Julian Bream (1933-2020)

LATE TUESDAY UPDATE: After I attempted some fixing and updating and amplifying of this post, which I'd thought had otherwise come out surprisingly okay, I discovered that important parts of it had gotten mangled or simply lost. So I went back in and repaired it as best I could, and while I was at it attempted some additional fixing and updating and amplifying. Goodness only knows what more has gone wrong now. Note: We've now got our own Django Reinhardt audio clip! -- Ken


Julian plays one of his Spanish staples, "Sevilla" from Isaac Albéniz's Suite española. (You can hear "Granada" here.)

by Ken

We'll be back to Beethoven next week, I expect. But since I got word that Julian Bream died at home in Wiltshire on August 14 at 87, it's been on my mind, and even though I'm poorly equipped for a proper commemoration, as I'll explain in a bit, I decided I didn't want to let another week go by without doing something.

During my college years (I'm horrified to have to note that we're talking about more than 50 years ago) Julian came to town and gave a recital that I imagine was very much like countless other recitals he gave in countless other places: He played the guitar, played the lute, and talked. My goodness, did he talk! His knowledge and passion reached out directly and grabbed at least this audience member, and I was hooked. As I must have mentioned here before, I'm not exactly a guitar enthusiast -- I don't mind it, but I don't go out of my way to hear it, except in the hands of a select few guitarists, starting with the greatest of them all, the Spaniard Andrès Segovia, and continuing with the other master, Julian B. (Whenever I say this, I also like to put in a good word for the guitar-playing Romero I know best, Angel R.)


SO YOU WANT TO PLAY A FUGUE -- ON A GUITAR?

Here's a case in point. Playing Bach on the guitar had been one of Segovia's great passions, and it became one of Julian's too. If you can play a fugue on a violin, why not on a guitar?




THE DIFFERENCE FOR ME BETWEEN ANDRÈS AND
JULIAN (AND ANGEL) vs. MOST OTHER GUITARISTS . . .

Annals of serendipity, Beethoven edition: Wouldja just listen to these horns go?

And that's some spiffy clarinet-playing too!
[With assorted UPDATEs]

No, not these particular horns, I mean the ones on the recording --

I wish I knew who our horn players -- and clarinetist -- were so I could credit them. (The regular recording credits are coming up momentarily.)

by Ken

What we just heard -- and I'll sort-of-explain in a moment how we got here -- is the Trio section of the minuet, or I should probably say the Tempo di Menuetto (not quite the same thing; what we have is a tempo marking, not necessarily a simple declaration that what follows is a minuet), of the Beethoven Eighth Symphony. It's nestled inside this performance:

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93:
iii. Tempo di Menuetto

London Symphony Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded November 1972

What's happened is that, in the course of our pursuit of the "lesson" of Fidelio, following our pursuit of the "lesson" of Don Giovanni, we are finding outselves knocking around Beethoven's workshop. As readers of recent installments may recall, our path to Fidelio is also leading us beyond, to Beethoven's seeming repository of all musical and perhaps human knowledge, his Ninth Symphony. Which has naturally had me scouting assorted musicscapes for the musical signposts we'll want to pass by.

One of which is a recording of the Beethoven Ninth that Carlo Maria Giulini made for DG, with the Berlin Philharmonic, in 1989, which is lodged in my memory as an especially powerful and personal statement. (For some reason I feel a compulsion to mention that I reviewed it in the New York Times, even though this really isn't here or there, except as it underlines the powerful effect the performance had on me.) It occurred to me that I have an earlier Giulini Beethoven Ninth, done with the London Symphony for EMI, and I was pretty sure I even had it on CD, and mightn't it be interesting to rehear both performances?


IT TURNED OUT THAT IT WAS INTERESTING,
AND NOT IN QUITE THE WAYS I EXPECTED

Here's a tease, or maybe a tiny bit more than a tease, of a sort-of-post that should be coming up soon

Here's a catchy old tune:

by Ken

The blog horror I reported last week, the imposition of a radical and near-catastrophic new interface by Google's Blogger bloghost, has taken an enormous toll, requiring limitless reserves of energy and determination to accomplish basic things that used to be fairly routine, making it that much more difficult to try to conceive a workable blogpost. I've got something that's not much of a blogpost but does advance us a little in some of our current inquiries, which have taken us from Mozart's Don Giovanni to Beethoven's Fidelio and onward to the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, but I still haven't been able to get even that stopgap thing posted. Monday, I hope?

Meanwhile, let me make good at least a little on the tease above.

To put it another way:

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Berlin Philharmonic, Ferenc Fricsay, cond. DG, recorded Dec. 1957-Apr. 1958

Franz Crass, bass; Vienna Singverein der Gesellschaft der Freunde, Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, June 6, 1960

Watch for further developments.

#

You remember those clips of Siegmund's monologue I mentioned?* Just for laughs, let's see what happens if I try to "publish" them

"A sword my father promised me": Stuart Skelton as Siegmund, so starkly alone and defenseless, literally and figuratively in the dark, in Seattle, 2012 (set by Thomas Lynch, photo by Elise Bakketun)

by Ken

Okay, this is maybe actually just possibly working, in a very limited way.*

[*To understand what I'm talking about, you would need to have read my earlier doom-engulfed outpouring. I'm not necessarily recommending it, I'm just saying.]

