The 'O Holy Night' Smackdown

I have not written in this Web log forever. It is time to get it started again.

Last night Howard and I got listening to "O Holy Night." OK, I got listening to it and I foisted it on him. But Howard likes great tenors and that is who is on the Internet singing "O Holy Night."

Jussi Bjorling ... Like a steam engine.



Franco Corelli, I like the Italian twist he gives to it. Also how he can go forever on a single breath. Thrilling. He does not however sail up to that high note.



 Caruso could sing it standing on his head.



 You know what, Bjorling is this marvel, but I like how Caruso sings it. He has a sensual, laid-back quality that makes me see his appeal. You often do not get that from listening to old scratchy records.

And the second-to-last "Noel, Noel," he has the second answer the first. He has his own operatic concept of the song.

Sometimes it is a good idea to listen to some song you really know to get an idea of the artist.

Reluctantly we turn to living artists. Jonas Kauffmann is a latter-day tenor I love. Listen to how he ends the first verse. Also he takes the melody up at times when you would think he would be taking it down.

That is a powerful voice!



 And a friend loves Juan Diego Florez. I am rather partial toward him myself.



I still give the edge to my old hero, Jussi. That command that he had, I have yet to hear anyone top it. Still ...

Imagine having any of these gentlemen at your Lessons and Carols.

Swoon, swoon!

The Finnish line

Last night at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra I got to hear the pianist Juho Pohjonen playing the Grieg Piano Concerto. Look at me, I could type Juho Pohjonen without checking it. And I am pretty sure I am right.

Not only that but last night I could type Eliel and Eero Saarinen without checking it! They are the Finnish architects of Kleinhans Music Hall. You know you are a true Buffalonian when you can type Eliel and Eero Saarinen without checking it.

Juho Pohjonen is also Finnish. Here in Buffalo we are in the middle of a celebration of Finnish culture. I love the Finns, I must say that. You picture them up in the frozen North with their umlauts and their wild language. In Buffalo we had Outokumpu American Brass. I think that is how you spelled it. I remember asking my mother, What is "Outokumpu," is it Indian or something? And she said no, it was Finnish.

My mother always knew everything!

Anyway Mr. Pohjonen, pictured above, played the daylights out of the Grieg Concerto as I wrote in my review. What a wonderful concerto. Writing about Leonard Pennario I think about it a lot because Pennario learned it when he was 12, in a week, and performed it from memory with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. You go, Pennario!

One thing I loved about Juho Pohjonen's performance was that afterwards he played a piece by Grieg called "Bridal Procession." I love these salon pieces. I say bring back these salon pieces by Grieg, by Edward MacDowell, by other composers we do not hear as much now as people used to 100 years ago.

Here is Grieg himself playing "Bridal Procession." It is actually "Norwegian Bridal Procession."

Hit it, Edvard!

Terror in the organ loft

I wrote before about the "Ave Verum Corpus" Gregorian chant that comes up now and then at Mass. This is the Latin text that Mozart famously set to music. But today we sang it as the Gregorian Chant.

What a beautiful chant!

The only trouble was, as I noted before, the women have to sing that one phrase by ourselves. We are always understaffed on days when this happens, I do not know why. Today it was pretty much me and a group of teenage girls. Nobody else was there. We got through it.

O Jesu dulcis
O Jesu pie...

And then the guys come in with us. Whew!

There are just these couple of lines the ladies sing by ourselves and it is tremendously stressful. At the end of the "Ave, Verum Corpus"  I turned to the teenagers and we all smiled and gave each other thumbs up.

"Good job," I whispered. I added: "This always makes me nervous."

That is the truth!

It is one thing to listen to Gregorian chant. It is another thing to sing it in your everyday life. With an entire church listening, I should put that out there too. It is beautiful but frightening to be in the organ loft during a Tridentine Mass. At the start, I always love that moment, all of us standing there waiting, nobody breathing, waiting for the priest to start us all off.

Then sometimes during the mass there is a screw-up. We might do the wrong verse or something and everyone looks at each other afterwards, and there are grimaces and rolling of eyes.

How did we mess that up??

This was the kind of thing I worried about when I was invited to join the choir at church. I know what goes on in organ lofts.

It is not pretty!

Pope Francis speaks of Wagner opera

Alex Ross over at the New Yorker is working on a book about Wagner and his effect on culture, and he wrote something very cool about Pope Francis and his knowledge of Wagner opera.

Mr. Ross put a link on Twitter which, it is great when something good comes out of Twitter, you know?

