Tuesday, December 25, 2007

O Soave Fanciulla

There is that time, when one is in their 20's, still drunk in the freshness of adulthood, when every thought seems hard like a diamond, and every passion seems inexhaustable and timeless...listen to this:




The first time I went to see La Boheme was in 1995. I was still a music student in Calgary, and utterly devoted to German opera. Wagner and Strauss and Mozart (I know) represented to me what opera was for, with most italian opera being high on style and low on substance.

So I walked out of the first act, and I ran into one of my music professors. He asked me what I thought, and I said something to the effect that Boheme was beautifully set but the story obvious and not terribly interesting.

My professor, a man whose walls in his home were covered in books and CDs and records, a man, to say the least, of great learning, a consumate scholar, a man with a reputation at the University for being too academic for those in music performance, you know, the real musicians, who just wanted to play, turns to me and says, "Some day you will watch that first act without the eyes of youth, and when you do, you will see what it is you cannot, a sentiment which only comes with age."

Nothing worse can be said to a 20 year old than that they are to young to understand something. To paraphrase Robert Lowell, this comment stuck like a fishbone in my consciouness. My age? How dare he? Me age? I was an adult for crying out loud! It said so on my driver's licence. I could buy beer.

But I forgot. Until 3 months ago, as I sat watching Bravo and the clip above came on. And I sat there, in my home, my kids upstairs, my wife sitting there next to me, and suddenly what he had said made sense. The question I then ask those of you who happen upon this is - do you?

Or if not that one, how about this one?



Perhaps it is that I had not loved like that before, or that I could not love like that yet, but I completely understand what my professor was telling me, and I now understand why Puccini, despite the dramatic flaccidity of his work, still beats out nearly everyone else. I understand why, to many, he is opera.

It is because no one before him ensnared so completely that first moment of true love.

Merry Christmas.



Friday, November 16, 2007

Mailer vs. McLuhan

I know I'm not really doing much here, but I thought I would offer up this bit of counterpoint to Conrad Roth's post on Norman Mailer. To keep things provincial, the video I'm offering up is from the CBC.


To be honest, I've never really known much about Mailer, and although I'm looking at my battered copy of The Guttenberg Galaxy, its dereliction is an artifact of its past before it got to me, protected now from ever again being touched by human hands. Nevertheless, when I found this a number of months ago, I quite enjoyed it, although I don't really know why.

This video strikes me as a kind of Catcher in the Rye for one's intellectual development. I suspect if I'd seen this 10 years ago, I would have been astounded by their profundity. Now, well....look, it's two guys talking like this on CBC Television. That alone, given CBC television's mandate is now to become a low-budget NBC makes it worth the half hour it will forever steal from you.

So, please enjoy two of the 20th Century's Greatest Minds, or two posturing public pseudo-intellectuals whose hot air and obfuscation managed to float down from the ivory tower and into the mass culture of their day.

UPDATE: Phil Ford at Dial "M" for Musicology has a very nice piece on Mailer, and also nicely tears apart Roger Kimball's Mailer article in the New Criterion. Read it here.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Floating World
























One of the funny things about new technology is that often there's far more to do with a gadget than its "purpose". Take the cell phone for instance. I suppose we could argue that the phone component constitutes the essence of the, uh, phone, but think of all the other things we've got cell phones doing now, like taking pictures.

I discovered this feature on my new phone while at this Royal Ontario Museum exhibition during the summer. So I was snapping away, when, unsurprisingly, I was informed I could not take pictures in this gallery, it being the Garfield Weston gallery, and therefore, like most spaces in the ROM, off limits to photography.

However, what's unusual about this encounter is that I was not asked to smash the phone with a hammer, or delete the photos. So here they are, at least until William Thorsell or some ROM staffer asks me to take them down.

I should also mention that this ROM post is an appetizer to my food review of their new high-end restaurant, C5, an amouse-bouche of my growing ambivalence to what is, and will remain, a wonderful museum. However, I have to do a few things before that review appears, like stop calling myself Otto van Karajanstein, because I just don't think it's fair to knock people down when they can't see you.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Umami

I know I should be putting more up here, but life....life! Please, one day.

In the interim, I post this youtube video of a monkey throwing poop at an old lady. No seriously, the exact opposite of that.

This is a kind of response to Gawain's post yesterday about the mysteriousness of singing. Watching Fischer-Dieskau puts this performance over the top. Between enjoyment and chills, a sickening sense of doom....simply unbelievable.

And Gerald Moore's hands! My God!

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Sadness

Learning that he has died.

So I will listen to him today and enjoy the sheer beauty of the voice, a voice that forced me to stop the car when Bella figlia dell'amore once came on the radio and then head to the local CD store and buy the recording of Rigoletto he performed in along with Sherrill Milnes and Joan Sutherland.

