CGF Newsletter 13: Encore!
The last generation takes the stage; a maple leaf rag; 2022 A Space Odyssey
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special, though when you listen to it, you’re likely to think it’s a Listener Jeremy submission. Your hint is that it’s a composer I’ve often advocated for on the podcast, while being roundly ignored every time!
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 11
Rossini, Introduction, Theme and Variations for Clarinet and Orchestra (1811)
Listener Laurie came in STRONG in the comments section with Rossini right out of the gate. I (wisely) bandwagonned with her, but I’ll give myself credit for solving Joey’s puzzling clue: Rossini was *technically* only 19 when he died because he is a leap year baby! Listener Eric was right there with us and threw out the possibility that this might be one of Rossini’s “Sins of Old Age” pieces, which I had also thought, but didn’t include in my comment. (We were both wrong — this piece comes right around the time of La Gazza Ladra and Semiramide.)
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
Climate Activism Comes to the Concert Hall
If you’ve followed the news in the past few months, you might be aware of a recent spate of climate actions taking place in art galleries and museums. From Madrid to Berlin to Vienna to Canberra, these actions mainly consist of activists throwing liquid (be it ink, soda, or tomato soup) at great works of art that they know are safely ensconced behind glass, and then gluing their hands to nearby walls to draw attention to their cause. One of the more clever iterations of this idea was covering John Constable’s The Hay Wain with a printout of the same painting but having the natural landscape distorted by the future effects of climate change.
But now for the first time (as far as I know) this sort of action has come to the concert hall. From Deutsche Welle:
The latest culture-related demonstration occurred in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie concert hall on the evening of November 23.
Just as the Sächsische Staatskapelle was about to begin its concert, two climate activists from Germany's "Letzte Generation" (Last Generation) movement walked onto the stage and glued themselves to the conductor's podium. They began calling for resistance to what they saw as the German government's indecisive climate policy.
A video shared on the group's Twitter feed shows the two activists wearing safety vests and coming onto the stage where they then superglued themselves to a rail of the conductor's podium.
I myself am not wholly opposed to such actions, but I just think, why would you do this at a classical music concert and not, say, a Taylor Swift concert? Way more people would be paying attention, and I promise you that her tour generates more carbon by orders of magnitude than the Elbphilharmonie playing the Beethoven violin concerto.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Concert Report
I did my patriotic duty over the Thanksgiving weekend by taking the train to Canada to see a lute recital by Thomas Dunford.
It’s hard for me to imagine that any Classical Gabfest Listeners don’t know who Dunford is, but some of you are new, so: Thomas Dunford is the French-American lutenist / artistic director of the Jupiter Ensemble. Jupiter revolves around Dunford and his partner Lea Desandre, the French-Italian mezzo-soprano, but the expanded Jupiter universe includes other superheroic French musicians Jean Rondeau (harpsichord), Bruno Philippe (cello) and Théotime Langlois de Swarte (violin).
Thomas gave an excellent recital of music by Dowland, Kapsberger, and Bach, and capped it off with a couple encores in which he also sang. I love it when he sings, and frankly, I think the whole concert should have been him accompanying himself. He’s a bit bashful about his singing (no surprise when your girlfriend is one of the best singers in the world) but he’s so charming and his voice is perfect for the Dowland stuff (not to mention the Beatles — his second encore was “Blackbird”.)
This gets to a larger point I want to make about encores, namely that the encores should be the show. I never felt this way more than after seeing Yuja Wang play a recital program of rather difficult repertoire (anchored by Schoenberg’s Suite op. 25) which she then followed up with seven encores featuring the most fun, glitzy, flamboyant piano rep you could imagine. And it’s just like, Yuja, that should be the concert!
[Note to my fellow Pacific Northwesterners: Dunford is returning to Vancouver in March with the whole Jupiter gang — including Lea — and you should go if you can.]
Ozawa in the Cosmos
At 87 years old, the Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, once a wunderkind, has slowed down quite a bit of late, but he made a special appearance last week with his Saito Kinen orchestra conducting Beethoven’s Egmont overture in a hall without an audience. So who was listening? Well, it turns out that this was a command performance for Wakata Koichi, a Japanese astronaut aboard the ISS.
It’s kind of sad to see Seiji looking so obviously frail, but you’ve got to respect the guy even more for getting up there and doing this project, which has a deep humanitarian mission. We talked quite a bit about Seiji back on CGF 21.
Classical Mixtape
Jan Dismas Zelenka, Miserere
A random selection served up by the YouTube algorithm this week, but after hearing this, I think 2023 might have to be the year of Zelenka. (2022 was the year of CPE Bach, and a very successful year at that.) The first 2 minutes of this slap SO HARD, but man are those some punishing oboe parts.
My memory tells me that Tailleferre is a composer who's often been brought up but doesn't usually end up as a final option, so I'll put her in my basket (I could see that piece being early 20th-century French music.
My other guess would be Villa-Lobos, mostly from the string writing.
Wow, that NTT really did seem like a Listener Jeremy special. And the hint doesn't help, since I never ignore Will's suggestions. ;)
I'm really not sure about this style, but it is definitely first half of 20th century. Could be American, could be French (by the harmonies in the strings? Which also could be exoticist). As for instrumentation, it seemed to be clarinet and string quartet, which doesn't help me particularly.
I have to say, I'm rather at a loss. I'll invoke the gods of clarinet and put in Widor and Reger.