Opera Chic

Chris Ware, the Smartest Kid on Earth, (Naturally) Listens to Brahms

For as many misunderstandings that label opera/classical music as an elitist, expensive hobby for 30-year-old pimply virgins and senile senior citizens, there are just as many misconceptions about graphic novels -- Trade School dropout doodles, collected by adult children -- well, there are much worse things to collect out there!

Way before his comics adorned The New Yorker covers, Chris Ware's been a graphic art demigod for the perfection of his typography, intricate illustrations and blindsiding narratives aching with abandonment, alienation and melancholy.

The American legend has influenced awesome cheerleaders (and practically a surrogate family): Françoise Mouly & Art Spiegelman; fellow cartoonist Ivan Brunetti; brilliant Alfred A. Knopf designer/author Chip Kidd and silver fox poet/librettist J.D. McClatchy.

During the seven years that Ware wrote his y2k breakout, 380-page graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which spans 1890's Chicago and 1980's Michigan as the eponymous anti-hero searches for his father, he was inspired by Brahms. In a current profile by Simon Willis for More Intelligent Life, he said of the artistic process:

"I thought of it musically," he told me. "I was listening to a lot of Brahms at the time—sorry, this sounds so pretentious, but it's true—and I remember feeling that I wanted to produce that sensation on the page, with a large image, and then something much more lyrical and textural, and then into a sweeping passage, and then focusing down into a point. I feel that music does that better than anything; it captures that weird sensation of writing one’s thoughts, that course of consciousness."

Now we want to know the soundtrack for his 2012 coup, Building Stories.

Fourth (x) Fourth German Greats with La Verdi and Axelrod

We love Brahms' gloriously-tragic Fourth symphony for its self-cannibalizing, E minor sorrow and although we try not to fall for its emo charms, it's our autumnal soundtrack of 3:00 pm twilights, burgundy-stained lips, white Alba truffles and minks fresh from cold storage.

Brahms' Fourth misery loves its company, and as much as we covet Rattle's kinetic splinters or Daniel Harding's swift-footed modernity to remind us of curious, new-skool Brahms, we often reach for Carlo Maria Giulini & the Wiener Philharmoniker (or the CSO) with its elastic energy, accessible soul and mercurial power.

This past weekend in Milan, Maestro John Axelrod tackled that ghastly-complex fourth in Giulini's melancholy shades with Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, recorded live for Telarc, slated for a September release.

In a joint program of grand German, symphonic columns -- Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was pensive, pastoral and almost bashful at times until that brilliant fourth movement roared down the front gates -- the Brahms cycle was off to a prodigious start.

It's a beast to understand and a monster to conduct with its shape-shifting textures and rhythms, massive variations and codas but La Verdi gave it an earnest shot -- what it lacked in technique was made up with passion, exuberance and intensity.

The first movement began earnestly and melted into lovely strings tension led by concertmaster Luca Santaniello, which rounded into a richer, lusher second movement. The third movement bristled with jubliant, bright tempi before it slammed into the final, smoky fourth movement's intense undercurrents.

We'll be happy to have the souvenir disc in hand this fall and look forward to next month when Brahms' Second Symphony takes the stage

/lol/ Johannes "Raisin" Brahms /lol/

OC must have been sleeping hardcore in .it'ville when this cultural ad campaign was launched by Americans for the Arts, where kids are literally fed art & music via novelty foods like "Raisin Brahms" and "VanGoghurt". What -- no Faure Flakes? No Cimarosa Toast Crunch? No Honey Bunches of Paisiello (ok, that one's a stretch)...Enjoy the Brahms shenanigans.

"The Present Day Composer"

A much larger, better image of Johannes Brahms on Tom Sutpen's blog.

Sidney To Brahms: Grew A Pair (of b00bs)

Poor Brahms. And poor maestro Gelmetti:

Sydney doesn't flock to Brahms the way it flocks to Beethoven and Mahler. We tend to give him the respect we gave to the Queen pre-Princess Diana. Can Gelmetti do a Helen Mirren for Brahms?

Memo to Gelmetti (for Brahms it's 2 L8): try with a blonde wig + more bewbs