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Insanely Beautiful
Curiously, the Schumann was for a long time considered a "woman's concerto," especially during the 70s when orchestra managers often found it difficult to find a male pianist to play it. For a time, the Grieg concerto was so strongly identified with a woman pianist (Gina Bachauer) that it, too, was seldom played in concert by male pianists. This was all before you were born, most likely, but -- believe it or not -- there was a time not too long ago when critics (of which, willy nilly, you must be denoted as one)claimed to be able to hear, or should that be "hear") a difference between the playing of woman pianists and man pianists. It is interesting that you place Uchida's photo with your posting, or is that just because she is the pianist on both pieces in the recording you were listening to? And that is, in itself, interesting......— June 27, 2011 4:04 p.m.
Mozart Lazy?
If you really want to be refined, then you will pronounce Giovanni in your second spelling, not the first. It is a common mistake to think that "Gio" equals "Joe" in English, but it just ain't so. Listen carefully to a refined (if that word has any meaning left in a world where ridicule usually greets anyone who actually aims for refinement) Italian speaker, and you will not hear the vowel sound in "Joe" but the quickly-combined sounds of long e (as "i" is pronounced in Italian) and long o (in other words, an Italian diphthong). The distortion of gee-oh is similar to the distortion in pronouncing Moliere's name in French, as Mohl-yer, leaving out the long (i) e sound, and substituting a "yuh" in its place.— June 27, 2011 3:54 p.m.
Review
The problem in San Diego is that we have critics who are willing to praise everything indiscriminately (see under Baldridge), with beautiful word-spinning but with an almost complete lack of knowledge of the operatic art form (see under Herman), with good intentions (see under Chute and UT), with such feverish boosterism and/or self-aggrandizement as to make any informed criticism meaningless (see under Jones Westlin City Beat), or with so much academic jargon that the reader is smothered (see JSmith Reader), or the occasional critic (Overton UT) who seems to live in another world altogether where he thinks the SDO is the Met or San Francisco, and your blog which, to be frank, treats its readers as though they never went to grammar school. Then there is the VOSD whose writer treats the arts as though they are her paper dolls. In the end, the public is the loser in every case.— May 8, 2011 10:02 a.m.
Rosenkavalier
Yes, you might say - in a very narrow sense - that the costumes and the sets are placed in the 18th century, but even that would not quite be the case.....and be careful, very careful, in dealing with anything that the wily Mansouri may have to say....about anything. There is a very large number of folks in this country who have been very glad to hear that this production will mark Mansouri's retirement from the operatic stage (although there is now a disheartening rumor making the rounds that he has gone back on his earlier assertion that this is the last time his particular kind of pseudo-stage direction will be inflicted on any audience anywhere.) In any case, the better solution here is to seek out some of the writings of Alfred Roller and see what he had to say about his original scenic designs. What you will find is that the original designs (on which the SDO mounting is based) were in most important ways a reflection of the time in which they were conceived and executed rather than any thorough-going attempt to bring any specific part of the 18th century back to life. This is pretty much the case with stage design in any period, no matter how much lip service designers may give to period authenticity. And there would be no point in "updating" ROSENKAVALIER, something that would alter the work so much that you would,in fact, be doing some other opera altogether. Oh, the words and the music might be the same, but the particular kind of resonance that Strauss and to a greater degree Hofmannstahl were trying to set up -- a multi-dimensional work of art that would function a bit like a hall of mirrors -- would cease to "sound" as it were. The point of the mythical world the text sets up is to create a kind of gigantic artistic elastic, at each end of which are worlds that speak to each other in profoundly different ways. This difference sets up what you might call a series of overtones that vibrate above and alongside the work. One can't "hear" them so much as "feel" what they have to say, things that are not explicit in the words and music, but exist only in the more or less invisible world that runs parallel to them in the experience of the listener/viewer.— March 24, 2011 4:04 p.m.
