Camerata Pacifica memories

Another concert tonight. This time at the Huntington Library: a pair of Beethoven piano sonatas – including Op. 90, one of my favorites – and chamber music by Schubert and Schumann presented by Camerata Pacifica. (Review coming Thursday.)

As I sat in the hall waiting for the performance, my memory transported me to a performance I heard more than a decade ago, in another facility on the same grounds. On that occasion, it was Xenakis’ duo for oboe and percussion, Dmaathen, and it was one of the finest performances of anything I’ve ever heard in concert. Nicholas Daniel (oboe) and Ji-hye Jung (percussion) performed this remarkable score with such unhinged power that it almost verged into spirit possession. The work was the centerpiece of a typically inventive program by Camerata Pacifica, which as I recall ranged from Debussy to Takemitsu to Shostakovich.

That, in turn, reminded me of the much missed summer concerts at the Huntington by Southwest Chamber Music from long ago. Performances of Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, Reger’s Clarinet Quintet, a selection of works by Vietnamese composers — these are just a few that I can immediately think of.

These recollections stirred up feelings of gratitude for having heard so many wonderful performances, some by people and organizations no longer with us, as well as gratitude for those groups who are still here. Camerata Pacifica is among the latter, one of the brightest gems in Southern California’s musical culture. The continued dedication of its artistic director Adrian Spence and all of his fellow Camerata Pacifica musicians refreshes one’s faith in the power of music.

Feldman Birthday Thoughts

Piano Spheres’ two-day Feldman marathon just ended a couple of hours ago; some brief thoughts before going to bed.

I wasn’t sure what the turn-out would be for these concerts. Feldman’s music demands two things from a listener: deep listening and openness to rethink musical expectations. Neither quality comes easy, yet Feldman’s proximity to the visual arts has broadened his appeal. The idea — although not always the reality — of the composer and his works attracts at least the curiosity of listeners who otherwise ignore unconventional music.

The first concert in the Feldman marathon was held at the Glorya Kaufman Auditorium at the Wende Museum, a venue that seats 60 people, plus maybe about two dozen more with extra seating. Over the span of six hours, the concert probably attracted about two or three times that amount. Cumulatively. Because a lot of people came and went. Audience turnover looked to be around 60% between each piece. Feldman’s name drew the crowds, but his music challenged many of his evidently neophyte listeners.

Second day was at the Brick in Koreatown. A smaller venue and, since it was a workday, smaller crowd. But more dedicated. Turnover was far less than the day before: over ⅔ of the audience that heard the last notes of Patterns in Chromatic Fields dissolve into the night had been there at the start of Why Patterns? six hours earlier.

A full review is coming Wednesday. We’re not even halfway into January, but these two concerts will certainly be among the highlights of 2026.

Mozart ineffective

My father introduced me to classical music. Accidentally. This was back in 1994 and instant self-help fads were everywhere. Among them was the “Mozart effect”, which claimed that children exposed to classical music had better test scores. I was 12 at the time and like a lot of kids of the time obsessed with video games. That was no good in my father’s eyes, so he sat me down one day after school and forced me to listen to classical music. To his disappointment, I somehow got hooked on the “bad” stuff, took a sharp turn at Darmstadt, and quickly fell in with the wrong crowd. Meanwhile, with my ears electrified by the din of Varèse and Boulez, the Baroque and Classical-era music that my father had hoped would lead me to academic glory was simply boring to me. 

Then about a decade ago, that began to change. Through a former colleague at Amoeba, I discovered blues music. His erudition and passion for the genre opened up new sounds for me. As I listened to Barbecue Bob, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others, I began to discern parallels between the blues and a lot of pre-Bach Western music. “roots music” too. Heard in this new way, these genres that I had previously avoided now sounded refreshingly contemporary and relatable.

For a long time, my ears rarely ventured beyond the 20th century. Now here I was on a breezy morning, listening to and enjoying every note of Bach, Vivaldi, and Heinichen. Wherever my father may be en el más allá, I hope he’s finally happy with my playlist. Although I still listen to a lot of those 20th-century modernists that distressed him. Hey, at least I kicked that video game habit! 

Nothing Lasts

Earlier today I spent a pleasant morning reading Ryan Dohoney’s Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde; an excellent book and quick read. It had been on my “to buy” list for some time and because of the forthcoming Piano Spheres recitals commemorating the composer’s centennial, now seemed a good time to pull the proverbial trigger.

The book is about the webs of friendships that sustained Feldman, his peers, and how these became objects of mourning in his late music. It also touches upon a number of other interesting related subjects. One of them is addressed at the very start of the first chapter, with an extensive quote by Feldman from a lecture in 1967:

When one begins to work — until that unlucky time when it is no longer involved with just a few friends, admirers, complainers — there is no separation between what you do and who you are. I don’t mean that you hope what you are doing is real or right. That is not the question. You work. The work leads to a concept of music that draws attention. You soon find yourself in the world. Maybe not for the right reason — but you find yourself in the world.

Yet there was that other “world” — of conversation — of anonymity — of seeing the paintings in the intimacy of the studio and not in a museum — of playing a new work on the piano in your home and not the concert hall — of the hours spent walking, eating, and talking with John Cage and not wondering if I should fly to Paris from London in order to spend a few hours with him in arrogant crowds of people. Nothing lasts.

“Even with his burgeoning success, Feldman longed for the past”, Doheny summarized. “Publicity yielded estrangement”.

