Music for a bad trip

During a little online research for a preconcert lecture Friday, I came across this article on Mozart and Haydn which concluded with the following paragraph:

Some years ago, I was discussing music with two friends, one of them a distinguished contemporary composer. We were chewing over the following peculiar question, peculiar especially since it concerned an experience none of us had had in approximately three decades: If you had taken LSD and suddenly realized your trip was heading seriously south, what music would you put on the stereo to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons? All three of us agreed without hesitation: a Haydn quartet. Almost any Haydn quartet.

Which got me to thinking, taking aside the LSD, what music do you turn to "to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons"? I'm not talking music to sooth or relax to, I'm talking about the stuff that fundamentally grounds you and gives you that deep and firm understanding of the rightness of living and your place in the world. For me, Bach Well Tempered Clavier puts molecules back in order when the universe is going astray. You?

The Art of Self-Destruction

Okay, so there's this dancer/performance artist in the UK who is planning to purposefully induce in herself an epilectic seizure in front of a paying audience. Not only that, the Arts Council of England has apparently endorsed this seemingly insane bit of art to the tune of £14,000. (If you happen to have been looking for a good shock-and-awe way of describing to a friend the difference between federal arts funding in Europe and America, you're welcome.)

Now, I don't know a whole lot about epilepsy beyond the fact that, back in seventh grade, my friend Joe Holland got hauled off to the principal's office, for bonking me over the head with a Life Sciences textbook, by a teacher who was claiming loudly that he'd probably just given me said condition. But I do have the general impression that it is one of those things that, once you Have It, you pretty much need to Medicate It. Forever. So this particular bit of performance art would seem to be ill-advised, no matter how many write-ups it gets you in advance of said performance.

Still, there are a lot of performers out there willing to put themselves at some degree of risk for the sake of art, or fame, or whatever. I can't say as I've personally ever been a part of such a show - I did once play a piece of music in which the composer strongly suggested that the conductor have a heart attack and die during the performance, though I'm fairly certain he was kidding - but I know that they're out there.

So my question to you is, what's the nuttiest/bravest/most self-destructive thing you've ever seen an artist, musician, or other performer do in the name of entertaining you? If anyone can top Epilepsy Girl, I'll be mightily impressed...

Beethovening

Yes, Sam and I are hours away from our first Inside the Classics show - we finished our second rehearsal this morning and now I'm home for a few hours of script touch-ups and last minute prep. As Sam said, we've been too busy to even talk about the show this time 'round! I promise I'll have some thoughts for you next week.

In the meantime, I couldn't let this bit of arts news go, because I can't think of a stranger combination (Lady Gaga and the Bohsoi? Really??). Can anyone out there think of a stranger mash-up???

"Get your hands off of my country"...

...says Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, causing great commotion in Disney Hall.

Art and politics are uneasy, if constant, bedfellows. I for one don't begrudge the opportunity (quite literally, a stage!) to air one's views (as do others); I only wonder why Zimerman chose this point in time and not, say, sometime in the past 8 years.

Putting aside whether you agree or not with his politics, what do you make of the fact that the statement was made in a concert venue (keeping in mind that he said his piece right before launching into the final work of the program, fellow countryman Karol Szymanowski’s “Variations on a Polish Folk Theme")?

A little nit-picking

I'm headed to Philadelphia for rehearsals and a concert with 20/21, the Curtis Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program next Friday includes a trio of pieces by Messiaen, one of which is "Oiseaux Exotique", which captures Messiaen at his most birdsong-obsessed. It's a trippy soundscape of timbres and rhythms, citing the calls of over 40 species of birds, and is one of the more rhythmically complicated pieces I know. It's hard for the ear to catch any single thing that's happening because it's so densely orchestrated, with individual instruments most often playing discrete parts.

The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.

Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?

Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?

Backtracking...

...to the season opener concerts here with the Minnesota Orchestra from last week. Fresh off of a fairly recent blog discussion of applause between movements (scroll down to the comments), what did we get during the Friday evening performance of Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez but...applause between movements. Anyone out there attend this particular show who'd be willing to weigh in? I'm always curious.