Tomás Luis de Victoria: The Tallis Scholars’s celebration of 400 years
As its contribution to the 400th anniversary of the Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria’s birth (1548-1611), The Tallis Scholars are making available a compilation at a bargain price of three of the Scholars’ discs of music by Victoria. This collection includes Victoria’s three most important works, the Requiem, the Lamentations and the Tenebrae Responsories. The recordings are on the Scholars’ own Gimell label. Through the Gimell site you can get it either as a specially-priced 3-CD set or as a download in either mp3 or (for $1 more) uncompressed FLAC files.
As usual with the Tallis Scholars, the performances are intense, with perfect blend and impeccable musicianship, and the sound of the recordings (I’ve been listening to the FLAC versions converted to AIFF format.) is clear and full. Listening to these great works, by these great performers, is almost a religious experience in itself. I highly recommend this music and especially these performances.
The International Music Score Library Project
An article in today’s New York time by music critic Daniel J. Wakin about the International Music Score Project library (also known as the Petrucci Library), draws attention to this vast digital library of music scores and parts that are in the public domain. That is, these editions of published music are no longer protected by copyright and can be freely downloaded, reproduced and used for whatever purpose.
I have used the IMSLP quite often in the past year, especially after the Euclid Avenue Congregational Church fire, when much of my personal organ music was destroyed. There were many things that I had originally purchased that in subsequent decades have now become public domain, including works by Bach, Franck, Reger, Guilmant, and many others. Among other things that church choirs use all the time are the G. Schirmer scores of standard choral works: Messiah, Elijah, Brahms’ Requiem, etc. Debussy’s works are now all in public domain (in the same Durand editions that you can pay through the nose for), as are many of the works of Sibelius and Mahler. Most of the operas by Puccini are there, as are the operas of Verdi and Wagner, often in multiple editions.
The NYTimes article points out that the public domain scores are old and don’t have the benefit of modern scholarship that might be available in new editions. But often new editions don’t provide great value (or at least not as great a value as their editors might have us believe.). While the music of Johann Sebastian Bach has had much valuable scholarship since the Bach Gesellschaft Edition was published in the 1800s, there is not a lot of recent work on Guilmant or Reger. Sometimes I just want to look at a score and then later decide to purchase it. There is value added by having a professionally printed and bound score. Some of the scores in the IMSLP are available commercially through such publishers as Dover and Kalmus.
Whether you’re a poor student, interested amateur or professional musician needing a quick look at at a standard repertoire work, the IMSLP is an invaluable resource.
About John Adams’s “Nixon in China”
The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross pointed out this blog post by Daniel Stephen Johnson about the recent Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’s Nixon in China. There has been a lot written in the last few weeks about the 1987 opera, but this one is the best I’ve read. I recommend it without reservation:
http://www.danielstephenjohnson.com/2011/02/adams-behemoth.html
P.S. Check out the advertisement for the T-shirt in the upper right corner of the page. It’s how I feel sometimes.
Music for a break-up: Poulenc’s “La voix humaine”
Have you ever been dumped by a boyfriend (or girlfriend) and feel that you just can’t go on? That you would do anything to talk to your beloved again and that you can talk him or her into getting back together again. Francis Poulenc’s one person opera La voix humaine (The Human Voice) is based on that premise. In 1930s Paris an unnamed woman waits in her bedroom for the man who has broken up with her to call her. The libretto is by Jean Cocteau, and we hear only the woman’s side of the conversation with her former lover. She flatters, cajoles, cries, begs him not to leave. She even describes her poor dog, who doesn’t understand why the man isn’t there. He may or may not be calling from a restaurant where he is with a new girlfriend.
This 1990 film (released on DVD in 2009) of the 50-minute opera stars the American soprano Julia Migenes. It is hard to imagine a better performance. The realistic set representing the woman’s apartment is lavish. The camera work focuses on the woman’s increasingly unhinged emotions. At the end, it is revealed that the lover is leaving the next day for Marseilles, and the woman will be alone. She clutches a handful of sleeping pills as the scene fades.
Unless you are fluent in French, be sure to use the English subtitles. Unlike a lot of operas, the words in La voix humaine are almost more important than the music.
“Nixon In China”—finally at the Met after all these years
Last night, February 2, 2011, John Adams’s iconic 1987 American opera Nixon in China finally had its Metropolitan Opera premiere, with the composer conducting his own work and with James Maddalena, the baritone who created the role of Richard Nixon at the opera’s first performance, making his Met debut as the U.S. president who visited the People’s Republic of China in 1972 and set in motion a chain of events that only now do we see fully expressed.
I listened to the performance via SiriusXM’s very steady, high quality stream. The Met also streamed the performance from its own web site. The opera will be performed on the Met HD video series on Saturday, February 12, at 1:00 PM.
The opera was given in a production modeled after the first production at the Houston Grand Opera. Peter Sellers made his Met debut as director. The widely published image of the production is that of the Air Force One 747 nose “landing” on the stage, with Dick and Pat Nixon (Scottish soprano Janis Kelly, in her Met debut) and Henry Kissinger (Richard Paul Fink) then descending the stairs to greet the Chinese delegation, including Chou En-lai (in the Met performance played by the elegant German baritone Russell Braun).
