Filmmaker Michael Lawrence tells me a field of wheat played Bach for Steve Jobs

Music-loving American filmmaker Michael Lawrence sent me a note this afternoon about a tribute to Steve Jobs he has put together, in which Jobs calls the computer the greatest tool ever devised by humans, "a bicycle for our minds."

Here is Lawrence's note to me, followed by the video.

Like so many people around the world, I have been thinking of Steve Jobs since his passing. The outpouring has been almost surreal. 

I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software.

In 1989, I filmed an interview with Steve for my Library of Congress film and what a special day that was.   I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him.  I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.

A few years back, I put up a clip from the interview on YouTube and it has been viewed over 400,000 times - 34,000 views just yesterday alone.  

I didn't know Steve Jobs loved Bach until Mike Hawley asked me to send Steve and his wife Laurene a copy of BACH & friends.  Mike shared that Steve was one of his closest personal friends.  I found this quote of Steve talking of Bach:

"I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field.”  Quote from "Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World" by Michael Moritz

 

Nike Wagner admits to her famous family's disdain for their famous ancestor Franz Liszt

Glossy German newsmagazine Der Spiegel has published an interview with Nike Wagner, one of Richard Wagner's great-granddaughters, and one of the many family members who, at one time or another, has vied to head the Bayreuth Festival.

Among the many things that get touched upon in the interview, which includes candour about the family's closeness with Hitler (they wouldn't go to be on New year's eve until the Fuehrer had called with his wishes), is an admission that Richard Wagner didn't think much of his father-in-law, disdaining his music as well as his showmanship.

For anyone curious about the personal side of the music world, the article is worth a read in translation here.

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Because this is the 200th anniversary year of Franz Liszt's birth, I've been hearing far more of his B Minor Piano Sonata than I would care to. It's a wonderful piece that is about far more than mere show, but Liszt left stacks and stacks of music that we are not hearing.

But there's a reason that the Sonata is on everyone's fingers. And I don't think that, among this year's recordings or concerts, I've heard as cleanly laid-out an interpretation as from Haiou Zhang, a young Chinese pianist of Lang Lang's vintage who left the Beijing Central Conservatory for northern Germany rather than the United States.

Zhang's career has been thriving in Europe. We've had three tastes of him in Toronto thanks for the enthusiastic support of conductor Kerry Stratton. And his new Liszt album is well worth checking out. There are four other pieces on it, besides the Sonata, providing an overview of Liszt's styles and proclivities.

You'll find the details here.

Also, Zhang returns to Ontario on May 2, 2012, for a recital at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts.

Rather than some Liszt, here is Zhang in a live performance Venetian Boat Song from Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words in Spandau last November (Mendelssohn was only two years older than Liszt -- and his music was the object of Richard Wagner's multiple anti-Semitic tirades):

Organist Cameron Carpenter boldly flying uncharted galaxies as a champion of a virtual one-man symphony

 

Cameron Carpenter in rehearsal at Koerner Hall on June 15, 2011. Photos: John Terauds

Boldly unorthodox American organist Cameron Carpenter, who turns 30 this year, has never been more focused about changing the culture surrounding pipe-organ concerts.

Moses Znaimer invited him to this year's IdeaCity conference, which was held at the Royal Conservatory's Telus Centre last week. Carpenter had thought he would give a concert, but Znaimer also wanted attendees to hear about the organist's quest to build the perfect electronic substitute for the notoriously cranky and maintenance-intensive traditional pipe organ.

I sat down with Carpenter a few days later to catch up over a long breakfast.

It's been a year of changes for him: He's now with mega artist-managers CAMI and has moved to Berlin, which has turned into quite the Mecca for adventurous younger creative souls in search of open-minded audiences and cheap rents.

In Berlin, Carpenter has found the perfect large hall to house his dream instrument: a five-manual virtual concert organ designed to make any sound he desires, require (virtually !) no maintenance and be easy to pack up and ship to any location with an electrical wall outlet.

The organist is trying to raise $1.5 million (U.S.) to make this all happen. Although this sounds like a ridiculous amount of money for a pipeless pipe organ, my guess it's less than half of what it would cost to build the real thing -- and the real thing would not be going anywhere in a hurry.

The electronic engineering expertise for all this comes from Marshall & Ogletree, a small outfit in suburban Boston that has developed a particularly effective way to generate the complex waveforms needed to make a digital pipe organ sound like the real thing.

