Haven’t heard of her? You should have. Julia Jones is one of Britain’s most successful conductors – it’s just that she’s made her entire career in the continent and the rest of the world rather than in the UK. Born in Droitwich, brought up on the Isle of Man, and schooled at Chetham’s specialist music school, the Guildhall and the National Opera Studio, Jones left Britain for a job as a repetiteur at the opera house in Cologne. And she hasn’t looked back. She worked her way through the German system, from rehearsal pianist to assistant conductor, eventually running her own opera house in Ulm (the same place that Herbert von Karajan started his career).

She’s now chief conductor of the San Carlo Opera House in Lisbon and its symphony orchestra, she frequently works at the Vienna State Opera, conducting the musicians who play as the Vienna Philharmonic when they give orchestral concerts, and she’s a regular guest in Berlin, in Hamburg, and all over Italy. Now 48, Jones is making her debut at Covent Garden, with a revival of Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte.

You can probably guess the line of questioning that had been annoying her in interviews she’s been giving to the British press: her gender, and the sexual politics she has inadvertently had to face in her career, like, for example, when the Italians made a fuss of her being the first woman to conduct Wagner there. (Mozart or Rossini would not have been a story, but the perceived Teutonic machismo of Wagner was another matter.)

The reasons that conductors’ gender is still an issue for us are twofold: there are still too few female conductors in charge of orchestras (apart from Jane Glover at the Royal Academy of Music, there are no women currently in posts high up the orchestral or operatic hierarchy anywhere in Britain), and the methods and opportunities for training conductors here are pitifully patchy. That lack of opportunity allows the cliched image of the male, tousle-haired maestro to perpetuate itself unchecked, and means, according to Jones, that there are proportionally fewer female conducting students in the UK than in the US, Portugal or China.

In Lisbon, half of the six conducting jobs in the city are taken by women – which makes Jones remarkably unremarkable over there, and allows her to concentrate on musical questions rather than what should be outdated sexual politics. That ratio is also, of course, the ideal gender balance. Despite the work of Glover with the London Mozart Players, Sian Edwards at English National Opera, and American conductor Marin Alsop at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra over the past couple of decades, we’re still an embarrassingly long way off that in the UK.

Tom Service | January 22, 2010
Weblink: www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2010/jan/22/women-conductors-julia-jones

La moza donosa

From Tangos Among Friends (1996)
Released by Teldec







Ginastera: La moza donosa

Many classical musicians have tried to add different genres to their repertoire, whether it is jazz, blues, musicals or something else, but most of the time, the rendition is just a disappointment.

So when I bought this Tango CD with Barenboim at the piano, I had my reservations, but the result is extremely pleasant.

He plays marvelously, with all the sensuality and exoticism you may expect from Buenos Aires, and it is a pure delight.

As the three creatures sing, answer distress calls by phone, and travel far away and sometimes through time, they are accompanied by a score written by current composers and played by an orchestra. The score climaxes every now and then in the Wonder Pets refrain: “What’s gonna work? Teamwork! What’s gonna work? Teamwork!” It’s an awesome achievement to set an entire cartoon series to music and to employ the voices of three young children. Deservedly, Wonder Pets won an Emmy award for music direction and composition in 2008.

Even in our wildest dreams as parents, however, we can’t imagine that Wonder Pets is going to grow an appreciation of singing, never mind opera, in our children. It’s just another passive experience that they sit through. Parents realize this, but we don’t need to worry about it in the toddler years because there is no lack of singing and play in children’s lives at that stage.

Singing is one of the first things that parents do with babies when they are born, and parents are constantly singing to toddlers: wordless ditties, choruses and refrains, made-up rhyming songs, anything to comfort them or engage with them. Parents sing, sing, sing in the early years of children’s lives—and then it stops.

What happens? Once children are at school age, after a toddlerhood of joy in singing, parents begin to consider their musical ability, they look into the future, ambition sets in, music lessons enter stage left, and suddenly, without anyone noticing it, singing has been dealt a critical blow. It is instrumental lessons that children are sent to. Piano, clarinet, fiddle, whatever. Parents suddenly emphasize playing an instrument, as if singing wasn’t substantial enough. Instruments are purchased, music stands are put up, practice is required, and slowly that natural instinct to sing out at the drop of a hat is left behind.

