Mozart | Richibi's Weblog

___________

for Collin, who’ll appreciate
especially, I’m sure, the
Chopin

while I’m on the subject of clarinet quintets,
since there are so few significant ones, let
me pull Brahms’ out of my hat and celebrate
it, a worthy challenge to Mozart’s own utter
masterpiece

but over a century has gone by, it’s 1891,
Beethoven, the French Revolution, the
Romantic Era is reaching its end, ceding
to Impressionism, after the disruptions of
rampant industrialization, and its
consequent effects on the social contract

Marx has proposed a theoretical master
plan to equitably protect the rest of us
from the 1%, however too politically
fraught, eventually, such a system – see
Communism

furthermore, Darwin had suggested that
we weren’t all descended from Adam and
Eve, but from larvae, which is to say,
millennially morphed, modified, through
time, genetically, leading to festering still
ideological objections

Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written
her unadulterated love poems to her
husband, Robert, Caspar David
Friedrich had shown us his wanderer’s
back while facing the mountainous
challenges of the upcoming world,
godless now after Nietzsche, Anna
Karenina had thrown herself in front
of a train, Madame Bovary had taken
poison, and Ibsen‘s Nora had left her
husband for a fraught, if not even
dangerous, life on her own, to escape
his safe but insufferable dominance,
while Jane Eyre was finding ghosts
in her cobwebbed, and insufferable,
to my mind, though admittedly
aristocratic, attic

you’ll note the clarinet is not sitting
centre stage, but has nevertheless
a place at the table, by this time,
though not not honoured, familiar,
and is more integrated to the
conversation, the idea of democracy
has taken hold, with everyone having
an equal, and even a vociferous, say

Brahms modelled his Clarinet Quintet,
on Mozart’s, the Classical structure is
still the same, movements, tonality,
musical recurrence, all to wonderful
effect

that he would do that is not a given,
but a tribute to the power of that form,
take the waltz for instance, alive from
even before Strauss, not to mention
Chopin, to approximately the middle
of the Twentieth Century

think about it, who waltzes anymore,
though they might’ve enchanted still,
residually, the 50’s – see Patti Page,
for instance – its lustre having
dissipated, with the wind, as it were,
the gust, before us, of the unending
ages

R ! chard

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January 4, 2018

Clarinet Quintet in A major, K581 – Mozart

“The Swing“ / “Les Hasards heureux de L’Escarpolette“ (1767)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

__________

it wouldn’t be fair to overlook Mozart
when it comes to string quartets, after
all, he wrote 23 of them, but they’re
not what he’s famous for, you have to
go to his piano concertos for that,
sublime things, and, in my estimation,
to one of his chamber pieces, his
utterly enchanting Clarinet Quintet,
in A major, K581, which, since I prefer
chamber pieces, I turn to most often

but to go to a quintet so quickly in a
discussion about quartets could be
disconcerting, after all, you’ve got
somebody else at the table, you’ll
need another chair, another place
setting, more food, for four still of the
standard courses, some of those even
elaborate, all this makes a difference

plus the new guest is to be accommodated,
should typically be given the place of honour,
as well as a distinct voice, command, like a
soloist in a concerto, though, of course, be
less peremptory, more, indeed, courtly,
courteous, where, incidentally, the word
“courtesy” comes from

the sound of the clarinet in this quintet
mimics the sound of birds, midst the
strings’ foliage, the guest, as it were, at
the party, the piece delivers a wonderfully
pastoral setting, a mainstay of that period
– see even above – an allegorical return to
Mother Nature as a guiding principle over
the irascibility and the imperviousness of
the Christian God, not to mention the
search for a, nearly obliterated, feminine
principle, deity

the second movement, the larghetto,
which means a slow largo, which
means it’s really, really slow, is
accordingly melting

also, where would that movement be
without the clarinet, I ponder, the guest
that evening of especial honour, I get
a momentary glimpse at genius then,
and marvel, Mozart had written this for
a clarinetist friend, a friend he must’ve
really admired

all the other movements are equally
consummate, unforgettable, perfect

I promise

R ! chard

psst: here’s Mozart’s 17th String Quartet
no 17 in B flat major, “The Hunt”,
nevertheless, a quartet, one of his
  several, however perfunctorily

