Sound Mind is looking forward to a Sound Sleep before the start of whatever comes next

I'm off for March Break and, given that my blog may or may not be present as part of the Star's entertainment offerings when I return, I figure it's a good time to pause and thank you, gentle reader, for popping by to visit and share in these miscellaneous musings, listenings and bits of news.

If I counted right, this is my 847th post since the first on March 16, 2009. I was, with the rest of my colleagues at the Star, encouraged to start a blog in the paper's effort to reach as many people as possible every day and also add to the variety of different voices that readers could find under the broad umbrella of a daily news organization.

The Old Skool printed Star still gets more than a million reads every day, as far as I know. Yesterday, for the first time since April, 2009, I saw the traffic figures for my blog and immediately understood why my managers see no point in having me spend a couple of hours every day working on it. I'm told my blog was more popular than many others under the Star's purview, but, to put it bluntly, for me they were a powerful slap in the face. The metaphoric red marks will take a little while to fade from my bestubbled cheek.

My little history with my little blog is a tiny microcosm of the well-documented struggles all news organizations are having with shifting reading and interest habits. Don't let any pundit, expert or visionary convince you otherwise: There isn't a single news organization out there that has any clue what combination of information and social media tools are the right mix to gather up a critical mass of readers while bringing in enough revenue to pay for the delivery of credible news and opinion. It is all a process of trial and error.

In the meantime, what we do -- and what format we do it in -- will continue to be in constant flux.

That said, I've had a ball with this blog. It's been a brilliant way to ask myself questions, to explore new music and to distract my wandering mind with a few grains of sand in the world's giant classical-music sandbox.

I've sometimes begrudged but largely enjoyed the discipline of having a daily post ready by 9 am (I'm slacking off already: it's 9:20 am as I write this) and it could be that I've become so addicted to the post-dog-walk Dear Diary routine that I'll want to continue this blog regardless of whether it enjoys the Star's official blessing.

But we'll see.

I can't very well say goodbye without a musical salutation influenced by the mind-blowing images from yesterday's earthquake in Japan.

Here are Edward Elgar's 1899 Sea Pictures, gorgeously sung by British mezzo Sarah Connolly in a 2006 Naxos recording with the Bournemouth Symphony led by Simon Wright.

I've included the poems (with the lines and verses clumped together to save space):

1. Sea Slumber-Song, by Roden Noel
Sea-birds are asleep, The world forgets to weep, Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song On the shadowy sand Of this elfin land; ‘I, the Mother mild, Hush thee, O my child, Forget the voices wild! Isles in elfin light Dream, the rocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves, Veil their marbles bright, Foam glimmers faintly white Upon the shelly sand Of this elfin land; Sea-sound, like violins, To slumber woos and wins, I murmur my soft slumber-song. Leave woes, and wails, and sins, Ocean’s shadowy might Breathes good-night, Good-night!’

2. In Haven (Capri), by Alice Elgar
Closely let me hold thy hand, Storms are sweeping sea and land; Love alone will stand. Closely cling, for waves beat fast, Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast; Love alone will last. Kiss my lips, and softly say; ‘Joy, sea-swept, may fade to-day; Love alone will stay.’

3. Sabbath Morning at Sea, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The ship went on with solemn face; To meet the darkness on the deep. The solemn ship went onward, I bowed down weary in the place; For parting tears and present sleep Had weighed mine eyelids downward. The new sight, the new wondrous sight! The waters around me, turbulent, The skies, impassive o’er me, Calm in a moonless, sunless light, As glorified by even the intent Of holding the day glory! Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day, The sea sings round me while ye roll Afar the hymn, unaltered, And kneel, where once I knelt to pray, And bless me deeper in your soul Because your voice has faltered. And though this sabbath comes to me Without the stoled minister, And chanting congregation. God’s Spirit shall give comfort. He Who brooded soft on waters drear Creator on creation. He shall assist me to look higher, Where keep the saints, with harp and song, An endless sabbath morning, And on that sea commixed with fire, Oft drop their eyelids raised too long To the full Godhead’s burning.

4. Where Corals Lie, by Richard Garnett
The deeps have music soft and low When winds awake the airy spry, It lures me, lures me on to go And see the land where corals lie. By mount and mead, by lawn and rill, When night is deep, and moon is high, That music seeks and finds me still, And tells me where the corals lie. Yes, press my eyelids close, ’tis well; But far the rapid fancies fly To rolling worlds of wave and shell, And all the lands where corals lie. Thy lips are like a sunset glow, Thy smile is like a morning sky, Yet leave me, leave me, let me go And see the land where corals lie.

