The Los Angeles Philharmonic is playing with virtual reality:
Orchestra VR is the first virtual reality experience produced by the LA Phil, and one of the first of its kind in the world. Be transported to our iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall for a 360° 3-D performance featuring the opening of Beethoven’s timeless Fifth Symphony performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and conducted by Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel.
Originally produced for the VAN Beethoven tour, Orchestra VR is a free app you can download and experience for yourself.
The goal was to capture sound as “it bounces around, and to create the audible sensory feeling of being there,” said Pietro Gagliano, a partner and executive creative director at Secret Location, the Toronto-based digital studio that worked with the orchestra on the project.
Users are able to detect subtle shifts in sound as they turn their heads to view different parts of the hall.
Incidentally, Mark Swed points out, “from Berlin to Beijing, Beethoven has had, for whatever reason (be it salability or spiritual sustenance), a very big year” — including in LA. In addition to the LA Phil’s VAN Beethoven project, “the new year began with Michael Tilson Thomas’ compelling Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of MissaSolemnis. The fall season began with Gustavo Dudamel’s Beethoven symphony cycle — shared by the L.A. Phil and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela — that demonstrated a young conductor’s profoundly deepening understanding of the composer.”
In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, music presenters struggled to readjust programmes so that they could provide an appropriately solemn response. For some this seemed the only justification to enjoy music at all in the face of nightmarish reality.
But the act of making music with care and conviction is itself life-affirming and humanity-empowering, as Leonard Bernstein knew when he famously declared: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before”.
One unfortunate trend in how concert music is often marketed these days showers disproportionate attention on a ‘star’ soloist, who basks in the limelight and the obligatory standing ovations, as though the orchestra were merely the house ‘backup band’ graciously permitted to share the stage.
What a delight this concert was, in contrast, when Alexander Melnikov joined with the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot’s baton to reaffirm the unadulteratedly collaborative experience of a concerto.
Rather than a parade of quirks justified as ‘virtuosity’ or a psychogram of a performer’s dominating personality, the 41-year-old Russian pianist provided a deeply satisfying, richly musical account of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in C major. And much of that satisfaction came from the sympathy Melnikov, Morlot and the SSO found in their partnership.
In my latest Musical America piece (behind a paywall), I review the second program in the remarkable Schubert Trilogy from last week at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
Tenor Mark Padmore and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout teamed up for three evenings of Schubert lieder cycles (with a touch of Beethoven for the second program — Schwanengesang prefaced by An die ferne Geliebte, reviewed here). Here’s an excerpt:
In a brief introduction to his Tully Hall recital on Thursday, October 15, the tenor Mark Padmore remarked that the sense of longing encompassed by the German Sehnsucht — a word that defies easy translation — provided the link between the evening’s pair of cycles by Schubert and Beethoven, performed with keyboard partner Kristian Bezuidenhout.
[…]
The term recital sounds too coldly objective. Certainly it fails to do justice to the sense they achieved of a “through-composed” emotional journey, without the benefit of staging or design elements: Gesamtkunstwerk of music and poetry on an intimate scale….
Stop right there: “Most educated people are uncomfortable admitting that Shakespeare’s language often feels more medicinal than enlightening.”
This absurd claim (“medicinal”??) is just one of the hopelessly faulty assumptions in John H. McWhorter’s Wall Street Journal piece “A Facelift for Shakespeare”, which attempts to argue the case for “translating” all of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary English — an initiative commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — “because Shakespeare’s English is so far removed from the English of 2015 that it often interferes [sic] with our own comprehension.”
This is the level of argument McWhorter puts forward: “It is true that translated Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare in the strictest [sic] sense.”
Let’s not forget to rewrite those passages that make us “uncomfortable,” right? After all, they gave King Lear a happy ending back in the Restoration.
And why hesitate when it comes to the other arts? I guess Walter Murphy was way ahead of his time in 1976 when he translated Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to “A Fifth of Beethoven,” making it safe and trigger-free for the disco era:
My review of the Ehnes Quartet and their Beethoven cycle from this summer’s Seattle Chamber Music Society Festival has been published in the current issue of String magazine. A link to it is here (pdf).
Here’s my piece for The Strad about violinist James Ehnes and his string quartet, who recently opened Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2015 Summer Festival:
James Ehnes has long been a familiar presence on the international circuit, but he remains known to many music lovers primarily as a solo violinist — a virtuoso who, armed with a stunning technique, also has something compelling to say. When he does appear in chamber programmes, it’s often been with a piano partner or in varying chamber formations.
This week brings the San Francisco Symphony’s performances with Michael Tilson Thomas of the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven — a work that certainly belongs to my top-ten list of all time.
Following a trial run in Los Angeles in January, it’s being given as a “multimedia staged event”, complete with scenic, lighting, and video design; James Darrah is the director.