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December 30, 2017

on string quartets – Opus 76, no 1 – Joseph Haydn

“Joseph Haydn“ (1791)

Thomas Hardy

______

to not consider other musical forms of
Shostakovich would be unfair, his
symphonies are mostly propaganda,
however often, though somewhat
culturally specific, riveting

my favourite works of his, works I
consider iconic, are mostly chamber
pieces, piano solos, string quartets

a string quartet, after a symphony, is
like sitting down to dinner with four,
at the very least, acquaintances,
rather than being a guest at a party,
the conversation is more intimate,
every person plays hir part, everyone
is heeded, if even only with courtesy,
a social, a Classical, an aristocratic,
prerequisite

movements can be compared to
courses, distinct and identifiable for
their particular culinary, musical,
propriety

later variations on this reflect the
variations in social mores, where
restaurants, the modern way of
socializing, allow for disparate
choices, often superimposed,
throughout the meal for any,
every, occasion

dim sum, tapas, celebrate this, not
unhappily

but string quartets can be tricky, I
thought I’d start from the beginning,
with some Haydn, their recognized
Father, you’ll understand when you
hear this, his Opus 76, no 1, an
outstanding string quartet to live
up to

Haydn set the standard for string
quartets when the norms of Western
music were being established, Bach
had given us the alphabet, the
well-tempered clavier, Mozart, the
grammar, the structure of music,
tempo, tonality, repetition, Beethoven
gave us the literature, the poetry, the
philosophical, the transcendent

Haydn is somewhere between these
last two, but decidedly, still, the king
of the string quartet, though Beethoven
does a good job of trying to best him,
and so does Shostakovich, you’ll have
to pick

but first, let’s start with Haydn, that’ll
be already, you’ll see, or hear, enough

later, I’ll get into it

R ! chard

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November 10, 2017

Symphony No 3 in Eb major, op. 20, “The First of May”

“The 1st May Demonstration on The Red Square, 1929“ (1930)

Konstantin Yuon

__________

let me correct something I wrote in my
last comment, inadvertently, misleading
you somewhat with my inappropriate
use of the word “movement”, that the
Symphony no 2 had only one, I stated,
by which I meant that there were no
pauses throughout, there are, however,
indeed four movements in the Second,
four distinct sections that have been
joined together, such an uninterrupted
piece would usually have been given
an appropriate title, or an opus number,
to identify it, but would not have been
called a symphony, a symphony is by
very definition a clearly segmented
composition, like chapters in a book,
they might follow a theme, though not
necessarily, see Mozart, but the breaks
are integral, where you get a chance to
cough, or to get up and replenish your
glass of wine

the Second could have been, should
have been, called simply, “October“,
and, ergo, left at that

but it wasn’t

the very same must be said about the
Third Symphony, “The First of May”,
you can already probably hear the
jubilation and fanfare in just the title,
another milestone of the Revolution,
the anniversary of Lenin’s death, the
final chorus sings a lyric of a poet of
the Revolution, Semyon Kirsanov, a
sure nod to the symphony‘s political,
however peripheral, intent

what you’ll note, however, is the
sensuality of the music, above
whatever weight of a, perhaps
more fitting, dirge, or the bombast
even of a commemorative, an exalting
tribute – though these are determinedly
there – going back to the orchestral
triumphs of the Romantic Era, with
its lush rallentandos and its voluptuous
ritardandos, the better to seduce

Shostakovich is getting ready for the
real thing, a piece with any partisan
message, he must sense, can never
work

by the way, should you disagree
with any of my evaluations, this
would not at all be offensive, but
even wonderful, I have been
wrong, I can prove it, I have the
dates, they are listed somewhere
in my papers, but it would mean
you’re paying attention, listening,
which is the entire purpose, more
than anything else, of this
exploratory exercise, should you
wish to participate