Will singing reappear in the family? Will the songs children learn at school be sung at home? Will their urge to sing, if it is strong enough, find an outlet in a band or a choir when they are teenagers? We don’t know, but by demoting singing when children are so young, we have suggested a trend for life. It is symbolic that the rise of the garage band has occurred as the practice of singing at home has waned. What does it say when the urge to sing or play music means that you end up in the coldest room in the house?

Perhaps singing has been taken for granted. It doesn’t require money, and, unlike instrumental ability, which we generally consider can be learned through practice, we often presume that you either have a voice or you don’t. Our language is full of phrases that inhibit our singing—“she’s tone deaf,” “he doesn’t have a note in his head,” “I never had a voice.” Very few people are actually tone deaf. Being able to sing in tune is little more than a matter of practice.

The lack of emphasis on singing in society means that, well, there is none. Nobody knows the lyrics to anything. Sing-alongs often require a laptop to Google the lyrics. The merry singing after the pub is an endless line of half choruses repeated and then abandoned. At the same time, sing-alongs have become such a rarity that those who have songs, who have learned them, are rarely asked to sing. Society—the bulk of it—has become shy about singing. The spontaneous song becomes the lesser-spotted vocal. Family occasions that cry out for a song—not just weddings and funerals, but also lunches and dinners—are bereft of the practice of calling for hush and asking the one or two in the family who are known to have a voice to release it. Do we know today if any of our nearest or dearest even have a voice?

There is no easy solution to this. Music clearly needs a champion in the home. The sheer variety of aural and visual entertainment available to us presents a formidable challenge. We spend a lot of our time singing and humming along to songs from a digital source. We need to show children that a song is not merely something you consume, but something that you can produce.

Toner Quinn, from the Journal of Music | January, 2010
Weblink: www.utne.com/Arts/The-Songs-We-Dont-Sing.aspx

They certainly enthralled Eric Siblin, a former pop-music journalist. “The Cello Suites”, his first book, vividly chronicles his international search for the original, and unfound, Bach score. The story is interspersed with digressions on the lives of Bach and Casals, which deftly reveal how contemporary politics shaped their music, and buffeted their careers. For Bach, for instance, “there is a straight line connecting Prussian militarism with [his] six suites.”

Mr Siblin’s book is well researched, and filled with enough anecdotes to engage even the classical-music aficionado. One of the suites, for example, exhibits the musical refrain B-flat, A, C, B, which in German usage spells Bach. Bach’s music also displays a fetish for Kabbalistic numbering. But the book is best distinguished by its writing. To vivify music in words is not easy. But Mr Siblin, who memorably describes one Bach passage as a “spine-shivering, jewel-encrusted melody on a swath of organ and strings”, rises to the task.

The dearth of data on Bach makes an accurate character portrayal difficult. Yet the book manages to chip away at the stuffy image of Bach famously fanned by a Saxon court painter, Elias Hausmann. Instead, we see Bach the irascible youth, the ambitious careerist, the grieving husband, and the father (of 20 children, only ten of whom survived infancy) keen to send his sons to university.

A fuller picture of Casals emerges. His musicality was complemented by an unwavering love for his native Catalonia, whose customs and people Spain’s fascist forces began to destroy in the civil war. Casals’s outspoken opposition to General Franco’s government kept him exiled in France. He refused requests to play the cello suites in the many countries that recognised the regime. Spain’s government swore to amputate his arms if he returned.

Casals’s mix of genius and musical martyrdom made him a geriatric superstar. In 1958 he played at the United Nations in New York (assuring himself that it was not American territory) in a concert that reached more listeners than any other to date. In 1961 President Kennedy invited him to the White House. Casals’s lifelong political torment was ultimately tempered by domestic bliss. Aged 80, he married a former student, 20-year-old Marta Montanez, and spent his final years with her in her native Puerto Rico.

