Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

It address a basic question: why, when paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock go for a hundred million dollars or more on the art market and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, is twentieth-century classical music still considered obscure and difficult? In fact, it’s better known than most people realize. Post-1900 music is all over Hollywood soundtracks, modern jazz, alternative rock. The minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass has had a huge impact on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground to Aphex Twin. What I want to do is to provide an intelligent introduction to this fabulous, labyrinthine world: not just the music itself, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky onward, but the entire cultural and social tumult around it: the Rite of Spring riot, the interaction of composers and jazz people in the twenties, the entanglement of composers in totalitarian regimes, the weird intersections of post-WWII avant-garde composers and Cold War politics, the origins of minimalism in the alternative philosophies of the West Coast. It’s not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century told through music.

Copyright law is packed with strange features, but here's one of the strangest: webcasters, satellite radio, and those music stations transmitted through your cable connection all have to pay performance rights both to the composers who wrote the song and the performers who played it. Terrestrial AM/FM radio stations, though, only pay the composer; the performer is allegedly getting "free promotion" and doesn't see a cent.

Howard Berman, the California Democrat who now heads the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, wonders if it's time for everyone to pay the same fees. "Is it finally time for a performance right to extend to terrestrial radio?" he said this morning.

It's hard to imagine two pianists who inhabit more starkly different worlds than Anthony de Mare and Murray Perahia, who played recitals here on Wednesday and Thursday. . . .

Each recital had its rewards, though both sent me into the night feeling unsettled. Perahia, playing on the Harriman-Jewell Series at the Folly, displayed his signature poetic touch and red-meat fortissimo — banging as ferociously in Bach or Chopin as in Brahms. . . .

De Mare is not nearly the pianist that Perahia is, but his recital was one of the most courageous local programs in recent history — an entertaining traversal of American iconoclasm, bookended by works of Frederic Rzewski. . . .

The new work, Mobberley’s “Phenomena,” mixed manipulated sounds on playback with live piano and vocal interjections from the pianist. It was intricately crafted but felt sprawling and over-stuffed with disparate elements.

Anyone with a strong interest in classical vocal music almost has to go with satellite because most commercial stations shy away from it. Bruce Ryder, a lawyer, subscribes to XM primarily for the three classical music channels, but he also listens to the BBC news service, a folk channel and the Cardinals.

One thing thats nice, particularly about the classical stations, is that the announcers are mercifully brief, Ryder says. Thats a decided advantage over the local stuff.Sirius and XM each offers three classical channels, organized along similar lines . . .

The audience is not all confirmed classical music fans — and that’s important, says Davis, the Vox programmer.

“As they shut down classical stations in major markets, we get an influx of people,” Davis says. “But as we make classical more widely available, a lot of people who never heard it before now have access and are listening in. We’re getting people in the door.”

"It's all about the sound," Wenger said. "It teaches you how the music of Mozart and Hayden was articulated."

Wenger played the school's new piano — an exact reproduction of the 1802 Viennese instrument at a recent recital in Columbia.

Compared to the two grand pianos in Wenger's second-floor office in the University's Fine Arts Building, the fortepiano looks like a pint-size replica. During a private demonstration, Wenger's fingers danced across the cow-bone keys, her knees activated hidden effect levers and the fortepiano produced cheery notes.

"He's playing with it," Wenger said while performing one of Beethoven's songs to demonstrate the instrument's range. "He's having fun with it."

An ancestor of the modern piano, the fortepiano features a wooden frame, hammers canvassed in leather and 68 keys for a 51/2-octave range. Today's pianos feature iron frames, hammers covered in felt and 88 keys for a 71/2-octave range.

Is classical music—a genre that has spent a seeming eternity on the commercial skids—staging a comeback? That's the buzz on Nielsen SoundScan's 2006 report card, which listed classical as the year's fastest-growing musical genre. In an otherwise dreary year, sales of classical albums—a figure that includes CDs, LPs, and downloaded albums—increased by 22.5 percent, or 3.57 million units. That put the genre way ahead of such laggards as jazz (down 8.3 percent), alternative (down 9.2 percent), and rap (down 20.7 percent).

Accustomed to dismal stories about the graying of classical's audience, aficionados were elated by the Nielsen numbers. "Who killed the death of classical music?" blogged New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, taking a verbal jab at an ominously titled 1997 book. Some industry observers, notably Wired editor Chris Anderson (a boss and friend of mine), opined that classical's rise was due mostly to increasing online sales—in other words, yet another validation of the Long Tail, his theory that the Internet will help niche media find bigger audiences. Since brick-and-mortar music stores have largely shrunk or mothballed their classical sections, Anderson wrote, fans have turned to the Web, where they've discovered a cornucopia of previously hard-to-find albums.

