Recording, Rachmaninoff, and songs of obsession
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
(A quick sort-of apology that there wasn’t a post last week because I simply ran out of time. I spent a bunch of my time and mental energy on getting the first draft of the chapter to the finish line and my brain cells can only produce so much before they go on strike.)
Minor news: the premiere of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto has been moved from March to June. On the one hand, this means I have way more time to work on the concerto; on the other hand, it’s slightly complicating my performing-recording timeline over the next couple of months. I’m trying to figure out when I can place several solo concerts (with slightly different programs for each one) and go into the recording studio at least twice and not mess up, you know, premiering a concerto.
One of my plans for the year is to record the original Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel sonata; however, I obviously also have to premiere the new concerto version, and I cannot work on both at once. This week I sat down with a calendar and tried to map out prep timelines for both, and it was like doing one of those wolf-goat-cabbage puzzles. The problem is I’m good at those puzzles, but not good at knowing how I can prep a bunch of music without stressing or burning myself out.
“Why can’t you work on both at once? Isn’t it essentially the same piece?” you might be asking.
Glad you asked, fictional skeptic I just projected all my doubts onto! The problem is that my muscle memory is tied directly to my ear, much as the faulty brakes were attached to the wheels of the mountain bike I got for my 14th birthday, and simultaneously working on two things that have the same-sounding melodies and harmonies just increases the chances that, just as on the inaugural ride of the mountain bike I got for my 14th birthday, I will fall spectacularly on my face.
One example! Here’s a bit from the second movement of the original:
And here’s the corresponding bit in the new concerto:
Practicing this concerto means I have to actively undo the muscle memory from the sonata; at some point I think (hope???) that I’ll be able to switch back and forth between the two more easily, but at the moment I would like them not to touch in my brain.
Meanwhile, while doing some last bits of research for the chapter this week, I rediscovered the fun little fact that Clara Schumann learned Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto in G minor in three days before performing it at the Gewandhaus. As much as I love Clara, “WWCD”—What Would Clara Do—is never the way to go, because “learn a concerto in three days” or “compose and copy out half a sonata in a week” is simply not an option for most mortals.
(I am, though, excited to get back in the recording studio, not least because funding my recordings is the whole point of getting income from this newsletter. Thank you all for contributing to this ongoing effort, especially those of you who have been subscribing through the pandemic without a recording in sight.)
I half-marathoned Rachmaninoff (as an audience member)
At the end of last month, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos AND the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one concert at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. (For the sake of brevity I will refer to the Rhapsody as a concerto going forward, because that’s what it is.)
As a pianist if I performed just one of the Rachmaninoff concertos I would follow it by mainlining a platter of carbs and sleeping for a week, instead of going “Okay, now I’m going to play FOUR more of those RIGHT NOW.” It also seems like it would be exhausting for the conductor and the orchestra and, hell, the audience! (I sat in on studio preliminaries for SFCM’s concerto competition the year they made it all-Mozart and after hearing half a dozen Mozart concertos in one sitting I actually got the first migraine of my entire life. And that’s Mozart, which as far as music goes has nothing on the density and richness of Rachmaninoff. Listening to all five Rachmaninoff concertos in one sitting is like Bruce Bogtrottering a chocolate cake.)
I genuinely do not understand why anyone would do this. It is actually insane. Sorry for the hot take, but I cannot think of a good reason to have done this, other than “just to prove that you can.” (You all know how I feel about Yuja Wang, so I don’t mean this as a hater!) It’s like how every couple of years some pianist does some highly publicized marathon of all 32 Beethoven sonatas, and despite the fact that I love (most of) Beethoven’s sonatas, you could not pay me to sit through them in one go. (And we have already been over how I feel about Brahms-fests.)
Last week Yuja Wang took her marathon to the West Coast but, thankfully, in a more palatable format: split into separate concerts, one per concerto, spread over a week. Now that is my kind of insanity. Months ago when I found out she was doing this, I hit up a close friend who is both a Yuja and Rach fan and tried to sell him and my husband on doing the marathon at the LA Phil.
Both negotiated me down to a paltry 2/5ths. (My husband’s reasoning: “That’s too much Rachmaninoff, and I have a job.” My friend’s reasoning: “I also have a job.”)
Which is how we ended up doing just Rach 3 and Rach 4 last weekend. I am going to risk eternal shame and a council of elders revoking my music degree and admit that up until recently, I had no idea there was a fourth Rachmaninoff concerto. I have a degree in piano performance, which involved studying most of the concertos in the modern canon, I have followed various major piano competitions off and on, and I go to concerts the way some people go to church, and yet I didn’t know that Rach 4 existed. (It’s entirely possible that whenever people mentioned the fourth concerto, I just assumed they meant the Rhapsody???)
Which meant that in addition to witnessing 40% of a truly mind-boggling feat I also got to experience the extreme whiplash of hearing Rach 3, a work played so often it threatens to become cliché, and then 18 hours later hearing Rach 4, a work played so infrequently I didn’t know it existed. (I know plenty of folks who don’t know classical music intimately get this newsletter, and if you ever feel like you’re out of place because you don’t know everything already, just remember that clearly I don’t know everything either! Not knowing things beforehand is a perfectly valid way to experience music and the world in general!)
One of the slightly unsettling things about the two performances was that there were cameras EVERYWHERE all at once. There were film crews with cameras on dollies on the stage, at the front of seating sections, and right behind me.