Feldman’s quote chimed with another near the end of the book, wherein he explained to Philip Guston how he sought to create a music unburdened by the weight of music history, of centuries of reception that explicitly and implicitly indoctrinated composers and listeners alike into linking musical gestures with ready-made associations. Or what Feldman called “fifteen-hundred years of goddamned references”. The trajectory of his life and work was trained on reaching that goal, but along the way he inadvertently created new references, sometimes in unexpected contexts that have been felt beyond his life and art in general.

Could Feldman have anticipated that the corrosive properties of professional renown would have wider implications beyond what he imagined? Consider the ongoing process of gentrification and economic stratification in one of its most visible flashpoints: the Lower East Side of New York, an enclave that historically was the domain of immigrants and the working poor. It was there that Feldman and his friends lived in the facetiously dubbed “Bozza Mansion”.

Mostly viewed as a 21st-century phenomenon, gentrification began in the immediate postwar years, when low income areas in large cities began to attract young artists and intellectuals still vying to establish themselves. These early gentrifiers differed in some crucial ways from their later successors; many of these postwar bohemians were not much better off economically, if at all, to the long-term residents they joined. Feldman himself was the son of an immigrant whose clothier business was forced into bankruptcy. The composer, his Eisenhower-era social milieu, and the yuppies of today, nonetheless, share important traits. Their perception of depressed urban spaces as a source of “authenticity”, for one, and their exhibitionist delight in juxtaposing themselves and their lofty aesthetic ideals against dilapidated surroundings.

I was alerted to this by Doheny’s astute observation that the places where Feldman and his friends lived and worked ironically “were offered up for public consumption”. He noted the “prurient delectation” with which Harper’s Bazaar in 1952 presented the “Bozza Mansion” and its denizens to a mass audience; a telling reveal of how postwar artists often were agents working on behalf, not against the postwar consumerism they ostensibly challenged. Their chosen surroundings became emblematic of the New York School, Doheny said, but it could also be said that these artists encoded for mainstream society expectations of the tópos of artistic creation, which they further reinforced by their sometimes self-aware performative bohemianism that became part of the popular iconography of the arts.

But the coveted “authenticity” perceived in low income urban neighborhoods is a finite resource, depleted with each new arrival, until they are stripped bare for developers eager to render their death blow by completing the transformation of an organic entity into yet another anonymous urban landscape, indistinguishable from any other, with streets walled by endless 5-over-1 condos fated to be the tenement housing and rest homes of the future. Despite everything, the vicious cycle continues and replicates itself. As a scholar on the Lower East Side told the New York Times in 2009, “the very history being rubbed out by developers and yuppies is, paradoxically, what draws them to the area”.

Success for Feldman was double-edged: it opened potentials for creative enrichment and material gain, but also for destruction; the latter produced its own “goddamned references” that society draws on to confirm the fertility of artistic soil. The results are neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, or Little Tokyo and Highland Park in Los Angeles; places where economic improvement has come at the cost of lives displaced, meaning disfigured, and the evisceration of collective memory.

The loved ones, places, ways of life that Feldman mourned in his late music, then, become a shared experience; his music a nexus that permits us to contemplate our grief along with his, superimpose our feelings of loss upon his in a continual thanatic palimpsest. When everything that shaped us, everything that established the parameters of living, those countless experiences, places, people that helped us forge identity and meaning are gone, what else remains but to mourn?

As the man himself once said, “nothing lasts”.

Brief Reflection on Being "Admirable" at 43

My 40s have been years of reexamination, most of all of music. Certain composers and musicians I love just as much today as when I was in my teens, some less, and some much more.

When I was younger, it seemed I only had time for the most extraordinary, rarest, emotionally intense recordings. Things started to change when I was in my 30s. Gradually, I fell under the charms of those recordings that had earned Penguin Guide rosettes or the epithet “admirable” from the Gramophone — the kind that my twentysomething self had scoffed at as square. Dutoit’s Ravel. Marriner’s Mozart. Haitink’s Shostakovich. And Mahler. And Bruckner. And Beethoven.

I haven’t “outgrown” the titans of the past. Just that my ears have now widened to make room for other perspectives on greatness. The musicians of today also have a number of advantages over the old. As much as I treasure Piero Coppola’s recordings of Ravel, there’s no denying that as a purely aural experience the new recordings of the composer’s music conducted by Christian Măcelaru are easier to listen and enjoyable in their own right.

Probably it’s simply a matter of evolving attitudes that are a natural part of aging. When you’re young, it isn’t enough to merely live. It’s as if you can only thrive by feeling the searing burn of existence. That’s how I felt 20 years ago, anyway. With the passing of the years, though, I’ve learned that there is more to the holistic enjoyment of life than what is found at the edges. Serenity, patience, control, acceptance, the contemplation of beauty — all facets of life that are rewarding, even thrilling to explore. Whether that’s sitting quietly with my wife at the park, walking around the neighborhood and being surprised by the rare sight of a rabbit or deer, watching hummingbirds fluttering around our feeder. Or listening to Haitink’s admirable interpretive equipoise in his Decca recording of Shostakovich 11.

