The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Meet Perry Allaire – radio host, singer, conductor, writer of program notes and Renaissance man of music.
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By Jacob Stockinger
When it comes to classical music, it is hard to surpass Perry Allaire for being a well-rounded and knowledgeable citizen of the classical music world.
Allaire qualifies as nothing less than a Renaissance man of music.
Allaire (below) hosts a Friday morning classical music program called “Fantasia” on Madison’s community radio station, WORT-FM 89.9.
Classically trained in voice, conducting, music theory and music history, Allaire is also a veteran singer with Madison Savoyards, which puts on productions of Gilbert and Sulivan operettas each summer. (Below is Perry Allaire singing Wagner in 2009.)
For nearly 25 years, Allaire contributed program notes for concerts at the Wisconsin Union Theater.
He also conducts the choir at Madison’s Holy Redeemer Church.
Perry Allaire recently spoke to Paul Baker (below), who hosts the “Only Strings” program for the radio station WSUM at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Baker published his interview with Perry Allaire on the blog that he writes for the show.
Meet Perry Allaire.
Here is a link to the interview:
https://onlystringswsum.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/perry-allaire-40-year-wort-veteran-host/
Tags: Amateur radio, Arts, Chamber music, choral music, Classical music, community, Gilbert and Sullivan, Jacob Stockinger, Madison, Madison Savoyards, Music, Only Strings, opera, Operetta, Paul Baker, program notes, Radio, Renaissance, Renaissance man, strings, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wagner, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Union Theater, WORT-FM 89.9, WSUM
Classical music: Listen to wrong notes played by great pianists.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Yesterday, The Ear offered a blog post about stage fright and performance anxiety.
It was written by someone who knows: Concert pianist and polymath Renaissance Man Stephen Hough (below), who is also a writer, painter, composer, photographer, culture critic and more.
But even the greatest musicians can -– and do — mess up.
So today is a follow-up.
Here is a link to a YouTube video with some pretty messed up notes and whole passages by some of history’s greatest pianists, virtuosos and technical wizards.
They include Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz (below) and Artur Schnabel – along with the actual scores to show you what is being muffed.
There was no recording technology back then, but it makes one wonder what Frederic Chopin or Franz Liszt might have sounded like off the page when they played. Or even such famed keyboard virtuosos as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.
After all, in the same video the great Arthur Rubinstein (below) even explains how he faked an entire difficult Chopin etude and dumped a whole batch of deliberately played wrong notes into it during a public concert — and still won rave reviews from the critics!
It also puts a frame around the picture, and suggests that maybe we should simply worry more about the music and less about the notes. Performers just have to learn to accept failure! Perfection is beyond any of us.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
If you know of other examples, or have personal experiences to share, let us know.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Arthur Rubinstein, Arts, Artur Schnabel, Beethoven, Chicago, Chopin, Classical music, Franz Liszt, Jacob Stockinger, Leonard Shure, Liszt, Ludwig van Beethoven, Madison, Music, performance anxiety, Piano, polymath, Renaissance, Renaissance man, stage fright, Stephen Hough, Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, wrong notes, YouTube
Classical music: The Madison Early Music Festival turns 15 with a perfect opening concert by the Toronto Consort that explored the Italian Renaissance and the musical legacy of Leonardo da Vinci.
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Madison Early Music Festival started as an idea.
So, what better way to mark its 15th anniversary than by exploring perhaps history’s greatest Man of Ideas -– Leonardo da Vinci?
And that is exactly what happened during the opening concert last Saturday night by MEMF, which this year is exploring Italian music from 1300 to 1600.
The festival — complete with workshops, lectures and concerts -– is held each summer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music.
It started as a way to help fill the summertime void of classical music. But now summer is its own season when it comes to classical music in Madison, and much of that success is due to MEMF’s success.
Co-founders and co-artistic directors UW-Madison baritone Paul Rowe and his soprano wife Cheryl Bensman Rowe (below) had every reason to be proud and moved -– and they were, visibly and audibly.
This summer, because Mills Hall is under construction, MEMF has had to turn to other venues, chiefly the nearby Luther Memorial Church at 1021 University Avenue and Music Hall on Bascom Hill.
The opening concert “The Da Vinci Codex” was held at Luther Memorial, and the church seemed close to full, meaning almost 400 listeners attended. This alternative venue actually seemed an improvement in that it offered a warm and acoustically superior environment with sets and a building that complemented the religious beliefs and art of that era’s music and culture.
