Rare 1946 Film: The Great Russian Composer Sergei Prokofiev Plays Piano, Discusses His Music

in Music | October 15th, 2012

In 1946 the great Russ­ian com­pos­er Sergei Prokofiev was at the height of his suc­cess in the Sovi­et cul­tur­al world, but the state of his health was falling.

Only a year before, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry, Prokofiev had con­duct­ed the glo­ri­ous pre­mier per­for­mance of his wide­ly praised Fifth Sym­pho­ny. “The hall was prob­a­bly lit as usu­al,” remem­bered the pianist Svi­atoslav Richter, who was there, “but when Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a mon­u­ment on a pedestal.” But a few days lat­er Prokofiev faint­ed and took a ter­ri­ble fall, injur­ing his head and near­ly dying as a result. The diag­no­sis was severe high blood pres­sure. Prokofiev’s doc­tors advised him to move away from Moscow to some­place qui­et, so in the sum­mer of 1946 he pur­chased a dacha in the wood­ed sub­urb of Nikoli­na Gora.

A short time lat­er a gov­ern­ment film crew vis­it­ed the 55-year-old Prokofiev at his new home. The clip above is one of two sur­viv­ing takes, accord­ing to Simon Mor­ri­son of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, author of The Peo­ple’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Sovi­et Years. In the film, Prokofiev sits at the piano and plays a selec­tion from one of the waltzes in his bal­let Cin­derel­la, which had pre­miered the pre­vi­ous fall at the Bol­shoi The­atre. The com­pos­er then walks over to his desk and is asked to say a few words about what he is work­ing on. His reply, as trans­lat­ed on YouTube:

Well, right now I am work­ing on a sym­phon­ic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cin­derel­la, two waltzes from War and Peace and one waltz from the movie score Ler­mon­tov. The War and Peace has just been bril­liant­ly pro­duced in Leningrad, where the com­pos­er Cheshko made an espe­cial­ly note­wor­thy appear­ance as a tenor, giv­ing a superb per­for­mance in the role of Pierre Bezukhov. Besides this suite, I am work­ing on a sonata for vio­lin and piano [No. 1 in F minor], upon com­ple­tion of which I will resume work on the Sixth Sym­pho­ny, which I had start­ed last year. I have just com­plet­ed thre suites from the Cin­derel­la bal­let and I am now turn­ing the score over to copy­ists for writ­ing the parts, so that most like­ly the suites will already be per­formed at the begin­ning of the fall sea­son.

The video con­cludes with a frag­ment of silent footage which, accord­ing to Mor­ri­son, shows Prokofiev play­ing the caden­za of the finale of his Third Piano Con­cer­to at Moscow in 1927 with “Per­sim­fans,” an ear­ly Sovi­et orches­tra that oper­at­ed with­out a con­duc­tor, in keep­ing with the pro­le­tar­i­an ideals of the rev­o­lu­tion. The rare films offer a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse of the great com­poser’s play­ing tech­nique. As Mor­ri­son told us in an email:

The footage tak­en at Nikoli­na Gora clear­ly shows that he had mas­sive hands, flu­id (if a lit­tle rusty) tech­nique, and awk­ward­ly rigid pos­ture. He plays from the fore­arms down, metro­nom­i­cal­ly, with an ease and finesse that indis­putably con­tributed to his tech­nique of chro­mat­ic dis­place­ment (play­ing music in one key or tonal­i­ty but then inflect­ing it with pitch­es from oth­er tonal areas). His was an intu­itive man­ner of com­po­si­tion, influ­enced by the nat­ur­al feel of the key­board under his hands–slide-slipping between black and white keys, as shad­ows of one anoth­er.