R ! chard

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September 29, 2017

the milonga

“For a Better Life III“

Fabian Perez

________

a milonga, a song with a syncopated
beat, is the musical form that gave
birth to the tango, I wondered what
one could be after my mom brought
my attention to one in a program for
an upcoming event in our city, I had
to look it up

my only clue was that it was by
Astor Piazzolla, the Argentinian who
in the 20th Century reinvigorated the
tango nearly all by himself, but in
translation from Spanish to English,
milonga still came up milonga, what
could a milonga be, I asked

here then, by Astor Piazzolla, is
what we’d be hearing

you’ll want to pay attention too to
the paintings of Fabian Perez, also
an Argentinian, which visually
accompany the music, they are
equally as seductive as the
irresistible Piazzollan rhythms

on the program as well, for a
completely different musical
experience, is Mozart’s Clarinet
Quintet, a piece I wrote about
several years ago here, but must
revisit, there is no more beautiful
clarinet quintet, in my estimation,
and not many musical pieces are
either as beautiful

I won’t say a word about the other
piece on this eclectic upcoming
program, but to say that I’d arrive
after the intermission

R ! chard

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September 1, 2017

an homage to the victims of the Titanic

“The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up“ (1839)

William Turner

_______

while I’m on the subject of threnodies,
which is to say “song[s] of lamentation
for the dead”, as I earlier stated, let me
bring your attention to this extraordinary
piece, an homage to the victims of the
Titanic

it doesn’t even have a title, much as
Mozart and Haydn didn’t before music
went mainstream, into public forums
rather than merely aristocratic salons,
and when an identifying moniker
instead of a number became manifestly
more practical, especially when the
emerging Middle Classes were
becoming the ones who were paying
the composer’s bills, at the opera
houses and the other sprouting
concert venues, when some composers
had even up to 32 sets of piano sonatas
to remember, three and four often to
a single set, opus number, as many as
there are movements in a very sonata

and that’s not counting the numbered
symphonies and string quartets of
theirs, left to similarly calculate,
decipher, extricate

it doesn’t have a title, I think, because
to my knowledge, it is the first of its
kind, a composition created by
computer, for computer, an entirely
self-contained digital work of,
manifestly, art – I’d been waiting,
diligently, for one – and like Beethoven,
after the work was done, the artist(s)
just felt the title best left to the
wordsmiths, thus – you’re welcome –
“Threnody for the Victims of the
Titanic“

sure, computers have done practical
things before, admirably, but never
told a story, and certainly never one
as profound as this one

these are the last moments of the
Titanic, digitally reproduced, in real
time, 2 hours and 40 minutes, they
are mesmerizing, you don’t want
to miss a thing

there are no voices, apart from a
few radio transmissions at the
start, spotting the iceberg, calling
out commands to beware, stop
the engines

afterwards only silence, and the
sound of the waves, the churning
of the engines, which have been
restarted, sounding as rhythmic,
incidentally, and numbing, as the
wheels on the railroad tracks of
Steve Reich‘s “Different Trains“,
another powerful threnody

later the flash and crack of flares,
the crunch of the ship sinking

the pervasive, however disrupted,
silence and the inexorable passage
of ever ticking time combine to be,
thereafter, transfixing, meditative,
ultimately transcendent, a fitting
setting for a threnody

I know of only another work to take
you to that venerable place,
Beethoven’s opus 111

and often enough Pink Floyd, for
that matter, and the visionary
Alan Parsons Project, of course,
discoursing on inexorable Time

and, now that I think of it, Elgar‘s
“The Dream of Gerontius“, whose
character goes from his deathbed
in the first act, to his afterlife in
the second, effecting transcendence
for us by, yes, ingenious
metaphorical proxy

but I digress

what I call “Threnody for the Victims
of the Titanic“ is a narrative with
sound, not a movie, not a television
program, it has more commonality
with a musical production than
anything else but painting in art
history, though its means are
intuitively literary, ship stories go
back to “The Odyssey“ through
“Gulliver’s Travels“ , “Treasure
Island“ and to one of my very
favourites, “Ship of Fools“,
relatively recently

