In Brief: In Splendoribus Sanctorum Edition

Georges de La Tour, La Nativité, c. 1645

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond. Merry Christmas!

• For your Christmas listening today, the children of the Maîtrise de Radio France, performing music for Christmas by Britten, Finzi, Bach, and others in the Basilique Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. [France Musique]


• To conclude the Liszt year, Bertrand Chamayou performs the entire cycle of Les Années de Pèlerinage, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. [France Musique]


• Concerto Romano performs sacred music by Pietro Paolo Bencini, Niccolò Jommelli, and Giovanni Battista Casali, from the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome. [France Musique]


• Watch Pierre Boulez conduct the Orchestre de Paris in music by Schoenberg and Bartok, with Bertrand Chamayou as soloist. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• A special offer for tomorrow (December 26), with free streaming of a collection of online videos. [Medici.tv]


• Ilan Volkov conducts the Stuttgart Radio Vocal Ensemble and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, in a program of Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, John Cage's Seventy-Four (1992), and Pascal Dusapin's operatorio La Melancholia (1991), from the Festival d'Automne in Paris. [France Musique]


• Listen to Valery Gergiev conduct the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, with pianist Alexander Toradze as soloist. [France Musique]


• Pianist Hélène Grimaud joins the WDR Symphony Orchestra Koln and conductor Manfred Honeck, for music mostly by Beethoven at Bad Kissingen. [France Musique]


• An unusual performance of Alain Moëne's Le Grand décret (2007), with Musicatreize and Ensemble L’Itinéraire. [France Musique]

For Your Consideration: 'War Horse'

Steven Spielberg has adapted War Horse, Michael Morpurgo's children's novel from the 1980s, into a film that often seems aimed at the same audience, like an after-school special, except set during World War I. Screenwriters Lee Hall and Richard Curtis could not have the book's title character, a horse named Joey, narrate or participate -- without a lot of voice-over, which thankfully the movie eschews -- as it did in the novel and in a stage adaptation from a few years ago, where it was played by an elaborate puppet. In the film, Joey, played by a series of beautiful horses, has a lot of staring silences, on which the viewer is meant to project his reverence for horses. Unfortunately, from the first scene one knows exactly how the story will go, from beginning to end. The faith kept between the horse and Albert Narracott, the boy who raises him (newcomer Jeremy Irvine, cast only because the young Ethan Hawke was not available), will triumph over all -- his father's tendencies toward drink and bad luck (Peter Mullan), the rapacious greed of the family's landlord (David Thewlis), even the devastation of the Great War. Some people may find this kind of movie heartwarming, but if you are like me, you will find it insincere and cloying.

Even worse, the film drags on for far too long (almost two and a half hours), as countless improbable plot twists play out, one after the other. Albert's "thoughtless" father, thinking only of trying to save what he almost lost by buying the horse in the first place, sells Joey to the British cavalry at the outbreak of the war. Joey falls in with two officers, played with straight-backed, stiff-lipped class distinction by Tom Hiddleston (seen recently in the equally saccharine Midnight in Paris) and Benedict Cumberbatch (less distinguished than in the superior Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). Tragically, the British cavalry did not realize its own obsolescence in war, with the advent of the machine gun, and the horse quickly falls into German hands. We follow the horse as it gets into and escapes from a series of predicaments and changes of fortune, each less believable than the last.

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You have all the ingredients for a grand Spielbergian success: a broad historical sweep, an equine protagonist that no one could not love, an epic human tragedy that can be soft-pedaled into the background, an eye for the big picture in cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (working on actual film, old school), and a stirring score by John Williams that sounds very much like many of the composer's other scores. Still, Spielberg has managed to make a film that is too violent for young children and too jejune for adults. For your holiday week entertainment, stick to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other options.