Less than two years after the Nikoli­na Gora news­reel footage was made, Prokofiev’s life took a bad turn. On Feb­ru­ary 10, 1948 he was accused, along with Dmitri Shos­tokovich and oth­ers, of “for­mal­ism,” which the pianist and Prokofiev schol­ar Boris Berman describes as “a polit­i­cal libel in the guise of an aes­thet­ic term.” For­mal­ist art was viewed as being elit­ist and “unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic” for its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with form over con­tent. As a result, Prokofiev and the oth­ers were unable to per­form or broad­cast their work. And just ten days after his denun­ci­a­tion, Prokofiev’s wife Lina was arrest­ed and charged with “espi­onage” for try­ing to send mon­ey to her moth­er in Spain. She was sen­tenced to 20 years in prison. Stress from the crises caused Prokofiev’s health to dete­ri­o­rate fur­ther, and on March 5, 1953 he died from a cere­bral hem­or­rhage. Joseph Stal­in died the same day.

h/t Matthew Barnes

Relat­ed con­tent:

Tchaikovsky’s Voice Cap­tured on an Edi­son Cylin­der (1890)

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The Uncensored Andy Warhol-Directed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hello Again” (NSFW)

in Art, Music | October 15th, 2012

post_thecars_helloagain_andywarhol

Andy Warhol was many things to many peo­ple in his long and event­ful career: painter and provo­ca­teur, pro­mot­er and direc­tor. But it sur­prised me to learn that he also made music videos. Well, he made one music video, for The Cars sin­gle “Hel­lo Again” from their 1984 album Heart­beat City. The biggest hit from that album, “You Might Think,” was a mas­sive MTV video hit and one of the first music videos to use com­put­er graph­ics. Warhol plays on much of the aes­thet­ic of the “You Might Think” video, which kind of epit­o­mized the cheesy, slight­ly sex­ist, mid-eight­ies look The Cars made big: giant, scant­i­ly-clad women, rudi­men­ta­ry com­put­er graph­ics scenes fea­tur­ing sun­glass­es and cock­tails, and, of course, plen­ty of cars. But there’s also lots of sig­na­ture Warhol here: lots of par­ties, lots of bod­ies, lots of sex (and nudi­ty).

Pop music always played a sig­nif­i­cant role in Warhol’s work, so it seems only nat­ur­al that he would align him­self with the cut­ting-edge mid-eight­ies syn­th­pop of the Cars. What’s more, he appears in a cameo as a bar­tender in the video, which also fea­tures a very young Gina Ger­shon. For obvi­ous rea­sons, the extend­ed, uncen­sored ver­sion of Warhol’s video (watch it here) didn’t make the rounds on MTV. The cen­sored ver­sion is, you might say, just a lit­tle less sexy, and a lot less Warhol. Since Warhol died in 1987, this video rep­re­sents one of the last pieces of the artist’s work. Warhol, an ear­ly adopter of dig­i­tal graph­ics tech­nol­o­gy, had pre­vi­ous­ly used Ami­ga com­put­ers to ani­mate images of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe and cre­ate com­put­er art of his friend Deb­bie Har­ry. See him “paint” the “first com­put­er art­work,” a por­trait of Har­ry, on an Ami­ga com­put­er below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Clas­sic Meet­ing of Egos

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Reunite in Exotic Marrakesh, 1994

in Music | October 11th, 2012

Wah Wah:

In 1994 Jim­my Page and Robert Plant col­lab­o­rat­ed on a new musi­cal project for the first time since the death 14 years ear­li­er of Led Zep­pelin’s drum­mer, John Bon­ham. The reunion result­ed from an invi­ta­tion to appear on MTV’s hit series Unplugged. But Page and Plant want­ed to steer clear of nos­tal­gia, so they exclud­ed for­mer Zep­pelin bassist John Paul Jones from the project and named it Unled­ded.

The result­ing album and DVD fea­ture an assort­ment of Zep­pelin songs that were rein­ter­pret­ed with the help of an Egypt­ian ensem­ble, an Indi­an vocal­ist and the Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Orches­tra, but per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of the project was a trio of new songs record­ed with local musi­cians in Mar­rakesh, Moroc­co. Those per­for­mances, shown here, were the result of a col­lab­o­ra­tion with tra­di­tion­al musi­cians of the Gnawa minor­i­ty, whose sub-Saha­ran ances­tors were brought to Moroc­co many cen­turies ago as slaves.

