The Well-Tempered Ear
What made Beethoven sick and deaf?
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By Jacob Stockinger
What made Beethoven (below) deaf and sick his entire adult life?
Scientists think they have an answer, although their opinion is not unanimous.
Here is a news story from Classic FM about the latest research:
https://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/scientists-hair-analysis-deaf-mystery/
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YOU MUST HEAR: Alkan’s ‘Barcarolle’
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By Jacob Stockinger
One of the standout recordings for The Ear this past year was “Waves.”
It is a recital of Baroque, Romantic and modern French piano music by Bruce Liu (below), who won the 18th Chopin Competition in 2021 and has since skyrocketed to fame.
Here is Liu’s story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Liu
Liu’s first recording for Deutsche Grammophon was a memorable and highly acclaimed all-Chopin recital made up of excerpts from his competition appearances. Recently, “Waves” (below), his second solo recording, was released.
You can enjoy “Waves” for the crisply articulated Rameau theme-and-variations suite. Or for the nuanced Ravel in “Miroirs” (Mirrors).
But Liu — who was born in Paris to Chinese parents, who came of age in Montreal, Canada, and who speaks fluent Mandarin, French and English — manages to unearth a piece that at least this pianophile never heard before and now wants to play.
It is the Barcarolle by the eccentric and misanthropic French-Jewish composer Charles-Valentin Alkan (1833-88, below).
I’m not usually a fan of Alkan.
He possessed a titanic keyboard technique and his music often sounds too much like simply a showcase for it, especially his Solo Concerto for Piano. Too often he sounds just too much over the top, too forced and virtuosic, not naturally lyrical or accessible.
Perhaps that stems from having so little social contact in his personal and artistic life.
Here is a walk-through narrative of his life: https://www.pianotv.net/2016/10/brief-history-charles-alkan/
And here is his Wikipedia biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Valentin_Alkan
But then I heard Liu playing Alkan’s Barcarolle — one of a set of pieces —and was joyfully surprised. It sounds mysterious and wistful, more like a nocturne than a rocking-boat barcarolle to me. And it even sounds playable by amateurs like The Ear.
So I intend to check out more Alkan, especially the short pieces like preludes.
Listen to the 4-minute Barcarolle in the YouTube video at the bottom.
What do you think?
Do you like it? Are you surprised by it?
Would you want to play it?
What do you think of Alkan?
Can you suggest other listenable and even playable pieces by Alkan?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Remembering the classical musicians who died in 2023
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By Jacob Stockinger
It remains an end-of-the-year ritual: remembering the dead who brought beauty to us through music.
Here are remembrances of the classical musicians we lost in 2023.
From Presto Music comes a list of world-known talents who died this past year — plus those who died in recent past years. It is relatively short and has links to the full obituaries, including the of American mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry (below, in 2009, in the singing the famous Habanera from Bizet’s “Carmen” in the YouTube video at the bottom). A pioneer, she was the first Black singer to perform at the annual summer Wagner festival in Beyreuth, Germany, and she performed at the Wisconsin Union Theater during the 1978-79 season:
https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/articles/obituary/browse
Here is a longer, less renowned and more international list from The Violin Channel.
It includes many very well known musicians, including Menahem Pressler (below who co-founded and played for more than 50 years with the Beaux Arts Trio, which performed several times at the Wisconsin Union Theater. He also taught at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
It also includes the jazz and classical bassist Richard Davis (below), who spent decades teaching and performing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mead Witter School of Music.
The Ear especially likes this list because ordinary “house” musicians — and not just stars — are remembered. After all, the majority of musicians who add so much to our lives are not stars — but usually just mainstream workers in the arts.
Click on the names in red to see the full biographies, many of which are more touching than you might expect — for example, the Ukrainian conductor who died young while defending his country against Russia.
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Napoleon’s own piano adds authenticity to the new biopic. Hear it here
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By Jacob Stockinger
Ridley Scott’s new critically acclaimed biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte — with Joaquin Phoenix portraying the famous emperor general — has been criticized, especially in France, for taking liberties with the actual history and life of Napoleon.
But in one respect, however, the movie “Napoleon” is unexpectedly authentic: the way composer Martin Phipps used a piano once owned by Napoleon in the soundtrack.
Here is a link to the story that aired Monday on National Public Radio (NPR): https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1216905501/napoleons-piano-adds-authenticity-to-the-music-of-ridley-scotts-movie
The Ear couldn’t find a photo of the actual Napoleon piano, but the 1795 Broadwood piano (below, from the Cobbe Collection in London) fits the description except for the the ornaments: https://www.cobbecollection.co.uk/collection/20-square-piano/
And if you click on the link to play a Haydn Fantasy that is on the historical collection’s website for this particular piano, you will hear how closely it resembles the sound of the piano used in the movie, which you can hear more at length in the YouTube video at the bottom.
Is it just me, or does the some of the soundtrack sound a lot like the theme music in “The Godfather”?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Meet the Met’s’Mighty Mouse’ — Yannick Nézet-Ségiun
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By Jacob Stockinger
You might think you already know the famous, high-profile musician and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin (below).
