Important Insights About The Canadian Opera Company's New General Manager

Canada's Opera Company has a new Intendant.

I thought I had written this out on the blog, but after Richard Bradshaw died, I had hoped that the COC would come hire someone young, who would be willing to stick around for a while, as Bradshaw had done, and build on the late man's work.

Not only do they appeared to have followed my advice (did they intercept my e-mails? One wonders), but they've scored a guy who's really connected to some big names - his talk about more co-productions can only mean that we will be sharing with Neef's close colleague, Gerard Mortier, who's taking over at the New York City Opera.

As for those of you who will talk about the fact that they couldn't (or didn't) find a Canadian, here's the thing - that's a ridiculous question, actually, although I expect to see it asked by someone, somewhere, need some space to fill.

And yes, he's young. Although it's ludicrous to think that this will somehow translate into expanding the coveted younger audience (what is this, MTV?), his youth could mean that if he really likes it here he'll stick around. Or exactly the opposite.

Now if only we could deal with the matter of the Four Seasons Opera House and the number of performances it can handle...but that, my friends, is another, much more serious, and much more complicated story.

What I can say is that I wish Alexander Neef all the best!

Cinquecento: Phillippe De Monte: Miss Ultimi miei sospiri

Today I'm going to get around to doing something I had planned to do when I began to blog - review CDs! Here's to hoping, unlike all my other "regular" features on this blog, this one sticks!

***

It is a fact of musicological life here in North America that in music survey courses, the Renaissance is represented by a triumvirate of composers. For the Early Renaissance you get Dufay, in the middle finds Josquin, and one finishes the Renaissance with Palestrina, pace Monteverdi, who lived too long to stay a Renaissance composer.

Really though, in sheer popularity, Palestrina appears to have cornered the market on the whole Renaissance. People know of some of his late-Renaissance contemporaries, like Lassus, Byrd, and of course, everyone's favourite dissonance-loving wife-killing prince , but it's Palestrina who usually gets the most play.

Given the lock Palestrina has, it was a real pleasure to discover the work of his Vienna-based contemporary Philippe De Monte on a recent Hyperion CD by the Vienna-based Cinquecento.

Their third CD for Hyperion (my first encounter with them), Cinquecento is the house choir for St. Rochus in Vienna, which means you can listen to them singing live on a weekly basis, provided you don't mind sitting through a church service. (Not now though - it's summer break!)

I will refrain from giving you background on the CD, because the magic of the Internet and the kindness of Hyperion let me link to the CD's full liner notes.

The CD is a treat. Their vocal texture is wonderful, alternatively molten and granite, and it is hard not to think of the Hilliard Ensemble while listening to them. This is a blessing and a curse - they are wonderfully balanced and in tune, and although every opening unfolds sumptuously, I felt they often lacked drive towards the cadence that would have made some of this music thrilling to the end, something I have grown very accustomed to in listening to the Hilliard Ensemble over the years.

The Credo, for instance, just walks to its finish, despite the forward momentum right there in the music. However, you forget this quickly because the opening of the Sanctus which follows is so gossamery.

Indeed, this is a beautiful and delicate recording, one that bears repeated listening. I intend to pick up their earlier recordings, and I look forward to their exploration of more music from this era of the Hapsburg court- did those Viennese ever have to contend with mediocre music?

Ah Vienna...why must you be so far from Toronto?

Pigs is Pigs

I remember little of my childhood. I listen to people speak of their lives as children and I long wistfully for the memories that so many around me can invoke without the slightest difficulty.

This goes doubly for my childhood entertainments. I remember very little of the cartoons and TV shows of my childhood. One thing I do remember - really liking Three's Company. And just to be clear if you were here yesterday, I don't like it anymore, or, should I say, I don't feel any need to return to my roots when it comes to sitcoms.

I also remember this cartoon. And who wouldn't? It's insane.



I had not watched this cartoon in 20 years, and it had changed quite a bit in my mind. I recalled the moral of the cartoon to be that you shouldn't overeat, the moral I believe most children took away from it.

However, it turns out that the moral is in fact that you shouldn't dream about overeating. Overeating outside of the dreamscape is fine.

But what does one make of the ending? For that matter, what does one make of the cartoon? I am sure Deleuzians or Žižekians could do a better job, but there is something about it that feels terribly relevant.