I could add “Mutiny on the Bounty“,
“Moby Dick“, “The Caine Mutiny“

in art, a precedent would’ve been set
in our collective consciousness by
William Turner‘s celebrated “The
Fighting Temeraire …“, but I would
mention as well Caspar David
Friedrich‘s “The Wanderer above
the Sea of Fog“ for its existential
pertinence

a few literary points I’d like to stress
to back up my overt adulation, I find
it impressive that the Classical rules
of tragedy have been maintained,
unity of action, time, and place,
prescriptions going back to
Aristotle‘s “Poetics“ in our cultural
history, to profoundly express
tragedy, iconic, epic, misfortune

not to mention the Classical musical
imperatives of tempo, tonality and
repetition, none of which can be
faulted here in this consummate
composition

there is a no greater leveller of tempo
than time, larghissimo here*, in the
largest sense of that word, the
cosmic, the inexorable pace of
temporality in our brief heavens

a greater leveller of tonality neither
is there than the rigorously impartial
hum of the imperturbable Cosmos

nor is there greater repetition than
uniformity, however disrupted by
however fervent ever human
intervention, see Sisyphus, or
Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf“ for iconic disrupters

R ! chard

* Shostakovich had asked the
Beethoven Quartet to play the first
movement of his 15th String Quartet,
“Elegy: Adagio“, “so that flies
drop dead in mid-air, and the
audience start leaving the hall from
sheer boredom“

well this inspired elucidation is even
slower than that

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February 11, 2017

“Is Art Truth?”

“Paradise”

Hieronymus Bosch

__________

“Is Art Truth?“, a friend asks after speaking of
its benefits, “Art accepts and tells the truth-Is
that it ?“, she inquires, wonders

art, like truth itself and beauty, is in the eye
of the beholder, I submit, and therefore my
definition is, once again, entirely personal,
though I’ve rigorously plumbed it

it requires background

art died for a thousand years, it was
essentially unrecorded, dormant from
the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, nor
promoted but for Catholic purposes,
hence the majestic cathedrals and the
magisterial altarpieces, works produced
by, however, communities until eventually
certain artisans were recognized as more
inspired than others, and given autonomy

enter Duccio, for instance

in time these new, necessarily idiosyncratic
perspectives – see Hieronymus Bosch, Dante
Alighieri – dominated, veering in their search
for truth in their art and beauty – selling points,
incidentally – towards less strictly orthodox
utterances

see above

art, and its contemporary science, were
chipping away at ecclesiastical dogma

till God died, and artists continued their
prescient march forward, shaping our
zeitgeist, our spirit of the times, with
their pronouncements for lack of any
other guides

but the voices grew personal, see Mozart,
often profound and prophetic, see
Beethoven, till the confluence of disparate
realities gave us secularism, each soul for
itself as a tenet, a credo, a belief, a truth

what did they have in common

I believe it was their quest for beauty
through truth, their quest for truth
through beauty, with a nod here to
the salient Keats

art is prayer, a search for, as well as a
manifestation of, one’s personal
identification with the sacred

it is not truth, it is not beauty, it is the
fervent intention itself, linked with a
correspondent workmanship, craft,
which inspires

see for instance van Gogh for this, who,
remember, nevertheless shot himself,
artists are mortal, merely, messengers,
ever, therefore, fallible, unsure, fearful
even, often, of their, perhaps
Promethean, fire

for consolation, or even maybe
transcendence, see again,
pertinently here, Beethoven

listen

Richard

psst: thanks, Joan

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July 11, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Daniel Kharitonov, ll‏

