Moved

We've moved to Los Feliz, the center of Los Angeles' film industry in the Silent Era. A typical street:

Charlie Chaplin lived about 2 o'clock in the direction this photograph faces several streets away, next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse in his uncle and aunt's house down the hill to the left and a bit over, in what is now a photocopy shop.

Realtors describe this area as 'New York walkable'. You can encounter sidewalk cafes, cinemas and theaters on an evening stroll. But I always think of Los Angeles as a series of villages dotted around the place and this is 1920s LA, conceived before cars took over. To the east (10 o'clock in this photograph) is Little Armenia and Thai Town. No wonder John Adams described Los Angeles as one of the most ethnically-diverse cities in the world.   

But we seem to have left behind the intense Hispanic-ness of the San Fernando Valley, the bilingual signage (if you don't take the bus and train). As a tribute to the Valley, I'll finish this blog with a photographic sequence. America's Religious Right considers Los Angeles "Sodom and Gomorrah". But I noticed a lot of Catholicism over there.

In the Valley, you could almost become an expert in images of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The patron saint of Mexico is everywhere

Even on supermarket shelves

 

Shchedrin's 'Carmen' for strings and percussion

Another of my program notes:

Rodion Shchedrin (born 1932),

after Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
Carmen Suite – Ballet for string orchestra and percussion

Russians have carved out quite a significant role in the history of ballet since the days of Tchaikovsky and Petipa and they continue to do so to this day. The ballet of Carmen by choreographer Alberto Alonso and composer Rodion Shchedrin is possibly one of the best-known Russian ballets of the past 50 years.

In 1964, the Russian prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya wanted to produce a ballet on the theme of Carmen, the seductress who plays lustful men off each other. She asked the famous Russian composer Shostakovich if he wouldn’t compose the music for her. But Shostakovich refused, saying, ‘Everyone is so used to [Bizet’s] opera that whatever you write, you’ll disappoint them.’ Plisetskaya then asked Aram Khachaturian, composer of the ballets Spartacus and Gayane, but he refused: ‘You have a composer at home,’ he said, clinching his argument. Only then did she ask her husband, Rodion Shchedrin.

Shchedrin originally intended to write an original score. But he too said he couldn’t think of Carmen without Bizet’s music, and so he decided ultimately to rethink Bizet.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference you’ll notice between Bizet’s and Shchedrin’s versions is in the orchestration – Shchedrin uses strings and a large battery of percussion. You will hear all your favourite themes of course, but sounding not quite like they did before. Witness the opening, the familiar Habañera, on bells with long string notes providing a note of expectation. But Shchedrin’s version is more than just orchestration; there are rhythmic differences and restructurings as well. At one stage Shchedrin uses the Bolero from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne in his score.

The ballet’s scenario was provided by the Cuban choreographer, Alberto Alonso, who had been commissioned during a visit to Moscow, and is similar to that of the opera. It tells of Carmen’s seduction of the straight-laced soldier Don José, whom she throws over for the more dashing toreador, Escamillo; and of Carmen’s subsequent murder at the hands of the jealous Don José. Along the way other characters have included Fate, a ballerina dressed in black who tells Carmen’s fortune, and Captain Zúñiga, José’s superior and perhaps also a competitor for Carmen’s affections.

The Naxos recording of this suite talks about the ‘white heat’ of Shchedrin’s arrangement. Poor uptight Don José can’t handle the heat of passions the sultry Carmen unexpectedly unleashes in him; the Carmen story adds another dimension to the meaning of ‘getting too close to the flame’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2012 

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:
 
Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013
Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, published 13 October 2013 
Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, published 21 October 2013

Articles on mine on composers include:


Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011

"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music, or is it drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], ideas for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012 
'Traditional terms?' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013

On my website, click on "USA blog" to scroll down the full range.

Urban environment?

Yes, we're in LA, looking toward Sepulveda Pass from the UCLA campus - one Fall evening.

Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' Overture

Another of my program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

The Flying Dutchman: Overture (1860)

Pursued by creditors, the 26 year-old Richard Wagner and his wife Minna fled for London in 1839 from Riga in Latvia, where he’d been music director. Their ship, the Thetis, was battered by storms and took shelter in a Norwegian cove. There, said Wagner in his memoirs, the idea for his fourth opera, The Flying Dutchman, took root. Listening to the overture’s stormy opening you could believe this. The real inspiration for the opera however, may have been Heinrich Heine’s The Recollections of Herr von Schanbelewopski (1834), which contains a version of the Flying Dutchman tale.

