encores encore

[calimac]

In an earlier entry I wrote about the perils for reviewers of identifying encores. Little did I know I was about to face my most frustrating encounter yet.

After Saturday's concert, with its rough, energetic encore by the rough, energetic solo violinist, I dropped a phone message on the symphony administration to query the piece. I got a call back Sunday afternoon after the matinee reprise (at which, they told me, he played Bach instead). My informant didn't have the name of the composer in front of him, but it was a recitative and scherzo by someone whose name he pronounced Cry-sir. If that were German it would be spelled Kreiser. I didn't know any Kreiser, so I said, "Is that Kreisler?", meaning (though I didn't say so specifically) Fritz Kreisler, the renowned early/mid 20C violinist known for writing his own encores and whimsically attributing them to obscure earlier composers. No, he repeated, Kreiser. I grabbed my handy ex-lib copy of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and hastily flipped through it. "Could it have been Kreutzer?" I asked. I pronounced that roughly Croy-tsur, and I thought it might be rendered Cry-sir by someone who didn't know German. I read off the name Rodolphe Kreutzer, a historically important violinist who wrote etudes and caprices for violin (though I didn't add that he was the dedicatee of a Beeethoven work that's since been known as the Kreutzer Sonata).

"That's it," said my informant, and I prepared to submit a review saying so. But before sending it in, I read the review in this morning's Mercury, which attributed the encore to Fritz Kreisler. "Oh, boy, did he ever make a mistake," was my first thought, but then I decided to Google the title given there, "Recitative and Scherzo-Caprice", with each composer's name, and found that Kreisler apparently indeed wrote one by that title, and nothing turned up at a hasty glance for Kreutzer. But this is teh Interwebs. The entire spectrum of Google results could easily have equally gotten the two mixed up, or maybe Kreisler wrote the piece and whimsically attributed it to Kreutzer. Baker's was no further help. I don't really know Kreisler's compositions. The idiom seemed a wee bit advanced for Kreutzer's time, but a showpiece encore would not be written in the same somber language as the heavy concert staples I know best.

My deadline was upon me, and there was no time to search further. So what the review now says is "by Fritz Kreisler (apparently: I was told it was Rodolphe Kreutzer)," which is my written equivalent of throwing my hands up in disgust. If it is Kreisler, could it be that the administrator of a semi-major symphony orchestra was not familiar with his name? Pfeh! I may well have just barely wiggled out of being led into making a major fool of myself. Or maybe I still have; I don't know yet.

Comments

[chorale.livejournal.com]

That's a good review. Thanks for the link.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Here's how I handled a situation where the pianist announced the encore inaudibly; in retrospect, I think the encore was not one of the bagatelles, but more likely one of the Schubert moments musicaux:

The audience applauded wildly, and after several bows, Kovacevich made an inaudible announcement from the stage and sat down at the piano for an encore. It was brief, about 90 seconds long — a Beethoven bagatelle, perhaps? This he played with such riveting concentration and intensity that you knew, immediately, that you were in the presence of greatness. It was pure magic, and it was over much too soon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Confession of frank uncertainty, as you do here, is not foolish. Being confidently certain of what is not so, which is what I may nearly have done - that's foolish.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

There are ways of hearing audio samples to confirm or rule out compositions. For instance, this page (found by searching "kreisler recitative site:emusic.com") has links to half-minute samples of the recitative and the scherzo-caprice. While it's true that the samples are never of the thirty seconds you really want to hear, they might be useful in cases like this.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I would have considered something like that, had there been:

1) Sufficient time, by which I mean not just physical time to listen to the clip, but time to consider it in repose instead of under hot deadline pressure;

2) Confidence in the accuracy of the ascriptions, which I do not have in YouTube, which also has the work - I don't know anything about this site;

3) Sufficiently long clips, which in this case 30 seconds would not have been;

4) A service I didn't have to sign up for, something I will absolutely not do on the web unless my time is completely open-ended.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I suggest it to you now as a resource, not as something you should have known or guessed. I'm surprised that 30 seconds wouldn't have helped. There's no need to sign up for emusic. They want to sell you mp3s (as does Amazon, Naxos, Rhapsody, and other places where you can hear excerpts), but if you don't want to buy it, there are still the samples from tracks. I do believe that if you sign up for a free version of Naxos, you can hear a little bit more from the tracks, but that might be incorrect — either outdated or mistaken, take your pick.

Other possibilities include the scores at IMSLP, but these might not happen to include Kreisler, since he died just about 50 years ago, which is only yesterday to copyright lawyers. I'd have suggested the MIDI files at the classical music archives (CMA), but those require at least the free sign-up, and then you only can download five per day, which means you have to pretty much already know what you're looking for.

Anyway, I'm just trying to be helpful for the next time, partly because I enjoy your reviews.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, I understand, and even the brief clips could be of use, along with Naxos and IMSLP, both of which are on my list, and this might be as good as Amazon, which I also use occasionally, though the manner of the track listings does not leave me with absolute confidence that they understand the classification structure of classical music pieces. (Amazon doesn't even understand the classification structure of books.)

Given sufficient time, I might have toodled around looking up Kreutzer, though I'd need a site that still supports full-bodied field searching, which surprisingly few - even those that claim to - still do, because the increasingly popular high-recall undifferentiated keyword searching would make it difficult to sort out the few recordings of Kreutzer the composer from a whole lot of the Kreutzer Sonata. (There are ways to limit searches, of course, but when you're looking for elusive items they are often very undesirable.)

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Amazon and eMusic and iTunes and all those guys think that every piece of music is called a "song," and they're not sure if Bach is a conductor or a singer. Finding things on emusic is an ordeal, using their own inadequate system. It's useful to remember [site:---] in Google searches, in order to bypass these things entirely. It's too bad there's no online version of my dictionary of musical themes. Handy book, but not extensive enough.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you may find this interesting. It's a video file (AVI) of the original Russian movie Lieutenant Kije with music by Prokofiev, from which the suite was taken. It's at archive.org, and the quality isn't hi-fi, but it's certainly watchable, and it has subtitles. I took a peek at it, and there's a character in it who looks just like your userpic. Well, somewhat. The whole thing is 746 MB, and there's a larger file in MP4 format at the website.

And now I'm going to bed. Night!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, I found that last year to my total delight.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The most common error is not grasping the concept of a work in multiple movements.