Lang Lang gets a partner

From Slipped disc:

"The Sony label, which paid $3 million to snatch Lang Lang from Deutsche Grammophon a few weeks ago, has swooped again to sign the violinist Ray Chen, winner of the latest Queen Elisabeth competition in Belgium.

Chen, 21, was born in Taiwan, raised in Australia and schooled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He is represented by the same CAMI management as Lang Lang and will play a limelight concert at the opening of the World expo in Shanghai, mainland China, this summer - much as Lang Lang did at the Olympics.

Ray Chen is, by all accounts, a highly promising young artist. But his signing confirms the general direction of Sony's classical strategy. A label that shed all of its conductors and all but handful of instrumentalists is now headlined by Lang Lang, Yo Yo Ma and Ray Chen, three artists from the same country - which is the market the Japanese label is pitching for.

In a signing-day statement Ray Chen said:'I am very excited to become a Sony Classical artist and I am looking forward to this wonderful collaboration. Our joint mission is to capture the excitement, passion, and life in a performance of the finest quality and to bring them to the audiences worldwide'."

Art must die

From Alex Ross:

"I was surprised and delighted to see my name pop up in John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of the young jazz bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding. She'd been reading The Rest Is Noise—on a Kindle, no less—and pondering a quotation that appears in the first chapter: lines from a letter that Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in 1850, condemning the emergent 'classical' tendency in the musical world. It's one of Wagner's most remarkable utterances, and I thought I'd reprint a longer sample here, as a footnote to Colaptino's piece. The translation is by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, in their Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 210:

I have felt the pulse of modern art and know that it will die! This knowledge, however, fills me not with despondency but with joy, for I know at the same time that it is not art in general which will perish but only our own particular type of art—which stands remote from modern life—, whereas true—imperishable—constantly renewed art is still to be born. The monumental character of our art will disappear, we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price: we shall let the past remain the past, the future—the future, and we shall live only in the present, in the here and now, and create works for the present age alone. Remember how fortunate I once considered you were in the practice of your own particular art, precisely because you were a performing artist, a real, actual artist whose every performance was clearly an act of giving: the fact that you could do so only upon a musical instrument was not your fault but the involuntary constraint of our age which compels the individual to depend entirely upon his own resources and renders impossible that sense of fellowship through which the individual artist, with the greatest possible deployment of his powers, might become part of a communal—immediate and actual—work of art. It was certainly not any wish to flatter you which made me say those things, rather was I—half-consciously—expressing my belief that only the performer is the real, true artist. All that we create as poets and composers expresses a wish but not an ability: only the performance itself reveals that ability or art. Believe me, I should be ten times happier if I were a dramatic performer instead of a dramatic poet and composer. — Now that I have come to hold this conviction, it can no longer be of interest to me to create works which I know in advance must be denied all life in the present in return for the flattering prospect of future immortality: what cannot be true today will remain untrue in the future as well. No longer do I abandon myself to the delusive idea of creating works for a future beyond the present: but if I am to create works for the present age, that age must offer me a less repellent aspect than is now the case. I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

That last sentence is something for opera-company managers and symphony-orchestra programmers to contemplate. If you really wanted to be true to the spirit of Wagner, you would stop playing him and focus on new work instead."

Great quote from Wagner (one imagines his letters are as prolix as this sample) and a great remark by Ross. I have to look up this profile of Esperanza Spalding.

Review: Yuja Wang plays with poetry, precision

From SF Chronicle:

"Sunday's San Francisco Performances program, rescheduled from April, was yet another case in point. In three Schubert-Liszt song transcriptions to open the evening, Wang paid full homage to both composers. Her readings reminded a listener of how tender and dramatically resonant Schubert's original songs are and of how ingeniously Liszt captured those qualities in his versions for the piano alone."

I love Liszt, and I love his transcriptions, though I'm not sure if I've heard these ones. A pianist, in any event, to look up.

Renée Fleming, Opera Star, Tries a Rock Album

From NYTimes:

"Renée Fleming, a darling of the opera world, has a new album titled “Dark Hope,” on which she covers indie rock acts. The classical world scratches its head at the impulse. The recording’s promoters — and Ms. Fleming herself — shy away from labeling it a crossover album, calling it instead, “somewhat sheepishly,” as Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, wrote in Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section, a visit to a “parallel universe.”"

First Peter Gabriel, now Renée Fleming, covers indie rock. I don't love this album, but I like it more than I expected, and in an appropriate twist, she covers—the best one, in my estimation—In Your Eyes, that anthem for Lloyd Dobblers everywhere, myself included. I could have done without the 10 millionth Hallelujah, however. There should be a moratorium on covers of that song.

The Rest Is Noise: Varèse does jazz

In an account of the Varèse festival at Tully Hall, Alex Ross at The New Yorker tells us of Varèse's encounter with Charlie Parker. This is about the saddest thing I have ever heard.

"With jazz, the ones who could have been good become very conventional. I heard the man who was playing—what was his name? He died. He was a god of music in that field. He played a kind of saxophone—Charlie Parker. At that time he lived in New York. He followed me on the street, and he said he wanted to be with us. The day I left I said, 'We'll get together. I'll take you for my pupil.' Then I had to catch my boat. It's when I went to Europe for Déserts. And Charlie Parker died in '55, in March. Oh, he was so nice, and so modest, and he had such a tone. You could not know if it was an angelic double bass, a saxophone, or a bass clarinet. Then one day I was in that big hall there on 14th Street, the Cooper Union. Somebody said, 'I want to meet you.' She was the widow of Charlie Parker. She said, 'He was always talking about you, so I know all about you.' And that man was a great star. He wanted to study music and thought I had something for him."

The Greatest Present-Day Liszt Pianist

The Greatest Present-Day Liszt Pianist:

"You can now watch Mykola Suk's incendiary Liszt Sonata on youtube.... - The Unanswered Question"

All art should be made the way that Liszt played the piano. All great art is. Let's hear it for Suk.