Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Opus 45: Capriccio italien

composed: 1880 (age 39-40, see above)
published: 1880
first performance: Moscow, December 18 [old 6], 1880 (Nikolai Rubinstein conducting the Russian Music Society [?])
dedicated to Karl Davidov (cellist, and director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory)

I’m pretty sure one of these is the title page of the original edition. I think they might both be – the first one as published in Germany, the second as published in Russia. There might also be covers from France and England. Not sure.

I’m including this because, as with book covers, I feel it’s useful to see the design elements originally associated with a work. I think pretty visually, and seeing an illustration, or even just type design like this, really helps me get aesthetically oriented to the whole stylistic world that the work comes from. As I’ve probably said on this site in the past, I don’t think it’s right to present old art as though it’s evergreen and can be repackaged any which way. Whether something appears “timeless” to us reflects more on our attitudes than on it, or on the time from which it comes. The only reliable way to have access to the past is to go out and meet it; it can’t be expected to come meet us. At least to meet it halfway. Seeing a book cover sometimes makes it instantly clear where I’m going; so too with music, maybe. Though decorative covers aren’t quite as ubiquitous in music. Still, even these relatively straightforward designs send certain signals.

I would have included the original covers for the prior selections but I couldn’t find them online. These were scanned by the Eastman School of Music, and come from here, where you can download the full score, the score of the composer’s own 4-hand piano arrangement (also 1880), and the score of a 2-piano arrangement by Eduard Leontyevich Langer (1835-1908), “a pianist colleague at the Moscow Conservatoire, whose ineptitude in making piano transcriptions was to cause Tchaikovsky so much exasperation” (quote from here).

Anyway, this was random number 359. Capriccio italien is a pretty dumb piece and its inclusion in the Essential Canon of Classical Music is mysterious. It’s not the warhorse of programming that it seems once to have been, so I’m not sure it can even be justified in terms of ubiquity. Who out there really loves this piece these days, or even thinks about it? It’s been recorded many many times, but I think only because it makes a good space-filler on an album of other Tchaikovsky works, and seems easy to play.

But maybe not easy to play well. Yet again I’m struck by how unsatisfying the recordings were. The piece is all about catchy tunes and corny fun, and it seemed fair to wait for a performance that really brought the catchiness and fun to life. But nearly every conductor seemed content to let it die on the vine, taking the score at its pedestrian word and not adding anything. The slow first theme, which in my imagination should be lusty and operatic almost to the point of comedy, falls totally flat in nearly every performance I heard, with the triplets coming out lazy and even instead of petulant and snappy. The whole score is clearly made up of tunes that PT thought were hummable; the least an orchestra could do is play them like they wanted to hum them.

Actually, all I really wanted from a performance of this piece is for it to sound like an old cartoon score, where dinky popular and traditional tunes have been thrown together and orchestrated and are played with gusto and a total lack of artistic ambition. The second theme here seemed like it come from a Carl Stalling depiction of Italy, and for all I know it may have been used that way. But if the Warner Brothers orchestra played it, they would have given it some kick!

The piece is actually just like those Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, only Italian, and with perhaps a slightly more agile sense of orchestration, but considerably less overall flair. The few connecting and developmental passages are rather weak, as I think Pyotr himself acknowledged, and in the end we don’t really come away with a sense of having gotten anywhere. The tempo and character transitions need a lot of goosing from the conductor; without adding a lot of accelerandos and rallentandos they don’t make enough sense. Unfortunately none of the conductors did that.

Apparently the actual inspiration was not Liszt but Glinka. But I don’t know those pieces so I can’t comment on that.

It’s a tourist piece, based on stuff Tchaikovsky took in while he was staying in Rome. The intro is a bugle call he could hear from the Italian cavalry barracks near his hotel room. I like the idea of taking some noise you hear every day on your vacation and making it the entrance gate to a work of art. With that in mind, the introduction is actually quite effective – the bugle call is played bare in the trumpets, exactly as he heard it, but then is magically joined by the rest of the whole orchestra, converted into something glorious as it passes through the gate of perception and into the interior world of the artist. Or something. For that to come across, though, the opening few bars have to be played like an actual bugle call – without too much expression and not too broadly. No conductors made that choice either.

