Greg Stepanich

Leo Arnaud: The sound of the Olympics

I meant to write this a couple days ago, but I fell ill Friday with the flu and it's only now, on Sunday evening, that I feel recovered enough to do some work. I'd planned to go to a couple musical events this weekend, but unfortunately, I was in no shape to do so. Apologies to all who were counting on me to show.

What I had wanted to say a couple days ago was on the subject of public music and Leo Arnaud specifically. Arnaud (1904-1991) was a French-born composer who studied with Maurice Ravel and Vincent d'Indy, certainly among the most important French musicians of their time and arguably in French musical history as a whole. In the 1930s he came to the United States, where he found a good career working in Hollywood, scoring and arranging music for the movies (here's a list of some of his credits).

In 1958, Arnaud wrote a piece called The Charge Suite, one section of which a fanfare for brass and tympani called Bugler's Holiday. That fanfare came to the attention of ABC executives 10 years later when they were looking for music to accompany the Olympics broadcast in 1968, and it's been used ever since as the theme. I've been looking for more information on Arnaud; a writer named George Broussard did a two-part interview with him in 1985 for the International Trombone Association, but it doesn't appear to be available online. Perhaps someone at the association would be kind enough to let us know how to find the piece on the Web; it'd be well worth reading.

In any case, it's one of the most recognizable pieces of music anywhere, and I'm sure Arnaud was delighted to have his music so prominently associated with the big sports event. It's a small kind of immortality, I suppose, but in some ways it's the best validation a composer can have: The music he wrote for a different purpose ended up meaning something instantaneously to millions and millions of people, and that says something about his work's ability to communicate.

(A Dallas freelancer named Jeff Harrell did a piece about this theme back in 2004, and here's a link to it, along with which he provides an MP3 of John Williams' 1984 reworking of Arnaud's original.)

The Arnaud story also reminds me of the power of public music in general. In the Olympics, we saw this clearly with the various national anthems of the winning countries. It was interesting to see athletes listening to their anthems, mouthing the words or audibly singing along (like the Swedish hockey team Sunday), and invariably tearing up. The idea of a national anthem is basically a 19th-century invention so far as I know (though I should probably do a little more research on that); it became a critical part of national identity when so many countries were being re-formed into the shapes by which we know them today.

And these anthems have proven effective. There are so many associations we have when we hear our own anthem (which wasn't even officially adopted as ours until the 1930s, though unofficially we'd been using it for years before that, which is why Puccini could quote it in Madama Butterfly back in 1904), though I get more sentimental when I hear America the Beautiful, which I like better. Still, play a couple notes of our anthem, and all of us hold our heads a little higher.

Another thought about the power of music: Once Sharon and I went down to Pompano for an Italian festival down at one of the churches there. In line for some pizza, I heard the band start up with Oh, Marie, and instantly, I was a human fountain. To hear that old tune was to remind me of my late Italian immigrant grandparents, and every happy thing I associated with them, and it was a few moments before I could recover. Mr. Sentimental, that's me.

Now I've got other associations with Arnaud's Olympics theme. It makes me think of Sharon's devotion to the broadcasts every two years, and now I'll also think about being sick the last time they came on, and she took such good care of me. It's an example of the public becoming personal, I guess. It doesn't take anything away from the basic excellence of Leo Arnaud's little fanfare, which for as long as we're alive will be associated with the quest for athletic mastery and national pride.

You could have a worse legacy as a composer. This one seems to me like a happy one to have.

Tech site good idea for arts groups

Here's an interesting marriage of technology and music: Streamingculture.org.

A project of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, this group offers Internet assistance to arts groups, helping them add sound and video links to their Web sites. If you browse the site, you'll see a nifty clip or two, one about the power of television after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 (that sounds like Orson Bean narrating), and another featuring a dance group doing a fun little installation featuring a bunch of bodies on top of each other in a box.