The Flying Dutchman concerns the old legend of a ship’s captain (the Dutchman) and his ghostly crew, condemned by a curse to sail the seas unless, and until, the Dutchman can find the redeeming love of a selfless woman. In Wagner’s opera, that woman is Senta, who sacrifices her life to save the Dutchman’s soul. The overture was written in November 1841, after the rest of the opera. Rather like the overtures of Weber whom Wagner admired, it foreshadows the opera’s concerns in its juxtaposition of tempestuous passages, the pacifying effect of ‘Senta’s Ballad’ (cor anglais solo) and the dance-like middle section based on the Scene 7 chorus, ‘Steuermann! Lass die Wacht!’ which Wagner claimed to have been suggested by the calls of the Thetis’s crewmen echoing round the Norwegian cove’s granite walls.

The Flying Dutchman was the earliest work that Wagner later acknowledged as part of his canon. Senta was the first of the ‘redeemer heroines’ he portrayed, and although Wagner was still decades away from the Music Drama with which he changed operatic history, The Flying Dutchman points the way to those operas in its dramatic sweep and insight into human motivation. It still features a stand-alone overture of course, but that overture is a superb example of 19^th century nature portraiture.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

    

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:
 
Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013
Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, published 13 October 2013 

Always take public transport in LA

There are wonderful things to discover in Los Angeles. You might walk past a block of flats that Charlie Chaplin built for his crew or the streets where Chinatown is set. I recently mentioned an article on the remnant stairways in hilly Silver Lake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23724797

You can still find the stairs that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up, or the one that the Three Stooges took the iceblock up only to end up with an ice cube at the top. This article makes the point, though, that most Angelenos don't notice these jewels because they're encapsulated in their cars zooming along the freeway.

I take the bus. And it's fantastic.

Granted, it takes two hours to get a lot of places. But you can sit in a traffic jam in your own car too. Sometimes, I think, public transport (or 'transportation' as they call it here) might be faster. But you certainly learn the layout of the city, and it's definitely interesting.

You get to pick up Spanish, meditate, read. Most of all you're exposed the theater that is America from the moment the bus, or train, pulls in at your stop.

What about the guy in the maroon striped suit playing shells on a flattened newspaper on his knee, and passengers vying to pick which shell the nut was under. 'Lemme have a go at that!' shouts a guy about to get off who just will not allow himself to be left out, and who turns over an empty shell - 'Oh m-a-a-a-a-n!' - and then scoots before the doors close again.

What about the two guys in front of us talking about guitar playing? The conversation - basically a sharing of enthusiasms - was like a seminar: 'I said, "This is 60s music, man. It's got to have bass." He kept playin' it soft. This is not Jazz.' I discovered their names later in the week when I ran into one of them again in Westwood (how does this happen in a city of 12 million??)

And of course, then you get the monologues from bus drivers: 'Good morning again. We are approaching Javier Ave. This is a far side stop but if you'd like to alight at the red light you may do so. Passengers who wish to alight at the regular stop, please stay on board and I'll drop you on the far corner.' Funnily enough, every driver we asked a question of in Sydney responded with a surly grunt. 'Does this bus go to Wynward?' And the driver voices something like a 'yes' with an inflection that suggests you're a bloody idiot. There was one bus driver who was spectacularly bright and affable - who seemed to relish life like an American. 

 

Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony

Another of my program notes:

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Symphony No.9 in E flat major, Op.70

Allegro

Moderato
Presto -
Largo -
Allegretto – Allegro

Ninth Symphonies have a certain mystique - Beethoven’s Ninth, Dvorák’s ‘Ninth’ (the New World),  Bruckner’s Ninth (dedicated to God, and left unfinished on Bruckner’s death). Schoenberg once said ‘it seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away…’ Mahler tried to sidestep a Ninth by writing a ‘song-symphony’ The Song of the Earth. But then he wrote a Ninth and died shortly after.