One thing I must ask - why all the incessant comparisons to Domingo in his obituary? Their necessity strikes me as odd, despite the obviousness of the comparison.

But no matter.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Friday Night Videos - Ballerina on a Boat

Here's a delightful piece of Russian animation, with music by Alfred Schnittke. Enjoy! And I promise there will be more next week.

And I'm off to the cottage, to enjoy the rural splendour and take in three musical theatre productions!

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Cavalli's Ipermestra

I managed to catch the Utrecht Early Music Festival’s production of Cavalli’s Ipermestra on Norwegian Radio (Thanks again to Operacast for making the world of opera so easily accessible).

Did any of my readers hear this marvelous work?

It was a beautiful performance, and one hopes that it was not only captured in audio, but in video as well - you can take a look at some performance stills over at Wim Trompert's site, the prduction's director.

Interestingly, one of the reviewer's on that site mentions that the Florentines would have expected something much larger, but it seems that Cavalli himself used an uncharacteristically small orchestra and singing cast for this performance.

According to Jan Glover (Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 102. (1975 - 1976), pp. 67-82) this period of Italian opera was characterized by a certain economy, and it was interesting to listen to the production, noting how little there was in the way of aria, and how they would simply emerge from the recitative, only to fall back into them, without much of the sharp division one is used to.

Can I make a bold claim that we don't see this kind of musical drama again until Wagner? As I've written before, Cavalli stands on the edge of the full separation of drama and music that was to occur in Baroque opera, that sharp division between recitative and aria. Ipermestra, to my ear, stands very much in between, and in contrast to some of Cavalli's other work, seems less fragmented, and more fluid in its handling of the dramatic and emotional material.

Need I mention also that Cavalli wrote wonderfully for the voice? It is always so easy to understand what the singers are on about with Cavalli, but he doesn't spare any beauty for the sake of clarity.

Again, I hope that someone will fully wake up to Cavalli's rich and varied musical dramas, and we'll see more regular stagings of his work.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Go West, Young Divi

How is that that Calgary is the New Opera capital of Canada?

An anecdote. I was in Fidelio's (one of Calgary's lost departed classical music stores) in Mount Royal Village, rooting through their selection of 18th Century Romanian operas when I overheard the shop's owner speaking to this woman about the upcoming opera season.

She was outraged at the upcoming season, and had cancelled her subscription. The reason? Calgary Opera was staging Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring. She had heard that Britten had been born in the 20th Century, and was deeply offended by this point, fearing that her ears and her nerves would perhaps never recover from the dissonance should would have to squirm through during a performance of 20th Century opera!

Just so she lived up to the stereotype I was quickly constructing in my head, she leaned over the counter, and, looking side to side, mentioned quietly, but not too quietly, that Britten was a homosexual.

Yes Virginia, Benjamin Britten was a homosexual. Now I wondered at the time, feeling as she did about homosexual composers, what she did whenever Tchaikovsky ever made it onto the radio? Did she shun Schubert too, fearing his melodies would draw her into a life of all-night partying and snappy dressing?

I digress. But there was a larger point. She had said her other friends had also cancelled their subscriptions in vile, ignorant protest, a work that, had they bothered to investigate, has all the drama and controversy of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But to my youngish music school ears, this was horrifying. These people really do exist, people who hold a gun to the heads of arts organizations and demand they perform the same three songs on their organ grinder or else the monkey gets what's coming to him, and it ain't a banana.

It was one of the many things that stuck in my mind about Calgary, about the kind of people who went to concerts, and my prospects when it came to being a musician in this kind of environment. So I left, for the vastly better developed artistic shores of Toronto.

Cue the present. Boy am I glad that people like me don't live in Calgary anymore. There's a ton going on out there, and many of the people I went to school with are gainfully employed as musicians in Calgary. I made a terrible mistake thinking the woman above represented Calgarians and culture.

In fact, being into opera or classical music is like being a liberal in Alberta - there are lots out there, you just can't bring it up in polite conversation, rather like being a conservative in Toronto.

Which brings me to my main point - why is Calgary Opera Canada's largest producer and developer of new Canadian opera? From the early 1990's, where staging Albert Herring was a risky decision, to staging Frobisher, Calgary Opera’s third new opera commission in the last five years?

If I were a journalist, I would interview Calgary Opera's current General Director, the delightfully named W.R. (Bob) McPhee - could his there be a more apt name for a Calgary impresario? The man and his team are doing something right.

But I'm not, so we'll just have to wonder why Toronto's own COC has done little in the way of new opera over the years, or why our own new opera company here in Toronto, Tapestry New Opera Works, has done some phenomenal work, but have struggled financially? And despite the fact that this supposed to be a big theatre town.