But the most interesting thing for me is the application this idea has for disseminating classical music, and opera in particular. There's a good talk on the site featuring Marc Scorca, who's the chief executive officer at Opera America.

"From a business-to-business perspective, we really feel as if the Internet were invented for opera,� he says on the clip, and I can see what he means. Opera has become more popular, and its audience younger, in recent years, Scorca says (and I'll bet he's right), and the benefit of being able to stream some actual performances via the site are obvious if you're trying to reach a wider audience.

We're all doing more multimedia these days, and this is a trend that's going to continue. Frankly, I don't see how anyone these days builds a composer Web site — to take one example — without plenty of clips from their pieces, and additionally there's probably not much point in building any sort of performing arts site anymore without plenty of audio or video to lure browsers into your cultural net.

People relate to their world differently now than they did even a generation ago, and they're not willing to just read about cultural events or performances they might want to attend without seeing or hearing something. In fact, we reviewers might be forced to mount video and sound clips before too long of the concerts we've attended to help make our points.

There's a whole forest of legal issues there that would have to be cleared and reduced to matchsticks before that could happen, but I can see the benefit of being able — especially with new music — to write something like:

The symphony began with a blaze of glory from 12 trumpets, followed by a magnificent theme that rose up from the lower brass and swept through the strings. Here's that theme:

That would have the benefit of being concrete, as opposed to having to summon up all your writerly capacity to choose just the right adjective. And no doubt much of your audience would disagree with you after hearing just what you're talking about.

And then we might find that people are listening less, not more, because of the way today's technology makes the music so immediately accessible. You could glance for a moment at a video clip of a wild new production of say, Parsifal, and think you'd had some sort of understanding of it without doing any more than that. So you could get more access but less impact.

But I think overall it's probably a positive development overall. Music is above all a communicative medium, and if new technologies can spread the word more easily about it, that's all to the good. The really interesting thing will be when composers and performers' reputations are artificially enhanced by the slickness of their sites, or unfairly discounted because their Web presence is so underwhelming.

Once again, it will be about packaging, and making sure that package helps get even your most abstruse thoughts across without detracting too much from it. Here's hoping ideas like streamingculture.org do more to advance the cause than contribute to the total Hollywoodization of every square inch of our common culture.

Finckel, Han give standout recital

To call a concert challenging is often to damn it with faint praise, but not in the case of the recital given Sunday afternoon by cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han.

Finckel and Han, who are married to each other and run their own record company while they're not out touring, offered three substantial sonatas at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, including a relatively new piece written for them in 2002 by the young pianist-composer Lera Auerbach.

Auerbach's Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 69, proved to be a stimulating composition in every important sense. It is the work of a very talented, intensely serious artist with a deep grounding in tradition who also has her ears wide open to newer possibilities for rhythm and color. But there was also something curiously unfinished about it, something half-explored; I think I felt that way because much of her material sounded to me as though it begged for more elaboration.

The four-movement sonata is dark, powerful, and tragic, but this is not mourning that's content to stay in one place. The piece fairly burns with energy, even in the second movement, marked Lament. Here, huge dynamic contrasts alternated with long, sad melodies in the cello over Romantic-style figurations in the piano. The third movement, a toccata, opens with both instruments playing a charging, churning rhythm that evokes rock more than it does jazz, with an effect every bit as magnetic.

Good things were on display in the two outer movements, too, including a melancholy semi-waltz in five-four time in the first movement, and tightly buzzing, aggressive quarter-tone trills by the cello in the finale that differed markedly from the closing bars, in which the music simply evaporates. An impressive piece overall, though again, a lot of the material (such as the little motif that began the second movement) suggested other potentialities that weren't addressed.

Auerbach could hardly have hoped for better executants than Finckel and Han, who demonstrated superior musicianship throughout. Finckel has a penetrating yet velvety sound that seizes center stage, and Han's wonderful technique made short work of much of the sonata's treacherous difficulties.