The Hatto scandal reminds us that, even in hands not sullied like his, the piecemeal process by which finished recordings are assembled bears a great moral question mark.

The technology of the modern studio has made possible a kind of synthetic perfection in recording undreamt of 50 years ago, in which hundreds of digital edits (tape splices in the old days) create an aural product that sometimes bears little relation to music as it's actually presented in the concert hall or opera house.

When wrong notes, irregularities and idiosyncrasies are removed by editing, what's often lost is the sweep and spontaneity of the original performance, not to mention the warmth that allows music to touch our souls.

Modern recordings have reinforced the 20th century reverence for textual and technical accuracy, making possible, as my colleague Stephen Wigler has pointed out, a kind of "creative lying" that could never be produced in the concert hall. Barrington-Coupe's crime was to compound the lie.

Radio listeners weary of hearing the same songs over and over may have something to cheer about: Broadcasters have tentatively agreed to anti-payola settlements that could shake up music playlists at some of the nation's largest radio chains.

Four major broadcast companies would pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists, The Associated Press has learned.

The agreement is aimed at curbing payola — generally defined as radio stations accepting cash or other consideration from record companies in exchange for airplay. The practice has been around as long as the radio industry and was made illegal after scandals in the late 1950s.

Two Federal Communications Commission officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because final language has not been approved by the full commission, said the monetary settlement is part of a consent decree between the FCC and Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio, Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting Corp.

The settlement was reached at the same time as a separate deal designed to lead to more airtime for smaller record companies and their lesser-known artists as well as local musicians.

It was already one of the strangest stories the classical music world had witnessed. But the discovery of the late English pianist Joyce Hatto as the greatest instrumentalist almost nobody had heard of, appears to have taken a bizarre, even potentially sinister turn.

It was around a year ago that Gramophone’s critics began to champion this little-known lady, whose discs – miraculous performances, released by her husband William Barrington-Coupe on the tiny label Concert Artist – were notoriously difficult to get hold of. Such was the brilliance of this pianist across Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more in a dizzying range – that it was worth making the effort to seek out Concert Artist to get these discs, and they became much sought-after. By the time she died in June 2006, Joyce Hatto was not only a sudden widespread success, she was a cause célèbre. To love Hatto recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn’t need the hype of a major label’s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it.

But at the same time as the cult of Hatto was burgeoning, there were persistent rumours on the internet as to the true origins of the recordings. How, wondered the doubters, could one woman – especially one who had battled cancer for many years – have mastered a range of repertoire and recorded a catalogue that arguably makes her more prolific than even the Richters and the Ashkenazys.

Explore the six string quartets of Bela Bartók through the vision of the Emerson String Quartet in this amalgamation of video footage, written commentary, and animated score. Much of the video was taken during a workshop given by the Emerson members in 2003 and has been supplemented with additional video of Emerson members and others speaking about the quartets.

This site is intended for performers who are preparing these pieces as well as listeners and concertgoers who wish to learn more about the Bartók quartets and about the many musical decisions that must be made in order to perform these demanding works.

"Yes, I would do it again," he said of the fraudulent recordings, which he said he produced without his wife's knowledge. "Because it made Joyce so happy. But this time I wouldn't publish the CDs."

A modestly successful concert pianist who stopped performing in public in the 1970s, Hatto died last year at age 77 and was hailed in obituaries as a neglected genius based on more than a hundred CDs produced by her husband on his Concert Artists label. . . .

Barrington-Coupe said his wife was suffering from advanced ovarian cancer by the time he had the capacity to produce CDs, and her grunts of pain had marred recording sessions. Barrington-Coupe said he searched for pianists of a similar sound and style to patch over his wife's recordings.

Over time, he took bigger and bigger pieces of other recordings, and learned how to manipulate speed to disguise the source.

He also made passages like Beethoven’s dreamy slow movement sound like he was making them up on the spot, which is probably the way Beethoven played them (since he often was making them up). He knows the meaning of a shocking harmony change, and doesn’t mind pausing just before, almost to the point of camp. . . .

In Schubert’s big B-flat Sonata, D. 960, Buchbinder showed us a more buttoned-down side of himself. This was a loving but not fawning tribute to one of Schubert’s last musical utterances, with suffused colors and diaphanous twists of fortune.

Again we found ourselves hearing new countermelodies and surprising inner voices. Even if I didn’t feel deeply moved throughout, by the end I felt I had heard — there buried in cascades of notes — some aspect of the real Schubert.