Barshai on the Rocks

It wasn’t until sometime early last year that I learned a recording of Shostakovich’s First and Ninth symphonies played by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Barshai existed. His cycle with the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne is well known and remains competitive, even nearly 30 years since it was first issued. Perhaps because it has long been available at budget price (although it was recently reissued on SACD in Japan) and frequently packaged as part of various Shostakovich omnibuses aimed at entry level collectors, the stature of Barshai's cycle may have diminished somewhat. At least I haven't heard critics mention it as much as they did in the 2000s, when it was practically a default recommendation. Admittedly, with the fecundity of the Shostakovich discography this century, I've also contributed to this relative neglect, although in the last few years I've renewed my delight in Barshai’s Shostakovich. Aside from his WDR cycle, Barshai also made live recordings of Shostakovich’s Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies with German and Swiss orchestras that are worth hearing. (Not to mention his studio Eighth for EMI.)

This Canadian recording is no less rewarding. Barshai draws rich tone from the Vancouver strings, as well as spirited playing from the winds. Just listen to the trombonist in the first movement of the Ninth, whose constant interjections sound satisfyingly and appropriately “out of pocket”, to use the Gen-Z parlance. I’ve listened to this Ninth several times in the past month and, each time, it reinforces my opinion that it’s one of the best in the discography. Good recordings of this symphony aren’t hard to come by, but this Ninth in Vancouver is really special.

Barshai’s Vancouver Shostakovich First is quite good, too, although not on the same level. The first movement starts off well enough, with characterful winds, especially trumpet and clarinet, but the gait of the second theme drags a bit, and when the climaxes arrive later the mood never breaks free from a general stolidity at odds with the score’s mood. Youthful energy is also lacking in the scherzo, though the Vancouver Symphony played it with impressive clarity of articulation, and the piano climax here has a fearsomeness that is not too often heard. Where the performance really grabs one’s ears is in the “Lento”, which Barshai convincingly directs with an implacable gravitas suggestive of Tchaikovsky or Mahler. Young man’s music it is not, at least in this recording.

This CBC disc is so good overall that one would never guess that by the time it was made the Vancouver/Barshai relationship was not only already on the rocks, but on the verge of ending acrimoniously. 

It had begun auspiciously enough back in 1984, when Barshai was selected by the Vancouver Symphony to succeed Akiyama Kazuyoshi (another excellent conductor I’ll probably write about some day). Echoing a well known quote by Shostakovich, Barshai told the press that the Vancouver Symphony would play “everything from Bach to Offenbach and more, including 20th-century composers”. Among those composers he hoped to program were Alexander Lokshin and Mieczysław Weinberg — esoteric music for a mid-tier North American orchestra of the 1980s. “Are Vancouver audiences ready for such introductions?”, a writer for the Canadian Press wondered.

Apparently not, as it turned out, but that would be the least of Barshai’s problems.

Even before the upbeat was signaled on the first, hesitant notes of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Barshai's Vancouver debut as music director, troubles were mounting. The orchestra was operating with a deficit of over US$600,000 (approximately US$2 million in 2026); an auditor projected an additional six-figure loss for the 1985–1986 season. A dramatic decline for an orchestra that a decade before had boasted the largest subscription base of any North American orchestra. According to another audit from 1982, management was bloated far in excess of the orchestra’s needs. On top of that, it reported that they squandered funds on expenses and interest-free personal loans. The revelations provoked the musicians of the Vancouver Symphony to threaten a strike, their second in less than five years. Management responded by locking the musicians out. Calm was restored after Barshai offered to take a pay cut in order to aid the orchestra, which led to a compromise that allowed operations to continue. It was a gesture as noble as it was timely — and went unreciprocated by management.

Barshai outwardly continued to maintain his resolve to make the Vancouver Symphony a “world-class ensemble”, in spite of the challenges. He might have succeeded had he not committed a misstep of his own: firing the orchestra’s concertmaster and one of its horn players, both well liked by personnel. Whatever feelings of goodwill that existed were poisoned once and for all. The feuding between Barshai and the orchestra’s musicians soon made local, then national headlines, capped by the publication of an internal poll that was effectively a vote of no-confidence against Barshai.

Amidst this chaos, the number of subscribers to the Vancouver Symphony continued to plummet and its deficit widened to nearly US$2 million (approximately US$6 million in 2026). In 1988, when their CBC CD of Shostakovich symphonies was issued, matters reached a point of no return. After months of grumbling, the orchestra’s board voted to refuse Barshai an extension of his contract, with the majority largely blaming him for the orchestra’s budget shortfall, despite audits that stated otherwise.

Barshai had his supporters and they took to the press to rally for his cause. One of them was Dennis Culver, the orchestra board’s president. In an interview with the music critic of the Toronto Star, Culver disagreed with his view that Barshai “failed to exert a charismatic presence during his three years in [Vancouver]”. Whatever issues the conductor may have had, Culver said, were nothing but “a pimple on the face of the world”. Instead, he cited ongoing economic problems in British Columbia, aging subscribers, and the failure of the orchestra’s marketing team to cultivate new listeners.

While the ink of the interview was still wet, the Vancouver Symphony declared bankruptcy, laid off its employees, and canceled the remainder of its season. Barshai retracted his initial threats of litigation against the orchestra, saying later through his attorney that he didn't want to inflict any harm on the ailing institution.

A few months later, the Vancouver Symphony came back from insolvency and resumed its activities. Denny Boyd, a Vancouver Sun columnist and Barshai defender, offered blunt advice to the embattled conductor’s potential successors: “Only sons-of-bitches need apply.”

