The Well-Tempered Ear
The Willy Street Chamber Players give a virtual concert in November plus personalized live “micro-concerts” with tickets that go on sale this Wednesday. Plus, the Madison Symphony Orchestra organ concerts start TONIGHT with a FREE online recital by Greg Zelek
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ALERT: Tonight, Oct. 13, at 7:30 p.m. CDT, the Madison Symphony Orchestra will open its concert organ series with a FREE streamed virtual online concert MSO virtual concert live from Overture Hall. The performer is MSO organist Greg Zelek (below, in a photo by Peter Rodgers) and the program includes music by Debussy, Franck, Durufle and Satie among others. For more information and to register, go to: https://madisonsymphony.org/event/greg-zelek-2020-streamed/
By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following note that once again cements the reputation that the Willy Street Chamber Players have for inventive, innovative and ingenious programming, even during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Willy Street Chamber Players (below) have announced a reimagined 2020 season titled 1NTERLUDE. The project includes two unique events designed with safety in mind and aims to provide meaningful artistic experiences during the pandemic.
BEYOND THE SCREEN
BEYOND THE SCREEN is a virtual concert that will air online on Sunday, Nov. 15, at noon CST. The program will explore two colorful works for violin and cello by Kodaly (below top) and Ravel (below bottom) as well as other unique works. (You can hear Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
While viewing, audience members will be encouraged to submit questions and insights via an online form.
After the performance, members of the group will host a virtual “reception” on ZOOM where they’ll answer submitted questions and lead a discussion.
MICRO-CONCERTS
The chamber music group is also announcing an entirely new way to experience live music during coronavirus pandemic: 1-on-1 “micro-concerts”that will start on Saturday, Nov. 2, and occur on a variety of dates this fall.
Tickets go on sale beginning this Wednesday, Oct. 14. Up to two guests from the same household can sign up for a 10-minute slot at the location of their choice to view a “living, breathing musical art exhibit.”
Locations include the new Arts + Literature Laboratory (below top), Garver Feed Mill and A Place To Be (below bottom), all on Madison’s east side.
Ticket prices will operate on a “pay what you can” structure. The group has suggested a $20 donation per concert.
“When you enter the room and sit down, two members of the Willy Street Chamber Players will curate a personalized concert just for you, says Willy Street co-founder and violinist Eleanor Bartsch (below). “The musicians will choose from a wide variety of solo and duo works in the moment. Micro-concerts are solely about the music. You enter the room as you are, in silence and with an open mind.”
Adds violinist Paran Amirinazari (below), who is the artistic director and co-founder of the Willys: “We encourage you to make your concert what you need it to be in this time: 10 minutes of meditation, healing, escape, positivity, relaxation or simply beautiful music.”
For more information, including safety guidelines such as masks and social distancing, go to: www.willystreetchamberplayers.org
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Classical music: Tuesday night brings concerts of band music as well as organ and violin duets
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By Jacob Stockinger
This Tuesday night, Oct. 22, will see concerts of band music and organ-violin duets.
Here are details:
ORGAN AND VIOLIN CONCERT
At 7:30 p.m. in Overture Hall, the Overture Concert Organ Series, sponsored by the Madison Symphony Orchestra and organized by MSO principal organist Greg Zelek, offers a concert of music for organ and violin.
The organist is Michael Hey (below right), a Wisconsin native who won first prize at an organ competition in Shanghai, China, and is the organist at the famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
The violinist is Christiana Liberis (below left) who recently toured with the rock band The Eagles.
Tickets are $20.
The program includes music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Sir Edward Elgar, Maurice Ravel, Charles-Marie Widor, Giovanni Battista Vitali, Naji Hakim and Fritz Kreisler.
In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear the duo perform a haunting version of the popular “Gymnopedie No. 1” by Erik Satie
For information, including specific works on the program and detailed biographies about the performers, go to: https://madisonsymphony.org/event/organ-michael-hey-christiana-liberis/
UW-MADISON CONCERT BAND
At 7:30 p.m. in the new Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall of the Hamel Music Center, 740 University Avenue, the UW-Madison Concert Band (below) will perform a FREE concert.
