Performed by
Franz André, conductor
Orchestre Symphonique de la Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge, Bruxelles

Recorded in 1950 – 1958

The documentary “Pianomania” follows Stefan Knüpfer as he works on grand pianos.

If their parsimonious storytelling doesn’t distract as much as it might it’s because these behind the scenes prove to be a good hook. Primarily using the unobtrusive tag-along strategies of traditional direct cinema, the filmmakers offer privileged access to musicians like Mr. Lang as he prepares for a concert, drawing attention to his cartoonish sneakers and then pulling back for a longer view when, now in fancy dress, he performs with an orchestra, his body wildly, rhythmically bouncing. There’s no narration or offscreen questions (though at times Mr. Knüpfer seems to be answering queries), and a minimum of onscreen text, mostly to identify pieces, people and places. What there is is trial and error, effort and labor, along with a little low-wattage drama, mostly from the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

At first blush “Pianomania” belongs to that class of documentaries that finds its nonfiction publishing analogue in commodity histories that spin rich narratives out of seemingly niche topics, like cod or the color mauve. But its truer equivalent is the recent documentary “Buck,” about a horse whisperer, which zeroes in on one extraordinarily gifted individual who does something that the rest of us can only dream of or (the filmmakers hope) marvel at, slack-jawed. Although there’s more romance in “Buck,” a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in “Pianomania” the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he’s a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.

The unassuming Mr. Knüpfer makes a steady, sometimes surprising guide — he can gut and reassemble a piano in seeming minutes — and provides a nice contrast to Mr. Aimard, who with his worried, swooping eyebrows and casually gnomic pronouncements paints a portrait of genius as mystery. Toward the beginning of the movie, Mr. Knüpfer and Mr. Aimard (speaking in German and French) meet to discuss the logistics of a recording that’s a year off. Mr. Aimard gropes toward what he needs for the session, not always transparently. When Mr. Knüpfer asks what kind of tone he’s after, the technician opens his arms wide, as if to suggest a round, sustained, expansive sound, and then closes them in a hug, as if to convey something tighter. “I would like to have both,” Mr. Aimard says simply.

Mr. Knüpfer struggles to please Mr. Aimard, including during the recording, in September 2007, of Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” Mr. Aimard’s first for Deutsche Grammophon. It’s a legendarily complex work that you learn next to nothing about here.

But “Pianomania” isn’t a concert film; it’s a process movie and its emphasis is on how pianos are readied to be played, which ends up being enough. (It would make an obvious double bill with the documentary “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.”) And so Mr. Aimard’s brows and notes rise and fall, and pianos and people pass by, leaving reverberations, like Aleksey Igudesman and Hyung-ki Joo, who perform as a music-comedy duo. Mr. Knüpfer seems delighted by their antics; they’re tickled by his Steinway stylings. Theirs is a geek trio, in fortissimo.

Manohla Dargis (The New York Times) / November 3, 2011

Weblink : http://movies.nytimes.com/
Photo credit : http://movies.nytimes.com/

Souvenir d’un lieu cher op.42 (orch. A.Glazunov)
Mélodie : Moderato con moto

Régis Pasquier, violin
Baltic Chamber Orchestra
Emmanuel Leducq-Barôme, conductor

From Tchaikovsky: Complete work for Violin and Orchestra (2012)
Released by Saphir Productions


Tchaikovsky: Souvenir d’un lieu cher op.42 –
Mélodie : Moderato con moto


Memory of a dear place was composed by Tchaikovsky in 1878 and dedicated to Brailovo, an Ukrainian country estate which belonged to his benefactress Nadezhda von Meck.

Official website

Performed by
Guiomar Novaes, piano
Hans Swarowsky, conductor
Orchestre Symphonique “Pro Musica” de Vienne

Recorded in 1954 & 1956

Radu Lupu, one of the performing artists at the Mozartwoche.

The title of the downloadable album is “Bleeding Chunks of Wagner,” a reference to an oft-quoted passage written in 1935 by English classical music critic Donald Tovey: “Defects of form are not a justifiable ground for criticism from listeners who profess to enjoy the bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas.”

The phrase is used these days as a shorthand for excerpts of music played out of context, thus, an ideal title for Naxos’ newest digital compilation adventure.

