were being broadcast on FM station only as individual movements rather than the entire piece. Time seemed to be the issue on FM, but is there something more to it? Is there some legal issue where the copyright holder is enforcing some claim? Is it the lack of classical music exposure and appreciation that causes the programmers to focus on "tunes" and not art?

The issue has become more personal as I've recently purchased a Chumby internet radio. It's a $200 wireless Linux computer, connected to my home wireless network. It's about the size of a large softball with a touch screen, USB inputs and decent on board speakers. Part alarm clock, part game console, part news ticker and part radio it's replaced my old FM radio. Unfortunately only Pandora and Shoutcast are built in, though there are some poorly documented hacks to enable others Internet broadcasters like my favorite Contemporary-Classical.COM via Live365. Pandora is what I've chosen to listen to each night. The programming, based on my personal targeted "genome" is actually very satisfying -- except for the track limitation. I was listening to Richard Strauss's "Alpine Symphony" the other night. Just as the music "climbed to the top of the mountain" it switched to something else. I'm sorry but I find that annoying and disrespectful to the composer.

Kudos to Contemporary-Classical.COM, though. They seem to play entire pieces, not just tracks. A few week back they broadcast all 20 sections of Olivier Messiaen's 'Vingt Regards su L'Enfant Jesus'. They've exposed me to several new composers and lots of intriguing music. Good for them!

More on Musical Chills

2009-06-19T14:01:00.003-06:00

Late the other night, when I couldn't sleep, I began to think more about the phenomenon "musical chill". In an earlier post I commented on this noting that Alex Ross wrote about this effect in the New Yorker article on Mahler. Apparently this was initially described by a neuroscience investigator, Jaak Panskepp, who has describe the physical reactions ”in which listeners are suddenly overcome by a physical tremor that runs down the body and raises the hairs on the skin." Mine were more like an internal, deep in the chest slowing, where my body seems to flush and my breath stops briefly. Since sleep wasn't coming, I tried to remember other times when I experienced this "musical chill" since that first one in college many years ago. Here are a few:

During a performance of "Rigoletto" in the city auditorium in Boeblingen Germany, I watch an amazing Gilda. I don't know her name. She was with a traveling troupe from Poland in West Germany, before the wall came down. This was in 1984 and she took my breath away and gave me the "chill". I remember thinking that it was too bad she would probably never be heard in the US since travel for the poles was so limited in those days. I wonder what happened to her.

In the late 80's I heard Kurt Moll sing Osmin's aria from "The Abduction from the Seraglio" at the Met. He took all the low notes and even though I was sitting high in the balcony, I could hear every one. It was an electric "chill", followed by another one as audience sprang up cheering.

Since I'm a fan of the low notes, I also recall a similar reaction in the early 90's when a Swedish(?) Baron Ochs (can't remember his name) went beautifully very, very deep at the end of the second act of Der Rosenkavelier at the Santa Fe Opera. I actually heard him sing Ochs twice within a week, but only the first one had the effect.

"Chills" haven't been frequent here in Boulder, but I do remember two:

During Giora Bernstein's tenure as the conductor of the Colorado Music Festival he once conducted Bruckner's 8th symphony. Giora founded and led CMF for some 20 years then moved on. I knew Giora a little and had talked to him about the Bruckner. He pointed me to a recording conducted by Gunter Wand which I used to "rehearse listening". I distinctly remember two "chills": once at the end of the second movement and at the end of the finale. Unfortunately, the CMF web site apparently doesn't have anything anymore about Giora -- not a nice way to treat the founder.

Two years ago the current CMF conductor, Michael Christie, choose to do a stage performance of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar". As I often do for an unknown piece, I bought a copy of the CD and listened to it many times. Sung in Spanish, the opera is about Lorca and his execution at the 'Fountain of Tears'. Being lazy I never bothered to read the libretto's translation and as a result never got a good feel for the work. Only the beginning and end of "Ainadamar" appealed to me musically, based on the CD. I went to at least one of the rehearsals and still felt the same way. At the CMF performance, however, there were super titles available and, of course, it was played straight through. The role of Lorca is a "trouser role" and was sung by mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor. The "chill" occurred when she softly began singing the "confession" prior to the execution. I'm listening to it now and still remember the overall wonderful effect.

Most "chills" happen at live performances, but once, and only once, was I hit by a recording. It wasn't the first time I'd heard the end of the third act of Die Walküre. James Morris was Wotan and sang "Leb wohl". Maybe I was drifting off to sleep at that point, but his singing suddenly jolted me with this rare "musical chill".

So I've come up with a total of seven so far --- hopefully, I'll get another one someday.

A class and Mahler's "Resurrection"

2009-06-08T14:33:00.003-06:00

It was a musical weekend. On Saturday I attended a one-day session at the University of Colorado on Verdi, taught by Erin Smith, a PhD candidate in Musicology. Smith knows her subject and has also mastered the technology (mostly) of switching from a PC to a DVD player. She started with early operatic forms and used musical samples to illustrate her points. All in all it was a good way to spend most of the day. The highlight of the class was a visit and performance by a CU graduate student who will be performing the role of Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata" this fall at Mackey auditorium. I wrote her name down in my handy-dandy little pocket notebook, which I unfortunately washed over the weekend. Her name was in there, but now it's all mush, sorry. She gave a delightful performance of the final aria from the first act, then answered questions from the class -- an excellent performance.

This is one of two classes she's teaching, both seeming focused on her interests. Surprisingly, the Music Department at Colorado has offered very few classes through adult or continuing education. I believe there has been one taught occasionally, but little selection. That's a shame with all the talent the Music Department has that there isn't more. Faculty and graduate students have plenty on their plates already, but more would be appreciated.

Sunday my wife and I traveled into Denver for the final performance of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra's 2008-2009 season. Maestro Jeffrey Kahane lead an enormous orchestra and around 250 voices of the orchestra's chorus. The "Resurrection" is one of my all-time favorites. In last week's New Yorker magazine article on Mahler performances, Alex Ross commented about "the phenomenon of the Musical Chill -- the ambiguous tremor of otherness that runs through the body when, for whatever reason, a particular sound overwhelms the reasoning mind." I remember my first "musical chill". I was a senior in college and was being exposed to Mahler for the first time. I remember sitting in my darkened dorm room and listening to the 2nd. It was the second time I had played a newly purchased vinyl recording of Otto Klemperer conducting and it hit me. That was a long time ago but I still remember the effect it had on me. Thanks to Alex Ross for leading me to it's name.

Well, Kahane didn't exactly give me a musical chill this time but he did a wonderful job. Mezzo Sasha Cooke was great in "Uhrlich" and soprano Janice Chandler Eteme's crystalline voice rose above everyone at just the right moments. The orchestra was, as always, outstanding, particularly the brass and the percussion session.

One minor detail disappointed me, though. In 2000 I went to another CSO performance of the "Resurrection". I clearly remember the chorus sitting in darkness and, in unison, opening their music as they began to sing "Aufstehen" in the last movement. The visual and music effect that day did give me a "musical chill". I'm pretty sure the CSO chorus was then also directed by Duain Wolfe. The effect just wasn't quite the same this time as the chorus members just leisurely opened their music as they saw fit. Too bad but if not a full "musical chill" at least a good shiver.

Some end of season catching up.

2009-05-04T11:53:00.002-06:00

It's getting to the end of the music season. It will be another dry summer, with only tepid fare at the Colorado Music Festival. They've turned into big fans of "world" music and "themes", so I'll be staying home most of the time. Oh well!

Here are a few comments on the season ending concerts over the last few weeks. The Tasman String Quartet did their farewell concert in Boulder playing the Janacek "Intimate Letters". They did this two years ago, shortly after the Takács Quartet did the same. Janacek has two quartets, "Kreutzer Sonata" and this one. I prefer "Letters" as a performance piece but recordings don't do it justice. As always live prevails. Good luck to the Tasman as they leave Boulder. They'll be missed.

Next up was Britten's "Albert Herring" by the University of Colorado school of music. English sub/super-titles for an English language opera seems like overkill, but in this case they would have been extremely helpful. The male singers were, for the most part, clear and understandable. The female roles though suffered from diction issues. Singing must be hard enough, but singing clearly certainly is harder still. Britten's music here wasn't his best, with no real high points for me. Choosing operas within the reach of undergraduate and graduate singers must be challenging.

The Boulder Philharmonic finished the season with Schubert's "Unfinished" and Jon Nakamatsu playing Brahm's Second Piano Concerto. Both came off well and Nakamatsu received a rousing standing ovation. The Boulder Phil audience is quick to leap to its feet for most performers, but this one was justified. A little bon-bon to start the concert was a short string overture by George Walker, father of the concertmaster Gregory Walker. The music director and conductor Michael Butterman should be congratulated for exposing the audience to this fairly unheard but deserving African-American composer.

The highlight of this stretch of classical music was the season ending Takács String Quartet concert. The surprise of the evening was the inclusion for Menahem Pressler as guest artist. The Takács started with 2 Haydn quartets, or parts of a quartet. Then a Debussy solo piece by Pressler. Still the pianist with the Beaux Arts Trio after 50 years, Pressler is now 85 and a treasure. When he stands on stage with the Takács he seems so short and elf-like, but he has a sprightly spring to his step and clearly enjoys what he is doing. The final work was Dvorak's "Quintet in A Major". I've got a good central seat and could see Pressler's glistening eyes and facial expressions and smiles as he interacted with the Takács. The performance was magical and the audience erupted with cheers. To top of the evening, they played an encore of the second movement of the Brahms Quintet. What an evening!

The next night my wife and I went to Opera Colorado's performance of "Cosi Fan Tutti". It was well sung and interestingly staged, but to me the music is, I hate to say, stale. I think I'm cursed with music memory where themes and tunes constantly recycle in my mind. But for reasons unknown little of this Mozart opera hangs around in my head. I leave the theater empty, so to speak. "Cosi" isn't one of my favorites though I've seen and heard it many times. My wife and I agreed that the next time it comes to town we might just skip it.

Finally, I went to the Boulder Chamber Orchestra's "Pioneers" concert - twice. The conductor, Bahman Saless, is a friend. He asked me to play "name that tune" with the opening piece on the concert, Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll". I went on stage as a "volunteer"; said my name was "Hans von Bülow", an inside joke for Wagner fans; and tried to link parts of the "Idyll" with leitmotifs from the "Ring" operas. It was harder to do that I thought, standing in front of the audience with the orchestra at my back, but I got most of them. Of course I had studied the score and did some background work using Google, a few books, a libretto from a CD which had the translations and a copy of the original scores for "Siegfried". It was fun. The concert came off well, with Andrew Cooperstock performing Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. Cooperstock stepped in at the last week after the Italian pianist chose not to come to the US because of travel warning about the H1N1 flu problem. He did a super job. This was the first time I've seen a pianist use a portable PC in place of a page turner. Cooperstock used a small foot pedal to page through the score.

I've no classical music concerts in my current schedule until a few at the Boulder Chautauqua's Colorado Music Festival, so I'll probably be quiet this summer. I'm still mourning the demise of classical music over the FM radio with KVOD's decision to reduce their transmission power. I noticed on another classical music blog an appeal from Colorado Public Radio, the corporate face for KVOD. They don't appear to be doing well. It shouldn't come as a surprise. The economy isn't doing well and the focus on talk-talk-talk on Colorado Public Radio is driving people like me to mp3 players and occasionally to Internet radio where the choice is much broader and diverse than the tepid music played on KVOD.

I've disabled my ClassicalFM.org's search engine and database. While there were lots of hits to the site from various search engines, with classical music on FM radio drying up, why continue.

An Interesting Day

2009-04-09T15:22:00.004-06:00

Yesterday I attended the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs. For the last 10 or 12 year I've been going fairly faithfully, but this year I've not attended as much. The topics were a bit lack-luster and it's the same old crew saying the same old things to an overly crowded audience. However, one session piqued my interest, Siriusly, Podcasts, Pandora and the Future of Radio. It was okay but nothing great. Margot Adler made an interesting comment which confirms what I've thought all along -- "Classical music radio has problems". Colorado Public Radio's classical music station basically went off the air when it changed it's broadcasting power. It was an economic decision due to a shrinking listener base, or that's what was intimated by the session moderator, Dan Meyers from Colorado Public Radio.

Another panelist in this session, Molly Sheridan, mentioned that the "gatekeepers are changing" and with the Internet you don't have to listen to the tepid local NPR broadcasts. You can listen select from thousands of stations world-wide. I completely agree with that, though my lousy Comcast connection still causes me grief.

Margot Adler also pointed out that there are still millions and millions of listeners in cars where the Internet isn't really available. Just this morning I noticed an advertisement for an Internet car radio. It was a device which would do a Blue Tooth connection to your iPhone. It seems like a bit of a kluge to me, so I think I'm going to pass on that one for now, particularly since I don't even have a cell phone.

The panelists' comments also got me thinking about their different view of music. They kept referring to "songs" and "artists" and "tunes" -- what the software and services focus on today. The iPod Shuffle plays stuff randomly -- image listening to an opera or a string quartet that way! As a classical music buff, I'm more interested in the "composer" and the "composition" and music has order. Is it a generational gap or an genre difference or is it just me?