For Your Consideration: 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'

Because I grew up with a father obsessed with books about wars -- Civil, World I and II, and especially Cold -- the novels of John Le Carré were early on pressed into my hands. Like Anthony Lane, who wrote a long analysis of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for The New Yorker earlier this month, I thought that Tomas Alfredson's new film adaptation of this Cold War classic was a fool's errand, after the memorable BBC television miniseries, with Alec Guinness as veteran spy master George Smiley. There are definitely things that both Le Carré's novel and the longer BBC adaptation do better, but the Swedish director's two-hour film both updates the sensibilities of the story (notably on the issue of homosexuality) and remains true to its spirit. It is a brilliant follow-up to Alfredson's last feature, the stylish vampire film Let the Right One In, thanks in no small part to a streamlined screenplay by Bridget O'Connor (who died last year) and Peter Straughan (O'Connor's husband, and one of the screenwriters for another, less successful espionage thriller, The Debt). For all of the film's tautness, reducing all of the characters and Byzantine plot complications to feature length, the pacing preserves the agonized waiting, silence, and unraveling of the spy chess match, making it certainly the best Le Carré film since Richard Burton's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Those of you searching for the right movie to see during the end-of-the-year holiday season, look no further.

The film hangs on the pasty, owl-glassed face of Gary Oldman's George Smiley, impassive and calculating yet vulnerable, as he plays a game of cat and mouse with his Soviet nemesis, the mysterious Karla, in an attempt to unmask a mole at the top of the British intelligence agency MI6, known charmingly as "The Circus." Also representing the old guard is the unstoppable John Hurt (recently reviewed in Melancholia and on stage in Krapp's Last Tape) as Smiley's shadowy mentor, known only as Control. Any of the younger agents -- played, all of them admirably, by a strong supporting cast of Mark Strong, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds, and Colin Firth -- could and do fall under suspicion. Officially retired from MI6, Smiley is entrusted with the job behind the scenes, taking with him only a couple of trusted colleagues, principally young Peter Guillam, played by a natty, tow-headed Benedict Cumberbatch, on my radar recently as the title role in the quirky new television series Sherlock. This is mostly a silent chess match of waiting, punctuated by a few moments of horror and violence, handled with terrifying austerity by Alfredson, in a palette of bright 70s colors and muted grays and browns (cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema, production design by Maria Djurkovic).

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The telescoping of the story may make it difficult for some viewers to follow, as many significant developments go by without much time to process them. It is easy to miss things. What is clear is that the heaviest sacrifice of espionage is the personal happiness of family life. Any affection or relationship equals a liability, and more than once in the film, relationships -- Smiley's attachment to his less than devoted wife, Guillam's secret liaison with an older man -- must be jettisoned as something to "clean up" rather than allow one's enemies an avenue of attack, and this could come from either side as allegiances are fluid. Ricki Tarr (the 70s-haired Tom Hardy), a lesser operative who inadvertently finds an inroad into the matter of the mole, puts it best when he says that he wants out of the Circus so he can have a family: "I don't want to end up like you lot." He makes the classic mistake of the spy, falling in love with the beautiful woman, a Soviet agent played by the lovely, elfin-featured Russian actress Svetlana Khodchenkova. He is in the wrong line of work, one where just a few words betray him and the woman he loves. Even the grave, taciturn Smiley, who does not say a word in the movie's first twenty minutes, has his most emotional moment, over many drinks with Peter Guillam, when he recounts how he said too much at one crucial moment early in his career. He, too, has paid for it ever since.

This film is screening at many area theaters.

Best (and Worst) of 2011

It is time to take stock of the year that was, beginning with the best concerts we heard here in the Washington area. (Jens will tell us about the best performances he heard in Europe this past year.) These are in no particular order of preference, listed simply from most recent to least. A few honorable (and dishonorable) mentions, in various categories, and a remembrance of some of the artists we mourned in 2011 are added at the end.

