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New Music I Like (No. 2): Valentin Silvestrov

8/31/2012

Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

Here’s the second installment in my entirely subjective series of posts about composers active today who write music I like.

Velentin Silvestrov is a Ukrainian composer who was born in Kiev in 1937. Evidently, he never quite felt at home either with the Socialist Realist or the International Modernist schools – avoiding the former and repudiating the latter – but his aesthetic ideas and values have found a welcome home within the Postmodernist fold. (For a biography, see here.)

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Cellos on Planes

8/29/2012

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A cello with a window seat.

Here’s something I wrote for today’s Globe and Mail newspaper.

Years after the snakes have been defeated, modern aviation has found a new nemesis: cellos.

Boston-based cellist Paul Katz recently bought a pair of seats – one for himself and another for his 1669 Andrea Guarneri cello – on an American Airlines flight from Calgary to Los Angeles. Only when he arrived at the airport did he learn that American Airlines “code-shares” with WestJet. His flight on American turned into a flight on WestJet – which, unlike AA, doesn’t allow cellos in cabins.

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New Music I Like (No. 1): Marjan Mozetich

8/26/2012

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Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich.

The sad truth is that there’s not a lot of recently composed music that I like very much.

I could go on at some length about all that I think is wrong with new music nowadays. Suffice it to say that I have very little patience for high modernist composers still fighting the battles of the mid-20th century. Similarly, I don’t have much interest in backward-looking composers whose scores are little more than unimaginative exercises in musical nostalgia for pre-modernist eras.

What I do like is composers who find fresh new ways to work with musical materials and ideas authentically embedded in our culture. Such composers are, unfortunately, few and far between – but they do exist. (And I can’t help noticing that they don’t generally come from the European countries that historically formed the “core” of the classical music world: France, Germany and Italy.)

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David Jalbert in Stratford

8/18/2012

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Pianist David Jalbert.

A few days ago I was in Stratford, Ontario, to attend a book launch. (The book was my own Remembering Glenn Gould. For information about it see here.)

But happily, I arrived in town a few hours before the book launch – just in time to hear pianist David Jalbert play a recital at St. Andrew’s Church, presented by Stratford Summer Music.

There was just one piece on his program: Bach’s monumental 32-movement Goldberg Variations. In an opening statement, the Ottawa-based pianist pointed out that the piece was originally written for a two-manual harpsichord. As his Yamaha grand piano only had one manual, this made for a lot of tricky fingerings – and those of us who were seated on the left side of the church were able to see just how challenging some passages were.

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Teaching Legato, Rubato and Values

8/12/2012

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In Renoir's day, students played new music.

September will soon be upon us, and students across the land will return to conservatories, universities and private studios, to resume their musical educations.

If you’re a music teacher, and these are your students, you should know that the place of classical music in our culture’s future is largely dependent on what you teach – and don’t teach – your students.

I recently had an interesting chat with the violinist Barry Shiffman – who runs the Young Artist Performance Academy, and also the Glenn Gould School, at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music – about music education. And in our conversation he emphasized the effectiveness of musical training in a studio environment.

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About My New Book

8/8/2012

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Gould was large, and contained multitudes.

In one short week, I’ll be launching my new book, Remembering Glenn Gould: Twenty Interviews With People Who Knew Him, at the Stratford Public Library, in Stratford, Ontario (see here). It’s a soft-cover book, published by Penumbra Press (see here).

I began this book almost inadvertently. It all started with an interview I did with Glenn Gould’s concert manager, Walter Homburger, back in 2008. (You may read the interview here.) At that time I wasn’t thinking beyond publication of this one interview, in Queen’s University’s venerable journal, Queen’s Quarterly. It was only after the article was published that it occurred to me it could be the beginning of a collection of similar interviews.

There was no lack of people to talk to, in Toronto and elsewhere. I soon discovered that Gould gathered around him an interesting and articulate group of people – and that they usually remember their encounters with Canada’s most famous classical musician as though they last saw him yesterday.

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New Music I Like (No. 2): Valentin Silvestrov

Cellos on Planes

New Music I Like (No. 1): Marjan Mozetich

David Jalbert in Stratford

Teaching Legato, Rubato and Values

About My New Book

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