“We’d nev­er met the Gnawa when we went there,” said Plant in a 1994 inter­view, “but they were very patient, and smil­ing is a great cur­ren­cy.” Gnawa music is tra­di­tion­al­ly per­formed for prayer and heal­ing, and dif­fers from oth­er North African music. “They play a kind of music which is much more akin to the music of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta than it is to do with Arab music,” Plant said in anoth­er inter­view. “It’s haunt­ing, seduc­tive, and quite allur­ing.”

City Don’t Cry:

The Truth Explodes (Yal­lah):

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of ‘Kash­mir’

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Thelonious Monk, Live in Oslo and Copenhagen (1966)

in Music | October 10th, 2012

A lit­tle present for what would be Thelo­nius Monk’s 95th birth­day today — 100 grand min­utes of Monk per­form­ing live in Oslo and Copen­hagen in 1966. In the spring of that year, Monk brought his leg­endary quar­tet (tenor sax­o­phon­ist Char­lie Rouse, bassist Lar­ry Gales, and drum­mer Ben Riley) to Scan­di­navia to per­form two tele­vised shows. The record­ing, saved for pos­ter­i­ty thanks to YouTube, fea­tures some Monk clas­sics: Blue Monk, Epistro­phy, Round Mid­night and oth­ers. Sit back and enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Advice From the Mas­ter: Thelo­nious Monk Scrib­bles a List of Tips for Play­ing a Gig

A Child’s Intro­duc­tion to Jazz by Can­non­ball Adder­ley (with Louis Arm­strong & Thelo­nious Monk)

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

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Leonard Cohen Plays a Spellbinding Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

in Film, Music | October 10th, 2012

Jimi Hen­drix was a tough act to fol­low under the best of cir­cum­stances. But to fol­low him onstage after mid­night in front of a crowd of more than half a mil­lion peo­ple that had been set­ting fires and throw­ing bot­tles at the stage seemed like an impos­si­ble task for a poet with an acoustic gui­tar and a gen­tle band of back­ing musi­cians. Yet Leonard Cohen turned the volatile sit­u­a­tion at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val into one of the most mag­i­cal per­for­mances of his career.

A lit­tle piece of land four miles off the south­ern coast of Eng­land, the Isle of Wight was host to three great music fes­ti­vals from 1968 to 1970. The last of these was some­thing of a cross between Wood­stock and Alta­mont: flower pow­er with an under­cur­rent of men­ace. Like the Wood­stock fes­ti­val the year before, the 1970 Isle of Wight fes­ti­val was crashed by thou­sands of unpay­ing fans.

Head­lin­ers for the five-day fes­ti­val includ­ed Hen­drix, Miles Davis, the Who and the Doors. By the time Cohen appeared–near the very end of the rainy final night–the atmos­phere had become dan­ger­ous. Dur­ing the Hen­dix per­for­mance, some­one threw a flare onto the top of the stage and set it on fire. Jour­nal­ist Sylvie Sim­mons describes the scene in her new book, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

Ten­sion had been ris­ing at the fes­ti­val for days. The pro­mot­ers had expect­ed a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand peo­ple but half a mil­lion more turned up, many with no inten­tion of pay­ing. Even after the pro­mot­ers were forced to declare it a free fes­ti­val, ill will remained. Dur­ing a set by Kris Kristof­fer­son, bot­tles were thrown and he was booed off­stage. “They were boo­ing every­body,” says Kristof­fer­son. “Except Leonard Cohen.”

As Cohen and his pro­duc­er and key­board play­er Bob John­ston stood watch­ing the may­hem dur­ing Hen­drix’s per­for­mance, Cohen stayed calm. “Leonard was­n’t wor­ried,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “Hen­drix did­n’t care and nei­ther did we. Leonard was always com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they did­n’t have a piano or an organ–I don’t know, some­one had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage–so I could­n’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trail­er tak­ing a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ”

Accord­ing to most accounts it was a lit­tle after two o’clock in the morn­ing when Cohen took the stage. His back­up band, or “Army,” includ­ed John­ston on key­boards, Char­lie Daniels on fid­dle and bass, Ron Cor­nelius on lead gui­tar and Elkin “Bub­ba” Fowler on ban­jo and bass, along with back­up singers Cor­lynn Han­ney, Susan Mus­man­no and Don­na Wash­burn. Cohen had a glazed-over look in his eyes through­out the per­for­mance, the result of his tak­ing the seda­tive Man­drax. “He was calm because of the Man­drax,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “That’s what saved the show and saved the fes­ti­val. It was the mid­dle of the night, all those peo­ple had been sit­ting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hen­drix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days.”

