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Learning the conductorly art of shaping music with your body.

Andrei Tchernov/iStock

Learning the conductorly art of shaping music with your body.

• How exactly does a conductor conduct? New York magazine critic Justin Davidson steps on the podium to find out after an intensive fall of coaching by Alan Gilbert and James Ross who co-lead Juilliard's conducting program. "Lifting the baton feels a little like getting ready to push off from the top of a ski slope, in that I'll move in the right direction whatever I do, and also because fear will cause disaster. Neither fact is comforting."
• Claudio Del Monaco, an occasional opera director and son of tenor Mario Del Monaco, is now in stable condition with damage to his heart, liver and diaphragm after his third wife, Daniela Hermann Werner, allegedly attacked him with a bread knife. "My wife stabbed me. She's crazy," he told emergency personnel. (link in Italian)
• What happens when a soloist has to call in sick? Often, an "all-points bulletin goes out to artists' management companies and to orchestra administrators." To this end, legendary Juilliard piano pedagogue Veda Kaplinsky tells her students to have lesser-known concertos in their repertoire to increase their chances of getting summoned from the bullpen.
• Bassoonists, rejoice: A New York musicologist has discovered four lost measures of the bassoon part in Ravel's ballet Ma Mere l'Oye. Apparently, there was an error that went undetected for 100 years.
• There's only one city in America that still employs a civic organist: San Diego. This year, citizens rose up to save her job.
• Remember how last week Opera Boston closed its doors very suddenly? Well, it seems that at least six of the company's 17 board members were not present at the meeting in which a vote was taken to disband the company.
• Says The Boston Globe: "It's both a strange and sad outcome ... the roughly $750,000 deficit and liabilities weighing down the company struck few experts as insurmountable in a city of Boston's size and cultural tastes. While some of the opera company's powerful board members may have grown tired of their commitments, they could have found a way to exit the stage without dismantling the company." (The Globe also says Boston mayor Tom Menino was "shocked" when he heard the news, and that "no one had sought help from him or the city's office of arts and culture to drum up support for the opera company.")
• Along the lines of those anonymous donors paying off people's layaway items at Kmart, a "secret Santa" contributed $25,000 to pay off a line of credit debt that has been plaguing the local symphony in Helena, Mont.
• In the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini presents "another way to occupy Lincoln Center" — go to free and low-cost performances.
• And within his year-end list of 2011's best performances for The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, "Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system."
• Ross' comment is a (credited) riff on Seth Colter Wall's post-Satyagraha/Occupy Wall Street protest column for The Awl earlier this month, which earns my nomination as 2011's comment of the year: "This persistent fiction of 'elitism,' and contemporary classical music's supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongside a 3D screening of 'Transformers 3."
• Dodging the year-end column doldrums, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's James Lileks imagines a classical-centric fracas at Minnesota's Mall of America between Abbado and Barenboim partisans: "Mall officials were stunned by what some are calling the worst outbreak of music among middle-aged, classical-music fans in the city's history ... 'These two dudes, they're dressed for trouble, the tails, the white scarf, everything, they start sneering at each other, and then the other stands up and sniffs dismissively, and then one dude gets out some opera glasses and looks down his nose at the other, and the other dude says "So's Yo-Yo Ma," and it was on."' The video, available on YouTube, shows the rioters throwing wadded-up napkins at each other, screaming insults in Italian, and picking up chairs and putting them down forcefully a few inches away." (N.B.: NPR tote bags are swung in the free-for-all.)

Enlarge Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

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Countertenor Andreas Scholl.

courtesy of the artist

Countertenor Andreas Scholl.

It's hard to think of a singer of any type who performs with more color and clarity than Andreas Scholl. The Times of London has called the German countertenor a "storyteller supreme, daring his audience to stay fully engaged for every compelling second."

Recently honored with a Grammy nomination for his album of music by Henry Purcell called O Solitude, he's just wrapped up a run of Handel's opera Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera performed with soprano Renee Fleming. And he's just released a new album of Bach arias with the Kammerorchester Basel and conductor Julia Schroeder.

