The Big List of Classical Music Blogs

Image from www.danfisher.org  used without permission

From Toronto, Colin Eatock launched a new site today called The Big List of Classical Music Blogs. There are over three hundred URLs listed and the site is nicely broken into sections: Composers, Performers, Presenters, Biz, Newspaper Critics, Scholars and Independent Views. I scanned the list and found many blogs I already knew of, but also saw many that are new to me. So if you get tired of what's appearing in your RSS feed or are looking for some new sources on the subject of Classical music, take a look at Eatock's big list.

Offensive? Misogynist? Moi?

Searching on Google to determine where certain feeds to this blog were coming from, I came across a blog called Music and Politics which has a post on it called "Fat Ladies need not apply." The author, who is taking a class on the blog's name, has written a post based on one of mine, "Did the fat lady sing?."

This is kind of weird. It's also amusing because the author goes to some length to make me look like a misogynistic ass by cherry-picking some of what I wrote. I feel shamefully abused.

Below is from her post:

An interesting post on a personal blog, A Beast in a Jungle, entitled “Did the fat lady sing?” credits Voigt’s firing scandal with what he perceives as a permanent shift in opera casting. As he says, “Deborah Voigt killed the fat lady. In all but a few roles, its over for them as far as opera is concerned.” To prove his point, he posts the pictures of the leading sopranos of the San Francisco Opera’s season. He calls them, “six reasons to applaud Operavision in the balconies, or justification to buy really good seats.” He introduces them as “the hotties.”

Despite the misogynist tendencies of his posting, “John Marcher” (he acknowledges that this is a pseudonym) has some valid points. If you sift through the offensive stuff I can see his point that “Mimis, Carmens, and Violettas are much more convincing when they don’t look like the well-fed wives of the King.” At the core of his argument is this statement:

“Opera is a combination of music and drama—it doesn’t work without both and when the people onstage look and sound the part (and can act as well as sing” it is only then that the true power of the Western world’s most potent art form fully comes to life.”

This is easily the least offensive statement Marcher makes and it is one I can acknowledge the practicality of. As opera seeks to become relevant to a culture full of movie stars and sexy pop idols, producers need to utilize every tool at their disposal. Actors and actresses that look the part of their tempting characters render more believable drama and add sexual appeal to the visual fantasticism that is typical of many operas, drawing audiences.

Ms. Voigt, in fact, also agrees. A New York Times article on her stresses that, despite the controversy, “Voigt defends the right of opera companies to take appearance into account when they are casting productions” though she “insists that vocal artistry should come first.”

Hmm... where shall I start?

The author takes offence at my using the word "hotties." Okay so perhaps the class is being taught at some politically correct school where they don't have a sense of humor about such things? I don't know, but I did include the 50 year-old Karita Mattila as one of the hotties, and she is, so what's the problem baby?

Incredulously, she then created a separate post using all of the pictures I posted (except she didn't call them "hotties"- entitled "The six leading sopranos for the San Francisco Opera’s 2010 season." The nerve of you, young lady!

Honestly, what bothers me most is that the writer essentially acknowledges everything I opined about is true and seems to be calling me out only because I focused on only the female singers. Darling, that was the point of the post! And you seem to agree with me, so why are you being so unkind by labeling me so?

Sweetie, had you delved a little deeper, perhaps you would have found out what I thought about overweight male singers- like Johan Botha, for example, who strains credibility onstage because of his size, and how the experience is improved when performed by someone who looks, as well as sounds, convincing in the role- regardless of being male or female.

I don't know if the author of Music and Politics will ever see my little rebuttal, but my dear, the comments section and my email are wide open for you (she has neither available on her blog).

A Beast in a Jungle's 1st Anniversary- thank you!

This is the 300th post on A Beast in a Jungle and what a nice number to mark its one year anniversary under this name and this URL.

First of all, thank you so much to the people who've found this blog and keep reading it. I appreciate it and it's been a source of great pleasure for me to write.

A few of you know this blog was originally called "The Ambassador Roams High and Low"and had a different URL. After changing it (not by choice), I lost most of the readers I'd slowly built up over eight months The Ambassador was up. After A Beast's first month the visitor stats registered only 40% of what it had been for the last couple of months of the Ambassador. I suspect that traffic was driven largely through the kindness of other bloggers who agreed to update the links from the old blog to the new.

What a difference a year makes. The number of visits to this blog last month were greater than the entire visit count for the Ambassador's entire eight months. Lately I've been watching the visitor count grow every month and every month I think it will go back down but there hasn't been a dip since March and this month seems to be on track to eclipse the last, much to my surprise.