Karajan Between East and West

One of the CDs that arrived for me last week from Japan was a live Karajan concert from 1961. On this occasion he was helming the Berlin Philharmonic on tour in Paris; their program was Beethoven 8 and 9.

Disdain for Karajan was downright trendy around the turn of the century. The Maestro Myth signaled the upbeat on this ritualistic grave dancing, fomented by shifts in tastes, as well as outrage over Karajan’s proximity to the NSDAP. The latter became so infamous, that at times it almost overwhelmed purely musicological discourse about Karajan. There was still a lot of that in the 1990s, though, while the conductor’s corpse was still warm. Karajan became obsessed with schönklang for its own sake, people would say; that he cowered under the shadow of Furtwängler, whose explosive posthumous reevaluation coincided with Karajan’s dwindling years; his hearing declined and his final digital mixes were terrible as a result; Karajan was a creation of the record studio, a muzak bandleader of a plastic listening experience. I heard these and other criticisms during my first record store stint between 1998 and 2003. Arguably, Karajan’s legacy in North America and Europe never recovered the primacy it once had; his recordings no longer are the default recommendation of critics and listeners.

In East Asia, on the other hand, Karajan’s studio recordings continue to be highly prized and regularly reissued, often in premium SACD editions. These are supplemented with a steady stream of live recordings, most of which come with excellent annotations and other paraphernalia that testify to Karajan’s enduring appeal in the region. The aforementioned set of the conductor’s 1960 French concert is a case in point: it was packaged with a nifty poster of the the man at work, evidently immersed in the moment, lost to the world. For a moment, as I folded it back up, I thought maybe it was time to take down the Farah Fawcett poster in my room and make way for Herbie.

Few conductors matched Karajan in his effortless and, for his time, visionary use of the studio as instrument. Other conductors had anticipated him. Stokowski and, to a degree, Mengelberg, who had not an insignificant influence on the young Karajan. But it was the Berlin Philharmonic’s longtime GMD that arguably perfected the role of conductor as co-producer, even if he did go too far at times (e.g. his recording of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra).

His virtuosic use of the studio control deck was no crutch, to be sure, as is amply testified by this Paris Beethoven concert, issued on Spectrum Sound’s Belle Âme sub-label, and released in cooperation with the INA. What is remarkable is not only the apparent consistency in energy between his studio and live recordings — which, as the flawed discographies of Barbirolli and Tennstedt demonstrate, is easier said than done — but also the moments of risk-taking and experimentation that dispel the rather staid image Karajan evokes in Western listeners. Another fascinating detail is the transitional sound of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1960. Six years after Furtwängler’s death, they still sounded much like his orchestra, albeit brightened with emergent qualities that would blossom into full flower by the mid-1960s. Still, the mid-range winds and basses especially recall the Berlin Philharmonic of the immediate postwar.

It would be interesting at a later date to explore why appraisals of Karajan’s legacy in East Asia have diverged from the more critical consensus in North America and Europe. (Although, if the recent Berlin Philharmonic box sets are any evidence, he still has his die-hards on this side of the world.) Where the world is headed to in this century seems more uncertain than ever, but global pluralism, at least in the realm of culture, seems here to stay. That is something to encourage and be thankful for.

Will The Dude Abide?

Reading the morning headlines in the 21st century can be a white-knuckle thrill ride; today was no different.

As much as Venezuela and related issues have figured in national news during the 2020s, these have never significantly affected the US. It’s a different story in Latin America, however, where more than two decades of Chavismo and American opposition against it have had significant consequences for local politics and quotidian life. One of the most dramatic recent manifestations of this phenomenon was the triumph of José Antonio Kast in the second round of the 2025 presidential election in my parents’ home country of Chile, a result powered in great part by widespread frustration over unprecedented levels of Venezuelan immigration.

In my childhood, Venezuela seemed like a glamorous country; a place that telenovelas, vaudevillian comedy programs, and other shows produced by Venevisión enticed me into believing was populated entirely by elegant gentlemen of leisure and beautiful women. The latter was a recurring cultural idée fixe growing up, perhaps because one of my mother’s friends, a Venezuelan lady, ostentatiously prided herself on that popular notion.

There are achievements in high culture, too, foremost among them those by Andrés Bello, an eminent polymath whose impact in Latin American history and the Spanish language are comparable to that of Goethe’s in Germany.

Dudamel, the single most recognizable Venezuelan fine artist in the entire world, maybe of all time, came much later, of course. His face and name are ubiquitous here in Los Angeles. You don’t have to go very far to see “The Dude” plastered on a billboard, hanging from a street lamp banner, or decorating the side of an MTA bus.

Whatever one’s opinion of Dudamel as a conductor, he undoubtedly possesses an instant brand recognition that is exceptionally rare in recent classical music history. It has been a blessing for a career unblemished by scandal, but this is increasingly being tried by his longstanding association with Chavismo. Gone are the days when sympathy for Hugo Chávez and his jumbled ideology was fashionable among the discontents of the Bush II era. As mainstream American and European media narratives on Chavismo have soured, scrutiny into Dudamel’s personal political beliefs has increased.