When Scholl was in Manhattan for his last Rodelinda appearances, we invited him into our New York bureau for a different kind of storytelling. We asked him to share his favorite music with us, no genres barred. He came back with an amazing range of choices, from jazz to Irish folk tunes to a song from a contemporary Israeli singer/songwriter to his own — yes, his own — dance club tune, which he wrote, sang and recorded after a very unfortunate encounter with Slovenia's national airline.

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Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) in the second installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

Warner Bros.

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) in the second installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

Last night, I was at the local multiplex to take in Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, the latest installment of Guy Ritchie's steampunk action-mystery franchise.

While this is not exactly a great film, it's pretty good fun for an escapist evening. And what's quite refreshing in the case of Sherlock Holmes is that — for once! — it's not just the villain who loves classical music. Usually, one of the trademark signs of a baddie is his creepy, mincing fondness for the classics. Just think of Hannibal Lecter's taste for Glenn Gould's Bach, or Norman Bates in Psycho playing Beethoven. (And in contemporary films from Die Hard to Bowling For Columbine, Beethoven almost always signals Nazism, as Michael Broyles demonstrates in his recent book Beethoven In America.)

Through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes adventures, we know the detective is a violinist. But classical music proves particularly pivotal in Shadows. In their contests of wits, we discover that both Holmes and his nemesis, the sneering Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), love Schubert songs, so much so that "Die Forelle" ("The Trout") becomes a major point of reference. (By the way, that's Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake on the soundtrack.) And I won't be giving anything away to say that Mozart's Don Giovanni also has a bit more than a cameo in this winter-break flick. There's also Hans Zimmer's clever score, which absorbs everything from Strauss waltzes to Romany fiddling.

Blockbusters like the Iron Man series notwithstanding, Game Of Shadows isn't the only recent Robert Downey Jr. movie that involves classical music. He also played real-life journalist Steve Lopez in the 2009 adaptation of the Los Angeles Times staffer's book The Soloist, about a homeless, mentally ill, Juilliard-trained musician.

Shadows composer Hans Zimmer has said in interviews that it was Downey who wanted to give classical music such a star turn in the film: "From Robert I kept hearing, 'We're going to have the Schubert,' 'We're going to have the Mozart.'"

So is a trope turning at last? Is it possible for a film's good guy to be steeped in classical music? On the other hand, it's not as if Detective Holmes is a contemporary hero. Does a character have to be a steampunk throwback for his love of classical music to be believable in the first place?

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A view of the 16th-century Shirvanshakhs palace in Azerbaijan's capital city, Baku.

Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

A view of the 16th-century Shirvanshakhs palace in Azerbaijan's capital city, Baku.

The folk music of Azerbaijan pervades the very rarely heard symphonic works on this album. A winning synthesis of East and West, these pieces — mostly for piano — feature five of the country's most celebrated composers, including Farhad Badalbeyli, who's also the principal piano soloist.

The disc opens with the three-movement Concerto for Piano and Orchestra after Arabian Themes by Fikret Amirov, probably the best known Azerbaijani composer. Written in 1957 in collaboration with pianist-composer Elmira Nazirova, it's an enjoyable pastiche of exotic Eastern melodies served up in Western concerto form.

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One of the great unknown Russian composers?: Tsar Alexander II of Russia, in a portrait from c. 1875.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

One of the great unknown Russian composers?: Tsar Alexander II of Russia, in a portrait from c. 1875.

