Alex Ross's Blog, page 110

Irrevocable shame

Benjamin Netanyahu's statement on the Holocaust.

Oddities of my library

Claudio Arrau's copies of Alkan's Festin d'Ésope, Cage's Music for Marcel Duchamp, and Adorno's Klangfiguren.

Previously: Marked up.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent recordings of interest.

— Schubert, Sonatas in G (D894) and B-flat (D960), Moments musicaux, Impromptus D935; András Schiff, fortepiano (ECM)

— Frances White, She Lost Her Voice That's How We Knew; Kristin Norderval, soprano (Ravello)

— Holliger, Machaut-Transkriptionen; Geneviève Strosser, Jürg Dähler, Muriel Cantoreggi, violas, Hilliard Ensemble (ECM)

— Manfred Werder, Stück 1998 (seiten 676 bis 683); Cristián Alvear, guitar (Irritable Hedgehog)

— Rufus Wainwright, Prima Donna; Janis Kelly, Kathryn Guthrie, Antonio Figueroa, Richard Morrison, Jayce Ogren conducting the BBC Symphony (DG)

— Schumann, Das Paradies und die Peri; Sally Matthews, Mark Padmore, Kate Royal, Bernarda Fink, Andrew Staples, Florian Boesch, Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony and London Symphony Chorus (LSO)

Noted

Philip Clark: "There is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it’s the wider cultural environment which surrounds classical music that has a problem."

How expensive is opera?

Andrew of the Passacaglia Test blog has a post demonstrating that opera tickets are not as expensive as many people seem to think they are. He tabulates ticket prices for events of various kinds and shows that opera is often cheaper than theatre, pop music, or sports. I should point out that the "senior journalist" mentioned at the top of the post, Gavin Esler, has protested on Twitter that he did not, in fact, describe opera as "very expensive"; apparently, in an interview with Jonas Kaufmann, he had asked the tenor why opera is perceived to be expensive, which is a different thing. That aside, Andrew's chart is telling. I'd be interested to see one for New York.

Bagpipes on the beach

Julia Wolfe's LAD on the Santa Monica bluffs, courtesy of Jacaranda. Curious sounds are beginning to emanate from public spaces all over LA as the three interlocking routes of Hopscotch, Yuval Sharon's mobile-opera project, fall into place.

Noted

Russell Thomas, speaking to Anne Midgette: "The conversation about blackface is a distraction. It’s not about whether or not Mr. Antonenko was painted dark. It’s also not about whether whites should be allowed to sing Porgy and Bess. It’s about this: Why aren’t the stages representative of the communities in which they are located?"

O Souverain, O Superman

Laurie Anderson's 1981 song, which was incorporated into her Habeas Corpus installation, takes inspiration from "O Souverain," the big tenor aria from Massenet's El Cid. "O king, o judge, o father" becomes "O Superman, O judge, O Mom and Dad." As Richard Taruskin notes in his Oxford History of Western Music, Anderson heard the African-American tenor Charles Holland sing the aria in 1978, and found herself haunted by it. (In a 1984 conversation with Charles Amirkhanian on KPFA, Anderson played a recording of Holland's performance and provided verbal annotations.) Susan McClary, in her book Feminine Endings, delivers a virtuoso analysis of "O Superman," noting that the seemingly rudimentary harmonic basis of the song — triads of C minor and A-flat major, rocking back and forth — creates a sense of hovering unease, as the ear is unable to decide which chord functions as the tonic. It is, as McClary says, a "musical semiotics of desire and dread, of hope and disillusion, of illusion and reality," matching the fractured imagery of the lyrics. "Another Day in America," from Anderson's 2010 album Homeland, rests on a similar ambiguity, though there the dread is much closer to the surface.

Now playing: Scott Worthington

This is, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson says, an exceptional disc, as bewitching as it is original. Worthington's double bass speaks not only in lumbering, thunderous tones but also in high, pale registers of piercing expressivity. I'll have a report shortly on Populist's first vinyl release, in which the trombonist Matt Barbier plays works of Nicholas Deyoe and Clint McCallum.

New arrival

Ann Goldstein, the head of the New Yorker's copyediting department, has achieved this wonder.