Oh, that's just another lie. I never said that about Lenny Bernstein. You can search my blog to find out what I said and how I backed it up when I said it. He figures everything is about him in the end so he thinks that's how everyone thinks. He's got a lot in common with Trump that way. And Trump's end.
Guess who this post is about. I'd give out prizes for the right answer but it would bankrupt me.
Update: Well, by that standard, Dopey, Liberace would have to count as a greater artist than Glenn gould, he sold way more records than Gould did. How many of them do you have?
Update 2: Dopey, you're the one who said that Glenn Gould was a greater artist than Gunther Schuller on the basis of units sold, not me. It's your standard of artistic excellence, which would mean that Jacqueline Susanne was a greater writer than, well, take your pick of great writers who didn't sell as many books. It would also mean Thomas Kinkade was a greater artist than any really great artist. Kitch, it sells. Trash, too.
We talking about Copland or the Norton Lectures? WTF is Simpleton whining about now?
ReplyDeleteHe gets really upset when someone ignores him and like a difficult two-year-old, he insists on getting attention. Deutsche Grammophon has decided to cash in on its Lenny Bernstein backlog by issuing a big box set and Simps thinks that's going to upset me. Sony did something recently with a smaller box set of all of the outtakes from Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variation album, which I'm sorry to tell him, I took with a medium small "meh!".
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me I was going to do a post of Copland music before I got sick and I forgot to. Stay tuned.
Given that Gould notoriously edited single notes in his recordings, did Sony include that in the outtakes?
ReplyDeleteInquiring minds want to know!
Hum. I don't know. I listened to Michael Enright and Someone else going on and on about it, much as I like Enright I do have to agree with the listener who commented that he bangs on way too much about Glenn Gould. Echidne once asked me if I'd review the book about Gould that she was sent, I declined because I really can't stand his playing. He was a great technician who used his technique to impose his will on the work of even the greatest composers, even changing notes around in pieces, not to mention his sometimes entirely insane tempos. His one foray into conducting that's perserved, him recording an incredibly, ridiculously slow performance of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll was described by Gunther Schuller as “probably the most inept, amateurish, wrong-headed rendition of a major classic ever put to vinyl." Which is to say that some of his distortions of piano works aren't as bad.
DeleteMy guess is that he was a piano player who should have composed music, his musique concrete pieces show something like what his music might have been like, his choral fugue is too jokey to show what his conventional compositions might have been like. He really should have had coaching like even top price opera singers take to reign in their self-indulgence, he really needed someone to tell him to cut some of it out. He had every tool to be a great musician except self-discipline and an ability to follow composers' instructions.
OMG, a Bernstein Box Set! THE HORROR!!!
ReplyDeleteHe imagines such stuff bothers me, I figure it's just DG cashing in the stuff in its vaults instead of going to the expense to record new performances. Nothing that bothers me much.
DeleteI don't know anyone who cares about composers' intentions who wouldn't say that Otmar Suitner or Stanisław Skrowaczewski was not a better conductor than Bernstein was but they're not household names based on an old PR campaign and the kind of legend that anything based in NYC attains just for that reason. If anyone had offered me a chance to go to either the NY Phil. while Lenny was conducting or the Minnesota Orch. when Skrowaczewski was conducting, I wouldn't have hesitated in choosing the later opportunity. I don't think I have a single recording of Lenny conducting in my collection. The only reason I have one by Seiji Ozawa is that the only recording available of Roger Sessions' When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed was conducted by him. Ozawa tended to keep his bad habits (no where near as bad as those of Lenny, including groaning and singing while he was conducting) in check when he was recording new pieces. James Levine, so in the news last year for allegations made against him, did a lot to repair the damage done to the Boston Sym. during the Ozawa years.
Simps isn't a music lover, he's more of a fame fucker.