The his­toric per­for­mance was cap­tured on film by Mur­ray Lern­er, who released it in 2009 as Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. The film (above) includes the fol­low­ing songs from the show:

  1. Dia­monds in the Mine
  2. Famous Blue Rain­coat
  3. Bird on the Wire
  4. One of us Can­not be Wrong
  5. The Stranger Song
  6. Tonight Will be Fine
  7. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Good­bye
  8. Sing Anoth­er Song Boys
  9. Suzanne
  10. The Par­ti­san
  11. Seems So Long Ago, Nan­cy
  12. So Long, Mar­i­anne (dur­ing clos­ing cred­its)

Per­haps the most mov­ing moment in the film comes at the begin­ning, when Cohen brings the mas­sive crowd togeth­er by ask­ing a favor: “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” Cohen says, “so I can see where you all are?” As Sim­mons puts it, “Leonard talked to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple he could not see as if they were sit­ting togeth­er in a small dark room.” Or as film­mak­er Lern­er lat­er said, “He mes­mer­ized them. And I got mes­mer­ized also.” Sum­ming up the con­cert and the film, Sim­mons writes: “It was a bril­liant per­for­mance. Lern­er’s cam­eras cap­tured Cohen’s com­mand­ing pres­ence, hyp­no­tist’s charm, and an inti­ma­cy that would seem unfea­si­ble in such a vast, inhos­pitable space.”

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John Lennon’s Victorian Circus Poster Lovingly Remade by Artists and Engravers

in Art, Music | October 9th, 2012

This won­drous lit­tle video is, as they say, guar­an­teed to raise a smile. Accord­ing to Bea­t­les leg­end, John Lennon was shoot­ing a pro­mo­tion­al film for “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” in ear­ly 1967 when he passed by an antique shop and dis­cov­ered a poster from 1843 trum­pet­ing the arrival of Pablo Fan­que’s Cir­cus. The cir­cus, the poster pro­claimed, was to be “for the ben­e­fit of Mr. Kite.” Intrigued, Lennon bought the quirky Vic­to­ri­an poster, hung it on his wall at home, and then pro­ceed­ed to write “Being for the Ben­e­fit of Mr. Kite!,” the sev­enth track on Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band.

Almost 45 years lat­er, Bea­t­les fans still can’t shake the poster from their minds. And, just recent­ly, Peter Dean and a team of artists decid­ed to recre­ate the poster using tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of wood engrav­ing and let­ter­press print­ing. They share their expe­ri­ence in the ele­gant video above. Your can buy your own copy of the lim­it­ed edi­tion print here.

via Kot­tke

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 Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er Demos: The Mak­ing of a Bea­t­les Clas­sic (1966)

Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Gui­tar Solo by George Har­ri­son

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

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Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Tweeted Daily By 92nd Street Y

in Music | October 8th, 2012

You’ve no doubt heard of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s The Well-Tem­pered Clavier. What’s more, you’ve no doubt heard it, even if you could swear you haven’t. (Need a refresh­er? Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s per­for­mance of it here.) If you’d like to gain much more famil­iar­i­ty with this deeply respect­ed piece of music, but in small pieces of it at a time, keep an ear on The Well-Tweet­ed Clavier, going on now from the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Known to pull a cul­tur­al stunt every now and again, 92Y has a plan to tweet about a pre­lude and fugue of The Well-Tem­pered Clavier each and every day. They launched this project on Sep­tem­ber 14, and it should run for a total of 48 days. You can see these tweets by fol­low­ing 92Y on Twit­ter, or sim­ply by check­ing the hash­tag #WTClavier. “The Well-Tem­pered Clavier can be played on any key­board,” 92Y Tweet­ed on Octo­ber 3. “Truth in adver­tis­ing?’ That day, they post­ed three videos asso­ci­at­ed with Pre­lude and Fugue No. 20 in A minor, BWV 865: a two-part per­for­mance and a short talk from pianist and con­duc­tor András Schiff.

