Classical pet peeves

[Hoppy T. Frog]

Cd liner notes that are totally different in different languages--the PolyGram group seems most guilty of this, at least back in the day. (Listening to John Eliot Gardiner's Missa Solemnis and Reinbert De Leeuw's Ustvolskaya prompted this). I wish my German and French were better than nonexsistent.

[Chuck Nessa]

Do you mean different translations of the original note or different notes for each language?

[lipi]

If you can tell they're completely different, then you're actually coming out ahead. You can read both, so you get more information.

Edited November 15, 2012 by alex.

[A Lark Ascending]

Dead maestro fetishism.

[A Lark Ascending]

Downloads of opera recordings that don't include librettos.

If Chandos or Hyperion can just have a link on their website, why can't Decca?

I want to get a couple of the Entartete Musik series that are OOP as discs but there s downloads. But I need to know what is being sung.

[rdavenport]

Dead maestro fetishism.

Maestro fetishism is something I'm intrigued by. If I occasionally watch a concert on Sky Arts or the BBC proms, I often wonder if , when the conductor is bowing and scraping to the audience, the players aren't thinking to themselves "who does this prick think he is?"

I mean, one would expect orchestral musicians to be able to play the right notes in the right places, no?

Edited November 16, 2012 by rdavenport

[A Lark Ascending]

You are missing the point. In classical music the conductor, the string quartet, the singer, the instrumentalist are what matters. Debating who is best is what it is all about.

The music is incidental.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

You are missing the point. In classical music the conductor, the string quartet, the singer, the instrumentalist are what matters. Debating who is best is what it is all about.

The music is incidental.

(what an agreeable little smiley )

MG

[Hoppy T. Frog]

Do you mean different translations of the original note or different notes for each language?

Different in each language.

[jeffcrom]

Cd liner notes that are totally different in different languages--the PolyGram group seems most guilty of this, at least back in the day. (Listening to John Eliot Gardiner's Missa Solemnis and Reinbert De Leeuw's Ustvolskaya prompted this). I wish my German and French were better than nonexsistent.

Do you mean different translations of the original note or different notes for each language?

Different in each language.

Yeah - it's particular frustrating when the German or French notes are much longer than the English and seem more detailed and interesting. And in the worst cases are when the notes in a language I don't speak have examples with musical notation, and the English notes don't.

Damn Tower of Babel!

[A Lark Ascending]

And in the worst cases are when the notes in a language I don't speak have examples with musical notation, and the English notes don't.

I don't speak musical notation in any language.

[johnlitweiler]

Lately vibrato has been driving me nuts, whether it's Sarah Vaughan or the Saturday afternoon opera on the radio.

[Chuck Nessa]

Lately vibrato has been driving me nuts, whether it's Sarah Vaughan or the Saturday afternoon opera on the radio.

I wondered what was driving you nuts.

[Larry Kart]

Lately vibrato has been driving me nuts, whether it's Sarah Vaughan or the Saturday afternoon opera on the radio.

Excerpt from something I wrote about Vaughan, though I wouldn't give her use of vibrato a blanket endorsement:

In the chapter [Martin] Williams devoted to Vaughan in his book

The Jazz Tradition

, he pointed out that it is on

Great Songs From Hit Shows

that “all her resources began to come together and a great artist emerged.” Those resources, he explained, included “an exceptional range (roughly of soprano through baritone), exceptional body, volume, a variety of vocal textures, and superb and highly personal vocal control.... When she first discovered her vibrato, she indulged it. But it has become a discreet ornament ...of unusually flexible size, shape, and duration.” All true, but perhaps more needs to be said about Vaughan’s vibrato, which to my mind is not an “ornament,” no matter how discreetly it is used, but a resource that, for Vaughan, may be the most fundamental of all....

On

Great Songs From Hit Shows

she swings harder and more freely on the ballads than she does on all but one of the medium- to up-tempo tracks, where she is accompanied by a brass-and-reeds big band or a brass-and-reeds-plus-strings ensemble. In part that’s because most of the big-band tracks have a rather mechanical, neo-Lunceford feel to them. But the key reason the best ballad tracks here are so rhythmically compelling is that Vaughan’s sense of swing begins in her sound. That is, her shadings of vibrato, volume, and timbre are also rhythmic events (rhythm, after all, being a facet of vibration)--to the point where the degree of rhythmic activity

within

a given Vaughan note (especially at slowish tempos) can be as intense, and as precisely controlled, as that of any of her note-to-note rhythmic relationships. And one notices that so much here because, as the occasionally very sugary strings swirl around her and flutes are left hanging from the chandeliers, control of the rhythmic flow is left almost entirely in Vaughan’s hands.