5. The Swimmer, by Adam Lindsay Gordon
With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid, To southward far as the sight can roam, Only the swirl of the surges livid, The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. Only the crag and cliff to nor’ward, And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, Waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward, On shallows sheeted with flaming foam. A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly, And shores trod seldom by feet of men – Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie, They have lain embedded these long years ten. Love! when we wandered here together, Hand in hand through the sparkling weather, From the heights and hollows of fern and heather, God surely loved us a little then. The skies were fairer and shores were firmer – The blue sea over the bright sand roll’d; Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur, Sheen of silver and glamour of gold. So, girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder And clad with lightning and shod with sleet, And strong winds treading the swift waves under The flying rollers with frothy feet, One gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on The sky line, staining the green gulf crimson, A death-stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun That strikes through his stormy winding sheet. O, brave white horses! you gather and gallop, The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins; Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop In your hollow backs, on your high-arched manes. I would ride as never a man has ridden In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden; To gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden, Where no light wearies and no loves wanes.

William Steinway diaries an example of how personal stuff turns history's big events into footnotes

There are just a few weeks left in the Smithsonian's Steinway exhibit, and I finally had a chance to check out the diaries of William Henry Steinway, a portion of which which the museum has made available online. He was the main driving force in the rise of Steinway & Sons, the developer of his own little section of Queens, as well as being a significant force in New York City's civic life.

The most striking thing about the entries is how earth-shattering events (in this case, the first big clash between Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War) are reduced to footnote status -- Sunday, July 21, 1861: "Battle of Bull Run" -- while we find out that Steinway's wife Regina got seasick on the boat crossing from Niagara to Toronto on Aug. 20. The next day, he was given a tour of the city by a Nordheimer (one of Toronto's two big pianomaking families). "Splendid place," he writes.

(The picture at left is of him in front of the Steinway mansion in Astoria, which happens to be up for sale right now for $2.5 million.)

The diaries brim with the little details of the very busy life of a keen entrepreneur. Steinway died, aged 61, in 1896. Here are the entries for June 3 & 4, 1877:

At 9 A.M. to factory, see Kroeger talk everything over with him, & see that Iron Resonator in Grand is dropped, &  Alberts improvement made. Then drive to Brosi, but do not find any of the Tafelrunde there. Take dinner with mother then drive to Kroegers house, to Astoria with him with him & Luther through the factory, third floor is completely finished, we talk over everything I then with Williams, Judge Pierce & Theodore Schultz look over my Rapalye Property on Winthrop Ave to locate auxiliary Waterworks, I then walk to Stonehouse Luther says that he will move during this week Drive to 52d str. leave horse & buggy there then home by 4th Ave. find my children and many other children at supper, George celebrating his 12th birthday which falls upon tomorrow. Mr. Tretbar, Chas & Henry & I play Skat, lose 5 Cents Yesterday & today slight touch in Elbow pit of right arm, take lunch at Rathskeller, Dr. Auerbach there. Take a Steambath in afternoon, my 6th this season, at home in eve'g, draw up my will

It doesn't look like there are any thunderbolts of enlightenment in these diaries, but it is a fun way to pass some time in another time and place, so different and yet so similar to our own.

Trio Medieval ready to release new disc of sacred music from 13th century England

Photo: Asa M. Mikkelsen

It's been a while since the excellent Norwegian female a cappella Trio Medieval has recorded a disc. In advance of the release of their latest, A Worcester Ladymass, next Tuesday, NPR is offering a free sneak peak on its website. It's a fantastic mix of great sound, serious scholarship and accessible new music.

The trio -- Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fugelseth and Torunn Ostrem  Osum -- sounds wonderful in this 13th century Mass setting, found at a Benedictine abbey in Worcester. As the introductory article at NPR notes, pages from the manuscript had been removed to bind and repair other books. English composer Gavin Bryars set the missing Credo and the closing Benedicamus Domino.

The original music is a fascinating hybrid of organum (plainsong with an, in this case, moving pedal point/accompaniment) and freer polyphony. Bryars didn't try to mimic the Worcester style at all, but his additions somehow manage to fit in very nicely.

Check it all out here.

Tonight: Pianist Frank Horvat keeps himself and his audience in the dark for Hart House concert

Torontonian Frank Horvat is one of the few working pianists whose living includes performing the music they themselves have created. It's interesting that, during these anniversary years for Chopin and Liszt, the two seminal composer-pianists, I haven't noticed many people stopping to appreciate those who carry on that tradition.

Horvat has been on the road since Earth Day last year, in an environmental concsiousness-raising effort he calls the Green Keys Tour. He stops tonight in the Music Room at Hart House, with a free recital at 8 p.m. of his own music in the dark, to minimize the number of atoms smashed and water droplets spun to generate electricity for this entertainment.