The first warning shots were fired at Dudamel before his international career had really begun, in 2007, goaded by media outrage over Chávez’s unsuccessful constitutional referendum that year. However, it was an op-ed published five years later in Commentary that broadened public attention into Dudamel’s connections to the Venezuelan government. Not satisfied with earlier critics’ implication of Dudamel as an unwitting accomplice, the essay’s author took a step further and accused the conductor of being a willing co-conspirator or at least enabler of Venezuela’s anti-democratic turn:

Instead of using his international prestige to stand up against Chávez’s efforts to subvert democracy, Dudamel may have become one more artistic façade for a government hell-bent on destroying human rights in Venezuela. In doing so, he has become part of a long tradition of morally obtuse musicians who played for dictators. [...] So while the likeable Dudamel has become a classical star here in the United States, he has also become a symbol of the way every aspect of Venezuelan culture has been taken over by the Chávez regime to the detriment of his country’s freedom and the security of the region.

Others expanded this line of attack, most notably the pianist Gabriela Montero, a fellow Venezuelan and former friend. Just last year, while urging on a boycott of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, she called for regime change in her home country.

Circumspect annoyance with the “over-politicized” state of the world notwithstanding, Dudamel has maintained his composure. For neoconservatives and the present day equivalent of those people that Mencken long ago referred to as “world savers”, Dudamel’s neutralism has been insufficient. A few hours ago, one tabloidist vaguely said that the conductor had to make some kind of correct public statement on the ongoing situation in Venezuela, lest he “be held to account” for his relationship to its government. What that actually involved and whether anything illicit resulted from it, as this tabloidist intimated without evidence, is unclear.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Richard Strauss grumbled that Americans were too obsessed with politics. He had a point, but there is more to it than that. (And it is not just Americans anymore.) Most people are either unable or unwilling to parse information given to them, exacerbating political partisanship that in the last two decades has become akin to the rivalry of the demes in Constantinople. In such an environment, where puerile “good guy/bad guy” dynamics define mainstream political discourse, and such perceptions can fluctuate on a whim, holding Dudamel to task for his mostly undefined ideological affiliations is a waste of time — his as much as ours.

"The Cigarette Symphonies"

I’d been looking for it for years: the Japanese CD reissue of Kurt Sanderling’s EMI cycle of the Beethoven symphonies. One of my pet passions are Beethoven cycles led by conductors of the “old school”. With over 80 such sets in my collection, you’d think it’d be time to give this proclivity a rest. But, no — I needed to listen to this one too.  Over the past several years, I’d bid on a number of listings for this set on Yahoo Auctions Japan. Each time it slipped my grasp, either because the auction ended higher than expected or because there was something else that I chose to bid all-out on. Last November I threaded the needle and won the thing for a very reasonable $22. Fast-forward: it was delivered to me on December 31 and I finally got around to listening to it today.

Sanderling’s was the first digital Beethoven symphony cycle, beating out the likes of Karajan, Muti, Abbado, and other more glamorous maestros. Asari Kōzō’s liner notes for the CD reissue touched upon that, but didn’t mention a more interesting detail: that the recording was sponsored by the British-Canadian tobacco company, Du Maurier. Which is why Sanderling’s Beethoven cycle was nicknamed by some contemporary reviewers as “the cigarette symphonies”.

Online tabloidists have ascribed darker motives for Du Maurier’s sponsorship and insinuated that Sanderling was shanghaied into this recording project. In fact, by the time Sanderling’s Beethoven was released in late 1981, Du Maurier had been the Philharmonia’s main sponsor for several years. Hardly chagrined at being “outshouted” by a cigarette brand, the orchestra prominently featured their sponsor’s logo in their advertisements, underlined by the legend, “A Du Maurier Concert Series”. They recorded the Beethoven symphonies with Sanderling at Abbey Road and Kingsway Hall in early 1981, a year after they performed the cycle live at Wembley Conference Center. Recordings were packed into a crowded schedule of two three-hour sessions per day, which permitted the musicians to maintain the flow of their performances. However, this came at the cost of retaining some technical imperfections.

Du Maurier was one of many British corporations of the time who viewed classical music as a potential avenue for brand outreach, a tactic that journalists likened to the sponsorships typical of American television programs. One of the beneficiaries of corporate interest in classical music was the unfinished period instrument Haydn cycle conducted by Derek Solomons. As a 1982 New York Times article explained:

The financial aid from Martini & Rossi included complete payment for the musicians and 50 percent of the cost of advertisements in which the Martini & Rossi logo appears.

Marcel Rodd, chairman of Saga Records, which had recorded the Solomons cycle, had no misgivings about this arrangement: “We could never balance our budgets if it were not for our vices”. Neither did the author of the article, who seemed more concerned that future listeners would forget about the musicians involved in recordings and, instead, talk “about the ‘Amoco Tristan’ and the ‘Du Maurier Beethoven’”.

After having listened to the cycle, I have to admit to being puzzled at its existence. Reviews of the live performances at Wembley were tepid. A critic for The Guardian wrote:

But for all the warmth and sturdiness […], Sanderling’s sometimes serious lack of fire and energy too often proved as perplexing as it was disconcerting.

Not exactly the thing that calls out for digital immortalization.

