I was looking at the other offers of an eBay seller and happened on a CD by composer Alla Pavlova, whom I had never heard of. Wondered who she was and what the music sounded like. Turns out to be born in Russia in 1952, established in the US in 1990, and apparently a late developer, limiting herself for a long time to Lieder and short piano pieces and writing her first big symphonic piece only in 1994. As for what the music sounds like, well, it’s on YouTube. The little presentation blurb says that “her language, in the beginning close to the avant-garde, shifted to neo-romanticism from year 2000 on.”. You bet! What it sounds like? Like Delius or the tritest early 20th century romantics, in too long and repeating again and again the same motives. It’s appalling. I’m listening as I write this (second movement) ad I don’t know if I’ll be able to reach the end. I wonder when she’ll shift to writing in the style of Mozart: like, when Trump gets elected?
Anything goes in our age of absolute philistinism. A composer can relinquish any compositional exigency, write anything that comes through his mind, any pastiche derivative of the tritest music from a century ago, and you’ll find Naxos to record it and an audience to clap and cheer. And when do painters go back to painting in the style of Frederic Remington? Now wouldn’t THAT put New York back at the center of the arts map? But, sure, there might be an undiscriminatng public for it…
I immediatly wrote a very scathing review which I posted on Amazon. Since I don’t even own that CD, I wonder if it is legitimate to publish it here…
The presentation blurb on YouTube calls her “one of the foremost female composers of her generation”. Is the level really so low?
There’s one silver lining to it: here’s a bunch of CDs that I won’t feel an urge to buy.
P.S. Looking at the CD’s backcover, I see that it the recording was “made possible thanks to generous sponsorship from Mind for Health”. Oh, okay, I was surprised too that Naxos’ Klaus Heymann, usually a shrewd businessman, would have financed such muck with his own pocket money. But who the heck is “Mind for Heath”? Google seach… oh yeah… Hypnosis, huh?… “biofeedback therapy” and “self-regulation training”? Well, I guess there’s a pattern there…
Posted my reviews of Reinbert de Leeuw’s live 2005 remake of Louis Andriessen: De Tijd (Time). Schönberg Ensemble & ASKO Ensemble, Reinbert De Leeuw. Attacca 25100 (2005), Etcetera KTC 9000 – CD 20 (2006), and of Louis Andriessen: Melodie (Frans Brüggen, Louis Andriessen), Symfonie voor losse snaren (Caecilia Ensemble, Ed Spanjaard). Attacca Babel 9267-6 (1992)