A few weeks ago, Naxos’ vision of the future of classical music expanded to include the undead. “Music for the Zombie Apocalypse” is made up of 20 tracks as varied as the Introit from Fauré’s “Requiem,” the Prologue to “Musique Funèbre” by Lutoslawski and “Discomfort Them, O Lord” by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis. The lineup seems chosen to make the last moments before zombies relieve you of your brains as haunting and ethereal as possible.

The downloads are more than a publicity stunt, said Naxos’ gleefully contrarian Chief Operating Officer Andrew Doe.

“I could come out with something pretentious about using this to bring classical music to more people, but that’s not really the goal here,” he said. “[We're making] products that are fun and that people are interested in. Most people like classical music to some degree. The struggle is often finding an entry point, a product that will give people something they can relate to.”

The “Zombie Apocalypse” album might especially seem the product of some desperate look-how-cool-we-are marketing plan. Think more fanboys.

Both Doe and Collin J. Rae, Naxos senior digital marketing manager, are horror film and zombie fans. Said Rae, “[The idea] came out of a brief conversation with some friends coupled with my longtime love affair with zombie films of the past and present. [It] was a no-brainer, for I already had the sound laid out in my head. I just had to match the pieces of music to that.”

The Wagner download, which contains excerpts you would expect to see on a traditional compilation, is an attention-getter — would we be talking about it otherwise? — but the “Zombie Apocalypse” release is more sophisticated. Instead of marketing it to the usual classical music audience, Naxos is focusing its attention on zombie blogs and fans of Devon Gilbert, the young artist who did the virtual cover. Naxos is aiming to meet people where they are, on their own terms instead of expecting listeners to come to them.

Compilations tend to come about because they are cost-effective, digital recordings even more so: When a record label already owns the songs, the cost of doing a digital-only release is negligible. When it doesn’t really matter if the release sells five copies or 10,000, the barriers to success are so low that it’s nearly impossible to fail.

Why, then, do most labels produce predictable, safe compilations?

Doe has an answer: “I think it’s a result of averaging in demographic research. If you mix all the colors together, you get dull, muddy brown. Most market researchers would say that I wouldn’t like [classical music]. But I do.”

The “Zombie Apocalypse” album peaked at No. 15 on the iTunes classical chart, selling for $7.99, and the Wagner virtual disc, at $5.99, went as high as No. 14. Both are now floating somewhere between 60 and 200. Considering how few copies of classical albums are downloaded each week, the movement isn’t as volatile as it sounds.

Adding to the shelf lift: Digital compilations are rarely deleted from the catalog (part of the reason Spotify, Ariama and other online retailers seem to be flooded with the things), so they can be sold for an indefinite period without the warehousing and distribution costs attendant to physical discs. Chart position doesn’t affect how an album appears in search results.

While chart results are open to interpretation, there is another indicator of success. Naxos plans to release a physical double disc of “Music for the Zombie Apocalypse” next fall.

The label usually releases two or three digital compilations a month, with one or two that it earmarks as a special product. Rae promised a “dark” Christmas album and another devoted to music that inspired violence at its premiere.

The possibilities are only limited by imagination.

“A digital music store is a [mail slot] through which you peer at … thousands of classical albums,” Doe said. “It does seem that the more adventurous the concept we come up with, the more traction it gains.

“Relaxing classical guitar has been done hundreds of times. There’s no point releasing that.”

Marcia Adair (Los Angeles Times) / October 26, 2011

Weblink : http://articles.latimes.com/
Photo credit : http://www.myspace.com/

Performed by
Michèle Auclair, violin
Willem van Otterloo, conductor
Orchestre Symphonique de Vienne
Orchestre Philharmonique de la Haye

Recorded in 1953 & 1958

I learned nothing from Beethoven, Reich commented.

Steve Reich: Beethoven was a great, great composer, whom I admire enormously. But for me, music history basically begins with Gregorian chant then goes to the end of 1750 with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then it goes on without me paying much attention until Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok and so on. The entire classical and Romantic period is filled with geniuses that I don’t listen to and from whom I’ve learned absolutely nothing.

I’ve learned the most from medieval music, from Bartok and Stravinsky, from John Coltrane, the jazz musician, and from Perotin in the 12th century in Paris.

At the beginning of the 20th century, people tended to think about progress in music. Does music have to go somewhere – does one piece or one composer lead to the next?

Well, there is a continuation in musical history – let’s say from Gregorian chant up through the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then there’s a break. Even his sons felt, “We can’t go on this way.” And they began with a much simpler music. Then the movement from Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Schumann on to Brahms and to Wagner, in particular, is all so continuous. It gets harder to tell what key you’re in. It gets less and less rhythmic. Any orchestra can play Mozart or Haydn without a conductor. But no orchestra on earth can play Wagner without a conductor because he’s just not about rhythm at all.