Carpenter himself is the specification brains -- figuring out just what kinds of sound should be assigned to each stop, how to arrange groups of stops for each manual, and how they can each (and all) be combined and recombined on the fly.

As we spoke, Carpenter revealed how he has even dabbled in the oh-so-fine art of modifying the sound waves of one tone to sound like another.

It's all a bit mind-boggling, but the short version of all this is that Carpenter is one of the rare artists who has the brain power and outside-the-box creativity to completely reshape their artform.

Exhibit A: Him rehearsing his paraphrase of Franz Schubert's Erlkönig on a Mighty Wurlitzer theatre organ for his latest album, Cameron Live!:

If you take Carpenter out of his creative context, it's easy to mistake him as arrogant and, at the extreme, a lunatic. Many professional organists look askance, because he repeats and over and over again how organists need to get out of the way of their own instrument.

Given how small and rarefied the world of concert organists is -- and how small and rarefied are its audiences -- I think people like Carpenter should be given as much encouragement as possible. 

There is no other instrument in the history of humankind that is capable of the breadth of expression as the organ. As the great English and French organ builders of the late 19th century intended, it is literally an orchestra in a box -- so why not approach it like Gustavo Dudamel and blow an audience's hair sideways in the process.

As for the electronic organ, there are so many bad ones out there, that it's difficult to keep an open mind.

I haven't been happy with the sound of the virtual organ Cameron has now used twice in Ontario concerts (a digital replica of a beast made in 1928 by E.M. Skinner for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Chicago). But Carpenter insists that his great Dream Opus (my name, not his) by Marshall & Ogletree will be wart-free.

It will even have special features, such as the ability to change each stop's temperament (the tuning setup) on the fly. ("Equal temperament can be so boring, after a while," said Carpenter.) The organist told me how, in one piece by Bach he has recorded, he goosed the tuning towards a towering climax, just to heighten the experience.

Purists are, justifyably, turned off by this sort of interpretive license. But there are many orchestras in the world -- the New York Philharmonic comes to mind -- that tune their strings sharp for the very same reason. They just can't do it in the middle of a piece.

The debate will continue over the pros and cons of showmanship vs toiling in relative obscurity. I'm happy to be around to watch and listen.

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Since my main skepticism with digital organs is over the quality of their sound, I played several videos Marshall & Ogletree have made of their Opus 5, installed in 2008 at Florida's newly minted Ave Maria University chapel -- with specifications by Cameron Carpenter. It's sounds very impressive on my Bose speakers.

This organ has many of the features Carpenter would have on his own instrument. The first video, of a Tuba Tune by C.S. Lang, provides a visual tour of the console and speaker array and Doug Marshall makes the merry noise.

The second video is of Brian Gilkes playing Olivier Messiaen's Dieu parmi nous (if this isn't totally convincing as an affirmation of faith, I don't know what is) on Marshall & Ogletree's more traditionally executed digital Op. 6, at Gordon College (in the Boston area).

The third clip is of the Tuba Tune by Norman Cocker played by the great traditional English organist Colin Walsh at one of my favourite traditional English organs, the great 1898 Father Willis at Lincoln Cathedral.

It's worth our while to embrace the age-old tradition of going away to find ourselves

I had lunch with Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic yesterday. She is in town to check up on progress with the June 24 premiere of her latest opera for Queen of Puddings Music Theatre.

The new opera, based on what happens on each of the seven days leading up to a wedding, is rooted in Serbian folk culture and music -- something I found out was not part of Sokolovic's internationalist upbringing in Belgrade.

The musical avant-garde was where the student composer's heart and head lay -- until she came to Canada to do her Masters in composition. She recalled how her teacher, José Evangelista, sat her down and asked her what she would like to compose.

She had been brought up in a prescriptive environment. "I always had to learn this and this, and had to write in this style," she explained. "No one had ever asked me what I wanted to write."

Over time, she discovered her voice, which included references to the folk traditions of her birth country.

This probably sounds hopelessly trite, but, for me, the biggest validation in this conversation was the value of distance.

There is a grand, old tradition of letting high school and university graduates take off to parts unknown for a few months or a year, to have them see the world. The act of experiencing other people and places is enriching enough, but, if I remember my own post-adolescent peregrinations well enough, the real, enduring value was being introduced to myself and who I was (and am) in the process.

Getting far away from home should be part of everyone's coming of age -- if they can afford to do it.