Echoes of Paris (Poulenc, Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev), A. Hadelich, R. Kulek

1. Augustin Hadelich, Kennedy Center Terrace, December 7
It is an unfortunate result of the music recording industry's obsession with photogenic marketability that second-rate violinists receive major contracts, while a far superior player like Augustin Hadelich does not. As shown again in a Wednesday night recital in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, with pianist Rohan de Silva, the Italian-born violinist, now in his late 20s, is an extraordinary musician. [Read Review]

2. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, WPAS, November 19
Far from resting on his laurels as he nears his 70th birthday, Gardiner continues to innovate and rethink his approach to Beethoven, as heard in this extraordinary concert. The overture to Egmont was supremely expressive, with curvaceous woodwind lines in the slow introduction and violent brass underpinning the full sections. A restless, tragic, windswept feeling hovered over this performance, and the small ensemble, huddled together at the center of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, sounded crisp and unified. The third symphony, focused on a similar theme of revolutionary heroism, was an ingenious counterweight—both works were created around the time of the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor and the subsequent French assault on Vienna. [Read Review]

3. National Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, October 28
Lorin Maazel, one of the world’s most accomplished and most senior conductors, has entered a glowing, autumnal phase in his career. In rather active semi-retirement since stepping down two years ago from a sometimes rocky tenure at the New York Philharmonic, Maazel has been giving performances characterized by warm, lovingly crafted mentorship — not descriptions one could always apply to this most imperious of leaders. [Read review]

Liszt, Années de pèlerinage, Louis Lortie (released on March 29, 2011) CHAN 10662(2) | 161'20"

4. Louis Lortie, Library of Congress, October 19
This recital reestablished Lortie in my estimation as one of the most gifted colorists at the piano and placed him at the top of my list of the best interpreters of Liszt’s keyboard music. He took Liszt’s often over-the-top romanticism at face value, giving the music its full drama without letting it descend into vulgarity. Each vignette received its own carefully calibrated soundscape of colors, from the ringing bells and nuptial hymn of the Sposalizio to the obsessive knell-like dotted-rhythm ostinato of Il Penseroso to the Mephistophelian snatches of impish motifs and fiercely virtuosic chaos of the Dante sonata movement. Lortie differentiated many voicings within each texture, creating luxuriantly paced, multilayered portraits of scenes or ideas inspired by the paintings of Raphael or the poetry of Petrarch and Dante. [Read review]

5. Hugo Wolf Quartett, Dumbarton Concerts, October 15
Unlike some other string quartets, these four musicians did not feel the need to scrape every last ounce of sound from the strings. Beginning with a glowing rendition of Schubert’s one-movement “Quartettsatz” in C minor, D. 703, they played with a mellow amber tone that was carefully balanced and rarified. The cello did not growl, the viola did not bark and the violins did not wail over the top of the ensemble. The intensity of the performance came from the fleet tempo and the rise and fall of expressive phrasing. [Read review]

Liszt Project, Pierre-Laurent Aimard (released on October 4, 2011)

6. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, WPAS, May 5
The program, combining four one-movement re-imaginings of the piano sonata form (by Wagner, Berg, Scriabin, and Liszt), was ingenious. Three short Liszt pieces, all experiments with the dissolution of tonality and traditional musical forms from Liszt's final years, prefaced each of the first three, shorter sonatas. In every case, the ambiguous ending of the Liszt piece obscured the aural boundary with the piece that followed it, an effect enhanced by Aimard's insistence on silence throughout the entire first half, his hands held intentionally on the keyboard as if the piece had not yet ended. [Read review]

7. Christine Brewer, Vocal Arts D.C., March 23
Composer Alan Louis Smith set words taken from letters by First Lieutenant George W. Honts, who went to fight in World War II a year after he was married to his wife, Evelyn Honts. The harmonic idiom is mostly tonal and quite nostalgic, with a broad range of vocal styles that played to Brewer's strengths as a storyteller, although some songs take a more dissonant turn, like the clustered death-knell ostinato in the fifth song, as the first signs of battle are looming. The climax of the cycle, a heart-rending setting of the telegram notifying Evelyn of George's death, was devastating, especially the high-soaring shrieks at the core of the message ("THE SECRETARY OF WAR . . . DESIRES TO EXPRESS"), where each fortissimo high note sets the piano strings, thanks to a depressed pedal, shimmering with overtones. [Read review]