There are about four themes – 1. the operatic one, 2. the dippy ice cream truck / Popeye one, 3. the suave, jaunty one (my favorite), and then, after the brief return of the operatic one, 4. the tarantella, which has at least one good part. Then a clumsy, would-be-triumphant return of the ice cream truck / Popeye theme leads into a middling coda of the “whipped into a frenzy” type, which actually undercuts its own frenzy in a couple places.

So: this is a deeply unambitious, “lowbrow” piece, and isn’t even a particularly fine specimen of that type. That said, it still gives off a sense of genuine good cheer, these tunes are pretty catchy, and I am able to imagine a really rollicking performance of this piece that delights me, even if I’ve never actually heard it. If someone started humming this I’d join in. But “essential canon” are strong words and this is quite obviously a lightweight. That’s okay by me, though – it still feels like I’ve tossed at least a spadeful of cultural literacy on to the pile.

The official four-hand version, by the way, is mostly very easy and potentially fun to play, but then has some really tricky scales in the middle. I would say fudge them – this was never going to sound good on a piano anyway. Though it looks like those crazy Labeques have recorded this version all the same.

Per Dubal:

London Symphony Orchestra, Rozhdestvensky: IMP Classics IMPPCD 875
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Slatkin: CA 09026-60433-2

I couldn’t readily find either of those. Note that the obscure link above is the only indication I can find anywhere on the web that the IMP Classics release ever existed. (Though a different release of the same recording can now be gotten here fairly easily.)

My favorite of the eleven recordings that I could find, see below, was the Czech Philharmonic / Karel Ančerl. It’s not particularly clean but at least events progress in a way that makes sense to me. Somewhere out there, I believe, there is an even better recording.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim. Deutsche Grammophon 445 523-2. 1981.
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Lorin Maazel. RCA 09026-68471-2. 1995.
Philharmonia Orchestra of London / Placido Domingo. EMI 5 55018 2. 1993.
New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein. Sony SMK 61556. 1960.
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra / Antal Dorati. Mercury 434 360-2. 1955.
Orchestr Ceská Filharmonie / Karel Ančerl. Supraphon SU 3680-2. 1965.
“London New Philharmonia Orchestra” / “Laurence Gordon Siegel”. Intersound CDQ 2027. Released 1988.
Berliner Philharmoniker / Herbert Von Karajan. Deutsche Grammophon 463 614-2. 1966.
Berliner Philharmoniker / Seiji Ozawa. Deutsche Grammophon 427 354-2. Released 1989.
Orchestre symphonique du Montréal / Charles Dutoit. Decca 466 419-2. 1986.
Cincinnati Pops Orchestra / Erich Kunzel. Telarc CD-80541. 1988.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1912)

Opus 78: Symphony no. 3, in C minor (“Organ”)

composed: 1886 (age 51)
published: 1886
first performance: London, May 19, 1886 (Saint-Saëns conducting the London Philharmonic Society)
dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt

Score can be studied, but not easily downloaded, here.

343 on the list.

Because of Babe (and, by extension, these dudes), I used to think of this as a piece with a sweet spot, a single sparkling moment at the top of the last movement, surrounded by satisfactory but unmemorable conventionality. I managed to think of it that way even after recognizing that the “sweet spot” is just one incarnation, neither the first nor the last, of a flexible motive that undergoes development throughout the entire symphony. The entirety of the piece preceding the sweet spot played as an elaborate anticipation of the sweet spot; the remainder as an obviously failed attempt to sustain its glory.

Now that I’ve heard the whole piece some twenty or thirty times, the sweet spot dims and takes its proper place in the form. It’s certainly not an unsweet spot, but it’s not the point of the piece either. Babe and I were partially right all along: yes, that moment is sort of a prophecy fulfilled, and yes, it’s sort of an announcement of victory. But the “prophecy” feeling is really only meant to function retroactively; the other movements really do stand on their own and don’t have any particularly anticipatory feeling to them. And the even more bombastic stuff at the very end is meant to trump the sweet spot. Which is very clear indeed when you’re listening to it straight through without any prior knowledge of “If I Had Words.”

