On the macro level – for the United States, for the world it thinks it runs – 2017 sucked. In terms of the United States, you’d have to go back to 1968 for a year as miserable and disorienting. (That was the year Martin Luther King and RFK were assassinated two months apart, and when the Tet Offensive woke everyone up to the horror of our cancerous presence in Vietnam.) I was saying that back in January; I read it everywhere now. Shoulda copyrighted it, I suppose… But it does not take a PhD. to see that things are completely f’ed up on the macro level. As I often mumble on the radio, a big part of the reason I decided to listen to classical music exclusively three years ago was to force myself to concentrate and listen deeper, in order to drown out the noise. (I knew next to nothing before the switch.) So in a sense, I am escaping the shitstorm of a visibly disintegrating world when I listen to this music. I do these tapes to stay sane and in hopes they might help anyone else, anywhere, who is likewise recoiling from the bleakness of the present day.
At the same time, my swandive into modern classical music was also driven by a growing understanding of history and how the world operates (which somehow eluded me during my school years) – which is to say I wanted to hear art produced under fascist or totalitarian regimes, or in the sorts of pressure cookers (Armenia, say, or Stalinist Russia ofr the Soviet satellites, or Chile and Argentina and Mexico and Central America, for that matter) that defined the 20th Century. And from that aspect of the music, I take a certain qualified comfort – art has thrived in inky darkness, for one thing. Art with a life-affirming power even in its darkness and bitter sarcasm, the way powerful music can in any genre can. (In rock terms, think Black Flag, c. 1980) And when you consider the forces that oppressed many of the composers you’ll hear here, you realize nothing has much permanence. That this will be over soon.
Here are my ten musical highlights of 2017. None of them have anything to do with 2017 (hence the asterisk); they’re just people and pieces I hadn’t really thought or known much about prior. I live in a small Southern city, with an NPR station that plays very safe classical music for 3-8 hours a day, a semi-pro symphony that sticks to the hits and plays in the worst hall for acoustics I’ve ever been to in my life, and has a zillion rich retirees who insure that even if a decent chamber group does visit, the fare will be Mozart and Schubert GUARANTEED. I guess could’ve gone to the Metropolitan Opera Broadcast of Thomas Ades’ Exterminating Angel at the Carolina 14, but the Luis Bunuel movie on which it was based was claustrophobic and time-eating enough, and I don’t have $30 to blow on… anything. ANYthing.
So, I’m just stumbling around in the past here… (If I bump your ass, it’s blindness – NOT sexual harrassment…) I should say the segue music on this mixtape is Vladimir Ussachevsky’s No Exit Suite, since, as you may have noticed, there is no exit. Without further ado…
1. Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich.
Vishenevskaya’s autobiography Galina was my favorite book of the year. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand mid-20th century music, when Shostakovich and Britten were at their peaks (and when their bodies were deteriorating), but also to understand Russia in the Stalin era. This is harrowing documentary. The poverty and family collapse she experienced as a child, and the siege of Leningrad she survived as a teenage girl – with only a feeble grandmother for moral support at a time when people ATE feeble grandmothers and children – make her the toughest person I ever met. In 2017, it was fortifying to read of her contempt for the Soviet higher-ups with whom she had to consort, at a time when my own contempt for my country’s government seems always to be a scratch away from gushing out.
Her husband Rostropovich, meanwhile, who I’d always assumed to be a stern and dour stoic (owing, I suppose, to his strange first name (she struggled with it), his Soviet-ness (one of the few artists allowed to travel abroad relatively freely) and his baldness), is revealed to have been a big, easy-going goofball in addition to being the greatest cellist of all time.
But they were a real couple, going all over the world together in a big adventure. They worked together often and independent of one another more often. It sounds like the best marriage I’ve ever heard of, and I do know of some good ones. They were, moreover, “besties” with Shostakovich and Britten (and the latter’s partner, Peter Pears) in the ’60s and ’70s, and the glimpses of DSCH and Britten as regular Joe’s going through the day-to-day is fascinating. Rostropovich was also Prokofiev’s very good friend right until the end, early in his relationship with Vishnevskaya, and Prokofiev, too, seems like a person who happened to be a genius composer.
I put my favorite vocal piece of the year, in which Vishnevskaya sings a Prokofiev song (to Rostropovich’s piano accompaniment) on the mixtape, and Rostropovich can also be heard playing the first movement of Arthur Honegger’s cello concerto. 2017 was the 100th anniversary of his birth, so he gets two.