He writes in his story that His Holiness especially liked the conductors Wilhelm Furtwangler and Hans Knappertsbusch. Fu and Kna -- remember?

"He mentions the Furtwängler La Scala Ring and the 1962 Knappertsbusch Parsifal as prized recordings. He is known to be a Furtwängler enthusiast; earlier this year, Angela Merkel presented him with a Furtwängler box set. But he also makes a broader point about intellectual rigidification and self-deception, using Wagner's works as points of reference: “When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.”

Pope Francis, talking about Parsifal in the palace of Klingsor! And he has favorite Wagner conductors!

This is Francis we are talking about, not my man Benedict XVI!

They are the same generation though. Gentlemen of that era knew about music and the finer things.

Read the whole column. It's not long, and it's free.

By the way I agree with Pope Francis: the church must recover genius.

Let's start by getting rid of all the folk guitars.

How Beethoven liked his coffee

My friend Steven who is a classical music nerd par excellence alertly snapped a picture of a cafe sign in Southern California. That is it above. The coffee shop is Peet's in Cotati. Calif.

Who knew that about Beethoven, that he measured his coffee beans? Not many people, I will tell you that right now. And many may call this information a hill of beans but I say fie. Fix that number in your mind, 60. Anyone who knows how to wake people up as creatively as Beethoven did surely knew a thing or two about caffeine.

Bravo, Peet's! Peet's is a California chain and I am not sure they are all as musical as this particular branch. But you can become a Peetnik on their Web site.

Steven also admired this sign at Peet's promoting the joy of saxophone duets. He is a former saxophone player! But that is another story for another day. Perhaps tomorrow.

After I have measured out my 60 beans. Tomorrow I am going to test Beethoven's formula.

I will report!

The Mozart and Coltrane effect

A while ago Google asked me if I was interested in Mozart and I replied yes. So now I get updates every day concerning Mozart.

Is this a wonderful world or what? I love technology.

Today's Mozart update comes from Britain and concerns Mozart, pictured above, and John Coltrane, pictured on this fine 1996 commemorative.

Their music, researchers think, can prevent epileptic seizures.

The Coltrane piece, his extended take on "My Favorite Things," is something I am intimately acquainted with. Years ago when I worked at the Niagara Gazette, I had a half-hour commute, and I had this piece in cassette. I used to stick it into the cassette player and it would pretty much take me to work. It would be ending right as I was pulling into Niagara Falls.

The obvious question in the research is, of course, does any intelligent music have this effect. They compared the Mozart and Coltrane only to silence. I would imagine that the idea is to engage your brain, to distract it from the seizures. I am only guessing but that seems to be what the research is driving at.

Or perhaps there is a kind of hypnotic effect. I mean that in a good way, not a sleepy way. There is something in the music that entrances you and carries you along. Mozart will do that.

Anyway, you may catch up on this groundbreaking research on Mozart and Coltrane here.

Hahaa.. Google just asked me: Are you still interested in Mozart?

Um, yes!

Haydn and nobility

Today at church we got to sing Haydn's "O Esca Viatorum." It must have something to do with this Mass this week although as usual I am too lame-brained to figure that out. I do know because of my other Web log that we sang it a couple of years ago in this same week.

"O Esca Viatorum" is listed in our Cantate Omnes choir book as "Traditional." I realized some time ago it was by Haydn. Singing it today got me remembering what tipped me off.

Well, I did not know at first it was by Haydn. But as we sang it, it kind of gives you a thrill, because the melody is so beautiful, so noble. Today it kind of gave me shivers the way it always does.

I remember thinking, there is something about the architecture of this piece, I would bet it is the work of a master. Beautiful as many traditional melodies are, this had a different cast. It is like identifying a painting. You look and say: ah, that has to be Rembrandt. Listening to "O Esca Viatorum," trying to sing it well, I thought, I would not be surprised if it were Mozart. But it was not quite Mozart. It was a little different.

Haydn! I did a search on YouTube and sure enough.

Haydn has that noble streak that Mozart, for all his greatness, does not quite have. It is a strange thing about Haydn, he knew Mozart was superior. He said so, with touching humility, toward the end of his life. But he did have this special something that was uniquely his. The St. Anthony Chorale that inspired Brahms' "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," that is that nobility. And of course the Kaiser hymn that became the German national anthem.

Here is "O Esca Viatorum," sung beautifully by a choir that, alas, is not ours.



Mozart does have a kind of similar nobility in a few pieces I could name and one of these days I will have to get to quoting them. But it is not quite the same.

Haydn.

Noble!