The two were no less accomplished on the recital's other two Russian sonatas — the G minor, Op. 19, of Sergei Rachmaninov, and the C major Sonata, Op. 119, of Sergei Prokofiev. (Auerbach, now 32, hails from the Urals but left Mother Russia just before the Soviet Union collapsed.)

The Prokofiev sonata that opened the recital is a very late work, but unlike other pieces from the end of his career, this one shows little diminishment of the composer's powers. Its mix of strong melodies and interesting textures served Finckel and Han well; the cellist gave plenty of sweep to the major theme of the first movement, and Han played even the fragmentary tune in the sonata's earlier measures with a maximum of poetry.

That movement ends with a very slow, high trill in the cello over gentle closing chords in the piano. This gesture is heard three times, and the two players turned each repetition into something special.

The second half of the concert was devoted to the Rachmaninov sonata, a big, highly charged piece brimming with the kind of tunes that continue to endear this composer to audiences. The sonata has a huge, expansive piano part that requires virtuoso equipment, and Han delivered, snapping off the little minor-scale smirk that opens the second movement with admirable crispness, and saving plenty in reserve for the climbing chords that Rachmaninov is fond of writing at points of emotional climax.

Finckel gave no ground to his wife in playing the music with the grand gesture it requires, driving the melodies forward with all-out passion time and again. It was a performance that showed both artists absolutely united on a common conception of the piece. There was no sense that Han was simply accompanying her husband, or that Finckel was trying to get a word in edgewise as Han cranked up the volume.

Instead, you had two separate artists giving their all together and as individuals to give the most committed performance they could. It was stellar music-making, from the choice of program to its execution, and the kind of recital that encourages listeners to further investigate the riches of the chamber music repertoire.

Finckel and Han gave an encore: The Scherzo-pizzicato movement from Benjamin Britten's sonata, also in C major, dating from 1961. It's a short, witty piece that exploits the varied effects a cellist can get from an all-pizzicato approach; it's humorous and charming, and piqued interest in the rest of the sonata.

An idea for a Mozart fiction

As I noted earlier this year, there's a bunch of new books out there dealing with one aspect or another of Mozart's life. There's been some fictional treatments, too; a couple years ago Stephanie Cowell wrote a good novel about the Weber family and their involvement with him (Marrying Mozart was its name).

But other possibilities remain, as they do for many of the great composers whose lives would make interesting literature or cinema. With that in mind, here's what I think is a good idea for a short story or novel based on something in the life of Mozart. I hereby offer it to the world of the Web, and ask only that if you use it, that you drop me a credit line in the acknowledgments.

In browsing through W.J. Turner's 1938 biography of the composer (Mozart: The Man and His Works), I found this citation from a letter Leopold Mozart sent Oct. 23, 1777, to his wife Maria Anna, who was accompanying their son on a concert tour:

Tell Wolfgang that the big-eyed royal baker's daughter who danced with him at the Stern and so often made him friendly compliments and then finally went into the Loretto convent has returned to her father's house. She had heard that he was leaving Salzburg and thought to see him and prevent him; he will therefore be so kind as to compensate the father for all the expense, the ceremony, etc., which her entering the convent cost . . .

There's a story with pathos: The baker's daughter, probably incredibly smitten with Mozart, finds that she can't go through with her vows and risks the outrage of her family to try to keep the composer near her. There's a nice back story there (and come to think of it, there was an Elvis movie on this theme, I think, with a would-be nun forsaking the convent for the young man with a sneer).

But still, if someone needs a good story idea, and likes to do research, too, you could write something compelling on the life of a big-eyed girl who probably didn't stand a chance with winning Mozart, but who was willing to turn her life upside down to try.

Anyway, if you use it, drop me a line, and good luck.

Reviewing the tape: Finally got a chance to review the Pavarotti tape from the Turin Olympics opening, and I'm still thinking it was a lip-synch (it's most noticeable to me in the line No, no, sulla tua bocca lo diro, in which he seems to come in a shade behind on the bocca). I'm not certain, but that's what it looks like to me. I also noticed something else: He's singing a half-step down, so that last high note is a B-flat, not a B.