(Incidentally, in her autobiography Vishnevskaya refers to “Testimony” as Shostakovich’s autobiography. Rostropovich and Maxim Shostakovich (Dmitri’s son) also vouch for it. So why is there any controversy about Testimony?!?)
2. Gloria Coates (everything available, but the 7th and 15th Symphonies in particular). I was floored by her music immediately. It had a dizzying effect and dizzying melodies not unlike My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless-era music. And if Vishnevskaya were the coolest people I met in 2017, then Gloria Coates is the coolest person I met in person, or at least via Skype. Naxos Records, which has released all of her string quartets and many of her symphonies, was kind enough to set up an interview with her. She is around 80 years old and a great storyteller with (I assume) a crystalline memory. Super fun to listen to. Music-wise, I’ve listened to, I’m pretty certain, everything of hers that’s on record and it is as dud-free a catalogue as any composer’s I can think of. I guess she would be considered “eccentric” – her music is instantly recognizable as her own – but a woman on her own in was a rarity in her day, and her otherness serves her well. She belongs to the school of great American Others with Ives, Ben Johnston, and John Cage. I would contend no American, other than maybe Ives or Barber, has written more great music than Coates. A preposterous comment from a layman, you say?
Gloria Coates w/ daughter, c. 1963
3. Tchaikovsky Piano Trio No. 2. as played by Gidon Kremer, Khatia Buniatishvili, and Giedre Dirvanauskaite on an ECM New Series release from several years ago. Perhaps in response to the grinding din of the news cycle in 2017, I found myself drawn to late-Romantic/19th Century Russians like Glinka, Mussorgsky (see below), and even Tchaikovsky. I listened more to this 1882 Tchaikovsky composition than any other over the course of the last year. There are many great versions of this hauntingly beautiful piece, but I am drawn to this one. There was a high definition Japanese TV (I assume) version of a performance in Tokyo that really brings it home. Gidon Kremer is one of the great artists going (and going very strong is he w/ his Kremerata Baltica, a chamber group of young musicians he leads), but Khatia Buniatishvili was something of a jolt. I knew of her (vaunted by most, abhorred by many) reputation from reading review journals but in person (in this case, via Youtube) she is overwhelming. She has… ah… ample cleavage and she wears gowns that show it; indeed, she has positioned herself as a sort of modern fertility goddess in an interview or two, which makes some people hate her. She has a voluptuousness about her that recalls earthy glamour icons of yore – Anna Magnani comes to mind, or, for the youngsters among you, Sofia Loren. A different ethnic background – she is Georgian, not Italian – but there is a universal aspect to beauty of that sort. I think women would find her beautiful. Of course, her playing style matches her presence – in your face, like her boobs – or I wouldn’t have bothered writing any of that. Trying to pronounce the cellist’s name on the radio was a lowlight of 2017.
Buniatshvili: see?
4. The violinist Patricia Kopatchingskaya, in general. I got four albums she headlined in 2017, all of them on the Naive label. I guess she gets too “into it” for some people’s tastes. She has an expressive face and leans into the passages she wants to. Her choice of material – Prokofiev, Bartok, Eotvos, Ligeti – also happens to line up exactly with what I want to hear. A Moldovan, she plays the E. European stuff with a vigor that sounds deadly serious, but with an expression on her face – a knowing smirk, a raised eyebrow – that indicates she’s having a blast. She is also a proponent of music from the Black and Caspian Sea regions (Armenia and Azerbaijan, e.g.), which I’m just getting into. And loving. I think I have a crush of sorts on her, but it’s hard to tell anymore…
5. Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2. The Trillion $ Trio of Emmanuel Ax, Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma played the version I listened to over and over last year. I listened to the Kremer/Argerich/Maisky version on Deutsche Grammophon multiple times, too, and, a little surprisingly, I like the Sony set better. It’s a little more urgent, maybe. Sometimes I’ll go for a few months without listening to Shostakovich and then I’ll hear a piece like this one that, because I’m kind of blundering along alone on this forray, I’d somehow missed til now (it’s one of his better-know works…), and it grounds me. Shostakovich is the sun around which CC revolves – as this list makes fairly plain… It’s nice to know that, because he was prolific despite Stalin’s wrath, I will continue to be blown away by Shostakovich’s genius right up until the day I die or the electricity goes out for good. Which brings us to…
