Floyd Camembert Reports

Sarah Deming, who won the Golden Gloves (see video) before getting married to a jazz pianist, is covering the first U.S. Olympic team trials for Women's Boxing in Spokane.  Huffington Posts one, two, three.  More to come.

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Darryl Pitt, the head of Depth of Field (TBP's management), was in the Times yesterday in an amusing story concerning D's other passion, meteorites.

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Philip Sandifer is doing extraordinary work at TARDIS Eruditorum.  The post on Logopolis blew my mind, not just because it takes the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure story (I read The Mystery of Chimney Rock right around the time I first watched Logopolis) but because Sandifer's insights are fresh and profound.

However, Sandifer isn't much interested in the music of Doctor Who.  Neither are Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, whose About Time books were probably the most comprehensive pre-Sandifer contribution to metatexual DW analysis. Has someone else covered the music already?  By this point, you'd think there would be nothing left to say about this old BBC sci-fi show for children! But apparently there is always more.

In Logopolis the chilling score is by Paddy Kingsland, who supplied an eerie ambience to several DW stories and penned the triumphant theme to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  "Dr. Gaz" transcribed the Logopolis regeneration scene and performed it on YouTube, thus saving me the trouble of doing it myself someday.

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On a more ungrateful note:  I'm just back from seeing Leif Ove Andsnes perform a casually brilliant solo recital at Carnegie.  It was "perfect," and therefore flawed.  His closer was that chestnut of chestnuts, the G Minor Ballade of Chopin.  I've seen this work at least four times at Carnegie already, played by Maurizio Pollini, Evgeny Kissin, Earl Wild, and Shura Cherkassky. 

Pollini and Kissin were like Andsnes, playing all the markings in the score just so. Fabulous, yet oddly forgettable.

Wild and Cherkassky (both dead now) played it like they wanted to please themselves, not piano teachers.  There were gutteral utterances, weird rubatos, and burning codas singed with wrong notes.  I remember them well.

Enough with excellent, middle-of-the-road Chopin performances!  It's time to move on from the conservatory approach.  I'm ready for an interpreter ready to toss out the score and tell me a story straight from the heart -- and willing to risk it all when doing so.

Part of the problem is the size of Stern Auditorium.  If Andsnes were in my living room playing exactly the same way, I'd be dumbfounded.  But these big halls demand an outsized approach.  

The highlight was Bartók's Suite Op. 14, where the pianist's superb control and lavish tone color lit up this comparatively slight collection.  I hadn't heard Op. 14 live before and was impressed by how well Andsnes made it work.  Next time, Out of Doors, the Op. 18 Etudes, Improvisations on Hungarian Songs, and the Sonata, too! 

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UPDATE:  NY Times review.  The concert can be streamed WQXR here.  The first Ballade is one hour, 42 minutes into the program.  Nice to get another listen!  My feeling of  "It's great, but it that all there is?" is unchanged for the moment. 

I admit it is not just Andsnes, Pollini, and Kissin that leave me cold in Chopin.  For me, relatively recent records of the Ballades by Krystian Zimmerman and Murray Perahia were wildly overpraised by the classical establishment. 

So who do I like in the first Ballade?  Three very old recordings come to mind:  the very first Gilels, the first Horowitz in 1947, and Josef Hofmann replete with an improvised prelude.  There's blood on the keys in every instance. 

I also approve of Rubinstein's world-weary, almost non-virtuosic performance.  Artur sits you down, pours the wine, and stares hypnotically into your eyes as he recites the tragic story.

While it is unfair to ask Andsnes, Zimmerman, Kissin, Pollini, Perahia and other faultless moderns to imitate Gilels, Hofmann, Horowitz, and Rubinstein, I remain convinced that the culture of Chopin performance has generally degraded. 

However, these things go in cycles.  Bach and Mozart are currently in very good hands.  Beethoven and Brahms have their defenders.  Chopin's time will come.

02/15/2012

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