Schönberg is the beginning of the death of German Romanticism. It’s about deciding that we didn’t need harmonic organization. But this was music for a small cadre of listeners. I think Schönberg said, “In fifty years, the postman will whistle my tunes.” Well, it’s been over a hundred years, and there is no postman on earth who whistles his tunes. There never will be a postman who whistles his music. Now this doesn’t mean Schönberg wasn’t a great composer – he is. But he’s in a dark corner and always will be.

What I and other people did was not a revolution. It was a restoration of harmony, of rhythm in a new way. We also recognized that there has always been a connection in Western music between popular music and classical music.

Mozart wrote a letter to his father that gives insight into his composing. He writes that he wants his piano concertos to appeal to the cognoscenti without going over the heads of the neophytes. Do you have the listener in mind when you compose?

When I compose, I notice I’m the only one in the room. (laughs) I tend to be a somewhat self-critical person. I use my emotional faculties to judge whether I want to hear something again. Basically I have no one in mind except pleasing myself. And my basic idea is, well, if I love it then hopefully you will love it too.

People ask me, “What do you want the listeners to feel?” To me, that’s an absurd question. I care very deeply that people want to hear my music. But how they will take it, what it will conjure up inside of them – who knows?

Looking back at music history, you sometimes see an overriding influence – without being aware of it, composers were influenced by something in the times in which they lived. Does this enter into your own creativity?

I think all of the music that we know and love comes from a time and a place. For me, one of the great examples is Kurt Weill. In the “Threepenny Opera,” Weill simply recreated – in his way – the cabaret band and the cabaret vocal style of the period and created a universal masterpiece which people can appreciate in Russia or in the US who know nothing about the Weimar Republic. But it couldn’t have come from any other time or place.

I was born in New York City, and you can hear that in my voice, in the pace of my speech and in the rhythmic energy of my music. I’ve actually come to dislike all cities and particularly New York. We moved out in 2006, and we’ve had a place in Vermont which was like my savior for 30 years.

With “Tehillim,” one of the best pieces I ever wrote, at the end of the page where I gave the date, I wrote New York, Stuttgart, Paris, New York, Vermont. Now, I sort of remembered writing the ending in Vermont, but who would know what part was written where, and who would care? “Vermont Counterpoint” was written partly in Vermont and largely in New York. But New York City is inside of me whether I like it or not, and no matter where I am.

The more composers give honest testimony to that time and place, the more we tend to love them.

Rick Fulker and Greg Wiser (Deutsche Welle) / September 27, 2011

Weblink : http://www.dw-world.de/
Photo credit : http://www.dw-world.de/

credit: http://www.last.fm/

Cello Concerto in D major, Badley D3

Flute Concerto in G major, Badley G2

Concerto for Oboe and Harpsichord in F major, Badley F1

Leopold Hofmann (1738 – 1793) was an Austrian church musician and composer of instrumental music. His symphonies, concerti and chamber works were played all over Europe. He was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the more gifted and influential composers of his generation.

Born in Vienna, Hofmann is the son of a senior and highly educated civil servant. His musical talents were shown early at the age of seven when he joined the chapel of the Empress Dowager Elisabeth Christine as a choir member. He received an extensive musical education studying keyboard, and later composition, with Georg Christoph Wagenseil. He also studied violin with Giuseppe Trani, teacher of Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.

Hofmann was a figure of considerable consequence in Vienna’s music scene. He became the music director of St. Peter’s Church and was appointed as the keyboard teacher to the Imperial family in 1769. Three years later, he became Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. With his many other lucrative posts, he confidently declined the position of musical directorship of the Imperial Chapel. However, in 1774, following the unexpected death of Florian Leopold Gassmann, his stance was altered. He decided to petition for the post, which was declined even though he was recognized as the best-qualified candidate.

Hofmann continued to hold the post of Cathedral Kapellmeister until his death in March 1793. In May 1791, under Hofmann’s request, the city appointed Mozart to be his assistant due to his illness. It was an unpaid position as it was expected that Mozart would most likely secure the post when Hofmann retired or died. Ironically, Hofmann outlived his assistant by about fifteen months. In 1792, Albrechtsberger succeeded Mozart to be his assistant.

