Four modern violins by Michael Rhonheimer and one Stradivarius made in 1711

Material scientist Francis W.M.R. Schwarze believed that biotechnology could modify contemporary woods to possess the acoustic properties found in the centuries-old violins produced by masters of violin-making’s Golden Age.

Schwarze used varying amounts of fungal decay to modify the density of the woods used in two violins built by Michael Ronheimer. An acoustic tone test was then arranged at the annual Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen (forestry conference).

English violinist Matthew Trusler would play the same piece on five violins, in a blind test including a Stradivarius worth two million dollars built in 1711, two Rhonheimer violins built of untreated wood, and two Rhonheimer violins built from wood subjected to varying amounts of decay.

Science Daily reports the astonishing result: Schwarze’s biotech defeated the workmanship of Stradivarius.

Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin “Opus 58” to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that “Opus 58” was actually the strad! “Opus 58” is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.

Francis W.M.R. Schwarze, et. al. Superior wood for violins – wood decay fungi as a substitute for cold climate

ABSTRACT:

Violins produced by Antonio Stradivari during the late 17th and early 18th centuries are reputed to have superior tonal qualities. Dendrochronological studies show that Stradivari used Norway spruce that had grown mostly during the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar activity when relatively low temperatures caused trees to lay down wood with narrow annual rings, resulting in a high modulus of elasticity and low density.

The main objective was to determine whether wood can be processed using selected decay fungi so that it becomes acoustically similar to the wood of trees that have grown in a cold climate (i.e. reduced density and unchanged modulus of elasticity).

This was investigated by incubating resonance wood specimens of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) with fungal species that can reduce wood density, but lack the ability to degrade the compound middle lamellae, at least in the earlier stages of decay.

Microscopic assessment of the incubated specimens and measurement of five physical properties (density, modulus of elasticity, speed of sound, radiation ratio, and the damping factor) using resonance frequency revealed that in the wood of both species there was a reduction in density, accompanied by relatively little change in the speed of sound. Thus, radiation ratio was increased from ‘poor’ to ‘good’, on a par with ‘superior’ resonance wood grown in a cold climate.

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It is possible to listen to this kind of comparison oneself. Ruggiero Ricci played the same opening of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (1866) on 15 important violins, including examples by Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivarius, on a record titled The Glory of Cremona, currently regrettably out-of-print and expensive.

But all 15 Ricci performances and 3 additions are available via YouTube vidoes, linked here.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Benjamin Ivry addresses Deutsche Grammaphon’s decision to stop recording Yundi Li with splendid indignation.

The question is whether the classical-music market has narrowed to the point where only a Chinese Liberace or “Chopinzee” (to adopt the term that James Huneker used to describe the 1920s exhibitionistic keyboard antics of Vladimir de Pachmann) can survive. Is it possible for fine artistry to coexist at a time when dazzling, if empty, display is exalted? In the era of the ubiquitous Hollywood star pianist José Iturbi (1895-1980), audiences still flocked to see sober, unflashy pianists like Rudolf Serkin or Benno Moiseiwitsch, masterly musicians who would never be mistaken for pop performers.

Deutsche Grammophon’s dismissal of Yundi Li is only the latest in a series of cases where musical achievement does not equal a recording contract. About a decade ago, Sony Classical dismissed the supremely refined Taiwan-born violinist Cho-Liang Lin (b. 1960), according to Mr. Lin himself, because he was unwilling and/or unable to record the quasi-pop “crossover” works that have kept the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the Billboard charts.

Telegraph:

A rare portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been unearthed which gives a true picture of the famous composer’s looks at the height of his fame.

It shows him in 1783, aged 27, dressed in a red tunic and a white ruff, with a wig of grey hair and an elegant but slightly hooked nose. ...

The picture has been authenticated by Professor Cliff Eisen, a music scholar at King’s College London. He described it as “arguably the most important Mozart portrait to be discovered” since the composer’s death in 1791.

Prof Eisen, who is to present his findings to academics at the Royal Musical Association on Saturday, said: “It is only the fourth known authentic portrait of him from the Vienna years, the period of his greatest professional successes and greatest compositional achievements.”

Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, aged 25, and died a decade later.

The oil, which measures 19 inches by 14 inches, was bought by an American collector in 2005 from a descendent of Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, a close friend of the composer’s father Leopold Mozart. The collector has insured it for £2 million.

It was probably painted by Joseph Hickel, a painter to the Imperial Court of Austria.

Prof Eisen said there was strong documentary evidence to suggest the subject was Mozart, including a letter he wrote to one of his patrons in September 1782 describing his desire for a “beautiful red coat” that matches the one painted.

The arrival on stage, last June, of Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from Cardiff, to compete on the British version of American Idol (Britain’s Got Talent) did not, at first glance, elicit a very enthusiastic welcome from the program’s studio audience or the judges. But when he proceeded to sing the aria Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot, a moment reminiscent of the climax of 1983 film Flashdance occurred, as members of the audience wiped away tears and the judges came to attention.

4:10 video

He won the competition, receiving a prize of £100,000 and a chance to perform at Royal Variety on December 3rd.

Hat tip to David l. Larkin.

Terry Teachout pays tribute to Artur Schnabel (April 17, 1882 – August 15, 1951) in Commentary.

“You will never be a pianist,” Theodor Leschetizky (sic), Schnabel’s teacher, told him. “You are a musician.” Schnabel modestly claimed not to have known what that meant, but of course he knew perfectly well, repeating the bon mot on numerous occasions. (Nobody ever accused him of insufficient self-regard.) From childhood on, his musical instincts had led him away from the splashy virtuosity of late-19th-century composers. He played Chopin and Liszt early in his career—very well, too, by most accounts—but by the 20’s he had stopped programming their works. Instead, he played Mozart’s piano music at a time when it was generally thought to be suitable only for young children, and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when they were unknown to most pianists. As he later explained:

I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. . . . Chopin’s studies are lovely pieces, perfect pieces, but I simply can’t spend time on them; I believe I know these pieces; but playing a Mozart sonata, I am not so sure that I do know it, inside and out. Therefore I can spend endless time on it.

...

The quality most immediately striking about Schnabel’s style—and the one recognized at once by his most perceptive contemporaries —is its rhythmic vitality. Leon Fleisher, his best-known pupil, described it as follows:

There would be this schwung, an irresistible swing to what he did, as though he were twirling you around in a dance. . . . The emphasis was that beats were never downward events, they were not like fence posts or the hammering of coffin nails—beats were upward springs that would spring you on to the next beat.

The impulsive forward momentum of Schnabel’s playing—it was so pronounced that he had a lifelong tendency to rush—helped ameliorate its other key feature. Like most Austro-German musicians of his generation, Schnabel used changes in tempo to delineate the structural features of the pieces he played, and his rhythmic flexibility was so pronounced that some musicians, Toscanini among them, felt that he slipped on occasion into outright exaggeration.

This latter quality is what Virgil Thomson had particularly in mind when he referred to the “late-19th-century romanticism” in Schnabel’s style.

Schnabel was the first to record Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas, a historic watershed for sound recordings. Later performances by other musicians are sometimes more perfectly polished, but Schnabel’s interpretations remain unsurpassed in warmth and musicality.

No performances of the Schubert piano sonatas come even close to Schnabel’s.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

A must-see 2:48 video

web-site

Hat tip to David Larkin.

Icelandic clown plays Beethoven, Boccherini, Vivaldi, &c. on squeeze horns attached to his clothing on a French broadcast.

video

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Just yesterday, I dropped in on YARGB, and found a posting by Seneca the Younger linking Tyler Cowen’s survey of recordings of Don Giovanni.

Having my own very decided opinions on the subject ï¼u02c6though our household has never really recovered from the trauma associated with the transition from LP recordings to CDs, and we abandoned any effort to stay courant years ago)ï¼u0152I was quite interested in reading what someone (inevitably) younger and more in touch with developments in recent years, would have to say. I was particularly interested in seeing which versions made the list.

I was very pleased to see that Mr. Cowen was well informed, and basically sound. I thought his opinions came close to being spot on, but I differ with him on a small number of points:

The Klemperer Magic Flute is a version of serious merit, and I think it deserves a high rank among versions of that opera, but it is the historic late 1930s Beecham recording, the first, which remains the best.

