One advantage — you can tell what the lyrics are in the background music. For a movie like Six-String Samurai, it adds to the experience. Maybe I should actually buy a Red Elvises CD.
Tag Archives: music
stealth soloist selection
Ari had a brilliant idea for a way to run chorus rehearsals. Soloist selection will be at random for each piece, but you won’t know if you have a solo until it’s time to sing it.
The corresponding conducting technique is to give the upbeat and then on the downbeat suddenly point at the soloist-to-be. This technique is adapted from a certain conductors-who-will-remain-unnamed’s habit of switching soloists at the last minute. The advantage is that everyone will be looking up out of their music, so it’s not all a wash.
tenors
I promised a while back that I would talk about tenors: Peter Pears, Fritz Wunderlich, and Ian Bostridge.
Manu lent me a cd of Ian Bostridge singing Schumann’s Dichterliebe with the (to me at the time) ludicrous assertion that it was significantly better than Wunderlich’s approach to the same song cycle. After long deliberation between the two recordings, I would agree that they are significantly different but the absolute quality depends on what you are in the mood for.
Wunderlich is a master of technique to the point that even the heavy Romanticism of Schumann seems somehow classical. He gives free reign to his vibrato in a natural way, it seems. Barring that effect, the songs are simple yet beautiful. He lets the sonic texture of the music speak for itself. Bostridge, on the other hand, takes a much more active role in the interpretation of the music. At times it sounds too meddlesome — in the song “Ich hab’ in traum geweinet,” he sounds too overwrought to me for such a spare and clinical accompaniment. On the other hand, in songs like “Ein Juengling liebt ein Maedchen,” Wunderlich sounds lumbering compared to the nimble and light Bostridge. It’s a toss-up for me, I think. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to implement my own interpretation of the Dichterliebe, but it lies somewhere between then. But having listened only to the Wunderlich, Bostridge’s interpretation is a breath of fresh air.
Bostridge’s vocal style leads me to talk about Peter Pears, who was Britten’s lover and partner (had they been in MA I’m sure they would have gotten married). Britten wrote many pieces for Pears that highlight what some characterize as an unusual voice. I don’t think it’s unusual at all, but rather a more natural voice than we hear from other classically trained singers. Pears sounds like he comes from the same “warbler” tradition that appears in the flashback scenes of The Singing Detective. He is full of vibrato and perhaps sounds ponderous in his low range, but his tone is agile, for lack of a better word. He glides effortlessly through Britten’s Nocturne, for example, a feat which most other tenors would find difficult to be sure.
All of these singers are worth a listen. It adds a whole different dimension to listen to such wildly varying interpretations as Wunderlich and Bostridge, and it’s worth hearing Britten as sung by his intended tenor to get the feel of his solo voice music.
new composers
Listening to the stream of WHRB, as recommended by Manu, I heard a program of choral music by the Danish composer Per Nørgård. It was rather beautiful, I thought, and I had never heard of him before.
recording in grace cathedral
Today I did the first half of a recording session with the Pacific Collegium in Grace Cathedral (Episcopalian) in San Francisco. We were trying to record Britten’s Hymn To The Virgin and A Boy Was Born. Unfortunately, our governor’s visit precipitated a helicopter flying over the church periodically and ruining any hope of recording for the first two hours. After that we did manage to get some things laid down, more or less. I’m not sure when the commercial CD will be available, but I hope I get to sing with this group some more. It’s definitely the best chamber group I’ve gotten a chance to sing with. And Britten is awesome.
day 2 report
I started out (ha) by going Lange’s Delicatessen in Bronxville, which was packed and had more people behind the counter than I’ve ever seen in a deli that size. It was ridiculous. Adam and I met up with the inimitable Geeta Dayal, journalist extraordinaire, for a trip to the Whitney Museum.
We went specifically to see the Tim Wilkinson exhibit, which was awesome. Huge sculptures with whirring motors generating strange clicking noises, tiny sculptures of feathers, eggs, webs, and skeletons made of human nails and hair, a geared machine that writes his signature, a skeleton with a slide whistle that goes up and down, and all sorts of other disturbing and wonderful creations. It was nerd-tastic. Other highlights were a number of self-portraits where the artist drew only the parts of him that he could see, or created a topographic map of his body by taking photographs of himself submerged in various depths of black paint and then drawing the level curves.
What we missed was the Überorgan, a large installation in a lobby of a building on 59th and Madison. It is a huge construction of baloons and tubes, like a tentacled brain gone amok. The music is read off of a gigantic roll of plastic, 2 feet or so wide, painted with dots and dashes of black. A light sensor reads the sheet like a player piano and plays it out of the pipes of the organ. It plays every hour on the hour though, and we arrived too late for the performance. It’s on until May though, and I might try and swing by tomorrow to see it.
We then went to Madras Mahal, which was somewhere on Lexington (26th I think). It’s one of a number of South Indian restaurants in that part of Manhattan. I had iddlies and a third of Geeta’s utthappam, which was tasty albeit not amazing. The dosas looked pretty good, but I didn’t think I was hungry enough for that. The place is around $10, but like I said, there looked like other equally good places nearby.
Adam and I returned to Bronxville, had dinner, and decided to go see Garaj Mahal at the Knitting Factory. It was pretty good, but we had to duck out near the end of the last set since it was around 3:30, and the show started at 11:30. Insert rant about Bay Area’s lack of late-night events here. The band was good, a sort of tepid Indian-jazz fusion (tepid meaning the fusion, not the playing). If you want more real Indian music, go with something like Natraj. But the show was good — I had only heard one song of theirs before and was pretty impressed. Fans of Charlie Hunter and John McLaughlin would appreciate it, I think.
And then, sleep.
cddb classical music entries
CDDB is absolutely atrocious when it comes to classical music. It’s not that the albums aren’t there, but the track information is completely screwed up. The most common screw-up is using the “artist” field for the expression marking on the movement of, for example, a piano concerto. The net effect of which is to introduce 3-5 spurious artists into your mp3 library who have names like “II. Molto Adagio.” Now, maybe there’s a famous sackbut player named II Molto Adagio, but I doubt that he would be the priciple artist on Schoenberg’s piano concerto.
Normally it’s not such a big deal, but since the iPod doesn’t have a convenient search feature, scrolling through all the different movements while looking through the artists is a pain in the ass. It’s almost faster to type in all the album information by hand, but not quite. Damn you, CDDB.
tooth and nail songs
Two songs from Tooth and Nail are up on the website of the composer, Mike Roberts. Apparently his brother wrote the audio player — it’s pretty damn cool.
immoral opera
The Duma wants to censor an opera called The Children of Rosenthal:
The opera tells a tale of a meeting in Moscow of clones created by a Russian scientist of five great classical composers Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Verdi.
I dunno about you, but that sounds like a hilarious premise. And it’ll be all avante-garde too — even better!
two new toys
At first, there was a lonely fruity box, singing a song to itself:
And then it found a friend who could help it sing out to the world:
Thanks to my brother for the awesome speaker dock. Huzzah!
An Ergodic Walk 