CD reissue of Sanderling’s Beethoven on my shelf [Image:Me]

Critics were not much more enthused by the recorded cycle. Alan Blyth in The Daily Telegraph was polite enough. He began by likening Sanderling to Weingartner, then expressed cautious approval of the former’s “sturdy and honest” cycle, before he admitted that Sanderling was “less convincing in the abrupt, blazing side of [Beethoven]”, and that he preferred a Beethoven cycle conducted by James Loughran over Sanderling’s. Theodore W. Libbey, Jr. of the New York Times was perhaps the most equanimous reviewer of Sanderling’s cycle:

There is much to be said for Mr. Sanderling’s approach. It is learned, though not archaeologically inclined. It takes into account the rhetorical foundations and performance practices of the 18th-century style — on which [Beethoven’s] symphonies were built — purging the orchestra’s playing of the attacks, accents, and wayward gestures that have come as later accretions to the interpretation of music of that period. This is done without giving up the sonic color or weight of the modern instruments or the methods of modern players. One suspects that in Beethoven’s ears, the Sanderling/Philharmonia performances would come closer to the measure of the music, if not the spirit, than almost any other “modern”, as opposed to “scholarly”, account.

In spite of this, Libbey also noted the set’s lapses in ensembles, awkward coordination, and generally variable quality. He reserved his most unreluctant approval for Sanderling’s recordings of the “Eroica” and “Pastoral”, as well as the Ninth, although the latter drew a caveat. “[It] is simply wonderful”, Libbey said, “until the singing starts, when it becomes simply awful”.

All these years chasing after this set, only to find that it’s a dud. But that’s OK! Sanderling left great recordings of Haydn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Shostakovich. So he’s allowed an off day or two. Disappointments are also rewarding because they help to cultivate one’s tastes. So as I slip the obi strip back on this set and slip it away into my shelves, I’m glad that I finally got to hear it.

Now onto the next Beethoven symphony cycle.

Embracing the World

Last year was one that could be said to be about many things for me, but perhaps most of all 2025 was my “Year of Britten”. I’m fudging things a bit here: my drastic reevaluation of the English composer’s music actually started in late 2024, after I pulled down a recording of his Lachrymae to listen on a whim. It was in 2025, however, where the essence of his music, the breadth of his genius were fully revealed to me.

Way back in 2010, when internet hook-ups and romance were still a breeze, I was on OKCupid and on my profile noted the music of Britten among the things I disliked most. This caught the attention of another user — not a young woman as I had hoped, but instead a gentleman oboist who lived in Long Beach. We had a friendly exchange of opinions. “Whaddaya mean you don’t like Britten?”, was the general thrust of his argument, followed by his personal evaluation of the composer’s mastery. I recognized those qualities, I told him, yet they somehow didn’t add up to a satisfying whole for me. Basically, his music to me seemed more about expression than actually being expressive.

Now that another third of my life has passed, imprinted with many formative experiences along the way, Britten’s music makes sense to me. And one of its salient qualities that is most appealing to my forty-something self is how adult it is. Which isn’t to diminish other composers who may be more immediately impactful on a youthful listener. After all, nobody would ever claim Beethoven or Chopin are less great because of how captivating their music often is to the young. But there is an essential remoteness to Britten that may be difficult for someone younger to attune themselves to. It certainly was for me to do so back in my teens and twenties.

It’s interesting to observe how, in a way, Britten’s music stands apart from his time. Yes, I know that his music, particularly in the early years, was marked by developments in 20th-century music. But rather than hitch himself to one stylistic trend or other, Britten remained sui generis; he belonged to no movement and although he continues to inspire subsequent generations of composers, he never became the progenitor of a “Britten school”.

I thought about that while listening to the Four Black American Dances by Carlos Simon last month at Disney Hall. In some future post I’ll write at greater length about my feelings for this superb American composer, but what struck me on this first listening of his music was how Brittenesque it is. Not that it is imitative of Britten. Simon is very much his own artist, his music shaped by influences that the Englishman could never have known (or cared) about. What they do have in common is an intrinsic earnestness of expression. Grotesquerie and irony inform much of their music, true. Both composers, nevertheless, are upfront with their listeners that there is no time to trifle about. Simon’s music is also distinctive in its responsiveness to the times, albeit in a topical manner that recalls composers like Theodorakis or Rzewski rather than Britten. Stylistically, however, Simon’s music, like Britten’s, heeds no school or ideology.

In an issue of the old Tower Records Pulse magazine (some resourceful person ought to scan these and make them available online), there was an interesting interview with Rautavaara. I no longer recall verbatim what he said, but towards the close of the interview he said that being a composer in the late 1990s was like being a boy who could play with anything in his toy chest. As frivolous as that simile may be in reference to the music of Britten and Simon, it succinctly illustrates the cornerstone of their art: a sense of eclecticism that drives the Mahlerian urge to embrace the world.

NYE thoughts on Utopian dreams — and nightmares

My wife and I were trying to decide which movie from the Criterion Channel to watch while we dined in anticipation of the new year. “Why don’t you pick The Shining”, she told me. “It’s kind of a New Year’s movie”. (She had in mind the crowd photo at the end of the film — which is dated July 4.)

For some reason it was only during this viewing that I took notice of the music, despite having seen the film several times at home and in theatres. “Oh, it’s Bartók”, I blurted out as Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd first wandered through the Overlook Hotel’s vertiginous garden maze.

When The Shining was released in 1980, the postwar avant-garde was already in retreat; various tonal restorationist sub-genres, with East Coast minimalism at the forefront, on the other hand, were all in the ascendant. That reminded me of an epiphany I had over a decade ago, during Southwest Chamber Music’s three-year John Cage retrospective: what the postwar avant-garde had sought was not to alienate listeners, but to forge a new world wherein a composer from anywhere could communicate to any listener in a musical Esperanto that would be immediately intelligible and unimpeded by barriers, physical and cultural. No longer would music be associated with the by-products of suspect ideologies that had led to the most destructive war in European history. In the new, rational Atomic Age, music could indeed be a universal language.

