Copper
Too much tchaikovsky
Henry Purcell’s King Arthur
Merlin waves his Wand; the Scene changes, and discovers the British Ocean in a Storm, AEolus in a Cloud above: Four Winds hanging, &c. . . . AEolus ascends, and the four Winds fly off....
Violin Plus Orchestra, Part Two
So many concertos, so little time. When I decided to devote two whole TMT columns to Violin Concertos After Beethoven, my aim seemed clear: sort through a pile of recent...
Violin Plus Orchestra, Part One
Our story begins with Beethoven. (What else is new?) His Violin Concerto (1806) especially, because it’s the poster child for Modern Concertos in so many ways. First, he wrote it...
Bach's Saint John Passion
High on my list of all-time favorite Bach arias is “Ich folge dir gleichfalls mit freudigen Schritten,” which translates as “I follow you likewise with joyful steps.” Scored for soprano...
Passions
Last month I made a single New Year’s resolution: to devote space in Copper to Bach’s two monumental Passion settings. These works are central masterpieces in Western art music, as important in...
Serenades
Serenade (Fr. sérénade; Ger. Serenade, Ständchen; It. serenada, serenata). A musical form, closely related to the DIVERTIMENTO. The term originally signified a musical greeting, usually performed out of doors in the evening, to a beloved...
When You Wish
Dear readers: as I write this, Christmas is over, the New Year soon to arrive. Happy 2021, everyone! To welcome in the New Year properly, let’s not talk about a...
Award Season
Christmas came early last month! In the space of ten days, I got four back issues of Gramophone: August, October, November, Awards! (Somehow the September issue managed to arrive in mid-October.) Pandemic postal priorities,...
Rossini (Bel Canto Part 2)
Here’s a question that should be a softball: who was Europe’s single most influential musician in the early 19th century? Was it Beethoven? After all, we had hoped to celebrate...
Holiday Music, Naughty & Nice
First, the Nice part: One of my earliest memories of hearing recorded choral music was of a particular disc from David (not yet Sir David) Willcocks and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge....
Bel Canto, Part 1
Recently I’ve been watching a lot of Dark, now streaming on Netflix. It’s both an epic tragedy and a sci-fi Bildungsroman like Stranger Things or Back to the Future. I like it! Dark is just clever enough, creepy enough, “deep”...
Winners
For weeks now I’ve been planning a column on the winners of various creative-achievement prizes in music. No problem with material — it’s all there. The only problem is...
Two Violas and a Cello
Dear Reader, Hi there! Yes, I’m back from a self-imposed sabbatical. Wish I could say it cleared my head, sharpened my hearing, lifted my spirits. Probably did, a little. But...
Symphonies and Social Movements
Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the activist’s protests. . . . The people...
Beethoven and . . . Britten?
Remember Beethoven? Late in 2019 the classical-music world set out to celebrate a Beethoven Year, but then the pandemic got in the way. Has this become an odd moment to chat...
Comfort and Adventure
Good: If I ever start making playlists again, or decide to re-organize my record collection, I could divide everything into just two piles, Comfort and Adventure. Lately I’ve been stuck...
Mozart's Tito and Idomeneo
Earlier this month I watched the Met’s free streaming presentation of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito; these nightly broadcasts are a generous, welcome gift to a pandemic-bound world. Yet as I...
Why Collect?
Part 1: Adventures in Time Travel Last week I unboxed a new vinyl-cleaning machine, plugged it in, flipped the on/off switches a few times. I knew the basics of LP...
Four Figaros
In the last six weeks, I’ve watched Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro three times. That’s three hours per performance, so nine hours, not counting bathroom breaks or snack attacks. Well worth...
Routine, Ritual and Wabi-Sabi
In the past few weeks, I’ve rediscovered something: routines can be comforting. They offer a sense of order when things get jumbly. Even humble food or drink habits help us...
Multichannel Hall of Fame Mk II
(Last time we offered overviews of several recording labels that led the way to a glorious high-res, multichannel future for classical music. Some persevered, some did not. Here’s the rest...
Multichannel Hall of Fame Mk I
Recently, I’ve had more time to poke around my “record collection,” i.e., anything I didn’t stream, download or mail-order last week. I focused on multichannel music, because I love it and...
Immersive Sound Part Two
When I started planning this column, the task seemed simple: why not start with nominees for the 2019 Grammy for Best Immersive Audio Album? That would give us an overview of the...
Opera and Immersive Sound
This is the first of two articles I’ve planned on immersive sound. The second will follow in Copper #109, covering recent Grammy nominees in that category. Space permitting, I will survey recent...
Steve Waksman, Rock Musicologist: Part Two
(Author’s note: In our interview with Steve Waksman in TMT #102, he discussed the shifting social role of the electric guitar in American life; then we talked about Bill Hanley, the...