Rather than earn money from selling tickets, Horvat hopes to sell some sheet music and CDs. A portion of the proceeds go to the World Wildlife Fund.

The pianist's style is accessible and eclectic. He draws from pop, blues and minimalism, among other things. The recital's main piece is Earth Hour, which is an hour long.

Horvat has a lot of music sampls on his website. In  case you want to save yourself a click or two, here is "Poverty," a sample from his 2010 CD, A Little Night Music:

New CD a sample of unconventional thinking from member of a band of Parisian hooligans

Whenever you kill hundreds of thousands of people, you're going to get some of their culture, too. Among the casulalties of World War I was a Parisian group that was more than a salon and less than the Arts & Crafts movement in England and the United States.

The Parisians called themselves la Société des Apaches, which in pre-politically correct form is meant to mean Society of Hooligans. They met every Saturday. Their anthem is said to have been the opening theme of the second movement of Borodin's Second Symphony:

There were writers, critics, composers, poets, publishers, interior decorators, textile artists (a sample pictured above is by Edouard Benedictus who also, I think, invented safety glass), musicians and painters among their ranks. Their unofficial leader was Maurice Ravel, who even created a fictional member of the group, Gomez de Riquet, just for fun. Ravel dedicated the pieces in Miroirs to this scrappy gang.

One of the members was composer and music critic Florent Schmitt, born in 1870 (making him five years older than Ravel). His music was very popular in France at the turn of the 20th century but here's another example of a composer who outlived his times. By the time he died in 1958, Schmitt was all but forgotten (it didn't help that Schmitt made a show of being a collaborator during World War II).

Excellent younger French pianist Vincent Larderet has done the world-premiere recording of Schmitt's piano transcription of his reworked 1911 ballet score for La Tragédie de Salomé, which was first performed in 1907 -- a work Stravinsky praised as a masterpiece of Modern music.

Larderet has filled out the Naxos CD with a three-piece suite called Ombres, written near the close of World War I and dripping with drama and melancholy. The second, Mirages, features a 1920 tribute to Claude Debussy and a piece dedicated to Alfred Cortot.

For album details, click here.

All of this music makes incredible technical demands on the pianist -- which Larderet overcomes with panache. His playing is remarkable for its ease as well as style. Although tonal, the music isn't easy to digest; it's the sort of listening experience that improves over multiple tries, as the composer's craft begins to show itself more clearly.

Here is Schmitt's colourful 1924 orchestration of Mirages. The conductor is Jacques Mercier:

Moment Musical: A swagger into Monday, thanks to Ahn Trio and David Balakrishnan

A short recital the hipper-than-thou Ahn Trio (cellist Maria, pianist Lucia, violinist Angella) gave for TEDWomen in Washington before Christmas is now available online. It is 10 minutes of excellent, spirited musicmaking. The sisters start with "Skylife," by Turtle Island String Quartet founder David Balakrishnan. Following is "Oblivion," by Astor Piazzolla:

What does it mean when we become physically and emotionally disengaged from music?

Here's a piece of Sunday reading (a story on whatever happened to the audiophile) and listening (a sparkling solo recital by Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker).

If you open both windows at the same time, reading one while listening, you are about to experience the music like most people do, these days.

Here's a passage from yesterday's National Public Radio article:

Listening to music used to be a plop-down, stay-still event. Now it's something people do while doing something else, like eating while driving or chatting on a phone while walking. The experience of listening to music these days, says Timothy Doyle of the Consumer Electronics Association, is "not unlike personal computing: It's a 24/7 multilocation proposition; people are taking their music with them, and as a whole, the world has changed so that there are simply fewer and fewer 'old school' proponents of sitting down and listening to music."

Cue up the statistics: In 1998, The New York Times estimated that high-end audio sales totaled approximately $500 million a year. In 2010, the CEA says, sales were around $200 million.

The article doesn't stray from its audiophile focus. But, as I was reading, the question that popped up in my mind was: Was does it mean for us and for our culture when we disengage from music?

Music was born and is practiced in many cultures as a way of releasing a range of human emotion, from jubliation to coping with loss. Alone or in concert, the music is being created or danced to or listened to as a single-focus activity.

Anyone living in a digital culture can carry a mix an ever-shifting soundtrack of musical styles as they shave, microwave fettucine alfredo, drive, take cash from an ATM, order a latte, jog, or tweet. There's no need to worry about the quality of sound beyond basic reproductive fidelity. Style is no issue, nor is a discussion of whether it is sacred or secular.

There are more musical soundwaves reaching more ears as you read this than at any other point in human history. Is that a good thing -- or too much of a good thing?

