Yamaha

I can remember the days when Yamaha was a motor vehicle company, churning out thousands of Japanese cars per annum, in that sudden amazing splurge of industry that occurred in Japan in the fifties/sixties. 

The first Yamaha piano I came across was in Queenstown.  I was touring with the NZ Opera Company in one of their piano tours (a very much cut-down version of La Boheme, for half a dozen principals and no chorus) and came across this baby grand at the venue we were using.  It looked marvellous; it wasn't anything like it looked, and for some years afterwards I thought that Yamaha pianos were likely to be rubbish, as this one seemed to be.

However, there came a time when Yamaha got things right, and their pianos came within cooee of being as good as the famous old European names, like Steinway, even though the way the pianos were made was entirely different.

Afterwards, Yamaha turned to electronic keyboards and all sorts of other electronic musical devices, (such as the Yamaha emx5014c case for their stereo mixers). Now they're a brand name trusted in all sorts of circles, as you can see from these videos. 

Wagner & Fry

Watched a documentary called Wagner & Me by Stephen Fry yesterday in which he expounds his enthusiasm for Wagner's music.  Fry has loved Wagner since he was a child, and he was like a child in the way he reacted to coming for the first time to Bayreuth, and the theatre Wagner had built for his music-dramas.  His enthusiasm was certainly one of the high points of this otherwise rather sluggishly-put-together doco, in which the music is often heard but there is only a little sign of it being performed on stage.   (We see some rehearsals, but no actual performances, I don't think.)

Fry also examined his Jewish background in relation to the way Hitler had 'taken over' Wagner, and smeared the huge colourful tapestry that Wagner created.  He sits on the steps where the Nuremberg rallies took place and feels uncomfortable about being there.  He can't bring himself to stand up on the platform where Hitler stood, even though it's a well-known tourist spot.  Towards the end of the doco he meets up with a women who survived Auschwitz - she was a young cellist and played in the orchestra that was produced from the prisoners.  Fry discusses his quandary with loving Wagner's music when Hitler had so besmirched it and left his historical stain on it.  The woman, in so many words, tells him to get over it.  At the end of the day, Wagner's genius is far more important than Hitler's attempt to use Wagner for his own ends.  (Though Fry also points out that Wagner wrote a particularly nasty anti-Semitic article at one point in his life, possibly because two Jewish composers, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were much more popular than him at that point.)

There's one particularly delightful moment in the film.  A pianist whose name I didn't catch is playing and discussing the Tristan und Isolde 'chord' that only gets resolved at the very end of the opera.  (It's interrupted at one other point when resolution seems imminent.)  He's playing on Wagner's own piano, a Steinway that was presented to Wagner by that company.  It's a massive grand and still holding up well after more than a century of use.  Fry, who claims no great skills as a musician at an earlier point in the film, waits with enormous anticipation to play the very last note of the opera, when all has been brought to fruition.  And hits the wrong note!  His embarrassment and hilarity makes it worth watching the film.

The other interesting thing was seeing the inside of the Bayreuth theatre, which is an odd building.  It's design - inside and out - is fairly ugly, to be honest, and from the film it looks as though the stage is narrower than the audience area.  Yet every seat has a clear view of the stage, according to Fry.  The stage seems as deep as it's wide, which is an odd way to design a stage.  However, it obviously works, since it's been showing successful productions since it was first built.  We saw the stage machinery as well, both under the stage and high above it - very high, in fact.  And then there's the intriguing way in which the orchestra isn't in a pit at the front of the stage, but virtually underneath it.  Only the conductor is visible to the singers.  There are a few comments on it here in Wikipedia.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationships with Wagner's music myself.  Personally I think the music-dramas (he wouldn't call them operas) are excessively lengthy and exhausting for audiences.  They're self-indulgent in terms of how much Wagner thinks needs to be included.  And the best tunes, by far, are given to the orchestra.  In fact, it's the orchestral music that grabs me far more than the singing, which, while it might be dramatic in form, is often tuneless to the point of tedium.  The orchestral interludes in the operas make me wonder if perhaps Wagner mightn't have been a much better composer of symphonies, if he'd gone in that direction.  Though if he'd considered that those needed to be as long, comparatively, as his operas, I might struggle!