Rosenkavalier
Actually, no, ROSENKAVALIER is not set in anything approaching a realistically-conceived Vienna, although it was R & H's conceit, one might say, to say that it is set there. The choice of the time period is the clue that leads you to the mythical plane on which the action of the piece is played out -- mythical being the key word. The Vienna in which THE ROSE BEARER takes place existed only in the creators' imaginations. This is not to say that it is not a world which both Strauss and vonH wished might have really existed. But vonH, in particular, was after bigger game than could have been encompassed in any artistic creation that was inextricably tied by time and actual circumstance to a real place. This is one dimension of the piece that has been (willfully, I assert) lost, and very quickly so in the 100 years since its premiere...a dimension that is indeed present in the work of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, in the music of Zemlinsky and Korngold, framed by the work of Freud, and sonically palpable in Mahler...and most of all in the single great work of Robert Musil. But that world and its agonies are not present in ROSENKAVALIER, and indeed not even prefigured. I strongly recommend both S. Zweig's volume of memoirs, and a long, leisurely pursuit of the correspondence between Hofmannstahl and Strauss.— March 23, 2011 4:16 p.m.
Das Wunder
Dear Mr. Harris: Your response was interesting, and I appreciate your taking the time to write at what is a great length for these kinds of fora, if indeed they can be called that. But your condescension is a little disturbing. Perhaps it surprises you to find out that there are people who have taken the trouble to inform themselves about historical matters that go a little bit further than what appears in the U-T or even the New York Times. In any case, if all you know about the politics of hate is Karl Luger and one or two others, here's a short reading list for you: Elias Canetti, Karl Krauss, Edouard Hanslick, L'Action Francaise, the boatloads of material re the Dreyfus Case, the Mauriacs father and son, the Daudet family, the diaries of Harry Kessler as well as THE RED COUNT, Laird Easton's excellent biography, and not least -- for the terrible period between the two world wars in England -- the diaries of Sir Henry "Chips" Channon. And that's just for starters.....and did you really mean to say that Schubert and Mozart were "Germans"? Yes, I know, it's said all the time, but as a lot of people (among them Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hoffmannstahl) would once have been at pains to tell you (and perhaps the lordly vonK himself, in spite of his Greek roots) there is what some would call a world of difference.— March 23, 2011 4:03 p.m.
Das Wunder
Has something formally called "Anti-Semitism" ever existed as a formal political movement or party, that is, as a separate entity with something called "anti-semitism" as a central program for structuring the whole of political life? Even Hitler did not claim that his motive for eliminating Jews from public life was due just to something as ill-defined as "anti-semitism," but was called for as a means of undoing what he saw as economic mistakes and a deleterious cultural influence. And exactly what is the point of your post? That von Karajan was a bad man because he joined the National Socialists? That he was a good man because he married a women who had a Jew among her immediate ancestors? That he was a mystery? That he had been "groomed" to take the place of the reluctant Furtwangler? In point of fact, von Karajan himself could have been endangered by his own ancestry, which you do not mention is your post (it has certainly been used by others to deean him.) Many people would say that there are far more serious things with which to reproach vK than just the possession of a party card, the grubbing opportunism that motivated him to kiss Nazi ass; that is, in fact, the least of the things he did during the war and afterward that might justify his being labeled a "bad" person. But the post seems to be a musing rather than a thought.— March 20, 2011 12:01 p.m.
It's all about the money
Hundreds, if not thousands, of classical music station managers and staff members across the country will read this and laugh. KPBS could onloy have been trying to pull some stunt or scam. "devote its current frequency to a lucrative classical music format....ther music station would be a cash cow for the university.....there are untouched philanthropic dollars in San Diego that will be pledged to support a classical music station...."! Where was this cow, where were those dollars when KPBS gutted its classical music programming and turned to all talk? Who are these folks who would exercise such philanthropy and why did they stand by when KBAQ (or whatever it was) went belly-up, as well as the classical music station in Escondido? The idea that a classical music station would generate so much surplus funding that it would, in effect, subsidize the KPBS news service is such a ludicrous disconnect with reality that it makes evenm you the reporter look very foolish.— February 18, 2010 8:44 a.m.