Perhaps, had he lived, this is something Richard Bradshaw was going to explore. One can only hope that his successor will take up the next challenge in building opera in Canada - the creation of an indigenous opera repertoire, similar to what's going on in Finland.

What's going on in Finland? Well, it's really hard to say, because all the stuff about the finnish opera boom is in....Finnish.

But new opera there is big. Perhaps all we need here in Canada is a Janacek-like figure, a highly gifted composer with a theatrical bent who speaks powerfully to the Canadian condition.

Well, I think we already have him. But he will likely never work with the COC again, after they produced one of his other works from the Partia cycle. Or perhaps people will awake to him and we'll stage his entire Patria cycle on a regular basis here in Canada.

Perhaps, Calgary's the perfect place for the real start of this boom. Indeed, "Calgary" and "boom" go hand in hand, and so again, Toronto will catch play catch up, and we'll then pretend that it started here all along. Plus ça change...

But you, faithful reader, you will know who really got things going, when people sit on the subway here and argue about the latest production of Barney's Version...you get the picture.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Richard Bradshaw has Died

The man who made opera something here in Toronto, has died unexpectedly.

With the COC's season just about to begin, I don't know what they will do. He was, to a great extent, the Canadian Opera Company, and the legacy he has left the city will be difficult to top.

As an aspiring conductor (at the time), I met him on a number of occasions, and he was always warm and charitable with me, letting me come into rehearsals, and offering advice.

He was an amazing man.

Sweet Narcissism

It's as though I have never been blogging.

Why did I think this thing would be about anyone but me?

How did I never recognize this before? Why now?

I am not the most prolific blogger. I tend to vanish. I usually have a good reason at the time I stop - work and life and all that.

But there's also these nagging question - who's my audience? What am I looking for?

And sometimes I stop and ask myself - what am I doing with this blog? Why?

I know these are stupid questions. But I cannot stop asking them.

But now I believe I have the answer to what I'm doing here. It's the answer I have been dreading to accept since I began writing - I want to be known.

What's that you say? How can an anonymous writer want to be known? Well, that will change.

I would also like to distinguish wanting to be known for wanting to be famous, or wanting to be an authority. I want this to be another way to talk about things that interest me, the upshot being that what interests me interests others, and I get to hear from them.

The one thing I've always like about blogging is the communities that form, and the ideas that get exchanged in those communities, and how what you write helps to determine the communities that emerge.

This is absolutely nothing new to anyone, but for a long time, I have been at cross-purposes at this blog, trying to deny the personal side of blogging for something more, shall we say, objective.

But then I went back and read what I've written here. And I realised something. They're all personal. Even the ones that weren't meant to be.

And I suddenly feel myself inside that little box, looking for the way out. And then I remember what Rorty and Wittgenstein told me once in a really, really boring dream, and I give up looking, and I go back to reading Either/Or (you know which part I'm referring to).

So this is me giving up.

***

We bought a piano in January. I had not played the piano in nearly two years. This was due to the fact that the piano I used to practice on, one at a local church, was no longer local.

So the first time I sat down to play, I was quite good. Indeed, I felt as though I had never stopped playing.

You know, the body has this wonderful way of picking you up and letting you play well when you haven't played for a while, as though it doesn't quite know what's going on.

And then it remembers.

The next day, I was horrible. I remained that way for months.

But I got better, and I got to point where I could say I was better than I have ever been, and I stayed that way. My diet consists mainly of Bach and Beethoven, and I have one of those foolish plans to learn both books of Das wohltemperirte Clavier and all 32 of Beethoven's piano Sonatas.

***

Despite the fact that I have a music degree, and I have been paid to be a musician, I am really an amateur.

The instrument that got me in, the tuba, has long been abandoned, although it was the only instrument which I could say, until perhaps a few months ago, that I had some kind of control over.

On the tuba, there was a certain freedom, a bit of facility, like the point where you're learning a foreign language and you stop translating - you just respond in the language, and you don't think about what you're saying. This was nice back in the day, but I don't play the tuba anymore.

However, sometimes, this happens to me while I'm playing the piano. I'll be playing something like the 19th Fugue from the first book of Das wohltemperirte Clavier, and suddenly, I can play the damn thing. I can make one voice sound a bit heavier, and I can phrase.

Do you know how nice it is to hear something in your head, and then begin to hear it on the outside? It is everything.

Indeed, it happened today. After I wrote everything above this sentence.

So perhaps, as an amateur, if I can't have an audience to hear me play, perhaps the audience who reads my writing will help me become a better musician. I think that's what I meant about being known. Being held accountable, and being accounted for.