Nimble Tread

Movies and Music

There are a couple of interesting cinematic offerings on the docket.  Tomorrow night, the London Sinfonietta will be performing Benedict Mason's ChaplinOperas: Easy Street, The Immigrant, The Adventurer at the Coronet, where Chaplin's three 1917 films of those titles will be projected alongside the music, though whether the music will be accompanying the images or the images accompanying the music isn't for me to say.  More information on that is available here.  Also coming up, albeit a bit farther into the future, are the screenings of the Met's Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Il Trittico at the various Picture House cinemas on March 24 and April 28th respectively.  Info and tickets can be found here.  On a related note, the Royal Opera is about to release a DVD of their most recent production of La fille du regiment starring Juan Diego Flórez and Natalie Dessay.  It'll be Flórez's second appearance on film in the role of Tonio -- he sang the part opposite Patrizia Ciofi at Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice -- and, depending on the finished product, probably his best.  As for Dessay, I'll simply say that I can't wait to watch her as Marie whenever I like.  The woman is nothing short of terrific. 

Strauss the Plagiarist

This bit of trivia comes via a circuitous route.
I was poking around YouTube last night and found an old Spike Jones clip in which Wilbur Hall does things with a violin that literally seem impossible.  It's impressive stuff, really, and might make a nice cadenza to Maxim Vengerov's Viola Tango Rock Concerto.  A few suggested videos were shown on the sidebar, one of which led me to a duo of manualists called the Four Squeezins who play a wide assortment of tunes on nothing more than their hands.  One of their vids showcased their efforts with a Flintstones Theme/Funiculì, Funiculà medley that inspired me to do a bit of research on the latter song's origins.  When I did so, I came across the following, which I quote from Wikipedia:

Six years after Funiculì, Funiculà was composed, German composer Richard Strauss heard the song while on a tour of Italy. Thinking that it was a traditional Italian folk song, he later incorporated it into his Aus Italien symphony. To his great embarrassment, Strauss realised his mistake when an angry Denza [the Italian composer, Luigi Denza] filed a lawsuit against him. Denza won the lawsuit, and Strauss was forced to pay him a royalty fee every time the Aus Italien was performed in public. 

Now isn't that something.

Sleight of Hand

The Joyce Hatto scandal continues to pick up steam.  People have grown very vocal about their opinions, and entire websites have been devoted to detailing what looks to be a remarkably prodigious fraud.  For those of you who haven't yet heard, Gramphone magazine has recently announced that the late English pianist Joyce Hatto, who they once hailed as the best pianist nobody's heard of, has, to one degree or another, been involved in a bit of recording trickery.  After retiring from performance due to her struggle with cancer, Hatto took to the studio and released a staggering number of albums -- in the neighborhood of 100 discs -- under the auspices of her husband, William Barrington-Coupe's, record label, Concert Artist.  As her cult status grew, rumours began to circulate that there was some funny business afoot, and a few days ago on of Gramophone's critics loaded Hatto's Liszt 12 Transcendental Studies cd into his computer and received a shock when iTunes identified the artist as Lászlo Simon.  The same thing happened when he tried out Hatto's recording of two Rachmaninoff concertos, only this time iTunes identified the pianist as Yefim Bronfman.  He compared both Hatto discs to the cds by Simon and Bronfman and discovered that they were identical.  Gramophone then sent the recordings to the audio experts Pristine Audio, who confirmed that the tracks were in fact identical.  Much of their analysis, more details, and a few mp3 samples can be found here.  You could read more about the story at Gramophone's website.  This is really an amazing case, especially when one stops to consider that entire orchestras might have been involved in what certainly appears to be out-and-out fraud.  Still I can't help but feel sorry for Hatto, who did in fact make recordings of her own, and was an undoubtedly accomplished pianist.  Also, nobody knows for sure to what extent, if any, she was directly involved.  What a sad legacy.

Itinerary

Sunday's going to be a big day at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall.  My fellow Quebecer, the astonishingly gifted pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, will be playing Beethoven's piano sonatas in E major Op. 109 and A flat major Op. 110 as well as Schubert's piano sonata in B flat major, D. 960.  Following that act, Vadim Repin will be on hand with violin sonatas by Janacek, Beethoven, and Ravel.  He'll also be playing Chausson's Poeme and Ravel's Tzigane.  It's a veritable parade of favourites.  If you feel the 3:00 start leaves you with too much time on your hands, you could always begin the day with the Barbican's Janacek Discovery Day and migrate to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to get a bit of lunch.   Yum!

