CGF Newsletter 9: Switched on Mozart

A Nazarene concertmaster, Amadeus in the metaverse, and a podcast that I will begrudgingly sample

Name That Tune

I had so much fun torturing you with last week’s Name That Tune that I’ve decided to do it again. (Also, we are running low on submissions.) Here’s your hint: the composer of this piece is definitely a one-hit wonder whose one hit is a solo instrumental work.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results

CGF Newsletter 8
Jean Sibelius, Music for the Press Celebrations: 3. Scene from Duke Johan’s Court

As I suspected, this one gave itself up rather easily to you, the Listeners, although Joey was somewhat salty that I framed it as a gimme. But he figured it out, working his way from Tchaikovsky through Grieg to Sibelius.

Listener Caspian took it one step further by correctly identifying Sibelius and referring to the piece as “the larger work from which is drawn Finlandia,” and this was right on the money! But even that wasn’t quite as finely-tuned its accuracy as Listener Steve, who wrote in with the exact title of this puzzlingly titled work.*

We had one additional guess from Listener Eric who suspected it might be a movement from Ma Vlast, a fair guess from the musical language and the given hint.

*The strange and strangely-innocuous sounding title given to this work stems from the fact that Sibelius wrote it as part of a fundraiser for the Finnish press, but this was a somewhat covert anti-Russification / Finnish-nationalist effort on the part of the organizers, so it had to be disguised.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

The Vienna Phil’s New Concertmaster

Violinist Yamen Saadi begins role as concertmaster of the Vienna State Opera & Vienna Philharmonic:

From The Strad:

25-year-old violinist Yamen Saadi has officially begun his role as concertmaster of Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic orchestra. 

After successfully passing the audition in June of this year, Saadi’s first performance as concertmaster will start on 26 October with the opening of Sleeping Beauty. 

Saadi, who was born in Nazareth, was previously concertmaster with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The orchestra was founded by Daniel Barenboim in 1999 and is made up of musicians from countries in the Middle East, of Egyptian, Iranian, Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Spanish background. Saadi joined the orchestra aged eleven and became its concertmaster six years later.

This is big news for many reasons, not least of which are Saadi’s youth and ethnicity. But just what exactly is his ethnicity / nationality? Classical music loves nothing more than reducing its artists to their nationality, and I find it notable that the headline isn’t “Israeli Violinist to Lead Vienna Philharmonic” or “Arab Violinist...” since that’s the kind of identifier prepended to 99% artists names in their bios.

The detail we get from the press releases is that Saadi is from Nazareth. Nazareth happens to be Israel’s largest Arab-majority city, so you might expect Saadi to identify as Palestinian. But as this excellent Wikipedia article points out, not all Arab citizens of Israel identify as Palestinian, and even the ones who don’t may feel uncomfortable identifying as Israeli.

My take is that it’s not any of anyone’s business (certainly not mine!) and that I applaud him for not identifying as anything if he doesn’t want to. That’s hard to do in this business. My other take is that the dude can play.

There is a Mozart Requiem Video Game

I’ll start here: this has been on the Classical Gabfest radar screen since we launched the podcast in September 2020, but we never got around to discussing it because the release date kept getting pushed back. Tiffany was going to buy it and play it since she is not-so-secretly a closet gamer. But I’m conducting the Mozart Requiem next weekend and since it’s still (sort of) spooky-ooky / all-souls season, I thought I’d see what had developed.

I am not a gamer, closet or otherwise, so I am perhaps the last person who should be weighing in upon this, and my weigh-in is based entirely on YouTube video footage. Did you know that watching people play video games online is like a huge, multi-billion dollar industry? To me, it beggars belief, but I’m guessing way more people would find my lifestyle (vegan dining, hobby vacuuming, yelling at people online about road design) equally perplexing.

However, from what I’ve watched, I would say that this video game, rather than being the nexus where the gamers and the people like me could come to a meeting of minds and share in a common joy, might offer me and my antagonists something we can equally agree is terrible. I’ve watched a couple online reviews (from people who speak too loudly and too softly) and it looks mind-numbingly, stultifyingly pokey and pointless.

But do you agree? Do we have any classical gamers out there?? If so, please write and set me straight, because maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. (Although in fairness to me, this game has but a single ranking on GameStop, and it’s one star.)

Or you could get a taste of the real thing by attending my concert next weekend (either in person or online.) I know which I’d pick!

A New Classical Podcast, but... oh no

“Backchat” is the new podcast enterprise from internet provocateur Norman Lebrecht and conductor-comedian Rainer Hersch. In their promo, they say that it will be a space for them to discuss, dissect, and laugh about the stories and themes from Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc website.

OK, here’s the thing: Lebrecht and Slipped Disc were constant objects of derision on the Classical Gabfest podcast and rightly so (I believe I once referred to SD as “the sewer pipe of the classical music information ecosystem.”) Lebrecht has created a click factory that is catnip for his generally conservative readership, and he frames his headlines in a way that brings out the worst in the people who comment on the blog. He’s leaned into an anti-woke, “I’m just asking questions” internet persona and he devotes many of his posts to blind items sent in by like-minded people around the world that amount to little more than gossip and rumor.

And yet, I’m going to give this a try, and an honest one at that. I am a believer in Ezra Klein’s thesis that podcasting forces internet trolls into being better, more humane versions of themselves. It’s happened time and again on Ezra’s show: he invites someone on who has been doing nasty hot takes on Twitter, and when they’re in the studio, on mic, speaking to another human being face-to-face, they turn into docile lambkins.

Lebrecht clearly has a wide-ranging knowledge about the classical music world, and he may or may not have intelligent things to say about it. I’m willing to try an episode, maybe even two, but if it sucks, I’m out!

Classical Mixtape

Viet Cuong, Electric Aroma (a most disagreeable noise)

I was helping a friend with a programming quagmire the other day and came across this piece. I just can’t get enough Viet Cuong. I find his music most agreeable indeed. Someone actually seems to be having fun writing new classical music — imagine!