Of the earlier run in January, Mark Swed had this to say about MTT’s relationship with the Beethoven score:
In the grandest sense, this “Missa Solemnis,” with all its attendant baggage, is a kind of mission statement for MTT. He sets out to unpack a complicated artistic and musical construct, to reveal its workings and to treat it as a large-scale act of discovery.
The Missa Solemnis held intense personal significance for its composer as well: “Von Herzen — Möge es wieder — Zu Herzen gehn!” (“From the heart –- may it return to the heart!” wrote Beethoven on the copy of the score he presented to its dedicatee, his pupil and friend Archduke Rudolf.
For its public “premiere” in Vienna, three of the Missa‘s movements were given as part of the grand concert of 7 May 1824 that also unveiled the Ninth Symphony. (The secular context brought objections to performing the entire Missa.)
Next week MTT and the SFS continue their Beethoven Festival with a recreation of an earlier “marathon concert”: the one on a cold December night in 1808, when Beethoven premiered his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and Fourth Piano Concerto in a program that also included a concert aria, three movements from his other Mass setting (the Mass in C major), a piano fantasy, and the Choral Fantasy, that fascinating precursor to the Ninth.
“When your heart beats irregularly from heart disease, it does so in some predictable patterns. We think we hear some of those same patterns in his music,”says Professor of Internal Medicine Joel Howell about Beethoven, referring to findings in an article he recently co-authored: “The Heartfelt Music of Ludwig van Beethoven” (together with cardiologist Zachary D. Goldberger and musicologist Steven Whiting.
Their article, according to the abstract, “strengthens the hypothesis that Beethoven suffered from cardiac arrhythmias by placing Beethoven’s music in its historical context, and by identifying several compositions that may reflect Beethoven’s experience of an arrhythmia.”
Of course Beethoven’s best-known physical condition was his deafness, which started setting in around the turn of the century, when he was entering his thirties. The causes, however, remain a matter of speculation. In her post on the Futurity website, Beata Mostafavi remarks that additional claims have been made over the years that the composer suffered from “a litany of mysterious health problems including inflammatory bowel disease, Paget’s disease (abnormal bone destruction), liver disease, alcohol abuse, and kidney disease.”
As for the claim of an abnormal heartbeat, the new study zeroes in on such compositions as the late string quartets: in particular, the Cavatina from Op. 130 in B-flat major. Mostafavi cites the famous score indication in the middle of the Cavatina — “beklemmt” (“anguished,” “pinched,” “oppressed”), which the authors apparently render as “heavy of heart”:
[The] authors note that “heavy of heart” could mean sadness but may also describe the sensation of pressure, a feeling that is associated with cardiac disease. “The arrhythmic quality of this section is unquestionable,” they write.
I wonder, though, whether their premise might be working the wrong way. Scientists and artists approach unpredictability and patterns in a radically different way. Musical genius deliberately expresses itself via unpredictable patterns. One of the key factors that makes mediocre music mediocre and boring is precisely because (usually unconsciously) we can tell “where it’s going” as it repeats the same formulas over and over.
(Note this is NOT to be equated with the techniques of Minimalism: predictability can also be made artfully unpredictable.)
But to the extent that this study is trying to “explain” pattern aberrations, I think it may be on the wrong track. On the other hand, there are plausible arguments for a composer like Mahler — who we know did suffer from a serious heart ailment — inscribing his bio-rhythms into something like the halting rhythmic patterns at the start of his Ninth Symphony.
I’ve also seen convincing descriptions of the finale of Beethoven’s Second Symphony — one of the great examples of humor in music — as alluding to the composer’s digestive problems to create a musical joke:
Pay attention to how that chirpy opening figure is set against the rumble lower in the strings that follows it — the leap from this “hiccup” high up to the rumbles and quivers below, like a belch with belly-growl. The Second was actually considered bizarre and even shocking music at its premiere in 1803. One contemporary review on the piece as a whole: “a hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refuses to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death.”
My review of the concluding concert of the 2014 Summer Festival is now on Bachtrack:
The days are starting to grow noticeably shorter in the Pacific Northwest, and the end of the month-long Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival brings yet another wistful reminder that we’re now facing the season’s inexorable downward slope. An immersive atmosphere of four weeks of three concerts each (plus free prelude recitals and additional events) gives the festival much of its flavour, making one all the more reluctant to bid adieu.
It’s been a month especially generous in discoveries, from the world première of an imaginatively crafted single-movement piano trio commissioned from Derek Bermel (with the Saramago-inspired title Death with Interruptions) to a welcome dose of vocal chamber music gems and other rarities mixed in with more standard fare.
On Saturday night the festival drew to a close with a typically diverse roster of musicians (totalling 15 over the course of the concert).
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 