Alex Ross's Blog, page 121

Noted

Ann Powers: "Music-focused cinema could provide something radical: a close view of the processes of composing and performing that reveals the work behind what seems, to listeners, like magic. Instead, like almost any other kind of cinema, it tends to focus on human relationships: on the interpersonal, not the inner personal. This understandable tendency has resulted in many great explorations of how musicians get along with each other, cope in the world, affect social change and build legacies. Yet it means that most music films (with a few exceptions) still sidestep what's unique about music-making: the mix of obsessive practice and spontaneous experimentation; the balance between listening and self-expression; the sensual experience of living through the ears."

Mass Reimaginings

Trinity Wall Street has announced a major, multi-year commissioning project, entitled Mass Reimaginings. In coming seasons, the composers Netsayi, Jonathan Newman, Paola Prestini, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Julian Wachner, and Daniel Felsenfeld, who is curating the project, will write contemporary responses to the traditional mass. The first of these commissions, by Felsenfeld, on a text by Rick Moody, will have its première on Dec. 30, as part of Trinity's annual Twelfth Night Festival. Wachner, Trinity's music director, will conduct. The six works will be heard en masse, as it were, in 2018, as part of a celebration of the centennial of Leonard Bernstein; at that time, the great man's Mass will join the throng.

The limpid stream

The Anxious Ease of Apple Music, New Yorker website.

Miscellany

On July 17, in New York, there will be a concert entitled “The Dream Unfinished: A Symphonic Benefit for Civil Rights"—a musical response to unabated police violence against people of color. The program will consist of works of William Grant Still, Leonard Bernstein, and Jessie Montgomery (a world premiere). James Blachly and John McLaughlin Williams will share conducting duties..... Jacaranda has announced an enticing 2015-16 season, one that will begin with a blast of bagpipes on the Santa Monica bluffs.... The centerpiece of this summer's Bard Summerscape is Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers, receiving a very belated American stage première.... The Castelton Festival will be streaming all of its performances this summer. The lineup includes a lecture on "Law and Opera" by the magnificent Ruth Bader Ginsburg... The Los Angeles International New Music Festival, July 7-15, will include the West Coast premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's The Raven and programs devoted to Gabriela Ortiz and Elliott Carter.... Christian Meyer, the longtime director of the Schoenberg Center in Vienna, has stepped aside; Angelika Möser is his successor. Meyer deserves congratulations for having made the Schoenberg Center an extraordinary resource, both for on-site researchers and for visitors online.... West Edge Opera, in Oakland, announces its summer festival, with performances in unusual venues: Lulu in an abandoned train station, Laura Kaminsky's As One at the Oakland Metro, Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses at American Steel Studios.... Good news: Kyle Gann's inexplicably beleaguered book about the Ives Concord Sonata has found a home at University of Illinois Press. It's shameful that a musical thinker of Kyle's stature should have encountered such difficulties.

Another Day in America

Previously: Ten Lines from Laurie Anderson.

Soundcloud of the Day: Cassandra Miller

Be sure to read the composer's note. Via Steve Smith.

A Tatiana Catanzaro moment

The composer's website can be found here.

Dog Days

photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging.
photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging
photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging
photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging
photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging
photos by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging

Photo by Greg Grudt / Matthew Imaging.

One day after the end of the Ojai Festival, I saw David T. Little's Dog Days at LA Opera — or, more accurately, at REDCAT, in a production under the aegis of LA Opera, with an assist from the LA Phil. Although I'd seen the work on video, I was still unprepared for the visceral, clobbering impact of this apocalyptic family drama, which Steve Smith memorably reviewed in the New York Times in 2012. Against an endless parade of quaint literary adaptations, Dog Days is furiously, frighteningly contemporary. I had originally planned to append a short review to my Ojai column, but I couldn't do it justice in limited space. Fortunately, there will be occasion to revisit the piece in New York next winter, and Little's next opera, JFK, will have its premiere in Fort Worth in April 2016.

Ojai Festival 2015

Outsiders. The New Yorker, July 6, 2015.

Grand merci

My book Listen to This, in the French translation by the superb Laurent Slaars, has received a prize from the Syndicat de la Critique, in the category "Meilleurs livres sur la musique." I am tremendously grateful for the honor.