Shostakovich broke the jinx, eventually writing 15 symphonies, but his Ninth was supposed to have some of the ‘Ninth’ mystique as well. A Ninth Symphony had come to mean some sort of ultimate statement. Beethoven introduced words and singers into the finale of his Ninth, and, at least according to Wagner, had pushed western art music’s most substantial form beyond its supposed limitations.
A ‘Ninth’ was certainly what Stalin was expecting. It was late 1944; the Nazis were clearly going to be defeated; the Russians sensed victory in the Great Patriotic War, and the foremost composer of symphonies in the Soviet Union, indeed the world, would no doubt provide an appropriate work of celebration.
Shostakovich had become a celebrity during World War II. He had continued composing during the siege of Leningrad and his broadcast message from that besieged city stirred hearts; his Seventh Symphony had been spirited out of war-torn Russia on microfilm via Tehran to the USA, where Stokowski and Toscanini vied for the honour of presenting the US premiere. Shostakovich was depicted on the front cover of Time magazine in his fire warden’s helmet. Shostakovich then composed an Eighth Symphony (premiered in Moscow in 1943) - the second instalment in a trilogy of war symphonies?
As biographer Ian MacDonald describes the run-up to the Ninth:

Shostakovich saw out 1944 with a cluster of minor pieces...none of which took him more than a day or two to finish....He then paused to ponder one of the most difficult and dangerous decisions of his entire career: what to make of his Ninth Symphony.

Why 'dangerous'? What is in this music, premiered in Leningrad under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 3 November 1945?

The first movement is in a recognisably standard sonata form, complete with traditional repeat of the exposition. We have here some of Shostakovich’s most characteristic orchestrational fingerprints – the insouciant opening violin melody, clucking oboe. A trombone call introduces the second theme. The piccolo quick-march will be taken over by a solo violin when this material recurs in the recapitulation. There is some turbulence after the repeat of the exposition. Perhaps if this symphony were subtitled something like ‘Leningrad’, like Symphony No.7, this turbulence could be read as revolutionary alarm. But here it is no more unrest than one would expect in a normal classical development section.
The second movement begins with a mournful clarinet melody which gradually picks up a lilt. MacDonald describes this rhythmic characteristic as ‘heel-dragging’ and sees the ‘two-note’ pattern as depicting the heavy-footed thug Stalin. Certainly the movement builds in intensity. The lilting ends up a glassy, ghost-like dance.
The bracing presto of the third movement with its thrilling Russian woodwind writing subsides into the recitative-like fourth movement. Some hear Wagnerian tones in the brass. Is there homage to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in the lower brass’ stentorian announcements? No arabesquing violin replies, but a bassoon’s chill lament, which however, eventually picks up speed to lead us into the constantly-accelerating finale. Here, as is not uncommon in last movements of Shostakovich symphonies, are effects that would not be out of place in circus music – double-tonguing trumpets and shrill piccolo, Shostakovich pleasing the audience in line with the strictest precepts of Soviet Social Realism. The movement ends neatly, if perfunctorily, as did the first.
MacDonald sees obvious references in this music, even daring caricatures of Stalin. No wonder he uses the word ‘dangerous’. But he stands on one side of a debate that has wracked the music world since the 1970s, when Testimony, Shostakovich’s purported memoirs, was published. Testimony’s authenticity has been questioned, but the picture it conveys of a Shostakovich aware of Soviet evil and encoding subversive messages in his music, was latched onto by western commentators relieved to find that Shostakovich wasn’t a lapdog of the regime after all. The man who cancelled his Fourth Symphony and wrote a less abrasive Fifth as a ‘Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’ could be embraced as a secret dissident. (Of course none of these disapproving commentators had to physically face Shostakovich’s reality: friends taken in the night, vanished, shot.)
But music’s meaning is reduced when we look too hard for concrete meaning, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, on the other side of the Shostakovich debate. He mocks the idea of music considered ‘beatifically exempt from [the wider world’s] vicissitudes’; but nevertheless urges a less-programmatic analysis.
Certainly this work is, if anything, as close to music as music and nothing but as anything Shostakovich wrote. There is a rising emergency in the last movement but it merely prepares a musical resolution, not dramatic climax.
But Stalin was expecting a grand celebratory symphony, and here ‘there was no chorus, no soloists. And no apotheosis.’ How could Shostakovich at War’s end have composed something this innocuous? Could it be the ultimate irony? The Shostakovich work in which the music is about nothing but itself, is therefore the most subversive? Perhaps Shostakovich was lucky to have evaded the jinx of ‘Ninths’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2006

Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013

Gone again

Heading east from Sydney yesterday, back to the USA

 

 

 

 

Distinguishing details

You know you're in Sydney as opposed to LA when (a provisional list):

- you're woken by raucous birds;
- you burn out the drier on 'high' because of the different voltage;
- you smell grilled fish (and other meat) from Pub Bistros as you pass;
- you come across areas called 'cove', 'bay' or 'point' as opposed to 'pass'...

- of course, you have eucalptus in LA, but not signs like this: