Review: Ólafsson's Ridiculous "From Afar"--You Can't Get Far Enough
2022 ж. 20 Қаз.
7 155 Рет қаралды
Víkingur Ólafsson's "From Afar" is quite simply the most confused, pretentious "concept" album I have ever heard, and it's all the more unfortunate coming from a really significant musician.
I guess "From Afar" is a more tantalizing title than "A Bunch of Pieces that I Currently Have in my Hands at the Moment"
If you’ve ever worked for a large corporation, you know exactly how this went down. During the pitch meeting with the execs, it was all smiles and nods. Then, out in the hallway, somebody whispers, “What a stupid f***ing idea.”
Exactly, nobody dares to say 'what a load of nonsense', because they are scared to be labeled as old fashioned left overs.
hm... I always thought it was the other way around. the poor artists are forced into this type of marketing to stand out, encouraged by the labels. I have no idea, never made a recording, so...
The funniest, most precise take-down of today's rampant narcissism.
You know what goes hand in hand with all this far-ness? Having concerts “curated.”
I'm interested to know how you mean that? Could you please elaborate? I'm not familiar.
Curated is a pretentious word used for essentially saying songs which fit the genre or subject of whatever they are portraying.
@@paulk8072 Back in the day, RCA Red Seal issued an Arthur Fiedler album of marching music titled "Pops On the March." Would that be called a curated CD nowadays? 😅
Thank-you for resurrecting the word "twaddle," and using it for exactly this recording (and trend).
"He doesn't look too abnormal".
I laughed out loud at that
"And every one will say, As you walk your mystic way, If this young man expresses himself in terms to deep for me, Why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!" ...Sorry, couldn't resist. Gilbert had a perfect knack for hitting the nail on the head.
'Ólafsson teamed up with director Magnús Leifsson to shoot the video in a fish processing plant in Iceland, complete with grand piano. They use the fish, an early Christian symbol, to allude to the mysticism and timelessness of Bach’s music - as changeable as water, it has to be understood at a metalevel, given the many different ways in which composition, transcription and performance can be interwoven.' Right. Great. See you back on planet Earth.
Deutsche Grammophon and concept albums are warning enough. One thinks of anything by Max Richter or Helene Grimaud's Water, and one gets as close to pretentious dross. Why would anyone want to pay money to hear Nitin Sawhney's electronic manipulations between piano pieces or Grimaud reading out the titles of the works she is playing. Enough is enough!
Tbf Kocsis played Kurtag with great humour and impish spontaneity. But I’ve always regarded VO with suspicion, he did a Mozart concerto at the Proms and it sealed the deal for me. I’m reminded of the story about Churchill asking a fellow MP if she had thought of a name for her imminent baby. She responded thus “if its a boy I will name him George after our king, if it’s a girl I will name it Elizabeth after the king’s wife, but if, as i suspect the baby is all piss and wind I’ll name it after you Winston” ditto VO
Like Orn, I disagree with Dave on this one. Pretentious? Maybe. Navel gazing? Perhaps. He's a young person in this crazy narcissistic time we live in. Let him have his moment. He's a very fine pianist, and the music he plays is mostly very good.
He can have all the moments he wants. Just let him stop inflicting them on the rest of us, or asking us to pay for them.
Talented Icelandic pianist is photographed in his home country - why is that so awful ?🙄
Dave is a little too salty here for my taste. No one is forcing you to listen to his music, please relax.
"like a big drawer of junk"...I laughed out loud here...Dave has a bright future in writing colorful obituaries...
I was introduced to Kurtag's music through that movie Pina, I think. That or some other ballet on video [it might've been The Great Mass? I can't remember...] but it was for (2?) piano 4 hands of Bach transcriptions. That wouldn't've been at all interesting, except for the dancing. And the piano might've been onstage.
