Favorite books and music of 2022

 As the season of "Year in Review" posts comes to an end, I'm thinking not only about the projects I saw through to completion this year (the biggest of which were the final revisions of my book manuscript), but the wonderful array of books and music I've consumed this year. Here's the roundup, along with some comments and observations.

Music

Strangely, my music consumption this year was modest compared to what it's been during previous years. Perhaps I was so absorbed with my various writing tasks, as well as with grant applications, prep for my CD recording in June, and the like, that I just didn't have it in me to engage in the depth of listening to match what I did in 2021. However, there were a few noteworthy albums I enjoyed. In classical music, the biggest discovery was Benjamin Allard's recording of the complete Bach organ works (with a few clavichord performances thrown in). I'm trying to listen to this relatively closely, so I've been slow to progress through the huge set; however, even just judging by the first couple of discs, the achievement is amazing. The playing is spectacular, and the music--much of which is new to me--is really brilliant. I've also been listening somewhat obsessively to the Peabody Trio's recording of Beethoven's Op.70 (these are on modern instruments, but are wonderfully flexible and deep), as well as to Robert Levin's complete Mozart sonata cycle, which I'll be reviewing next year. Outside of classical music, I've really enjoyed Ethan Iverson's jazz album "Every Note Is True" (especially for its large-scale pacing).

Books

But it was a good year for reading! As ever, I've been somewhat lazy about keeping up with academic literature in my field. I tend to think that the bad stuff, which isn't worth reading anyway, will turn out not to have mattered, and that the good stuff will keep rearing up over the coming years, and that if this is true it makes sense to hold off and read things a few years after they're published. Nonetheless, I did enjoy some new or new-ish academic books. Highlights in this category were:

• Matt Strohl, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies (not exactly in my field, but there were enough resonances with my academic interests that I was able to review it for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism)
• Adeline Mueller, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood (a brilliant and exacting study, the kind that makes me realize just how lazy a historian I actually am)
• Rebecca Cypess, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment
• Mark Ferraguto, Beethoven 1806
• Yoel Greenberg, How Sonata Forms (an excellent book, written in fabulous prose. The hardcore music-theory portions I'm not really qualified to comment on, but the premise, framing, and methodological discussions are revelatory and pertinent)
• Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy
• Tom Beghin, Beethoven's French Piano
• John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity (can't believe it took me so long to get to this!)
• I also read a bunch of Benedict Taylor, whose stuff is pretty amazing (The Melody of Time remains a highlight)

Outside of academic writing, I had a particularly rich year of reading novels. Because I don't tend to keep track of how many novels I read per year, I don't actually know whether there were more than usual in 2022 (and in any case, I'm usually reading some sort of fiction)--but I have the sense that there were. Interestingly, although I didn't explicitly set out to read novels by women (I had tried this sort of thing in 2017 or '18, deciding to read only female novelists for a year), much of what I read ended up being by women, just by accident. There were some revelatory new finds for me:

• I read three novels by the wonderful Tessa Hadley - Free Love, Late in the Day, and The Past. I suspect that The Past may have been, in some absolute sense, the "best" of these; but Late in the Day was the one I found most moving and important, for my own life
• Octavia Butler, Blood Child - I didn't really enjoy this collection, but I'm told that my taste is faulty
• Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black - this was an amazing book, with some of the most beautiful sentences I've read in a long time. I didn't ultimately care for the story or characters, but the truly gorgeous prose was enough to keep me involved
• Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris - spectacular novel. If Mantel's sentences are the most beautiful I've read recently, Bowen is perfection at the level of the paragraph. A gorgeous novel, in every way.
• J.M. Coetzee, Foe - it took me about 66% of the book before I really got into it, but once this happened, it was excellent. And it's interesting to see seeds of Coetzee's trademark terseness in this early book of his. It was less sparse than his mature work, but there were passages of real beauty, where one had the sense that each word had been chosen with astonishing care, and this seemed to prefigure the experience of reading, say, Disgrace or Elizabeth Costello.
• Nabokov, Mary - again, astonishing prose, and remarkable book
• Rachel Cusk, Aftermath - is it fiction, or not? I found it moving but perplexing
• Proust, Swann's Way, in the Lydia Davis translation. This was great, and I tweeted a bit (in May? June?) about some favorite passages. I didn't love Proust when I read the cycle (in the old translation) some years ago, and though I see that this new edition is a big improvement, I still mostly didn't enjoy the text. There were some wonderful, revelatory, moving passages, though! But I found myself thinking back to that quip about Wagner, that there are lovely moments separated by terrible half-hours.
• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow - recommended by a friend. Very easy to read, feels like literary candy. I didn't like the prose style, which felt smarmy and smug...but the last third of the book had some lovely things in it, and the ending was moving.
• Orwell, 1984
• Skinner, Walden Two

I also read some wonderful non-academic nonfiction:

• Russ Roberts, Wild Problems - highly recommended, very humane book with lots of wisdom in it
• Dan Moller, The Way of Bach - also highly recommended, a rare success at turning some detailed philosophical discussions of music and art into a reader-friendly trade book with a narrative arc. A model for what I'm trying to write at the moment, and far smarter, better, and deeper than some other attempts at this genre
• Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch - tons of fun! I was less thrilled with his Discover Your Inner Economist
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

I also read some good academic books from other fields, most notably Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, Aaron Hanlon, A World of Disorderly Notions, Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, and a few others.

All of this probably means that the "Recommended Books" tab on this blog needs to be updated!

Finally, I started and then abandoned a bunch of books that I just couldn't get into, despite (in all of these cases) wanting to be able to get into them. Perhaps my tastes just aren't quite up to the task, or I'm missing something?

• Ali Smith, Autumn
• Susan Blum, Ungrading
• Oliver Roeder, Seven Games (this, for instance, was a book I really wanted to love)
• Larry Lockridge, The Great Cypress Think Tank
• Jeremy Denk, Every Good Boy Does Fine
• Nick Riggle, On Being Awesome
• Laura Kipnis, Against Love
• Agnes Callard, Aspiration
• George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I'm sure there were others as well, but I can't remember them.

And to end, I'll say that what I'm most looking forward to reading at the beginning of 2023 is more Elizabeth Bowen, Anita Brookner, and Maeve Brennan! Another year beginning with female novelists.

Happy new year!

Sondheim's most underrated show?

I've always been obsessed with Sondheim's musicals. In general, however, my fascination is entangled with broad features of his technique and aesthetic vision, rather than with any particular work. In the former category, I love the clarity with which he discusses the details of his craft. He often stated in interviews and lectures that writers/composers should be able to defend every word of their librettos and every note of their scores, and this is an ideal he certainly pursued - and indeed, this self-awareness is something that unites all of the artists in my pantheon, especially Mozart. In the second category, I resonate particularly with the ambivalence so many of Sondheim's characters experience, as well as the philosophical acuity of his shows (something I wrote about at the end of last year). 

Nonetheless, even if my intellectual interest in Sondheim is bound up with aspects of his technique and vision that apply to all of his shows, I can't help but have developed favorites. These works, to which I return again and again, are, perhaps unsurprisingly, beloved in mainstream culture as well. I find Sweeney Todd to contain some of Sondheim's best musical storytelling; I find Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods to be his most philosophically stimulating and meaningful shows (even compared with the rest of his extremely meaningful output); and I love the musical classicism of A Little Night Music, the verbal brilliance of Follies, and the cleverness of Pacific Overtures. None of these choices is unusual; none cuts against the cultural grain.

But in the course of revisiting much of Sondheim's work over the past few months, I've started to wonder whether Merrily We Roll Along could be his most underrated work. It was commercially unsuccessful (though this isn't saying much, since by this standard most of his output is criminally underrated). But my impression is that Merrily is also underrated by many critics and musicians. I had certainly dismissed it for most of my life, as had many of my family and friends. I've never seen it performed live, nor have I seen a theatrical recording that seemed to do it justice. Thus, I can't speak to the overarching effect of the show as a piece of theater. However, from the point of view of the songs, it has some of the best and most impressive writing I've encountered in Sondheim's oeuvre. These are better than much of Follies and Pacific Overtures, and Night Music, at least, and I could imagine that the show as a whole might be better in some ways than Sweeney or Into the Woods.

Performances of three particularly good songs:

"Not a day goes by" (it's amazing how much Sondheim can do with a simple minor triad, not to mention the power of the text and the extraordinary performance):

"Opening doors" (one of Sondheim's epic puzzle songs, complete with a joke about Stravinsky in the middle, here sung by the original cast at the 20-year reunion - an easier rendition to follow than in their earlier studio recording):

"Our time":

The fact that Merrily strikes me as being underrated also raises the (related) question of whether some of his other shows are overrated. In general, I don't think that this is the case; Sondheim's work is so good that even now it's probably, on the whole, a bit underrated. (And I'd also guess that even many of his devotees don't realize just how great he was, and thus that he's in that sense underrated, even by those who do love his shows.) Nonetheless, I suspect that some other of his shows have received more attention than they deserve in comparison with Merrily. For instance, Pacific Overtures does have some nice moments, but its score isn't as consistently great as Merrily's; and Night Music has wonderful music, but the play is extremely shabby both in conception and especially in execution.

My year of listening and reading

[This is an abridged version of a longer post written for violinist.com]

Each year, as the end of December approaches, I receive an array of "year in review" newsletters. 2021 is no exception. Every time I open my inbox I find another such email, with details of performances, recordings, and other musical projects undertaken over the previous 12 months by friends and colleagues. Sometimes, reading these newsletters, I find myself wondering: how do they manage to do so much? But more often I simply enjoy the ritual of reflecting on past successes and shoring up hopes for the future.

However, as 2021 rolls into 2022, and with a fresh wave of Covid-related cancellations and closures on the horizon, I feel aware of the sheer circularity of it all. Never in my experience has the "arrow-of-time" metaphor felt less apt: 2021 doesn't really appear to be over, but (like 2020) seems ready to stretch endlessly into the future. Perhaps as a result, I feel disinclined to take an accounting of accomplishments of the past year, much less to lay out goals for the coming months. But this does seem a moment to reflect on some of the music and books that I consumed over the past year, and which made 2021 more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.

Listening

Because I began 2020 with a busy concert schedule (albeit one cut off rather abruptly after the first quarter of the year), I count 2021 as the first year I spent mostly off the stage. Of course, there were a few straggling concerts--but, for the most part, in 2021 my musical identity was not that of a performer but of...a listener. This turned out to be the source of many unexpected delights. In the past, I spent so much time making music that I barely found the mental and aural space to enjoy hearing it; yet in 2021, I rediscovered the joys of being in the audience, and particularly of listening in complete cycles rather than just spot-checking favorite movements or works.

During the first portion of the year, I focused almost exclusively on Beethoven, listening to the bulk of his sonata, chamber, and concerto output. Being a card-carrying period performer, I am always on the lookout for compelling recordings that use fortepianos and gut strings, since, particularly with Beethoven, the old instruments make it easier to capture the gripping, volatile excitement of the music. Beethoven pushed players and instruments alike to their limits (and sometimes beyond those limits!), and the danger of the music is often dulled by the power of the modern equipment used by most performers today. It is only because the fortepiano and period violin are comparatively delicate instruments that they can be played, as Beethoven intended, at the very edge of possibility.

For some of Beethoven's repertoire, 2021 gave me the opportunity to revisit favorite cycles from an earlier phase of period performance. I listened twice-through to the marvelous piano sonata cycle by Malcolm Bilson and colleagues. Age has not dulled these performances; the cycle as a whole still strikes me as one of the greatest Beethoven recordings I've ever heard. (I also supplemented this cycle with some other, more recent recordings, including Andreas Staier's exploration of opp.31, 34, and 35.) I also re-listened to Bilson's recording of the Beethoven cello sonatas (with Anner Bylsma), and, here as well, the music-making is extraordinary. Finally, I re-listened a few times to the Beethoven piano concerto cycle, performed by Robert Levin. Although these works have been re-recorded recently by both Ronald Brautigam and Kristian Bezuidenhout, I am still partial to Levin's recording. Whereas the more recent readings find welcome lyricism and clarity in Beethoven's writing, they simply lack Levin's audacity, brilliance, and wit. Although Levin is known primarily as a Mozart performer, I think he is at his best in this slightly later repertoire. The improvised cadenza to the first movement of the Fourth Concerto is a particular highlight--though the other cadenzas, too, as well as the playing overall, are consistently astonishing. (Although I remain committed to my preference for period performances, I also loved a spectacular recent modern-instrument recording by Eugene Albulescu and the Orchestra of Friends.)

I also discovered some more recent Beethoven recordings. The most revelatory was Trio Goya's performance of the Piano Trios op.1. These early works are difficult to bring off well, since they demand that the performers balance both classical polish and lyrical intensity. Previously, I had found the Castle Trio to provide a close approximation; but Trio Goya's readings are deeper in every respect. Speaking of the piano trios, I also recently discovered a wonderful complete cycle by (modern-instrument) Van Baerle Trio. Although I still prefer Trio Goya for Op.1, these readings of the other works in the cycle are wonderfully stylish and sensitive. Alongside these recordings of the piano trios, I listened to several complete violin sonata cycles, including those by Midori Seiler with Jos van Immerseel, Susanna Ogata with Ian Watson, Ralph Holmes with Richard Burnett, and Benjamin Hudson with Mary Verney. In this field, it was difficult to find a clear favorite, since each recording had very different strengths. Finally, I surveyed a few new recordings of the Violin Concerto, of which my favorite modern-instrument reading was by Daniel Lozakovich--though my heart still belongs to both the Monica Huggett recording and the early (and live?) Heifetz/Toscanini recording.

Following my Beethoven phase, I embarked on a survey of Mozart's violin concertos in a number of new period recordings. Here, as with the Beethoven sonatas, it was impossible to choose a favorite, though among recent recordings the cycle by Christoph Koncz was perhaps the most elegant, and the cycle by Nils-Erik Sparf the most creative and compelling. (The classic recording by Monica Huggett remains my benchmark.)

Finally, I ended the year with a pretty obsessive dive into Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin. My original go-to recording was by Ian Bostridge with Mitsuko Uchida: although the timbre of Bostridge's voice isn't always pleasing, and his intonation is occasionally imperfect, I adore his delivery of the text; and Uchida's piano playing is sublime. However, this year I listened to some other recordings: Mark Padmore with Paul Lewis (gorgeous singing, boring piano playing); Christoph Prégardien with Andreas Staier (abrasive singing, gorgeous piano playing); and Jan Kobow with Kristian Bezuidenhout (difficult to get into at first, and with a handful of imperfect songs...but ultimately mesmerizing). If only it were possible to pair Padmore with Bezuidenhout for this cycle, as Harmonia Mundi has already done for An die ferne Geliebte, Winterreise, Dichterliebe.

Finally, I enjoyed some recordings that didn't fit into any of these three major listening projects. Highlights include: Hank Knox's reading of some Scarlatti sonatas, David Hyun-Su Kim's Schumann, and Trio Goya's spectacular Haydn recording.

Reading

Book recommendations may be of less direct interest to readers here. I didn't do much violin-specific reading in the past year, though there are some broadly music-related books that I very much enjoyed. Two are new (or relatively new) trade books: Dan Moller's The Way of Bach, and Robin Wallace's Hearing Beethoven. Both are beautiful and beautifully-written; the authors reflect on music itself, as well as a wide range of related topics. On the academic side, I read or re-read a number of older books, the most enjoyable of which were Dean Sutcliffe's The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, Annette Richards's The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, David Yearsley's Bach's Feet, and Nina Penner's Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. I also kept up a pretty brisk pace through various novels (the best of which were by Dorothy Baker, Shirley Hazzard, Dermot Healy, Martin Amis, and others) and poetry. I wrote about some of those other books in this e-interview back in March. Many of the novels I read this year were brought to my attention by the wonderful literary podcast Backlisted, which has been a source of entertainment and stimulation over the past year and a half.

Happy new year to everyone!