Finally last night I went to this year's final Pendulum concert at the University of Colorado's music school. The quality of both the performances and the compositions by these these undergraduate and graduate students was very impressive. I particularly enjoyed a string quartet by Dustin Rumsey called "Lighting Dreams" and the "Piano Quintet No 1: Scenes from Childhood" by Greg Simon. Simon was the winner of an annual award for the best student composition for this quintet and it seems well deserved. The performing string quartet in both pieces was the Tasman String Quartet. I've enjoyed them many times over these last two years while they studied with the Takács String Quartet. I wish them well as they head off to Champagne-Urbana for further studies.

I normally enjoy the summer in Boulder without all those college kid. The area is a little less crowded. However, I'll be missing the music school students and the Pendulum series.

Two nights of strings

2009-04-07T19:16:00.002-06:00

Over the last few nights I attended two concerts, both featuring strings. The first was the the Boulder Chamber Orchestra under the leadership of Bahman Saless. Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola was well played by Annamaria Karacason and Geraldine Walther. Karacason is the wife of Karoly Schranz, second violin for the famous Takács String Quartet and Walther is their violist. It's interesting the see a famous quartet member playing outside her normal role.

The piece that intrigued me the most was Verdi's Symphony for Strings in E minor, a transcription of his only string quartet. At the beginning of the piece Saless commented that according to legend, Verdi composed this quickly to fill some time while waiting for a stop in the rehearsals for Aida. Saless said it seemed to him that the movements were about a murder. First the actual mysterious murder, then the arrival on the scene of the detective, an unknown third movement (to Saless) and finally the resolution with the detective pointing out the guilty. It was an amusing premise that got my imagination going during the performance. When the third movement began it was clear to me that this was the time when all the parties were stewing about worrying if the detective suspected them. There is a beautiful flowing cello section that reminded me of a soprano solo early in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Clearly this was the innocent virgin satisfied in her knowledge that she most certainly did not commit the murder. How did Bahman not pick this out?

The Verdi quartet is an interesting piece with some luscious song like lines which clearly remind you that Verdi is an opera composer. It was performed here a few years ago by either the Takács or the Vinca quartet. On our supposedly all classical FM radio station, essentially off the air in Boulder, the quartet was broadcast 5 times in 2006, 3 times in 2007, 1 time in 2008 and not yet this year. Opera isn't broadcast much save for the Saturday Metropolitan broadcasts, and Verdi's limited broadcast repertoire seems to be snippets of a few of the old favorites. So much for the educational role of public radio.

Last night I went to what would normally be a performance by the Takács String Quartet. Instead, a visiting group, the Albers Trio, performed. Three attractive sisters did a yeoman's job on Mozart's long Divertimento in E-flat, K563, but to me the highlight was a wonderful Serenade for String Trio by Ernst von Dohnányi. I wonder what their early family life was like, with 3 talented musicians? Competion? Pressure? The program notes said they performed as young girls down on the Pearl Street mall in Boulder, so they must have once been somewhat local. They offered an nteresting evening.

Bad, bad music

2009-03-26T22:15:00.002-06:00

Boulder had snow today, lots of it. My wife and I shoveled several times, yet when I went out late tonight there was at least another inch covering the walk. Why should snow make for bad music? I'm clueless, but Comcast must know. I've been trying to listen to my standard internet radio station, contemporary-classical.com. Tonight, it's musicmusicmic .. rest .. musi ..rest.. musicmu ..rest .. ic .. rest .. music musi ..rest.. etc, etc, etc. You get the idea. I've turned it off but wistfully remember the good old days when my FM radio faithfully broadcast classical music. KVOD went off the air here in Boulder, so it's either CDs or internet radio. Well, I guess I'm stuck with CDs.

I've been using the internet a lot today and had horrible results with ssh. Comcast kept dropping my connections in mid-stream. Scp wasn't much better, with long delays as I tried to move files from my workstation to remote servers.

It must have been the snow, freezing the bits. It couldn't be a faulty Comcast router.

Very old and very new

2009-03-19T11:39:00.003-06:00

Over the past two nights I heard two completely different concerts at the University of Colorado: Music of the High Baroque and the Pendulum New Music.

Elizabeth Farr played harpsichord in the first. Two Bach pieces preceded by a suite by D'Angelbert from around 1689. I've listened to a lot of Bach, but only during the Bourée did I remember hearing any of it before -- and that, I believe, was sung by the Swingle Singers years ago. While Farr's playing was wonderful, I found the D'Angelbert hard to digest. While I tried to follow or find a melodic line the ornamentation threw me. I was listening to 300 year old music with ears tuned to the 21st century.

The Pendulum New Music project has been a favorite of mine over the years. You hear stuff you've never heard before - some good, some not so. I had never heard the D'Angelbert harpsichord suite, either, though. Last night's concert was at the CU Atlas Black Box Theater which is equipped with lots of high-tech sound and projection systems. Multimedia music was interspersed with live soloists playing with computers and projections. I was particularly impressed with multimedia presentation of Hunter Ewen's Elements. One section which I think of as "Birds" but which he called "Staccato" was particularly clever. The black and white projection of bird shapes first appeared to be bi-laterally symmetric but I realized as I watched more closely there was more more going on and things were not symmetric, even though the music did seem so. Fun. It would seem to me that Mr. Ewen has a future in TV commercials, at the least.

The "known" composer on the program was Steve Reich. His "Pendulum Music" was, how do I say it, "performed". Three microphones were swung back and forth over special spherical speakers on the floor, generating feedback as they moved back and forth. Music? I think not. I like some of Reich's works and I'm listening to his Music for 18 Musicians as I type this. Unlike the earlier D'Angelbert which hid the theme behind ornamentation, Reich's theme is repeated over and over and over, with small ornamentation or variations. "Pendulum Music" apparently has no relationship to the Pendulum New Music program, only a shared word.

I also enjoyed the combination of a live performer playing alongside taped electronic music. We had two tubas and a violin in 3 separate pieces. Michael Dunn, from the faculty and who gave his own concert the prior week, played well again, this time in a minimalistic "Tapestry for Tuba and Tape" by James DeMar. In the second tuba piece, Ryan Wurst's "Flow II for Solo Tuba and Live Electronics", the tuba player Ed Wagner used something to tap on the bell. To me it sounded as if he was using two different things -- there appeared to be two completely different sounds. However, when I asked Wagner after the performance he said it was just a penny.

The big brass....

2009-03-12T18:55:00.002-06:00

The Colorado Symphony performed Bruckner's 7Th symphony over this past weekend. What a sound! Bruckner has always been one of my favorites and his 7Th was wonderful. I'm listening to it again as I type this. At the applause, the maestro, Hans Graf, gave special attention to the euphonium section, the substitutes for the "Wagner tubas" which highlight the second movement and are heard throught. You don't hear the euphonium often, but at the University of Colorado the other night I heard a faculty concert, "The Winsome Tuba", with Michael Dunn on tuba. During the concery there was a performance with Aaron Tindall on the euphonium of "Michelangelo". The composer was listed as both Sigfart Dagsland and Sigvard Dagsland. I prefer the former, chuckle, chuckle. It's the first time I can recall that I attended an all tuba concert. Fun, but not something I'd want to do again in the immediate future. Dunn showed the extreme ranges of the tuba and played well, so to hear both the tuba and euphonium in a duet was fun and an ear challenge -- well done by both.

Back on Bruckner, my favorite Internet music station, contemporary-classical.com, introduced me to a composer that I've never heard of,Albéric Magnard, the "French Bruckner". I ordered his complete (4) symphonies from Amazon and weeks later, from England, they arrived. Perhaps I'm jaded and perhaps I've listened to too many symphonies by all the greats, but I'm really enjoying these new works by Magnard. One might assume that something broadcast on a contemporary classical internet station might be a bit weird, but these symphonies are not. With some similarities to Wagner and Bruckner and Franck, these are tonal, fairly long and thoroughly romantic works that would appeal to most audiences. Too bad Magnard isn't better know, but I'm glad I found out about him. Thank you contemporary-classical.com.

By the way, Magnard was killed in the early days of World War I defending his home against invading or marauding German soldiers. He was reputed to have a temper and personality like his dwarf name-sake from the Ring. His home was burned, apparently along with some of his other compositions.

More Pendulum swings.

2009-02-27T10:13:00.002-07:00

I went again to a Pendulum concert the other night at the University of Colorado. The Pendulum series is one of my favorites: all contemporary music that I'm hearing for the first time.

The featured composer this time as Alan Fletcher, the president of the Aspen Music Festival. Milton Babbit, one of his teachers, told him that he was "French" (as opposed to "German") and his music lived up to that designation. A short, Messiaen-like piece "Green" was beautifully played by Hsing-ay Hsu who then with violinist Lina Bahn performed a delightful "Study: Woman Holding a Balance", a musical impression of Vermeer's painting. While in college I had a print of Vermeer's "Milkmaid", so this piece reminded me of college. Fletcher's music is tonal and accessible and fairly short. Since he's a "local" composer for Colorado, you might expect that the so-called classical music station for Colorado, KVOD, would have broadcast something of his. Nope. I then went to my favorite Internet station, http://contemporary-classical.com and looked there for Fletcher. Unfortunately nothing is available there either.

A student composition, Jökulhlaup, by Paul Hembree was another interesting piano piece at this concert. A Jökulhlaup is Icelandic for a catastrophic flood caused by a volcanic eruption under a glacier -- shades of the cartoon move "Ice Age".

The final piece at this Pendulum concert was an violin octet "Gran Turismo" by Andrew Norman. I'm not into video games, the inspiration for the piece, but I could sense the agitation and speed. Another fun composition well played.

Brand of Shame

2009-02-24T20:48:00.002-07:00

Beethoven famously scribbled out Bonaparte's name on his third symphony and changed it to "Eroica". Historians suggest this was out of disgust. I normally don't comment politically, but after watching Obama's speech to congress, I realized the network was labeling some in the audience with a similar brand of shame and disgust. Open parenthesis, capital R, close parenthesis. (R).

It's that time of the year

2009-02-20T10:41:00.002-07:00

Each year about this time the classical music scene in Boulder explodes with opportunities. The Boulder Chamber Orchestra performed nationalistic pieces by the Greek composer Nikos, Skalkottas, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Josef Suk on Saturday February 7Th. Then last Monday night, February 8Th, I listened to the Takacs String Quartet play Haydn's "Emperor" quarter and Schubert's Quintet, D956 with Judith Glyde. A wonderful evening. I skipped the next night's performance by the CU (University of Colorado) Wind Band due to lethargy, but heard the CU Orchestra perform on Thursday night. I'm always amazed at the quality that this student orchestra demonstrates under the leadership of Gary Lewis. The highlight for me was Ilya Goldberg's performance in the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Ilya lived with us for a short time and I've followed his performances ever since. He did a wonderful job and interestingly, just as he got into an early extra fast passage the shoulder support on his violin slipped. He slightly grimaced but didn't appear to miss a note. Bravo

The next night, Friday February 13th, I went to a performance of the Tasman Quartet. They are the quartet currently studying with the Takacs at CU and are now in their second year. They again performed the Schubert Quartet D810 with strong dynamics and a wonderful tone. The next night my wife and I had friends over for dinner and then attended the Boulder Philharmonic. Butterman. Misha and Cipa Dichter performed Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos, K365 smoothly, then Michael Butterman lead the orchestra in a rousing performance of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony.

I rested for two nights then I heard Bizet's "Pearl Fishers" at Opera Colorado. I had prepared for it a bit by listening to the complete opera a few times. Clearly the highlight was the tenor-baritone duo "Au fond du" but I was very pleased with the entire opera. Listening ahead of time helped and I enjoyed the whole thing, contrary to my impression that I'd be bored after the duet.

The next night I went back to CU for the finals of the Bruce Ekstrand Graduate Student Performance Competition. The judges had to choose between a pianist, a soprano, a harpist, a flutist, a violinist (my friend Ilya Goldberg), and a piano duo. It was a very difficult choice as they were all excellent. Judging such diverse instruments must have been very tough. We in the audience were given a ballot for a separate survey. Try as I did, it was nearly impossible for me to rank one over the other, particularly as a non-musician but devoted listener. I finally selected the harpist but the judges selected the flutist, Melissa Lotspeich, followed by the piano duo of Miroslava Mintcheva and David McArthur. The rest of the audience selected the piano duo. I'm certain that was based on their rousing performance of Bolcom's "The Serpent's Kiss".

Last night, February 19th, I again went to CU for Julia Fischer and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The two Bach violin concertos and Walton's "Sonata for Strings" were okay, but I enjoyed Britten's "Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge". It's another piece I had recently listened to, so perhaps listening to a piece ahead of time increases my enjoyment, though I've heard both Bach pieces many times.

Tonight we might go to the Boulder Chorale's performance of Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", but maybe not. The Upstart Crow's performance of the little known Shakespeare play "The Two Noble Kinsmen" might just beat out the Haydn.

I'm lucky to live in Boulder and have so many musical opportunities open to me. I need to rest my ears a bit so we'll head to the mountains for some skiing. The CU Pendulum series is up again next week.

Les Nuits D'Été

2009-02-04T11:44:00.004-07:00

The song cycle "Les Nuits D'Été" by Berlioz was sung last night by Julie Simpson as part of the University of Colorado's Music Faculty Series. What a treat! Some people have commented to me about their negative reaction to Berlioz. Some of his works might be a bit over-blown, but not this song cycle. He only has 28 works with opus numbers, so for someone who lived to be 65, his output wasn't prodigious. Simpson has a silky voice and she hit a home run with her deliverance. She also sang "Arianna a Naxos" by Haydn and the witch's scene from Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel", assisted by Kara Guggenmos and Jennifer DeDominic. It was a wonderful concert.

