June and July adventures (plus concerto footage!)
Sharon's Monthly Roundup
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So this free-tier newsletter is totally supposed to be a monthly thing, but June was a lot for me and it’s somehow the end of July already?
Today’s monthly roundup features tidbits from the following newsletters:
June 3: Concerto thoughts, performance prep, and Romanticism
July 21: From Beethovenian assholery to Romeo and Juliet basicness
I’m back from Boston and am awash in a cloud of happy incredulous relief—we did it! We performed it for the first time, it went even better than I’d ever dreamed, the reactions and feedback we got are so good, and…it’s over? This thing that had been looming in the eternal future for literal years is suddenly behind me?
If you’ve been following this project on social media, the process from the outside has probably looked like this:
???
Profitlol who are we kidding, this is the arts we’re talking aboutPerformance!
…when in fact this one performance alone has involved a whole team of people working their butts off for literal years, sending so many emails (SO MANY EMAILS) and having constant Zoom calls.
Andrés Ballesteros steered this project through two organizations and a pandemic, hit up donors, assembled an orchestra, and got an amazing conductor on board, Britney Alcine, who gave the concerto’s first outing the love and thoughtful care it deserved. Anna Winestein with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative adopted this project and provided the institutional support (overseeing funding, sorting out venue + filming + many other logistics) and Jane Hua worked behind the scenes to help get everything together. I leaned a lot on my Spotlight mentor, Kathleen Kelly, who advised the project and also gave me a lot of support through it, as well as many members of the Spotlight Team who made the time to help the project in many ways big and small.
Funding-wise, the performance was very generously supported by the Hegardt Foundation, the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, the Rebecca Clarke Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Aurora Charitable Fund, and multiple individual donors.
And obviously, a crucial part of why this first outing was such a success is all thanks to Patricia Wallinga and her compositional brilliance—she took my half-baked ideas and ran with them (in some cases, wisely substituting her much better ideas) to produce an orchestral score so good that, when you play or listen to it, you cannot believe it was originally a solo piano work.
So if you’ve ever wondered how hard it is to write a work, drum up an orchestra, and get it performed…the answer is that it’s very hard, and you need a lot of people to buy in and contribute a lot of time and money, and I probably won’t be doing something like this anytime soon.
(But also, we are now assembling a consortium of orchestras to perform this in future seasons, so if you have any connection to ensembles/music directors, hi, call me. 👋)
I want very much to share the full performance, but for now, will just share little clips.
Movement the first
I love this little bit because this was one of the first most obvious moments that screamed “I am a concerto!!!” to me; please also enjoy my vibe-filled cadenza, which is the cumulation of many improvisatory sessions in which I just smooshed the first movement themes around and took them to far off keys.
Movement the second
If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve already heard this moment from rehearsal; it’s one of my favorite favorite bits. (This theme in the second movement is actually what made me want to play the sonata to begin with; it’s just so beautiful and shimmery, and Patricia made it even more magical by stripping the orchestra down for a Chamber Music Moment and then gently dropping everyone in.)
Confession: the section starting at 0:48 in this clip was not my favorite in either the original sonata or the piano part of the concerto when I first got it, but once I heard how it sounded with a real orchestra I really really loved it and now I think it’s such a good moment!
Beethoven, master of pettiness
By virtue of having started my music history sort-of-career with Beethoven and being mentored by a Beethoven scholar, I feel sometimes like I already know most of the Fun Beethoven Facts out there and that there isn’t that much surprise and delight left in Ludwig Land for me. So I was utterly stoked when Emily Hogstad shared a delicious petty morsel from Beethoven’s letters over on Bluesky, which I then reshared (with permission from Emily) over on Twitter:
I’m not rephrasing for comedic effect, btw; that’s literally verbatim what Wikipedia quotes from multiple sources. Beethoven, you are such a shitposter.
Because Ludwig van Beethoven was, by all accounts, kind of an asshole even in the most charitable and empathetic readings, I wondered if maybe this was a case of bitter broke energy directed towards a fiscally responsible sibling, and then I read more of Johann’s Wikipedia article and went, nope, Johann sounds like a piece of work! (I guess assholery just really ran in the family.)
First of all, look at this f**king guy:
How did the portrait artist (L. Gross) have the balls to make his subject look so damn smug? How did Nikolaus Johann van Beethoven himself look at that shit-eating grin on his own face and go “Yup, looks great, let’s go with it”??? This portrait literally has the exact same energy as the trollface meme:
Secondly, I was curious how Johann made the money to buy the estate that allowed him to peacock to his brother as a proud landowner, and it turns out, the answer was war profiteering! Specifically, when Napoleon invaded Austria, Johann made his money supplying the French army with medical supplies.
