Zeitschichten

For all you radio junkies out there check out the WDR RadioRecorder. This neat tool lets you record the streams of the WDR radio station to your computer. The big plus of this software is that you can select specific programs you wish to record via a clean interface. The program will then save the shows in mp3 format and you can transfer those to your mp3 player or play them directly on your computer.

This is a very handy tool for those who live outside of Germany and have to miss all the interesting shows on WDR due to time differences etc.

Please let me know if there are any other interesting tools like this out there. Thanks!

Here is the link

Yesterday we heard Stockhausen’s Mantra at Harvard. Frank Gutschmidt and Benjamin Kobler captivated their audience in a late-night performance that was colorful, precise, groovy, and overwhelmingly lucid. What I liked most about their interpretation was the sense of unity that they created; at times one had the feeling that all the music came from one instrument solely.

The concert was part of the Fromm Concert Series at Harvard, which is curated by the German composer and electro-acoustic music specialist Hans Tutschku. The series will continue today with two more concerts. If you are in the area come by; from what I heard in the rehearsals today’s performances should be good, too! Here is the program:

CONCERT I, 8pm:

Jonathan Harvarey: Tombeau de Messiaen
Mario Davidovsky: Synchronisms No. 9
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Wireless Fantasy
Chaya Czernowin: Ina

INTERMISSION

Pierre Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Ezra Sims: Night Piece

CONCERT II, 11pm

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Oktophonie

All concerts take place in Paine Hall, Harvard University and are free! See you there!

“On Thursday, December 13th 2007, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. it will be possible to personally say farewell to Karlheinz Stockhausen in the chapel of the Waldfriedhof in Kuerten (Kastanienstrasse).”
– (http://stockhausen.org/stockhasuen_passes.html)

I wish I could go.

Interesting video to go along with KONTAKTE.

Stockhausen lecturing:

On Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in New York:

“The Adagio of the Ninth was a classic Berliner tour-de-force: the extreme polish of the playing in every section created a fabulous mirage of music as three-dimensional space.”

– Alex Ross, New Yorker, December 3, 2007, p. 107

Earlier on today I was chatting with a friend from Munich who seemed to have a lot of fun with the YouTube videos of the Mozart Karaoke that I put on this blog a while back.

By accident I came across an interesting video on facebook today that I wanted to share with you. Remember that I blogged about the Sting concert in Berlin where he was doing the Dowland songs? This one is similar, only that it’s much more interesting than Sting:

The performer, Ola Sandström, is from Sweden. You can listen to more music on his myspace profile. He also has a website at http://www.olasandstrom.com in case you want to practice your Swedish…

This of course reminded me of The Forge Players whose interpretation of Dowland’s Come Again is my all-time favorite! Unfortunately I couldn’t find this recording on YouTube. Instead I found Come Heavy Sleep, which I like too:

Here is another one by the Forge Players and Freddie Wadling: Unquiet Thoughts by Dowland.

And then there is this one:

Elliott Carter who will turn 100 next year, has visited Boston for the premiere of his newest work, a horn concerto. The concerto was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on November 15 in a program that featured Haydn’s London Symphony and Mahler’s 1st Symphony.

After the premiere, Carter visited Harvard University were he received the Boston Symphony Orchestra Mark M. Horblit Award. The event featured a panel discussion with Carter and James Levine that was moderated by Anne Shreffler.

Shortly before the ceremony the doctoral students and faculty in the music department had a chance to meet Carter in a more private setting. I had met Carter for the first time in 2004 when he visited Harvard for a symposion in his honor. The impression he made on me last week was even greater. The minute he walked into the room he radiated a kind of energy that is hard to find in most New Music contexts. In the discussion, Carter spoke mostly about the “interesting problems” he had solve in his concertos. At first it was not clear to me what he meant by “interesting problems,” I thought he might have referred to compositional procedures or methods, but it soon became clear that he was talking about the “problem” to make the solo instrument sound good when playing together with the huge symphony orchestra. Carter was talking about how he wanted to make the soloist “have fun” while playing the music, challanging them but at the same giving them something that works really well for their instruments.

Maybe this is Carter’s secret, that he cares a lot about the performers who then go out an play his music. And of course he is right with this attitude, for if the performers do not have fun playing the piece, how should the audience enjoy the music?

