http://sverigesradio.se/webbradio/webbradio.asp?type=broadcast&Id=2263649&BroadcastDate=&IsBlock=

Lest we forget. The story when new, well told here –

http://www.current.org/radio/radio0923wgbh.shtml

A glimpse backstage during James Levine’s first season — http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_proves_hard_on_bso/

His eventual successor … no, one is not being morbid. Surely the search is on, if only in the pondering stage … could well be a Finn, or a Russian. There are so many.

Of course, he got old and crotchety. Doesn’t nearly everybody? And clearly, he was no saint; maybe, even, not a very nice person. At least he kept his anti-Semitism largely to himself, rather than making it part of his public persona, a la Wagner.

The essential point is the MUSICAL value of the later works by the author of the earth-shattering Le Sacre. How important or valuable are they? Nadia Boulanger was a ferocious defender of every note that came from Stravinsky’s ear and pen. I remember her going over every detail of a miniscule late piece — was it Requiem Canticles? — and pointing out astonishing felicities in every measure. “I maintain,” she would say, “that Stravinsky is one of the great unknown composers of the 20th century.”

Below: the art of the brief, graceful, but jarringly candid review.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/09/biography.music

How long has this common knowledge? Its veracity seems pretty well nailed down.

I myself first heard of it from Stephen Johnson on BBC Radio 3. He just happened to be speaking from Shostakovich’s apartment.

Who is going to write the book on the topic “Irony, Burlesque and Parody as Cornerstones of 20th Century Modernism: Music and Visual Arts”? Not only do the musical languages of mid-level masters like Poulenc and Kurt Weill depend on parody and imitation: some of the very greatest creative spirits build at least parts of their personae on mockery and ironic citation: Stravinsky, Picasso, who else? You might even say that intellectualized sendups are a central, constituent element of 20th c. hipness…..

So – In join him in self-correcting myself in fast-typed blogs. I need a couple more to catch up with him, tho.’ Keep looking.

Yeah, yeah. “PROspective. But I LOVE purportedly and will change its usage before I croak.

What is a “perspective” pianist?

And how does one call out something “purportedly”?

Requiems. Satie, Fauré, and Poulenc were all French Catholics, so even when they engage in leg-pulling and various _audaces_ they remain within the fold. Lennie, on the other hand….I quote, from memory, Randall Thompson regarding L.B.:

“Naughty boy. NAUGHTY boy.”

I’m delighted with what Poulenc writes about his own Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, which I think is a great masterpiece — I have performed it myself. What is especially fun is to try to figure out how many styles, or how many specific works, are quoted-parodied-burlesqued in the course of that work. Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto is almost hinted at in the first movement; gamelan styles at the beginning and end of that same movement; Mozart’s K. 466 and 467 Piano Concertos, barely concealed, in the second movement; _La mer_ brazenly burlesqued in the third movement.

I can see him in imagination, rolling his eyes at the worthy, provincial Boston choirmaster. Hmm, I think I’d like to hear the piece again.

Nadia Boulanger to me, ca. 1966, re Poulenc: “Des fois, en écoutant sa musique, j’ai envie de lui dire, ‘mon cher François, aujourd’hui vous êtes allé un peu trop loin.’”

“There’s a particular sickly-religious subdepartment of French Catholicism — the ‘Sacre Coeur style’ — which can sully even the best composers, believers or no, when they turn in its direction: Franck, the Debussy of ‘Le martyre’, Messiaen. And in its name, anything goes.”

“My own love for Poulenc,” he writes earlier, “is almost wholly confined to smaller pieces, piano and chamber music and above all songs. Small only in the sense of scale and forces; but the complete appropriateness of talent to medium and material, the perfect marriage of style and idea (to coin a phrase), give this body of work a high place in the music of mid-century. Within it he is virtually infallible.

“The sureness of touch extends to some larger pieces, especially those involving the stage. ‘Les biches’ and ‘Les mamelles de Teresias’ are, in their different ways, triumphs of outrageous stylisation.”

‘Les biches’! Does anyone else remember the old Decca/London ffrr LP with Roger Desormiere and the Paris Conservatory Orchestra? Ensembles nowadays simply don’t/can’t/won’t come up with such in-the-style, ripely individualistic sonorities. And to our loss. They’re like a vanished dialect.