Alex Ross's Blog, page 116

Blue Heron sings Robert Jones

Robert Jones: Missa Spes nostra (Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 4) by Blue Heron

The superb Boston-based choir Blue Heron have released Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 4, featuring works of Robert Jones, Nicholas Ludford, and Robert Hunt in reconstructions by Nick Sandon. Almost nothing is known about Jones (fl. 1520-35), yet his Missa Spes nostra is, as Scott Metcalfe writes in his notes, the "unique creation of a mature composer with a distinct individual voice." Flowing vocal lines are interspersed with tart, ambiguous harmonies; there is a canny use of musical space, a sense of height and depth to the unfolding structures. As on previous releases, the singing is both precise and fluid, immaculate and alive. In Robert Hunt's Stabat mater, another remarkable piece by an otherwise unknown composer, the choir swells to a darkly splendid climax at "Stabat natus sic contentus / Ad debellandum Sathanam," the latter name slicing through the air.

Miscellany: La Monte, Latvia, etc.

The eternally fascinating La Monte Young spoke to Will Robin in advance of an exceedingly rare performance of Young's Trio for Strings, ground zero for American minimalism. The big event takes place on Sept. 3, at Dia:Chelsea, as part of a multi-month Young /Marian Zazeela / Jung Hee Choi series.... ACME kicks off its season on Sept. 11, with a program featuring Timo Andres, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen, Ben Russell, and Caroline Shaw, both as composers and performers. It's part of the Five Boroughs Music Festival.... On the same night in LA, wild Up presents the winners of the American Composers Forum National Composition Competition: Alex Temple, Nina C. Young, and William Gardiner all receive premieres.... There are many fascinating pages on Frank Gehry's musical architecture in Paul Goldberger's new biography, Building Art.... The new Sono Luminus recording of Anna Thorvaldsdottír's mesmerizing In The Light Of Air is streaming on NPR Music. You can also watch an ICE video above.... Never mind those celebrity Baltic conductors: Q2 is today presenting a twenty-four-hour marathon of twenty-first-century music from Latvia. There will be a repeat on Aug. 29.... At WFMT, the gifted young composer-conductor Matthew Aucoin has a thoughtful response to some absurdly overblown comparisons (Bernstein, Mozart) that he has lately inspired: "When a young playwright is getting attention, no one says, ‘Oh, this person is the next Shakespeare.'" His children's opera Second Nature has its première at Chicago Lyric Opera on Oct. 17.... Floating Opera, New York's newest alternative opera company, will make its début on Oct. 16, with a production of Pelléas. The venue will be the Lehigh Valley Barge No. 79, Red Hook's beloved arts barge. Cage's Europeras 3 and 4 will follow later in the season.

Twentieth-century symphonies

The Symphony, Unfinished. The New Yorker, Aug. 31, 2015.

Nightafternight playlist

— Loyset Compère, Magnificat, etc.; Orlando Consort (Hyperion)

— Chou Wen-chung, Eternal Pine I, II, III, Ode to Eternal Pine; Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea, Boston Musica Viva, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, etc. (New World)

— Bach, Harpsichord Concertos; Andreas Staier, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (Harmonia Mundi)

— Panufnik, Concertos for violin, cello, piano; Łukasz Borowicz conducting the Konzerthaus Orchestra Berlin, with Alexander Sitkovetsky, Raphael Wallfisch, Ewa Kupiec (cpo)

— Lukas Foss, Complete Symphonies; Gil Rose conducting the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP)

— Nielsen, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6; Sakari Oramo conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (BIS)

Miscellany: Tristan on demand, etc.

With another Bayreuth summer beginning to wind down, Micaela Baranello has a New York Times report on the current state of the festival, and Jens Laurson supplies a very thorough review of the revival of the Castorf Ring. The complete Katharina Wagner Tristan, this summer's new show, has shown up on YouTube; also, David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony have begun to stream their recent Tristan-in-concert, with Act I now available and the rest to come shortly....  Programs from the 2015 MATA Festival are now archived on Q2.... Also on Q2, Nadia Sirota hosts a Meet the Composer episode devoted to Kaija Saariaho, with a Library of Congress performance of Saariaho's Light and Matter tacked on for good measure.... The Detroit Symphony, the most tech-savvy of American orchestras, has launched a new service called Replay, archiving its popular video streams. A one-time donation of fifty dollars buys you access.... Ensemble Dal Niente, in Chicago, has announced an enticing 2015-16 season; the U.S. première of Stefan Prins's Generation Kill is on the schedule, as well as world premières by Johannes Kreidler, Natacha Diels, Kirsten Broberg, and Ben Sutherland, among others.... On Sept. 7, Annie Gosfield will have a semi-retrospective concert at The Stone in NYC.

Liza Lim, Invisibility

G. F. Haas, I can't breathe

Marco Blaauw, the brilliant trumpeter of Musikfabrik, plays Georg Friedrich Haas's I can't breathe (In memoriam Eric Garner). Haas writes: "[The piece] begins quite traditionally with a dirge: a free cantilena in twelve-tone space. Then the intervals constrict; the song becomes more and more smothered, ultimately in a 16-note scale. The dirge constricts within a sonic space of other trumpet notes of extreme registers and changing colours — cautionary symbols, perhaps, of the world from which the victim was violently torn away. I give no notes to the perpetrators." (Via Emre Tetik.)

Mission: Octatonic

Lalo Schifrin, the composer of the Mission: Impossible theme, studied with Messiaen in the nineteen-fifties. In an interview with Royal S. Brown (published in Brown's excellent book Overtones and Undertones), Schifrin described how his studies with Messiaen left their mark on his Hollywood work: the cue above, from the music for the Mission: Impossible TV show, is based on Messiaen's second mode of limited transpositions, better known as the octatonic scale.

Mission: Impossible goes to the opera

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Oddity: Vittorio Giannini's IBM Symphony