Much to my surprise, we've got the Walküre clips posted (I'll bet you thought I was making it up, about having them made and ready to go!), and I've successfully -- as far as I can tell -- taken the further step of adding the promised English texts, though typographically I can't help feeling that this is sort of the way Ben Franklin would have cobbled his blog together. Still, if it works, it works! (You'll notice that I've even managed to add images to the previous post and this one.) There's time ahead for contemplating the implications, if any.

So let's go ahead, in pursuit of our listening project, and listen to Siegmund's monologue from Act I of Die Walküre; then we'll rehear Florestan's Act II monologue from Fidelio sung by the same three tenors. The idea is to see whether, and in what ways, we can hear the strong vocal kinship between the roles of Florestan and Siegmund. First off, we're hearing, twice each, probably the two most notable Siegmunds since Melchior, Jon Vickers and James King, and then we'll hear no-sort-of-dramatic-tenor at all but instead that jack-of-all-tenor-trades Plácido Domingo.

The plan then, in the event that we can actually get away with this much madness, is to retrieve from last week's post ("The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 2) the Vickers, King, and Domingo performances of Florestan's monologue.

NOTE ON THE EDITING OF THE AUDIO CLIPS: This bothered me while I was doing it, and it bothers me now. Normally with multiple clips of a selection, I try to make them start and stop at pretty much the same points. In this case, though, with all six sources containing Siegmund's monologue by itself on a single CD track, in the interest of sanity I just went with the CD track placements; doing otherwise would have involved having, for all six versions, the preceding and following tracks at hand in case it proved necessary to edit in bits from them. I sorta wish I'd done it that way. (On second thought, maybe not. As it turns out, the clips start in pretty much the same place, though the King-Böhm and Domingo-Barenboim go back a bit farther. More importantly, the King-Böhm continues on significantly farther, and if I'd done the editing as per "rule" it might regrettably not have -- see below.)

WAGNER: Die Walküre: Act I, Scene 2, Siegmund's monologue
("Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater")

Thanks to the ravaging savages at Google, I don't know when, if ever, I'll be able to figure out how to do another post

UPDATE: Well, after thrashing my way through a follow-up post-of-sorts, I decided to try inserting an image here, and it sort-of-worked -- more cumbersomely and stupidly and with less satisfactory results than the way it used to work, but still, there's unquestionably an image here. (I've also found the buried option to "Revert to legacy Blogger" -- for as long as it works.)

by Ken

It looks like no post this Sunday, and maybe no Sunday to follow, thanks to Google, which has imposed not just a new interface for Blogger/Blogspot, the blog host that has been owned (and degraded) for several years now by Google, a change I knew was coming and was dreading, but what seems, now that I've been forcibly plunged into it, to be a different way of doing absolutely everything I've previously learned how to do. I have no idea what will happen when I gather all my nerve and press "Publish" on whatever I wind up writing here.

My fallback might have been to just share some music, but ironically that's one of the things I now don't know whether I have any clue how to do, since the new interface has been dismissing my HTML code as "incorrect code" even though it's just like code that's been working perfectly well -- and still seems to read okay even in already-posted posts I've had occasion to tinker with using the dreaded new interface.

I'M NOT JUST BEING THEORETICAL ABOUT THE IRONY

The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 2

Welcome to what we might call "The Florestan Test"
We should talk about this at some point, but these two points in Florestan's monologue crystallize what separates him from the normal run of humans.

Moment 1
Note especially: the vocal and orchestral explosion on "Ketten" ("chains")
[NOTE: We pick up here in bar 3 and continue just into bar 8.]




Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded 1970

Moment 2
Note especially: Florestan's emphatic repetitions of "Pflicht" ("duty")
[NOTE: Our clip runs from bar 2 to the start of the Poco Allegro.]



Jon Vickers (t), Florestan; Covent Garden Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Testament, recorded live, Feb. 24, 1961

by Ken

Where we are: Last week we took time off from the inquiry we began the week before into the minister Don Fernando and his literally life-saving arrival in the nick of time in the final scene of Fidelio "The Minister is coming! The Minister is coming! Don Fernando and the lesson of Fidelio, Part 1"): Who is he? What's right and what's wrong with his miraculous arrival? And what does it all mean for us? We paused to take a closer look at the protagonists for whom the Minister's arrival means miraculous rescue, Leonore Florestan and her imprisoned and near-death husband.

We did that by means of reconstituting a 2012 Sunday Classics post, in a preview, "Put these two little orchestral excerpts together, and you'll know the subject of this week's main post," and main post, "Meet the Florestans, Beethoven's supercouple." Which was okay as far as it went; it just didn't go far enough. Notably we looked, as we did in 2012, at Florestan's Act II-opening dungeon monologue, breaking it into several parts and hearing an assortment of tenors tackle them. What I really wanted to do, and had wanted to back in 2012, was to look at the monologue almost word by word, musical emphasis by musical emphasis, and that's what I aimed to do today.

It hasn't worked out, so for now the two examples will have to serve. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Florestan's monologue,definitely including the spiritually as well as physically gloom-and-doom-ridden orchestral introduction, is the most remarkable music ever written. I will say that I don't know of any more remarkable music.


SO HERE'S WHAT I PROPOSE --