"Les Nuits D'Été"has only been broadcast on my local , now non-reachable, classical station, KVOD, 11 times since the beginning of 2004. 6 broadcasts were between 8 PM and midnight, and 5 between in the 1 AM and 4 AM. What a shame that listeners in the Denver area don't get much chance to hear this wonderful cycle.

The University of Colorado's "Pendulum" series

2009-01-29T13:05:00.002-07:00

Last night I went to a concert of the University of Colorado's "Pendulum New Music" series, presenting the best of new music from both students and faculty. It has always been fun to hear new compositions from unknown composers and last night was rewarding.

A guest faculty composer, Ed Knight from Oklahoma City, had his "Trio for flute, viola, and piano" played for the first time. It was an interesting tonal work well worth hearing again. As it progressed I could believe that Knight would do well writing for the movies. What made this piece even more interesting was that the he went on stage and said a few words about it. The evening's program merely named the piece but Knight gave names to the 4 movements. I cannot just image an event or setting just by listening to the music, particularly one which I've never heard before. But Knight's description of the work being influence by the Internet added immensely to its appeal. "Spam", with a hint of the darkness and even a worm made the first movement come alive. While I don't know much about "Classmates.com" or "Matchmaker.com", his brief explanation put substance to the second and third movements. "Ebay bidding war", once named could be imagined musically and was realized with the final spoken word "Sold". It was much fun.

"Pendulum New Music" has always been enjoyable and it's pleasing to hear the student and faculty compositions. It is to the composition faculty's credit that the music comes off as well as it does. The students say a few words about their work and take applause afterwords. Greg Simon's "Prometheus in the Dead Zone" was exciting, but the other works by Matthew Browne and Mary Mixter should be complemented also. Kudos to all involved.

It's been a while.......

2009-01-27T14:24:00.002-07:00

I've been still trying to find a decent replacement for my old FM radio. Since KVOD, the Denver all classical music station, essentially went off the air, I've been trying Internet stations from a few different systems. While the broadcast fare from KVOD was tepid, at least all I needed to do to hear it was turn on the radio and there it was -- oh, for the good old days.

While having breakfast the other day it dawned on me that I could listen to some classical music on my TV. Comcast has several stations, so I thought to try them out. They were pretty innocuous but okay. Then I noticed that Comcast also believes in only playing parts of a composition. If a composer only wanted his audience to hear the 2nd movement he wouldn't write a first. It's a petty peeve of mine --- if you broadcast a composer's work of art, play the entire thing!

I've been very happy with the music broadcast over the Internet using the Live365's network, particularly contemporary-classical.com which broadcasts 20th and 21st century composers. I've heard some incredible music on contemporary-classical.com that I've never heard before. Stations like KVOD never took the risk of exposing their listeners to this stuff, instead broadcasting the same old masters over and over and over. Even broadcasting 24 hours each day, they just couldn't risk contemporary music.

The contemporary-classical.com web site went off the air a week or so ago. Two musicians associated with the group "Alarm Will Sound" were staying at our house while rehearsing for a Denver performance. I was telling one of them about the music broadcast on contemporary-classical.com. Later that day I went to check out the web site and instead found a note "Will the owner of this site please contact his ISP". Since I was about to renew my annual membership with Live365, I wasn't sure I wanted to re-up if the main station I was interested in was going away. Using Live365's contact form, I asked what they knew about the site. I got no response. A few days later, still no contemporary-classical.com web site, so I sent another query. The day after the second request to Live365 I noticed that the Contemporary-classical.com web site was back up. The next day Live365 finally responded (twice, separately) and said all was fine, just clear my browser cache. Give me a break! This was not a caching issue. Anyway, I'm back and happy listening to some very interesting contemporary classical music.

Right now I'm listening to Roy Harris's Symphony #7 on Live365/contemporary-classical. Was it broadcast on any of the stations I monitor in the last 5 years? Nope. Harris's 3rd, 4th, 6th and 9th, yes, but not the 7th. Such is the state of broadcast classical music in some of cities around the country.

On the reliability of Internet Classical Music

2008-12-19T11:00:00.002-07:00

With the demise of over-the-air classical music in Boulder, I'm now listening to more and more classical music over the Internet. It's not as easy as just turning on the radio and it doesn't work in my car, but it's better than nothing, or even worse, the talk-talk-talk news-news-news nonsense. One major downside of listening over the Internet is the technological addition of lots of rests. Rests in music are very important - they indicate that the musician(s) should to stop and wait a bit. Composers use them for emphasis, transitions, surprise and emotion. There's the famous rest in the adagio of Samuel Barber's String Quartet, opus 11, often performed as the "Adagio for Strings". The strings ascend to a tense dissonance, then stop and return in a mild tonal lower key. If my memory serves, it was played during the time of Kennedy's assassination as a reminder of how life can be cut short. Rests make music music.

But Internet music has interspersed rests where they shouldn't be. They aren't really rests, rather they are transmission breaks. I've been listening to my favorite Internet station, Contemporary-Classical.COM at night. Frequently, very frequently in the middle of some music there's a break. I know it's not supposed to be there, but there it is anyway. Sometimes it's a short one, more often not 2, 3 or more seconds -- disruptive. I don't believe it's the fault of Contemporary-Classical.COM because I hear the same "rests" in other Internet music: Pandora, LastFM, ShoutCast stations, KING live streaming and others. I'm convinced that it's the same "rests" that I see while using the secure shell, SSH, to access another system on the Internet. I'm typing away and ...... everything stops. My keystrokes don't get reflected back and I'm stuck. All too often I get a message that the remote server has disconnected my session. Since I'm somewhat familiar with the Internet technology and I monitor stuff, I see breaks in the connection from my cable modem to the Comcast router which is my gateway to the Internet. SSH breaks and so does Internet music.

On a slightly different subject, some of my initial exposure to some of these Internet music services have left me disappointed with their notion of what constitutes a classical "tune". I was startled to hear the 3rd movement of Mahler's Second Symphony ("Resurrection") played as a stand-alone fragment sandwiched between two non-related selections. The technologists who put these services together need to view classical music through other than a popular lens. Media companies push laws to protect their intellectual property but never seem to protect artistic intent. If Mahler wanted just some of his music to be played independently without context, then he would have written "tunes" and not symphonies.

Pandora

2008-11-28T12:43:00.002-07:00

Another Internet classical music provider I've been told about is Pandora. Friends that have used it say it's good but my experience has not been so. Like all these so-called stations they use lots of JavaScript to make things work. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by trying to protect myself, but I use FireFox with the NoScript add-on enabled. I also run under Linux and the KDE windowing system. It appears that the techies at Pandora must be MAC or Windows enthusiasts and never look at their stuff from a Linux-based browser. After telling Firefox/NoScript to allow Pandora's script, when I try to listen to something I get a funny smudge on my screen and nothing else. Certainly no music. So much for Pandora.

Many of these stations (and lots of other web sites) are using secondary web measuring tools like google-analytics, double-click and quantserv. I've got my browser configured to ignore these annoying and intrustive scripts. It's always seemed to me that sites that rely on these tracking tools are just lazy and unwilling to look at what their own servers generate in terms of logging. Why should the end user suffer additional network traffic after loading these pages which contains hidden links to other measuring sites. I'm old-fashioned I guess, but I don't approve of it.

Last.FM

2008-11-18T10:19:00.002-07:00

I've stumbled upon another Internet classical music broadcasting system that seems pretty good, Last.FM. I haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet, but I does seem to have a lot of interesting music fitting my tastes. The pieces tend to be relatively short though I'm now listening to Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" which is 52 minutes long. The music is broadcast by a player imbedded within the Last.FM HTML page, though there are other ways to listen. If you go away from the Last.FM page you are listening to you loose the music, but if you pop into another Firefox tab, the playing continues. There is a way to use the Last.FM player in Linux, but the installation is by configuring and compiling from a tar ball. I tried installing it, but it complained about my system and wouldn't compile. Their in-page player buffers the music, so the occasional breaks I was hearing on Live365 and ShoutCast, caused by Comcast's router connectivity issues, don't appear as obvious. But if you inadvertently go to the Last.FM page playing the music and follow a link from there your music is gone.

Last.FM has "stations" which appear to be collections of similarly catalogued music. At first glance their classical listings aren't all that deep, but I've found their contemporary classical selections to be fairly extensive. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising given the nature of the site and the content.

Is the new "contemporary classical" music any good? I'm now listening to "The Storm" by Wojciech Kilar. Last.FM has a succinct biography of the composer being played, a dynamic Web 2.0 ajax feature. Kilar is a contemporary Polish composer mentioned along-side Pendereski and Gorecki. In checking on FM broadcasts, a Kilar composition was broadcast 4 times on 3 different stations over the last 5 years. The FM radio is not the way to get exposed to his music it seems.

Contemporary classical music and Geirr Tveitt

2008-11-14T09:39:00.004-07:00

I went again to the music school at the University of Colorado (CU) for a concert Wednesday night. It was their Pendulum series, featuring contemporary music which included some student compositions and Stravinsky's "Les Noces". Some of was good, some not so good. CU's faculty and students are a great resource and most Tuesday nights find me there for recitals and performances. It's a wonderful thing to have access to such talent. To hear contemporary music "in the raw" is a great thing.

Since I can't hear my local FM station any more and since they discontinued playing any substantial contemporary music anyway, the Internet is my only source of exposure to new "contemporary classical" music other than local performances. I've been listening to contemporary music over the Internet though a site http://contemporary-classical.com/. This site is part of the Live365.com "network" which I started listening to when I had a wireless media center device. I got rid of that and now just listen to the "live365" network using one of my computers. Unfortunately, live365 got fancy and have their own "player", so I can't use my small handheld Nokia, my preferred device for listening at night,

Contemporary-classical.com introduced me to Geirr Tveitt, a Norwegian composer who lived until 1981. I've never heard of him until I came upon the end of one of his pieces being broadcast on Contemporary-classical.com. A day later I went to Amazon and ordered two of Tveitt's Cd's. As is often the case, you get additional music on the CD which you hadn't intended to buy but which came with the piece you did want. In this case, it was Tveitt's "Variations on a Folksong from Hardanger for two pianos and orchestra" from 1939. I ended up liking this much more than his Piano Concerto #4 "Aurora Borealis" which is what I ordered. I recommend the "Variations".

Tveitt's broadcasts on FM radio? Pretty skimpy. KVOD played the Piano Concerto #4 three times in the last 5 years and always late a night. KING and KUSC seem to like Tveitt much more, though, surprisingly, WQXR hasn't played him at all in the last 5 years. And my favorite "Variations"? It has not been broadcast at all by any of the stations I monitor. Too bad.

Listening to "Internet" classical music

2008-11-12T10:43:00.003-07:00

A few weeks back I received email from someone on the KVOD staff. She had found my web site which catalogs KVOD's and other classical FM radio playlists and said she liked my site. She asked if I could get KVOD after they switched to a newer, much weaker frequency. I told her No, KVOD was too weak and that I had given up on trying to listen to it either at home or in the car. Try new stuff she suggested. Spend $350 and get a Squeezebox to hear Internet Radio! Try an HD Radio, after I buy a new one for each of my rooms where I have radios. She reminded me of George Bush after 9/11 telling us to go out and spend!

Using the internet to listen to classical music is possible, but it's a bit of a weak soup. Sure I can listen to KVOD on any of my computers, but why would I do that? The Internet makes available stations from around the world, so why listen to cow-town Denver? I've tracked their broadcasts for years and they prefer broadcasting predictable "popular" easy-listening music, almost always short. They've shrunk their broadcasts of contemporary classics and really push the pap.

So given that I have a world-wide choice of internet classical music, what's the problem? Connectivity, in a word. I'm a Comcast subscriber and have been for many years. They are okay, but while listening to internet music, I get frequent breaks in the music. It just stops for a while, then comes back. It really adds to the music, inserting 'rests' where the composer forgot to write them. ;)

I use SSH to connect to my server to maintain my web sites. All too often I'm in the middle of a session and my keystrokes stop. A high percentage of the time I'm just thrown off and I have to start all over again. I've been noticing this for years with SSH so I wrote a little perl program to ping my external router, the one that my Comcast-supplied modem is connected to. My techie friends tell me that I should always be able to ping my router and that it should always be there. Such is not my case. I've seen it go away for fairly lengthy periods of time, with the blinking lights on the modem confirming what my computer tells me. At other times it just comes and goes. In the last 10 minutes or so, 78% of the pings got through fine, and the rest of the time I had between a 20% and 100% packet loss. Fortunately I can listen to my own mp3 library and avoid these unexpected 'rests' in the music.

On the good old radio and choice

2008-09-21T09:26:00.002-06:00

FM radios used to be a big feature of my life. Now that I'm thinking about them, I count 6 in my house and one in both of our cars. One used to be next to my bed. I faithfully listened to KVOD's classical music every night as I went to bed. Many nights I would put in earphones so as not to waken my wife and listen well into the wee hours. Sometimes my wife would shoo me into a guest room where I could listen and read. There's a nice Bose stereo system in the family room next to the kitchen where I used to listen to choral music every Sunday morning on KVOD. It's funny that so little choral music was broadcast at other times. There was a portable radio in my basement work room next to an exercise bike and a stereo system in my office. While driving KVOD was always tuned in. Now with KVOD's switch to all-talk, all-opinions, all-noise, all-the-time it all gone.