Nixon in China was John Adams’s first opera, and the music he composed—for both singers and orchestra—is fiendishly difficult. The orchestral parts are fraught with rhythmic difficulties; and the vocal lines have many repetitions, often at a very high range. There are several set-piece “arias,” including Nixon’s antic “News, news, news” at the beginning; Pat Nixon’s “This is prophetic” during the second act, and, most astonishing, Madame Mao’s coloratura triumph, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung.” The characters of Mao and Kissinger are treated more as caricatures, without being fleshed out as much as some of the other roles. (In the third act, Henry Kissinger has what must be the most humiliating exit in all of opera, when he asks Cho En-lai where the toilet is and exits for the rest of the opera.)
The performance itself was for the most part spectacular. James Maddalena’s Nixon must be considered definitive. However, the singer seemed to be struggling with a bad cold. His voice sounded very husky, he had trouble maintaining the lines, and his voice cracked several times during the impossible music that Adams composed for Nixon in the first act. It is a marathon for a singer at the peak of form; it must have been torture to feel not up to par. Janis Kelly played a very sympathetic Pat Nixon, who tolerates the slights she receives from her husband, but who displays spunk during the Chinese opera performance of the second act, when she steps into the action to “protect” a Chinese peasant being beaten by a sadistic man not yet “converted” to communism. Kathleen Kim (who also performs coloratura biggies as Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Strauss’s Zerbinetta) tossed off her big showpiece aria at the end of Act 2 as if it was a little ditty.
The music of third act has a sense of greater repose than most of the rest of the opera. The principal characters, the Nixons, the Maos, Kissinger and Chou En-lai play the act on six single beds spread across the stage. It is at the end of the Nixon visit; all are exhausted. The act is one long intertwined ensemble in which each of the characters express regrets of the past and comment on what might be in the future. Chou En-lai has the last words, in which he ruminates on the coming of the new day. The opera’s libretto by Alice Goodman is highly poetic. The singers did an excellent job with their diction; the words were understandable, but much of the context is lost without benefit of the printed libretto. (Poet Alice Goodman is an interesting character. She is a friend of director Sellers and had never before written an opera libretto. After Nixon in China, she went on to collaborate on the libretto for Adams’s second, highly controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer. In more recent years, she converted from Judaism to the Anglican branch of Christianity and now serves as a chaplain at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.)
Pride of place must go to the incomparable Metropolitan Opera orchestra for their precision and beauty of sound. John Adams has long been a convincing conductor of his own works. He is clearly a skilled conductor, and this was not just a vanity engagement.
I’m looking forward to the HD video broadcast. That will be the fourth performance of the run. We can hope that the cast will be restored to full health. Nixon in China is an important musical work of the twentieth century. We can celebrate its appearance at the Met.
Stranded in Ann Arbor? What to do: Go to a bar and give a concert
So, your concert in Symphony Hall in Chicago gets canceled by a blizzard and you’re stranded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, without a gig. What’s a Cleveland Orchestra member to do?
Zachary Lewis, the Plain Dealer’s Cleveland Orchestra critic, reports in today’s paper about Wednesday evening’s cultural offering by several of the orchestra’s members. Joshua Smith, William Preucil, Frank Rosenwein, and others showed up at Silvio’s pizza and gave an impromptu concert as part of Ann Arbor’s ongoing “Classical Revolution” series (a branch of which takes place in Cleveland). Some of the performers used borrowed instruments, because their own were already on the way to New York for the orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concerts later this week. Franz Welser-Möst showed up to listen, and—most unusually—French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is touring as soloist with the orchestra, arrived and played a Brahms work on what Mr. Lewis charitably describes as a “modest upright.” Yee-haw!
The more music the better! Yay to these hardworking musicians for bringing Cleveland’s best to Ann Arbor on a snowy night.
Now *this* would be something: Wim Wenders “Ring” at Bayreuth
Deutsche-Welle reported on January 7th that the film director Wim Wenders is in discussions with the directors of the Bayreuth Festival to direct Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2013 to mark the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth. It would almost certainly be striking.
Groban Sing’s Kanye’s Tweets
This has been making the rounds of the internet, but first was presented on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. It is hilarious.
The power of coffee
This morning I had a double espresso of the high test coffee I brought back from Italy (Illy, which I later discovered is easily available at some supermarkets in the U.S.) Within an hour I had done a load of laundry, scrubbed the bathtub and shower within an inch of its life, cleaned the toilet and sink. I hate housecleaning. Now I'm exhausted and need a nap. Alas, more Saturday errands to do.
Severe medieval music
In the January 10, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross writes about current vocal groups performing medieval and Renaissance polyphony. Among the groups he discusses are the Tallis Scholars, Alamire, Blue Heron and Stile Antico. But one passage of his review article especially caught my interest:
The most daring approach still belongs, after several decades, to Marcel Pèrés’s Ensemble Organum, whose tremulous, darkly florid delivery of medieval and Renaissance music is based more on Byzantine chant than on the familiar Benedictine manner. … Pèrés and his singers presented Guillaume de Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame.” Severe, relentless, devoid of ambient comfort, it was an eerie approximation of an unrecoverable past.
Now THAT seemed like my kind of music. So I found Ensemble Organum’s recording of the Machaut Mass on iTunes, and it is extraordinary. Note especially the French pronunciation of the Latin text
Here’s an excerpt, the Gloria in excelsis:
It reminds me of Roman Catholic Church vs. American shapenote singing. Not the kind of vocal production we normally associate with religious music, but arresting.
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