Saint-Saëns’ reputation is for facility, in both the positive and negative sense. (Or can you only use “facile” in the negative sense, not “facility?” Well then, Saint-Saëns’ reputation is for being very talented but writing facile music.) But I’m not sure that reputation is borne out by this piece, which certainly feels craftsmanly in many ways but is hardly a slick, seamless piece of work. Throughout, he can be heard taking unusual risks, not all of which pay off. His struggles to achieve formal and aesthetic balance are fairly apparent; the piece does not “make it look easy.”

This sounds like a criticism but I mean it as a defense against the accusation that the music is superficial and glossy. I enjoy that the piece is actually a string of idiosyncracies, some of them awkward; it helps give value and definition to the passages that are both slick and conventional, and imbues the whole with a sense of human ambition that I find sympathetic, if not always necessarily successful.

He has some kind of big idea about how the four movement scheme has been subsumed into a two-movement scheme because the 1st and 3rd movements lead semi-smoothly into the 2nd and 4th movements; but the actual effect is fairly local and negligible, if you ask me. Maybe by having had no actual “big finishes” prior to the 4th movement, he thinks he’s justified a final mega-parade of big finishes. I’m not so sure.

The theme of the first movement seems like some kind of reference to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, not clear why. The syncopated effect in the strings starting on page 5, it would seem, is near impossible to play with exact precision. Or else conductors just don’t prioritize it – I don’t think any of the recordings I heard were able to keep that texture truly crisp. I can imagine that the rehearsal-time-to-impact ratio is much too high in almost every situation; I would therefore class this as poor judgment on the composer’s part. The second theme is weakish in the way that everything I’ve ever heard by Franck seems weakish; and the development, based mostly on transitional figures, verges on the dull. Then it suddenly lurches out boldly in a way that maybe it hasn’t earned. All that said, I have driven this piece deep into my brain and will cheerfully listen to the entire movement, humming the whole way through. It doesn’t really make a solid argument for or about anything but just listen to how vigorous those strings are! “If that ain’t a symphony I don’t know what is!”

The theme of the slow second movement (first movement part 2, in Saint-Saëns’ scheme), is both beautiful and “beautiful.” This is not the only respect in which it is comparable to Saint-Saëns’ mega-hit, “The Swan.” Of the two I think the present melody is superior. Actually, it sort of sounds like an inversion of “The Swan.” Has anyone else pointed this out?

The nicknamular organ enters in this movement for a unique atmosphere. An organ generally suggests worship and cathedrals and all that, but I don’t actually get that here. To me this is more like an intense lullaby, something so warm and soothing that it’s unearthly. The organ puts us not in a church but underwater, or in utero. The melody, in this context, is like the kind of too-simple tune that lingers from my dreams sometimes when I’m waking up – it seems more laden with emotion than something this bare has any right to be. I get this sense of “the uncanny within the mild and hummable” from Puccini, too, whose melodies this resembles. His supposedly “beautiful” tunes have an unnerving not-actually-casual quality; like someone has lifted up the skin of a salon song and we are looking at its concave face from the inside. Whew, how horrific.

I’m talking especially about the part of the melody at rehearsal “R” in the score. I wouldn’t be shocked if Saint-Saëns just meant this to be baby Jesus in the manger or something like that, but to me there’s something dizzying and dreamy about it. Although I suppose for a lot of people there’s something dizzying and dreamy about baby Jesus, too. Anyway, that’s probably the most successful movement.

It’s not like me to pick the slow movement!

The third movement (i.e. second movement part 1) is built on awfully thin material. I guess that’s how Beethoven scherzi are too, and I think Saint-Saëns had Beethoven very much in mind. The whole symphony is, and I’m not exactly making this up myself, a French composer’s aspiration to a more Germanic, Beethovenian form and tone. This third movement is where the borrowing feels most forced. The counter-material is of course the recurring motive from the first movement. Once you’ve noticed that – and you notice it immediately – the movement’s pretty much played all its cards. Then comes the zany trio, which seems to be built out of exploded bits of the rest of the movement. Program notes will invariably mention the appearance of a piano playing rapid scales, but will avoid talking about why this happens, because no matter how many times you hear it, it’s really, really nuts. I respect Saint-Saëns for doing this. Also, the swoopy second theme of the trio is delightful. Don’t know what it has to do with anything else but who cares. It’s comedic in a wry and graceful way and that comes as a pleasant relief.