Actually KVOD can still be heard on a different frequency. It is still broadcasting classical music, just on a very very very week transmitter, probably an old tube model they dug out of some one's attic. It reminds me of my college days when I had a classical music program every Sunday night on the school station. I remember it was a 10 watt transmitter that served the local 10 or 20 blocks surrounding campus. KVOD's transmitter is probably in the same range, it seems.

In talking with other classical fans like myself, the complaint is the same. No KVOD and hence no classical music. No Metropolitan opera. There's plenty of talk, though. The station management knows the market well and acts always in the listener's best interest. Public radio needs to be competitive, so KVOD has given us a competitive choice with two public radio stations broadcasting over FM so we fortunate Coloradans can hear "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" and the news and news and news. Two stations offering us talk and talk and talk. Isn't it wonderful. I now have a choice of two stations broadcasting public radio and, after a tumultuous few months, just two major investment banks. Such are the virtues of capitalism.

On Internet Radio Genres .....

2008-08-06T14:46:00.004-06:00

With the demise of radio broadcasts of KVOD's classical music, I've found it necessary to go more online for music enjoyment. ShoutCast.COM is one and Live365 is another. They both might fill the bill. I'll focus on ShoutCast first.

ShoutCast is a central interface to several thousand servers running broadcasting software delivering music in all forms -- all different genres. With this clear diversity of interest in music, I began thinking of listeners' choices and usage patterns. What genres are hot and what are not? Classical music fans appear to be diminishing at concerts, so is it the same over the Internet?

To address with ShoutCast.com's data, I wrote a little perl routine to access it and save each one of the 19 different genre's top 20 "stations" page. The routine analyzed each page's HTML and extracted the number of current listeners and the number of potential slots, the maximum number of concurrent listeners an individual server can handle.

The following table, with some percentages, are what I observed:


                      Current    % of   Total    % of
Genre                  Users   Total   Slots   Total
----------------     -------   -----  ------   -----     
Alternative            14419    3.4%   74709    5.5% 
Classical              10110    2.4%   30973    2.3% 
Comedy                  1634    0.4%   10865    0.8%
Country                 8917    2.1%   48355    3.6%
Dance                  42693   10.2%  125477    9.3%
Funk                    8992    2.1%   43823    3.3%
Jazz                   14898    3.6%   49916    3.7%
Metal                   8508    2.0%   36024    2.7%
Mixed                   3338    0.8%   11996    0.9%
Pop                    52327   12.5%  136385   10.1%
Rap                    19169    4.6%   79631    5.9%
Rhythm and Blues       21522    5.1%   79925    5.9%
Rock                   52511   12.5%  147951   11.0%
Talk                    5224    1.2%   34151    2.5%
Techno                 31127    7.4%   80498    6.0%
TopTen                 80941   19.3%  201824   15.0%
World                  10723    2.6%   48000    3.6%
70s                     9401    2.2%   35881    2.7%
80s                    22273    5.3%   70788    5.3%

TOTALS                418727  100.0% 1347172  100.0%

So how does the classical music audience rank? 2.4% of all the listeners at the point where I took the measurements. I've done it at a few different points during the day and 2.4% is pretty consistent. For all of ShoutCast's total 400 thousand current listeners, that's still a pretty small audience.

You can also question what the "classical" genre designation means. On one other Internet radio site, the only "classic" music was "Classic Rock"! Sampling various "stations" I've found that very often it means "light" orchestral music or "contemporary" easy-listening piano music. Opera seems to be represented fairly well and some seem to be streamed in their entirety. As an aside, it is the world-wide Internet ShoutCasters are listening to. Sometimes the stations make announcements in their native language. Hungarian I don't understand!!

It's probably an open question whether or not classical audiences are shrinking. In my experience, they are "greying" and attendance is smaller -- but that's just my personal observation. Older people are generally less Internet savvy, so I guess the ShoutCast numbers aren't really surprising. It is interesting technology.

Shoutcast.Com also provides down loadable software to "run your own radio station". I installed and configured it on my Linux box. It works quite well. I was able to wire in my entire private collection of mp3s but I haven't decided whether I want to run it in addition to my other base application. With a radio, the announcer would choose what to broadcast. But what if you have all the control? Sometimes I like surprises, sometimes not. In my base music application, somewhat similar to iTunes but hand-grown and much older, I can either select specific composers and pieces, choose from some random selections or accept a mystery piece. That all appears to be a bit more work under ShoutCast's server, but clearly possible.

Boulder's Quartet Program Participation

2008-07-29T15:40:00.003-06:00

This summer has been musically sterile for me. I've been boycotting the local Colorado Music Festival because of their crappy programming, with the Beethoven stunt and ukuleles and tap dancing and guitars and all.

There was a bright spot this past weekend, however. The university hosted The Quartet Program, a program started in 1970 by Charles Castleman. See http://www.quartetprogram.com for more information on the programs. Apparently this was the first time it was done at the University of Colorado, but it appeared to me to be quite successful.

On three consecutive nights I was entertained by a total of 9 different string quartets. There was little information about the participants but I would guess most were late-teens early twenties students from around the country. I was impressed by the quality and consistency of the playing. The fare was Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Janacek, Haydn, Borodin, Ravel, Dvorak and Debussy. All played impressively.

As I understand, there were afternoon solo string performances, too. I couldn't attend, but I suspect the quality was also very good.

I hope this will not be the last time the program spends the summer in Boulder.

Death of the old...

2008-07-19T09:32:00.004-06:00

A few days ago I commented on the demise of contemporary classical music broadcast on KVOD. Well, my lament is louder now. For reasons only known to KVOD and public radio in Colorado, the broadcast frequency was switched earlier in July from 90.1 MHz to 88.1 mHz on the FM band. I noticed immediately a decrease in the signal strength in my car and at home. My expensive auto-seeking radio at home couldn't even find KVOD. What stayed on 90.1 FM? Talk radio -- round the clock talk radio, news, commentary and more talk.

A letter to the editor to the Boulder Camera complained that even with a new pricey high definition radio KVOD didn't come in around Boulder. Then today a similar letter from a friend, Barry Knapp, pointed out that KVOD went from a 50 kilowatt transmitter for 90.1 MHz to a "puny" 1.2 kilowatt transmitter fpr 88.1 MHz. That's okay. Folks north of Denver didn't want to hear classical music or listen to the Metropolitan opera anyway. Boulder really only wants News! "News, News, News has a kind of mystery" sings Nixon in John Adams' "Nixon in China"

So it is with great regret that we bury KVOD and forget all about it. They took away contemporary classical music and now they've taken away all classical music. Who needs Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Brahms and some of the other great composers? KVOD already stopped broadcasting Mahler and Bruckner and anyone who was foolish to compose music longer than about 25 minutes anyway. Colorado public radio wants News!! Forget the listening audience.

People have told me that I can always "listen" over the Internet. That just doesn't work in my car, of course. Nor is it convenient at night in my bedroom. I do sometimes listen from my desktop, but with Comcast being Comcast, I also get intermittent interruptions and dropped signals on my broadband connection. Frankly I don't want to replace the radios in my car nor in my home.

The radio was neat! You pressed a button and it instantly was played was was being broadcast. It was free except for the purchase of the radio. Now what are my choices?

Forget the high definition radio that was being touted by KVOD. Based on others experiences it won't be any better and will be a waste of money. Last weekend I went to three different electronic stores looking for information and pricing about HD radios. Only one clerk knew anything about them and she said they weren't very good according to the customers that brought them back. I appreciated her honesty.

Internet radio? Somewhat acceptable for when I'm in my office and at my computer, but what about late at night when I want to read in bed? I do have a small Nokia wireless tablet which I've made work with my local MP3 collection. But can I turn it on and instantly play something? Not way. Boot time is about 2 minutes. I then have to open a browser, wait for it find my wireless network and then go to the MP3 library and select something. I could buy a small portable PC and keep it always on sitting on my night stand, but I don't want to waste electricity nor spend more money just for classical music.

XM or Sirius satellite radio? Wow! What a deal. $100 for a "boom box" without receiver, $40 for the receiver, plus $40 for one for each car. Then it is only $13 a month for home plus $7 monthly for each car. What a deal! How can I miss!!! Sirius has 3 classical broadcast streams: symphonic and chamber music, Metropolitan opera radio, and classical pops. XM apparently has 3 similar offerings. With the proposed merger of XM and Sirius does that mean 6 or 3? Ask the FCC since I'm not interested in shelling out several hundred dollars a year to replace what I was getting for free for the last 60 years.

So what am I left with? A few MP3 players and my Cd's. Amazon's MP3 download library isn't bad, but how will I hear anything new or be exposed to unfamiliar composers or works? Just take some chances I guess at 99 cents a pop. While we do have classical music in Denver and Boulder, new works aren't performed much since they might drive away audiences.

I was going to end with RIP KVOD, but why give them the benefit of peace?

Death of the new......

2008-07-14T20:25:00.002-06:00

Saturday nights at 10 was always a good time for me. KVOD, the Denver all-classical FM station, would broadcast two hours of 'contemporary' music' -- their definition. While sometimes it was only Prokofiev or Shostokovich or Copland, other times it would be Rautavaara or Kaipainen or Del Tredici. It was new music and I hadn't heard it and I liked that!

Reviewing my private library, I believe I've also heard music by the likes of Alwyn, Andriessen, Berio, Bolcom, Ciurlionis, Corigliano, Creston, Crumb, Diamond, Feldman, Golijov, Gorecki, Harvey, Henze, Higdon, Kancheli, Kernis, Laderman, Larsson, Lauridsen, Part, Reich, Riley, Rorem, Rouse, Sallinen, Salonen, Santos, Takemitsu and Varese during those late Saturday nights. I knew about some but hadn't heard much from them, others were completely new.

The announcer had interesting things to say. One sequence went through compositions from the 1940s, then the early 1950s, then late 50s. Centennials or deaths brought an entire evening of one composer, often with longer works that seem never to be played in normal hours. It was almost always interesting and challenging.

Sometimes after listening I would get on a kick and buy CDs by guys like Rautavaara. (What a great first name Einojuhani -- so much better than Sam or Robert or Arthur!) They might be good, sometimes not. Often the CD would also have something by another unknown. Again some good some bad, but fun listening to anyway. KVOD lead the way and I followed.

All that has changed. Now KVOD broadcasts on Saturday at 10 contemporary composers like Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Puccini and some seldom-heard pieces by the new guys Friedrich the Great and Ignace Pleyel. The two hours late on Saturday are now just like the remaining 166 hours each week. There's nothing to look forward to, nothing new and unknown. Just pap, pap, and more pap!

Who knows why KVOD changed its format? Perhaps they ran out of CDs, or, more likely, perception about the contemporary. Regardless, they've lost an interested listener.

Opera Colorado's "Nixon in China"

2008-06-14T19:50:00.003-06:00

"Nixon in China" has always been one of my favorite contemporary operas. Twice, at the Colorado Music Festival, I've seen concert performances of it, back when the CMF was a bit more adventuresome. I've had the original cast performance on CD, with James Madallena as Nixon and Carolann Page as as his wife Pat.

Opera Colorado decided more than a year ago to present it in Denver in 2008 and I looked forward to the performance. As I often do, I listened to the CD several times to "practice" before the performance. I had read about the original Houston Grand Opera staging with a 747 on stage, but I knew from reading the local reviews that this was different. Different is okay.

What surprised me the most was how the sequences played out, always different from the way I imagined it. For example, in Act 2 there is a storm, whose musical content always reminds me of Wagner and "Siegfried". For unknown reasons, I've always imagined that Pat, who interrupts this wonderful orchestral music to sing "Thank God you came.....". is alone in her room waiting for Nixon to return. It sounds that way, to me. Wrong!!! It all transpires, as per Opera Colorado's performance, as part of the long second act dance scene where Kissinger sings "whip her to death!". I was way off, clearly.

The last act also surprised me. I guess I was so enamored of the earlier parts that I forgot the slow diminuendo that ends the opera as all the characters think to themselves their own relevance. While long, it is beautiful.

Robert Orth sang Nixon, Maria Kanyova was Pat, Chen-Ye Yuan sang the role of Chou En-lai and Marc Heller was Mao. The highlight to me though was Tracy Dahl belting out "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung". Great fun!!

Once again, a real performance with the words visible in the super-title box changed my impression and acceptance of an opera. Normally I have the words turned off so I can focus on the music and singing. I guess that's a mistake. Kudos to Opera Colorado.

Broadcasting Beethoven Piano Sonatas

2008-06-04T21:22:00.007-06:00

Several months back I was curious about the frequency of broadcasts of Beethoven's string quartets. I chose 3 of the larger classical music radio stations: New York's WQXR, Seattle's KING and Denver's KVOD, the one I listen to frequently. I also chose these three since I calculated daily their symphony broadcasts as part of my classicalfmradio.org statistics.

