Alex Ross's Blog, page 125
May 8, 2015
May 7, 2015
The Other Side of the Wind
When I wrote about Orson Welles for the New York Times in 1996, I said that The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's unfinished satire of seventies Hollywood, had "returned to friendly hands and should eventually find release." This was optimistic: nearly twenty years on, the film, which Welles more or less completed shooting and edited in part, has yet to see the light of day. (Josh Karp's new book Orson Welles's Last Movie gives a lively account of its fate.) Yet a serious effort is under way to round out a crucial part of Welles's legacy: as Brooks Barnes reports in the Times, a team led by Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall, and Peter Bodganovich plans to have the film in theaters by the end of the Welles centenary year. Affonso Gonçalves has been hired as editor, and an Indiegogo fundraiser was launched last night, with the goal of raising two million dollars. As a longtime Welles obsessive, I'm uncommonly eager to see what results.
May 6, 2015
Welles/Herrmann
The Mercury Theatre's incomparably creepy rendition of Lucille Fletcher's The Hitchhiker, in a version from 1946. Seventeen minutes in, Bernard Herrmann is working out the theme that would become Cape Fear. It was, of course, Welles who launched Herrmann's film-music career, with Kane.
May 5, 2015
Welles at 100
Orson Welles, one of the supreme American artists of the twentieth century, would have been one hundred years old today. He never directed a full-blown opera production, despite numerous invitations to do so (his stagings of Copland's The Second Hurricane and Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock fall into a different category), but he did create what will forever stand as the greatest opera scene in film history: the disastrous première of Salammbô, with Susan Alexander Kane in the title role. (The delicious Massenet-ish aria that Bernard Herrmann composed for the occasion has become a concert item; on YouTube you can find performances by Eileen Farrell, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Venera Gimadieva. The text, by John Houseman, incorporates lines from Racine's Phèdre: "Ah! cruel, tu m'as trop entendue," etc.) Welles was an experienced operagoer, one who even had a bit of music criticism in his past: when he was thirteen, he wrote the "Hitting the High Notes" column for the Highland Park News, reviewing performances at the Ravinia Festival.
Previously: Welles in 1996.
More: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Catherine Benamou.
May 3, 2015
Cav/Pag, Wagner voices
High Concept. The New Yorker, May 11, 2015.
May 2, 2015
Miscellany
The Look and Listen Festival unfolds this weekend in Manhattan and Brooklyn. So Percussion, the Daedalus Quartet, Talujon, and Miranda Cuckson are among the performers; featured composers include Miya Masoka, Anna Weesner, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, Kaija Saariaho, and Tyshawn Sorey... On the other coast, the Hear Now Festival offers a sweeping survey of LA-based composers, while John Zorn enjoys a day-long tribute that sprawls between LACMA and UCLA's Royce Hall... The American Composers Orchestra's Underwood New Music Readings are scheduled for May 6-7.... The Stefan Wolpe Society's season-long, four-concert survey concludes on May 11.... Coming later in May in Toronto, the Royal Conservatory's 21C Music Festival, with Saariaho as the featured composer.... The New World Symphony has unveiled a lovely, video-stocked website devoted to John Cage.... Kate Soper will be featured in NYC's Music Mondays series on May 11. In June she will appear with the Seattle Modern Orchestra, in a program that also includes Fausto Romitelli and G. F. Haas.... Harry Lawrence Freeman's 1914 opera Voodoo is to be revived by the Morningside Opera, the Harlem Chamber Players, and Harlem Opera Theater, Michael Cooper reports.
April 27, 2015
Appearance
On May 1 I will appear with the Portland ensemble Third Angle, reading some texts in support of a program devoted to West Coast composers, from Henry Cowell to John Luther Adams.
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