I'll pass thanks! The marketing departments seem also long ago to have assumed control of concert programming. So we now get "programs" with the most ridiculously banal titles: "The Power & the Passion" and suchlike. Or if they can't think of anything, it's "So and so 'Does' Bruckner" or whomever...As for the selection of works! A recent LPO concert featured the Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliette, followed by a Dutilleux song cycle. After the interval...Dvorak 7. Go figure! Each work done pretty well, the Dutilleux marvellous, but a "program "?
Actually, to be honest that LPO program does not sound bad to me at all... ^^
I thoroughly agree with you David. And ignoring the flawed concept and pretentiousness for a moment, Olafsson's playing is SO self-conscious that all stylistic characteristics of the composer are neutered...Olafsson's Bach release, and the Debussy-Rameau coupling, were well realised, but he's completely lost me after that. (His Mozart album was tasteless in many spots).
Then you're really not going to like DG's "album trailer," the 4:24 minute video that announced the release of this recording. Olafsson wandering in Icelandic wastelands to the accompaniment of wispy Kurtag fragments and portentous voice-overs.
Thanks for the alert. The DG vid is priceless 🤣
I watched the trailer thanks to you, and that was fun. Monty Python comedy material essentially. "It's easier to appreciate the silence in Iceland than in most places". Likewise, it's easier to appreciate noise in NY City than smack in the middle of the Sahara Desert, but it's 2022, so it's never a complete waste of time stating the uber-obvious, I suppose. I could imagine John Cleese (as interviewer) asking Olafsson the following: "I'm currently experiencing a severe bout of existential anxiety over the infamous "F sharp dilemma" Chopin referred to in the very last letter he ever wrote but wasn't quite able to finish. Death does that to some people, you know. It has the most awful tendency of incapacitating nearly everyone from completing a task they had set themselves on doing, a most terribly disruptive thing really. Anyway, most scholars nowadays are of the opinion Chopin preferred the sound of F sharp on cheap upright pianos manufactured in North Korea, but, as you know, this directly conflicts with Liszt's personal account, as told to Rachmaninoff after a masterclass, while sipping Earl Lohengrin tea: that he was absolutely sure Chopin preferred the sounds F sharp made on a Pleyel Grand. You now have a deep personal experience of playing, recording and listening to yourself playing the same stuff on both the upright and the grand piano, thus which F sharp sound do you prefer over the other?" to which Pretendur Olafsson replies "Thanks to DG I don't have to choose, and if Chopin was alive today and under contract with DG, he wouldn't have to, either".
I guess Ólafsson has developed a bad case of Brad Mehldau-itis.
What many artists seem to be doing these days is making a recording of a recital they concocted based on some "concept" they devised. From a practical point of view, the product is, as often as not, worthless for those of us who still collect music (as opposed to using a periodically paid streaming service). And that would hold true even if the CD had any special attractions to merit it. To add insult to injury, there comes the little booklet, which nowadays tells us absolutely nothing about the music played. Instead, we get more one-cent-philosophy, or (as in a recent CD of the Beethoven & Stravinsky violin concertos with Vilde Frang) - a dialog between the soloist and the conductor in which they reminisce and muse about the works they perform. And one final thought, pertaining to the "scraps of faint recollections": is classical music nowadays adopting the ways of Homeopathy...?
Thank you Dave
I thought it couldn't get worse and then I heard about the content of CD 2. I can only say I will use it if ever I'll have trouble falling asleep
Yes it's Derek Bell's 20th anniversary. Best remembered in Ireland as an early member of the Cheiftans he definately (judging by the cover of that infamously titled album) did not take himself too seriously. Interestingly he was also a protestant and a devout one at that. According to a tribute by Hot Press the are stories about how at the start of his career Derek would place an open copy of Playboy on the music stand while he was rehearsing with a BBC Orchestra.
Víkingur Ólafsson is undoubtedly a great pianist. Yet, as I have followed him over the past several years, I can't help myself finding him getting more eccentric as time goes on. A wicked question: perhaps he could be persuaded to play live on site to accompany of the next volcanic eruption in Iceland? Oh well... What a pity to watch such talent go to waste.
