I’ll be honest: Paquita’s music is not the most interesting in the world. Still, look at what boring costs. The flute runs are quick and exposed, the kind you practice for years so that nobody notices them. The steps are the same: small, fast, exact, on the beat, with a smile. One person in the pit and one on stage have each trained for a decade to deliver two minutes of mediocre, boring, bathroom-break filler. ...
From Fritz Kreisler’s chapter, “Personality in Art,” in Frederick H. Martens’s Violin Mastery (1919), a book of interviews with violinists from Ysaÿe to Heifetz: What makes one man an artist and keeps another an amateur is a God-given instinct for the artistically and musically right. It is not a thing to be explained, but to be felt. There is often only a narrow line of demarcation between the artistically right and wrong. Yet nearly every real artist will be found to agree as to when and when not that boundary has been overstepped. Sincerity and personality as well as disinterestedness, an expression of himself in his art that is absolutely honest, these, I believe, are ideals which every artist should cherish and try to realize. I believe, furthermore, that these ideals will come more and more into their own; that after the war there will be a great uplift, and that Art will realize to the full its value as a humanizing factor in life. ...
Dorothée Gilbert danced her farewell at the Palais Garnier on October 15, in MacMillan’s L’Histoire de Manon. Her Des Grieux was Hugo Marchand, her partner of twelve years; they met rehearsing this ballet. The applause lasted thirty-five minutes. I’ve written about Manon before, after seeing the Australian Ballet in Sydney. This time, let’s talk about the music, and why Manon might be so popular for farewell performances. Ballet has more good music than it gets credit for. Manon’s score isn’t Massenet’s Manon. MacMillan used neither that opera nor Puccini’s. Leighton Lucas assembled the score from the rest of Massenet: other operas, oratorios, songs. It works better than a patchwork should. I’d put it in tier one. Tier zero is Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, who wrote ballet as symphonists. Tier one is well-orchestrated scores that serve the stage: Manon, Giselle, a few others. ...
The other Paganini concerto: the first, in D major. Or E-flat, depending on whom you ask. Paganini wrote the orchestra in E-flat and the solo part in D, then tuned his violin up a semitone. The fingers play in an easy key, and the strings ring brighter. The finale is a rondo, Allegro spiritoso. It’s cute: the tune is as catchy as every Paganini tune, and the violin keeps leaving it to do something unreasonable, like ricochet, harmonics, or a dash to the top of the fingerboard. Then it comes back as if nothing happened. ...
The title track of Allume is by the harpist herself. Carrol McLaughlin (1952–2018) grew up in Alberta and was playing professionally as a teenager. She ran the harp department at the University of Arizona for over thirty years and founded HarpFusion, a touring harp ensemble. Allume is French for “lit,” as in a candle. One review says the piece was inspired by monastic illuminations. You can hear it: the harp is gold leaf, the flute the lettering. Neither is flashy, and both are lovely. ...
Histoire du Tango is one of Piazzolla’s most popular chamber works: a history of the tango in four scenes, written for flute and guitar and frequently stolen by cellists. Café 1930 is the decade when people stopped dancing to tango and started listening to it. It’s slow, melancholy, and more about sitting than moving. Swapping guitar for harp is an easy trade, since both are plucked. The harp has more resonance, though, so the café sounds a little more expensive. Luce keeps the flute dark and low, and the piece stays sad. ...
Auguste Durand was an organist who became a publisher. His firm, Durand & Cie, went on to publish Debussy and Ravel. Long before that, he wrote a salon piece for piano, the Première Valse, Op. 83, which sold enormously and was played in every parlor with a piano. This track turns the waltz into Christus factus est, the gradual for Holy Thursday (“Christ became obedient unto death”). It’s an odd marriage, but it works. The tune turns out to be hymn-like once you slow it down. Without the waltz rhythm, it’s a lovely, earnest melody, and on flute and harp it sounds a bit like a church on a weekday afternoon. ...
Michel Blavet was the best French flutist of the 1730s. Quantz admired him, and Frederick the Great tried and failed to hire him. He was largely self-taught and held the flute to the left. L’Henriette is the first of his Op. 2 sonatas (Apple labels it No. 2). The heart of it is the third movement, an aria named after the sonata: a simple rondeau tune that keeps coming back, each time a little more ornamented. ...
Stravinsky preferred winds to strings, and said so. In a 1924 note on his Octet, he wrote that winds better rendered “a certain rigidity of the form,” while strings were “less cold and more vague.” Coming from him, cold was a compliment. Hence the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Octet, a piano concerto accompanied only by winds, and the Symphony of Psalms, which has no violins or violas at all. ...
Woody Allen’s 1996 musical, with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth and Drew Barrymore. The cast sings old standards in their own voices, and everyone sings awfully. Barrymore was the exception: she got dubbed. The awfulness adds to the fun. If I wanted someone who can sing, I’d watch an opera. The movie is really pretty, though. New York in the fall, Venice, Paris at Christmas, Goldie Hawn floating along the Seine. It even features Perlman. Everything about it is luxurious. ...