Welcome Back, Jessica

Jessica Duchen, who writes a classical music blog, has published a new article (String when you're winning, January 31) for The Independent:

When a slender, dark-eyed, 16-year-old girl lifted her bow and began to play the exotic music of Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No 1, the audience at the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2004 final realised they were hearing something out of the ordinary. There had been much excitement over Benjamin Grosvenor, an 11-year-old piano prodigy; some expected him to walk away with the prize. But it was clear to me, for one, that Nicola Benedetti was exceptional. Her rich, expressive tone, her assured and controlled technique and her intuitive grasp of this complex concerto and its subtle colours marked her as a musician far ahead of her years: a fully fledged artist, ready to begin her career there and then.

In fact, Benedetti had already begun her career. She trained at the Yehudi Menuhin School, home to the cream of young musical talent in the UK, and left at 15 to concentrate on the violin alone. Before the BBC competition, she had already been snapped up by the powerful agency IMG, and several record companies had expressed interest. But the prize accelerated matters; last week it was announced that Benedetti has signed for Deutsche Grammophon in a six-album, £1m deal that sets her up as one of the biggest stars of her generation.

Read the whole thing here. Jessica's blog has been sadly silent for over a week, an absence she has just explained: she was on vacation in Madeira. Now I'm really jealous.

Finnish Music

Hooray for Finland! Finnish-Canadian blogger Marja-Leena Rathje should be thrilled about Alex Ross's upcoming piece for The New Yorker on Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä (who is "rëälly gööd"). Alex's mathematical exploration of the significance of symphonic attendance in one Finnish town is just the latest reason why you should be reading his blog regularly. Marja-Leena and I have traded posts before on the subject of Finnish music:

• Music in Finland (August 20, 2004)

Judging from what Alex has to say, Finland is not only long on opera. He says he has "been listening to dozens of Finnish new-music CDs, and [is] working on a follow-up." That should make Marja-Leena, who is celebrating her one-year blogging anniversary, extra happy.

UPDATE:
Marja-Leena has taken the Finnish thing I suggested her for her anniversary and run with it. Go over to her blog. Now.

Schnittke's Gesualdo in Vienna

I am a big fan of Alfred Schnittke's music, especially his opera Life with an Idiot. I am not really familiar with his opera Gesualdo (1995), on the life of the virtuoso madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo, which has recently been revived at the Vienna Staatsoper. The new production, directed by Cesare Lievi and conducted by Jun Märkl, premiered on December 22, 2004, and concluded on January 2, 2005. On December 27, 2004, a member of the OPERA-L mailing list, Ruth C. Jacobs, posted some comments to that list about seeing the production:

The opera is set in seven scenes, with a prolog and epilog in Latin sung a capella by a chorus, both on and offstage. There are some differences between the libretto as written and this performance, i.e. Carlo kills the lovers himself, rather than his hunting friends killing them, and the child of Maria and Fabrizio is portrayed as a doll on a huge red swing (Gesualdo is supposed to swing the child to death and this is taken literally at the end when the servant who saved the child swings it, and then as Carlo grows madder and madder, and the music becomes more and more intense, two, then three, then six doll children appear, swinging higher and higher, the child's cries portrayed by what sounds like a synthesizer in the orchestra, the endless heartbeats drumming -- are they Carlo's or the child's? In the epilog, the madrigalists who opened the opera return, singing once again Latin a capella, bringing a huge white cloth over the steps, and eventually over the entire stage, as in the first scene. The whole stage is a shroud, and the music gradually fades away.

Wilhelm Sinkovicz wrote a review (Staatsoper: Neuer Versuch mit dem Kindsmord [State Opera: new attempt at infanticide], December 24, 2004) for Die Presse. He singles out conductor Jun Märkl for having carefully rehearsed the work, although the music, he says,

avoids triadic harmony, leading to fatiguing clusters of seconds and dissonaces and, above all, tritone leaps. [...] The State Opera may again point to the fact that it has supported one of the most discussed composers of the last century. Whether the work will ever be produced again remains questionable. Interested customers should make a trip to the Staatoper.

In another review (Düst'rer die Glocken nie klingen, December 24, 2004) for the Wiener Zeitung, Christoph Irrgeher also praises the conductor, who navigates the challenges of the late Schnittke style, pronounced in the "compact scene structure" and the "undramatic, cloudy cluster chords." Dominik Troger, in his review (Gesualdo ist kein Vorbild für das Lösen von Ehekrisen (Opera in Wien, December 26, 2004), says that his impression of the opera from its 1995 premiere was essentially confirmed: only the last 20 to 25 minutes are worthwhile as staged drama. There is also this unsigned review (Finstere Operngestalt der unvollendeten Moderne [Dark operawork of the unfinished modern], December 27, 2004) in Der Standard. The only other review in English I could find was Larry L. Lash, Schnittke's Gesualdo at the Wiener Staatsoper (London Financial Times, December 27, 2004):

In a house where world premieres are rare and successful ones even rarer, I suspect the Vienna State Opera feels it must produce at least one recently composed, audience-alienating work each season, so as to say “we tried”, with respect to promoting contemporary music. To this end, George Enescu's Oedipe was revived last winter in a brilliant production, magnificently sung (it returns in April 2005). This year, we have the first reprise of Alfred Schnittke's Gesualdo since its world premiere in 1995, three years before the composer's death. Many of the audience exercised a proclivity denied to critics: simply to leave the theatre at the interval and go and do something productive or pleasant, such as change the cat litter box. [...] Schnittke wrote a lot of interesting, groundbreaking music. But Gesualdo should be reserved for bored musicologists with time on their hands.

Bored musicologist, time on my hands. Wait a minute! I think he's talking about me. That may be why I actually watched the video on this page, which has about a minute of excerpts from the opera.

Filmed Concerts in the Louvre

Some people I know don't like to watch concerts on film, because they find the closeups on instruments being played too artificial. Still, filmed concerts are some of the best documents in the history of conducting. With that in mind, I was intrigued to read an article (L'Orchestre national et ses chefs, January 25) by Christian Merlin in Le Figaro, about a series of concert films (Musique filmée):

The cycle of filmed music organized by Christian Labrande in the Louvre Auditorium is one of the most anticipated events for music-lovers poking through archives. Labrande is without equal in unearthing unseen documents, focusing on artists whose names only have to be mentioned to make us salivate. His next series, 13 viewings from January 27 to February 7, will be dedicated to the Orchestre National de France and its conductors. If this orchestra was founded in 1934, it was only at the end of 1950s that its concerts began to be filmed: the screenings will not retrace all of its history, but that's still 50 years of music to be brought to life, from black and white to color.

You can observe both what has remained constant and what has evolved with this virtuosic group, capable of ignoring everything if it was bored or of electrifying the audience if a conductor made it want to do it. You can also see how much there still was, forty years ago, an immediately recognizable French sound, clear, nasal, strongly individualized, and how the internationalization of the repertoire has obliged the ONF to broaden its palette to play German music a German sound.

Present conductor Kurt Masur is represented in the series by his début appearance with the orchestra, in 1974, and Leonard Bernstein is shown conducting works by Ravel, including vocal music with Marilyn Horne plus the G major piano concerto, in which Bernstein plays the solo part. The schedule of films for the Portrait de l'Orchestre National de France is available from the Louvre's Web site. Marie-Aude Roux, in another article (L'Orchestre national de France, 70 ans de concerts en treize films, January 28) for Le Monde, says the following about that Bernstein concert:

"It was true love: we would have cut ourselves to pieces for him!" they say today, those from the Orchestre National de France who played under Leonard Bernstein. If you have never heard the joy of an orchestra in a state of grace and seen a conductor commune with his musicians, you should run to the Louvre Auditorium to watch the archived concerts of the American conductor.

That viewing took place on Friday, January 28.

Thanks for Reading

We have been receiving all kinds of new traffic, from the link that the kind folks over at DCist gave us today. If you're new to Ionarts, here are some recent Washington-related posts that may be of interest:

• Ionarts Concert Schedule: Early February (a bimonthly feature that is your guide to the best classical music events in and around the District of Columbia: the installments for early January and late January have links to reviews of many concerts listed)
  
• Ionarts Concert Reviews (look at the bottom of this list for recent concerts that Ionarts critics have attended so you don't have to)
  
• Premiere of Scott Wheeler's new opera Democracy (a review of the world premiere at Lisner Auditorium last Friday)
  
• Meine unsterbliche Geliebte: Who Was Beethoven's Immortal Beloved? (transcription of the introductory remarks I gave before a screening of the film Immortal Beloved at Catholic University on January 19)

Please look around and come back often!

Photographs of Four Saints

In 1934, a group called The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music produced Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's strange opera Four Saints in Three Acts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. The cast consisted entirely of African-American singers, a year before Gershwin produced his Porgy and Bess in the same way. Here are two interesting reviews of those first performances:

• Stein Opera Sung by All-Negro Cast (New York Times, February 9, 1934)
  
• North Side: Gertrude Stein (Pittsburgh Press, April 15, 1934)

The production was choreographed by Frederick Ashton and directed by the painter Maurice Grosser, who was Thomson's partner. Now Charlotte Higgins, in an article (War photographer's 1933 portraits from all-black opera unveiled, January 31) in The Guardian, says that there are some photographs of that production that will go on exhibit in London in February.

A pair of portraits by Lee Miller - the brilliant photographer who was the lover-muse of surrealist painter Man Ray and was famously pictured in Hitler's bath in 1945 - is to be shown for the first time. The portraits, taken in New York in 1933, show opera singers Bruce Howard and Edward Matthews as saints Teresa and Ignatius, in character for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by the American composer Virgil Thomson. The pictures, which will go on show at the National Portrait Gallery in February, were taken shortly before the work was premiered in Connecticut.

The exhibit, Lee Miller: Portraits, will be at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, from February 3 until May 30. It will contain some 120 black-and-white photographs by Lee Miller. I hope the NPG makes a lot of images available online. For now, you can check out this gallery of Lee Miller photographs from The Guardian; the Lee Miller Archive, which has its own extensive gallery; and the exhibit Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray (at the Getty Museum in 2003).

"You're Rubensesque, My Dear" / "Ouch"

Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolaas Rubens Wearing a Coral Necklace, c. 1619 Other Reviews: Peter Schjeldahl, Rubenessence: The making of a successful style (The New Yorker, February 7) Paul Jeromack, Rubens Superstar (artnet.com, January 26) Michael Kimmelman, From the Assembly Line of a Genius (New York Times, January 14)

Passing through New York this weekend, I headed straight to the Met to see the fabulous exhibit of the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens.

In a previous post (from December 19, 2004), I mentioned the drawing galleries at the new and improved MOMA, and how great it is to spend time with the sketches, watercolors, and many times finished works on paper. Works on paper don't often get the exposure I would like. It's an opportunity to see an artist's process and vulnurability. This exhibit is a rare chance to see 115 drawings from American and European collections at one time.

Although my wife will throw heavy objects at me whenever I call her Rubensesque, one could also see that as a compliment. In an era of waifs and buffed bodies, the full-figured beauties in Rubens's works have a graceful nobility. I would like to link images to this post, but the Met is misguidedly stingy with their Web site.

Plan to spend as much time as you possibly can or return visits. It was refreshing to see such beautifully drawn and executed compositions. The line, the luminous washes, the details and subtle gestures: Rubens is one of the best. I'm buying some brown ink today.

Before you leave the Met, stop in and have a visitation with the new Madonna and Child, by Duccio di Buoninsegna. Purchased for a mere $45 million, I believe it's their most expensive yet, and the gallery can be crowded with pilgrims paying homage. It is a beautiful icon piece at about 8 x 11 inches, the price is a little scary and a distraction, but it's causing a stir. With the winter baseball acquisitions in progress, one Duccio could trade for a few pitchers and maybe a relief hitter.

New Boltanski Show

Other Resources: Christian Boltanski (Tate Magazine) Christian Boltanski: Réflexion (Museum of Fine Art, Boston) Christian Boltanski, Monument Odessa (1991, Spencer Museum of Art) Christian Boltanski, Autel De Lycée Chases (1988, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) Christian Boltanski, Monument (1989, Hirshhorn Museum) Christian Boltanski Images (Artnet.com)

Raphaël Garrigos and Isabelle Roberts had an article (Boltanski Art sur image, January 19) in Libération on the latest show from French artist Christian Boltanski. The exhibit, called 6 septembres, was at the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale in Paris through January 28. The show is part of the special exhibit series Les intrus from the Musée de l'Art Moderne, which is closed for renovations (see my review of the Annette Messager show in the same series).

The idea is simple, to compile television and historical images occurring on September 6, 1944 (when Boltanski was born) and every subsequent September 6 through 2004. Although Boltanski apparently did not know that his latest video project would be shown there, the building that houses the SEIN was where the Lumière brothers showed the first moving picture, La sortie des usines Lumière, on March 22, 1895. The work was created at the invitation of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, which wanted more of its extraordinary archive to be explored and made available to the public. From the article in Libération:

Two years ago, Christian Boltanski went to survey the ground: "The INA is an extraordinary place, very Borges-like: slightly ugly concrete buildings; there is even a room there where ten channels are taped 24 hours a day." For him whose work has always revolved around memory, a mine of the trails left by people as they disappear. At first Boltanski felt around, beginning by typing "with clumsy fists" on the INA computers with the idea of gathering images of handshakes. "I work on anonymous memory, the 'little memory' as I call it; I was looking for a way to bind myself with the INA archives, and then I found the way inside, something really stupid, my birthdate."

You can see seven stills from the video at the INA site.