Like the Beethoven symphonies, the string quartets were broadcast in a similar pattern -- long quartets broadcast less frequently than short ones. I expected similar results for Beethoven sonatas but I was somewhat surprised. Here is the table of the sonatas, their durations and the frequency of broadcasts by the 3 stations: Beethoven Piano Sonata DURATION KVOD KING WQXR |
=================================================================================|
#01 in F minor, Op 2 No 1 17:10 2 11 13 |
#02 in A Major, Op 2 No 2 22:33 14 15 9 |
#03 in C Major, Op 2 No 3 25:17 0 11 12 |
#04 in Eb Major, Op 7 28:36 7 11 9 |
#05 in C minor, Op 10 No 1 18:54 10 15 10 |
#06 in F Major, Op 10 No 2 14:01 28 13 27 |
#07 in D Major, Op 10 No 3 25:20 5 12 9 |
#08 in C minor Op 13, 'Pathetique' 18:28 70 47 25 |
#09 in E Major, Op 14 No 1 14:13 41 13 25 |
#10 in G Major, Op 14 No 2 17:00 19 16 24 |
#11 in B Major Op 22 22:46 16 20 9 |
#12 in A Flat Major, Op 26 11:43 11 4 14 |
#13 in E Flat Major, Op 27 No 1 15:46 17 12 17 |
#14 in C# minor, Op 27 No 2 'Moonlight' 16:21 88 57 39 |
#15 in D Major, Op 28 'Pastoral' 24:52 54 16 33 |
#16 in G Major, Op 31 No 1 22:56 8 14 9 |
#17 in D minor, Op 31 No 2 'Tempest' 22:01 33 27 24 |
#18 in G Major, Op 31 No 3 22:19 11 29 10 |
#19 in G minor, Op 49 No 1 8:11 17 2 24 |
#20 in G Major, Op 49 No 2 8:14 51 8 25 |
#21 in C Major, Op 53 'Waldstein' 22:12 53 40 20 |
#22 in F Major, Op 54 11:29 27 9 21 |
#23 in F minor Op 57 'Appassionata' 21:47 68 44 26 |
#24 in F# Major, Op 78 'Fur Theresa' 8:23 23 8 0 |
#25 in G Major, Op 79 10:07 22 10 25 |
#26 in E Flat, Op 81a 'Les Adieux' 16:37 49 35 29 |
#27 in E minor, Op 90 12:34 17 18 21 |
#28 in A Major, Op 101 20:41 22 17 17 |
#29 in F Flat Major, Op 106 'HammerKlavier' 42:52 20 25 7 |
#30 in E Major, Op 109 23:49 29 20 14 |
#31 in A Flat Major, Op 110 23:13 30 25 21 |
#32 in C minor, Op 111 29:05 14 22 10 |
=================================================================================|
Average Length of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas 19:22 |
=================================================================================|
Total Performances of all Beethoven Piano Sonatas 876 626 569 |
Average Performances for all 32 Sonatas 27.4 19.6 17.8 |
=================================================================================|
Number of Broadcast Days by the Stations in Study 1980 1698 1698 |
Average Performances per day .44 .36 .34 |
=================================================================================|

I'm not sure what this tells me: a few surprises like KVOD never broadcasting his Sonata #3 in over 5 years and WQXR not broadcasting #24. Come on, even on a bad day, Beethoven was way better than most. It appears that nicknamed sonatas are broadcast more than ones without, but I guess that's not surprising. The real long one, "Hammerklavier" does get played some and you can plan on hearing one of his piano sonatas about every other day or so. Not bad, I guess.

Golijov's Oceana

2008-06-02T20:32:00.002-06:00

Osvaldo Golijov's Oceana was performed the other night by the Pro Musical Colorado Chamber Orchestra and the Ars Nova Singers. Last summer I got turned onto Golijov, though somewhat grudgingly, by a performance by the Colorado Music Festival of his Ainadamar, which I commented on earlier. Golijov is "hot" and has several recordings of which I have a few. I've been meaning to track down his St, Mark Passion, but it's a pricey album, with only so-so reviews.

The FM stations don't seem to like him, even though he's getting big billing nationally. Only WQXR in New York and KING in Seattle have broadcast anything by him thus far this year. KVOD, my local station, continues to pretty much ignore him, though they have played some of his songs from Ayre and broadcast his Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind once in 2007. KVOD, Denver, Cow town -- I'll say no more.

Back to the performance. I have the CD and knew what to expect, but the audience didn't. While they responded admirably, I sensed a certain unease with the piece. It is sung in Spanish from poems by Neruda with a diverse orchestra and extra percussion. It was hard to grasp and follow, though I wonder if a Spanish speaker would have had a different reaction. I had earlier told my dinner hosts that I only really like the last part "Chorale of the Reef" and the performance confirmed my opinion. But let's give a big three cheers to this new orchestra and the Ars Nova for giving us something new and different. It's just too bad that you can only get music like this live and not on public radio.

One negative comment: why is it that a somewhat inconsequential performer sitting up front, the fellow playing the "Talking Drum", which seemed mute from where I was sitting, wore a white shirt while everyone else was in a tux or black dress? Didn't get the message, I guess.

Movie music

2008-05-27T14:36:00.002-06:00

Vincent D'Indy's ''Souvenirs" was broadcast last night on KVOD in Denver. The announcer, Charles Andrews, commented that D'Indy would have been a wonderful movie composer. While I am familiar with D'Indy's "Symphony on a French Mountain Air", "Souvenirs" was new to me. As I listened I agreed with Andrews' comment and then began the mental game of imagining what movie I would be watching: a western; a forlorn big city romance; maybe a mystery; a documentary; certainly not science fiction or horror. I don't know exactly what it would be. That is music's limit. Instrumental music can't tell a tale or specify reality. Set the idea first, then music can help define it.

John Ireland

2008-05-21T11:52:00.003-06:00

Last night I turned on KVOD and heard the end of a nice piece: John Irelands's "Orchestral Poem", a 15 minute work. The announcer commented at the end that it's too bad that we don't get to hear it more often. I've never heard it performed, but it certainly sounds like it would please an audience.

The announcer proceeded to play Brahm's "Tragic Overture". Okay, KVOD, do what you suggest. The "Tragic Overture" has been broadcast 129 times in the last 1996 days (since 2003). If Ireland's "Orchestral Poem" is that nice, how come KVOD has only broadcast it 21 times over the same 5 and a half years? For every time Ireland's work is played, you play the "Tragic Overture" over 6 times.

I suspect orchestras don't play music by John Ireland much because audiences aren't familiar with him. An English composer, Ireland (1879-1962) has a late-romantic, impressionist sound. I've just downloaded some mp3's from Amazon of his piano concerto and two symphonic studies. Amazon doesn't seem to have the "Orchestral Poem" in its catalog -- too bad. We'll see how much I like the others.

Apollo and Dionysus

2008-05-13T18:39:00.005-06:00

Listening to KVOD last night, the announcer Charles Andrews introduced Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven's Symphony #8. KVOD has broadcast this symphony 14 times thus far in 2008, compared to only one time for Symphony #9, by the way. Andrews normally has interesting comments and insight. He said something about the Apollonian versus Dionysian characteristic of Bruno's Beethoven. Apollo represents harmony, order, and reason while Dionysus represents ecstasy and disorder. Was Andrews saying Beethoven's symphony was an example of reason conducted in a disorderly fashion by Bruno Walter? I was confused by the comment but I wondered since the performance was very good.

Later, in the middle of Bach's Violin Concerto, I noticed something that we don't often hear in Boulder -- the sound of rain. I turned off the radio and listened to its quiet trickle on the roof. Apollo and Dionysus were still wandering in my head when it dawned on me that I was right in the middle of both. The sound from the skylight was Dionysus: quiet, pleasant random rain. On my right, with the window slightly open, I could hear the steady uniform plunk of water dripping into the gutter. Dionysus in the skylight, Apollo sliding down the roof. Thank you Charles Andrews!

More on the Alaskan John Adams

2008-05-12T19:31:00.002-06:00

In an earlier posting, I mentioned John Luther Adams, the "Alaskan" Adams, to differentiate him from John Coolidge Adams, the "California" Adams, and the more well known John Adams. John Luther Adams had been written up in an article by Alex Ross in The New Yorker. Impatiently I had downloaded some of his music from Amazon, all done by the Cincinnati Percussion Ensemble. I wasn't overly impressed by it, but I decided to wait it out and see what the mail might bring. I had also ordered Earth and Great Weather, a piece commented on by Alex Ross in his New Yorker article. Today it arrived and I'm listening to it as I write this. "Earth and Great Weather" or, as the composer calls it "Nunavlusilaqpauvlu Nan Kak Nats'aa Gweedhaa", is more of the same and, unfortunately, I'm not much impressed. In both Ross's article and in the liner notes there are references to Morton Feldman. I have but one piece by Feldman, his Piano and String Quartet with Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet. Apparently like a lot of Feldman's works, it goes on and on and on -- for an hour and 20 minutes. I like it. While I wouldn't quite rate up in my top 10, I do enjoy listening to Feldman. Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed with the "Alaskan" John Adams.

I don't expect to hear any performances of either Feldman or Luther Adams locally, even in a town like Boulder where somewhat adventuresome music is often performed. Percussionists may know Russell Peck's "The Glory and the Grandeur" a concerto for 3 percussionists. I heard it for the first time about 10 years ago at the Colorado Music Festival, under Giora Bernstein. It was fun to listen to, and, equally important, fun to watch. Now, the Boulder Philharmonic is planning on performing it this fall. Unlike the Luther Adam's pieces I've heard, it's percussion AND orchestra, not just percussion. Perhaps that's why I like it more.

Is it performed on the radio? Not on the stations I monitor. It is available on CD since I have a copy, but do they play it. No, but perhaps that's best since you only really appreciate it in a live performance.

John Luther Adams, at first blush

2008-05-07T10:31:00.003-06:00

Today, I got my weekly New Yorker and found an article by Alex Ross. Entitled Letter From Alaska, it is about John Luther Adams. This Adams is not to be mistaken from John Coolidge Adams, the "California" Adams of "Nixon in China", "Dr Atomic", "Death of Klinghoffer", and so forth -- the one we really listen to and appreciate. I'm a fan of contemporary music and actually saw a reference to this article earlier this week on Alex Ross's blog "The Rest if Noise". I've read Ross's book of the same name and enjoy reading his writing. I though, good, another new composer! What is he all about? Is this going to be another winner?

After finishing the article I went to Amazon and looked for "John Luther Adams" and found several hits. I looked for titles that Ross referenced and found that some that were available. A few were only available as CD's, so I ordered one "Earth and the Great Weather". I could immediately download some mp3's for only 99 cents, so I did. I patched them into my home-grown mp3 database and listened. Perhaps my choices weren't any good, but I was disappointed. There were 5 pieces, performed by the Cincinnati Percussion Ensemble. They were uninspiring and frankly boring. Dare I say it? Like tedious Edgar Varese.

Ross wrote about 20Th century composers in his book "The Rest is Noise". Prokofiev, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Strauss, -- all the major 20Th Century composers. He also mentioned many many composers like Varese and Feldman, two he referenced in the New Yorker article. Are they Important? I don't know. Listenable? Again, I don't know. I remember getting a record of Varese's music: Ionisation, Density 21.5, Integrales, Octandre, Hyperprism and Poeme Electronique. I still have the record, though I haven't converted it over into mp3's yet. I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Luther Adams from my first brush with him appeals much like Varese.

Morton Feldman does have his appeal. Perhaps the CD of Luther Adam's work Earth and the Great Weather will be more like Feldman than Varese. I'll have to wait for delivery to find out.

Does the radio audience get to hear John Luther Adams? Not for the FM classical stations I monitor. Looking for "Luther Adams" I found nothing with both names together. There were 1170 broadcasts of "Adams" and all appear to be the California one, not the Alaskan one. Luther was found 40 times, but were either by Martin Luther or involving Lutheran.

When to play what and reality.

2008-04-29T20:58:00.003-06:00

I tend to listen to my local FM classical music station at night, either preparing for bed, or, as is often the case, while snuggling in bed prior to sleep. The ear-plugs are in so not to bother my wife, a classical music lover but a sleeper first. Many nights I've listened to KVOD out of Denver for hours after the lights have gone out. Sometimes hours and hours.

The reason for setting the scene is that I've come to wonder why this station, and probably others, chooses to broadcast pieces when they do. Last night at around 10:30 they broadcast Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #1. I wasn't exactly snoozing, but it jolted me more awake. The brass seemed too loud and too throbbing for this time of night. Later they played Mozart's "Coronation" piano concerto, which, too, seemed out of place for the late hour. Maybe it's me, but at that time of night I expect long, soothing romantic symphonies ala Mahler, Bruckner, etc. Of course these composers are too long for the radio these days, but why not hope? Anyway, I got to thinking what is an appropriate time for different types of classical music? Baroque all the time? Contemporary only late on Saturday nights the way KVOD does it? Renaissance early in the morning? Classical only at supper time? Should it correspond to the orchestration? The average volume? It's length? Composer? Period? I don't have an answer, but for some reason I want to hear intellectual depth and challenge late at night. On KVOD I don't seem to get it. When I lived in Connecticut, I faithfully listened to WQXR. The late evening was for the late romantics -- not always, but most frequently. Denver was and is a cow town. We get whatever the programming director wants to foist on us, unfortunately. Artistic consistency and planning aren't important.