Of course a taste for imperceptibly shading tone-color events into rhythmic ones is not unique to Vaughan; Debussy’s music, for one, is unthinkable without it, as is, for that matter, Johnny Hodges’s and Johnny Dodds’s. But Vaughan’s overtone-rich timbre, the way it and her vibrato interact, and the seemingly spontaneous control she has over every aspect of all this are unique. As Gunther Schuller put it, Vaughan doesn’t have one voice but voices, while her vibrato is a “compositional, structural...element.” Just listen to Vaughan in full flight--say, at the very beginning of “You’re My Everything.” In the six seconds and five notes that it takes her to sing the title phrase, cruising out on the booming lushness she gives to “thing,” it’s virtually impossible to sort out whether, at any point, it is rhythmic needs that are shaping Vaughan’s timbral colorations or vice versa--and that is as it should be. In fact, one way to describe Vaughan’s timbre cum vibrato, inside-the-note rhythmic shapes would be to say that she has drums in her voice--perhaps Elvin Jones’s.

[king ubu]

Cd liner notes that are totally different in different languages--the PolyGram group seems most guilty of this, at least back in the day. (Listening to John Eliot Gardiner's Missa Solemnis and Reinbert De Leeuw's Ustvolskaya prompted this). I wish my German and French were better than nonexsistent.

Do you mean different translations of the original note or different notes for each language?

Different in each language.

Yeah - it's particular frustrating when the German or French notes are much longer than the English and seem more detailed and interesting. And in the worst cases are when the notes in a language I don't speak have examples with musical notation, and the English notes don't.

Damn Tower of Babel!

I actually enjoy that a lot - being able to read French rather easily, in addition to German and English, and - if necessary - able to read some Spanish and also able to get the gist out of Italian notes, just going from my high school Latin and the other languages I'm more or less familiar with. Hence I find the opposite frustrating: why include three or even four or five versions of the same notes (in ofter lacklustre translations) at all? But then on the other hand, the new Glenn Could Edition (or is it Collection?) has notes in English only, but written by a German guy - that I find very silly (but in the end acceptable as it's clearly a cheapo series and other than some crappy minor layout gaffes, the presentation is very nicely done).

As for length: you'll often note considerable differences even if there's just one text in English, German and French. English a most economic language by comparison, a four page English text usually needs almost a page more in German and French (sometimes even more in French, I think, but differences aren't that big there, usually).

So a longer German text might only seem longer, if you look at it like that.

Not that it really matters, though.

As for my pets, I'm not sure what their likes and dislikes in classical music are, but they're surely not driven away if I play free jazz loudly.

[jeffcrom]

I actually enjoy that a lot - being able to read French rather easily, in addition to German and English, and - if necessary - able to read some Spanish and also able to get the gist out of Italian notes, just going from my high school Latin and the other languages I'm more or less familiar with. Hence I find the opposite frustrating: why include three or even four or five versions of the same notes (in ofter lacklustre translations) at all?

You Continental types are so smart! I'm the first to admit that being a native English speaker tends to make one lazy about learning other languages, since it seems as if everyone else in the world will adapt to you.

[king ubu]

Yes, that's a difference, of course!

But you know, I spent the week before last and will spend the next one on work in Luxembourg, and there I'm amazed at how many languages they talk. They learn French and German from the git-go in school, it seems, have their own (very weird) native language (which sounds to me like a wild mix of French, German and what I assume to be Dutch/Flemish), everybody of course speaks English, but many are also fluent in one or two more languages, it seems. Quite amazing even for continental Europeans!

But back on topic: what I often regret with those classical liners is that in many cases they only deal with the works (like what Mozart wrote to his father in his letters while he stood someplace during the time he composed or first performed said concerto), and don't contain any reference to the interpretation/recording in question. That's different, say, with the EMI ICON boxes since those focus on the performing artist and not on works, but with plenty of single discs, it's all about works and not a word about musicians and their approaches to same.

[Teasing the Korean]

My pet peeve is digital orchestral recordings with wildly exaggerated dynamic ranges. This rarely happened with LPs. I have a few CDs that I simply cannot listen to at any single level. The quiet passages either disappear into the room noise, or the loud passages shake the building.

[A Lark Ascending]

My pet peeve is digital orchestral recordings with wildly exaggerated dynamic ranges. This rarely happened with LPs. I have a few CDs that I simply cannot listen to at any single level. The quiet passages either disappear into the room noise, or the loud passages shake the building.

I'd agree there, though it doesn't happen as often as it once did. I don't care for recordings that sound like they've been made in an aircraft hanger - Chandos used to be guilty of this in the 80s.

****************

The pantomime of the classical performance. Dress, order of appearance on stage, complete lack of verbal communication.

I attended a couple of classical concerts this year where members of small ensembles just said a few words about the pieces they were playing. I found it really engaging - in both cases you got a real sense that the musicians really wanted to play this music and why.

I don't want a lecture but I'm there to enjoy myself, to be intrigued - too often it seems like I'm in the cathedral of great art and am required to adopt a suitably pious demeanour.

Edited November 23, 2012 by A Lark Ascending

[A Lark Ascending]

Downloads of opera recordings that don't include librettos.