8. National Symphony Orchestra, Turangalîla-Symphonie, March 11
The sprawling Turangalîla-Symphonie is a dazzling, even stultifying piece that merits all of the epithets, kind and unkind, leveled at it over the years: most famously, Boulez dismissed it as "bordello music" for its obvious orgasmic moments (inspired by Messiaen's love for Yvonne Loriod, who would become his second wife) and Stravinsky said the work contained more embarrassment than riches ("plus d'embarras que de richesses") adding that "little more is needed to write such music than a copious supply of ink." Like so much of Messiaen's music, it binds together an impossible number of references and influences -- Indian rhythmic patterns, bird song, Tristan and Isolde, and much more -- with a vast orchestral palette, almost too large, too loud to absorb with the human ear. To hear it in live performance, even a less than perfect one like that led by Eschenbach, is an unforgettable experience. [Read review]

Kissin Plays Liszt Live recordings, 1987-2003 (released on April 4, 2011)

9. Evgeny Kissin, WPAS, March 6
Kissin's program was limited in chronological scope, but Liszt's music sounded tenderly poetic, as in "Ricordanza" (the ninth Transcendental Etude), and far less saccharine. Even in "Venezia e Napoli," Liszt's Italianate reworking of Italian composers' themes, Kissin steered clear of the potentially treacly sentimentality of this kind of paraphrase. To no one's surprise, he also played Liszt's Piano Sonata, a work that unites many elements of his musical style: the almost keyless ambiguity of the opening theme; the metamorphosis of that theme through variation; extraordinary technical demands, and a seemingly programmatic narrative, in the manner of his tone poems for orchestra. No one knows for certain if Liszt intended the sonata to have a story, although both the Faust legend and the passion of Christ have been suggested, among many others. Kissin gave the work a driven urgency, taking no rhythmic freedom, even in the many astonishing passages in octaves, and achieving a glowing, glossy performance, alternating between sinister and angelic. [Read review]

10. Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride, Washington National Opera, May 7
Without any daringly ornamented arias or anything extraneous that might divert attention from the story's dramatic continuity, a Gluck opera will succeed only with talented singing actors and compelling direction. There are almost none of the tried-and-true operatic clichés to fall back on, not even a romantic intrigue: the central relationship here is of brother and sister, who do not even recognize one another until the end. In the title role, soprano Patricia Racette was riveting, the searing strength of her voice underscoring the still intensity of her stage presence. Racette hit her stride, singing with lyrical abandon in the Act IV aria "Je t'implore et je tremble." [Read review]

Puer Natus Est: Tudor Music for Advent and Christmas, Stile Antico

Best Local Debut:
Stile Antico, Folger Library, April 2

Worst Concert:
Paul Appleby, Vocal Arts D.C., May 15

Best Opera Production:
Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor, Washington National Opera, November 10 and 12 (directed by David Alden)

Worst Opera Production:
Vivaldi, Griselda, Santa Fe Opera (directed by Peter Sellars)

Best Contemporary Program:
JACK Quartet, Mansion at Strathmore, November 5

Best Early Music Program:
Le Poème Harmonique, La Maison Française, February 19

Best Christmas Concert:
Folger Consort and guests, Music of Spanish Renaissance, December 10

Lux perpetua luceat eis:
The list of beloved artistic figures we lost this year includes playwright Václav Havel; singers Cesária Évora, Montserrat Figueras, Salvatore Licitra, and Margaret Price; writer Christopher Hitchens; composers John Gardner, Daniel Catán, John Barry, Peter Lieberson, Lee Hoiby, and Milton Babbitt; film directors Ken Russell and Sidney Lumet; actors John Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, and Pete Postelthwaite; violinist Josef Suk; painter Cy Twombly; and conductor Yakov Kreizberg. We also note the passing of Denis Dutton, the founder of Arts and Letters Daily; Roman Catholic Cardinal John Foley, the voice of American broadcasts from the Vatican; and musicologists Charles Hamm, Piero Weiss, and László Dobszay.