That pig, he just can't stop eating. Despite the constant scolding of his German or Polish mother (the accent seems to vary, perhaps they are Kashubians), he cheats his siblings out of food, unrepentant.

Then he has this dream. Now this is his dream, and it is a dream where our Piggy purges his sins, by being mechanically force fed by a drunk yellow-skinned scientist (another in-joke?) who enjoys feeding him as much as Piggy enjoys eating. And even when he's finished, and about to leave, he can't help himself, and, grabbing a turkey leg, he finally explodes.

But the dream explosion wakes him back into the real world, where, in the final seconds of the short, Piggy realises that it was all a dream, and that he is good to go on his program of incessant binge eating.

So my reading? Oh, how about this looks a lot like what's going on in our world right now? A sense that the end is nigh, but not quite nigh enough, so we can think that the past was merely a dream, and that the future will solve the problems we created in our past.

In other words, Pigs is Pigs.

***

I misremembered something else about the cartoon. My mind's version of the cartoon included the very famous Powerhouse B piece from many other Warner Brothers cartoons. Somewhere along the way I remembered Pigs is Pigs as having this Raymond Scott tune while Piggy is being force fed by the mad scientist.

Indeed, while you watch it, it makes sense that this assembly line music would be part of the cartoon. Perhaps a later iteration of the cartoon had the powerhouse tune, but I don't know, because I don't remember. And thankfully, that's also the message of the cartoon.

Craptacular

For some reason, I read Leah McLaren in the Globe and Mail today. (I encourage you to read her wikipedia entry before proceeding, that's why I linked to it)

Anyway, there is a lot of resentment toward Ms. McLaren around these parts. Her mother was an editor at the Globe and Mail and it is alleged that the reason she has a nice column and a book deal etc. is because of connections, and not writing ability.

I don't read her often, but when I do, she's infuriating.

Based on the evidence of her columns, history appears to be on the side of her detractors, but really, who knows? My own take on her success is that she speaks to a particular constituency, and she does it well. It just so happens that this constituency is at the forefront of ruining the world.

She had a column a while back complaining about how there were no hardware stores in her super-trendy Toronto neighbourhood. I found her frustration interesting, as I happen to live in the same neighbourhood, and know of at least three hardware stores, two of which sell lumber for crying out loud, within a 10 minute walk of the area.

However, what's worse, she uses this "problem" to craft a bizarre paean to suburbia, where every Home Depot is just an SUV ride away. Her conclusion was that it is in fact the suburbs(?) where things are really accessible and convenient.

OK.

Well, she's at it again. This time, in a column perhaps ironically, perhaps not, entitled A contrarian yuppie snob - moi - returns to her roots: A Lament for Junk.

Friends around the world, if you want a glimpse into bleakest corner of the North American condition, here's a flashlight.

After discussing her friends' praise of the Angus beef burger at McDonald's, she writes,

I miss the days when bad things could just simply be bad. Why is it these days we must dress everything up as new, improved, upgraded or purified? I'm all for fresh white asparagus and imported Italian bathroom faucets, but sometimes you just want a crappy burger from a low-end burger joint. What ever happened to shameless crummy convenience?

Now, sure, this could all be a clever ruse, and Ms. McLaren could be putting us on. However, I'm willing to bet that she's not. Indeed, I'm willing to bet that any irony in her work is what I would like to term "hazzardian", in honour of the weekly festival of unintentional irony that was the Dukes of Hazzard.

Ms. McLaren's hazzardian irony knows nearly no bounds. After regaling us with stories of her crap-filled childhood in Cobourg Ontario, she tells us why she returned to her "roots":

How was I to know my own taste revelation would coincide with the turn of the century and the decrappification of the English-speaking world? First came Starbucks, then came H&M and the next thing I knew real-estate agents in Ajax, Ont., were sipping green-tea lattes in Stella McCartney frocks.

I did the only thing any self-respecting born-again contrarian aesthetic yuppie snob would do: I returned to my roots and learned to love crap all over again.

I went to Wal-Mart and bought plastic patio furniture. I served KD and frozen peas to dinner guests. I filled my iPod with Kylie, Britney and late Elton John.

She admits this turn is hard to defend, but the final lines of her column are where her real argument lies, and it's a stab at the philosophical:

Because here's the thing: Without the bad, there is no good. Cast the KD out of your life and pretty soon the beef carpaccio tastes about as special as a Happy Meal. McDonald's might be trying to sell me an Angus burger, but that doesn't mean I have to buy one.