But again, it was still good to hear this beautiful aria again, and to see the one opera singer in our time who has true crossover appeal, and to whom many non-fans of opera continue to respond with pleasure.

Auerbach sonata on Sunday program

This weekend, lovers of new music have a chance to hear a cello sonata by the young Russian composer Lera Auerbach (I wrote about her winning the Hindemith Prize last year in a previous blog posting). The husband-wife team of cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han commissioned the sonata from Auerbach in 2002, and gave its world premiere in Iowa City in February 2003.

For a program Sunday afternoon at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Finckel and Han have programmed the Auerbach sonata (it's No. 1, Op. 69) on an all-Russian program that also features the late C major sonata, Op. 119, of Prokofiev, written in 1949, very near the end of Prokofiev's life, and the G minor sonata of Rachmaninov, Op. 19, composed in 1901, about the same time as Rachmaninov had returned to form with his Second Piano Concerto.

As I think I mentioned at the time of my original Auerbach blog, it's intimidating, to say the least, to cruise through this composer's dossier and see what she's accomplished at only age 32. Besides winning critical praise as a first-class pianist, she's written nearly 100 works and several books of poetry to boot. Clearly, this is someone who burns to create, and create constantly.

And the encomia surrounding her music are every bit as generous as the flower horseshoes she's received for her poetry and pianism. When a composer comes this highly recommended, we fellow composers have to put in an appearance to hear what's up.

From the hints I can gather from the various short sound clips on this or that Web site, her music sounds like a good companion for the Prokofiev sonata in that they share a certain sonic sense steeped in tradition yet expressed in a pungent, off-center style. I'm reaching here, I know, because I'm not familiar with Auerbach's music in any deep sense. But that's what I'm expecting when I go to the concert Sunday.

Her dossier makes me wonder how in the world she does all these things. I imagine spending some time around her watching her work is probably an intense experience; she probably works very hard much of the day, and is planning other projects for the rest of it. I don't see how you could it any other way.

Truth be told, it's amazing how hard a lot of young artists these days work. If we read the memoirs of Artur Rubinstein, there are many moments in which leisure seemed to be the great pianist's chief occupation. I don't know that the listening world will let artists these days do anything less than to constantly work, and that probably has some consequences for the art and the artist over time that are less than pleasant.

But who knows? It doesn't seem to be bothering Lera Auerbach any, and in any case, it's the music she's written that really counts. I'm greatly looking forward to hearing the piece.

The concert starts at 3 p.m. Sunday (more details here).

Review: Boca Symphonia sparkles

The new Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia, giving only the fourth concert of its inaugural season (fifth if you count November's appearance with the Master Chorale of South Florida in Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem), showed Sunday afternoon that it already has become quite a good chamber orchestra.

Under the guest direction of Alexander Platt (that's him pictured above), who leads the Waukesha Symphony in southeastern Wisconsin, the Symphonia gave fine readings of symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, and an excellent traversal of the First Piano Concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Pianist William Wolfram, who played from the score for his performance of this early (1933) wiseacre work of a young and confident Shostakovich, demonstrated a large and impressive technique as well as taste and intelligence. The opening pages were slightly muddy, as was the last jazzy outburst in the finale, which detracted a little from the crisp wit and nervous energy of the concerto, but overall Wolfram's performance was sparkling.

He was matched every step of the way by the orchestra, which was absolutely committed to this piece, unified with its soloist and fully in synch with its conductor. This was a performance that clicked on every level, from the passion the violins dug out of a long passage on their G-strings, to trumpet soloist Jeffrey Kaye's big, round tone making the most of a bluesy solo in the second movement.

The best thing about this rendition of the Shostakovich concerto is that it showed its audience what a marvelous work this is. There's nothing quite like it in the repertoire, and without the right approach, listeners won't get the sense of joy that is so rare in later works by this composer (whose centenary is being celebrated this year). But this was a nearly ideal rendition, full of life and heat.