Christmas Blah Blah Blah

Charles T. Downey, Choral Arts Society Christmas concert at the Kennedy Center
Washington Post, December 21, 2011

Norman Scribner, who has led the Choral Arts Society of Washington since founding it in 1965, has set the date of his retirement for next summer. Scribner’s leadership of this mammoth volunteer choir has certainly been consistent. The ensemble’s current season, offered in tribute to Scribner, is recapitulating his legacy down to the annual Christmas concert, heard Monday night.

Many people love concerts of Christmas music, certainly enough to fill most of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Much of the program was aimed at the group’s strength, which is full-bodied, strongly articulated singing, an ethos put clearly into words by Scribner when he instructed the audience for the inevitable carol singalongs with the gruff words, “Stand up and sing. LOUD.” This was true of both the rather unsubtle rendition of “Jauchzet, Frohlocket!,” from Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” and a lusty waltz scene from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” made forceful by the sheer number of singers. [Continue reading]

It may be difficult to take seriously the idea of a war on Christmas, given how pervasive the holiday’s trappings are in the marketplace. In any case, it remains unclear on which side the forces of trivialization would be fighting.

Getting in the Spirit: Alt-Christmas

On Sunday evening, there were two Christmas concerts after my own heart. This is not really a review, because of my friendly connection to the performers, but more an appreciation. First, Jeremy Filsell gave an organ recital at Washington National Cathedral, with a rare complete performance of Olivier Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur. It is a fairly youthful work, composed when Messiaen was still in his 20s, but it still hits all the hallmarks of the composer's intensely mystical style, just with a few more plain triads, fewer hallucinatory bird songs, and some unexpected humor. Filsell chose some exciting registrations: glowing stained-glass colors, whirring intense sounds, brassy theater organ fanfare, ominous low reeds clustered like bagpipes. In a pithy presentation on the work beforehand, Filsell explained some of the pictorial devices Messiaen embedded in the score, and many of them popped out in the performance, like the pastoral cantillation of the shepherds, the crunchy dissonant chords in time-suspending rhythmic patterns (hints of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), the chaotic dancing of the angels, the heavy-footed slog of the wise men's camels. While parts of the piece are slow, even spare, there are some technical challenges, played here as thrilling toccatas.

Later that evening, it was out to the wilds of Virginia with my passport in hand for the second Christmas concert from the local all-male choir known as the Suspicious Cheese Lords. The venue kind enough to host the ensemble was Holy Spirit Catholic Church, one of those wood-and-carpet mid-20th-century buildings, with an acoustic that sounds like a living room. Still, this concert gets high marks for programming, proof yet again that Christmas programming really does not need to regurgitate Messiah and countless other tired pieces. The Lords, as is their wont, fed us with mostly unknown Renaissance motets, by the likes of Gregorio Turini, Leonhard Paminger, Melchor Robledo, Ivo de Vento, Dominique Phinot (an expansive Ave Maria, somber except for a glorious opening up at the words "O mater dei"), Giovanni Nanino, and Francesco de Layolle, all worth knowing.

More recent pieces were just as alluring, including the moody Christmas processional Voici la nuit (featured in the splendid film Of Gods and Men), Stephen Sametz's catchy, hocket-like Noel!, the austere American hymn Shepherds Rejoice (from The Sacred Harp), and the magnificent Three Kings by Canadian composer Healey Willan, who is always worth discovering further. Russell Weismann, organist and Associate Director of Music at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (where I sang for many years in the choir), added some unusual organ selections to the mix, from the theatrical use of bells and Zimbelstern in Richard Purvis's setting of Greensleeves to the crazy toccata of Keith Chapman's take on Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella.

For Your Consideration: 'Melancholia'

If you have not realized it yet, you will die. If there is one thing of which you can be certain, it is that your days upon this planet are numbered. As obvious as that seems -- and most of us come to this realization quite young -- people often suddenly react to some development in life as if it suddenly makes them aware of the limits of time. Whether doomsayers are right about the supposed end predicted by the Mayan calendar, the imminent (and continually rescheduled) rapture or other world-ending cataclysm, or that enormous blue planet that was hiding behind the sun and is now hurtling toward an apocalyptic date with Earth does not alter the fact of your own inevitable demise.

