Alex Ross's Blog, page 124

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Jessica Hopper, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (featherproof)

Rufus Jones, Jr., Dean Dixon: Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad (Rowman & Littlefield)

Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Knopf)

Graham Johnson, Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs, 3 vols. (Yale)

Nigel Simeone and John Tyrrell, eds., Charles Mackerras (Boydell)

Lily E. Hirsch, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment (University of Michigan)

Mid-May Miscellany

On May 21 and 28, under the auspices of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Talea Ensemble will survey the admirably unpredictable Austrian composer Clemens Gadenstätter.... The Library of Congress, in collaboration with Q2, has made available a host of new-music concerts. I'm listening now to Chaya Czernowin's Slow Summer Stay II: Lakes.... The influential Berlin critic Manuel Brug is blogging.... VisionIntoArt's Ferus Festival (May 29-30, NYC) features this year the likes of Agata Zubel, Hafez Modirzadeh, Molly Joyce, and Cornelius Dufallo.... Steve Schick, the Krishnamurti of percussion, has prepared an online course in advance of this year's Ojai Festival, which looks deliriously interesting.... Will Robin writes about Holly Herndon at Bandcamp.... The longstanding June in Buffalo festival and the related Performance Institute get under way on May 30; David Felder's large-scale song cycle Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux will be featured in an Ensemble Signal performance..... Chicago's Spektral Quartet goes comic on May 30, with a Chris Fisher-Lochhead piece inspired by the stand-up cadences of Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, and Tig Notaro.... One more George Perle centennial event: May 21 at New York Public Library.... David T. Little's powerful and unsettling Dog Days is coming to LA Opera, under the umbrella of the LA Phil's richly stocked Next on Grand festival.... Noted: a fascinating essay by Alice Coote on singing across gender lines.... On May 22 and 23, at Roulette in Brooklyn, ICE will give a preview of George Lewis's opera Afterword, an "aesthetic extension of Lewis’s 2008 book about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.".... In an unusual move, on May 20 the Detroit Symphony will webcast part of its rehearsals for an upcoming Mahler First.... Opera Philadelphia, which won strong notices for its Don Carlo with Eric Owens, is gearing up for the June 5 première of Charlie Parker's Yardbird, an opera by Daniel Schnyder. Larry Brownlee and Angela Brown, the leads, discuss the work.... The new Whitney Museum launches a promising new performance series with a three-day festival, presented by Issue Project Room, devoted to the pioneering multimedia composer David Rosenboom (May 22-24). Coming in June is a major Conlon Nancarrow survey.

Lewis Nielson

The Oberlin-based composer has a strong new disc on Mode.

Soundcloud of the day: Amadeus Regucera

The JACK Quartet plays obscured-distorted-redacted by Amadeus Regucera, a young Bay Area composer.

Four Parsifal Places

Parsifal Place, Albuquerque NM.

Parsifal Place, Las Vegas NV.

Parsifal Place, Apex NC.

The corner of Parsifal Place and Lohengrin Place, Bronx NY.

Images courtesy of Google Street View.

Previously: A Walking Tour of Wagner's New York.

Failharmoniker

The Berlin Philharmonic Searches for a Messiah, on the New Yorker website.

The wisdom of the algorithm

Nikisch Avenue

Joel Stein alerts me to this cluster of musical street names in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Arthur Nikisch conducted the Boston Symphony from 1889 to 1893, before moving on to the Budapest Opera and, well, the Berlin Philharmonic.

Previously: The corner of Strauss and Stravinsky, Vivaldi in Antarctica, Rachmaninov in Valhalla.

"Too wedded to print"

Wendy Lesser, the editor of The Threepenny Review, notes in a letter to her readers that last year the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew a long-standing grant to the publication, on the grounds that it was "too wedded to print." Anyone who is happily married to the printed word might consider offering support. And the NEA should reconsider its decision.

Boulez auction

The autograph of Boulez's Structures 1A, from the collection of the pianist Paul Jacobs, is up for auction at Sotheby's. In the same offering, a draft of the opening of Debussy's unfinished opera on The Fall of the House of Usher.