Platt also programmed two symphonies nicknamed Paris from the Viennese classical tradition: The No. 86 of Haydn, in D major, and the No. 31 of Mozart, K. 297, also in D. In good, useful remarks to the audience before the concert, Platt made a case for Haydn as every bit the "towering genius" Mozart was, if of a slightly different type.

The Haydn performance that opened the concert was distinguished by scrupulous attention to dynamics, good ensemble throughout the orchestra, and an overall sense of restraint that was quite attractive. Platt made much of the slow movement's Capriccio marking; the simple broken chord that rises like lazy bubbles in the opening bars got steadily slower as the piece progressed, bringing the energy level perilously close to collapse. Still, it was an imaginative choice, and it worked well.

There were more fireworks in the Paris symphony of Mozart that closed the afternoon. The ensemble, good as it was in the Haydn, was even better in the Mozart; clearly, the strings did a lot of section work in rehearsal. All those scalar runs so beloved of the younger Mozart were right on the money, and the profusion of skittering thirds throughout were beautifully in tune.

By the finale, the orchestra was at the top of its game, bending to swift dynamic changes as one, and providing every punch and shock Platt asked for. It was bracing Mozart, and like the Shostakovich, it presented listeners with an exciting picture of a young composer of immense promise in the process of flexing his muscles and finding out just how good they were.

One other work was featured: Lyric for Strings, written in 1941 by George Walker, the current dean of African-American classical composers. Platt and the orchestra played this modest, Barber-inspired piece with surpassing tenderness, rarely rising above a breathy confidence.

A word about the venue: The Symphonia played for the first time in the Roberts Theater on the campus of St. Andrew's School in Boca Raton. It's something of an improvement over the dryness of Florida Atlantic University's University Theatre, but it's still a little bit barn-like, and the orchestra's musicians no doubt needed the baffle at the back to help them hear each other.

The orchestra will be giving all its concerts for the coming season at the Roberts, orchestra President Martin Coyne announced Sunday, and also said the new group would finish the season with a surplus. "The bad news is that the surplus is $1.45,� Coyne said to much laughter before making a pitch for donors to be generous.

The Roberts is a very attractive venue for an afternoon of music, but it has a serious problem in its serious shortage of restrooms. Orchestra organizers are going to have to figure out a way for concertgoers to have more places to visit at intermission.

Pavarotti at Turin: A recording?

I had a fairly late Friday night, but after I got home I watched the very end of the Winter Olympics ceremony, and there at the end was Luciano Pavarotti, singing, inevitably, Nessun dorma, which has practically become his signature piece.

I'm listening now to his 1972 recording of Turandot, the Puccini opera from which that aria comes. This recording (also featuring Joan Sutherland, Montserrat Caballe, Nicolai Ghiaurov and even Sir Peter Pears, led by Zubin Mehta) is, for me, the definitive reading of what I consider a magnificent piece of musical theater, despite its unfinished state. I never tire of listening to it, and of hearing Puccini's genius for turning his magpie eclecticism into beautiful art.

So I don't mind hearing yet another rendition of Nessun dorma; it's gorgeous and always has been. It's just that I'm pretty sure Pavarotti was lip-synching. I'm going to go back and review the tape my wife Sharon made of the performance, but I'm almost sure there was a recording behind him; he appears to miss a couple of his entrances. (I don't think he has that high B anymore, anyway, though I could be wrong.)

If he was lip-synching, it doesn't make that much difference as far as the opening ceremony went. It's a big piece of theater, and what matters is the overall impact more than whether one of the participants (who's 70, after all) is up to his former Olympian singing ability. The ceremony itself looked marvelous in some respects, very cheesy in others, especially all those 1970s disco hits during the parade of the athletes. But it was still great fun.

I won't pretend to know what it's like to be a massive celebrity like Pavarotti, a man of great natural gifts who is still probably the world's best known opera singer. He's had a long career and the demands on his throat have been considerable. He might very well have been in bad health and unable to sing.

