Wow! A genius - as composer and violinist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os8fFmEmRZE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os8fFmEmRZE)
She was born in February 2005, so she was approx. 12½ when she gave this performance at the Carinthian Summer Music Festival in July 2017. Her VC is fully romantic, beautiful - and memorable.
The same summer Alma premiered the slow movement of her new PC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURlp17F1wo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURlp17F1wo)
Incredible!
Indeed, what a musical prodigy. Her precocity is quite amazing and the music itself is a very pleasurable listen, even if it could have been written almost 200 years ago. I wonder if she will "mature" into a modern composer in time?
I find listening to the violin concerto a very weird experience. I started by thinking Bruch, then Mozart, then Stravinsky (the episode for winds!) then Brahms, then goodness knows who, maybe even Deutscher? She clearly has the makings of a terrific player and a highly expert composer, but a child of the 21st century who dwells in the 18th and 19th! Even weirder are the comments on youtube - in a world where trolls walk the land in battalions, doesn't anyone have a word of criticism?
Well, she's only 13½. She's clearly composing in the idioms she currently loves. Let's see how she develops. I personally am glad that there's no online criticism of her: most would probably be unhelpful and some downright destructive.
What a beautiful violin concerto.
Here she is at 13+ singing a very beautiful song of her own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXx9rnK95Ug&list=PL64108521BFB99335 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXx9rnK95Ug&list=PL64108521BFB99335)
Alma improvising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz0OAcYknyw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz0OAcYknyw)
Surely this is genius in action?
Alma's compositional credo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yf_pbVvIWk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yf_pbVvIWk)
Alma: 'If the world is so ugly, what is the point of making it even uglier?' Precisely!
OK she's very young, but I'm pretty old and I don't have time for music that calls for shed-loads of "amazing-for-her-age" toleration. Try to imagine how you might feel if you knew the concerto had been written by an adult or an unsung 19th century composer
Look, let's not get carried away. This is very attractive and accomplished music. It is remarkable that it has been written by one so young, BUT it is not mature music. I do not hear an individual voice here (nor would I expect to): I hear a lot of beautifully written pastiche - pastiche of many different composers, some portions of which do not sit very comfortably with other portions. What is important is that Alma Deutscher is encouraged and trained and continues to compose. As she grows up her music will surely grow with her experience (she still has all the angst of adolescence to get through, for goodness' sake) and she should be able to develop a voice of her own. If she doesn't then she may be admired as a "wunderkind" but she will not merit the accolade of genius.
I think there's evidence of technical genius at the very least. However, as Gareth quite rightly says, this is music by a young, barely adolescent girl and as yet no individual voice is discernible. What will be interesting to observe as she grows up is whether her compositional credo - to write beautiful music - will remain the same and, if it does, how she will embody it in her mature music.
After all, the age of romanticism in music is past. The nearest we have got to a modern-day romantic composer was Schmidt-Kowalski and even his music was hardly individual (although hugely enjoyable). Isn't all romantic-style music now bound to be redolent of a composer or composers of that period?
Remarkable for me (and I couldn't help mulling this over in the small hours!) is the way her music does seem to give you a glimpse into her mind. However fluently expressed in a strange composite language derived from many previous composers, it speaks to me of naivete, gaucheness, childishness. Like reciting Shakespeare with all the hackneyed dramatic mannerisms but not much notion of what the words actually mean. She should write a tone-poem about something that is important to her, like dolly falling out of the pram and being carried away by the dog.
That's a very good description, matesic. Spot on. And I'm not sure that the exposure this early music by a talented musician is receiving will be good for her in the long run.
In fact, although she has travelled a fair bit and some of her music is instantly available for us all to hear, I suspect that she is being quite jealously guarded by her parents from intrusion by the 'world out there'. If you go to her YouTube channel, you'll actually find that uploads are pretty infrequent, so my sense (at the moment) is that she's not at any risk.
As for her compositional ability, we won't really know for the best part of a decade which direction she will take. However, she's no Korngold, that's for sure! This is what he was writing at 11:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbS9hSe_Ek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbS9hSe_Ek)
Well, quite.
Maybe given all the praise she's currently garnering it's her juvenilia she'll be remembered for!
Maybe. Let's hope not. Let's hope that one day she will be lifting our spirits through her mature compositions.
Quote from: matesic on Friday 19 October 2018, 08:13
Remarkable for me (and I couldn't help mulling this over in the small hours!) is the way her music does seem to give you a glimpse into her mind. However fluently expressed in a strange composite language derived from many previous composers, it speaks to me of naivete, gaucheness, childishness. Like reciting Shakespeare with all the hackneyed dramatic mannerisms but not much notion of what the words actually mean. She should write a tone-poem about something that is important to her, like dolly falling out of the pram and being carried away by the dog.
Well I think we found her troll. What unnecessary and unpleasant final few words. Your critique had some merit up until then. A sneer of age at youth with a dash of sexism thrown in. Possibly not written in that spirit, but as our moderators are always rightly reminding us, think about how your posts are read. You have no idea what is important to her.
(If Alma, or her parents or agent should ever read this, please don't think that everyone on this forum is a "sneerer". I am rooting for her and I am sure most others on here are too.)
Sorry! I see she has written an opera on Cinderella
By the way did you see her wikipedia page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Deutscher
I do try to be kind, usually, but when I read the youtube comments on her violin concerto and realise they are all orchestrated the milk tends to run sour
Quotelike dolly falling out of the pram and being carried away by the dog.
I took that as being akin to the sorts of things that happen in children's fairy tales - hardly something unfamiliar to Alma when she has set Cinderella!
Yes, but Christopher is right that I should consider more how others might read it. Poor Alma has enough of a problem at the hands of her publicity machine to need snarkiness from me, even largely unintended. On ebay I was once fooled into buying a violin by "feedback" of the sort on her youtube clip. It's clear who's responsible, but I wonder how he does it?
Quotethe youtube comments on her violin concerto and realise they are all orchestrated
Evidence, please? (Who reads this stuff anyway? Not I!)
QuotePoor Alma has enough of a problem at the hands of her publicity machine
She hasn't got one. At least, not a
machine.
We're getting into the realms of fantasy here.
I suggest we now confine our remarks to whatever music emerges in the coming months and years and base our judgments solely on that.
QuoteOn ebay I was once fooled into buying a violin by "feedback" of the sort on her youtube clip. It's clear who's responsible, but I wonder how he does it?
I've no idea what this has to do with anything.
Alan - try reading it and then say I'm delusional! Nobody in the history of the internet ever had praise this unanimous or hyperbolic, with more than one assertion that Alma's music is "better than Mozart".
OK. Enough. Let's just leave it all there, please. Everyone.
Glad to. I don't (usually!) read YouTube comments - on principle. As I said, back to the music, please.
The american premiere of Cinderella was online for a couple of months, and I watched the first act. It was good and fun. Of course I hear the obvious influences of Schumann, Mozart and other composers. I wished I downloaded the video before it went down, I want to see the entire thing...
I wonder what music she will make 10 years from now? (I hope she discovers Mahler!)
I hope that, in Alma's opera, Cinderella doesn't "wait around for a rich guy to rescue her. Don't! Rescue yourself. Obviously!" If that's the case the opera will definitely be going on Keira Knightley's list of no-sees for her small daughter. And it was written by a girl too! Well, before I get told off, that's enough politics. Back to the music!
Here's the forthcoming DVD of Cinderella:
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07GRLPLP5/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B07GRLPLP5&linkCode=as2&tag=theunfoldin03-21&linkId=a4e3f69cef0e2609714bafbe27d63934 (https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07GRLPLP5/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B07GRLPLP5&linkCode=as2&tag=theunfoldin03-21&linkId=a4e3f69cef0e2609714bafbe27d63934)
I'm curious to know what you folks expect of this young, talented composer/musician as she "matures:???
I expect we'd like it to be beautiful, melodic, romantic but it must never sound like it's derived from anyone elses earlier work? Damned tall order, even for a young prodigy who can orchestrate a violin concerto or an opera.
I'm with you, Alma - take your music where your heart tells you to. For most of us, that's what music is about......
I expect, at the very least, that she will stop stitching together disparate pastiches of composers from Bach to Bruch. Korngold had his own voice early on. She needs to be allowed to develop her own and not over praised on social media (or elsewhere).
And no, it is not a "damned tall order". Rachmaninov (for example) sounds like Rachmaninov, not Elgar, not Sibelius, not Richard Strauss, all of whom were writing in the Romantic idiom at roughly the same time.
And, we might add, that Brahms doesn't sound like Bruch, even though they're much closer in idiom than the composers Gareth mentions.
It is hard these days to avoid comments being put out on social media. That's the world we (unfortunately) live in. Let's hope that her head is not turned by all the adulation; if she survives it, she may emerge all the stronger.
All we can do at the moment is wait and see whether she's more than a child phenomenon - and whether she will develop a mature, adult voice of her own. I'm sure I speak for everyone in wishing her well.