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This has nothing to do with my conversation with Sokolovic, but I couldn't help thinking tangentially of Gustav Mahler's first Lieder cycle, Songs of a Wayfarer.

Here is Measha Brueggergosman singing the fourth, final song, "Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz", performing at the "Risor in New York" festival presented by Carnegie Hall last December:

 

The two blue eyes

of my darling

they sent me into the

wide world.

I had to take my leave of this most-beloved place!

O blue eyes,

why did you gaze on me?

Now I have eternal sorrow and grief.

I went out into the quiet night

well across the dark heath.

To me no one bade farewell.

Farewell!

My companions are love and sorrow!

By the road stood a linden tree,

Where, for the first time,

I found rest in sleep!

Under the linden tree

that snowed its blossoms

over me,

I did not know how life went on,

and all was well again!

All! All, love and sorrow

and world and dream!

 

Tomorrow: John Tuttle's music on CBC Radio 2 and Detroit Symphony streams for free in HD

Organist and choir director John Tuttle is retiring after 30 years as the founding music director of the Exultate Chamber Singers. They give their final concert together at Grace Church-on-the-Hill a week from today, on May 13.

Tomorrow, Tuttle is the guest on This is My Music on CBC Radio 2, from 10 a.m. to noon. I'll be listening to find out how Tuttle's wit and broad musical horizons translate into his favourite pieces of music.

There's another musical moment to pay attention to tomorrow, across the river from Windsor. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which has somehow managed to scrape out a few spring concerts at the end of a strike-demolished season, is streaming its evening concert, starting at 8 p.m. It features Leila Josefowicz performing Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. Also on the programme is Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 and Shostakovich's perky Festive Overture. The conductor is Norwegian Arild Remmereit, who takes over as music director of the Rochester Philharmonic on Sepetember.

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Here, just because it's there, and because it is Franz Liszt's 200th, here is ever-elegant Cuban pianist Jorge Luis Prats performing Liszt's transcription of J.S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue for organ, in A minor:

Funny how schools teach conductors, but no one can accurately describe exactly what it takes to be a great one

Photo: Mark McNulty

Watching and hearing Vasily Petrenko, music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, at work with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last night was a treat. Here was another one of those young conductors who added a layer of magic to the music. His leadership wasn't about flash or panache. The word that came to mind over and over again was vibrancy, as if the orchestra had a colour-saturation control that the maestro had somehow turned up a few notches.

The orchestra also played particularly well, meaning that they were with Petrenko physically as well as emotionally.

It made me think again about what it is, exactly, that makes a great conductor. Everyone agrees on a certain set of basic attributes, which are part of teaching at any music school: of being prepared and knowing how to communicate one's musical ideas to each section of an orchestra.

Of course, it's not so simple.

I had a chance to sit down with Lorin Maazel a couple of weeks ago, in connection with the BlackCreek Music Festival launching in Toronto this summer.

A half-century ago, he was a hotshot conductor like Petrenko. Now he's a legend. (I have to admit I was intimidated at the prospect of an interview, and Maazel turned out to be far gentler than I feared.)

I asked Maazel what it is that makes a great conductor -- what is that special extra something.

He paused for a second.

"It's a good question, and I have no idea what it is. No one knows what it is that makes a conductor special, except that you know it when you hear it."

Petrenko has it. This is his first Toronto gig -- catch it if you can tonight. Hearing André Laplante play the Liszt First Piano Concerto is double-extra-creamy icing on the evening's cake.

Here is a link to Petrenko's blog.

Here is a 5-minute fragment of a BBC interview with Petrenko from 2008, filled with interesting, current issues:

This is a BBC clip of Petrenko leading the Liverpool orchestra in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6

Britain's James Rhodes: Total emotional breakdown followed by passionately hip musicmaking

There's a nice profile in today's Observer magazine in the Guardian on James Rhodes, a 35-year-old hipster who gave up live as a financial editor in London's City a few years ago in order to devote himself to classical piano. Except that there's nothing of the City -- or of classical aesthetic convention -- in what he does.

I'm not sure if he's anything more than a flash in the pan (if for no other reason than his personal emotional stamina), but I like what he's doing in terms of trying to connect with an audience in different ways.

(Don't miss the short video that accompanies the article: Here's this long-haired, tattoed dude surrounded by the gilded history in London's Steinway Hall, a jarring juxtaposition.)