In that case, it would be the honorable thing to do to give the people a good performance of this aria rather than let la bell' Italia down when the eyes of the world are upon her.

It's just a little ironic, that an event celebrating the triumph of superior talent, one of the performers — admittedly, one four or five decades older than the majority of participants — might not have been able to meet that standard.

Again, I don't know that it's very important. It was good to see him there, really, doing his bit for his country. And the music, wherever it came from, sounded good, and served as a reminder, as it was meant to do, of Italy's great place in the history of opera, and of music in general.

In the Mozart-matic: Piano sonatas in C (K. 309) and F (K. 332), played by me, on my piano. Dreadful performances, but fun to do, and it struck me that much of what Mozart is about it purity: It's a pure music; this is a composer who knows exactly how much weight each note will carry, and how it will work in the structure. Humbling, but fascinating.

Maybe it hurt more than it showed

From Stanley Sadie's Mozart: The Early Years, released in December:

Possibly, in a different age, when it was thought appropriate to develop women's gifts and their opportunities more nearly matched those open to men, Nannerl might have been as fully and professionally trained as her brother was, and have developed into a considerable composer. But it is clear that the family, living in a socially conservative environment, always took it for granted that a girl's only destiny was marriage, and there is no indication that Nannerl ever nurtured other ambitions. As far as we can judge from the family correspondence and from their later relations, she never felt any jealousy towards Wolfgang, recognized his superior abilities and always took great pride in his success.

You can't read a lot about Mozart's early years without reading about his elder sister by five years, Maria Anna Walburgia Ignatia, a fine musician who shared Wolfie's triumphs when the two siblings were younger, but then was gradually forgotten as more attention was focused on her brother.

Surely Nannerl was a child of her time and place, and shared the expectations her family did for her eventual life. But it had to be hard for her, touring the courts of Europe as a young girl and being celebrated for her abilities, to have to put all that away in her later years as father Leopold concentrated on his son.

Sadie's being scrupulous when he writes that there's no indication that Nannerl ever thought about another career besides marriage, because it would be mere speculation to suggest anything otherwise, and he was trying to write an unimpeachable, important text. And you don't want to apply 21st-century standards of behavior for 18th-century people acting according to the dictates of their own culture.

Seriously, though: It had to hurt. Nannerl had to be jealous at some point when she was younger, and maybe she confided to her pillow in some inn on the road a very daring dream — that she could be a musician, too; that she could compose and play the piano all of her life, and be celebrated and admired for it. That we don't have any evidence for it is not surprising, but I think it would be strange to grow up in a house where music was the family business and not be caught up in it.

Although we have music by Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, I don't think we have anything by Nannerl Mozart, nor do we know whether she actually wrote anything (though someone out there knows). But whether she did compose or not, it's certain that Nannerl received much praise as a young person for her keyboard prowess, and it's a fair guess that she probably was a serious talent whose potential was never fully developed.

She wouldn't be the only musician in history who could have given the world a lot more than she did had different circumstances applied. Frustrated, wasted talent is always something of a crime, and while we're thinking a lot about Wolfgang and playing his music everywhere, it's worthwhile to spare a thought for Nannerl.

Grammy gloating: I was a little modest in my Grammy prediction for William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It took the Grammy in all three categories in which it was nominated, and its producer, Tim Handley, won Producer of the Year (Classical). I also mentioned the Kissin record of Russian piano music, and it won the Grammy in its category as well.

You can see the whole list here.

Bolcom a Grammy contender

The classical music section of tonight's Grammy Awards probably won't get a good deal of attention, but there are a lot of interesting recordings on the list (which you can see here), and one of them is nominated in no fewer than three categories.