Some thoughts on the two performances:
Despite my “what is the point of this” stance I was still very impressed—no matter how you slice it, this was a triumph of mental and physical exertion, and I am fully aware that I could never.
All I want when I listen to music is to feel things. I don’t go to the concert hall demanding technical flawlessness or being one of those boors who wants to show off how much they know and how unimpressed they are with the proceedings. Get out of here with that nonsense. I am a simple creature: Yuja still made me feel things, so I’m happy. I just want to feel chills when I hear Rachmaninoff, and she gave me those chills.
That being said! I have seen Yuja so many times it verges on the problematic, and I will be nitpicky and say that while both performances were top-tier compared to other performers I’ve seen, they weren’t the best performances I’ve seen from her. There was an unexplained 30-minute delay before Rach 3, and maybe because of that, her performance of it seemed less open and exuberant than I’d expect from her.
I really enjoyed Rach 4! I so rarely get to experience pieces by well-known composers for the first time, so it felt like such a luxury to listen to a Rachmaninoff concerto with fully fresh ears. The fourth concerto struck me as being especially lush and cinematic; it could very easily be used to score a Spielberg film.
Also, this is barely relevant and I have no idea where to put this thought: as someone with synesthesia it’s just weird and amusing to realize that someone else has a totally different perception of color from mine. Yuja Wang has stated that she chooses her concert outfits to go with the pieces she plays, and presumably the color is a big part of it. Her dress for Rach 3 was a sparkly red, but I definitely hear Rach 3 as a deep emerald green. She did wear green for Rach 4, but I heard that piece as royal purple. Someone should survey synesthetes on what colors works of music are; I think it would be super interesting!
The Onion continues to not miss
There have been many, many good insightful takes about the New York Times’ bungled response to the open letter calling for a more equitable approach to reporting on trans issues. I particularly appreciated this piece in the SF Chronicle by Soleil Ho and this historical retrospective by Jack Mirkinson at The Nation.
I am, obviously, a stalwart proponent of the power of satire, and The Onion really delivered.
“It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible” is a masterpiece of the form. There are so many viciously quotable bits, but here’s one:
“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.
We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
(The use of the word “lodestar,” by the way, is such a brilliant [chef’s kiss].)
“Enshittification” is my new favorite word
I love when articles come along that identify and analyze things I’ve noticed and felt and connect these observations to larger trends, particularly when it comes to the more nebulous shifts on social media. I texted a whole bunch of friends “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok” by Cory Doctorow this week, which 1) is about social media platforms in general, not just TikTok and 2) is a really excellent analysis of how the success of a social media platform all but guarantees a particular type of decline Doctorow calls “enshittification,” which is now one of my favorite words.
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.
[…]
Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time, and energy into.
If you miss Derry Girls, I have the book for you
Derry Girls was one of the best TV shows I’ve seen in this decade. (Also, if you haven’t watched the GBBO holiday special with the Derry Girls cast, get on it because that was literally one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV.) I was a little mournful when the show came to an end last year.
I think it’s really reductive whenever people tout books as being “like this one thing you love, but different!” (for years I saw countless books, movies, and TV shows shilled as “Crazy Rich Asians meets XYZ,” usually solely because there were Asian people involved) but Séamas O’Reilly’s Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is genuinely Derry Girl vibes in a book. It’s a memoir of his adolescence in Derry during the Troubles, and while grief and trauma are an ever-present backdrop, there’s a mundane absurdity to his retellings of childhood and family shenanigans that is hilariously endearing. The book also fleshes out a lot more context about the Troubles that the show touched on.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Séamas O’Reilly is the author of this hilarious thread, which is one of the greatest things to have come out of Twitter:
I have been obsessed with these songs
I checked out the songs from Italy’s Sanremo Festival and one song—which was not the winner—was the clear standout to me.
I have listened to Madame’s “Il bene nel male” so many times it’s a little worrying. The song starts out sounding like a bog-standard slow ballad (we have been over my feelings about slow songs already) and then the beat kicks in and it’s just…hypnotic. The insistent repetition embodies the sensation of obsession so perfectly. (I am trying, very hard, not to shoehorn the term “idée fixe” in here, so just know that and appreciate my efforts.)
Then thanks to a friend sending me this music video and saying “the girl in it looks like you” I discovered Maître Gims, a French rapper, this week, and this song in particular.
“Reste” immediately kicks off with that seductive synth and the first time I heard it, I was already on board, and then went “Wait, is that Sting???”
I don’t know why it shocked me so much—it’s just that when you’re diving into the oeuvre of a new-to-you French rapper, the last voice you expect to hear is Sting’s. We love an unexpected collab! Anyway, this song…it’s just so good. I have listened to it on repeat so many times, man; it just takes me to a good place.
(The song is also about all-consuming fixation, so I just might be obsessed with obsession.)
I have dumped “Il bene nel male” on “L’anglais est ennuyeux,” my ongoing master-playlist of bops and bangers in anything other than English. Sadly “Reste” did not make the cut, because Sting’s extensive verses in English disqualify it from entering. Sorry, Sting.
Snail mail PSA
Those of you who are subscribed to this newsletter at $20/month and up, I owe you a letter. I am very behind on many things at the moment—just last night I got a “hey I haven’t heard from you, are we doing this interview or what?” email—and while I have a pen inked up and can’t wait to sit down and write some letters, I am also realistic about the fact that I probably won’t get the February mail out until later in March. Yes, I am the worst Valentine.