• A surprising revival of music written by Russia's Tsar Alexander II and other members of the Romanov family: "When I played bits and pieces of various works to music reviewers and historians, they would come out with the wildest guesses, from Hector Berlioz to Pyotr Tchaikovsky, but not a single person even suspected that we could be talking about a musical piece written by a Russian aristocrat."
• They just premiered the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Madame White Snake this past April, but it wasn't enough to save Opera Boston. In a surprise announcement on the Friday before Christmas, the company said that it is closing its doors on Jan. 1, 2012.
• Critic Lloyd Schwarz weighed in on this late-December surprise on Boston's WGBH today: "It [had] sounded as things were going well!"
• The financially beleaguered Colorado Symphony Orchestra has announced a new "consumer-first" business model, putting aside a modus operandi in which "the notion of relevance was defined by the institution, not by the community it served." Additionally, "the plan changes the way the CSO does business, putting more emphasis on earned income rather than donations, working closely with educational groups and corporations to demonstrate its value beyond music-making and using newer technologies, such as video screens during concerts and social networking sites, to help it connect with contemporary audiences."
• Mezzo-soprano Wendy White fell from a platform while performing Gounod's Faust at the Metropolitan Opera Saturday night. She is now recuperating at home.
• The recent House spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown trimmed another 5.6% from the budget for fiscal year 2012 for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, the Smithsonian Institution's budget is going up a bit: "The NEA and NEH spread the wealth to the provinces, so to speak. Meanwhile, the arts agencies that Washingtonians (such as members of Congress) are best positioned to enjoy won't be absorbing cuts under the proposal."
• According to police, the manager of Pennsylvania's York Symphony Orchestra has admitted to stealing more than $200,000 from the ensemble, apparently to feed her gambling addiction.
• Rupert Christiansen ruminates over British opera in 2011: "I fear we must anticipate an era of cost-cutting, with more 'safe' revivals of pop classics in nice traditional productions. A lot of people who are understandably sick of the pretensions and gimmicks purveyed by fancy-pants directors may welcome this, but I only hope that the beacon of risk, youth and imagination doesn't get extinguished in the process."
• Meanwhile – and after some vociferous protests – BP has announced that it will give $15.5 million total to the Royal Opera House, Tate Britain, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in the UK.
• The Park Avenue Armory is amping up its presence as a major New York arts presenter. With their second Tune-In Music Festival and a New York Philharmonic performance of Stockhausen's Gruppen on the way, the Armory has just named the appointment of its first artistic director, Alex Poots.
• Do you know who Count Harry Kessler was? You probably don't know him — but you definitely know his friends and acquaintances, who included Strauss, Ravel, Stravinsky and Schoenberg (along with Monet, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev and Nijinsky).
• Charlotte Church's new dream? To be an opera star – someday: "'I'd love to come back to that a bit later, I'd love to do it properly and do an opera when I'm a bit older."
• Sure, Siri is your pocket companion (as long as you have a new iPhone), but do you know that she can play any song in your phone's music library (as long as you have access to a Yamaha Disklavier piano)?
• Human pianist Jonathan Biss, who is starting to record a full cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas, offers a frank and perceptive analysis on the process of recording: "The experience [of recording] can feel terribly lonely and isolating. The relationship one has with an audience may not always be positive or even healthy, but it is a relationship, and thus extremely conspicuous by its absence."
• And speaking of Beethoven: a group of scientists from the University of Amsterdam claim that as Beethoven's hearing worsened, he used fewer and fewer high notes until he became totally deaf. They based their work on his string quartets.
• And yet more on Beethoven: a look at the evolution of perception of him – and classical music generally – in American pop culture: "America [was fascinated] with Beethoven in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when classical music was regarded as an uplifting moral force, and Beethoven as the zenith of its power... [but] World War II essentially shattered the notion of classical music as inherently moral. It's hard to watch film of an orchestra playing Beethoven for an audience of uniformed Nazis and continue to believe that the music has some special moral power. The Beethoven as an Ethical Force industry collapsed after the war."
• Where Sibelius fell silent: "Most artists' houses have had previous and subsequent owners. In some you feel only a vestige of the artist's presence; others have had their spirit crushed by museumification, by curatorial intervention and the accretion of study centers. The Sibelius house is one of those rare places where no other presence interferes with the genius loci: it is a house of, for, by, with and about Sibelius."
• Author and composer Jan Swafford on life at artist colonies like Yaddo and MacDowell: "So how deranged, sodden, lascivious, egomaniacal, and so on, are the colonies? Actually the level of excess disappointed me. I found the bulk of artists to be, on average, no crazier than anybody else. After all, a substantial percentage of the human race is nuts, and most of those people don't have art as an excuse. The percentage of drunks and loonies I encountered at the colonies is not significantly higher than the percentage to be found among my own friends and family."