That said, some musical performances -- and musicians -- compel attention. Jackie Parker is one of those people. Nothing he plays is dull, and he tends to draw from a colourful palette. Check out the concert, which includes Petrouchka, from his set of spectacular home-made piano transcriptions of Stravinsky's ballets.

Story of Roman emperor Caligula and Vivaldi's Four Seasons pack an odd punch in new ballet

In 2005, the Paris Opera ballet presented a new ballet built by dancer Nicholas Le Riche on mentally unstable Roman emperor Caligula, who was 29 when he was killed by the Pretorian Guard in 41 A.D. Le Riche says he spent five years researching Caligula's life and fashioning this ballet built on the music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos and newly composed electro-acoustic interludes by Louis Dandrel. As the choice of music suggests, le Riche sees more than wantonness and evil in Caligula's life.

The results are debatable from a historical point of view, and the choice of music really is strange. But, in a remount captured on video last month, the Paris Opera orchestra is fantastic (led by violin soloist and concertmaster Frédéric Laroque) and the dancing is, I think, extraordinary from the corps de ballet up to Stéphane Buillion as Caligula. I found it mesmerising -- and enjoyable once I stopped thinking about the historical Caligula.

You can catch it for free on medici.tv, here.

This is a little trailer video prepared by Paris Opera:

Tafelmusik's Galileo Project, on now, blows away New York Times critic

I'm not sure many Torontonians appreciate what's been going on in our concert halls lately. Here is just one example from one week out of 52, found in today's New York Times ArtsBeat blog:

(For details on the remaining concerts -- most of which are sold-out, click here.)

Star-Studded Early Music in Toronto

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

TORONTO — Sometimes you get lucky. I came here to see how the Toronto Symphony was faring a decade after its troubled times, and that, it turns out, would have been satisfying enough.

But the timing also allowed me to catch up with the acclaimed early-music ensemble Tafelmusik at the Trinity-St. Paul’s Center, a converted church near Toronto University, on Thursday. And it was a superb evening: a revival of the group’s magnum opus, “The Galileo Project,” created in 2009 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, tied to the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s development of the astronomical telescope.

Since 1609 was also the year Monteverdi’s landmark opera “Orfeo” was published, and since Galileo was, in the narrator’s words, an “amateur member of a professional family of lute players,” many musical avenues were open, and the project — programmed and scripted by Alison Mackay, Tafelmusik’s double-bassist — took most of them. Especially in the first half, the program offered some of the Baroque era’s choicest morsels, including selections from “Orfeo” and from Lully’s “Phaeton.”

The second half, with the added agenda of representing composers involved in what the narrator called “the most famous arts festival of the 18th century,” the Festival of the Planets in 1719, celebrating a royal wedding in Dresden, had drier moments in works by Georg Philipp Telemann, Jan Dismas Zelenka and Sylvius Leopold Weiss. (The 32 oboists and bassoonists of the festival were gamely represented here by 2 oboists and a lone bassoonist.) But the culmination came — as it only could, in an event steeped in intellect and imagination — with Bach: the Sinfonia from the Cantata No. 1, “How Brightly Shines the Morning Star,” introduced by snippets from Kepler’s “Harmony of the Worlds.”

All of this was woven into a theatrical production designed by Glenn Davidson and directed by Marshall Pynkoski. The narration incorporated texts by and about Galileo and Newton, poetry by Ovid and Shakespeare, and modern commentary; and a stream of colorful astronomical images were projected onto a round screen, as if viewed through a giant telescope.

The actor Shaun Smyth was an excellent narrator, and in an anonymous 18th-century “Astronomical Drinking Song,” a purposefully mediocre singer. He and the players not anchored to large instruments moved about the stage — sometimes circling in orbits, occasionally breaking into near-dance, always interacting with one another — and occasionally wandering into the auditorium.

That the musical performance, through it all, was of the highest order hardly needs saying. As usual Jeanne Lamon, Tafelmusik’s music director, led from the violin. Charlotte Nediger, on harpsichord, and Ms. Mackay, on bass, were also solid presences, and the bursts of virtuosity were too widespread and numerous to list.

But what was truly remarkable, for a band of 17 playing a kaleidoscopic variety of repertory, was that it was all done from memory: necessarily, given the almost constant movement and the occasional semidarkness. It said much for the professionalism of the enterprise that an understudy, replacing an ailing violinist, could step seamlessly into the mix.

This production, which has traveled to China and Malaysia, to Mexico and California, and is bound for Australia, the Netherlands and Spain, has yet to find its way to New York. That can’t happen soon enough.

 

What is it I do? It's not about following the notes, says conductor Riccardo Muti

Here is an excellent, recent presentation by Riccardo Muti, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the art of conducting (thanks to my friend Shelley for passing this along):