At the end of this month, Schiff, famous­ly a boost­er of Bach’s work, opens the New York com­po­nent of his pro­gram The Bach Project, an effort that will, all told, include the San Fran­cis­co Sym­pho­ny, Los Ange­les Phil­har­mon­ic, New York Phil­har­mon­ic, 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall and Great Per­form­ers at Lin­coln Cen­ter. “To me, Bach’s music is not black and white; it’s full of colours,” Schiff writes in his essay “With­out the Ped­al But With Plen­ty of Col­ors.” “In my imag­i­na­tion, each tonal­i­ty cor­re­sponds to a colour. The Well-Tem­pered Clavier, with its 24 pre­ludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, pro­vides an ide­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for this fan­ci­ful fan­ta­sy.” You can explore these col­ors on 92Y’s main Well-Tweet­ed Clavier page, which actu­al­ly col­or-codes all the pre­ludes and fugues thus far tweet­ed so you can expe­ri­ence them as chro­mat­i­cal­ly as Schiff does. “Of course, this is a very per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion, and each of you may have a dif­fer­ent opin­ion,” he adds. “Nev­er­the­less, if some of us hap­pen to believe that music is more than just a series of notes and sounds, then a lit­tle bit of fan­ta­sy is wel­come.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Open Gold­berg Vari­a­tions: J.S. Bach’s Mas­ter­piece Free to Down­load

A Big Bach Down­load: The Com­plete Organ Works for Free

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

A Young Glenn Gould Plays Bach

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Higgs Boson, the Musical: CERN Data Turned into Melody

in Music, Science, Technology | October 4th, 2012

When researchers at CERN announced the dis­cov­ery of the Hig­gs Boson this sum­mer, Domeni­co Vic­i­nan­za, a pro­fes­sion­al com­pos­er and par­ti­cle physi­cist at DANTE (Deliv­ery of Advanced Net­work Tech­nol­o­gy to Europe) took the Hig­gs research data and turned it into a melody. He explained how he did it to PRI’s The World:

In order to take a sub­atom­ic par­ti­cle like the Hig­gs Boson and con­vert it into a melody, to notes, what we do is basi­cal­ly take the data and asso­ciate with each one of the numer­ic val­ues a sin­gle note on a score. Melody is fol­low­ing basi­cal­ly exact­ly the same behav­ior the sci­en­tif­ic data is show­ing. So when the piano starts play­ing, you can hear some real­ly real­ly high pitched notes.… They are the sig­na­ture of the Hig­gs Boson melody and they are cor­re­spond­ing to a peak in the sci­en­tif­ic draft research has shown at CERN. The actu­al data points are only the one played by the piano at the begin­ning and then played by piano and marim­ba in the sec­ond rep­e­ti­tion. So the marim­ba was play­ing the low­er notes and the piano was play­ing the high­er notes. So it sounds like a Cuban Habanera but this is clas­si­cal insi­d­ence.… I thor­ough­ly believe that sci­ence can offer musi­cians a won­der­ful way to look for inter­est­ing melodies, inter­est­ing har­monies, inter­est­ing son­ic phe­nom­e­na. They can be tak­en and be used by com­posers to cre­ate some real enter­tain­ment.

Back in 2009, Vic­i­nan­za orig­i­nal­ly caught our atten­tion when he and the ‘Lost Sounds Orches­tra’ gave a unique per­for­mance, play­ing ancient instru­ments live in Stock­holm while the audi­ence watched dancers per­form some 7,000 miles away in Kuala Lumpur on an ultra-fast dis­play screen. You can catch scenes from that per­for­mance right here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Hig­gs Boson and Its Dis­cov­ery Explained with Ani­ma­tion

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Hig­gs Boson with Leonard Susskind, the Father of String The­o­ry

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