Alex Ross's Blog, page 119

For Ivan Moravec

The great Czech pianist died today, at the age of eighty-four. I heard him only once in solo recital, at Carnegie in 2001: Janáček's 1.X.1905, Debussy's Estampes and Pour le piano, Chopin's F-minor Ballade and Preludes. I had the sense of being transported many decades back in time, to some small hall in a Central European town between the wars, where composer, performer, and audience all lived in the same world and spoke the same language. It was playing of the utmost naturalness, strewn with unstressed, seemingly off-the-cuff subtleties. I have heard Chopin executed more brilliantly, more spectacularly, but never more persuasively.

Noted

Susanna Mälkki: "No guilt when it comes to music. There are days when Led Zeppelin is the only right thing to listen to."

The woman who saw seventy-six Rings

Lisa Hirsch reports the death of the Bay Area opera enthusiast Verna Parino (1916-2015), who, in her long life, saw no fewer than seventy-six complete performances of Wagner's Ring cycle, on four continents. San Francisco Classical Voice interviewed her in 2011.

Noted

Philip Kennicott on the Kennedy Center Honors: "The Honors have lost their way, and it will take far more than tweaks to the televised ceremony to improve them. What it will take, in fact, is courage, the courage to declare the Honors solely devoted to the arts that define the Kennedy Center’s mission."

See also: The Kennedy Center Honors Go Pop.

Tune out the old

Here's an exceptionally useful page on the BBC 3 website: a listing of contemporary works recently broadcast on the channel and available for streaming. I'll be sampling Proms premières, giving a listen to Mark Simpson's The Immortal, and revisiting Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Symphony-Antiphony, which I raved about in Fanfare a couple of decades ago.

Field that one, Frank Zappa

A Rolling Stone ad from 1969, as seen in S. Andrew Granade's book Harry Partch: Hobo Composer. Partch's Delusion of the Fury plays this Thursday and Friday at the Lincoln Center Festival, courtesy of Heiner Goebbels and Musikfabrik. The festival website supplies a quick guide to the composer's life and work; Michael Cooper, in the New York Times, has more about the Partch instrumentarium; Russell Platt has a preview in The New Yorker. I will have a review in a future issue, pairing Partch with Ethel Smyth, a renegade of a different sort.

When the Levy breaks

Dawn Fatale, at Parterre, pans the memoirs of Reynold Levy, the former president of Lincoln Center. One might add that the book is riddled with errors: Kurt Masur does not spell his last name with a "z," and I did not win the Pulitzer Prize. I receive glancing criticism in the book, alongside my colleague Tony Tommasini, for having promoted the idea that City Opera should leave Lincoln Center and adopt a more independent profile. I agree with Tony's response: "Arts institutions have been granted nonprofit status to encourage them to take on noncommercial projects. Critics should demand that major opera companies and orchestras earn their select status by taking chances with challenging work."

A Maconchy moment

Inspired by Corymbus and the Overgrown Path.

More on Adorno/Thomson

Back in April, I linked to a notable discovery by the scholar James Schmidt: Adorno's own English translation of his Philosophy of New Music, which turned up in the papers of Virgil Thomson, at Yale. Schmidt has posted, on his blog, further details of the friendship between Adorno and Thomson, with extensive quotations from their correspondence. This relationship has been almost entirely overlooked in extant writing on the two men, and Schmidt's post is particularly revealing of Adorno's ambitions and frustrations during his American period. Among other things, Schmidt discovers that Adorno hoped to win a position on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune: "I think of working once again as a music critic . . . Do you know of any opportunity? What I should like most, of course, would be to collaborate with you, but I do not know whether there is any such chance." Thomson failed to respond to this inquiry, perhaps fearing that Adorno's English wasn't quite up to the task. But, as Schmidt points out, "it is only in retrospect that the prospect of Adorno working at the Herald Tribune seems less plausible than his having abandoned his studies in philosophy to begin a career as a music critic in Vienna or his leaving a bewildered Schoenberg in order to return to Frankfurt to resume his academic career and defend a Habilitation that would be published on the exact date of Hitler’s assumption of power." See also Part II and Part III of Schmidt's superb four-part series.

Previously: The Naysayers.

Noted

Micaela Baranello, on operatic depictions of rape: "For all its noble goals, though, this particular strain of directorial revisionism only occasionally concerns itself with women’s agency. It is not insignificant that most of these sexually charged productions were — like a vast majority of opera productions over all — directed by men."