Alex Ross's Blog, page 128

Listen to This en français

My translator is again the brilliant Laurent Slaars.

David Bowie is Pierre Boulez

Or so these signs at the Philharmonie de Paris might lead you to believe. The Boulez exhibition is sprawling and superb. Bowie is outside my field of expertise.

Philharmonie de Paris

Boulez at 90

George Benjamin has a fine appreciation in the Guardian.

Previously: Boulez at 70, at 75, at 80, at 85.

Miscellany

Symphomania, Will Robin's twenty-four-hour festival of twenty-first-century orchestral music, is under way on Q2. The discovery of the morning has been Georges Lentz's gorgeously hellish Jerusalem (after Blake), a pick by the ever-inquisitive David Robertson.... I'm looking forward to hearing John Adams's latest big piece, Scheherezade.2, at the New York Philharmonic this week. It's billed as a "dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra."... Another beguiling musical fiction from the fertile mind of Jennifer Walshe: Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde. More here.... The first installment of Lisa Bielawa's online opera Vireo, subtitled "the spiritual biiography of a witch's accuser," will appear on March 31.... Heartiest congratulations to Zachary Woolfe, who, after several years of incisive free-lance criticism for the New York Times, has been as the paper's new classical-music editor. This is the first classical hire by the Times since Tony Tommasini joined the staff in the late nineties.... Tim Rutherford-Johnson listens to the scary, brilliant music of Adam de la Cour.... Steve Smith, whose blog is springing back to life, listens to Pierluigi Billone.... Also in the Globe: Jeremy Eichler on Feldman and Rothko. An outstanding recent Feldman release is the Flux Quartet's rendition of the First Quartet, Structures, and Three Pieces, on Mode.

The Critic and the Maestro

A rare tribute from a musician to a critic: Riccardo Muti speaks to WFMT's David Polk about the late Andrew Patner, in advance of the Patner Celebration in Chicago tomorrow. Andrew mentioned the music played at the end — Franck's Symphony in D Minor and Bob Dylan's Shadows in the Night — in e-mails to me a couple of days before his shockingly sudden death. We exchanged, on average, three or four messages a day, adding up to tens of thousands over the years. I miss him every morning.

Previously: For Andrew Patner.

Noted

Kozinn: "Today, newspapers across the country have reduced their staffs of critics and the space they devote to performance coverage, sometimes drastically, and it is not uncommon to hear the culture editors at even prestigious papers wondering—with no apparent realization that perhaps they should be in a different business—why they are publishing reviews at all, particularly of performances that happen only once."

Miscellany

On March 18, the Chicago Symphony will host a Celebration of Andrew Patner.... The twentieth Other Minds festival unfolds in San Francisco this weekend: featured are Don Byron, Frode Haltli, Tigran Mansurian, Miya Masaoka, Michael Nyman, Pauline Oliveros, David Tanenbaum, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Errollyn Wallen, and Charles Amirkhanian.... The JACK Quartet plays a new Augusta Read Thomas piece at Miller tonight. Next week they'll be at the National Gallery of Art's American Music Festival in DC, and toward the end of the month they will reprise Czernowin's HIDDEN at MaerzMuzik in Berlin.... Boston's Sound Icon devotes a program to Salvatore Sciarrino this Saturday, with a Pierluigi Billone portrait following on April 1.... TENET will conclude their epic survey of Gesualdo's Responsoria in the period March 12-15 (concerts in New York, Florida, and Georgia)....  Gesualdo will also appear on a March 11 Italian Academy program by the Mivos Quartet, whose major novelty will be a new work by Kate Soper.... The Dallas Opera's Institute for Women Conductors is receiving applications through April 15.... The pianist Philip Thomas will make a short North American tour later this month, stopping in Ithaca, Buffalo, and Toronto. He offers a program of Skempton, Wolff, and Finnissy.... Spectrum in NYC will host a Finnissy Fest from March 22 to March 25, with four world premières on the schedule.... In New York, Justin Davidson writes excellently on Thomas Adès's Totentanz and Andrew Norman's Play.... On March 24, Will Robin hosts a Symphomania festival on Q2.

Film music circa 2015

Composing for Hollywood, on the New Yorker website.

The Meyer effect

Wizards of Sound. The New Yorker, Feb. 23 and March 2, 2015.