In Melancholia, the stately, expansive new film from Lars von Trier, the implacable approach of the eponymous heavenly body, like an evil star in ancient astrology (and, like astrology, mostly nonsense, shown with stunning CGI effects by Pixomondo and Platige Image), may be the cause of the saturnine disposition of the leading lady, played by Kirsten Dunst -- or it may be only a justification of her own long-term negativity about the world. As Justine, a pretty, young creative writer of advertising, Dunst paints an infuriating and accurate portrayal of the personal disaster of depression, as she sabotages her own wedding (to a well-meaning but clueless Alexander Skarsgård) and alienates everyone who cares about her. No one can really blame Justine, given that she was apparently born this way and that she had despicably dysfunctional parents -- the sentimental yet suspiciously touchy John Hurt and the imperious Charlotte Rampling, who gives the acid-tongued wedding toast all of us have probably dreamed of making at some point. As is true in real life, unfortunately, people do blame her. Only her long-suffering sister and substitute maternal figure, Claire (played with patience by Charlotte Gainsbourg), remains devoted to her, in spite of Justine's many reasons to make herself hated.

In the Renaissance, melancholy was thought to inspire both artistic creativity and, in the worst cases, insanity. That combination seems to be behind Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I, from 1514, commonly interpreted as a self-portrait of the artistic temperament given over to imagination, which traps even the winged figure of genius in inaction. This seems to be the case for Dunst's Justine, who is hounded by her employer, played ruthlessly by Stellan Skarsgård, at the wedding reception for a tag line for his latest ad campaign -- and for Lars von Trier himself, who has long struggled with depression, often rendering him unable to work.

On the other hand, it is hard to feel sorry for Justine, or for Claire, whose story is brought more clearly into focus in the second part of the film. To use a contemporary metaphor, the film does not concern itself with how the 99% would react to the possibility of a cataclysm: there is no looting or lawlessness in evidence in the privileged lives of von Trier's characters. The entire film takes place at a secluded estate in an unspecified country, and in general the 1%-type tragedies that these wealthy people face, like Justine having wasted the outrageous sum spent by her brother-in-law (the vain, grouchy Kiefer Sutherland) on a failed wedding or Claire being shocked that the butler (a brilliantly dry Jesper Christensen, of The Debt) has not reported for work with a planetary collision looming, do not really garner much sympathy. I should have such problems.

Other Reviews: TIME | Roger Ebert | Wall Street Journal | Washington Post | New York Times Village Voice | The New Yorker | NPR | Movie Review Intelligence

Melancholia is an intensely beautiful film (cinematography by Manuel Alberto Claro), with a tidal pace that may annoy many viewers, as will the frank examination of the unpleasantness of dealing with someone with depression. Von Trier has done a much better job of incorporating his story with its cosmic backdrop than a film with which it must inevitably be compared, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. The film feels longer than its 2.5-hour running time, because of the sense of suspension of time produced by von Trier's looping, sometimes non-narrative storytelling. The awkward cutting and splicing of the music from the prelude to Act I of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which returns obsessively to the opening theme of that music like a manic tic or the gravitational pull of the approaching planet, bothered me at times, as it will anyone who is familiar with that opera -- but it did not annoy me as much as it did Alex Ross.

As far as von Trier's films go, Melancholia is one of the easiest to watch, since it does not confront the viewer so irritatingly with unpleasant subjects as some of his other movies (Dogville, Antichrist, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, actually pretty much all of them). He also peppers the film with humor, like the bitchy wedding planner played by Udo Kier, in ways that do not undermine the seriousness of the story but that do help put the viewer more at ease. Don't worry, von Trier will be back in that territory soon enough: Charlotte Gainsbourg, it is being reported (in spite of von Trier's ouster from the Cannes Festival last spring, over an off-the-cuff remark about being a Nazi), will star in von Trier's next film, The Nymphomaniac, to be released in two versions, more and less raunchy.