The Ear certainly did.
But then I saw the profile and comprehensive interview with the 48-year-old on CBS’ “60 Minutes” last Sunday. And I learned many new things, including how enjoyable and humorous the native French-Canadian can be as well as how he plans to breathe new life and bring new audience into the Met.
I learned how extremely busy he is being the music director of three major artistic organizations: the Metropolitan Opera in New York; the Philadelphia Orchestra; and the Metropolitan Orchestra of Montreal. In addition, he is a prolific recording artist.
I also learned much about his personal life (below, on vacation) and his professional career. You meet his parents and his longtime violist husband.
Not for nothing has the renowned mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato affectionately dubbed this openly gay man with the nickname of the cartoon character Mighty Mouse (below) because of his small size but muscular physique, his cheerful and expressive face, and his ambitious rescue mission as the third music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Here is a link to the wide-ranging and candid interview, both amusingly serious and seriously amusing, which you can read it or watch and listen to it:
What do you think of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his plans to revitalize the Metropolitan Opera with contemporary works and younger audiences?
What did you think of the “60 Minutes” interview?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Remember Marika with Bach Around the Clock 2023. The FREE five-day, in-person and online birthday celebration begins today
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NOTE: You can see and hear the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s Final Forte concert with four youth concerto finalists at 7 tonight on PBS Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Radio. For complete information, including other airings, go to these websites: https://madisonsymphony.org/education-community/education-programs/young-artist-competitions/the-final-forte/ and https://pbswisconsin.org/the-final-forte/
By Jacob Stockinger
The seventh annual Madison-based Bach Around the Clock festival — a celebration of the March 31 birthday of composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1756, below) —- will start today and run through Sunday both in-person and online.
All events and streaming are free and open to the public.
As usual, it will feature professional and amateur performers of all ages and levels of proficiency in all kinds of repertoire and arrangements, including Bach on the Marimba.
It begins today, Wednesday, March 8, at noon with a Bach motet sung in Luther Memorial Church, 1021 University Ave.
The live portion, which will also be live-streamed, will end on Saturday, March 11, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with continuous performances at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (below) at 1833 Regent Street on the near west side.
Then on this Sunday, March 12, the virtual online festival will premier.
For more details — including a full schedule with times, venues, pieces, performers and other links — go to:
Home
The Ear thinks of the entire festival as a life celebration and memorial not just for Bach but also for his avid local advocate, violist Marika Fisher Hoyt (below).
Hoyt — who was also a member of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the Madison Bach Musicians, the Ancora String Quartet, Just Bach and Sonata à Quattro — died Feb. 21 from cancer. She was one of the kindest and most caring persons, one of the hard-working and most energetic, talented musicians, that The Ear has ever known and worked with.
After Wisconsin Public Radio abandoned BATC in 2013, Fischer Hoyt rescued it in 2017, raised money and support, and expanded its offerings and performers as well as took it into a virtual online format as well as remaining an in-person event.
You can find many tributes online. You can also plug in her name on this blog’s search engine to get some idea of her overwhelming and inspiring contributions to the area’s cultural life. In 2017, The Ear named her Musician of the Year:
Classical music: For reviving and securing Bach Around the Clock, The Ear names Marika Fischer Hoyt as “Musician of the Year” for 2017
But the best tribute of all will be to listen to Bach’s extraordinarily inventive and beautiful music — her abiding passion and the gift she never stopped wanting to give to others — with Marika in mind.
You can also find videos from past BATC’s. But she once told me that the piece she loved most is the St. John Passion. So a YouTube video of the final chorus from that oratorio is posted at the bottom.
Have you attended or heard BATC before?
What did you especially like and would you recommend the event to others?
Did you know Marika Fischer Hoyt?
What would you like other people to know about Marika?
The Ear wants to hear.
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One piano lesson made all the difference
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By Jacob Stockinger
Not long ago, NPR and Wisconsin Public Radio featured a moving story from the website “Hidden Brain” and its series of profile called “My Unsung Hero.”
It told the simple story of a single piano lesson — and how just one short sentence at this piano lesson proved both ordinary and momentous – and made all the difference, changing the course of a young boy’s life.
The Ear found it inspiring. And it provoked some of his own memories of important music lessons and music teachers as well as other subjects and other influential teachers in school.
He hopes you will also like it and share it, perhaps with a friend who had a similar experience or with a special teacher who influenced you and made an important difference in your life.
Here is a link:
Did you ever have a similar experience with a music teacher and music lesson?
Or find an “unsung hero” in music or another field of education who made a big difference?
Please tell us about it.
The Ear wants to hear.
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Ailing superstar maestro and pianist Daniel Barenboim, 80, quits longtime German opera post
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By Jacob Stockinger
Yesterday — Friday, Jan. 6, 2023 — superstar maestro and pianist Daniel Barenboim, 80, resigned his longtime post of over 30 years as director of the Berlin State Opera.
Barenboim (below) cited ill health — specifically a severe inflammation of blood vessels — as the reason for his resignation.
