Thomasina’s last waltz

The Six Stages of a Nickname

This year my orchestra is playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K467. The concerto has a nickname but it’s not Mozart’s, and it rankles a lot of musical people who’d like to see it disappear. (The nickname not the concerto.)

I was reminded of this today, and so I offer you the Six Stages of a Nickname

1. Non-Name
Ein klavier konzert

2. Appropriation
Keep in mind that it wasn’t some obscure, languishing work that film-maker Bo Widerberg adopted for his soundtrack in 1967.

3. Nickname
At first, when the film is current, smart concert and record marketers tack on the name as a label for the concerto. As is generally well-known, any abstract work with a nickname (authentic or not) has an easier path to audience affections and recognition. This is proven yet again.

4. Shifting Fashion
The source film dates and makes its way to a dusty “Classics” shelf at the video shop. The nick-named concerto remains a concert staple, partly because of its inherent strengths (it was always going to be popular in the repertoire), partly because of the residual audience familiarity built up and then exploited via use of the nickname.

5. Role Reversal, or Perhaps Perplexity

(a) The situation reverses: instead of audiences hearing the music in the film and seeking it out in concerts and recordings, they instead encounter the nickname via the music and read its explanation in program and liner notes. They just might at some point, out of curiosity, rent the movie. (I did. Eventually.) The nicknamed concerto has, quite incidentally, become a promotion for an old film.

(b) Then, with the further passage of time (sooner in some parts of the world than others), it transpires that very few know the origin of the nickname at all. Perhaps – and why not! – they assume the nickname refers to a dedicatee, like Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets.

6. Rejection
Increasingly – and this is surely a sign of the times – the nickname is being rejected. In the 1980s we were urged to grin and bear it (the nickname is very handy and it’s here to stay). Thirty years later concert promoters and record labels are less and less likely to list the nickname in any way that grants it legitimacy. My orchestra, for example, no longer includes the nickname as part of the concerto’s title in its repertoire index or publicity listings. On the other hand, we’d be nuts to deny a famous label to which a good portion of the concert audience still responds. So the nickname is mentioned in passing in the brochure copy, and will certainly warrant a fleeting reference somewhere in the program notes.

My thoughts: first, nicknames are mighty useful and, whether we like it or not, they have a demonstrable effect on the reception of the music. Mozart’s contemporaries knew that, and there are plenty of 18th-century works that were given nicknames by the public or by canny publishers. Second, there’s no shortage of nicknames whose origins are irrelevant or uncertain or forgotten – ‘La passione’, for example – but we still use them. On those grounds, maybe we’re too harsh on this legacy from the 1960s. All the same, I’d like to see it fade away.

By the way, our soloist this year hasn’t seen Elvira Madigan. He’s not sure he really wants to!

Coco & Igor

The risk you run when making a movie about important musicians from history is that the pedants will be out in force. Salieri didn’t really plan to poison Mozart or make masked visitations, for example. There are really only two solutions. One is to make a truly great movie (which is why no sane person cares whether Amadeus is ‘historical’ or not). The other is to bore the pants off the pedants.

This is the solution adopted by the creators of Coco & Igor.

In theory, I should have liked this film a great deal: I’m interested in fashion history, I’m a Chanel No.5 girl, I adore Stravinsky’s music, and anything involving a substantial re-enactment of the premiere of The Rite of Spring must surely be a winner. But it left me unmoved, and by the second half I was stifling yawns continuously. Because – and there is really no getting ’round it – Coco & Igor is not a good movie.

First, an incident that might warrant a sentence in a book or a few minutes in a bio-documentary has been expanded beyond its means to fill two hours. This fleeting relationship is not a two-hour story. In fact, as a fellow sufferer kept pointing out to me, Stravinsky’s relationship with Vera Sudeikina (which followed hot on the heels of the fling with Chanel) and their eventual marriage is far more significant and interesting.

