Accordion Crimes

Sorry to any Proulx fans. This isn't a crime. I always thought the accordion was for drunks at village weddings. I think so no longer, having heard this Ukrainian chap playing Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor and making it sound like he had a church organ on his knee. (Via Alex Ross)

Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).

Ebony and Ivory

Hat-tip to Alex Ross who pointed out that Amazon has the complete Stravinsky, on 22CDs, recorded by top orchestras, for £17.99. Admittedly, I didn't think that he'd written 6CDs-worth of ballet, but it's still an astonishing bargain. I don't mind plugging Amazon in this case: Wolverhampton doesn't have a classical music shop. HMV is pitifully inadequate for anything outside the top 40, let alone top composers. Try asking for Nono in there… I'm also revelling in the Perahia and Gould Goldberg Variations. Perhaps the Perahia is technically superior, but there's just something weirdly compelling about Gould's twisty, moaning performance that tops every other recording since 1955. Phantom Band's Checkmate Savage is also doing it for me today.

Congratulations Alex

One of my favourite books, Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, has won an award from my favourite newspaper, The Guardian (though it now calls itself theguardian because it has an inferiority complex about the web). Ross's book is a guide to modern classical music - it's informed, witty, educational and passionate, and it certainly made me go back to some music I'd overlooked and listen to some I'd previously dismissed. There are blank spots, such as British composers (though he rates Britten) but it's a great read. 

More than that, Ross is one of the few who have genuinely grasped the possibilities of blogging. The book and his site go together, allowing him to post extracts of pieces of music he writes about.

Feldman

Alex Ross over at Therestisnoise has posted a few moments of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. If this doesn't convince you of the joy of modern music, nothing ever will. The first instrument is a viola, that underestimated but noble plank. 

I can't help thinking that in this snippet, it sounds very like the opening theme of Vaughan Williams's Flos Campi, a far more beautiful piece than The Lark Ascending, although perhaps that's because the former hasn't been done to death by Classic FM (soporifically stealing your soul with music from bourgeois commercials: all your M+S favourites). I hate that station. It's the Daily Mail of classical music.