I am an American artist living part-time in Berlin. I have never written anything about a classical music concert, I do not have a sophisticated ear for music, and, in fact, I do not literally hear very well. But, I do know what I like and do not like, and what I experience.

This past Thursday, the 15^th of November, I attended a concert at the Philharmonie with Daniel Barenboim playing piano and Zubin Metha conducting the Staatskapelle. The presence of these two strong, dominant personalities provided a great energetic, anticipation from the audience. We were not disapppointed. Both Barenboim and Metha gave us what we wanted – an emotional, theatrical, masterful performance that had us on our feet at the end, expressing with great gusto our appreciation of their talents.

The evening began with Metha conducting Brahms’ Symphony Nr. 4. The music of Brahms, the control and passionate conducting of Mehta, and the playing of the Staatskapelle, were well integrated. The sensations generated were so palpable one could only smile with enjoyment.Then came Barenboim, always an interesting, riveting performer. He played Beethoven’s concerto for piano and orchestra Nr. 4 op 58, and Liszt’s concerto for piano and orchestra Nr. 1 Es-Dur 124. The delicacy of his touch and the utter passion of his playing were wonderful in both pieces. Barenboim literally was bouncing from his seat and his body shaking violently at the conclusion of the fourth movement of Liszt. One was reminded of the playing of Jerry Lee Lewis on Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On. The audience loved it and responded with an endless, standing ovation for Barenboim and Metha. The Staatskapelle joined also in the admiration for these two great performers. We all left the hall happy for the evenings experience.

– Frederic Ohringer

Yesterday night, Seda played a short concert with Schubert’s Sonate in a-moll D. 784 and Brahm’s Sechs Klavierstücke op. 118 in the Lowell House library at Harvard University. I love this pensive program. It is full of deep emotions, thorough thinking, and rhythmic complexities.Seda played on the piano that once belonged to David Lewin, the legendary American music theorist and composer who was a graduate of the class of 1954 and a Professor of music at Harvard since 1985. It was a strange sensation, but half-way through the program I realized that I wasn’t listening to Seda’s playing or Schubert’s music only. No, I was experiencing Schubert’s music through Seda’s interpretation which in turn was affected by the acoustics of the room, the general mood of the audience but also by the character of David Lewin’s piano. Obviously, Seda’s playing had to happen within the boundaries of what was possible on that particular instrument. An instrument that was for years played by Lewin. An instrument that had adapted to his way of playing, his way of thinking about the music. An instrument that even bears the marks of his smoking while playing habits (there are quite a few burn marks on the keyboard).

In this respect, instruments are much like old books: they contain traces of former envolvement (annotations), passion (extensive commenting in the margins), sometimes even aggression (ripped-out pages) and you cannot play on them without engaging with the spirit of their former owners. If you disregard the instrument’s personality you are doomed to fail and the ghosts of their previous owners will haunt you.

At yesterday’s concert, David Lewin’s spirit was a welcome guest, observing and listening, at times making a witty comment, but always with an unmistakenly friendly smile on his face. And what else could he have been with such a talented and serious musician bringing his piano back to life?

After a couple of weeks without concerts and opera I am finally starting to explore the Boston music scene (again). So far, most of the non-campus events were disappointing:

1) Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine played Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (with Christian Tetzlaff) and Mahler’s 9th Symphony. This concert was a let-down: the orchestra (and the soloist) had major intonation problems in the Violin Concerto and in addition to that they were not playing together most of the times. This can happen, of course, but what should not happen is what happened in the Mahler where the brass section was constantly too loud! What did the trumpet player think when he totally overblew his instrument at an obnoxious volume? And what is more: shouldn’t Levine have changed this imbalance? Or was that his interpretation of the work?

2) Boston Musica Viva honoring Elliott Carter presented a program with pieces that were dedicated to Carter. An interesting idea, but it really didn’t take off that well. The pieces on the program seemed too diverse for me and it was difficult to relate them to Carter’s music. I’m looking forward to BMV’s “Hands Across the Seas” program in May, though, that will feature music by Chen Yi, William Kraft, and Osvaldo Golijov (who seems to be a some kind of a new music star over here).

To be honest, I moved to Boston again, and as you may agree, it’s quite hard to write about music in Berlin from here. I haven’t decided yet what’s gonna happen to this blog. Will it become a blog about music in Boston? Maybe not… Will it become a blog about about music in general? Quite possibly so…

In any case. If you live in Berlin and if you’d like to write about the music scene, get in touch. You’re welcome to post here.