Steve Waksman, Rock Musicologist
(Author’s note: Last November at a meeting of the American Musicological Society, Professor Steve Waksman, who holds joint appointments in American Studies and Music at Smith College, gave a fascinating keynote paper, “A...
Beethoven Plus One: Songs
2020 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, the single most influential figure in the history of Western music. His intense focus on individual expression and...
Rarities and Remembrances
This TMT will appear in Copper #100 on December 16, 2019. Happy Anniversary to Copper and to all the fine people who make it happen! What you’re reading is not my 100th column for Copper; I started...
Haydn and the Theatre
Today we most often encounter Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) as the celebrated “father” of the string quartet and composer of over a hundred symphonies. But for much of his lifetime, Haydn’s...
Russian Composers: Rachmaninov, Medtner and Pro...
They were contemporaries. Sergey Rachmaninov (1873–1943) was born seven years earlier than Nicolay Medtner (1880–1951), who arrived a year before Sergey Prokofiev (1881–1953). Rachmaninov studied first at the St. Petersburg...
Doin’ It
My friend Dale Cockrell has written a remarkable book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840–1917, which details the codependent development of social dance, popular music, and prostitution...
Maurice Duruflé
Maybe you’ve heard about FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. It’s a disease I know, having caught it once or twice over the years. I was the first kid on my block...
Ear Candy
Of the four strictly definable parameters of any musical sound—pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre—the last of these, also called color, may be hardest to define or describe. Think about it: a tone...
Copycats
Today we’re talking about musical imitation and modeling. Also ripoffs, quotations, homages, sampling. Apologies to those who’ve read my previous rants on these topics; I realize I’m going back to...
Standard Time
It may seem like I seldom devote space here to repertoire favorites, e.g., Top Twenty World’s Greatest Concertos. Why is that? Well, some people are heavily invested in the Top...
“Who the hell is Allan Pettersson?”
Not my words. Just the title of a 1974 TV interview with Pettersson (1911–80). The simple answer? Pettersson was the most significant Swedish symphonic composer of the late 20th century....
Hall Sounds
Late this May I fulfilled a longstanding wish—to attend Choral Evensong at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Director Stephen Cleobury retired at the end of June; this was one of the last...
Prokofiev Piano Concertos
What I’m writing about this week: Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and his five piano concertos. Also, concertos by Huw Watkins (b. 1976). Plus, backstory from W. A. Mozart, especially his twenty-odd...
Pan and Perséphone
Today we begin with Mahler and his Third Symphony. Then we move on to Perséphone, a melodrama for which Igor Stravinsky composed music in 1934. Both works—and a lot of other music from...
Eine kleine zuviele Nachtmusik
This is about Mahler and his Seventh Symphony. Which means, I guess, that it’s about everything. More than anyone else, Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) set out to depict huge chunks of the universe...
Violin Plus One
Or two, or six. There’s no end to what you can do, and with whom. Today we check out recent releases that feature at least one violin up front. Beethoven wrote...
How I Became an Audiophile
My earliest memories of listening to recorded music go back to when I was a child living in what seemed like an enormous house on an even more enormous farm...
Purcell’s King Arthur
Merlin waves his Wand; the Scene changes, and discovers the British Ocean in a Storm, AEolus in a Cloud above: Four Winds hanging, &c. . . . AEolus ascends, and the four Winds fly off....
Stay Hot!
Last week I finally signed up for a streaming service. First two albums I clicked on were Yuja Wang: The Berlin Recital and Nemanja Radulović: Baïka, both DG releases. Not sure why I chose them,...
Stay Warm
It’s cold, it’s gray, it’s wet. Time for comfort food: Dvořák and German lieder and tuneful chamber music. No atonal scratching and heaving for a while! No earnest searches after our deepest,...
Telling the (Vocal) Story
In TMT #75 we talked about narrative in instrumental music. Today, let’s consider narrative in vocal works. But really, what’s to consider? Reminds me of that exchange in the 1988 film Big Business when...
Telling the Story
Every picture tells a story. That’s utterly true, regardless of Rod Stewart. And if every picture can speak, so can all the music ever made. It’s always useful to remind...
Stocking Stuffers 2018
It’s that time of year again; maybe you’re still in need of a few things. And so I’m offering this simple phrase (no, sorry!) uh, these can’t-miss gift suggestions, a mix of the...
Collaborators
Nearly all the great creative musicians were good collaborators. It obviously worked for George Frideric Handel (1685–175). Eccentric country squire Charles Jennens (1700–1773) wrote several libretti for him; Handel set them...
Putting Down Roots
I’ve just seen a documentary about a food writer. It was inspiring, it made me think—about what critics can accomplish, for instance. We can always direct you to a nice restaurant, a...