Let other people have their fancy white slipcovers and $50 chardonnays this summer. I'm quite happy as a born-again crap-lover.

So you see, we wouldn't know what was good without the bad. We wouldn't know the beauty of a Bach Fugue without J-Lo (yes, I'm going out on that limb). We would be lost in the aesthetic wilderness without the shit on our boots to keep us "grounded". She is as happy as a pig in shit, because, finally, she's back in the brown stuff after years of soap and water.

Ms. McLaren reminds me of a university student who sat next to me, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq. She informed her friends that she was in support of the Iraq War. Why on earth would you support it, they asked? Well, she replied, she is just so tired of how cool it is to oppose the war, so she's going to be for it, because someone has to be.

Hannah Arendt, anyone?

The problem with Leah McLaren's "contrarianism" is that buried under its liberalish urban veneer, is a kind of hazzardian banality that chills me to the core.

I mean, from the two columns I speak of, what does she appear to long for? The days of car-filled suburbs filled with cheap mass produced crap.

Seriously, who longs for this? Who longs for mediocrity of the worst kind?

Her mediocrity isn't even the anonymous middle-classness most Canadians strive for, it's actually a longing for the days when Canadians had no taste, and to boot, didn't even know they had none.

Leah, those days you long for are dead, and they are dead because that life you long for is killing everyone. And what's worse, the life you mock in your column is even worse. We aren't going down either of these roads.

While we're at it, let's turn her "argument" about needing the bad with the good on its head - Did the crap lovers of yore ever feel the need to read Joyce? Or listen to Beethoven? Don't they need some good with their bad? Has anyone spotted McLaren reading Proust to Cobourg schoolchildren lately?

This argument only ever seems to work one way, the way that apologizes for what's bad at the expense of what's good. If there's anything I am nostalgic for, it is for the day of What's Opera, Doc?, when popular culture and high culture observed a kind of detente. This kind of fluidity seems very foreign now.

And I realise now that those of uswho know we're smarter than her, who maybe even resent her success, or perhaps the ease of her success, are missing the bigger problem -
what she advocates isn't banal, it's incredibly destructive.

So Leah, if you are indeed being ironic, let us know.

Making Language a Two-Way Street

Three pieces which recently crossed my path have me picking up an old saw.

Actually, this is really in response to Timothy Burke's post. And I'm not even going to really disagree with him. So you can see that this post is going to be a powerhouse of controversy.

Anyway, while reading Timothy Burke's post, his tone struck me as all too familiar - Burke appears to be implying that it is up to the educated to cross that cultural divide between blue and white collars, to hold our champagne glasses (note reflexive use of "us" here - hmmmm) out in the hopes that they will be clinked with the domestic beer cans of the less literate. (Sorry, I have to be a little cheeky, this is a blog.)

But what about looking at things in the other direction? What about say, ensuring that people who don't go to university have a smattering of knowledge about the arts and culture? (This, of course, betrays another assumption, that the plumber in the sports cap knows nothing about arts and culture. hmmmm...)

Actually, I don't want to go down that road today. So how about this - Why don't we, as er, a society (of english-speakers), try to ensure that people of all walks of life can speak (standard?)english well. More accurately, how about we ensure that they can converse well. (I'm not diminishing dialects here. Dialects are fine, perhaps it's time we took a page from the Germans and accepted a high-low version of language instead of trying to squish things into the oozy egalitarian-but-not-really mess we English speakers appear so culturally inclined toward.)

Now I know many of you will balk at this, but I submit for you a people who support my idealistic assertion: The Irish.

Has anyone ever noticed that nearly every man and woman raised on the Emerald Isle is well able to converse on a variety of subjects? That they, by and large, and irrspective of class, speak English better than everyone else on the planet?

I suspect the reason for this is obvious - they really beat English into them. Ask an Irishman or woman how much they read in school, and it will blow your mind. Ask them what they were expected to know, and, if you are a North American, your mind will be blown.

So I suppose what I am getting at is that it can be done, it being getting everyone to be able to speak well, or at least commensurably. However, this wasn't entirely Mr. Burke's point, was it?

Not really, his point was really about class, that one class, the educated one, needs to be even more educated, this time in speaking to the less educated. But wouldn't it be better, for all of us, and here I'm repeating myself, if we could turn this on its head?