Absolutely, Alan.
Hear hear!
All I would add is this: Alma Deutscher is 13+ years old. Did Elgar sound like mature Elgar in 1870? Or Rachmaninov like mature Rachmaninov in 1886? Or Sibelius like mature Sibelius in 1878? Or Richard Strauss like mature Richard Strauss in 1877? Of course not! Not every great composer was first a child prodigy (as a composer). Korngold was clearly an exception. If Miss Deutscher achieves compositional maturity in her twenties or thirties, she'd simply be like most other composers - such as the abovementioned geniuses.
Note, though, that she also plays the piano and violin to a very high level. And she can improvise. Oh, and she seems to have a remarkable command of German. My sense is that she does have extraordinary abilities. As we've said, though, whether that will extend to mature compositional ability is another thing entirely.
I see I was not perhaps very clear. Jerfilm asked what we expected her to produce "as she matures" and thought it was a tall order for her not to sound like other Romantic composers. My point was that I expected her, as she matures, to develop her own voice so that eventually she has the individuality, within the Romantic idiom, of composers like the ones I mentioned, and I didn't think that was a tall order. I was not suggesting that they all (like Korngold) began speaking with an original voice. I am very worried that her charming immature music, which is nothing more than accomplished pastiche, is being hailed as the work of a genius. There is no doubt that she is a fine and talented performer - this does not always translate into being a fine composer. (And, incidentally, I know a few 13-year-olds who are fluent in more than one language; that is no evidence of genius if their parents were bi- or tr-lingual as they would have learned the languages from the cradle. Of course, I don't know if this was the case with Alma Deutscher, but i suspect it may have been.) I am not trying to belittle her achievements. But some people are, it seems to me, getting carried away.
I know exactly what you were getting at, Gareth. And you are quite right, of course. And you are also right to question the silly media hype that has arisen in the wake of public performances of her music. Comparisons with certain composers who preceded her are silly because, as you say, up till now all she has been producing is pastiches of their music. (Mind you, that in itself is pretty remarkable.) And you are also in all likelihood correct that her linguistic ability comes from her parents, though there's no evidence of German being spoken in the home (she has learned the language using textbooks) and Alma does more than just speak German - she actually sets the language to music, as in her opera Cinderella.
So why do I hesitate to agree 100%? Maybe it's the sense (impossible to articulate) - more from the documentaries about her than from examples of her music - that this is an extraordinary young girl, someone who has more than mere talent. So it's a guess on my part, really - a guess that this is a child genius; but of course she may turn out to be no more than that. Her drive to compose may burn itself out once she realises that there is more to beautiful music than naïve childlike attractiveness. But maybe I just I want to believe...
This article is an interesting read:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/meet-prodigy-alma-deutscher-12-year-old-opera/ (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/meet-prodigy-alma-deutscher-12-year-old-opera/)
..as is this one:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/05/alma-deutscher-10-music-world (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/05/alma-deutscher-10-music-world)
And try this heartwarming documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19WORtE3xuM&feature=youtu.be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19WORtE3xuM&feature=youtu.be)
I am so pleasantly surprised by the overall positivity of this thread - three times hear hear!
In the abovementioned BBC documentary available on YouTube Simon Rattle avers that he has never met anyone with Alma's range of abilities. Dare we hope that his comments are rather more trustworthy than those posted on YouTube and other social media?
That's easy to concur with - quite astonishing
Quite so. You'd like to think that Rattle, with his range of contacts worldwide, would know of anyone remotely comparable. Still leaves us with hopes rather than certainties with regard to Miss Deutscher's future, of course.
The only two child prodigy composers I can think of in the modern era are Jay Greenberg (American, b.1991) and Alex Prior (British, b.1992).
Here's a very interesting article (written in 2008, so pre-Alma Deutscher) on the subject:
http://www.gavindixon.info/Prodigy_Composers.htm (http://www.gavindixon.info/Prodigy_Composers.htm)
And here's a rather scathing article on Greenberg, specifically his 5th Symphony, written at 15:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/24/classicalmusicandopera (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jan/24/classicalmusicandopera)
Note the criticism that all he was doing was recycling others' music! Haven't we heard that somewhere before...?
So here's a challenge: apart from Korngold (maybe), which child prodigy composers actually wrote mature music that was recognisably in their own style/voice in their childhood - e.g. by Alma Deutscher's current age (13½)?