Vera is also reported to have been more beautiful than the real Coco. You wouldn’t know this, of course, because the film casts in the role of Coco a beautiful and willowy actress-model (and representative of the House of Chanel, incidentally). She does justice to the gorgeous clothes, but not so much to the script, which is minimalist, or to the emotions, which smoulder with the uniform stoniness of the modern catwalk. She is extraordinarily tall. Perhaps this is why her Igor must be a foot or so taller than he was in real life. They both look rather good in the nude. Repeatedly.

I give brownie points for the extended opening sequence showing the premiere of The Rite of Spring. (And for what sounded like a French bassoon.) The BBC documentary, Riot at the Rite, captured the ballet better and more completely, but it was spoilt a little by its English-accented audience shouting things like ‘utter twaddle’. At least the heckling in Coco & Igor is in French.

And Gabriel Yared doesn’t do too badly in creating a complementary soundtrack in a Stravinskian vein.

Someone has done some research, working into the plot Chanel’s financing of the December 1920 revival of The Rite… (to the tune of Fr.300,000), which used Roerich’s original costumes and decor but with revised choreography by Massine. But it’s probably best not to look too closely at the timeline in relation to the affair (winter 1920/21). Nor worry that Chanel’s foray into Ballets Russes costume design was later, for Cocteau’s Le Train Bleu (1924), or that Ernest Ansermet conducted the revival, not Stravinsky. Ah, picky details!

Someone – possibly the same someone – seems to think that Stravinsky practically recomposed The Rite of Spring for the revival. (Not so. Some very minor revisions were made, but after the score was published in 1921.) Even more amusing is the fond belief that composers spend their time playing over music that they composed six or seven years ago.

I can’t deny that it was all very beautiful: the aloof decor of Chanel’s villa, the period clothing eye candy. But I was left questioning the motivation behind this movie. For example, the conclusion involves a completely unnecessary ‘flash forward’, with a doddery Stravinsky yet again picking out that bassoon solo on the piano and a very elderly Coco wearing an iconic Chanel suit. I can’t help thinking that this sequence is there primarily to get on screen an example of a post-1920s Chanel design (the Chanel design), which otherwise couldn’t have been featured. The ‘aimable’ collaboration with the House of Chanel acknowledged in the credits seems to have dipped in the direction of a branding exercise.

Meanwhile, there is no genuine drama or convincing storytelling to compensate for the infelicities or the tedium. It’s not sufficient just to be good looking. I call it utter twaddle.

Before and after: the dance makeover

Imagine saying to Fred Astaire “No one could teach you to dance in a million years”?!

But it was true – it took rather less time than that:

Thank you to the new President of the United States for reminding me about Swing Time!

If you had to choose

A meme courtesy of composer Daniel Wolf, via the world-changing blog. In the ancient tradition of memes, I make my own variations and spell Handel’s name auf Englisch, the way he would have liked it.

1. Bach or Handel?

2. Haydn or Mozart?

3. Beethoven or Rossini?

4. Strauss or Richard?

5. Puccini or Verdi?

6. Debussy or Ravel? 

7. Mahler or Strauss?

8. Schoenberg or Stravinsky? 

9. Prokofiev or Shostakovich?

10. Porter or Sondheim?

Bonus round:

1. Astaire or Kelly?

2. Eliot or Yeats?

3. Joyce or Mann?

4. Hitchcock or Welles?

5. Duchamp or Picasso?

6. Futura or Gill Sans?

7. Ballet or Opera?

Intermission

Much as I like the idea of someone making a big, old-fashioned movie (preferably the kind that comes up with an “INTERMISSION” slide halfway through, like Gone With the Wind), Baz Luhrmann’s Australia hasn’t really caught my imagination.

This, however, gave me no end of amusement:

It’s the doing of Tourism Tasmania and you can also see the trailer (less witty) on the youtubes.

I hope this campaign will work; I like it that much. Not that Tasmania has much of a hard sell to do when it comes to tourism. There’s a reason why it’s universally acknowledged the most desirable holiday destination on the planet. 

I don’t know who was behind this clever and shamelessly opportunistic campaign, but I would like to see the TSO hire them immediately to promote their next Sydney tour. Can you see it?