This is Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a massive, polystylistic oratorio based on the William Blake poems by the American composer William Bolcom. This 3-CD Naxos set, featuring soloists and choirs and the University of Michigan Symphony under Leonard Slatkin, is up for Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance and Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Another disc of Bolcom's music, a recital of songs sung by the soprano Carole Farley, also on Naxos, is up for Best Engineered Album (Classical) and Best Classical Vocal Performance. Farley sang some of these songs during an appearance in West Palm Beach last year.

The liner notes to this recording note that the first performance of the work took place in 1984, and that the composer wrote most of the cycle in the years 1973-74 and 1979-82. The new recording is a live performance done in April 2004 at the University of Michigan, where Bolcom has taught for more than 30 years.

One of the most important things about Bolcom's career has been his range: He has done important records of rags by Scott Joplin and classics from the Great American Songbook with his wife, the singer Joan Morris. He's also written symphonies, chamber music, and operas, including McTeague, based on the novel by Frank Norris, and A View From the Bridge, from the play by Arthur Miller. Local concertgoers might also remember one of the premiere performances of his monodrama Medusa at the Kravis a couple years ago, in a scorching performance by Catherine Malfitano.

In an important sense, he's got the history of American music right at his fingertips, and it comes out when he writes. Somewhere in a book about the history of the piano, he writes about a passage in the Gladiolus rag of Joplin, in which the melody, which starts out like an old European two-step, suddenly bends into the blue. It's that exact moment, Bolcom says, where American music announces itself. It's a memorable piece of analysis, and right on the money, if you ask me.

The Songs is one of those pieces that de facto have to be called "ambitious," because it's so large and long, with 46 poems, a huge performing force (there were 450 people on stage at this performance, including four choirs, 13 soloists, and a big orchestra), and a compositional style that blends styles from all across the musical spectrum. For example, The Lamb, a piece of straightforward classical composition, is followed by The Shepherd, which is set to a country waltz (performed here by Peter "Madcat" Ruth).

Not everything is so starkly different; much of the piece has a consistent language of contemporary but not forbidding music, and each of the songs has a distinct personality, which shows Bolcom's ability to wrap his mind around a text and give it his own individual stamp.

Before Farley's appearance here last year, I called him, but he was on the road, and I passed on some questions to an assistant. He called back and left his answers on my voice mail, and one of my questions was about the varied musics he brought to the Blake cycle and what led him to take that approach. His answer as best I recall was that doing the piece like this wouldn't work unless the individual pieces "talked to each other," which he said was the reason the piece hangs together.

As I listen to it now, I'm hearing links — woodblock patterns, little wind roulades that go from song to song — that do help unify what is a very broad tapestry indeed. And as Bolcom says in the notes (from 1984, also included here), he's been looking for this kind of unity throughout his career:

If any one work of mine has been the chief source and progenitor of the others, I would have to say that this is it. My fascination with the synthesis of the most unlikely stylistic elements dates from my knowledge and application of Blake's principle of contraries, and I have spent most of my artistic life in pursuit of this higher synthesis.

It's a powerful, fascinating work, and it probably has a good shot at coming away with a Grammy.

Other Grammy notes: Pianist Evgeny Kissin's record of Russian piano music by Scriabin, Medtner and Stravinsky is up for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance, and it's a knockout. It's up against a record of music by the 20th-century Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, played by pianist Piotr Anderszewski, among others. I bet the Szymanowski disc has an edge because of the novelty of the repertoire.

There are all kinds of contemporary pieces on the list, too, including music by Harbison, Rorem, Boulez, Golijov, Boyer and others. That's healthy and impressive. I also see a couple nominations for a disc of the complete Mendelssohn string quartets as played by the Emerson Quartet, which also is good for repertoire purposes: My Ysaye Quartet disc from 1993 of the Mendelssohn quartets was a revelation to me. These are marvelous pieces, and not done nearly enough.

Let's take a week off for culture

Dropping in Sunday afternoon at the Society of the Four Arts for a performance by the Tokyo String Quartet, I heard the Third Quartet of Bela Bartok.