One other point of interest. I went to a chamber concert performed by musicians from the Colorado Music Festival on the afternoon of April 20th, 2008. My wife and I hosted 2 of the performers, both friends who had visited with us over the past 5 or 6 summers. After the concert, while driving home, I had the car radio tuned to KVOD and lo and behold, the rarest of pieces! They were broadcasting a performance of Beethoven's 9th symphony. While listening I could tell it was a live recording. It had somewhat of a hollow sound, with an occasional audience cough, etc. The Colorado Music Festival had ended its season a few years ago with it, so I suspected it was the CMF orchestra under Michael Christie. It went on, so when I got home I immediately put it on my home radio and continued listening. I was surprised to find out it was not CMF but the Boulder Philharmonic, performed the same year, under the baton of Michael Butterman. Okay, so far, so good. What surprised me next was a week later when I checked my web site (http://classicalfmradio.org) and looked for the frequency count of symphonies I discovered that it had not been counted. Was my programming that bad? How could I have missed it? I investigated and discovered that the KVOD listing for Sunday, April 20th, did not include anything by Beethoven during that time slot. Mozart, Resphigi, Vivaldi, Schubert, Hayden, etc, but not Beethoven. I hadn't tuned to another station; I hadn't mistaken the piece since both my wife and our Japanese guest were with me and agreed. So I can only conclude that the daily listings from the KVOD only partially reflect reality. Should I be surprised? I guess not.

Janacek's Intimate Vixen

2008-04-25T16:30:00.004-06:00

Last evening I saw a performance of Leos Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen" at the University of Colorado. It was surprisingly good with a large cast and an interesting staging. In preparation for the performance, I'd been listening to it in it's original Czech -- but I didn't understand a word sung. The CU Music school used super-titles and had it sung in English. That was good choice. Clearly it's best to understand what an opera is all about.

This is the second performance of a Janacek piece in a week for me. Last Friday night I heard the Tasman Quartet play his "Intimate Letters", the second string quartet. The Tasman Quartet from New Zealand are the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Colorado School of Music. They will be studying for 2 years with the famous Takacs Quartet. The Takacs did "Intimate Letters" in the fall of 2007, so I wasn't surprised that the Tasman tackled this difficult piece, too. They played it very, very well.

Do we hear Janacek on the radio? Some. It appears that the "Lachian Dances" and "Sinfonietta" are actually played with some frequency on most of the stations I monitor. A suite from "The Cunning Little Vixen" is also performed occasionally, though looking it looks like the full hour and a half opera was only broadcast once in 5 years, over KUSC in Los Angeles. "Intimate Letters" has been broadcast, but it must be too long and too complicated for the KVOD team, who have chosen not to broadcast at all in the last 5 years. What a pity!

One final note about the CU opera performance. First, clearly the students at CU must have smallish bladders. OVer the last 10 or 15 minutes of the performance, small groups of them had to get up and disturb the audience and run off to piddle (or whatever). We read in the paper about the CU students drinking a lot, but come on, guys! If we older audience members can hold it, why can't you?

Lastly there is William Gustafson, the stage director. He always sits in the back and laughs too loudly or breaks out clapping as loud as he can. I feel he is trying to indicate to us, the audience, that now is the time to show our appreciation. Please, the show deserves applause, but let us choose when and how much.

Performers or the performed?

2008-04-15T16:42:00.003-06:00

Last night, KVOD broadcast Haydn's Cello Concerto #1. The announcer, Stephanie Wendt, praised the cellist, Matt Haimovitz, raising expectations about the performance. As I listened I wondered about his performance. What could I really sense about his playing? How did it rate compared with others? Could I tell? More importantly, could I tell over the radio?

I go to many live concerts. Live artists are always at risk during the playing. What if they flub a note, miss some, go out of tune, etc? You can watch and feel the intensity of playing and appreciate the artists' skill. But can you judge that over the radio? For me, no -- it's an imperfect medium for judging talent. Radio just can't compete against a live performance.

It turns out that the Haydn Cello Concert #1 has been performed 5 times thus far this year on KVOD. Twice by Truls Mork, twice by last night's Haimovitz and once by Jacqueline du Pre. So is it the intention of the radio station to show us different artists or to play music? I don't know. Personally, I'd rather hear different music rather than different artists playing the same piece.

How to judge a masterpiece.

2008-04-12T16:09:00.002-06:00

I earlier commented that I had read Alex Ross's "And the Rest is Noise", an intriguing book. It's a bit of a tome, but well worth the effort. When writing about Olivier Messiaen, Ross gives somewhat short-shrift to his Turangalila Symphony and doesn't have a lot to say about Vingt Regards su L'Enfant Jesus, but at one point he refers to Des Canyons aux Étoiles (The Canyons and the Stars) as Messiaen's masterpiece. Well, after getting a copy, I have to say it really does sound like Messiaen with his distinctive percussiveness and stange chords and plent of bird-like sounds. But his masterpiece? Both Turangalila and Vingt Regards are much more impressive to me, but Ross must have some reason for favoring Des Canyons. Beats me why, though.

Given that December 10th, 2008 is the 100th anniversary of Messiaen's birth, here in Boulder we have been luck to hear quite a bit of his music. I've tracked down and listened to a lot of Messiaen lately. He's been featured by Hsing-ay Hsu several times at the University of Colorado. Wouldn't you expect some of the FM radio stations to play some of his music? Well, not yet this year. KVOD, in Denver hasn't played anything yet, nor have many of the other stations I monitor. When they do play something by him, it's typically his Quartet for the End of Time, historically significant and penetrating, but not on my all-time favorite Messiaen list.

Boulder has many music lovers, a strong music faculty at the university, several critics and a bunch of musical organizations. Surprisingly, I haven't found anyone yet that has also read Ross's book. I've lent my copy to a friend who promises to read it and give me feedback, but he hasn't yet. That's surprising for an often written-about book that made the Pulitzer finals this year.

What did they hear that I didn't?

2008-04-08T19:21:00.003-06:00

I went to a Takacs String Quartet concert last night and was treated to the string quartet number 59, known as "The Rider" or the "The Horseman". A well-played, typically Haydn-esque quartet, As usual, the Takacs was flawless. What I got thinking about as they played was how did this get nicknamed "The Rider"? The program notes (by Andreas Anderswo) said ".. is immediately apparent after that pause that follows the unison introduction to the opening Allegro: the instruments enter one by one imitating each other with the first subject upon which a lilting subject follows". Now I ask, what does this have to do with riding horses or being a horseman? [Note: I tried to track down this Andeas Anderswo (Andrea Elsewhere???) at the University of Colorado but to no avail. However, someone in the know told me that Andreas Anderswo is the pen-name for none other than one of the local classical music critics, Wes Bloomster.]

As I sat listening, I wondered if, shortly after the premiere of this work, the composer, the performers, the patrons and some hangers-on didn't convene in a local tavern or palatial home and sit around and chat about the piece and the performance. They probably had port or something stronger and smoked their favorite tobacco and gabbed. At some point, someone probably mumbled something about "It sounded like horses" or "did you hear the loud horse's hooves rumble by during the first movement" and, wallah! a nickname was born.

I read the introduction by Anderswo and listened carefully to the opening and, for the life of me, could not get any perception of horses, riders, hooves, whatever in that opening movement. The name stuck with me and I kept wondering and, just perhaps, during the finale I might have heard something like restless horses. But what do I know?

Too often we hear on the FM radio pieces broadcast with their historical names? "Eroica", "The Prague", "The Surprise", etc, etc, etc. Sometimes they seem to mean something and sometimes not. I can understand where some of the names and tag-lines come from, but often not. It just causes me to wonder. and, in the case of "The Rider" ponder, how it all came to be named.

Symphonies tomorrow......

2008-03-23T17:59:00.002-06:00

Last evening I went to another "Fusion" concert of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra. Over the past year they attempted to fuse music with art, cinema, dance, Shakespeare and pizza-flipping -- not really! Several friends agree that the evenings haven't been well received -- not exactly flops, but distractions to the music being performed. Next year, the Boulder Phil gives us an evening of Frank Sinatra style singing, one with the world premiere of a concerto for Tabla and orchestra, and a family concert "Alien encounter 2: Schnoodle meets Sch(n)ubert." Why?

The Colorado Music Festival, where I seldom miss any concert, has announced a season heavy with "World" music and extremes. How about a night of ukelele music; one of tap dance; the Brazilian Guitar Quartet and the stunt of performing all the Beethoven symphonies in one week? Is this intended to develop audience and generate donations? What is going on here? What happened to a balanced season of plain old classical and contemporary music? Chamber music? Piano soloists? Some new music? I give up. I can see the next CMF season: all 104 Haydn symphonies one long evening and a concerto for claves and washboard.

In the blog Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise Justin Davidson writing about the financing of symphony orchestras notes that "....this doesn't mean that the symphony orchestras are no longer viable, or that they're about to be extinct, only that they have to do everything right.". I have always supported my local orchestras, donating regularly (with a company matching grant) and buying a couple of full subscriptions. Now, looking at what I'm being offered I'm reluctantly deciding that I'll not subscribe but only selectively buy tickets. I'll let the ukelele fans in the area make the donations instead of me. The orchestras just aren't "doing everything right".

Am I being a stick in the mud? Am I failing to adapt? I look forward to contemporary classical music on the radio and love live concerts, but what's happening here?

Strauss had to be wrong.....

2008-03-11T15:59:00.002-06:00

Last night I was listening to KVOD (Denver) when the announcer Charles Andrews mentioned that Richard Strauss considered the Mozart String Quintet in g, K 516 very highly. I don't remember the exact words Andrews used, but I thought to myself that if Strauss thought this to be the case, the String Quintet (apparently a string quartet with 2 viola) must really be pretty good. It was written in 1787, somewhere between the "Prague" and the 39th symphony and between the 20th and 21st string quartets. Much to my surprise I found the K 516 mundane. How could a fellow composer like Strauss have held this piece in such high esteem? Strauss comes across as a somewhat enigmatic character in Ross's "The Rest is Noise". I wonder if this comment about this particular Mozart quintet came after the war? I don't know, but to me the quintet was a bore.

Olivier Messiaen

2008-02-14T13:44:00.002-07:00

I had the pleasure of attending a concert of all-Messiaen piano music at the University of Colorado the other night. Hsing-Ay Hsu, director of CU's Pendulum New Music series, performed 5 works, some with MinTze Wu on violin and Alejandro Cremaschi, piano. What a great concert and such interesting music. It's Messiaen's Centennial so over the next few weeks there will several local performances of his works.

In Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise" Messiaen plays an important role. Ross writes about his influence and about his World War II imprisonment in an Nazi concentration camp where he wrote The Quartet for the End of Time. Surprisingly Ross is silent about the Turangalila Symphony and praises From the Canyons to the Star, which I've never heard and which has not be broadcast on any of the FM stations I catalog. Amazon has it, but the price is awfully high. I guess I'll have to wait on Canyons.

What I particularly liked at Hsing-Ay's concert were two excerpts from Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus. She gave a brief explanation of the setting of the work, and called it one of the greatest piano pieces in the 20th century. While I thought that might be a bit of hyperbole, I started to wonder what would be the greatest. The piano music of Ravel and Debussy would probably rank up there, but then what else? I'm not sure that Hsing-Ay's hyperbole might not just be correct.

While I guess it is not surprising, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, is seldom broadcast on the 7 all-classical FM radio stations I monitor. Only WQXR(New York) and KUSC(LA) have broadcast movements from it in the last 4 years. Here in Denver, nothing, though, for example, Debussy's Children's Corner Suite has been broadcast 103 times in the last 4 years. Now I really enjoy Debussy's piano music, but as I'm writing this, I'm also listening to an interesting performance by Madelaine Fort of six pieces of Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus with commentary by her husband Alan Forte. The Debussy suite or Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess (133 broadcasts in Denver) are, to me, just not that much better than the Messiaen. So why have the radio stations not chosen to allow us to hear him? Your guess is as good as mine.

On Ross's "The Rest is Noise"

2008-02-04T11:26:00.001-07:00

I've just finished The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. Surprisingly I found it a tough read even though it was on the top of my Christmas wish-list, I had high expectations. What I can't quite put my finger on is how and why he chose to discuss some composers and essentially ignored others. Perhaps it was too broad a brush and too much for one book.

In particular, I was interested in his comments on the last 30 years of the 20th century. I was looking for pointers to new compositions and composers, but I wonder if I really want to hear some of them. Of La Mont Young, he suggests the Berkley music department gave him money 'to get him out of town', then quotes 3 supposed compositions. Do I really want to listen to him? There's a lot on Pierre Boulez and John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and of course Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but tonal composers? He groups John Taverner and Michael Gorecki but says nothing about them. Gorecki's 3rd Symphony was a big commercial hit, but nothing more is said of him. There are interesting details about Stravinsky, Shostokovich, Copland, Sibelius, Britten and Richard Strauss and the effects of the world around them on their music.

I'm not a musician, so when Ross talks says it "ends in unambigous B-flat major" or "D-flat major, D major with B attached, E-flat major and the notes C and E" he leaves me cold. I can't imagine it and would need a keyboard to sound it out. Perhaps it's meaningful to a real musician, but it's nothing to me.

The historical coverage of the World War II impact on music was insightful. In an earlier post, I noticed the lack of broadcasting of Bruckner's symphonies. Perhaps I now understand it differently. Ross points out how frequently during the Nazi era Bruckner's works were performed. Apparently he was almost as popular as Wagner and Strauss. Is there some anti-German bias creeping into the broadcast selections? I've always concluded his omission had more to do with the length of the symphonies, but now I wonder a bit.