Again my thanks to the readers, the other blogs who have linked to this one and the cast of characters: The Minister's Rebellious Daughter, Chad Newsome, Maria Gostrey, both Swedes, GG, CC, General Chang, Penelope, the Greek, the Femme Fatale, Dr. Hank, Maggie the Cat, Madame Merle, Herr Feldheim, Patrick, the Opera Tattler and of course, the Little Chinese Man.

The Upcoming link and a disclosure

A year ago, after learning a stalker had moved into my building and being attacked by a couple of drunks whom I had to make a citizen's arrest on, I changed the name and url of this blog and removed all pictures of my friends, of me and any references to my real identity. I also made it a habit of not posting about where I was going to be ahead of time so those people wouldn't be able to find me easily. However, it's been a year, and the violent drunks have probably forgotten about me and been arrested a few times since then (one of them had outstanding warrants in three states for same kind of thing) and I'm not even sure if the stalker still lives here- I never ask about her and a court action made her extremely unlikely to  initiate any contact with me.

While I still keep my identity apart from A Beast to the extent I can and don't post pictures of myself or friends, I felt it was time to loosen up a bit and post a calendar of what I'm going to attend over the next few weeks and it appears under the title picture. Click on it and you'll see where I'm planning to be. Clicking on the links of the individual shows will take you to the most reasonable and informative page about it I could find at the time. I hope it will help promote these performances and at the same time help me to keep the next couple of months straight, since they're going to be busy. Fun, but busy

See you there?

The Top Ten and a sad state of affairs

Tim Mangan, a classical music critic for the Orange County Register, has been assigned to cover a new beat- celebrities. That's a damn shame because there's already so much of that kind of content in papers, magazines and online, while art music coverage is moving more and more to blogs. Newspaper critics who write about the arts provide value to a community. I obviously don't think they should be the only voices heard when discussing or reviewing a performance, but I do think it's important for a community to have a "voice" in print providing consistent coverage of the arts scene and local companies. Bloggers often can't rely on the pr departments of organizations for free tickets, so we often end up writing about things we really want to see or hear and besides, almost all of us have day jobs which can interrupt the length and  frequency of what we write about, not to mention the quality.

His re-assignment to fluff material is dismaying, but it seems we Americans have a never-ending appetite for junk news that doesn't really change or impact our own lives in anyway. We also like movies and pop art much more than we do things that may require a little bit more effort or knowledge to appreciate. This is true of this blog as well- posts on non-classical or opera performances or topics often have a much greater hit count than those subjects which compelled me to start blogging in the first place.

Below are the top ten posts which have drawn the most traffic to this site. Most of them are not about performances, which makes sense because performances capture a particular moment and aren't something you can get on Netflix, at a store, or the next tour. Interest in them has a brief and fleeting shelf life except for obsessives like me who love to read old reviews of works or performers I may not have yet experienced in person.

A Serbian Film is a Horrific Masterpiece (far and away the most read post, especially since it's only been on about 6 weeks)

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Corrected

KISS, Rock and Roll Madeleines All Night

Carie Delmar Punks the Huffington Post

James Brown Lives, but Record Stores are the Living Dead

Review of the Lepage "Damnation of Faust" at the Met

The T.A.M.I Show!

What Happened to the Ghost Writer's Mole?

Gaspar Noe's "Enter the Void"

tied:

Merola Grand Finale 2009

Nostalgia Trip

As you can see, for an opera and classical music oriented blog (usually), those subjects are covered in only three of the eleven posts listed above. Still, you won't be reading about Tiger, LiLo or a Kardashian here any time soon. I am however, really looking forward to upcoming concerts by Shakira and Lady Gaga when they make their way to the Bay Area. You'll be able to read all about it right here.

November Rain

Actually there is no rain- it's an incredibly warm and clear evening in San Francisco as I write this but the Guns 'n' Roses song seemed like the most apt title for the post. It's the kind of night which reminds me of summers long past spent in the San Fernando Valley when I was a teenager. There's a full Harvest Moon in the sky and after having dinner at the Ferry Building with my mother, watching the moon rise over the Bay Bridge, things seem hopeful and yet nostalgic at the same time.

There's no real point to this post other than that I wanted to note there may not be much on this blog for the next couple of weeks and then there's going to be so much to write about I wonder how I'll actually get it all done.

Friday I'm going to the San Francisco Symphony for an all-Rachmaninoff program conducted by Simon Bychkov featuring the Second Symphony and The Bells. Talk about romantic overload, but I think this concert is going to be one of the highlights of the SFS's season. I'm going to ask a fellow blogger to accompany me because the romance will just have to wait another week, when MG and I go to New York. It will be the first time I've gone back since I went to see Cristo's Gates. I've really missed these annual trips and I'm pleased to have resurrected this tradition of seeing at least a couple of things a year at the Met.