Stay tuned,

Matthias

Ok, this year’s festival was a short one for me. I saw only a couple of performances but some of these were really excellent!

1) Grisey: Les Espaces Acoustiques. I’ve already written about that one on this blog.

2) Then there was this other concert from the Kontinent Scelsi series. An evening with the Ensemble Dissonanzen and Marc Ribot, whose Morning Scelsi was combined with several of Scelsi’s own compositions. While I was initially very enthusiastic about this idea, the performance itself turned out to be a let-down. First of all, Ribot’s music is not really ingenious, it’s not even convincing. Second, at times the performance was so loud that it started to be painful for one’s ears. What I liked about the evening, though, was the superb performance of the first two pieces from „Tre pezzi“ for saxophone by Scelsi.

3) Scelsi/Marthaler/Klangforum Wien: Sauser aus Italien. Eine Urheberei. I saw this excellent production twice and if I had had the chance I would have gone a third time. Marthaler created a theater play around several of Scelsi’s pieces. The fine performance by the Klangforum Wien and the impressive playing by Marthaler’s family (as he calls his actors) was my personal highlight of the festival. Imagine a stage design that incorporates seemingly random items such as buddha statues, tape recorders, candles, oriental table linen, and antiquarian radios (in fact most of these things can also be seen on images taken in Scelsi’s study). This imaginary Scelsi-landscape is inhabited by strange characters who seem to be living in the same apartment block. The whole performance spans over the time of one day, starting with a surreal breakfast scene that features an essentially one-note piano piece by Scelsi and ending with a cocktail party that is accompanied by a Respighi (?) piece for orchestra. In the course of the day the characters listen to several pieces by Scelsi, and what’s really cool to observe for us are their reactions to the music. Sometimes they are delighted, sometimes their are frightened. They dance, dream, wonder, dislike and detest - the whole gamut of human reaction to music is there. Of course - one can ask, why do you have to create a theater play that goes along with contemporary music? The answer is: just for poetry’s sake. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

4) Gidon Kremer, Tatjana Grindenko, Mischa Maisky and Valery Afanassiev. It’s always the same problem when chamber music is performed by musicians who rarely play together. Delicate entries are seldomly together, the sound of the ensemble is often out of balance, and since many famous performers apparently have no time to practice, the difficult bits and pieces never quite work. The Brahms sonata No 3 in d minor (with Afanassiev) was completely obnoxious, as were the first two movements of the Bartok sonata for solo violin. The remainder of the evening was much better (second half of Bartok and the Prokofjew sonata for two violins) - at times even breathtakingly beautiful (the Shostakovic trio in e minor). This, by the way, is also typical for great performers: they know exactly which parts to practice and play well - it’s always the last piece of the evening that the audience keeps in mind. In this case, everyone will have the recollection of a wonderful chamber music evening.

Just to remind all of us how great the Vienna Philharmonic and Christine Schäfer are… and of course that nothing can kill a good song!

And this one only of you are really bold! Watch it until the end, there is a great tremolo coming…

Almost exactly one year after I heard Claus Guth’s Figaro in Salzburg, I had the chance to hear that same production again yesterday (again in the Orchesterhauptprobe). The impression it made on me was even better than last July. It’s a very intelligent staging and the cast consists of truly great singers, amongst them Gerald Finley (Almaviva), Dorothea Röschmann (Contessa), Diana Damrau (Susanna), Luca Pisaroni (Figaro), and Martina Janková (Cherubino) who has the thankless task of following last year’s spectacular performance of Christine Schäfer.

Here are two short videos I found on YouTube of the 2006 performance. You can (and should!) buy a DVD of this wonderful performance. Check it out at http://shop.salzburgfestival.com

This was an amazing concert. The Basel Sinfonietta under Stefan Asbury and Geneviève Strosser (viola) performed Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques at the Salzburg Festival. Having thought a lot about an aethetics of spacial music listening I found yesterday’s concert to be a perfect stimulus. It was incredible to hear this piece in its entirety and live, played by such fine musicians.

As I have outlined elsewhere the Kontinente Series has some other promising programs to offer. Tonight we will hear Marc Ribot and the Ensemble Dissonanzen. This should be an interesting experience as well. Tickets are still available!