The program was set up by a fine and well-attended lecture and slide show given by UW-Madison art professor Gail Geiger (below). She examined the heretofore underestimated role of music in Leonardo’s life and career as a painter, drawing master, poet, engineer, inventor and all-round genius.
What the audience then heard was a two-hour concert in which no false note was sounded, no false step was taken.
The performer was the Toronto Consort, making its Madison debut. It proved an outstanding and thoroughly professional group of eight persons (below) who are multi-talented in their ability to sing, to play instruments and to recite narration dramatically, expressively and convincingly. They were not afraid to entertain and as well as to inform. (You can hear a sample of similar music performed by the Toronto Consort in a YouTube video at the bottom.)
The Ear was especially impressed by the tightness of the scissors-and-paste presentation and the uncanny way the Toronto Consort spoke to and engaged with the audience, who laughed and applauded thunderously.
The program’s effectiveness came from the terrifically seamless and smooth narrative thread, the story that centered on the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci. It was unifying and used primary sources (Leonardo’s notebooks and letters) and secondary sources like the proto-art historian Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives” and other historians or critics. (Below is David Fallis, the artistic director, tenor and narrator.)
The performers moved easily from historical accounts of Leonardo in Florence, Milan and France to contextual music that illustrated Leonardo –- the ultimate Renaissance Man — from birth to death. And it proved thoroughly enjoyable and often deeply moving. You did not have to be a fan of early music to be taken in by the contagious melodies and harmonies, the catchy inflections and rhythms, the facts of an amazing life and career.
Just watching these complete professionals perform took us into their world because they are full-body performers who used hands, feet and facial expressions to convey the emotional meaning of the music and get the audience to connect with the music and with them. It felt like Renaissance jazz, so free and yet also so disciplined and practiced was the performance. It is what The Ear likes to call “the well-rehearsed surprise” and is a hallmark of all great performances that are virtuosic and make what is hard seem easy or effortless. (Below is Katherine Hall, viola da gamba player and soprano, singing.)
There is much more left of the 15th Madison Early Music Festival to hear, including “Songs of Love” by the instrumentalists and vocal ensemble Ex Umbris in Music Hall tonight at 7:30 p.m. tonight; plus other concerts including the second annual Handel Aria Competition in Music Hall on Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. (NOT 7 p.m., as the MEMF home website mistakenly said at first, and the always impressive All-Festival Concert, which focuses this year on the Trionfi of the poet Petrarch, on Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. in Luther Memorial Church. FREE pre-concert lectures by experts in art, music and history take place at 6:30 p.m.
Here is a link to a schedule and descriptions of events, with times, places and participants:
Unlike many of Leonardo’s ideas, which were adventurous and even prophetic if uncompleted, MEMF has moved from idea to reality.
The Ear has no doubt, and every hope, that it is here to stay, and that it will continue to evolve and grow.
Tags: aria, art history, Arts, Baroque, Bascom Hill, Chamber music, Classical music, drawing, Early music, engineering, festival, Florence, France, genius, George Frideric Handel, Giorgio Vasari, Handel, instrument, inventor, Italian Renaissance, Italy, Jacob Stockinger, Leonardo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Madison, Madison Early Music Festival, MEMF, Milan, Music, Music Hall, painting, Petrarch, Poetry, Renaissance, Renaissance man, song, songs, soprano, Toronto, Toronto Consort, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, viola da gamba, vocal music, voice, YouTube
Classical music: Award-winning pianist Stephen Hough is an accomplished polymath or Renaissance man who also blogs and paints. His personal history is fascinating. So are the sharp stylistic differences he demonstrates in different art forms.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Longtime readers of this blog know my admiration for the British pianist Stephen Hough (below).
Hough, who won the prestigious Naumberg Competition while at the Juilliard School, plays the piano superbly well and has a large shelf full of international awards for his recordings on the Hyperion label. He especially likes to explore less well-known repertoire.
He is a terrific teacher and coach, as I have witnessed firsthand in a masterful master class (below) in Madison.