We're going to see the LePage production of La Damnation of Faust with Borodina and her hubby, conducted by Conlon. I was actually a bit dismayed to see Idlar was part of the cast because in my one encounter with both of them, SFO's terrible production L'Italiana a few years back, I walked away thinking if he hadn't been in it Olga would have been as great in the role as she was when I saw her perform it at the Met some seven or so years ago. That's probably wrong and ridiculous, but once you formulate a prejudice they can be unreasonable things to let go of. Still I think it will be worthwhile and it will be MG's first Met experience, which I'm pleased to partake in.

The next night we are going to see what is likely to be the buzz production for the entire year. Almost every opera geek I know on the West Coast is making a trip all the way to the Met in November or December primarily to see Janacek's 100-minute opera From the House of the Dead. The highly-acclaimed Chereau production, originally done at the Aix-en-Provence festival and conducted by Salonen in his Met debut, is available on DVD but I haven't watched it. Instead I've been listening to the Mackerras recording to prepare for it. It sounds like The Cunning Little Vixen, but inverted, with that score's joy and naturalism replaced by equal amounts of despair and human frailty. It's mesmerizing and I have high hopes surrounding it. Kudos to Peter Gelb for bringing something special like this to the States that at one time would have made sense for SFO to stage but we no longer have that kind of opera company in this City.

Then MG and I are going Broadway-bound to see the Bill T. Jones directed Fela! about the life and music of the only musician who can be said to be an equal to James Brown: Nigeria's father of Afrofunk, Fela Kuti. We're seeing a preview because of the timing, but this too promises to be an evening of solid grooves and amazing dancing.

Friday we return home and the following night we are off to see Johan Botha in Verdi's Otello, conducted by Luisotti. If this production is any good (and there really is no possible way it can be worse than the last Otello to grace the War Memorial stage, which was Pamela Rosenberg's only admitted artistic regret), then I'm afraid I'll have to admit Mr. Gockley's plans for this season have been a resounding success despite my initial deep skepticism and ridicule. That's going to be a very untasty bit of crow to eat, but the play's the thing, and so far the Gock has had a winning fall season way beyond anyone's (except perhaps his own) expectations.

Sunday night is the other big event besides the Janacek opera: KISS's Alive! 35 tour rolls into the Oakland Arena. I was at the first Alive! tour when it hit LA in 1976 (yes, I know the math is off) and was present for the recording of Kiss Alive II at the LA Forum a couple of years later. That was my first concert and if you can't understand how someone goes from being a teenage KISS fan to an opera geek, well, my goal is to make you "get it" by the time it finally rains in November.

Madeleines

Sometimes I try (and inevitably fail) to gain some kind of perspective on my own life through the medium of writing this blog. What transpires as a result of it (meeting Mademoiselle MG, an invitation to the SF Symphony Gala, angry phone calls from my mother, nasty emails from performers, etc.), what I really want it to be, etc., are things which interest me. Last night I came across a blog called Echovar which made me realize this one still has quite a way to go before it's truly what I want it to be. "Echovar is Cliff Gerrish’s blog on the Internet, economies, language, philosophy and the arts" and it's Gerrish's ability to traverse these topics with such fluid ease that I admire. I also like the clean look of the blog, so much so that I'm thinking of moving this one to WordPress. On the other hand, the chief editor of the very cool and diverse Spinning Patters, whom I didn't know I was speaking with at the Paulina Rubio show, had some very kind words to say about the A Beast in a Jungle the way it is now, which I truly appreciated.

There is a certain schizophrenic quality to this blog, not by design, but due to my own personal tastes and peccadilloes. Yeah, I like Paulina, Nelly Furtado and Latin Pop almost as much as I like Wagner and Beethoven, and part of the intent of this blog is to explicate how these aren't incompatible appreciations. It's all entertainment, art, a visceral response to the work of another human being- whatever you want to call it or how you label it is beside the point. Art doesn't exist in neat silos. We choose to place art into silos so we can better understand it or more easily make it part of our identity by associating ourselves with certain genres or representations- in doing so the art's identity or reputation is meant to reflect favorably upon our own. I reject this idea, though I understand it.

My teenage years were spent in the San Fernando Valley of the 1970's. The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, though based on a Pacific Palisades school, is an accurate representation of how and where I grew up. The influence of this area, at that time, has reverberated throughout American culture more than I can possibly explain, but if you were there and lived it then you know what I mean.