Then comes the sweet spot (at page 126) preceded by some flagbearers and a guy on a unicycle, which starts us off into the final movement, the most ambitious and sloppiest of all. It took me several listens to realize that the movement is in totally standard sonata form and that the “sweet spot” theme – which, incidentally, is in a flowing 9/4, where it makes sense, and not the confusing quirked-up 4/4 of the reggae version – is actually recapitulated later (just after “AA”). But during the recapitulation, it’s intentionally hobbled – he kicks the legs out from under it so that it flops over prematurely each time it’s stated. This presumably is to maintain a sense of suspense until the very end, which is attended by gargantuan bombast. The whole movement is bloated, and then it ends with a tiered celebration of ascending bloat, a finale that’s very hard for conductors to pull off. There’s a metrical experiment of sorts going on, where the pulse gets only slightly broader while the notation gets vastly broader, and that seems to confuse musicians. The only conductor I heard who had the ending fully in hand was von Karajan.

Dubal’s recommendations were

M. Dupré, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paray: Mercury 432719-2
Raver, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernstein: CBS MYK 37255
Alain, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Prêtre: Erato 2292-45696-2

And my favorite recording of the piece overall was indeed the Paul Paray / Detroit one, which I found appealingly direct throughout. The Bernstein / New York recording isn’t particularly distinguished. I couldn’t find the Prêtre / Vienna recording anywhere – here begin my struggles with Dubal’s frequently obscure recommendations – though I did end up buying another Prêtre recording of the same piece, in confusion. Different performance, and not a spectacular one either.

My second choice, and maybe it would be my first choice if I really side-by-sided them, is Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And third comes the von Karajan, which is cold but in a suitably Beethovenian way, and stands head-and-shoulders above the rest in terms of making sense of the score on the whole. He cleans up every mess with ease.

Again my favorites were the oldest two.

Overall review of the piece: This piece is flawed in several ways, and it saddened me when I read that Saint-Saëns said something like “I did things there I will never be able to do again.” Why didn’t he keep aspiring onward in this direction? I think he would have in fact done better the next time around. The piece is full of appealing details and for all its shortcomings, I’ve made friends with it. I’m just not about to open up to it; I have smarter friends for that.

Beth, I can tell you, didn’t like it.

In the order they appear above, with dates of recording. Many of these album covers (and Dubal) name the organist like he’s an important soloist but please. There’s nothing soloistic about it. So I don’t name the organists below.

Orchestre symphonique de Montréal / Charles Dutoit. Decca 475 7728 7 DOR. 1982.
Detroit Symphony Orchestra / Paul Paray. Mercury Living Presence 432 719-2. 1957.
Berliner Philharmoniker / James Levine. Deutsche Grammophon 419 617-2. 1986.
Berliner Philharmoniker / Herbert von Karajan. 439 014-2. 1981.
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra / Lorin Maazel. SK53979. 1993.
Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire / Georges Prêtre. EMI 5 74753 2. 1964.
New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein. CBS MYK 37255. 1978.
Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse / Michel Plasson. EMI 5 56362 2. 1995.
Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch. RCA 09026-61500-2. 1959.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Opus 38: Cello Sonata no. 1, in E minor

composed: 1862-5 (age 29-32)
published: 1866
first performance: Leipzig, January 14, 1871 (Emil Hegar, cello; Carl Reinecke, piano)
dedicated to Josef Gänsbacher

The classical music canon thing got off to a superb start with the number 324, which you know as Brahms: Sonata No. 1 in E Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 38 (1862-5).

I’m not sure what I’m looking to get out of this exercise – cultural literacy, I guess, whatever that is – but part of me is just rooting for each piece to be good, for its sake, for my sake, and for the canon’s sake. No question this piece is good. A fine way to push off on this journey.

The piece as a whole has a nice dark cello-y quality, and also a simplicity and openness that suits the instrument more naturally, I think, than the higher-strung passionate stuff that often gets written for it. The cello as a very graceful bear, rather than as a very heavy bird.