I think this will soon appear at my favourite used cd place.
Right Dave: this is pure scrape, a junk drawer. Have you ever read the "Kejserens nye Klæder (The Emperor's New Clothes)" in your childhood, well, I did and I think this is exactly what this is. Not only him, but there are a bunch of them - Klaus Mäkälä (aka the ken doll of a conductor), Wang Yuja, Andris Nelsons, you name them, all the same - empty and senseless - tools of the record industry of our time, who need synesthesic photography to enhance their marketability, I gather.
This is hilarious and so true, I sent this to my closest friends. It is so good, thanks man!! haha
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
At first I thought you might be exaggerating - but obviously not. I hope DG or Olafsson’s management or marketing company or whoever leaned on him to make this happen. We have had enough eccentric pianists in classical music! I see he is touring next year, playing the Ravel G Major Concerto: a work “afar” from Kurtag.
I added the word "sniglet" to my vocabulary today.
Enjoyed review. Digital Yamahas are eons better than the Baldwin upright I practiced on as a teenager and which I still keep as an heirloom. That said. New uprights are great, but freaking expensive....
I keep on seeing him all over the place on Spotify.
I don't mind saying that I love his first three cds (haven't heard the Mozart), but I'll keep your comments in mind regarding "From Afar." I surely don't need to own everything he's recorded.
This kind of New-Agish rub**sh shouldn't in the very most absolute term belong to the Classical Music world. I'd be glad if some of the performers indulging into this kind of things would try to step up their game and write their own Music, that would be interesting. But such a kind of delusional, egocentric "projects"? Just hate them...
I thought it was the 1970s rockers who wrote the book on Conceptual Pretentiousness (note the befitting caps). My bad.
I first heard Olafsson, at La Roque D'Antheron in 2017. He played Bach's Ist Partita superbly, but then treated us to Philip Glass' Etudes which, by contrast seemed superficial, empty and pretentious. I wondered then at the lack of an ability to discern that such a juxtaposition would do Glass no favours, not that he deserves any. It seems now that poor Vikingur has succumbed to an even worse fate, buying into the empty crap of his own half-assed DG marketing machine. If anyone really wants to throw up, try looking at the DG publicity videos for Beatrice Rana (a superb pianist) and Jan Lisiecki, also a fine artist. Cliched, dreadful, embarassing. DG videos actually put me off Trifonov, which is, if you think about it, really a remarkable achievement.
Agree totally.
I might one of the very few, but I’m gonna push back here… Yes, the album might be over-marketed or over-conceptualized to some, but what isn’t these days in the classical world? I actually think this works for VO and why not? Due to the ad nauseam of repeated recordings and cycles and whatnot in classical music, I think DG and other companies are trying to find ways to keep things fresh, and with new ideas to present music, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In terms of the music and the selections on this album, I love it! When I listen to music, especially in the classical world, I’m listening to the quality of the performances and if it speaks to me or not. I don’t let the concept, or the photos in the jacket, or the script in the marketing videos bother me, (which they don’t), I listen for if the playing is great or not, and in this case I think it stands up to his incredible Bach, Debussy/Rameau, and Mozart & Contemporaries albums. I don’t think of the musical selections contained here as a “junk box”, but rather a fascinating set of pieces that roll into each other well. And the playing and recording of the playing is beautiful. By the way, I wouldn’t be so put off by the photo subjects…the man is from Iceland after all…
The only thing that matters here is that you love the selection of music on the album, and I respect that. Everything else you had to say is nonsense!
Loose change, a popsicle stick and a Playboy centerfold? Was my web cam on?
The performances are fine if undistinguished, and I could swallow the photos and liner notes, but the whole replaying everything on a slightly different instrument with more clacking is a pretentiousness too far. If it’s your thing, slurp it up, but that is what leads me to seeing this as serious ad absurdum. Like the emperor in Amadeus, I just want to exclaim “but look at it!”