6. Katerina Ismailova. This is the Soviet movie version of Shostakovich’s 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, edited in the mid-’60s, reworked with Vishnevskaya in mind. By the 1960s, Soviet art was getting weird again. In the film world, you have Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, whose movies Ivan’s Childhood and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, respectively, were two of my favorite first-view movies of the year- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!), and poetry-wise you have Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the “Russian Bob Dylan,” whose poems Shostakovich set to music in his 13th symphony and The Execution of Stepan Razin cantata. The interiors of Katerina are shot in a borderline-psychedelic color-saturated way, while the exteriors are shot National Geographic-style, absolutely naturalistic, in a way and the cold whisking across the Siberian plains feel very cold indeed. (Indeed, in her autobiography, Vishnevskaya reveals that due to a production fubar, the final scene, in which Katarina drowns a romantic rival and then herself in icy waters, was shot in real icy waters. You can’t fake that kind of cold. Because it’s a movie with close-ups, it is impossible not to appreciate Vishnevskaya’s acting skills. She’s in control. I played the 1934 opera (a ’60s recording w/ Vishnevskaya singing and Rostropovich conducting the London SO) over the course of six or seven radio shows last year, which is how I have to deal with listening to 2.5 hour operas at home – in chunks. But even if you hate opera, you should try this one, in twenty minute doses if necessary. Listen to what’s going on in the music. And watching operas is 100x better than just listening; the movie is under two hours and watchable in one (or two, in my case) sittings. A word of advice: Leave the subtitles OFF. Read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia before you watch it, or, better yet, watch William Oldroyd’s 2017 movie version of the story. It captures the anger and defiance of the Russian novel on which the film and opera are based (I’m told – I haven’t read the novel), the setting transposed in the film Lady Macbeth to a bleak English countryside in roughly the same (mid-19th C.) time period. It is fantastic, and it has an alternate ending which is as satisfactory as the drowning-suicide. The first piece on the mixtape is the title credit music from the film…
7. Estonian composers Jaan Raats, Raimo Kangro and Lepo Sumera, and a Dane who was born in Estonia – Knudåge Riisager – and thereby qualifies technically. Before this year, I associated Estonia with Arvo Part, whose monkish vibe has produced many well-known pieces of deep melancholy since his stye-shift in the early ’70s. But if you know of Part’s aggressive and jabbing early work from the late ’50s and 1960s, it’s not so surprising to learn that a hyper-creative scene existed in Estonia during the “thaw” of Soviet cultural hegemony. The native trio and Riisager, who was a generation or so before them – composed radically-arranged soundscapes that are extroverted and engaging, melodic and bright and sunny – almost pop-ish (the trio were, like Part, young men in the ’60s and ’70s) – but able to swoop low into some dark and beautiful gloom when the need arose. Of the four, Riisager has the most to listen to, and Kangro seems to be the weirdest of the bunch. (Along those lines, I hope you can stay tuned til the end of the mixtape…)
Kangro: genius
8. Sergei Prokofiev, in general but the Piano Sonatas and Violin Concertos 1 and 2 in particular. I have a long way to go before I can talk about Prokofiev. Three years ago when I started the radio show, all I knew of was Peter and the Wolf and, from working for a while in a ticket office, the Lt. Kije Suite. Natalia Trull played the complete piano sonatas on a 3-CD set that was acclaimed by people who know what they are talking about (Fanfare, the American Record Guide) as one of the best, if not the best, renderings ever. I listened to Jascha Heifitz’s version of the concertos first and was blown away by them. On this mixtape, there’s a movement from #1 with Kopatchinskaja at the helm.
9. Anna Shelest’s solo piano version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It was written for solo piano; the most famous of several orchestrations was Ravel’s long after Mussorgsky had drunk himself into the ground, which is the one played on safe classical stations. It is a whole different ballgame on piano. It seems like most young hotshot pianists take a crack at the piece, which in its entirety runs about a half hour, but I am fondest of Shelest’s version on the Sorel Classics label. (Sorel is a label devoted to presenting female artists; they issued Natalia Trull’s Prokofiev set as well.)