Although a church musician by profession, Hofmann was regarded as an important and prolific composer. His earliest known compositions include symphonies, flute concerti and a number of small-scale sacred works in the late 1750s. By 1760, his reputation had spread well beyond Vienna when Sieber, the Parisian publisher, printed six of his symphonies that year. A number of the great Austrian Monastic houses including Göettweig also began seeking out and collecting his works. During his tenure, Hofmann continued to compose concerti for various solo instruments including keyboard, flute, oboe and cello, in addition to chamber music. It was only until the last decade of his life that he eventually ceased writing music because of his deteriorated health. On 17 March, 1793, he passed away peacefully at the age of 55, with Albrechtsberger being appointed as the new Cathedral Kapellmeister.

Johann Strauss II

Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) (1883)

Kaiser Walzer (Emperor Waltz), Op. 437 (1889)

Aufs Korn, Op. 478 (1898)

Psychoanalytical models suggest that a human being, emotionally responding to the loss of a loved one, undergoes a process of grieving that involves various stages. The first two stages, so we are told, involve denial and anger. As it happens, the death of his beloved wife “Jetty” Treffz on 8 April 1878 elicited a textbook response from Johann Strauss Junior. Initially, he refused to believe that she was dead, and did not even attend her funeral, which had to be organized by his younger brother Eduard. Once denial turned to anger, which seemingly happened in a matter of minutes, the female population of Vienna bore the brunt of his rage. At least, the profits of the local bordellos skyrocketed over the next couple of weeks!


Surely still part of the denial/anger stage of dealing with grief, Strauss Junior quickly got engaged to Henriette Angelika Diettrich, also known as “Lily”. A slender young actress with Rapunzel-like blond hair, “Lily” had recently celebrated her 20th birthday. Local gossip suggested that “Lily” had been intimately acquainted with Strauss Junior prior to his wife’s death. Be that as it may, she certainly hoped that Strauss Junior could get her a lucrative acting engagement at the Theater an der Wien. What she really got, initially, was an invitation to his bedroom and on 28 May 1878 wedding bells rang in the Karlskirche. Soon the couple moved into a new Palais — incidentally designed by “Jetty” — and things became complicated. While he was busily writing music and conducting his orchestra, she roamed the streets of Vienna in the company of handsome young military officers. The local press quickly dubbed her “Diabolika”, and she was said to effortlessly combine the qualities of Eve and Jezebel. Predictably, things were deteriorating on the home front. He called her a whore and a crumpet, she called him an old impotent man, and the domestic peace was shattered forever. In December of 1878, Strauss Junior had managed to get his operetta “Blind Kuh” (Blind Man’s Buff) premiered at the Theater an der Wien. Once “Lily” had gotten into the trousers of Franz Steiner — the director of the Theater an der Wien — however, Strauss’ works were no longer welcome, and one of his most famous operettas “Eine Nacht in Venedig” (A night in Venice) had to be premiered in Berlin instead.


During the disastrous four years of their marriage, Strauss must undoubtedly have passed through the next two stages of dealing with his grief. One might even suggest that his hasty marriage to “Lily” was part of an initial bargaining process that quickly turned into depression. The fifth stage is generally acknowledged to contain an element of acceptance. In the case of Strauss Junior this meant — not entirely unexpected — a stormy affair with a much younger women. This time, it was the widowed daughter-in-law of his banker Albert Strauss — no relations. When he announced his engagement to Adele Deutsch in 1887, it created a scandal. Strauss Junior was still married to “Lily”, who in the meantime had left Steiner and sought to return to her husband. She was unwilling to grant him a divorce, as was the Catholic Church. However, Strauss was now in his final two stages of dealing with his grief over the loss of “Jetty”. He had decided to start all over again and create a new life for himself. He traveled to Coburg, renounced his Austrian citizenship and became a follower of the Protestant faith. His divorce from “Lily” was quickly granted, and he married Adele within days. Strauss described his new marriage as “the best of them all”, and the union inspired some of his most memorable compositions, including the “Kaiser Walzer” (Emperor Waltz), and “Auf’s Korn” (Take Aim). He even composed his opera “Ritter Pázmán” (Knight Pazman) — based on a Hungarian narrative poem — and was working on the ballet “Aschenbrödel” (Cinderella) when pneumonia ended his life on 3 June 1899. We know that Strauss Junior was greatly admired by Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms, yet we may rightfully assume that Sigmund Freud also learned a thing or two from the undisputed King of the Waltz.