There are three themes in the opening movement and they are all excellent. The first in particular is beautiful and well-balanced and very satisfying. Brahms’ melodies never swoop or feint, they’re very forthright about the way they navigate the harmonies – everything lines up very precisely – and yet he manages to create all kinds of gentle subtleties. If you look closely at any bar or two of the score, there is nothing but clean, hard craftsmanship. But somewhere beyond that, something more tender and mysterious is going on. The secret seems simply to be taste and care; truly fine craftsmanship is more than the sum of its parts. This is exquisitely demonstrated in the coda of the first movement, where, within a very simple texture, the music calmly leans back slightly, and suddenly something incredibly poignant seems to be happening. Something sad and important that explains and answers everything that’s gone before. That music can do things like this at all is always remarkable, but what impresses me here is that it’s being done with no fancy shading – all clean corners and everything out in the open.

This is what impresses me about Beethoven, too: the suggestion of curves and shadows using only straight lines and primary colors. The excerpt above reminds me a little of this – the music progresses geometrically but the emotions experience some kind of non-Euclidean bend; the straight line that feels like a tensed bow. In Beethoven this sort of thing is even more pronounced because his straight lines are really, really straight. When he fails to create that transcendent effect, he writes incredibly inane stuff.* Brahms is much more versatile, and could do the fancy stuff too, when he wanted, but he usually doesn’t need to. His line is just pliant enough; no more, no less.

The second movement is the least ambitious of the three, which is customary. The fairy-tale delicacy is more compelling in the B section than the A: my only real dissatisfaction with the entire piece is with the first melody in the second movement, which doesn’t convince, especially when placed in such an exposed relationship to its accompaniment. In particular, there’s an awkwardly resolved and very un-folksy tritone in it, which could easily have been avoided. But the B section is a graceful, amusing combination of mystery and smarm.

The third movement stands slightly apart from the other two – the “age 29-32” above means that when Brahms was 29, he composed the first two movements (along with a slow movement later discarded and now presumed lost) and then three years later added this finale, which is rather more intricate and forceful than what precedes it. Appropriate for a last movement; but – and maybe this is only because I’ve been tipped off to the compositional history – to me it feels a little like a departure rather than just a finale. It’s a busy contrapuntal treatment of a triplet-y theme:

For what it’s worth, say all the liner notes, compare this theme from Bach’s Art of the Fugue:

Bach’s theme, however, starts with a pickup quarter note on the fifth of the scale, which clearly identifies the downbeat. In Brahms’ version, it is very hard to hear (or to play so that one hears) the downbeat on the first note, since the heavy falling octave places such a strong emphasis on the second note, and then the falling fifth in the second bar reinforces it. Even now, having come to know this piece very well indeed, I still tend to hear most recordings as

which is rather less satisfying a theme, especially as the movement progresses, because its harmonic shifts, no longer aligning with the barlines, are hardly as propulsive. But Brahms is in a sense working against himself here, so the duty of making this “read” properly therefore falls on the player. Most recordings I heard, however, did not fight the fight well enough.

Which brings me to the other component of this project – the actual recordings of the pieces. David Dubal, whose list the project follows, provides several recommendations for each piece. In this case his list (which is the list for both this sonata and the Cello Sonata No. 2, Op. 99) reads:

Du Pré, Barenboim: EMI Classics CDM 63298
Ma, Ax: RCA 09026-61355-2
Rostropovich, Serkin: Deutsche Grammophon 410510-2

As you’ll see in the links, those first two are out of print, luckily replaced by newer issues of the same recordings. Seeing as the book dates from 2001 when this was probably already the case, one could say that this is a count against Dubal. But whatever. More on this issue as regards later pieces.

For this piece, the immediate resources of two public libraries and the internet provided me with many options, including all three of Dubal’s suggestions; see below. The very first one I listened to was the Ma/Ax RCA recording, which is extremely warm and beautiful in terms of sound and surface; Yo-Yo Ma’s cello is probably the prettiest of anyone’s I heard. But there were a number of passages – particularly in the last movement – that I still didn’t really understand after listening to this recording repeatedly, and the performance consistently gave me some wandering attention problems. A little too much of a warm bed.

