Surely we can do better than this…?

OK, a while back, I posted a blog entry about poor Esa-Pekka, who had been made to look so egregiously un-handsome by some LA press agent’s legerdemain, and now it’s maybe gotten worse…?

Picture 1

…to the point where I have to suspect that he is consciously choosing to present himself in the least flattering light, perhaps under the assumption that an ever-vivacious 50-something conductor/doyen does not a full-time serious composer make.

But at least he looks way less old-lesbianish in this more recent photo – more grizzled, more rugged, even kind of hot (I mean come on, those eyes…?)

But what, Dear Readers, are we to make of the following image??

Picture 2

To the credit of the New York Philharmonic, they did not choose their new Music Director for his looks. Maestro Gilbert never won any beauty competitions and that’s just fine – I’m sure he more than makes up for it in his probing interpretations.  But to the publicity department of the NYP: surely, surely we can do better than this… can’t we?

What happened to the days of composers and conductors having respectable portraits taken of themselves?

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ravel

shostakovich

And since we’re on the subject: where are the cigarettes in the first two photos??  As the portraits of Mssrs. Reiner, Ravel, and Shostakovich clearly reveal, any adult male classical musician who wants to be taken seriously needs to be photographed smoking a cigarette, regardless of whether he smokes in real life.  It wouldn’t hurt him to get his ass over to a piano and procure a large piece of manuscript paper either.

Pitted against their predecessors, the first two photos come of looking pretty amateurish.  Of course, certain advanced models should not necessarily be emulated:

lenny inappropriate

Yes!! …No…

Too bad:

A New Plymouth woman who played classical music to her cannabis plants to encourage them to grow was yesterday sentenced to community work.

Solo mother-of-three Zarah Murphy cultivated 20 cannabis plants in a room with photos of healthy plants as role models on the walls and played them “nice classical music”, her lawyer Pamela Jensen told New Plymouth District Court yesterday.

Ms Jensen said Murphy was growing the plants for her own use, to treat her diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, the Taranaki Daily News reported.

She was undergoing psychotherapy for her condition and could possibly attend drug counselling in future, Ms Jensen said.

Judge Allan Roberts said the converted room was a “pretty good effort” in which to grow the plants.*

He sentenced Murphy to 250 hours’ community work, including the remission of $1235 in unpaid fines.

– NZPA

*[Ed: umm…?]

marijuana_then_mahler

or the other way around….

Yet another quote from David Foster Wallace about Academic Prose that applies equally well to Academic Music

…the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own résumé.  In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly).  The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

DFW, “Authority and American Usage” from Consider the Lobster

Hence: https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/augusta%20trim.mp3

[Addendum: I do realize that the quote, the music, and the overall angsty anti-Modernist zeitgeist of this post are very 1990’s, but whatever — it still rings true, and as much as the situation may have changed, one must be ever vigilant.]

I always knew Britten must be good for something

New to the British stage, Alan Bennett’s “The Habit of Art”

tells of a (fictional) visit in 1972 in Oxford between the onetime artistic collaborators Auden, who would die the next year, and Britten that finds room within it for the competing attentions of a rent boy (Stephen Wight), whom Auden has hired for a frolicsome bit of fellatio, and of Humphrey Carpenter (Adrian Scarborough), both men’s real-life biographer, who is on hand to dispense important bits of narrative and raise questions about “the shortcomings of great men.”

Meanwhile, the British remain privy to the greatest, boldest artistic festival in recent memory: the London Philharmonic’s “Between Two Worlds” festival, featuring the music of Alfred Schnittke.  Not surprisingly, the mainstream media across the pond is just as dunderheaded as it is here:

It seems a trifle self-indulgent of Jurowski to follow up this fiasco so soon with another hugely costly and equally bizarre mish-mash of mysticism and doggerel – Alfred Schnittke’s opera-cantata The History of D Johann Faustus, unperformed since its Hamburg première in 1995.

Um, did you just call Al Schnittke “doggerel“?  Burn.  I’ll let my readers be the judge:

The Faustus score embraces everything from pseudo-Bachian chorales and declamatory recitative in the style of the Passions through the manic depressive symphonies of Mahler and Shostakovich to Weill’s cabaret songs and even, I felt, a touch of Lloyd Webber schmaltz.

Wow, is that what you felt, Rupert?  Well you must be like really, really smart to hear all of those things.  I’m just overwhelmed.  Did you also write this review?

I am so exasperated  to find that the Evansville, South Dakota Volunteer Fire Department Symphony Orchestra has mandatorily decided to perform the cacophoneuous gross concertoes of the communist Alfred Schnittke.

What is wrong with the pomp and fireplace of Elgar? Or a rousting rendition of John Williams scores? The Conductor of the Symphony promised us Scheherazade and Paganini’s Violin Concerto Number One.

I did not purchase my season tickets to the ESDVFDSO to be treated to a barrage  of  communist music .

This Schnittke is hurting my ears.  Help me.

But seriously, much of the press concerning this festival brings up a larger critical problem concerning Schnittke and his music: that he is inevitably compared to Shostakovitch.  Folks, this has simply got to stop.  Because let’s be honest — objectively, Schnittke is a way better composer.  Like, orders of magnitude better.  Yes, they both lived in Soviet Russia, and Shostakovitch was certainly an influence on AS, but Schnittke is working on a whole different level, and the musical and extra-musical issues associated with his music are a total different beast.

Schnittke_Alfred_photo