The band will perform under director Scott Teeple (below) and guest conductor Ross Wolf.
The program includes:
“Lux Arumque” by Eric Whitacre
“Firefly” by Ryan George
“Colonial Song” by Percy Grainger/ed. Mark Rogers
“Huntington Tower Ballad” by Ottorino Respighi
“George Washington Bridge” by William Schuman
For information, go to: https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/uw-concert-band-and-winds-of-wisconsin/
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Classical music: The eclectic fusion group Mr. Chair plays music by Stravinsky, Satie and others on Monday night in Spring Green
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement from the Rural Musicians Forum:
Mr. Chair looks like a jazz quartet, sounds sometimes like a rock band, but in actuality is a contemporary classical music group in the guise of a modern band.
Classically trained musicians who are well versed in jazz, the players in Mr. Chair create a new sound using both acoustic and electric instruments.(You can hear Mr. Chair perform the original composition “Freed” in the the YouTube video at the bottom.)
The Rural Musicians Forum audience will have the chance to enjoy the soundscapes of this fascinating eclectic fusion group on this coming Monday night, Aug. 19, at 7:30 p.m. at Taliesin’s Hillside Theater (below) in Spring Green.
Members of Mr. Chair (below) are Professor Mark Hetzler, trombone and electronics; Jason Kutz, piano and keyboards; Ben Ferris, acoustic and electric bass; and Mike Koszewski, drums and percussion. All have close ties to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, where they also perform as an ensemble.
Mr. Chair’s compositions are long-form journeys, telling stories through sound by using and exploring the three pillars of music: melody, harmony and rhythm. Think cinematic, orchestral, surreal, romantic, emotional and gripping, and always equal parts dissonant and consonant. Their influences are far-reaching from classical, blues and rock to soul, funk, jazz and beyond.
For this concert, Mr. Chair will perform re-imagined excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical ballet masterpiece Pulcinella as well as music by Erik Satie and selections from their debut album, NEBULEBULA, which will be released on Thursday, Sept. 5, on vinyl, CD and digital streaming platforms.
The genre-bending quartet will perform in the beautiful Hillside Theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as part of his Taliesin compound. It is located at 6604 State Highway 23, about five miles south of Spring Green.
Admission is by free will offering, with a suggested donation of $15.
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Classical music: YOU MUST HEAR THIS – the “Meditation” for solo piano by Mexican composer Carlos Chavez
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By Jacob Stockinger
The solo piano repertoire is huge, but The Ear knows quite a lot of it.
Yet here is a piece he had never heard, live or recorded, until he finally did hear it this week on Wisconsin Public Radio.
It is the five-minute ”Meditacion” – or Meditation – by the 20th-century Mexican composer Carlos Chavez (below, in a photo by Paul Strand).
It is played beautifully and sensitively in a live performance by the unjustly neglected Mexican virtuoso pianist Jorge Federico Osorio (below), and was recorded — perhaps as an encore, given the applause at the end — with the Piano Concerto by Chavez for the nonprofit Cedille Records in Chicago and distributed by Naxos Records.
Listen to it and let The Ear know what you think.
Does anyone else hear echoes of the eccentric French composer Erik Satie in the music? Shades of other pieces or composers?
Do you like the Chavez piece?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: Your warhorses are my masterpieces — and I want to hear them
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ALERT: This Sunday afternoon from 12:30 to 2 p.m., “Sunday Afternoon Live From the Chazen” will feature Madison keyboard artist Trevor Stephenson performing on a restored 1855 Boesendorfer grand piano. The program includes music by Chopin, Granados, Brahms, Wagner, Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and Satie.
You can attend it live for FREE in Brittingham Gallery No. 3 of the UW-Madison’s art museum. But you can also stream it live using the link on this web page:
By Jacob Stockinger
It’s that time of the year again when music groups announce their new seasons.
And it seems to The Ear that the word “warhorse” is again being tossed around a lot, especially by experienced listeners who use the term pejoratively or disapprovingly, in a snobby or condescending way, to describe great music that is performed frequently.