The Du Pré/Barenboim performance has much more drama in it – the score is far more “performed,” not just rendered in attractive sound – but sometimes to the point of obscurity. What was she getting so worked up about, exactly? It wasn’t always clear. Only one of the confusing passages was resolved for me.

The Rostropovich/Serkin recording didn’t add much to either the surface or the sense of the piece. Surprisingly uninvolving.

And then there are all the others… so let me generalize very broadly: Big name musicians, especially in the last quarter-century, tend to play with a reserve – or is it an over-confidence – that neglects to come down on one side or the other of the “big choices” that pieces present. I suspect that in the case of, say, Ma and Ax, there is considered thought behind the performance – it just ends up canceling itself out: “Great music is so rich – let’s exercise our maturity and sophistication by embracing all its ambiguity and not rob the listener of any listening possibilities by force-feeding them anything – let’s just make the music sing for itself.” Akin to declaiming Shakespeare in a rich sonorous voice without actually acting, because actually seeming uncertain, say, would be a disservice to the grand poetry of uncertainty.

To me this is, no matter how well-intentioned, a big mistake, and is also a convenient mask for artistic shortcomings. Is it really a gift of trust to the listener to allow him to make the interpretative choices? Or is it just wimpy?

I’ve been to a bunch of high-profile classical concerts in the last several years, and it seems like common to nearly all of them was the tendency toward the least possible “acting” – just the facts, ma’am, along with a requisite smattering of mannerisms meant to suggest thought and emotion, and, let’s not forget, greatness. A bit like this:

TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION, WHETHER TIS NOBLER, IN THE MIND, TO SUFFER, THE SLINGS AND ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE? OR, TO TAKE ARMS, AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES AND BY OPPOSING, END THEM? TO DIE TO SLEEP, NO MORE, AND BY A SLEEP, TO SAY, WE END THE HEARTACHE AND THE THOUSAND NATURAL SHOCKS THAT FLESH IS HEIR TO, TIS A CONSUMMATION, DEVOUTLY, TO BE WISHED…!

And then the cultural elite jump up and braVO, braVO!

Okay, so that would be a particularly bad one. Most of them, actually, are more like

To be or not to be, that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And to one degree or another, these recordings (and the recordings of pieces to come later in this project) generally give me some of that effect. But, and this is interesting, the older ones don’t; it’s a recent phenomenon. The Du Pré/Barenboim one that I said had more “acting” in it was from 1968. And the recording that ultimately I liked best, that stood out head and shoulders above the rest in terms of telling a story, playing the role, was the 1964 Starker/Sebok performance, the earliest one I was able to get my hands on. Definitely my recommended first choice of these. Starker may not have the polish of Yo-Yo Ma, but hearing from the piece itself, as it were, more than makes up for it.

But there are still some things that I didn’t understand until seeing the score (PDF here), because nobody, not even Starker and Sebok, really “explained” them. Namely, the passages in the third movement where the counter-melody figure (see the left hand at bars 5-6, above) metamorphoses into the second theme (i.e. bars 53-64, look in the score). Pretty much every pianist seems to get distracted by the doodles in the right hand even though the left hand is obviously in the lead, and then they completely restart the argument in midstream when the texture changes at 61. And then, am I crazy, or isn’t the left hand at 65-68 the first three notes of the theme? Nobody brought that out. If anyone knows of recordings where the performers really make this part of the piece work, I’d love to hear them.

In the (random) order they appear above, with dates of recording.

Anner Bylsma / Lambert Orkis. Sony Classical SK 68249. 1995.
Janos Starker / Gyorgy Sebok. Mercury Living Presence 434 377-2. 1964.
Colin Carr / Lee Luvisi. Arabesque Z6748. 1999.
Jacqueline Du Pré / Daniel Barenboim. EMI Classics 5 86233 2. 1968.
Yegor Dyachkov / Jean Saulnier. Analekta 2 3167. 2002.
Lynn Harrell / Stephen Kovacevich. EMI Classics 5 56440 2. 1996.
Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. RCA Red Seal 82 876 59415 2. 1985.
Yo-Yo Ma / Emanuel Ax. Sony Classical SK 48191. 1991.
Mstislav Rostropovich / Rudolf Serkin. Deutsche Grammophon 410 510-2. 1982.
Heinrich Schiff / Gerhard Oppitz. Philips 456 402-2. 1996.