Daniel Kharitonov

_________

there ‘ve been extraordinary
performances since Maria Mazo‘s
defining reinvention of Mozart’s
21st Piano Concerto, the “Elvira
Madigan”, at the XVth International
Tchaikovsky Competition, worthy
of, believe me, fruitful commentary,
but for the sake of brevity and, of
course, indiscretion, I’ve refrained
from going on and on, and on,
about however many of them, all,
nevertheless, quite outstanding

but before even the end of Daniel
Kharitonov‘s final and deciding
performance, of Tchaikovsky’s
indomitable 1st Piano Concerto,
followed by whatever by Liszt,
he has, like Maria Mazo, here
given us a new standard for
hearing these indelible musical
epics, she takes over from
Mitsuko Uchida, goddess of
Mozart, he takes over from very
Van Cliburn, you’ve got to go
back to 1958 to have heard
this commanding thunder

Kharitonov is sixteen, a bud
becoming a flower

wow, no matter who wins

Richard

psst: his Liszt, incidentally, will
restore your faith in Liszt

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July 8, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Maria Mazo, ll‏

a still from the movie “Elvira Madigan”

________________

there’s been a second round of
recitals, enough to make you
weary of sonatas, unless you’re
stalwart, devoted, primed

the prizes have been awarded,
the results posted at the site,
so that any mystery, excitement,
has been chilled, had you been
in any way excited about your
choices

they certainly rained on my
parade

by now most of my favourites
have gone down, others have
been perfunctory, to my mind,
but three, which surely I’ll
cover, but presently let me
start with Maria Mazo, a
wonder, who’d wowed me
earlier with her
transcendental Beethoven

here, with an orchestra, she
takes on a monument of the
20th Century, Mozart’s 21st
Piano Concerto, better known
since the mid-20th Century as
the theme to the movie,
“Elvira Madigan“, a forgotten
film now, however enchanting,
but this is where a generation
learned about Mozart

Maria Mazo sets the new
standard here, this is how
you’ll hear this concerto from
now on, it is magical, it is
mystical, it is extraordinary,
it’s right up there with the
greatest, who are presently
handing over to her our
musical reins

thank you, Mitsuko Uchida,
with the greatest admiration

strangely Maria Mazo didn’t
even place

who could ‘a’ ever thunk it

Richard

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July 2, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Shino Hidaka

“The Musical Contest“ (1754-5)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

______

with only four contestants to go,
I already crown Shino Hidaka the
winner of the XVth Tchaikovsky
Competition, this kind of affinity
only comes around once in a
lifetime, her Bach was not only
perfect but inspired, probing,
her ensuing Chopin,
mesmerizing, the Beethoven
that followed aptly, though ever
unexpectedly, transcendental,
transcendence not ever
happening without absolute
mystical concentration, her
Tchaikovsky, an evocation
rather than a mere description
of a Russian village, her
Rachmaninov, on utter fire

Dmitry Shishkin, before her,
neither was un-brilliant, a
consummate technician,
however, rather than an outright
revelation, his spirited Bach was
a turning point for me, finally
someone who got it, his Mozart,
as frivolous and delightful as
Mozart would’ve wanted it to be,
the rest appropriately everywhere
dazzling, second, therefore, ever
so illustrious, nevertheless,
prize, bravo

neither, incidentally, milked any
of their notes, just played what
was written

Richard

psst: compare Fragonard, above, to
Mozart, a synaesthetic match,
where sight and sound are
interwoven, giving you social
intimations of the mid-18th
Century

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: Mozart

January 7, 2018

Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115 – Johannes Brahms

January 4, 2018

Clarinet Quintet in A major, K581 – Mozart

December 30, 2017

on string quartets – Opus 76, no 1 – Joseph Haydn

November 10, 2017

Symphony No 3 in Eb major, op. 20, “The First of May”

September 29, 2017

the milonga

September 1, 2017

an homage to the victims of the Titanic

February 11, 2017

“Is Art Truth?”

July 11, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Daniel Kharitonov, ll‏

July 8, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Maria Mazo, ll‏

July 2, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Shino Hidaka