Spirited Sunday

Quite the day today on the concert front.  First there was a barn-burner at the Barbican, where the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performed Berlioz's Overture: Le carnaval romain, Debussy's La mer, a selection of Berio's folk songs, and Ravel's La valse.  All terrific, particularly the Jeux de vagues and  Dialogue du vent et de la mer movements of La mer, and all of La valse, which positively crackled with orchestral energy.  Following the gang from Amsterdam, it was off to the Wigmore to hear Jack Liebeck and Katya Apekisheva play through Mozart's Sonata in B flat major, K.454, Brahms' Sonata No.1 in G major Op.78, Bartók's Rhapsody No.2, and Elgar's Sonata in E minor, Op.82.  Liebeck is a very fine, highly secure violinist, though he seemed much more comfortable with the Classical and Romantic pieces than with the Bartók, which came across a bit flat.   Not bad, mind you, just not as good as his take on Elgar's sonata, and especially Brahms' Rhapsody, which he and Apekisheva played expressively and with terrific attention to detail and line.   I've noticed that Liebeck pops up in unexpected places, and that he seems to enjoy exploring avenues tangential to music.  There are a few examples of what I mean on his website, including a mildly disturbing mixed-media video based on the "Kreuzter" sonata.  Most unusual, though, is his foray into the field of particle physics through his participation with Prof. Brian Foster in the Superstrings Lecture-Recital Series, which I plan on seeing at the Oxford Playhouse on May 18th.   Still a long way off, but I find it useful to plan ahead.   

Yippee!

Snow!  I woke up to six inches on the ground and immediately made for the Heath.  Parliament Hill offered a rare glimpse into the English winter sports psyche: people were tobogganing on anything they could find, from recycling bin lids to other people, and I imagine it was a banner day for the city's emergency rooms.  I tried to get to Central London to take some snaps before the snow melted but I was too late.  All that was left by 10 was slush.  Did manage to get some good shots closer to home though:

The English Consort

There's much wonder to be derived from history's little overlaps.  David Vickers tells us the following story:

Perhaps Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy's interest in both composers is the only substantial link between Haydn's sociable hours and Vivaldi's turbulent night, but connecting their Venetian melodrama and Austro-Hungarian wit together is logical, for one poignant reason: when Vivaldi died chasing his dwindling operatic fortunes in Vienna on 28 July 1741, it seems few attended the pauper's funeral service.  However, it is known that six choirboys from St Stephen's Cathedral provided the music.  It is highly likely that one of these boys was the nine-year old choral scholar Josef Haydn.  We do not know if the boy was aware of who Vivaldi was, and he might not have been interested.  But twenty years later, Haydn's three symphonies created for portraying the morning, noon and evening illustrate that the devices of the high Italian baroque were firmly part of the foundation of the Viennese classical school.

Well isn't that something.  This text comes from Vickers' programme notes to The English Concert's most recent Wigmore Hall performance in which they paired Haydn Symphonies 6, 7, and 8 -- Le Matin, Le Midi, and Le Soir respectively -- with Vivaldi's Flute Concerto in G minor, aka La Notte.  I'm a big fan of the group, and have found that they very rarely disappoint, though when they do, the effect is never complete.   For instance, on this evening, they played the first two pieces terrifically, and then took it easy with the Flute Concerto, not quite dragging their feet, but playing it totally safe.  I thought it was really a shame, since the music is so cool, but my disappointment was quickly swept away by their performance of Le Soir.  They played the symphony terrifically by working as a group and absolutely nailing the dynamic variations.  There was virtually no fuzz at all, and the result was wonderfully clear music that was highly communicative.  The same can be said for their crack at Le Matin, though I'll admit that my favourite moment came during the trio of Le Midi's minuet, when the double bass and horns took over to toot and burp their way through the tune.   I take a perverse pleasure in listening to this particular combination of instruments, especially when it appears on period instruments, because I find their charm is enhanced ten-fold by the fact that someone, if not everyone, is playing out of tune.  It's like listening to a group of beginners on modern instruments who've somehow managed to develop professional tone before hammering out the kinks in their intonation.  Hearing it always puts a smile on my face, and I don't mean that in an even remotely malicious way.  We live in a time when technically perfect recordings have changed the ethos of live performance -- an alteration that certainly has its merits -- but from time to time it's nice to be reminded of how sweet mistakes can sound.

Blame the Kids

In David Denby's recent New Yorker article on the future of film as a medium he writes:

Kids who get hooked on watching movies on a portable device will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don't know it yet -- even if they never know it.  And their consumer choices could affect the rest of us, just as they have in the music business.

Denby's a clever guy, and if I'm reading this right, he's managed to slip in a zinger while maintaining complete deniability.  Read in the context of musical technology, this paragraph contends that kids are settling for lesser acoustic experiences, though with today's myriad high quality listening options, just the opposite seems to be the case.  Thus it would appear that Denby's leveling an accusatory, though somewhat good humoured, finger at today's youth and questioning the merit of the chosen music, not their chosen devices.  Sounds a bit curmudgeonly to me, but is he right?

One kid who certainly shouldn't be blamed is William Zauscher, whose YouTube clips go some way toward establishing a paradigm for 21st-century music appreciation.  (I love his efforts with Bach's B minor Mass, and there are some wonderful moments in his interpretation of Strauss' Death and Transfiguration.)