I vividly remember the first time I danced to Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and what a liberating experience it was to feel that immesne Giorgio Moroder beat pulsating  through my body and hear Donna's orgasmic sighs as I danced with a girl named Veronica at the Teen Center on Victory Blvd.  The mantra at the time was "disco sucks," but how could that be true when nothing sounded so sublime and nothing sounded better than the Trammp's "Disco Inferno" pumping through my friend Stan's Chevy Nova's AM radio at full gloriously distorted blast- except perhaps for the sound of Ozzy's hacking cough and Tony Iommi's monster riffs that lead off Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf," played at maximim volume as you took a huge hit from the bong at a party with your friends?


Many years later, when Veronica showed up at an amateur stripping contest in North Hollywood, where I was the emcee/dj, she asked me to play a certain Patti Smith song ("Because the Night") that was popular during the summer we spent together as she performed her routine. It was a Proustian moment unlike any other I've ever had. Fifteen years after that summer, I was reliving it all over again.
 
Why am I going on about this? Well, because I know there are few blogs where you'll find "Proustian" and "amateur stripping contest" in the same sentence. And that's pretty much the purpose behind the Beast.

In the next few weeks readers may see a lot of posts about KISS on this blog. The first concert I ever attended was in early 1976 and it was the first KISS Alive tour. Now the band is doing a 35 year anniversary tour and yeah, I'm going to go see it in November. Between now and then, I'll see a number of operas, performances by the San Francisco Symphony and a few concerts by bands or performers who sing in Spanish that many of you may have never heard of before. And yet it all strikes a chord, a chord that resonates like "Smoke on the Water" the first time you heard it on a radio, or the piano's entrance in Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto, or experiencing the communal release when Enanitos Verdes launches into "Lamento Boliviano" during one of their concerts and the audience is singing along louder than the band is playing it. The essential, unique feeling that music alone can convey to make one feel alive is present in all those moments and those moments feel the same no matter what the genre of music is, whether the notes comes from a Gibson Birdland or a Strad. This much I know is true- and it started with that KISS concert way back in the day. It's my own rock and roll madeleine.

Earlier I posted a notice about a local Enanitos Verdes concert this Friday night that also mentioned a concert they are performing tonight in Salt Lake City. Oddly enough, I've received a tremendous amount of blog hits today via search engines regarding the Salt Lake concert coming from many parts of the country (and Mexico). Mademoiselle MG is at that show right now and she told me there are about a thousand people there having a great time as I write this post. I suspect there are many people experiencing the sensory equivalent of dipping a madeleine into a cup of  tea tonight, all over the world, in various venues, who've never heard of Proust (or Enanitos Verdes for that matter)- and yet though he may have best transcribed the experience into words, it doesn't really matter- people every where still feel it- and I think that is what really matters.

Does that interest you? I'm not sure I can articulate why, but it interests me immensely. And there we are.

Another view of War Music, more peaceful than my own

One of the things that inspired me to start this blog was a desire to interact with others whose interests, if not tastes, at least ran somewhat parallel to my own. Whether you loved, hated or were indifferent to a particular opera, genre of music, book or political act you had enough of a reaction to it to say something about it and that impressed and pleased me enough to want to join in the conversation.

So please, I encourage you to comment on anything I've written if you feel the urge. This afternoon, through email, I received some pretty insightful comments about "War Music" from someone who also attended last night's performance and whose theater experience far exceeds my own. I won't identify the commenter, as that seems unfair without his knowledge beforehand, though he can identify himself at any time if he likes!I'm posting this because I wish the exchange we had took place in comments section of my blog, because I know my review was pretty harsh and these comments offer a different perspective which I find valuable and informative (and perhaps muffles the sound of my bludgeoning this play, no matter how much it deserves it, which it most certainly does). I hope he doesn’t mind.


I basically enjoyed it, but thought the script should have been tightened and focused a little more. And some of the staging didn’t work for me – the weird dance/fight at the end of Act 1, for example. I give them credit for trying something adventurous with a big cast, rather than another one- or two-person show.

I think a lot of your problems with the play are problems with the source material, which is Logue's version of the Iliad (not the actual Iliad). I haven't read more than snatches of it (one of which involved a discussion of how appropriate his use of "thong" was in his description of Aphrodite), but it is widely praised -- however, that doesn't mean everyone's going to like it. But a lot of what they were doing flowed from that. I don't think the double-casting was meant to indicate specific mirroring of the characters -- I think sometimes it was more for contrast.

I wouldn't try to persuade you that it's better than you thought it -- I see your points and they're valid, but I think sometimes you're criticizing them for things they are deliberately choosing to do -- in other words, you can hate it, but they're not failing at what they're doing, they're just doing something you wish they wouldn't ( bold is mine).

I think this last point is quite valid and captures a certain truth about what I found so loathsome about this play. Point taken- though I still think it’s awful.