Alex Ross's Blog, page 123

Feldman sunrise

Claire Chase, Steven Schick, and Sarah Rothenberg play Feldman's For Philip Guston at the Ojai Festival. The performance began at 5am and ended at 9:40am. I'll have a report on what Chase described as the "sonic gluttony" of Ojai in a future issue of The New Yorker. The ever-indispensable Mark Swed, who has been attending Ojai for some fifty years, has a piece on the festival's first day in the LA Times.

For Ornette Coleman

Ben Ratliff has an obituary for the jazz master, who once said to Frank Oteri, "For me, composing is a way of keeping up with not repeating." No better definition has been devised.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent released of interest.

Rihm, Et Lux; Paul Van Nevel conducting the Huelgas Ensemble and the Minguet Quartet (ECM)

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 9, Violin Concerto No. 1; Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, with Leonidas Kavakos (Mariinsky)

Birtwistle, Angel Fighter, In Broken Images, Virelai; David Atherton conducting the BBC Singers and the London Sinfonietta, with Andrew Watts, countertenor, and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, tenor (NMC)

Dreamfall: works of Scott Smallwood, Mark Dancigers, John Supko, Nathan Williamson, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Andrea Mazzariello, Judd Greenstein; NOW Ensemble (New Amsterdam)

Johannes Kreidler, Musik mit Musik (selected works); Nadar Ensemble, Ensemble Lux, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Modern (Wergo)

Grieg, Piano Concerto and Lyric Pieces; Javier Perianes, with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Harmonia Mundi)

Feldman, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello; Aleck Karis, Curtis Macomber, Danielle Farina, Christopher Finckel (Bridge)

Playlist

New and recent released of interest.

Rihm, Et Lux; Paul Van Nevel conducting the Huelgas Ensemble and the Minguet Quartet (ECM)

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 9, Violin Concerto No. 1; Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra, with Leonidas Kavakos (Mariinsky)

Birtwistle, Angel Fighter, In Broken Images, Virelai; David Atherton conducting the BBC Singers and the London Sinfonietta, with Andrew Watts, countertenor, and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, tenor (NMC)

Dreamfall: works of Scott Smallwood, Mark Dancigers, John Supko, Nathan Williamson, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Andrea Mazzariello, Judd Greenstein; NOW Ensemble (New Amsterdam)

Johannes Kreidler, Musik mit Musik (selected works); Nadar Ensemble, Ensemble Lux, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Modern (Wergo)

Grieg, Piano Concerto and Lyric Pieces; Javier Perianes, with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Harmonia Mundi)

Feldman, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello; Aleck Karis, Curtis Macomber, Danielle Farina, Christopher Finckel (Bridge)

Transcontinental orchestra notes

Last week I saw a concert at Disney Hall one night and at Avery Fisher Hall the next. The LA Phil, at Disney, was in the middle of its Next on Grand festival, a somewhat amorphous but generously proportioned festival of "Contemporary Americans." The event that night was a Green Umbrella show devoted to Dylan Mattingly, Sean Friar, Chris Cerrone, and Jacob Cooper; Mark Swed has a review, and, space permitting, I'll say something in a future column. For the moment, I want to focus on the seemingly trivial matter of the LA Phil's on-site store. Each time I visit, I'm entranced by the sight of CDs, DVDs, music books, and scores. Yes, actual musical scores, for sale in a concert hall! O uncanny apparition!

I remember the late Andrew Porter lamenting, sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, that Fisher lacked such a store. You should be able to buy or browse the scores of that evening's program on site, he said. Needless to say, little has changed. At Fisher itself, the principal reading matter consists of rack upon rack of brochures. The Juilliard Store has an excellent selection of scores, but since the renovation of the Lincoln Center campus it's been harder to reach, and it closes at 7pm or earlier. You could go the Performing Arts Library and check out a score, but that praiseworthy institution is plagued by what I call the Law of Adjacent Abundance: if you're looking for, say, Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, you are almost guaranteed to see four or five copies of the Fifth, and two or three copies of the Seventh, but none of the Sixth. At Disney, you can, indeed, buy scores related to that week's program; there's also a general selection of Dover publications and a few modern items such as Takemitsu's Green. I watched as a man took out Falla's El amor brujo and explained the distribution of the instruments to his young daughter. In classical music, everything revolves around scores. Yet a display such as the one at Disney is rare. Do people buy these scores in great quantity? Probably not, but their presence sends an encouraging message, promoting musical literacy. Let's hope the future Geffen Hall follows suit.