But in addition to his career as a concert pianist, the supremely talented Hough — who is an astonishingly accomplished polymath or Renaissance man — also writes a regular and highly informative and entertaining blog for the Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. He touches on everything from, of course, the piano (especially historic pianists and performances) to theology (an openly gay man he converted to Roman Catholicism at 19) and fashion (especially his fondness for hats). One of his best entries for me was about the role of hitting wrong notes:
Here is a link to his website:
http://stephenhough.com/index.php
Here is a link to his marvelous blog:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/author/stephenhough/
What most people – and I include myself – – most admire about Hough’s playing is its clarity, its sense of measure and proportion.
As he himself says, he is not much given to “hairy-chested” interpretations of big, intense Russian music like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. His recent award-winning recording of the complete Chopin waltzes shows his ability to find new and convincing things to say about familiar works and he says them clearly as well as gracefully and elegantly. (Just listen to the YouTube video at the bottom.)
He discusses his approach in a fine interview and profile that appeared in The New York Times just before a Carnegie Hall recital this past spring in which is also played his latest big work, his own Sonata “Notturno luminoso.”
And here is a review in the Times of that recital:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/arts/music/stephen-hough-at-carnegie-hall.html?_r=0
But the real surprise for me came when I about and saw his style of painting. He paints in oils, and he exhibits and sells his art.
But unlike his music-making, his painting of this MacArthur “genius award” winner seems almost violently Abstract Expressionist.
Here are a couple of examples:
But of course ultimately it is piano playing that keeps Hough – who resides in the UK, New York and Australia – in the public eye. Listen to this Chopin waltz and you can understand why.
Tags: Abstract Expressionism, Carnegie Hall, Daily Telegraph, fashion, Frédéric Chopin, gay, hats, Hough, Juilliard School, New York City, New York Times, Proms, Rachmaninov, Renaissance man, Roman Catholicism, Russian music, Stephen Hough, Tchaikovksy, The Juilliard School, The New York Times, theology, wrong notes, YouTube
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Here is a collaborative obituary for music critic, radio host, performer and gay pioneer Jess Anderson, who died in January at 85
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PLEASE HELP THE EAR. IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.
By Jacob Stockinger
In late January of this year, Jess Anderson (below) — a longtime friend, devoted musician and respected music critic – died at 85.
The Ear promised then that when more was known or written, it would be posted on this blog.
That time has come.
Jess was a polymath, a Renaissance Man, as the comments below attest to time and again.
For the past several years, he suffered from advancing dementia and moved from his home of 56 years to an assisted living facility. He had contracted COVID-19, but died from a severe fall from which he never regained consciousness.
Jess did not write his own obituary and he had no family member to do it. So a close friend – Ed Wegert (below) – invited several of the people who knew Jess and worked with him, to co-author a collaborative obituary. We are all grateful to Ed for the effort the obituary took and for his caring for Jess in his final years.
In addition, the obituary has some wonderful, not-to-be-overlooked photos of Jess young and old, at home, with friends, sitting at the piano and at his custom-built harpsichord.
It appears in the March issue of Our Lives, a free statewide LGBTQ magazine that is distributed through grocery stores and other retail outlets as well as free subscriptions. Here is a link to the magazine’s home webpage for details about it: https://ourliveswisconsin.com.
That Jess was an exceptional and multi-talented person is obvious even from the distinguished names of the accomplished people who contributed to the obituary:
They include:
Chester Biscardi (below), who is an acclaimed prize-winning composer, UW-Madison graduate, composer and teacher of composition at Sarah Lawrence College.
John Harbison (below), the MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who teaches at MIT and co-directs the nearby Token Creek Chamber Music Festival in the summer.
Rose Mary Harbison (below), who attended the UW-Madison with Jess and became a professional performing and teaching violinist who co-directs the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.
Steve Miller (below), a close friend who became a bookmaker and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.
The Ear, who knew Jess over many decades, was also invited to contribute.
Here is a link to the joint obituary in Our Lives magazine, a free LGBTQ periodical that you can find in local grocery store and other retail outlets: https://ourliveswisconsin.com/article/remembering-jess-anderson/?fbclid=IwAR027dzv2YqRUNlYF1cF6JyXnEcQxAwcprPYbtBQCs3rYt0Nu847W_xbjpk
Feel free to leave your own thoughts about and memories of Jess in the comment section.
It also seems a fitting tribute to play the final chorus from The St. John Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. You can hear it in the YouTube video below. It is, if memory serves me well, the same piece of sublime music that Jess played when he signed off from hosting his Sunday morning early music show for many years on WORT-FM 89.9.
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