I suppose I have a crush on her, too. It doesn’t really concern me at this point. Included on the mixtape is a picture from Mussorgsky’s exhibition, but no hallway…
10. The Spectralists Tristan Murail, Jean Baptiste Barriere and Gerard Grisey. I encountered these names while reading up on Kaija Saariaho; she studied with them at the IRCAM electronic music facility in Paris in the ’70s and ’80s, and she ended up marrying Barriere, whose 1983 Chreode is on the mixtape… These are people I want to learn more about.
And so, as 2017 dwindles to snuffout, I would like to thank classical music for giving me somewhere to go to escape the bleakness of this world. Seriously, thanks. I’ll get a playlist w/ details for this mixtape up soon. I shut off the home internet effective Jan. 1 , 2018, though, so give me a minute.
And, yes, I know no one is reading this. Like I would give a fu*k! With no further ado, then…
0:01:24
Konstantin Simeonov: Shevchenko Opera and Ballet Orchestra
Dmitri Shostakovich (1907-1976): Katerina Izmailova title credit music
from Katerina Izmailova (Decca DVD, 2006)
0:06:21
Janina Baechle (soprano) w/ Charles Spencer (piano)
Lili Boulanger: Dans l’Immense Tristesse
from Janina Baechle: Chansons Grises (MARSYAS, 2008)
0:12:05
Anna Shelest
Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; IV. Bydlo
from Anna Shelest: Pictures at an Exhibition (Sorel Classics, 2010)
0:15:34
Gidon Kremer (violin). Geidre Dirvanauskaite (cello), & Khatia Buniatishvili (piano)
Peter Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50; I. Pezzo elegiaco
from Tchaikovsky/Kissine Piano Trios (ECM New Series, 2011)
0:36:03
Chingiz Osmanov (v), Nikolai Mazhara (p) w/ Yuri Serov: St. Petersburg SO
Boris Tishchenko: Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra, Op. 144; IV. Romance
from Tishchenko: Symphony No. 8, etc. (Naxos, 2016)
0:46:48
Gary Verkade
John Cage/Supply Belcher: Some of the Harmony of Maine, III.
from John Cage: The Works for Organ (Mode, 2013)
0:50:11
Carole Wilson (mezzo) w/ Adrian Sunshine: Budapest Camerata
Otto Leuning: Five Summer Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson:
“I Know a Place Where Summer Strives”
from American Music for Flute, Voice & Strings (Albany Records, 2006)
0:53:45
Olaf Henzold: Bavarian Radio SO
Gloria Coates: Symphony No. 7; III. Corridors of Time
from Coates: Symphonies 1, 7 and 14 (Naxos, 2006)
1:05:25
player piano
Conlon Nancarrow: Study for Player Piano #9
from Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano (Other Minds, 2008)
1:09:57
Alan Gilbert: NY Philharmonic Orchestra
Christopher Rouse: Odna Zhizn
from Rouse: Odna Zhizn/Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4/Prospero’s Rooms(Dacapo, 2016)
1:26:27
Nora Novik & Raffi Haradjanjan (pianos) w/ Toomas Kapten: Youth Philharmonic of Tallinn
Raimo Kangro: Concerto for Two Pianos & Chamber Orchestra No. 2, Op. 36
from Kangro: Concerto for Two Pianos, etc. (Antes Edition, 1996)
1:35:28
Owain Arwel Hughes: Danish National SO
Knudåge Riisager (Denmark, 1897-1974): Archaeopteryx, Op. 51
from Knudåge Riisager: Benzin (Dacapo, 2017)
1:46:19
Mstislav Rostropovich w/ Kent Nagano: London Symphony Orchestra
Arthur Honegger : Cello Concerto
from a live recording, London, October 1989 (Youtube)
2:01:50
Emmanuel Ax, Isaac Stern & Yo-Yo Ma
Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2, III. Largo
from Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 and Cello Sonata (Sony, 1988)
2:07:00
Galina Vishnevskaya (soprano) and Mstislav Rostropvich
Sergei Prokofiev: 5 Poems of Anna Akhmatova; No. 5 “The Grey-Eyed King”
from Galina Vishnevskaya Sings Russian Songs (Decca, 2011)
2:12:18
Patricia Kopatchinskaja with Vladimir Jurowski: London Philharmonic Orchestra
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 63; I. Allegro moderato
from Prokofiev & Stravinsky violin Concertos (Naive, 2013)
2:23:46
Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Barrière: Chreode I (1983)
from Computer Music Currents 4 (Wergo, 1989)
Concentration Camp 