Mr Siblin never found the original script. It remains unclear whether Bach even meant the suites for the cello. The sixth suite curiously calls for an instrument with five strings, whereas the cello has only four. One thing is sure. Read “The Cello Suites”—preferably with their melodious hum in the background—and you will never look at a cello in quite the same way again.

January 7, 2010
Weblink: www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15211187
Photo credits: jsbach.net

The question — the $64,000 question for all forms of so-called “new technology” — is what you put out there through this new medium. It’s the same problem that has faced countless organizations that got themselves spiffy new websites and then discovered they had to figure out a little thing called “content.” (A great scramble of the 2000s involved lots of performing-arts organizations discovering, after they had launched websites, that what audiences really wanted to do on-line was buy tickets. One of the Metropolitan Opera’s less-heralded but possibly most influential innovations was the development of the software Tessitura, a ticket-selling and fund-raising program that’s now in wide use.)

For the most part, organizations are settling for using Twitter as a glorified bulletin board for PR notices: “Come see our performance on Sunday! Tickets going fast!” Some, though, are developing personalities, from “Here’s what I did this morning” to “Hear a recording of our recent concert.” Were it not for the Fairfax Symphony’s Twitter feed, I wouldn’t know that the group is represented on the newly ubiquitous service Instant Encore, where you can hear recordings of recent concerts and even of ones that are coming up. (In fact, I had a brief moment of panic when I saw on the Fairfax site a recording of Avner Dorman’s second piano concerto, which had its world premiere in Kansas City in November, and thought I had somehow missed the Fairfax performance — it’s coming up on March 13.) The Welsh National Opera is one of my favorites, because it is engagingly personal and, not least, because it Tweets everything in both English and Welsh.

But I think the Leipzig Gewandhaus has set some kind of new benchmark with its latest Tweet. It’s searching for a new director of its concert office and artistic planning. And it’s making this known over Twitter.

This is actually a nice sign of institutional transparency — even, arguably, a sounder understanding of the Twitter audience than many groups seem to harbor. This ad tacitly presupposes that an internationally experienced classical-music business type with extensive connections in the field may be reading the Gewandhaus’s Tweets. At least it doesn’t fall into the trap of assuming that all Twitter users are 20 to 30 years old and card-carrying representatives of a hip generation. (Of course, since the Gewandhaus has all of 317 Twitter followers as of this morning, they are in a position to know exactly who’s following them.) I’d be curious to know what kind of response, if any, they get.

Anne Midgette | January 6, 2010
Weblink: voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/01/its_been_observed_here_before_1.html
Photo credits: ccapp.osu.edu

Winterreise, Song Cycle for Voice & Piano, D. 911 (Op. 89) – Book I, Gute Nacht (‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen’)

From Schubert: Winterreise (2009)
Released by Harmonia Mundi






Schubert: Winterreise, Gute Nacht

Based on poems by Wilhelm Müller.

Every time I listen to Gute Nacht, sung by Mark Padmore with Paul Lewis at the piano, I get goosebumps.

I have never heard this song sung and played with so much intensity and sensibility; there are no words to describe it, the music simply goes straight to your heart.

Good Night (Gute Nacht)

As a stranger I arrived
As a stranger I shall leave
I remember a perfect day in May
How bright the flowers, how cool the breeze

The maiden had a friendly smile
The mother had kind words
But now the world is dreary
With a winter path before me

I can’t choose the season
To depart from this place
I won’t delay or ponder
I must begin my journey now

The bright moon lights my path
It will guide me on my road
I see the snow-covered meadow
I see where deer have trod

A voice within says – go now
Why linger and delay?
Leave the dogs to bay at the moon
Before her father’s gate

For love is a thing of changes
God has made it so
Ever-changing from old to new
God has made it so

So love delights in changes
Good night, my love, good night
Love is a thing of changes
Good night, my love, good night

I’ll not disturb your sleep
But I’ll write over your door
A simple farewell message
Good night, my love, good night

These are the last words spoken
Soon I’ll be out of sight
A simple farewell message
Goodnight, my love, good night

The score is really a blueprint for our creative talents and, consequently, our interpretive options abound. We interpret not only the music but the verbal directions the composer has given us. No score will tell you how to play allegro (quickly)—there are a lot of different “quicklies” to go around. No score will give you the coordinates for playing rubato (freely), agitato (agitated) orsemplice (simply). Nor will it tell you how to adapt the pedal indications, which applied to 19th-century pianos—a far cry from the very sonorous ones of today.