One can even point to a time where North Americans still believed it possible to educate and cultivate the average citizen - Does anyone know of the Little Blue Books? So why not? What stops us (North Americans) from simply trying to educate everyone to an extent that renders the kind of issues Mr. Burke raises irrelevant?

Again, I think the issue is Culture, and I think it's the same reasons why high culture is disparaged with such ease while the well-educated are worried about how "normal" they are when it comes to speaking with the masses.

Those Opera Snobs

are at it again.

As this blog descends into the virtual hell of pointing to newspaper clippings and other ephemera, a fate that has befallen many a great blogger, I don my rubber devil suit and provide for your edification:

Wimpy elitist opera lovers chicken out over possibility of rubbing shoulder to shoulder with riff raff.

Now maybe I'm just paranoid about media bias when it comes to classical music (you who read me may chuckle - NOW) but seriously, does anyone want to be in downtown Vienna right now, soccer fans included? Am I the only one who finds the tone of the piece patronizing?

Embrace Change

The news that the CBC intends to ditch the long-running theme song to Hockey Night in Canada has this page wondering what the media reaction will be.

Will they, as during the Radio Two debacle, wag their fingers at the hockey fans and encourage them to embrace change?

Or will they attack the CBC for breaking with tradition and rally people to support the good old days?

My money's on the latter. Let's see how this plays out, and I hope to be proven wrong.

UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong, but for reasons that had nothing to do with my post! Look like good ol' lucre was the deciding factor here, and not CBC's willingness to dispense with tradition.

Gustav Szathmáry

I don't know why I remembered the Hungarian composer Gustav Szathmáry last week.

Sometime ago, I encountered his work at an exhibition in Bremen, Germany. Four years ago? Five? Something like that.

I remember at the time being fascinated by his work, and reminded myself constantly that I would look into his life and work at some later date. For some reason, when the thought occurred to me to examine his work, I was never at a computer or a library. Szathmáry would wander into my thoughts at the least convenient times.

But last week, after years of forgetting Gustav Szathmáry, I remembered him while at a computer. So I looked him up. I found this - please let it play while you read this:

GUSTAV SZATHMARY


I recall there being a video at the exhibition, and I remember how moved I was the first time I heard the work that plays throughout the video. The clear homage to Bach's C major Prelude, simultaneously haunting and yet, in its own way, reflecting both his time and presaging the work of minimalists like Glass, Reich, and Peter Machajdík.

Beautiful, simple music, yet still of his native land. Does anyone else think of Kurtág's Játékok when they hear this music?

However, I have found virtually nothing else. How does someone like this, who writes music of such simple beauty, become so easily forgotten?

No blogger seems to have written about him. Not A.C. Douglas, not Chris Foley, not Jessica Duchen, Jeremy Denk, not not even Alex Ross. Sequenza21 has nothing, nothing, and not even the master of exhuming forgotten composers, On An Overgrown Path, has a single word on him.

So you few who come here, you are in a special place, because you are on virtually the only site that knows of Gustav Szathmáry's existence.

So what do I know? He was the lover of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and he was friends with Rainer Maria Rilke. How do I know this? That bloody exhibition. I remember it. And this is pretty much all I remember.

Oh yes, and I remember his perfectly preserved corpse. It was on display at the exhibition.

I have seen the man's body, but his body of work is nowhere to be found. Except for this PDF of one set of piano pieces of his, on some German site of no other importance whatsoever to my investigations, there is nothing left of his music.

So I turn it out to you - do any of you remember him? Or in German, Erinnern Sie sich an ihn?

I Hear Music

I Hear Music, the last truly intelligent and creative show on CBC Radio 2, the one show that actually pulled together popular and classical music convincingly and sincerely, goes off the air forever in about 15 minutes.

Robert Harris, along with all the other casualties in CBCs relentless drive towards mediocrity, will be sorely missed. Each of his shows was a beautiful argument for the relevance of all kinds of music in our world.

As I speak, he is playing Feist, and somehow, he makes it seem as though she belongs on CBC Radio 2, not because focus groups say so, but because she speaks to us in some meaningful way.

Feist has taken a lot of flack in the changes at Radio Two as an example of the lowering of the bar, but the problem, to me, has never been that there will be more popular music on CBC, but that popular music, or classical music, or any music, will not be presented intelligently, and that the CBC is no longer a place where music lovers can cut their teeth.