These ambitions were never achieved, particularly because of animosity from the cultural establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union, which is somewhat ironic given that both nations espoused beliefs that on the surface seemed sympathetic to this sort of utopianism. Ultimately the music of the postwar avant-garde did attain a kind of universality: as part of the musical grammar of filmic horror. William Bolcom once wrote in the New York Review of Books that Boulez — and by extension the music he represented — had “terrorized” the musical establishment of the mid-20th century. According to Bolcom’s way of thinking, the excerpts from works by Bartók, Ligeti, and Penderecki that magnify the horror of The Shining are probably especially fitting.

Rethinking a Russian master

After uncertainty and worry over the “Liberation Day” tariffs, the year 2025 is ending with my Japanese CD-collecting habit still going strong. Mostly. Because since Buyee now distributes the pain of the tariffs equally — whether one is a weeb buying plastic figurines of their “waifu” or a kook like myself placing sniper bids on oddball private-press CDs of Japanese regional orchestras  — I’ve had to temper my whims. A recent release, entitled simply Mravinsky in Helsinki, however, was too good to pass up.

The label, Janus Classics (spelled with an idiosyncratic “v” in their logo), is one that I had only first heard about earlier this year by way of a batch of Paul Kletzki CDs that are currently on my “to buy” list. The big works on this Mravinsky set are Tchaikovsky 5 and Shostakovich 5, both of which have survived only piecemeal. Damage to the latter’s master tapes is so extensive that the entire first movement is lost. What remains suggests that the performance, recorded live at the 1961 Sibelius Festival, had it survived whole, would have been the best in Mravinsky’s discography. So just a curiosity for die-hards then, right?

Janus’ high production values, first of all, are impressive. Classical music CD covers are often ugly, even infamously so. The cover of Mravinsky in Helsinki, designed by Di Xiao, consists of a photo of the conductor with the Leningrad Philharmonic, centered within an elegant gainsboro frame that features the album title, with the opening measures of the Shostakovich’s “Largo” embellished along the spine. Open the booklet and you find essays on the conductor and recordings, but before you even start reading them you notice the fine paper they’re printed on. As you begin to read the essays by (in order of appearance) Nam Li, Qiao Huang, Brian Wang, and Jiewei Xiong, you realize that this isn’t the glib fluff typical now even in specialist archival reissues. (That is if they’re even included at all.) Even the plastic jewel case — sturdier and thicker than usual — evinces the care that Janus took in producing this release. Already cutting corners at the turn of the century, record companies in the last decade have pushed it even further, lovelessly dumping recordings onto CDs as the kind of e-waste they apparently believe them to be. Janus, on the other hand, seems to believe that their releases aren’t just “content”, but living testaments of a past most of us were not fortunate to experience. Holding this Mravinsky in Helsinki set in my hands one thing was clear: we’ve come a long way from the bad old days of labels like Gramofono 2000, Iron Needle, Doremi, and Classica d’Oro.

Conductors from yesteryear, unlike those of today, indulge in dramatic interpretive shifts that are rewarding to listen and study. At least that’s how obsessive collectors like myself justify the purchase of yet another live Beethoven 5 conducted by Furtwängler. (Maestros as impulsive and mercurial as Knappertsbusch, the wild man of the podium, are rare in any age.) Mravinsky, as his widow told the DSCH Journal in 2002, was different:

Each time Yevgeny Alexandrovich immersed himself in a score he had studied before, he would discover new nuances and colors, just as a geologist strips off layer after layer as he works towards the discovery of true facts. He always strove towards the essence of a work and for a high standard of performance, hopefully revealing a new aspect of the composer and enriching our understanding of him.

For a listener seeking an immediate fix of musical thrills, Mravinsky’s lofty goals can seem unexciting. Which is maybe why his stock has plummeted with Western collectors since the 1990s, when his work was thoroughly exhumed by Olympia, BMG, and other labels. I, too, quickly moved on after a brief and intense interest in Mravinsky during my teens. But in April 2020, when businesses began to reopen after the pandemic lockdowns, I bought a clutch of Mravinsky CDs at Record Surplus in Santa Monica when they were liquidating their classical music section. These discs initiated a personal reexamination of the conductor’s discography that is ongoing.

Mravinsky belonged to the “fail, fail again, fail better” school of conducting: each of his performances of a given work was another step towards the realization of its unattainable ideal. To quote his widow:

Although Shostakovich was happy with the first performance, each time Mravinsky returned to the Fifth he introduced something new that he’d been able to draw from the depths of the piece: a nuance or an idea. In Mravinsky’s hands the score underwent changes, just as human life changes. Even the composer’s metronome markings, after repeated performances of the symphony, adapted to the atmosphere, like a human pulse.

Rather than mount the podium as a conquering hero, Mravinsky saw himself as a pilgrim repeating his ascent over and over again, his goal always visible over the horizon, yet ever out of reach. There is a vulnerability about this that I now find moving, even relatable. It’s amplified by the state of the Shostakovich 5 on this set  — a survivor despite its scars  — and the care with which the producers of this Janus release devoted upon it.

A Complete Unknown

For an artist eager to succeed, a well placed apologist can be the difference between speeding ahead of the line and oblivion. They can also do wonders for talking around or deflecting attention to deficiencies in native talent. Remember the “nepo baby” furor from a couple of years ago?