In a review of a recital at London's über-hip Roundhouse in 2009, the Guardian's young Erica Jeal thought "Rhodes's abilities as an interpreter don't yet do justice to the real greats on his programme:"

Rhodes is fed up with the traditional piano recital format - and who can blame him? So, though his programme is decidedly old-school, he presents it more like a pop gig. Half the audience are sitting at round tables with drinks, and cameras project live footage on to the screens behind Rhodes's spotlit Steinway. On one level, it has worked: the average age of the audience is at most half that of the Wigmore Hall, where it can safely be said nobody has introduced Busoni's arrangement of Bach's D minor Chaconne as being "like a fucking cathedral".

Here's a sample of some of Rhodes' playing, none of which moves me much, but, again, that's not the point of why I'm bringing him up. This is from last summer's Cheltenham Music Festival:

TODAY AT 3 p.m.: Don't miss Cape Bretoner Ian Hominick's free piano recital at the Great Hall, Hart House.

Exposure is surest way to breed appreciation in the arts

I don't think I've ever been chastised as gently as by Toronto Arts Council executive director Claire Hopkinson yesterday afternoon. I'm sure she would describe our 90 minutes together a get-acquainted session (I had never visited the council's offices, and hadn't spoken to Hopkinson since she left Tapestry New Opera Works five years ago), nothing more. 

Hopkinson had read my blog entry about culture, and was eager to point out that dollars-and-cents are not the only way in which the arts try to justify themselves, and, similarly, an appeal to vanity is equally one-dimensional.

We talked about a lot of different things yesterday, but what left the deepest impression was needing to have faith in the power of persistence -- and confidence in the power of each artform to speak to those people who have made the journey to experience it.

If our mayor, the budget chief and everyone else who helps shape policy in this city, were to see and experience how the arts make a difference in our community centres and parks and auditoriums and galleries and libraries -- and how they build bonds between children as strong as those fostered by sports teams -- perhaps we would need to worry less about the dollars-and-cents.

I guess we have to make sure that not only our politicians but also the rest of their staff always get invited, introduced and exposed to our creative efforts.

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Here's a clip from the launch of the Toronto Arts Foundation's Neighbourhood Arts Network, last year:

Brit pianist Paul Lewis turning his attention from Beethoven to Schubert

English pianist Paul Lewis, fresh from having obsessed his way through all of Beethoven's piano music, is taking on Franz Schubert. (Unfortunately, his punishing winter-spring recital and concert schedule won't bring him to Canada.)

Lewis talks at length about Beethoven, Schubert and how he made a connection to classical music in a long feature article in today's Observer magazine in the Guardian.

I love the way Lewis's acceptance at Chetham's school of music echoed what Tafelmusik continuo player Charlotte Nediger told me (for yesterday's article in the Star) about going to a summer music camp in Interlochen, Mich., and finding herself surrounded by people who loved music as much as she did, and how this helped her decide to pursue music as a career.

Lewis's musicality may have come from nowhere genetic, but it was implanted during infancy. "When I was four, an aunt gave me a toy organ, an octave and a half, and I'd write and play my own tunes." The music in the house, he says, "was John Denver… My parents were never anything other than supportive but didn't themselves know about music, and had nothing to guide them, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage".

Lewis's primary school had no piano teacher, "which is why I started by learning the cello, at which I was not good at all". At the age of 11, Lewis's parents arranged for him to try for a place at the independent Chetham's school of music in Manchester, up the East Lancs Road. He was turned down, "so I went to the local comp, which was OK, but there were no kids interested in the same sort of things as me". His talent had been spotted at Chetham's, however, by a piano teacher, Nigel Pitceathly, who took Lewis on. "So that every Wednesday, my father" – who was by now working in a special needs school – "would drive me to Stockport for a lesson, which was quite a thing for him to do." It paid off: aged 14, Lewis was accepted by Chetham's, and his course decided. "For the first time, I was surrounded by people who shared my interest, who I could talk to about music, and that saved me, I suppose." Saved him from what? Lewis laughs: "I never got to find out what exactly I was saved from." 

To go with the reading, here is Lewis playing the first three movements of Schubert's C-minor Piano Sonata No. 19 (D.958), from a 2001 recording:

Documentary film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould available for free streaming until Jan. 11

PBS has made its American Masters (!) broadcast of Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould available for free streaming on the web until Jan. 11. Incredibly, they've even made the HTML code for available for embedding elsewhere, so you don't have to leave the comfort of my blog to watch. Plus, there are several extras on the PBS site, including interviews with the filmmakers, Peter Raymont and Michèle Hozer.

Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.