* I was going to put a link on “stuff” to this but I just played through it again and, you know, it has its redeeming qualities. Ain’t no “transcendent meaning,” though, that’s for sure!

The reading-the-western-canon-randomly project is going really well for me, so naturally I thought to apply the same technique to other cultural lacunae.

We had some discussion about doing this for the visual arts but that becomes difficult twice over – 1) because apart from some blatantly commercial “The 10,000 Grrrrrrreatest Paintings Ever!” compendiums, there don’t seem to have been many attempts to articulate an Objective Master List of important artworks; 2) because it’s not clear what degree and depth of exposure ought to be considered satisfactory.

I was coincidentally thinking about this while thinking about jigsaw puzzles. The kind of intimate feeling I get for the geography/personality of a jigsaw puzzle image, while solving it, is a depth of engagement I rarely if ever reach at the museum. Solving a jigsaw engages the analytical/creative side of aesthetic perception – sort of a cheap and stupid way to simulate the process of painting the picture yourself. In sifting and sorting the pieces you end up having to recognize color relations and their significance, formal relationships, proportion, detail, etc. This is not the case with paint-by-number or tracing or any other common crypto-creative task I can think of. Art-school-style copying by sight obviously gives valuable access to the thought and craft behind the painting. But I think maybe jigsaw puzzling, being utterly non-technical, requiring no thought about paint itself, might actually have a more direct relationship to the task of viewing and understanding the finished art.

Maybe not – anyway, so the visual arts are still a bit up in the air.

Movies would be easier to manage systematically, of course – and god knows there are enough lists out there to work with – but 1) I don’t feel like my movie intake needs any kick in the pants like this, and 2) I’m not as convinced as I am in the case of literature that my experiences of “great” “important” movies have been genuinely more valuable to me than my experiences of the lesser stuff. This is odd, come to think of it. With literature there’s really no question that my sense of whether something is “good” and whether I’m glad to have it in my life are basically linked and proportional. Movies I’m less sure. It may simply be that my exposure to “art” movies has been too limited, in proportional relationship to multiple viewings of Back to the Future, to affect my overall sense of what movies are and ought to be.

Also came across this when I was looking into the issue, wherein Paul Schrader says he started to write a film canon book and then got disenchanted with the idea that it should exist at all. Eh. I’m not gonna get into it here, but despite my distaste for Bloom’s idea that his canon is “for real” in any sense, lists are valuable, as my exercise shows, and a well-made list of film worth seeing would be appreciated.

Okay, anyway, so the one that I am, in fact, currently taking on, is music, by which I’m talking about classical music – by which I’m talking about, if you insist, “Western” classical music, which is what you absolutely already knew I meant.

There are a bunch of “canon” type lists out there about classical music, but many of them list recordings rather than works, since these books are written for the “just tell me what to buy” market. As far as I can tell, the only pretentiously high-minded Bloom-style effort is David Dubal’s The Essential Canon of Classical Music, which satisfies me in terms of being both grandiose in its claims and also attempting to be evenhanded in representing the long-term cultural consensus rather than anything snootier. I.e. it includes Carmina Burana.

Of course if you look too close at any such list, the arbitrary nature starts to become apparent. So, having looked it over initially, I’m not going to evaluate any more. I have a list, and it has 750 works on it – which is a nice big round number.

Beth’s joining me on this one, by the way.

The rules are: once a piece comes up, we have to listen to it attentively, in its entirety, at least 3 times. That may seem easygoing but it’s nothing to snort at in the case of Parsifal and the like. But I’ll be honest with you – that’s just there so that Beth can stay in the game and so that I can move on fairly quickly in case of something really desperately unappealing. My actual personal goal is to listen to a piece until I know it and get it to my satisfaction. In my case I’ve found that this generally requires at least 9 listens.

What with ipods and the subway, though, this is actually a snap. Much easier than reading German poetry on the subway, which I have found is impossible.

The first Essential Canonic Classical Musical Work has been completed and will be written about someday soon, now that I got this intro out of the way.

I make a lot of hurdles for myself.