Although a child of relative privilege (at least in comparison to the likes of Georgy Sviridov or German Galynin), Dmitri Shostakovich had no need for the crutch of familial nepotism. Nevertheless, his material achievements would’ve been a lot more difficult to come by had he also not cultivated an extensive support network in Russia and abroad from a young age. It’s enough to remember Gavriil Popov, his Moscow-born contemporary, who once was spoken in the same breath as Shostakovich during the pioneering years of Soviet music. He died forgotten in 1973, a fate his widow rightfully decried as an injustice.

Or Mikhail Starokadomsky.

I didn’t know his name either until a few weeks ago, when Pristine Classics issued the latest in their series of Artur Rodziński’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, which included a performance of Starokadomsky’s 1933 Concerto for Orchestra.

Who was this composer? He was born in Brest-Litovsk in 1901, the youngest of two children fathered by the military doctor and polar explorer Leonid Starokadomsky. The younger Starokadomsky grew up in St. Petersburg and began to compose from an early age.

In 1921, he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Nikolai Myaskovsky and Sergei Vasilenko, as well as organ with Alexander Goedicke. Soon after, Starokadomsky was among the founding members of an informal new music circle known as the “Moscow Six”, which included fellow pupils Mikhail Kvadri, Lev Oborin, and Vissarion Shebalin. Around this time he also joined the Association for Contemporary Music.

Starokadomsky joined the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1930, where he taught and later authored a number of important textbooks. His transition from post-Schoenbergian to neo-classicist was well under way by this point. Aside from being a composer, organist, and pedagogue, he also worked in programming for All-Union Radio and wrote musical criticism. His most enduring achievement was in the genre of children’s songs, for which he was awarded a Stalin Prize (third class) in 1952. He died in 1954, predeceasing his father by about a decade and his wife by several more. A Russian blog post implies that Starokadomsky’s death was the result of a chronic illness, but it didn’t specify which. He and his wife are buried at the family plot in Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

It is tempting to hear Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra as a derivative of Hindemith’s from 1925, but their stylistic convergences are probably as much the result of coincidence as deliberate study. More telling, perhaps, are parallels between the Starokadomsky and Shostakovich’s 1940 Piano Quintet. In May 1941, Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was hailed by Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky as a testament not only to the variety of expression that Soviet culture fostered, but also as an exemplary fusion of neo-classicism and socialist realist ideals. One wonders whether Shostakovich, who had been personally acquainted with Starokadomsky since December 1924, had the concerto in the back of his mind while he composed the Piano Quintet. Even more tantalizing is a potential earlier overlap between the composition of the magisterial passacaglia at the center of Starokadomsky’s concerto and the one in Act II of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. Was it a coincidence that both these composers wrote passacaglias around the same time? (It should be noted that both men had been personally acquainted with each other since December 1924.)

Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was perhaps his widest performed orchestral work. It was first played outside of Russia at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. Serge Koussevitzky, who was in attendance, later bemoaned to reporters that most of the music he had heard there was “wretched, positively wretched”. (Not an entirely fair appraisal, given that excerpts from Hanns Eisler’s superb Deutsche Sinfonie were also among the works performed.) Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was one of only two scores Koussevitzky brought back to conduct for the Boston Symphony’s 1937–1938 season. (The other was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Second Symphony.) After its US premiere on December 17, 1937, Cyrus Durgin, the music critic for the Boston Globe, praised the Starokadomsky concerto as “honest, unforced and buoyant, reasonably melodic, free from the extravagance of dissonance for its own sake”. His review of a subsequent performance a few weeks later solidified that impression. “Where more than one modern piece is merely noisy”, Durgan said, “Starokadomsky’s Concerto seems powerful”. Koussevitzky’s performances were followed by others in North America, Europe, and Australia conducted by a number of conductors, including Malcolm Sargent, Werner Janssen, and of course Rodziński. American reviews of the work ranged from Miles Kastendieck’s damnation by way of faint praise in the Brooklyn Eagle (“Its strongest claim for attention is effectiveness for whatever that is worth”), to Bruno David Ussher’s puzzlement in the Los Angeles Daily News (“I am offering a prize to anyone who will convincingly tell me why the Starokadomsky Concerto for Orchestra should have been broadcast on Saturday’s NBC symphony program”), to Herbert Elwell’s red-baiting in The Plain Dealer (“If this is the music of Communism, give me the bourgeois platitudes of Strauss”). Postwar critics, possibly influenced by the incipient Cold War, were even more hostile. London’s Daily Herald dismissed Starokadomsky’s concerto as so much busyness that could not “conceal the absence of anything worth calling a musical idea”. Then there was the bitchy takedown of the “so-called concerto” in Sydney’s Truth: “The music is bustling, perky, and brilliant — and says nothing”.

Virtually alone in his praise was Arthur Loesser in the Cleveland Press, who wrote that the Concerto for Orchestra was among the finest new works he had heard. Unfortunately for Starokadomsky, the Loesser man did not prevail.

Long forgotten composers tend to stay that way because of entrenched skepticism of the unfamiliar, as well as belief in an objective meritocracy of the arts. After all, if a composer was forgotten or ignored, they probably deserved it, or so people seem to think. It often happens, however, that the only things obstructing a fair hearing of a composer’s work are entrenched prejudices. Shostakovich had to contend with those too, but at least in his case — and unlike Starokadomsky — he had a little help from his friends.