Enlarge Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Coburn Dukehart/NPR

Does this ring a bell? Match the composers with their compositions that include sleigh bells.

My colleague Bob Boilen has sleigh bells on the shelf behind his desk (they're pictured above). Every once in a while, even in the dripping heat of summer, he gives them a little shake — mainly to pester another colleague, Robin Hilton, who I'm certain is the only person in the world who hates sleigh bells. The instant I hear that lush jingling, I think of Christmas — you know, a one horse open sleigh and all that. It's a pleasant sound, like aural comfort food.

Over the centuries, composers have slipped these tinkling little bells into their pieces — pieces that, by the way, often have nothing to do with the holidays. Below you will find six clips of music with sleigh bells. Click on a clip to listen, then drag it to the image of the composer who wrote it. Get them all right and feel the warmth of the holiday season swell in your chest. Get them wrong and notice winter's chill at the nape of your neck.

Wikimedia

An image of the Holy Spirit-inspired Hildegard and her scribe from the Rupertsberg Codex des Liber Scivias, c. 1180.

Pope Benedict XIV has indicated he plans to canonize the 12th-century female composer, mystic, author, physician and abbess Hildegard von Bingen and then proclaim her a Doctor of the Church in October 2012.

Even more important than her long-delayed official canonization is the fact that Hildegard will be only the fourth woman among less than three dozen saints total to be bestowed with the title of Doctor of the Church. That designation honors men and women whose teachings and writings have been particularly significant and instructional to the church — including the likes of St. John Chrysostom, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. (The three other women Doctors are St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Therese of Lisieux.)

Of Hildegard, Benedict said last September:

...This great woman, this "prophetess" [who] also speaks with great timeliness to us today, with her courageous ability to discern the signs of the times, her love for creation, her medicine, her poetry, her music, which today has been reconstructed, her love for Christ and for his Church which was suffering in that period too, wounded also in that time by the sins of both priests and lay people, and far better loved as the Body of Christ.

Though he mentions her capabilities as a composer nearly parenthetically, it would be hard to imagine that Hildegard's amazing musical works have escaped the ears of this classical-music-loving, piano-playing pontiff.

In our own time, early music lovers have become well acquainted with the marvelous compositions of this Benedictine abbess through beautiful and moving performances such as these.

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Edwin Outwater leads the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony in fresh music from the 40 and under crowd.

Kitchener Waterloo Symphony

Edwin Outwater leads the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony in fresh music from the 40 and under crowd.

Having the right music director can make a huge difference for an orchestra. Take the young conductor Edwin Outwater and his Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, a modestly sized 65-year-old ensemble situated about an hour's drive west of Toronto. You won't find any Beethoven or Brahms on their new CD From Here On Out. Instead, it's fresh music from the 40-and-under crowd, including the prolific Nico Muhly, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and Arcade Fire member Richard Reed Parry.

The album is titled after the opening piece, which Muhly wrote for the American Ballet Theatre. The composer's had quite a good year already, with the world premieres of two operas and a major-label release of his violin concerto. This music pulses out of the gate with a solo violin engulfed in warm strings and brass. From there Muhly sets up a slow, rolling passacaglia in the bass and gradually adds layers of fluttering winds and interlaced parts for piano and marimba. It's one of the composer's most enjoyable scores. There are more interlocking parts for winds and percussion throbbing ecstatically in Muhly's atmospheric Wish You Were Here, a Boston Pops commission that pays homage to Canadian-born American composer and musicologist Colin McPhee, a devotee of Balinese gamelan music.