The six Bartok quartets are touchstones of the contemporary string quartet literature, but it's been a long time since I've heard any one of them in a live performance. I've heard several of the Shostakovich quartets, one of the Britten quartets, the Barber quartet and numerous others. But I can't think of the last time I heard Bartok live.

I liked the Tokyo's reading of this relatively brief work, too: There was a good deal of strength in their approach, which brought out the sublimated folk textures, and they didn't shrink from Bartok's tough harmonies. They played it straight and direct, and made a good case for the composer.

What it made me think of was something Vladimir Horowitz once said about discovering the Mozart G minor String Quintet late in his life; he apparently hadn't heard it until he was in his mid-80s. He said at the time something to the effect that we live with so many treasures around us, and it we go through a lot of life without ever encountering so many of them. And these are works that would do you some good.

I'm starting to warm to the idea of time being set aside every year for cultural rejuvenation. Many people do that through travel, but I think it might behoove me to set aside a week for art museums, or reading a literary classic, or listening to The Ring all the way through in one sitting. I'd have to be disciplined about it, and that means I'd probably have to go somewhere relatively anonymous if I wanted to read; staying at home would inevitably cause me great guilt about not fixing the fence, or feeding the citrus, or getting that garden laid out.

I don't see how, really, I can do it any other way if I'm trying to fill in my cultural gaps. Everything takes planning, and the leisure time we have these days is already planned to the hilt when we get some time off. And those things are necessary: doctor's appointments, car repairs, shopping for an upcoming event.

But for me, actually getting time to read Rabelais, or the two or three Shakespeare plays I haven't gotten to, or to listen to all six Bartok quartets (and study the scores while doing it), would be time perfectly spent, and I know I'd come out of the experience a changed man. Small price to pay for a week of cultural immersion.

So let's say we have a Culture Week for one of our vacations. What would you do with it? Post your list on the blog and we'll see what everyone has to say. More good ideas, I expect.

In the Mozart-matic: The Early Symphonies, Vol. 1, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (Musical Heritage Society). Even the earliest works, written when Mozart was only 9, are charming, full of energy and invention, and a good listen.

Loss of classical online mag won't stop the music

Learned with sadness this week that Andante.com, a good online classical music magazine, has been shut down. (Here's the story as told by the Los Angeles Times.)

I've had a link on my blog to Andante since the beginning, but haven't checked in for a week or so. If you didn't get a chance to see it, it was a good-looking page with interesting coverage of musical events plus links to concert reviews and book reviews, among other things.

It was always nice to pull up the site and see classical music treated with depth and verve on a well-designed format, so I'll miss it. There are other good classical music sites, but I don't think you can have too many.

One of the questions raised by the demise of Andante revolves around classical music and its future, and in particular how it's doing on the Web. As the LAT piece mentions, the end of the online zine seems to say no one's listening, and no one cares.

I don't have much patience for that point of view. The great saving grace of the current technology marvels we enjoy is that music is such a central part of it: Endless amounts of sound can not only be stored but created using minimal equipment; the beauty of this is that the production and storage don't cause any microchips to break out into a sweat, but the music itself occupies enormous space in your head.

That has made it easier, not harder, for classical music to survive. The reason is that without all the old genteel-culture impedimenta, it reverts back to what it has always been —- just music. It's much more likely now that listeners will bump randomly into a piece of classical music and judge it on its own terms, instead of avoiding it because it's supposed to be boring.

So the Web in an important sense has set classical music free, and the disappearance of an online magazine that chronicled that world doesn't mean anything about the health of the art form. But it does deprive us of a good forum for discussing its issues, and that's to be regretted.

In the Mozart-matic: I'm going through my Mozart collections here at home as part of an extended observance of the composer's 250th. This week, it's been the String Quintets in C and G minor (K. 515, K. 516), played by the Melos Quartet with violist Franz Beyer (DG, 1987), and the String Quartets Nos. 20 in D ("Hoffmeister," K. 499) and 22 in B-flat (K. 589), played by the Endellion Quartet (Virgin, 1990.)