Alma Deutscher is a big talent. However, at her present stage of development, Deutscher's music is in truth uninteresting, empty and impersonal. Let us wait a decade - I hope to hear grandious music from her soon! Concerning Rattle: He has reached a state of mind and artistry, where it would be best to completely ignore him in any respect.
QuoteDeutscher's music is in truth uninteresting, empty and impersonal
I think that's more than a bit harsh, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course.
QuoteConcerning Rattle: He has reached a state of mind and artistry, where it would be best to completely ignore him in any respect.
I'm not the world's greatest Rattle fan either. I don't like the way he often seems to micro-manage the music he conducts; but I think it's worth paying attention when he talks of not having met anyone with AD's range of abilities.
Interesting question re prodigies. Can't agree about Rattle, whose Suk, Szymanowski and Bruckner completion recordings e.g. seem, from what I've heard of them so far, to be remarkably good.
Alma isn't the only young violinist composing in 19th century style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2luD83eK20
but Roman Kim has an alternative persona
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ixLgdSD43Y
Thanks very much for this.
Roman Kim was born in Kazakhstan on 11th October 1991 and, according to one article, was still writing his VC1 in B minor in 2015. Kim himself gave the premiere in Cluj Napoca (Romania) in 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2luD83eK20 (first mvt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE2KFUbFZpA (slow mvt)
Kim isn't really comparable with Alma Deutscher; he's no child prodigy composer. His VC is the work of a young man in his twenties. And yet, although it is clearly a much more sophisticated composition than AD's VC, it's just as much in thrall to the music of the past as AD's. Nevertheless, I'd be glad to encounter it in a concert and hope that it might one day be recorded. It's a very attractive piece!
Indeed it is, but it's very derivative - sounds like Warsaw Concerto-style film "classical music" to me. What I find disturbing, as I think Matesic did about the Alma Deutscher YouTube videos, are the ridiculously over the top adulatory comments, and the vitriolic attack on the one poor poster who, IMHO, wrote a few home truths about the work. Truly, we live in uncomfortable times.
Spot on, Mark.
I'd certainly buy a recording of it, though. I agree, of course, that it's terribly derivative.
The real point, though, is that this VC was written by a young man; AD's was written when she was 9 and revised when she was 12.
For those interested in her music, Deutscher's complete piano concerto is now on youtube.
If you were listening "blind" what would you think? John Field? Not enough notes
No. It's a pastiche of AD's favourite styles/composers. But a remarkable pastiche.
Alma certainly plays it very expressively. How she's had time to absorb an authentic-sounding rubato style as well as all the rest completely baffles me. Some pianists never seem to get it, but that doesn't stop them playing Chopin!
I still think she's absolutely remarkable. What will her 25 year-old self be composing?
Surely the youngest composer to attain the "Greatest Hits"-style album milestone. ;)
(release early Nov)
Amazon: "My Book of Melodies reveals the melodies Alma composed from the age of 4 to 14. For this album she has chosen one melody from each of those years. The melodies she collected over these years are written down in her same named sketch book (book of melodies) which she keeps with her all the time."
https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8672509--alma-deutscher-my-book-of-melodies (https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8672509--alma-deutscher-my-book-of-melodies)
QuoteBut a remarkable pastiche.
Well, it is certainly remarkably
dull! Look - she's a clever girl, but this sort of exposure does her talent and reputation no good at all. She needs to mature. The young Korngold was streets ahead of her.
She's clearly more than merely 'clever'; but if she never grows out of her childhood interests and obsessions, she'll disappear from public view, won't she?
That's why I think all this exposure and adulation at a relatively early age is dangerous. She needs to learn to be far more self-critical, and that only comes with maturity. It doesn't help to have audiences gasping and applauding over a concerto which is no more than mediocre and derivative.
I agree about her exposure. It'd be best if she hid herself away and emerged as a mature musician - if she has the ability to be that. She may not, of course.
I think this discussion is a bit pointless... (no offense to anyone who posted here so far) the argument that this budding composer should not let the "adulation go to her head" is true for any child prodigy and the audience reaction to such young artists was/is/will always be enthusiastic. As far as her future works are concerned, let time tell the tale. If she doesn't fulfill any expectations we put on her, it won't matter so much (imho) - We will survive as will Alma Deutscher.
Her music gives much pleasure to many regardless of it being pastiche or otherwise. Oh, that the commissions from the BBC or new music funded by the various arts organisations during the last sixty years gave as much. Classical music now is not for the general public but music directors, second rate composers and people who have an agenda. One has only to look at the trouble English National Opera are in to see how detached the powers that be are from the general public.