But more than a little irony or inaccuracy is involved.
For example, a some people have referred to the Symphony No. 1 by Johannes Brahms – scheduled next season by both the Madison Symphony Orchestra (below) and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra — as a warhorse.
Yet The Ear has heard that symphony performed live only once – perhaps because programmers wanted to avoid the warhorse label.
The same goes for the iconic Fifth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, which will be performed next year by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra (below). It was a revolutionary work that changed the course of music history, and it is a great piece of engaging music. (You can hear the opening movement, with an arresting graphic representation, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Here’s the irony: I have heard the Piano Quintet by Brahms, the Cello Quintet by Franz Schubert and the String Octet by Felix Mendelssohn – all great masterpieces — far more often than I have heard those “warhorse” symphonies by Brahms and Beethoven. Can it be that connoisseurs usually seem more reluctant to describe chamber music masterpieces as warhorses? (Below in the Pro Arte Quartet in a photo by Rick Langer.)
The Ear is reminded of a comment made by the great Russian-American musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky (below): “Bizet’s opera “Carmen” is not great because it is popular; it is popular because it is great.”
So yes, I don’t care what more sophisticated or experienced listeners say. I still find the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Peter Tchaikovsky to be a beautiful and thrilling work that rewards me each time I hear it. It never fails.
Add to the list the popular symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the “New World” Symphony by Antonin Dvorak, several piano concertos by Sergei Rachmaninoff (below), the Brandenburg Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach, the “Jupiter” Symphony and Symphony No. 40 in G minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And one could go on and on.
They are all great masterpieces more than they are warhorses.
Plus, just because a piece of music is new or neglected doesn’t mean that it is good or that it merits a performance.
Otherwise, you could easily spend the rest of a life listening to second-rate and third-rate works out of curiosity and never feel the powerful emotional connection and deep intellectual insight that you get with a genuine masterpiece that rewards repeated hearings.
Of course, some warhorses do leave The Ear less than enthusiastic The “1812 Overture” comes immediately to mind. Boy, do the crowds like that potboiler — on the Fourth of July, of course, when it has a traditional place.
But often enough your warhorse is my masterpiece, and I want to hear it without being thought of as a philistine.
It might even be that playing more warhorses — not fewer — will attract some new audience members at a time when music groups face challenges in attendance and finances?
It may not be cool to say that, but it might be true, even allowing room for new and neglected works that deserve to be programmed for their merit — not their newness or their neglect.
So-called “warhorses” have usually survived a long time and received many performances because they are great music by great composers that speak meaningfully to a lot of listeners. They deserve praise, not insults or denigration, as well as a secure and unapologetic place in balanced programming.
Of course, it is a matter of personal taste.
So …
What do you think?
Are there favorite warhorses you like?
Are there warhorses you detest?
Leave word in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
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Classical music: Pianist Aldo Ciccolini, who popularized the music of Erik Satie, is dead at 89.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Did I come to know the pianist Aldo Ciccolini through the music of Erik Satie?
Or did I come to know the music of Erik Satie through the playing of pianist Aldo Ciccolini (below in his later years)?
It says something to me – something very Sixties and very dear – that the two were, and remain, inextricable for me. (Once discovered, the more soulful music of Erik Satie (below) even found its way into popular culture and rock music through groups like ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears.”)
And the public’s taste for Satie continues. Satie, as played by Pascal Roge, was recently featured on the soundtrack to the documentary film “Man on Wire,” about Philippe Petit and his historic tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York City.)
And maybe it was that way for you too.
Last Saturday night, Aldo Ciccolini, a prize-winning concert pianist, a prolific recording artist and a renowned teacher whose students included Jacques-Yves Thibaudet, died in his sleep at the age of 89.
There is not much for The Ear to say except that Ciccolini did for me what the greatest artists do: Use beauty to hijack me from the ordinary world and elevate me in an unforgettable way.
I am pretty sure that I and many others did not know the beautiful, graceful and contemplative “Trois Gymnopedies” until the young and handsome Ciccolini’s perfectly paced recordings of those pieces, and of Satie’s complete works, received worldwide circulation and acclaim.