Seven multiplied…

Prima la musica has extended a voluntary tag to the Seven Things About Me meme, the rules of which are noted at Score Desk. As I understand it, the facts are intended to be a combination of the random and the weird.

1. Childhood ambitions and their inspirations: pirate (Treasure Island), submarine captain (Navy open day), pilot (too many Biggles books).

2. Irises. Always. Nothing but.

3. Recorder, viola, harpsichord – instruments on which I never had lessons but which I somehow found myself playing. Viola was the first instrument that I played on the stage of the Sydney Opera House.

4. Musical theatre. My first musical love. There was a time when I could sing all the songs from just about any musical you cared to name. There are still times when I’d rather hear Sondheim than Mahler. [I’ll drink to that.]

5. Fifteen. The number of years I collected and devoured concert and theatre programs before realising that someone must be paid to write and edit these things. And normally I’m so quick off the mark…

6. My handwriting? I taught myself as a kid. From a little book Dad owned called Good Handwriting and How to Acquire It (1954). I share with Winsome Evans the view that it is simple courtesy to write in an æsthetically pleasing hand, and with the Chinese and Japanese the idea that calligraphy is an essential item in the scholar's toolbox. Oh, and I'm a typography nerd.

7. I think the most exquisite sound in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum. Clearly Peter Greenaway thinks it’s pretty special too:

Update: the above YouTube clip is no longer available, but the beginning of this one will do.

I join the cowards of the world by also suggesting that, if the whim takes you, you may consider yourself tagged. Don't have a blog? Make a facebook Note instead.

But that's what conductors do

The other night I watched As It Is in Heaven, the Swedish movie that's been running for something like two years at the Cremorne Orpheum.

In one scene an uptight, repressed and very likely jealous chorister, Siv, is moved to "report" the village cantor (famous conductor Daniel Daréus) to her pastor. She can't quite put her finger on it, but…

"It's as if he's using us for his own purposes."

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage

Indiana Jones is getting careless in his old age. He plunges his arm into crevices, yanks at random levers and strides across chambers which in the Lost Ark he would have first investigated carefully for booby traps. At the same time his instincts are as strong as ever ("I have a bad feeling about this") and his ophidiophobia continues unabated. But perhaps he can afford to be careless, since it's clearly the end for Dr Henry Jones II: he's been exposed to a serious amount of radiation, fridge or no fridge, and, as a friend cynically observed, he is now married.

It's a shame really – he's given a tremendous amount of pleasure over the years, especially in the two movies that saw him go in search of Judæo-Christian artefacts. Perhaps this is mere coincidence, but Temple of Doom (mystical stones and "Hindu" sacrifices) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (magnetic crystal and alien-inspired religion) are by comparison tricked-up and a bit silly, and as pure adventures the least rewarding of the four movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade had their share of supernatural (divine) phenomena  – including the awful consequences of looking on the face of God – but to watch the conclusion of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and see a shiny inter-spatial vessel arise from "El Dorado" and disappear into the sunset was simply unsatisfying. Worse, you could see this pseudo-scientific Gainax Ending coming the minute we were told early on about natives binding children's heads to give them elongated skulls – just like their gods. In the end I was left feeling as if this last Indiana Jones movie had turned out as a cross between The Mummy and Tommyknockers. If I were Indy I'd say, "Aliens. Why'd it have to be aliens?"

The archeology has always been a bit slapdash, not that this has necessarily bothered the archeologists, who have a healthy grasp on fiction and reality. All the same, the carelessness is clearly emerging on that front too. Would Lost-Ark Indy really have hacked into burial wrappings like that?

Still, I shouldn't whinge: it was fun, it had its thrilling moments, the baddies got their just deserts, Cate was in it, there was fencing, and at its most implausible it was still deliciously tongue-in-cheek. Finally, as Matthew of Soho the Dog has pointed out in more detail, there is – as with Mozart – great delight to be had simply from observing the supreme craft with which the formula is realised.