Thanks Robert Harris, and here's to hoping we will hear from you again.

Tim Hortons - Why God Why?

You know what this blog has been missing, besides regular posting? A good spleen-venting screed....

Canada's beloved Tim Hortons doughnut shop and coffee emporium has been in the news lately, and not for good reasons. The latest bit of bad press was reported in the Star today, and as of right now, is the most e-mailed and most read item online.

And it’s one of quite a few bit of bad press recently, detailing how Tim Hortons employees have been fired for ridiculous reasons, or, as in the above, employees themselves have demonstrated less than stellar behaviour.

For those of you outside of Canada, it is difficult to describe the bizarre love affair Canadians have with Tim Hortons. People here endure long line ups, all day and every day, for a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee, and indeed, many who drink it believe it has mystical properties and curative powers.

And the advent of Tim Hortons annual Roll up the Rim contest, where patrons, uh, roll up the rim of their coffee cup to see if they've won a prize, verges on a national holiday, and is greeted with more anticipation than children waiting for St. Nick.

I don't get it. I don't get any of it.

I went to Tim Hortons for coffee once. It was after a choir rehearsal. I noticed on the menu that they sold "cappuccinos" and, rube that I was, I thought, hey, a cappuccino, how bad could it be?

What did the geniuses in product development come up with? A machine that says "cappuccino" on it. So to make my "cappuccino", the Tim Horton's employee poured Tim Hortons coffee into a cup, and then sat it under the "cappuccino" machine. Then, with great skill, she pushed a large green button in the centre of the machine, and a beige froth gurgled and spat out onto the coffee she had poured. Once the machine had stopped working its magic, she handed the cup to me.

What can I say? The cappuccino was disgusting. Not because it wasn't really a cappuccino, but because it was just awful.

And this is my point. The coffee isn't very good, the doughnuts are sweet and fatty, but slap enough butter and sugar into anything and people will like it. So why is Tim Horton's a quasi-religious institution here?

The answer, my friends, is marketing. Tim Hortons is the puppet master of perhaps one of the most insidious and successful marketing campaigns in human history, where my nation, desperate for some kind of identity, finds its soul not in our vast expanse of sea and land, our great natural beauty and spirit of cultural accommodation, our prosperity or our valour, but in a dollop of sweetened fried dough and coffee most Europeans would deem as shit.

How? Well, no one has been more successful than Tim Horton's at evoking this kind of small town feel most Canadians believes is at the heart of our strength.

Except it's a delusion. Most Canadians live in cities, and behave accordingly. Somehow, Tim Hortons, a giant corporate entity, has made itself the place where Canadians can feel parochial and "at home", a place where they can be small and think small. They feed and water the lie that is at the heart of perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Canadian identity – our provincialism.

And now, horror of horrors, the brand is under threat, not from dissidents like myself, but from within. But note the Toronto Star's "analysis" of the problem:

The Lee incident Wednesday and the Timbit controversy two weeks earlier illustrates the challenges companies like Tim Hortons face in protecting their brand images from negative publicity created by the decisions of their franchises.

You see, it's not Tim Hortons fault, it's their unruly franchisees!! Except...the franchisees that make up 95% of all Tim Horton stores.

You don't have to be Theseus' Ship to know that this the Star's anaylsis is just a bit of Tim Hortons spin.

Why is no one thinking the obvious - that the whole franchisee system allows for Tim Horton's to be seen as the benevolent parent, while their unruly children sometimes get in trouble. Why has the Star swallowed this line so completely? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that most Star journalists and editors are Timmy patrons too.

I mean, who do you think is profiting from the franchisees? Is Tim Horton’s a non-profit run by benevolent French-Canadian nuns?

Does anyone think that a franchisee could run a Tim Horton's where they pay their staff really well and offer them benefits? Do you think Timmy's would be OK with that?

No, everyone has sales targets and profit margins, and firing people for giving away a 16 cent Timbit to a child may not be company policy, but you can be sure that if that franchisee doesn't make certain sales targets there will be repercussions, and everyone has to tighten their belts in these kinds of situations, right?

And yet, despite the obviousness of all this, people here continue to eat and drink there in droves. Worse, despite the bad press, they continue to believe in Tim Horton’s, and ignore the mediocrity it embodies, from its marketing and the quality of what it produces to its labour practices.

God knows why, no wait, I do – because Tim Horton’s, God help this land, is us.