If Chandos or Hyperion can just have a link on their website, why can't Decca?

I want to get a couple of the Entartete Musik series that are OOP as discs but there s downloads. But I need to know what is being sung.

A point in Decca's favour.

I bought a 2012 reissue of Schrecker's 'Die Gezeichneten' in London a couple of weeks back to find no libretto inside. However there was an online link - to my mind a perfectly sensible solution.

Had real problems getting it to open but Decca were really helpful. Turns out Chrome was the problem - opened without trouble in IE.

[johnlitweiler]

Lately vibrato has been driving me nuts, whether it's Sarah Vaughan or the Saturday afternoon opera on the radio.

Excerpt from something I wrote about Vaughan, though I wouldn't give her use of vibrato a blanket endorsement:

In the chapter [Martin] Williams devoted to Vaughan in his book

The Jazz Tradition

, he pointed out that it is on

Great Songs From Hit Shows

that “all her resources began to come together and a great artist emerged.” Those resources, he explained, included “an exceptional range (roughly of soprano through baritone), exceptional body, volume, a variety of vocal textures, and superb and highly personal vocal control.... When she first discovered her vibrato, she indulged it. But it has become a discreet ornament ...of unusually flexible size, shape, and duration.” All true, but perhaps more needs to be said about Vaughan’s vibrato, which to my mind is not an “ornament,” no matter how discreetly it is used, but a resource that, for Vaughan, may be the most fundamental of all....

On

Great Songs From Hit Shows

she swings harder and more freely on the ballads than she does on all but one of the medium- to up-tempo tracks, where she is accompanied by a brass-and-reeds big band or a brass-and-reeds-plus-strings ensemble. In part that’s because most of the big-band tracks have a rather mechanical, neo-Lunceford feel to them. But the key reason the best ballad tracks here are so rhythmically compelling is that Vaughan’s sense of swing begins in her sound. That is, her shadings of vibrato, volume, and timbre are also rhythmic events (rhythm, after all, being a facet of vibration)--to the point where the degree of rhythmic activity

within

a given Vaughan note (especially at slowish tempos) can be as intense, and as precisely controlled, as that of any of her note-to-note rhythmic relationships. And one notices that so much here because, as the occasionally very sugary strings swirl around her and flutes are left hanging from the chandeliers, control of the rhythmic flow is left almost entirely in Vaughan’s hands.

Of course a taste for imperceptibly shading tone-color events into rhythmic ones is not unique to Vaughan; Debussy’s music, for one, is unthinkable without it, as is, for that matter, Johnny Hodges’s and Johnny Dodds’s. But Vaughan’s overtone-rich timbre, the way it and her vibrato interact, and the seemingly spontaneous control she has over every aspect of all this are unique. As Gunther Schuller put it, Vaughan doesn’t have one voice but voices, while her vibrato is a “compositional, structural...element.” Just listen to Vaughan in full flight--say, at the very beginning of “You’re My Everything.” In the six seconds and five notes that it takes her to sing the title phrase, cruising out on the booming lushness she gives to “thing,” it’s virtually impossible to sort out whether, at any point, it is rhythmic needs that are shaping Vaughan’s timbral colorations or vice versa--and that is as it should be. In fact, one way to describe Vaughan’s timbre cum vibrato, inside-the-note rhythmic shapes would be to say that she has drums in her voice--perhaps Elvin Jones’s.

Hm. To take an artist I like far more than I like Vaughan - yes, J. Dodds's shadings of sound are at least as mobile as his rhythms - maybe the best example of his expressing changing feeling via sound color is Someday Sweetheart. But this looks like you're saying the very source of his rhythm in that one is not his choices of where to put notes, but his sound. And not his choices of registers and tones, or his attack, dynamics, and legato-staccato, but his vibrato. The width and speed of his vibrato certainly help communicate feeling, but how are they the source of his rhythm? Rather than simultaneous with his rhythm and the rest of music-producing in his communicating?

BTW I think Someday Sweetheart is at least as great as Perdido St. Blues and Hear Me Talking

[Teasing the Korean]

Lately vibrato has been driving me nuts, whether it's Sarah Vaughan or the Saturday afternoon opera on the radio.

I wrote the following in the "Opera" thread:

I like certain singers (Gigli, Bjorling), but have a hard time with full operas, largely because it's rare to see a production with consistently good singers.

Too many contemporary opera singers have amazingly out-of-control vibratos. They are so wide you can't tell what the target note is. When they try to sing a rapidly ascending or descending line, forget it. Then, go listen to an aria by Gigli and see how it's really done.

It boggles my mind that someone who could put that amount of work, time, discipline, and dedication to his/her craft doesn't have a good enough ear - let alone voice coach - to tell them that their vibrato sucks.

Yes, there are some great composers like Verdi and Puccini. However, until as long as the opera world continues to encourage or tolerate the current vogue of bad singing, I have no interest.