At Avery Fisher, the Philharmonic was performing under the direction of Manfred Honeck. David Allen wrote an enthusiastic review in the Times. He went back two nights later and added a further thought on Twitter: "Honeck's Brahms on Thursday was very interesting. Honeck's Brahms tonight was utterly, unbelievably shattering." I wish I'd heard that later outing; I was sufficiently impressed with the vitality and the stylishness of the playing on the first night. It was, admittedly, a standard-issue, old-fashioned program: the Fledermaus overture, Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto (with Augustin Hadelich, not quite on his customary form), and the Brahms Fourth. Honeck has been more adventurous in his programming at the Pittsburgh Symphony, although he seems in essence a core-repertory kind of conductor. To be sure, his deconstructive approach to the Mozart Requiem shows that he doesn't always proceed in conservative fashion.

The Brahms is one of my favorite pieces. I'm extremely picky about it, imposing various “checkpoints” that even legendary conductors fail to pass. But Honeck kept me riveted all the way through, even if he was guilty of Overloud Triangle and a few other offenses. The long, effusive lyrical lines put me in mind at times of old Bruno Walter recordings. The aggressive punch of the scherzo smacked of Toscanini. One passage after another "spoke" with idiomatic diction, transcending the fastidious, soulless execution that one hears so often in modern orchestral playing, not least at the Phil. Honeck seems to be on the radar for the music-director search; so is Jaap van Zweden, a somewhat relentlessly hammering conductor who strikes me as Solti lite. If the choice were between those two, I'd vote for Honeck. He is a true musician.

Miscellany

The NY Phil has named Anna Þorvaldsdóttir its next Kravis Emerging Composer. A very sound choice.... Next week in NYC, the Either/Or 10th Spring Festival presents Gio Janiashvili, Anthony Coleman, Rădulescu, and Feldman....On June 6 at the DiMenna Center in NYC, Lisa Moore plays music of Stephen Cabell, Kate Moore, Chris Rogerson, and John Luther Adams — part of the Kettle Corn New Music series....  The musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard has made some amazing discoveries about the music boxes that Puccini used for source material in Butterfly and Turandot. His article appears in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (free access for the moment).... Worthy of support: a documentary about Einstein on the Beach.... A beautiful package of the films of Bill Morrison is now available from BFI.... This year the Chelsea Music Festival takes a Finno-Urgic turn, celebrating Finland and Hungary. The ensemble-in-residence is Avanti!, playing the obvious Sibelius and Bartók as well as a great many lesser-known or up-and-coming figures, including composer-in-residence Ilari Kaila.... The Carlsbad Music Festival has its annual Village Music Walk on June 20.... The full lineup for the Bang on a Can Marathon, on June 21, has been announced. The three founding composers are collaborating with Robert Zollitsch (aka Lao Luo) on a new collective work, Cloud-River-Mountain. Given that Make Music NY is slated for the same date, it will be a mad day in the big city.

From our virtual pages

Russell Platt on Nico Muhly and Anwen Crawford on female rock critics, both on the New Yorker website.

Crisis 1970

From a speech by Amyas Ames, former chair of the New York Philharmonic and of Lincoln Center. Inspired by Will Robin.

Recent Greenstein

Judd Greenstein's City Boy appears on the new NOW Ensemble disc Dreamfall.

Recent Birtwistle

I've just received a new Birtwistle recording from the NMC label. Cortege, which made such a strong impression at an Ensemble Intercontemporain performance at the Philharmonie de Paris earlier this spring, isn't on the disc, but Angel Fighter, In Broken Images, and the miniature Virelai, three other works of the past decade, are included.