I'm lending my copy to a friend with similar interests. Let's see what he has to say, assuming that he takes the time to plow through the full 543 pages.

Poor Bruckner.

2008-01-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, I want to incorporate one of the all time most famous pictures painted by a famous Italian, just to make a point:

Surely you recognize this! Now art is art and whatever the artist gives you is what you should get. You shouldn't be forced to accept an edited version chosen by someone who filters what you see. I shouldn't be putting in just part of of the Mona Lisa, though in your memory you probably see the rest with your mind's eye anyway. But what about this one:

Not as obvious, I suppose. Is your mind's eye missing something. It is a famous picture. or at least part of it.

Now what about music. When a composer produces a piece of art, it is what they write and should be view as a whole. But consider poor old Anton Bruckner, one of the composers ofter referenced as one who produces "Cathedrals of Sound": long majestic symphonies. He did 9 numbered symphonies, along with an early "Study" symphony and one number 0. Listen to it sometime and you'll pick out Bruckner right away.

Now look at this table of broadcasts of his symphonies from a sampling of classical FM radio stations around the country:


symphony:               "Study"  #0  #1  #2  #3  #4  #5  #6  #7  #8  #9
----------------------  -------  --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Minneapolis, MN(CL24):                            *
Seattle, WA(KING):         1      2   5   2   6   3*  2   5   1*  2   4
Los Angeles, CA(KUSC):                1   7   1   6*  3*  1   2*  4   3*
Denver, CO(KVOD):                                 1   5           1   1
Birmingham, AL(WBHM):                                 1           1   1
Cincinnati, OH(WGUC):                             1*      1           1
New York, NY(WQXR):               2   5       1   3*      1   6*  1   1

Notice the asterisks, *, which indicated that the station chose not to broadcast the entire symphony, but rather just one or two movements. Those in the upper midwest listening to CL24 are only provided with a snippet like the second art fragment above, not the entire beautiful "Romantic" symphony that Bruckner worked so long and hard on. It's a shame that stations choose to do this. Why, I wonder, and can conclude that what Bruckner did was violate the station's operating premise, short works only.

Clearly the two coasts "appreciate" Bruckner more, and middle America needn't bother to listen to Bruckner.

Recognize the second art fragment? Its from "The persistance of memory" by Salvador Dali.

Stockhausen

2007-12-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

Both The Week and The Economist had featured obituaries of Karlheinz Stockhausen on Saturday. The composer, called a "genius-madman" by one and "seeker of new sounds" by the other, died in early December at 79. Both magazines pointed out that his picture appears on the famous cover of the Beetle's Sgt. Pepper's Longly Hearts Club Band. I tracked down my copy of it but couldn't figure out which one was Stockhausen. Marilyn Monroe he was not!

With his death recent, KVOD chose to broadcast his Gruppen for three orchestras and Stimmung. I listened and wondered about them. Stimmung, a sextet for unaccompanied voices, made no sense whatsover and I was glad when it was over. For Christmas I've requested Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century and I'm curious to read what Ross says about Stockhausen. I just couldn't get any enjoyment out of his music.

Not related, on Friday night I participated in a new Boulder "event" -- a group performance of Phil Klein's UnSilent Night. There were about 60-70 participants, mostly students from the CU school of music and others interested in the CU Pendulum program. Armed with boom-boxes and powered speakers attached to mp3 players, we wandered for about an hour along the Pearl Street mall, playing segments of Klein's performance piece. The sound, with percussion, bells, chorus and organ reflected off the walls of the buildings and merged with the crunch of feet on the frozen snow. We were all met with smiles of wonderment from shoppers and those wandering the decked-out mall on a cold evening. One woman came up to my wife and asked "What religion is this? It's great!". It was and let's hope it happens again next year.

Symphonies being broadcast.

2007-12-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

I was curious about the broadcast frequencies of symphonies by some of the greatest symphonists. Here's a small table of the broadcasts of symphonies over KVOD (Denver, CO) for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007 (through yesterday):

Composers	Symphonies Composed	KVOD 2005	KVOD 2006	KVOD 2007
Beethoven	9	159	224	243
Schubert	9	139	195	156
Schumann	4	81	114	100
Mozart	42	384	451	401
Haydn	104	384	525	569
Saint-Saens	3	38	52	40
Brahms	4	63	96	80
Dvorak	9	48	99	94
Sibelius	7	56	60	66
Tchaikovsky	6	40	74	78
Mahler	10	26	12	7
Bruckner	9	14	9	3
Prokofiev	7	45	44	42
Shostakovich	15	16	35	22

Poor Mahler and Bruckner. Of course what this table doesn't show is the distribution of the broadcasts. For more details see
classicalfmradio.org and click on the button 'Show an interesting report on broadcast symphonies'.

PS: Working from a comcast connection can be a real pain. I've got a cron job which pings my comcast gateway regularly and I'm really getting a lot of dropped pings.
I sure wish there was some competition here -- and don't even mention qworst (qwest).

La Valse

2007-12-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

One of the most played pieces on KVOD is Ravel's "La Valse", ranked 15th over the last 4 years. It's not one of my favorites, but I understand the need to broadcast it. It was written for orchestra and that's what is normally played. However, this past week I attended a concert at the University of Colorado where I heard a piano version, one that apparently Ravel arranged. I had never heard it done this way. The pianist was Vladimir Stoepel, a Russian pianist now living in Berlin. He preceded the performance with a brief explanation that Ravel was heart-sick at what had happened in World War I and wanted to reflect the coming darkness he felt was coming to Europe. It was, indeed, a dark and wrenching piece, full of power. Stoepel played with great passion. To sit and hear such a performance; to recognize the to-me syrupy themes and yet to sense the dispare was thrilling. Now if only some of the FM radio stations would broadcast this version instead of the incessant orchestra suite.

The Early Quartets Win

2007-11-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

I've probably focused too much on orchestral music when I look at what's been playing.

On the day after Thanksgiving, rather than get wrapped up in Black Friday crap and football, I decided to take a look at Beethoven's String Quartets. I'm lucky to have the Takacs Quartet performing regularly in Boulder, very lucky. They've recorded on CD and won awards for their renditions of the Beethoven quartets. I must admit, though, that even though I love their CD's, nothing is as good as a live performance.

Anyway, here is a table of the broadcasts of the Beethoven String Quartets by KVOD for 2007 through November 24th.

KVOD Broadcasts	Beethoven String Quartet	Time in minutes
11	#01 in F Major, Op 18/1	27
7	#02 in G Major, Op 18/2	23
8	#03 in C minor, Op 18/3	24
10	#04 in A Major, Op 18/4	22
10	#05 in A Major, Op 18/5	28
12	#06 in Bb Major, Op 18/6	24
11	#07 in F Major 'Razumovsky', Op 59/1	40
1	#08 in E minor 'Razumovsky', Op 59/2	40
9	#09 in C Major 'Razumovsky', Op 59/3	32
1	#10 in E flat Major 'Harp', Op 74	32
1	#11 in f minor 'Serioso', Op 95	21
0	#12 in E flat Major [1825], Op 127	35
2	#13 in Bb Major, Op 130 with 'Grosse Fugue'	57
0	#14 in C# minor, Op 131	39
2	#15 in a minor, Op 132	43
1	#16 in F Major, Op 135	25

Now there are only 16 of them, and there are roughly 525,600 minutes each year, so why can't they all be broadcast? What about #12 and #14? And only 2 times for the great Opus 132? Interestingly they did broadcast this on Thanksgiving night, appropriately with it's 3rd movement marked by Beethoven with "Heiliger Danksgesang eine Genesenen and die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart." ("Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode", thanks Wikipedia)

So it's the early quartets, a smidge of the middle ones and short shrift to the late quartets, arguably Beethoven's finest. I just can help but wonder why a public radio station can't do better?

It's almost Thanksgiving...

2007-11-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

and it's turning into another dismal year for some poor composers of long works. It's just hard for me to understand why a classical radio station that is listener supported finds itself totally unable to broadcast any works of length. My favorite peeve is Beethoven. His first 8 symphonies have been broadcast on KVOD anywhere from 21 times thus far in 2007 (symphony #3) to 29 times (or more) for symphonies 1,2 7 and 8. Yet symphony number 9, the mighty Chorale has only been broadcast 3 times in all of 2007 -- and one of those times was on a special series that I caught that features "Listener Requests"!!!

Then there is Mahler. 2 broadcast each for symphonies 1, 2 and 5. Poor Bruckner has had only 4 symphonies broadcast, one each for 1, 4, 8 and 9. Bruckner has had only 14 pieces broadcast in total for 2007 including smaller religious works. Ravel, on the other hand, clearly a better composer by KVOD's broadcast standards, has had 362 broadcast.

In music appreciation classes (when there were music appreciation classes!) Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" was often the example of programmatic music. Remember the
"Dream of the Witches Sabbath" and "March to the Scaffold"! Well, the 'all classical music - all the time' stations are broadcasting individual sections and not just the whole piece. KVOD broadcast the entire thing 4 times, WQXR 9 times and KING 6 times.

I cannot understand what causes stations that broadcast round the clock to have to limit pieces based on length. Forget opera, also -- but that's another issue. I also think it somewhat disrespectful to single out individual movements for separate broadcast. But who cares, the composers are dead and not complaining. Perhaps I'm the one complaining too much.

Someone else's interesting observation

2007-08-10T10:44:00.000-06:00

A user of my ClassicalFMRadio.org web set sent me an interesting comment supporting something that I've felt for years -- that repetiticious broadcasting is bad for everyone. Thomas, from LA but now living in Boise, commented that "In Boise, we are stuck with a full daily dose of CPRN repetition, and it is horrible! ... Think of what this will do to local orchestras who will only have patrons who want to hear 'From Bohemia's Woods and Fields', or 'In the Steppes of Central Asia', or Handel's Water Music/Royal Fireworks." I couldn't agree more.

Now, having said that, I have to observe that here in Boulder we are very lucky to have the Colorado Music Festival. The CMF music directory, Michael Christie, each summer introduces the audience to some new and very interesting composers and compositions. This July year we were lucky to have a staged performance of Goligov's Ainadamar, a wonderful opera. Additionally we were introduced to compositions by Jennifer Higdon, Dimitrije Buzarovski, Madeleine Dring, Ofer Ben-Amots, and Marjan Mozetich. This last composer, from Canada, is very accessible and tonal. Mozetich has Bassoon and Marimba Concerto, a Concerto for 2 harps and string orchestra and a violin concerto. I recommend them all, thanks to the adventuresome Michael Christie.

In search of contemporary "classical" music

2007-05-20T14:00:00.000-06:00

The music broadcast on KVOD tends to be tepid at best. I'm listening less and playing more mp3s of my own rather than just listening to the radio. But how do you find and hear new, interesting music? Generally speaking the FM classical stations focus on only short, easy-listening classical pieces. Lots of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart ...... and Ravel? Forget long pieces, contemporary, challenging classical music.

Saturday night at 10 pm, mountain time, though, KVOD plays some contemporary pieces. I try to listen, hoping to find a few gems every once in a while. The other week KVOD broadcast Jouni Kaipainen's Cello Concerto. I'd never heard of him. While the first movement didn't do much for me, the second and third were very nice. I decided to get a copy of my own from Amazon and, after listening again, think so still. The Cello Concerto comes with his Horn Concerto No. 1. Kaipainen isn't played much on the stations I monitor. Only 3 broadcasts of each, on the 3 "networked" stations, KVOD, WBHM and KUSC, in over 3 years. Too bad.

Toensing and Responsoria

2007-04-14T10:29:00.000-06:00

While listening to KVOD the other night I heard some very nice, quiet choral music. Somehow I missed the ending announcer's description. However, I was able to find it from ClassicalFMRadio.org. It was Responsoria by Richard Toensing.

Toensing, it turns out, was Professor of Composition at the University of Colorado here in Boulder and has just recently retired (I think). A local! I even know one of the sponsors of the CD! Since I liked the quiet tolling quality of the piece, I wanted to listen to it again by getting it from the local library. No such luck. Even the local guys don't seem to get acquired for the library CD collection. Amazon had Responsoria so I ordered it from one of their subsidiaries. It showed up promptly and I'm listening to it as I post this. Since I've put it into my mp3 repository, I've decided to donate my copy to the Boulder Public Library.

Responsoria is a setting of the Tenebrae services, the Roman Catholic Church's services of "The Offices of Matins and Lauds". Not being Catholic, nor particularly Christian, the words in Latin have little meaning or effect. But the a capella singing with muted percussion and bells is very soothing and other-worldly. It's 3 CDs, referred to as Books. All much the same, but beautiful none the less.

A new recording by Sibelius

2007-02-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to the magazine, The Week, which has a nice digest of news. It also has a weekly review of new CDs, almost always including one of classical music. The other week I saw a positive review of "Kullervo", an early, large-scale symphonic work by Jean Sibelius, his Opus 7, conducted by Robert Spano. I had never heard of it, but when I checked on my broadcast history, I found that 3 stations had broadcast it. WQXR in New York had broadcast as early as February, 2004. I ordered a copy from Amazon. Since the Spano recording was done in May of 2006, the must be other recordings available, though I didn't really check.