Glenn Gould

I’ve just finished reading an unusual book, A Romance on Three Legs, by Katie Hafner. I’m not much fussed about the title, which actually doesn’t make a lot of sense when you get down to it, but the book otherwise is wonderfully written.
It’s firstly the story of Glenn Gould, that extraordinary Canadian pianist who wowed the world with his playing of Bach and various other composers, and who was also (pretty much undeniably) the most eccentric genius/pianist to walk the earth for many moons. He was self-centred, increasingly a hypochondriac (he wore heavy coats in summer, and fingerless gloves), arrogant, and in general a fair pain to deal with. Yet some people got past all that and cared about him.
Secondly, it’s the story of Verne Edquist, an almost blind piano tuner, who served Gould’s tuning needs for a good deal of the latter’s later years.
It’s also the story of the wonderful Steinway piano that Gould fell in love with. It had a ‘name’ CD318, and was perfectly attuned to Gould’s needs. After having searched without success for the ‘right’ piano all over the States and Canada, it turned out that CD318 was sitting waiting for him in a hall in his own city – and he’d actually played on it as a child prodigy.
Beyond these three stories are more: the growth and success and decline of Steinway and Sons, an extraordinary piano-making company that was without rival in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the intricate way in which a grand piano is constructed, piece by piece, and then worked over until it’s tuned to perfection. Hafner goes into detail, the way North American journalists do, but here she keeps us interested from the word go.
Gould seldom comes across as someone you’d want to spend much time with. He was often devious, he dropped longstanding friends at the drop of a hat, he was obsessive about a multitude of things (including another man’s wife), he was ridiculously superstitious, and he felt the world was there to serve him. He was forgiven most of these aspects of his character because of his ability to play so wonderfully. There is no doubt he had genius: quite apart from anything else, he could study a score away from the piano, and play it perfectly once he sat down in front of the keyboard. ‘Sat down’ is apt: he always sat on an ancient chair (it eventually lost all padding) even at concerts, and it was so low that his nose was virtually level with the keyboard. Any pianist will tell you that this is an impossible and potentially unhealthy way to play, but Gould did it, because it somehow suited his utterly fluid style. [The photo shows him sitting relatively normally at the keyboard, but other photos have him sitting in a much less 'normal' position.]
Did I mention that Gould was opinionated? (Often to his disadvantage: he once missed out on hearing an older pianistic genius play because he disdained his choice of repertoire.) Here’s Hafner on Gould’s musical tastes (which admittedly varied at times):
Glenn Gould seldom played the Romantics, and even spoke scornfully of the entire 19th century piano repertoire, including Beethoven. He had a passion for Beethoven’s early sonatas but considered the composer’s middle period – the Appassionatia and Waldstein, for example – nothing but ‘junk’ (although he did record most of the composer’s major works for piano). Gould could be a fickle critic; he dismissed Mozart’s later music as either hedonistic or, at the other extreme, mechanical. “Too many of his works sound like interoffice memos,” he once wrote. Yet he was very fond of Mozart’s early sonatas, especially those with a Baroque character, and he ended up recording all of them. He liked Mendelssohn but dismissed most of his piano music. He simply ignored Schubert, while more thoroughly denouncing Liszt, Chopin and Schumann. Early 20th century composers like Ravel and Debussy didn’t fare much better. And he detested Bartok and Stravinsky; in 1952, when Gould was nineteen, he filled in a questionnaire for the CBC and placed those two musicians under the heading “Most Over-estimated Modern Composers.”

Hafner's biography may be incomplete in some respects; the Wikipedia article (see link under his name above) discusses a number of other matters that make little or no appearance in the book, such as his extensive writing and his compositions. There are a bunch of videos of Gould, both in black and white and colour, on You Tube.