Composers occasionally specified with metronome markings the exact speed of a tempo they desired. Arturo Toscanini once confided to John Pfeiffer, a recording engineer at RCA Victor, that he preferred a faster tempo in a work of Beethoven than the composer’s metronome markings indicated. But after a long inner struggle, he decided he should stick with the score as written, saying, “I’d rather be wrong with Beethoven.” A passage in a letter written by Brahms could have eased his dilemma. “As far as my experience goes,” Brahms wrote, “every composer who has given metronome marks has sooner or later withdrawn them.”

The great composer Robert Schumann definitely had a malfunctioning metronome judging by some of his tempo markings. At the end of his G-minor Sonata he wrote, “As fast as possible,” and shortly thereafter, “Still faster.” If the “faithful-to-the-score people” ever thought of being unfaithful, that would surely be the time!

Do composers regard their work as sacrosanct as the demands for fidelity to the score would suggest? The answer might surprise you.

In 1960, I opened the cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and brought Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata to play. Never having performed it before, I wanted to play it for the composer first. On arriving at his home, I found him tinkering with one of its passages and said, “Mr. Copland, I notice you are playing forte and you have marked it piano in the score.” He turned to me grinning mischievously and said, “Ah, but that was 10 years ago!”

Some 200 years earlier, Chopin would have made a similar remark. Only he would have said, “but that was 10 seconds ago!” Julius Seligmann, president of the Glasgow Society of Musicians, attended a recital where the composer played his new “Mazurka in B flat, Opus 7 no. 1″ as an encore. According to Seligmann, it met with such great success that Chopin decided to play it again, this time with such a radically different interpretation—tempos, colors and phrasing had all been changed—that it sounded like an entirely different piece. The audience was amazed when it finally realized he was playing the very same mazurka, and it rewarded him with a prolonged, vociferous ovation. It seems he had facetiously decided to show why he had no need to republish a score—the magic of interpretation would do it for him. He would often say, “I never play the same way twice.”

How thrilled I was in 1967, at the Château de Thoiry in France, when I accidentally discovered previously unknown versions of two Chopin waltzes, written in his own hand and dated 1833. Unbelievably, six years later I again accidentally found unknown versions of the very same two waltzes, this time at Yale University and dated 1832. Besides experiencing the drama of the discovery, I was excited to be privy to Chopin’s interpretive and creative process, ever-changing right up until the moment of publication.

Thinking is creativity’s worst enemy. When I first sight-read a score, everything seems so right, so natural. The notes seem to be playing themselves and the music flows. Why? Because I am not thinking. Inspiration has been my guide—the adventure of a first time. Then comes familiarization, the learning process where, until the piece is well in hand, thinking is allowed. After that, interpretation—choices must be made, but you are finally free to feel and use your creative instincts. And, at last, creation—how do I make the music sound as it did when I didn’t know it? The great poet Yeats spoke of this dilemma so beautifully in his poem “Adam’s Curse”:

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Before the heart can remember, the mind must forget. And, when I least expect to, I will suddenly start playing that piece, again without thinking, as I did in the beginning when I first sight-read it. That is when it happens—I have finally discovered my “moment’s thought.”

Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, as well as the eye. I’m reminded of a story of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who after playing a recital in Chicago confided to a friend that he had had an off night. “Well, tomorrow comes the bad news from Miss Cassidy,” he said. Claudia Cassidy, the Chicago Tribune’s music critic, was notorious for her sharp-tongued reviews. The next day he was stunned to read in her column that “Rubinstein never played better.” And with a somewhat bemused smile the pianist quipped, “Who am I to disagree with her?”

And who could disagree with Mozart saying, “Finally it comes down to a matter of taste”?

Byron Janis | January 6, 2010
Weblink: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638380890512334.html