Perhaps the same goes for the music of Camille Saint-Saens, another of Ciccolini’s specialties.
Ciccolini was Italian, but he had an uncanny flair for French music, which remains under-appreciated even today — including the music of Francois Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Gabriel Faure — even if the works of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy have fared much better.
I think Ciccolini understood that special French hybrid of clarity and mystery, of rationality and passion, of Descartes and Baudelaire. (You can hear Ciccolini’s incomparable playing of Satie in a popular YouTube video at the bottom which has a lot of reader comments.)
Anyway, here are three obituaries with lots of great background information.
From NPR (National Public Radio):
From The New York Times:
From the BBC:
http://www.classical-music.com/news/aldo-ciccolini-1925-2015
Tags: Aldo Ciccolini, Arts, Asnières-sur-Seine, Baroque, Baudelaire, BBC, Chamber music, clarity, Classical music, Claude Debussy, Compact Disc, concerto, Couperin, Debussy, Descartes, Erik Satie, Faure, France, French music, grace, graceful, Italy, Jacob Stockinger, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition, Madison, Man on Wire, Music, Music conservatories of Naples, mystery, New York Times, NPR, Pascal Roge, Passion, Philippe Petit, Piano, popular culture, Rameau, rationality, Ravel, reason, Rock, rock music, Saint-Saens, soul, Twin Towers, YouTube
Classical music: “Wisconsin Soundscapes” project features six contemporary composers with ties to Wisconsin and will be performed tonight at the First Unitarian Society in Madison.
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ALERT: Tonight at 8 p.m. in Morphy Hall, UW clarinetist Linda Bartley performs a FREE concert. Then on Sunday at 2 p.m. in the First Unitarian Society, 900 University Bay Drive, “Music in the Wright Place” will be performed in the new Atrium Auditorium (below, in a photo by Zane Williams). General admission is $25. You can purchase tickets at the door, and credit cards are accepted. Music will be performed by FUS music staff Dan Broner, Heather Thorpe and Linda Warren with special guests Karlos Moser, Eva Wright, Tyrone Greive and Trevor Stephenson. The concert will include music for solo voice, piano, piano duet, violin, harp and fortepiano by David Watkins, Erik Satie, Benjamin Britten, Mozart, Bernstein, Peter Schickele and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.
By Jacob Stockinger
I apologize for the late notice, but, as they say “Better late than never” — especially with an event this contemporary and this local.
Tonight, on Saturday, Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m. at the historic and landmark Frank Lloyd Wright-designed First Unitarian Society Meeting House in Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, pianist Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi (below) will perform six works by Wisconsin composers who were commissioned by the Wisconsin Arts Board to capture the spirit of the state’s people, places, events and more.
Admission is FREE.
A University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh music professor and pianist, Astolfi started “Wisconsin Soundscapes” at UW Oshkosh on Sept. 30. The tour also includes performances in Milwaukee, Manitowoc, La Crosse and Three Lakes.
In 2011, the Wisconsin Alliance for Composers received support from the Wisconsin Arts Board to commission six Wisconsin composers, each chosen through a double-blind judging process, to create original solo piano works based on Wisconsin themes. With support from a second Wisconsin Arts Board grant in 2012, the resulting concert was to be performed in communities throughout Wisconsin.
The concert features the compositions of Geoffrey Gordon, Joseph Koykkar (below top), Ryan Maguire, Joel Naumann, Yehuda Yannay (below bottom) and Donald J. Young.
The pieces were based on various Wisconsin themes, including: geographic locations (Black Earth, Mineral Point and Spring Green; Brady Street and Downer Avenue in Milwaukee); personalities (Steve Nelson-Raney, a pianist and saxophone player, jazz musician, composer, poet and visual artist); scenes (a field study of a herd of cows in a thunderstorm, Good Times at River Bend, Cloudy Day-River Rising, Pounding Rain-Raging River); and events (depiction of the political turmoil in Wisconsin leading up to the June 2012 recall election).
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The Well-Tempered Ear 