Local residents might recall his long tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where many of them probably heard him conduct and perhaps even perform as a concert pianist.
Here is a long biographical entry in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Barenboim
Below are links to two news articles about Barenboim’s decision.
In them you can read a lot of details about: his philosophy of interpretation; his childhood as a Jewish child prodigy in Argentina; his training and early career as both pianist and conductor; his performances with marriage to British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who died young; his love of German music and his role in Germany’s reunification; his controversial criticism of how Israel treats Palestinians; and the orchestra and music school he co-founded with the Palestinian activist and world-famous literary scholar Edward Said.
Here is a story from British newspaper The Guardian:
And here is the story from the German broadcasting network and media conglomerate Deutsche Welle:
https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dw.com%2Fen%2Fconductor-daniel-barenboim-resigns-as-berlin-state-opera-director-over-ill-health%2Fa-63760683&data=05%7C01%7C%7Ceeb75c8f244542d0496e08daf02ed28b%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0e%7C638086381129033294%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=qmTwyPzkWpJKfAT4ohHJVWWnISE%2BxZS%2FxuM7hrC09zQ%3D&reserved=0
Finally, here is a recent compilation video from the outstanding arts website and streaming service medici.tv to celebrate Barenboim’s recent 80th birthday. It is called “80 Minutes with the Barenboim” and it features many other classical luminaries such as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Pierre Boulez who have been vital to his life and global career.
Do you know any of Barenboim’s many recordings?
Do you have a favorite recording to recommend?
Did you ever hear Barenboim in person conduct or play the piano?
What did you think of him? Of his conducting or playing?
The Ear wants to hear.
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YOU MUST HEAR THIS: No piece captures the mixed emotions of Memorial Day better than Charles Ives’ “Decoration Day”
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today is Memorial Day, 2022.
It is the annual holiday to remember those who died in military service to the country. (Below are flags placed each year at the tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.)
If you want to honor survivors and current service members, that would be Veterans Day on Nov. 11.
All weekend long the radio has been playing music and the television has been showing war movies.
A lot of the music is familiar and repeated every year: Sousa marches and Morton Gould suites, elegies by Gustav Mahler, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein; requiems by Mozart and Fauré; a hymn by John Williams and other movie scores. This year has also seen the playlist include rediscovered works of homage by African-American composers such as William Grant Still.
But only this year did The Ear finally hear — thanks to Wisconsin Public Radio — the one piece that, to his mind, best captures Memorial Day with its blending of consonance and dissonance, its mix of major and major keys, of familiar or “found” music and original music.
It is called, simply, “Decoration Day” and it was composed in 1912 — but not published until 1989 — by the 20th-century iconoclastic and early modernist American composer Charles Ives (below, 1874-1954). It ended up as part of a work the composer called “A Symphony: New England Hollidays.”
See if you agree with The Ear.
Listen to the 8-minute performance by “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band in the YouTube video at the bottom.
Listen to the deep anguish and and sense of loss conveyed in the opening, when a solemn remembrance procession goes to a cemetery to plant flags and lay flowers and wreaths to “decorate” the graves of the fallen.
Listen carefully and you will hear a faint version of “Taps” and ringing church bells in the atmospheric music.
Then as so often happens in reality, life suddenly intrudes in the form of a celebration by a loud marching brass band as it leaves the cemetery for the celebratory marches, picnics and fireworks.
But at the end, the darkness briefly returns. The sense of loss lingers long after the actual death and long after the holiday has been celebrated.
There is no closure.
Just resignation.
Just living with loss.
Here is the background from Wikipedia about how the holiday started as Decoration Day after the Civil War and when it evolved into Memorial Day in 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day
And here is biographical background, with the actual sources and depictions of “Decoration Day” — just go down the page to compositions and click — about Charles Ives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives
Did you know and like Charles Ives’ music?
Does “Decoration Day” impress or move you?
What music most embodies Memorial Day for you?
The Ear wants to hear.
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Con Vivo woodwind quintet plays a FREE outdoor concert TONIGHT on Madison’s west side
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear wants to thanks the many readers who sent congratulations and best wishes to him on the return of his blog.
He also wants to post the following announcement:
Con Vivo! … music with life has been opening its 18th season of chamber music concerts with free concerts in city parks performed by CVQ — the con vivo! woodwind quintet (below).
The last FREE performance will take place TONIGHT – Saturday, June 12 — at 7 p.m. at Rennebohm Park (below, the exterior and interior of the shelter), 115 North Eau Claire Ave., on Madison’s west side not far where the old state DMV building used to be.
The concert will include music by Aaron Copland, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Franz Danzi and Beethoven.
The woodwind quintet is composed of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn.
The event is free and everyone is welcome. So bring a lawn chair or blanket, and join us for what will prove to be an enjoyable evening of live music!
For more information, visit www.convivomusicwithlife.org or call (608) 277-8087.
This project is supported in part by Dane Arts with additional funds from the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation; The Evjue Foundation, Inc., the charitable arm of The Capital Times; the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation; and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation.
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