hodge podge

First things first. I've been thinking a lot about getting a bicycle. In fact, I did get one, for about $100. It was with me for a couple months and then was stolen. Also because I locked it up a bit improperly, but it wasn't exactly a bike that I was going to be able to ride around everywhere, nor did it fit the rather specific things I needed my bike to be able to do: be portable, work well in commuter traffice, yet still be able to handle longer tours and bike trips.

Thought about it and it laid dormant. I had been eyeing Bromptons a good deal, but the $$ pricetag on them really stopped me from pulling the build-it-yourself trigger at NYCE Wheels Build Your Own website. This weekend, I went with F to trade in his beat-up Zenetik on-loan from Mt. Airy Bikes for another one the owner said he should try. A folded up Brompton caught my eye and I took it for a spin.

It felt great! The gear selection was such that I really could get quite a bit of power into the wheels and go for a zoom zoom. I'm going to see if I can loan one from them a bit -- or even see if they can give me a better deal than the a la carte one I've built that runs about $1300 at the moment.

Check out its folding action though:


Next, to return to a thought about a previous post on which features make voices really great in baroque/early music, I had a discussion with a friend, and I think it really is all about freedom. There are many pieces of romantic singing (many of them operatic) that can handle what sounds like strain in the vocal production -- Ortrud's Oath, for instance. I have to admit that I kind of like hearing the singer battle the orchestra as she invokes Wotan and Freia -- to hear Varnay flatten her backup band without any sign of strain whatsoever is thrilling in a completely different way.

Christa Ludwig


Astrid Varnay


Even comparing Christa Ludwig's Invocation with Varnay shows a remarkable difference. One is aware of how hard Ludwig is working, and how easily she could clamp down and tense more than she is (which is not very much). It's a clearly comparison with Waltraud Meier. I'll see if I can upload something.

Early music is almost completely unlike this in affect. Virtually at no time should the audience hear how hard you are working. They'll know anyway -- some of this shit is incredibly nutty. (Whatever Vivica Genaux sings would apply).

Alright, so fine -- freedom of the voice is paramount in this music. Meaning that a voice can freely and without inhibition achieve its expressive goals without feeling or sounding like it is hitching or working around technical obstacles, although this just is the very fact of life.

But what sort of standard to you apply in describing a free voice? It's so easy to fall on bizarre little tropes in music criticism when a writer isn't even trying to describe something technically -- the buzzwords range from strapping singers to well-oiled wooden voices (singers?).

It's bizarre, but I recently started to think about singing quality using textile immagery. Was I going for a velvet-feeling sound or a gauzy one? Taking it further, thinking about the vastly different kinds of yarn really did it for me. Someone who loves to knit (like my friend Knitting Pretty in DC might not like mohair, but could see that (I don't know the terms, exactly) that the thread is nice and consistent. The dye holds well, and color shifts are natural and pleasing rather than arbitrary and jarring.

It really pulled into focus how I think about voices and how free they are -- even with tones and colors that I myself do not appreciate.

Finally -- I still can't find a Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo that I like. The piano ones play the Arioso in such a way that it's either too fast (it is Adagio) or sounds a bit too sentimental. I like the Tureck, but it's somewhat sentimental for me. I think that I like it best on harpsichord, which allows the performer to go even slower (this is almost toooooo slow) without the sentimentality that inevitably creeps in on a piano.

All of which means that I'm going to have to learn it myself and possibly play it on a recital, which I would really like to be crazy vaudevillian more than yucky and staid.

piano piano piano

It seems common wisdom that meeting and/or getting to know an idol (in any sense of the word) is always somewhat disillusioning. One's performative self is rarely the same when meeting with individuals rather than in mediums where interactivity is more one-sided (e.g., the viewer and the viewed). The crazy thing is with an additional performative layer of more "visible" performance, like that of television/movie/stage acting or any sort of performing thereof, meeting someone in a different performative "level" can be somewhat jarring.

An ex-boyfriend (ex-friend? ex-thing?) once told me about "falling-out-of-love" with Lara Flynn Boyle (don't ask) after watching her on a talk show. I mean, it's not like that LFB is any more "authentic" than any other, even when playing her hard-nosed evil-looking (EEEE!) character on The Practice, so I'm not all sure what it means -- aside from the fact that nothing on this green earth could prepare him for LFB on Letterman (or whichever show it was that he saw). Big turn-off he said (and not necessarily of the hubba hubba variety).

It can work the other way though, too. When I was younger, my piano teacher gave me the Christmas gift of a CD of Mitsuko Uchida playing Schumann's Carnivale and Kreisleriana. I can't say that it knocked my socks off (that waited until I heard her recording of one of Mozart's piano sonatas that I was working on at the time. A-flat? I really don't recall, and I don't know any body of sonata's so well to be able to call out more specific identifiers beyond thematic fragments), but one thing that did strike me was the statuesque and "removed aesthete" quality of her photo presentation. Reading an old interview (must have been in the 90's) published in BBC Music Magazine did little to alleviate this impression (here's a more recent interview I dug up which shows a quite different quality of persona than I had originally gleaned).

Seeing (and hearing her) in action was a startling, and positive, change! RealPlayer interview (I think at her home in London) and youtube of Uchida playing (and conducting from the piano) Mozart's Piano Concerto No.20 K.466




What's also interesting is Uchida's involvement with the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and a related semi-interview. I had stumbled across all this (and the preceding re-evaluation of Uchida's personality) because of my interest in the Peabody Conservatory. When I was living in a hole-in-the-wall and trying to scrape together pennies for a rainy day (and for voice lessons), I had decided that I needed a more constant vocal instruction than what I had been able to afford at that time (2 a month -- totally not enough, in my experience, for someone trying to piece together a working technical understanding of singing), and so a conservatory or at least school-like regimen seemed to be a good solution. Of course, Peabody was certainly on the handful of schools that I knew simply based on reputation alone (aside from a story (and related tales) told to me by my hilarious hilarious friend Marina), but upon investigation, it sounded like a wonderful fit. Of primary persuasiveness was the profile of Hyunah Yu, an alumna of virtually all the programs at Peabody (you'll have to access the profile directly at the Peabody website as I still have to figure out how to embed it here.

Anyhow, as a winner of a BBTrust award, there are quite a few sound samples on the BBTrust site, here in a playlist for enjoyment, including 3 selections from a soon-to-be-released solo recital CD from EMI. I'm not entirely sure what I think about those three selections, but there is plenty to love from the previous sound clips posted at the BBTrust (and you can hear what sounds as a beautiful, radiant account of Obradors' chestnut "Del cabello mas sutil" as background to Yu's profile at Peabody).

First three tracks from the forthcoming recital disc:

P.S. Also for fun comparison, below is Martha Argerich playing the same Mozart Piano Concerto: