Classical Music for Aficionados

In Vino Veritas

2 CD set of Vladimir Sofronitsky, one disc a Chopin recital and the second a Scriabin recital.  The Chopin was great but doesn't displace Moravec, but the Scriabin is truly other-worldly.  I don't know if it has something to do with the acoustic of the recording space or the piano.  Or perhaps it really is just Scriabin's sonorities...

There is a new book out on Richard Wagner, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross.
 I came to Wagner while studying with Vincent Scully about Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, inventor of the steel framed skyscraper, always replete with ornamentation that has never been matched.
I realize that some here revile Wagner.  This book refutes some of the reasons often given for this revulsion, so perhaps it is worth quoting:
quote
Ross has much that’s interesting to say about the responses to Wagner’s controversial, wide-ranging, and widely circulated writings about art, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and any number of other topics; he’s attentive to Wagner’s early anarchist and leftist views; and, of course, he devotes many pages to the embrace of Wagner’s music and ideas by Hitler and the Third Reich. 
The strongest pages in Wagnerism—they come in the final third of the book, mostly in the chapter “Siegfried’s Death”—deal with the complex position of Wagner in Hitler’s imagination, Nazi Germany, and the Allied countries before, during, and immediately after World War II. Ross brings a feeling for historical paradox and ambiguity to this prototypical case study in the relationship among art, society, and politics. He explores the long-running scholarly debates about what he refers to as “the Wagner-Hitler problem.” Addressing scholarly discussions as to whether Hitler’s obsession with Wagner was dominated by a rapturous engagement with the operas themselves or an enthusiasm for Wagner’s writings on anti-Semitism and the German spirit, Ross concludes that “Hitler’s relationship with Wagner remained one of musical fandom rather than of ideological fanaticism.” 
Whatever attracted him most strongly to Wagner, Hitler was determined to make him central to the iconography and mythology of Nazism, though the composer and his work were not wholeheartedly embraced by the citizens of the Third Reich. Wagner “was too strange, too eccentric, to serve as a reliable ideological bulwark” in Nazi Germany, Ross writes. “Nor was his work popular enough, in the mass-market sense, to operate as a unifying force.” 
As for the claims that Wagner’s music was played in the concentration camps, Ross examines them carefully and concludes that if it happened, it was only rarely. “The vast majority of survivor testimonies,” he writes, “indicate that the music of the camps was popular in nature: marches, dance tunes, hits of the day, light classics.” 
Ross argues that “Wagner’s popularity in America actually surged” in the 1940s. Arturo Toscanini and other conductors performed the operas before enthusiastic audiences; apparently some concertgoers didn’t find it difficult to separate the nineteenth-century artist from the country that he had mythologized and that was now a sworn enemy. The New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote that Wagner’s operas were “the antithesis of Hitler, and crushing condemnation of all that Hitlerism implies.”

end quote

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/the-cults-of-wagner/
if you encounter a paywall, you can read it here
https://outline.com/z94bDB

Wagner = Hitler  period .

Schumann, Humoreske, Novelletten, Nachtstucke, Piano Sonata #2 / Andras Schiff.  Live recording by ECM, 2 CDs.  Not surprisingly it being ECM, the piano recording is excellent, and Schiff is on top form for his audience.