Famously, Napoleon was Beethoven’s original muse when he was writing his Eroica Symphony (that’s “Eroica” as in “Heroic,” not “Erotic”), but Beethoven disavowed his former hero, referring to him as a “tyrant,” when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. I can’t imagine that Beethoven was thrilled about his own brother making a fortune supplying Napoleon’s conquests.
I looked up Kaspar, Beethoven’s other brother (whose son, Karl, Beethoven disastrously adopted) to see if he was maybe less of a shithead, and it turns out he was going around selling Beethoven’s compositions without his knowledge when they had been promised to other publishers. Was there anyone in this family who wasn’t an asshole?
It is now headcanon to me that the famous “Ode to Joy” setting in his Ninth Symphony is Beethoven expressing his love and feeling of universal brotherhood to everyone except his actual brothers. This layer of screw-you pettiness significantly improves what is otherwise a cliche and culturally hackneyed piece, which pleases me greatly.
However much you already liked John Williams, this will make you like him even more
Frank Lehman: How to Write Music for Rolling Boulders (New York Times)
The price of cinematic immersion, we have wrongly been trained, is a disregard for this great music on all but an unconscious level. So for film composers, the greatest challenge — and sometimes the greatest frustration — is to write dramatically apt and musically complex underscore for scenes in which the competition for our attention is at its fiercest.
I really truly enjoyed this multimedia interactive piece which you absolutely must read with the sound on (and, fyi, I had better luck with the interactive elements on my laptop than on my iPad). The article does a great job explaining the brilliance of John Williams’ film scoring in a way that’s easy for laypeople to understand. Also, I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny last weekend, and it’s surprisingly good! It’s honestly way better than Temple of Doom (which, depending on your thoughts about that movie, may not be saying much).
Stuff I’ve Been Listening To
I recently was made aware of the fact that Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson, Gabriel, is also a composer, and one of the coolest works I think he’s done is his first Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra.
THIS IS SO COOL AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH. You can listen to the whole thing on streaming which I highly recommend because it’s just…so, so fun, and so virtuosic and exacting in a totally different way than what I’m used to.
Also, I am still not over Thomas Adès’ Dante, but only the part that takes place in Hell, to the point that it’s maybe getting tired but I still can’t stop. I love the entire “Inferno” sequence but this week found myself repeatedly going back to “The Gluttons—in slime.”
I think what gets me is that this segment—as with every movement depicting one of the circles of Hell—starts out depicting some unbearably torturous setting, but then, almost inexplicably, just becomes so beautiful. The section starting at 1:48 feels like an almost heartbreaking escape from the heaviness of eternal punishment, and then at 2:55 there’s a sequence so ridiculously, rapturously gorgeous that it makes my hair stand on end every damn time. It’s a stretch of such intense suspended yearning that I think that a movement titled “The Gluttons—in slime” has no business being this lovely.
Of course, this is Hell, and gluttony is a sin (says who), and so at 3:27 everything comes tumbling down with no hope of catharsis. However, this is the digital streaming era, so what I do is just keep scrubbing back to that 1:48-3:27 section and listening to that bit over and over again, living forever in that too-brief stretch of hope and beauty, subjecting myself to a sort of auditory Sisyphean agony.
Now for a complete 180. I created a playlist (on Apple Music only, sorry) called “Summer Vibes” which is exactly what it sounds like!
Every song on my Summer Vibes playlist has to pass a crucial test: would this song make me feel like the effortlessly chic heroine in a lighthearted movie if I were to blast it in my convertible while driving along the Pacific Coast Highway?
Maybe an easier shorthand test—does this song make me feel like this:
I’ve also really been enjoying the new Misterwives album, Nosebleeds, which is solid no-skips listening all the way through, and kind of straddles that semi-pop, semi-rock zone that I feel like a lot of artists have been doing recently.
I’d previously wrung the hell out of the lead single, “Out of Your Mind,” which I still really love but has less of an impact after I’d repeatedly listened to it over almost four months. “Dagger” and “Trigger Pull” were also some initial favorites off the album, but this week I found myself really drawn to “End of My Rope.”
I just want to bop around and wave my arms every time that chorus kicks in.
Happy end of July (???????) everyone, and see you in August! 🎹