But I guess that’s how it be; “gotta get a gimmick,” as they sing in Gypsy.
Let's do itty bits of two dozen different composers ain't in my collecting wheelhouse for sure.
The pretentious classical music album began about 30 years ago with CDs of the Kronos Quartet. The godawful album covers, which portrayed the players as though they were alternative rock stars just left a bad taste in my mouth. This marketing ploy to get people to buy recordings was for me the 1990s version of RCA Red Seal's and Polydor's 1970s marketing of classical albums with psychedelic pop art album covers.
Like all concepts, this concept is atrocious and this double playlist is ridiculous. But I've liked very much the Mozart and the Bach 1st Trio Sonata (the grand piano recording). I've not listened to the rest. Also note that Presto doesn't make the booklet available for download.
Look forward to Jed Distler’s opinion on this
Actually another artist who enjoys producing music which entails hearing their bowel movements, the plonking of keys, the creaking of wood etc is Ólafur Arnalds. It is just as pretentious, if not more.
Am so sick of classical music labels trying to make the music we love seem more appealing through pointless photographs and video content that says nothing about the music. Smacks of desperation!
So it includes both a modern and authentic instrument version, the latter played without vibrato.
Well, perhaps it's good for the category of elevator music.
What a shame. His Bach album was a personal favourite, sucks that this new disc is a disappointment.
Check the auto-subtitles on 4:44. Hilarious!
There you go again with your harshness! Why can't you appreciate a disc meant for the deaf with a booklet painstakingly crafted for the blind every once in a while? Show some compassion, man, really now.
Sigh. You're right.
I got really bored listening to this. Glad others also felt the same way.
I heard this. The music is nearly all boring, so do we need to buy it twice??
I love how you don't pull your punches, Dave! Makes me trust your opinions that much more! 😃
And something weird is happening to Olafsson's once astonishing playing. It's becoming self-conscious and - this is really maddening - he won't take his foot off the sustaining peal.
But...seriously...is someone buying a CLASSICAL MUSIC CD on the base of such junk and not only for its (at least supposed) musical value? I really cannot believe this...
Out of pure curiosity: What do you think about the "new" listening experience Dolby Atmos? Surround ..or 5.1? Is this an important topic in the CD collecting world or is the stereo concept preferred? Thanks in advance! As always, many thanks to Mr. Hurwitz' entertaining and fun videos!
I couldn't care less. I don't think it's important or interesting.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Ok, thanks for your opinion!
Ah, I see you've been reading my new Oxfordish Dictionary of Musical Terminology. Gould: n. A performer trapped in his own narcissistic bubble. Adj: Gouldish. Example: "Ólafsson was so up himself, he couldn't help but be Gouldish". I've always thought so, anyway.
I wonder what you'd make of Keith Emerson's non-rock compositions, such as his Piano Concerto No.1
I like them.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Sounds like a video. Pop/Rock/Broadway composers who delved into classical and succeeded or failed.
I'd take Lang Lang's Goldbergs (which actually ain't too bad) over this any day.
Some will disagree, but Kurtag is the ultimate manifestation of the Emperor's not-so-new clothes. An extremely entertaining video.
Thanks alot. Just went and listened to some Kurtág and now my ears won't stop bleeding. 😐
I know this is a site for recordings, but I saw him live at the Edinburgh Festival playing the Schuman concerto. He played it like "from afar". I was totally flattened by it, could hardly clap at the end. So sad. And now I cannot listen to him. I loved that Bach CD. But he seems to be a "product" for DG to market. Sorry to see this happen to a nice piano player.
That was funny!
Olafsson, Kathia Buniatishvili, Lola Astanova , Currentzis, David Garret, Nigel Kennedy, all in the same pot ...LOL and many more.....there is a new one each year.....
Horrible and very pretentious CD.