What I wonder is are Classical FM stations acquiring new CDs any more, or are they just playing the same old ones? Sibelius symphonies are popular. In 2006, stations KING (Seattle), KCME (Colorado Springs), WUSC (Los Angeles) and WQXR (New York) broadcast all 6 of his symphonies. KVOD (Denver) broadcast all except #6. KVOD likes #2, having played it 70 times in the last 4 years. But it has never played #6. I guess they either don't like it or don't have recording.

"Kullervo" is okay but not memorable, with a thick, brooding, dark, Scandanavian sound. It's based on the Finnish "Kalevala" legends, and, unlike any of Sibelius's orchestral works, has soprano and baritone voices.

iPod's organization with Classical Music

2006-12-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

I bought myself an iPod NANO to play around with. It's my 3rd MP3 player after buying an Arcos 'Jukebox' 20 M player and a little Creative Lab's 512 Mb portable. I've had the Archos for several years and it's traveled well, though it's filled now. I use the Creative mostly when I bike or ski. It's light and portable and 512MB is enough to hold the entire Robert Greenburg lectures on the Symphony.

In both of these cases, I was able to take and construct m3u files containing the playlist order of the music and point them to the appropriate mp3 files, organized heirarchically on the player drive. One or two clicks and I'm off into my own world of music. No need for the FM radio, since most portable radios don't pick up the signal well enough to enjoy. Up in the mountains, forget classical music.

So I assumed the use of the iPod would be similar. Map the iPod directories, copy in the m3u and mp3s and keep Apple and me happy. It doesn't seem to work that way. I asked the young fellow at the Apple store and he said 'no problem'. Clearly he was not up-to-snuff, or else I didn't frame my question properly. Anyway, I'm on a quest to make it all work. Apparently m3u's from some Window's applications can be imported, but it sure isn't clear yet to me.

Silly little snippets

2006-11-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

On KVOD, the Denver, Colorado classical music radio station, their format is to play a piece, name the piece that's just been played, play a snippet, have a station announcement, play a snippet, then announce and play the next piece. Perhaps it's me, but those snippets -- short, 5-12 second clips extracted from some light classical piece somewhere -- are annoying.

Image the setting. You are listening to some intense piece of chamber music, say a late Beethoven quartet and it reaches its climactic ending. The announcer says the piece, then the music moment is broken with this piece of twaddle which breaks the spell. Silence is better.

I'm not sure why they do it other than the use up some seconds to balance out their timing or some such. But it's annoying

Number Nine - the big loser

2006-11-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

After a break of more than a month, I'm back with my constant complaint about long music. Poor old Beethoven. If he had only known to shorten his 9th. Had he, it would be played more. It's now after election day and yet KVOD, in Denver, has only broadcast the 9th 3 times this year. Just Three!
Here are the numbers:

Symphony No 1: 25 times

Symphony No 2: 25 times

Symphony No 3: 18 times

Symphony No 4: 19 times

Symphony No 5: 24 times

Symphony No 6: 24 times

Symphony No 7: 23 times

Symphony No 8: 24 times

Symphony No 9: 3 times

Doesn't that seem odd?

ClassicalFM

2006-09-21T10:32:00.000-06:00

ClassicalFM

Not what they are know for:

2006-08-14T19:51:00.000-06:00

Okay, I suspect I'm reaching for it here, but suppose the world knew John Lennon only as "a victim of an assassin". If you look for information about him, all you would find about him is the date of death, the location, the assassin, the assassin's punishment, etc. Nothing about what he did prior to the bullet.

Now image the same thing about a composer. You want to hear music by him, but what do you get?

Take poor old Vincenzo Bellini! I noticed that someone checked on his broadcasts on the 8 major FM classical music stations I monitor. I looked too and discovered that his most popular piece is the Oboe Concerto in E flat. So old Mr. Bellini is an oboe composer. Great! Now I do seem to remember that he wrote something called "Norma". And "La Sonnambla". And "il Puritani" and "il Pirati". They must be small pieces for woodwinds or something. Were he still alive, I suspect he would be shut himself into a closet and say "I give up! My music isn't appreciated in this silly century!"

Opera isn't an art form on the commercial FM radio stations anymore -- they take too long.

What about opera?

2006-08-12T11:10:00.000-06:00

In most of my posts, I complain about the lack of broadcasts of lengthier works. Mahler, Bruckner, Beetoven's Ninth, "Symphony Fantastique" just aren't broadcast over the FM stations I've been monitoring. Well opera falls into the "don't bother with it" syndrome --- except for the live from the Metropolitan opera on Saturdays during the Met's season.

My local station KVOD, when it was a commercial station, would broadcast "Sunday night at the opera" around 8 pm each Sunday. With some good commentary, often with comments from the local Opera Colorado performers and officials, you could depend on listening to an entire opera.

KVOD was tranformed from a commercial station to part of a public radio duo. KVOD broadcast classical music 24 hours each day, with an "In-depth News" talk radio on KCFR with "All Things Considered" and similar programs. With this switch, opera was deep-sixed. The Sunday program disappeared, the local support of Opera Colorado diminished and opera lovers were sent to their CD collections.

Clearly masters like Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccinni -- you know who I mean, are only worthy of fragments from their works. Sad, sad, sad.

"Fantastique" slights

2006-08-05T19:01:00.000-06:00

Berlioz's Symphony "Fantastique" is another one of the longer pieces in the standard classical repetoire. It's a fairly long symphony, typically lasting nearly 58 minutes. It has 5 movements, "Reveries", "A Ball", "Scenes in the Country", "March to the Scaffold" and "Dreams of a Witches Sabbath". It's one of the early examples of program music, where the composer intends the listener to "hear" the story. Berlioz wrote his own program for it, leaving his audience the hints about his own passions. See
http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/sfantastique.htm for more details.

Why bother to look at this? Well, it's another example of where the classical broadcasters are chopping up a masterpiece to fit their own time schedules. Sure it's long, but it's worth it and it's a grand listening experience. I just heard two performances by the Colorado Music Festival orchestra under Michael Christie. It involved a large orchestra, 100+ musicians, with 2 tympany and 2 bass drums. So what does the poor FM radio listener get to here for this work? Very little.

Here is a table showing broadcast this year. There are two columns about broadcasts, the first showing the number of complete performances and the second broadcasts of an individual movement.

Station	Full	Partial
KUSC Los Angeles	2	1
CL24 Minnesota	0	11
KCME Colorado Springs, CO	5	4
KING Seattle, WA	4	2
WBMH Birminham, AL	3	0
WGUC Cincinatti, OH	2	12
WQXR New York, NY	5	17
KVOD Denver, CO	2	1

Sad isn't it! Why can't these stations leave art alone? If a composer wants to compose 5 movements, then play 5 movements. And it if is a masterpiece like "Fantastique" let us hear it occasionally, not just a few times each year.

Poor Bruckner

2006-07-28T11:34:00.000-06:00

I guess Bruckner is just out of favor on the FM band now. KVOD in Denver, in all of 2006 through July 27th, has only broadcast 11 of his 150 or so compositions. KVOD broadcast his Symphony #4 and the String Quintet in F twice, but only once for the Symphonies #8 and #6 , the "Te Deum", Masses #2 and #3, Psalm 150, the Intermezzo, his "Ave Maria" and "Os justi".

Ravel, on the other hand, has had 32 of his 85 compositions broadcast in the same time period on KVOD, with 9 pieces broadcast more than 15 times. That's during nearly 5000 hours of time on the air.

Some other composers of note: Bach had roughly 267 compositions for 916 broadcasts, Mozart 306 for 1179 and Beethoven 153 for 295 broadcast. One of my favorites, Richard Wagner had 32 compositions broadcast 238 times. However, not one complete opera of hist was broadcast to-date in 2006. Wagner apparently was only a composer of excerpts.

I'm getting to the point that I only listen to KVOD while I'm driving in the car.

Sleepy time composers

2006-06-28T14:27:00.000-06:00

I guess I'm not surprised that when some stations broadcast symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, they tend to broadcast in the late hours. The symphonies are long........, so I guess they can be used to put some people to sleep. Why enjoy music, after all, when you can sleep.

Here's a table of when symphonies were broadcast on Denver's All-Classical 24 Hour KVOD
station. Each number represents the number of symphonies broadcast from January 1, 2003
through the end of June, 2006.

Time	Mahler	Bruckner
12 AM	1
1 AM	15	9
2 AM	31	18
3 AM
4 AM	1
5 AM
6 AM
7 AM
8 AM
9 AM
10 AM
11 AM		1
12 PM	3	1
1 PM
2 PM	5	2
3 PM
4 PM
5 PM		1
6 PM
7 PM	18	1
8 PM	6	6
9 PM	32	21
10 PM		2
11 PM		2

This is pretty much what one would expect, I guess. Perhaps it's too bad I always
fall asleep before midnight.

Denver says goodbye to the late Romantics

2006-06-27T08:40:00.000-06:00

KVOD, "The Voice of Classical Music in Colorado", seems to shunning the late Romantic symphonists, particularly Mahler and Bruckner.

I'm sure one of their music programmers must have thought at some time "Couldn't these guys write shorter stuff?" Well, they didn't, so they don't get programmed much any more.

Here's some data:

Symphonies Broadcast by	2004	2005	1st half 2006	Projection for end of 2006
Mahler	44	26	6	12
Bruckner	25	14	3	6

It sure looks pretty bad for those fan's of these two late 19th century giants. It's particularly bad for Mahler given the great success of the Boulder Mahler Festival.

I should note that some other stations aren't this bad. New York's WQXR looks on track with Mahler with about 32-34 broadcasts of his symphonies, somewhat less for Bruckner. KING out of Seattle looks like it might broadcast more Mahler in 2006 than 2005, similarly with Bruckner.

I guess it's just too bad, but "Quality must be quick!".

Oh, it should also be remembered that KVOD broadcast 24 hours a day. Still not enough time for long symphonies from the masters.

A Symphony coincidence.

2006-06-25T12:15:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, for the second time in 2006 KVOD played a symphony "Il Comista" in C by the composer Johann Vanhal. Frankly I had never heard of him. WikiPedia has a brief article about him. He wrote 73 symphonies and some were compared favorably with Haydn. What brought Herr Vanhal to mind is that he is one of the four composers touched on by Robert Greenberg in his Symphonies lectures as one of the "Classical Masters". I just listened to this lecture today, hence the coincidence.

Vanhal isn't played much on any of stations, with only 110 discrete broadcasts since about October of 2003. He seems to be a favorite of CL24, the Minneapolis PBS station, though. However, they seem to feel that only certain movements of his "Symphony" are worth playing. I noticed that they give no number to his symphony, but with 73 under his belt it might make a difference. So here is a minor composer, considered a "Classical Master" by a major musical lecturer, who only gets fragments of his works broadcast. CL24's tastes tend toward the really short, so let's only listen to certain movements of a piece of art, rather than the whole thing. It's like the Louvre covering all but the smile on the Mona Lisa -- why would you want to look at the rest anyway?

Quality must be quick, again.

So much for long symphonies

2006-06-23T10:52:00.000-06:00

Continuing with long symphonies not being broadcast on FM anymore.

KVOD in Denver broadcast Mahler Symphony #3 7 times in 2004, twice in 2003 and not at all by this time in 2006. Why? Probably because it's about 94 minutes long. It doesn't matter that it's a wonderful symphony that deserves a listening public, it's just too long.

KVOD is a publicly supported FM station that fund-raises a few times each year. It doesn't have advertisements, but has constant fillers of 10-20 second musical snippets and or station announcements. Yet, it still seems to feel that the audience isn't mature enough to listen to anything substantial or of any length. Three of top 4 most frequently broadcast pieces are by Ravel, "Allborada del gracioso" (#1), "Le Tombeau de Couperin" (#2) and "La Valse" (#4). Vaughn-Williams "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" is # 3. All fine pieces but not really substantial. It seems that classical music broadcasting continues a slide from quality to mediocrity.

Time over quality

2006-06-22T19:27:00.000-06:00

I've always view Beethoven as arguably the greatest symphonist. Yes, Mozart was a wonder, Brahms unbeatable, Mahler incomparable, Shostakovich profound, etc, etc. But Beethoven! What can one say?

Now you would think that his symphonies would be broadcast a lot on the radio and you would be right. However, when it comes time to see what Beethoven symphonies get broadcast, things change.

Symphony No 1 in C, opus 21 was written in 1800 and is a nice, pleasant work that marked Beethoven as a symphonist. His Opus 125 Symphony #9 in d, the famous "Choral", was written between 1822 and 1824 is a masterpiece. It's mature Beethoven and it was earthshaking. Years ago the New York radio station WQXR would end the year with a count-down of the "top 100". The last piece, the "number one piece" would be broadcast to end just at midnight in New York. It was always Beethoven's 9th.

Today, however, the 9th isn't broadcast much. Using data from my www.classicalfmradio.org's 'Interesting report on broadcast symphonies', one finds that by mid-June 2006, the 9th symphony has been broadcast on the Denver station KVOD only 3 times in all of 2006, while the nice little symphony #1 has been broadcast 15 times. WQXR in New York has 8 broadcasts for #1 and 3 for #9 and KING in Seattle has 7 broadcasts for #1 and also 3 for #9.

Why the disparity. The "Choral" was what was performed with the wall fell in Berlin! It's almost
featured time and time again. Yet, classical FM radio stations don't seem to think the 9th is worth broadcasting. I'm guessing, but I think they think it's TOO LONG. Serious music, to be broadcast to the obviously impatient listening audience, must be short.

Quality must be quick!