This film is still screening at the recently reopened West End Cinema, at 23rd and M Streets NW, a theater we mourned when it went out of business and are glad to see back in action.

UPDATE:
Tim Page, Filmmaker’s audacious teaming of his ‘Melancholia’ with Wagner’s music (Washington Post, December 23)

In Brief: Chance of Snow Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Watch James Conlon conduct the Orchestre de Paris and the Chœur de l'Orchestre de Paris (also available as audio only) in Debussy's Trois Nocturnes and Poulenc's Gloria (with Patricia Petibon as soloist), plus Samuel Barber's violin concerto with Gil Shaham. [ARTE Live Web]


• Listen to a performance of Philip Glass's opera Les enfants terribles, with Emmanuel Olivier conducting the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, live from the Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. [France Musique]


• More contemporary music, most of it inspired by rock music, with the so-called Fête de l'Humanité from the Parc de La Courneuve, including pieces by Didier Benetti, Graham Fitkin, Edgard Varèse, Frank Zappa, Iannis Xenakis, Christopher Rouse, and Stewart Copeland. [France Musique]


• A concert devoted to music of John Cage, with the vocal ensemble Exaudi and friends, from the Théâtre de la Ville as part of the Festival d'Automne in Paris. [France Musique]


• In hagiographical news, Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will canonize Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval abbess, mystic, and composer, and name her a Doctor of the Church. Some see the move as a possible hint of movement from the Vatican to reform liturgical music practices in the Catholic Mass. [The Chant Café]


• Watch Paul Agnew conduct Les Arts Florissants in a concert of Monteverdi's second book of madrigals. [Cité de la Musique Live]


• Listen to the Chœur de Radio France perform sacred music by Liszt and Kodály, in the Basilique Sainte-Clotilde. [France Musique]


• Watch Valery Gergiev conduct the Israel Philharmonic in Beethoven's third symphony, plus Gil Shaham in two violin concertos, by Bruch (no. 1) and Tchaikovsky. [ARTE Live Web]


• Revisit the performances of the last two winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, Denis Kozhukhin and Anna Vinnitskaya. (Click on the headphones icon under the heading "(ré)écouter.") [France Musique]


• Watch the Orchestre National du Capitole perform music by Tchaikovsky and Brahms, plus Musorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death with soloists Tugan Sokhiev and Olga Borodina. [Medici.tv]


• Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a program of Prokofiev, Roussel, and Strauss, with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. [France Musique]


• For more ideas on good music to be heard, for little to nothing, Tim Page has a nice piece in this weekend's Washington Post. The paper's beloved former music critic is in town for a couple weeks as an end-of-the-year bonus for Washingtonians. [Washington Post]


• Listen to soprano Polina Pasztirczak give a recital of German Lieder by Strauss and others, with pianists Jan Philip Schulze and Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. [France Musique]


• As widely reported earlier this week, legendary harpsichordist, teacher, and early music luminary Gustav Leonhardt played what he says will be his last concert on Monday. Now 83 years old and appearing frail and thin at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, Leonhardt says that health concerns required him to cancel the rest of his engagements in 2012. Jacques Drillon reported on the extraordinary event of this final concert: "The theater was packed, with some listeners even being seated on cushions on the floor, and the auditorium included a striking number of musicians, especially harpsichord players, all more or less his students, or students of his students." We wish him good health and some well-deserved rest. [Le Nouvel Observateur]


• More Strauss and Mahler, this time chamber music performed by Jean-Frédéric Neuburger and friends. [France Musique]


• The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris is showing an exhibit of art by the German sculptor and painter Georg Baselitz, through January 29. Here is a video (en français). [Le Point]


• The Chœur de Radio France and the Orchestre National de France perform Beethoven's Mass in C Major, under the baton of Colin Davis, plus Beethoven's fourth piano concerto with soloist Nicholas Angelich. [France Musique]


• In another example of the worst parts of American culture invading France, Michel Legrand, among several others, has released an album of Christmas music. An article by Jessica Rat explains to the French what a Christmas album is. [L'Express]