In the first place, Sir Thomas Beecham was one of the two greatest conducter interpreters of Mozart of the last century, the other being Bruno Walther. Beecham’s lucid and precise rationalism is equally appropriate to Mozart as Walther’s warm Romanticism. And Beecham’s conducting was accompanied in the historic first recording by an impossible-to-equal group of singers. Gerhard Hüsch is the best of all possible Papagenos. Helge Rosvaenge, Tiana Lemnitz, and Erna Berger were all also extraordinary performers of legendary stature. Klemperer is pretty much at his best in his version, but I’m afraid Thomas Beecham’s best day is a lot better than Otto Klemperer’s best day. Walter Berry is a fine singer, but Hüsch is a demigod.

Cowen correctly identifies the best Giovanni as the Fürtwangler 1953 Salzburg Festspiele recording, with Cesare Siepi, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, Walter Berry, Otto Edelmann, Elizabeth Grümmer, and Raffaele Arie, but he is somewhat agnostic about the best choice among Fürtwangler Salzburg recordings of different years. I know two of them well. The 1953 was available long ago (via Discophile on St. Mark’s Place) on the luxury pirate BJR label. The 1954 could be gotten on the humble Everest label. Cowen’s friends are right: Fürtwangler was better in the 1953 recording, bringing a completely passionate identification to the music, resulting in an emphatically right momentum.

Best of all, Mr. Cowen’s Amazon link went to a page on which this magnificent recording was accompanied by a review written for Amazon by Jeff Lipscomb of Sacramento, California. Jeff Lipscomb is a find. He is a superb reviewer working on the basis of a serious listening background with excellent taste. I have not yet had time to read all 30 pages of Lipscomb reviews, but I know already that my music collection and Amazon’s bottom line will both soon be richer for these.

The Sunday Times remembers Franz Jolowicz, owner 1976-1984 of Discophile, New York City’s most illustrious classical record store, who passed away November 8th.

It may seem peculiar to some who did not live there then that the Times published a major obituary of the one-time owner of a small basement shop on St. Mark’s Place, officially 26 West 8th Street, which closed its doors more than twenty years ago. But in its day Franz’ subteraenean sanctum was one of New York City musical culture’s best-known and most important landmarks.

Franz, assisted by his partner Dominic (looked like Lorre, sounded like Capote), operated as passionate recording importer, pirate, retailer, and connoisseur. His piercing dark eyes glaring forth indignantly from beneath formidable Mittel-Europan brows, Franz would sit chain-smoking behind his counter, purveying carefully-selected benchmark recordings of astonishingly diverse international origin, while—assisted by a loyal clientele—carrying on a scathing critique of the ignorance and bad taste of the classical recording industry, and of the critics writing in England’s Gramaphone Magazine, at whose absurd fondness for the likes of Klemperer, Solti, and Sutherland, he particularly loved to jeer.

Strange docecahedronal speakers, which Franz himself admitted weren’t any good, but which did look hi-tech and could be suspended from the ceiling leaving more room for LPs, usually played softly in the background, but Franz would crank the volume up and rattle the windows of his little shop to demonstrate particular favorites. I can remember Franz playing a 1944 Berlin Gieseking performance of the Emperor Concerto, gleefully pointing out the sound of anti-aircraft fire in the background, and then joking at an audible cough from the audience: “That was Goebbels!”

He knew his records. Franz sold us a marvellous set of Callas arias, many recorded at rehearsals, on the BJR label. Could BJR have been his own? He introduced us also to the extraordinary early performances of the Franco-Belgian Flonzaley Quartet, and it was Franz who prevailed on us to buy the Vienna Concerthaus Quartet’s unrivalled Schuberts, and the superb contemporary Tatrai Quartet Haydns. I could go on for pages. He will be missed.

I did not know that Franz was once a soldier, and served in La Legion Etrangere. I’ll have to find an appropriate version of Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, and play it for Franz later. No Gerhard Husch unfortunately, I fear, no Schlussnuss. I might have Leo Slezak. Bleib du im ew’gen Leben, Franz.