Alex Ross's Blog, page 134

Ashley Fure

Until recently a student of Chaya Czernowin's at Harvard, Fure will featured at a Dal Niente Party Concert on Sunday.

Jeanne Demessieux

Bob Shingleton responds to the Mrs. Bach "clickbait fest" by drawing attention to the organist and composer Jeanne Demessieux, in whom Virgil Thomson once heard "music making of the most crystalline and dazzling clarity." Above, the ever-superb Paul Jacobs plays her "Octaves" Étude.

Curiosity of the day

I picked up a copy of B. H. Haggin's once popular music-appreciation book, Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet. Published in 1944, it included a record-measuring tool, so that the reader could time musical examples. I might repurpose it as an exotic bookmark.

The unfortunate Mr. Lazić

Miscellany: RBG on Klinghoffer, etc.

A final indignity for the misbegotten protest against The Death of Klinghoffer: as Michael Cooper reports in the New York Times, ticket sales at the Met, initially sluggish, have picked up as a result of all the media coverage. In what amounts to a final ruling on the matter, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to see the opera and found nothing anti-Semitic in it.... Disturbing: the pianist Dejan Lazic has asked that an Anne Midgette review of one of his recitals be removed from the Internet, under the EU's "right to be forgotten" ruling... A fairly mouth-watering lineup for the Huddersfield Festival later this month: the SEM Ensemble pays tribute to Christian Wolff, Feldman's multi-piano pieces receive rare performances, and James Dillon is celebrated, among much else.... On Nov. 1, wild Up plays at the Colburn in LA: works of Steve Mackey, Kate Moore, Derek Bermel, and Ted Hearne.... ASCAP will soon hand out its annual Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson prizes; I'm proud to see Will Robin, my former assistant, receive recognition for his NewMusicBox article “Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms." Will has a piece in the Sunday Times about Irving Fine. Other worthy honorees include Annegret Fauser, for Sounds of War, and Terry Teachout, for Duke.... This is the last weekend to see In the Garden of Sonic Delights, Caramoor's celebration of sound art.... On Nov. 7-8, the Kitchen will present a production of Originale, Stockhausen's 1961 "happening," in association with Analog Arts, the Goethe Institute, and Darmstadt Essential Repertoire. The distinguished and provocative cast includes the poet Eileen Myles, the downtown luminary Justin Vivian Bond, and the pianist Stephen Drury. There are some wonderful images of the 1961 New York production at the Analog Arts website, including David Tudor in drag.... Also new from Analog Arts, a loadbang album featuring Eve Beglarian's Island of the Sirens, Hannah Lash's Stoned Prince, Andy Akiho's Six Haikus, and Paul Pinto's g3db.Did0 (goodbye, Dido). On Nov. 5 there will be a release event at Greenwich House Music School.... Two striking visual representations of the state of classical music: Ricky O'Bannon's charts of American orchestral repertory, and Suby Raman's graphs detailing the neglect of living composers at the Met.

The "Mrs. Bach" story

The Search for Mrs. Bach, New Yorker website.

Nightafternight playlist for Halloween

— Ustvolskaya, Violin Sonata, Clarinet Trio, Duet; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Markus Hinterhäuser, Reto Bieri (ECM)

— Milhaud, L'Orestie d'Eschyle; Lori Phillips, Dan Kempson, Sidney Outlaw, Sophie Delphis, Brenda Rae, Tamara Mumford, Jennifer Lane, Julianna Di Giacomo, Kristin Eder, with Kenneth Kiesler conducting the University of Michigan Symphony, University Choir, Orpheus Singers, and UMS Choral Union (Naxos)

— áltaVoz: works of Felipe Lara, José Luis Hurtado, Mauricio Pauly, Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann; JACK Quartet (New Focus)

— Andrew McIntosh, Symmetry Etudes, Hyenas in the Temples of Pleasure; Yarn/Wire, James Sullivan, Brian Walsh, and Andrew McIntosh (Populist)

— Mamoru Fujieda, Patterns of Plants; Sarah Cahill (Pinna)

— Nico Muhly, Two Boys; Paul Appleby, Alice Coote, David Robertson conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus (Nonesuch)

Tomoko Fukui

Gaku Yamada obtains some astonishing sounds from the guitar in Fukui's color song III.

New Soper

Kate Soper's The Understanding of All Things, on a Kafka text. Wet Ink, which is currently on tour in Germany, will perform the piece in New York in December.

Rodzinski's home movies

Via the invaluable site Composers Doing Normal Shit, here are remarkable home movies taken by the conductor Artur Rodzinski in the early and mid-nineteen thirties. They have been uploaded to YouTube by his grandson, the film composer Xander Rodzinski. The parade of celebrities includes Clemens Krauss, Richard Strauss, Vladimir Horowitz, Leopold Stokowski, George Gershwin, William Andrews Clark, Jr. (founder of the LA Phil), Maurice Ravel, Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Lourié, Franz Schreker, and Karol Szymanowski (seen at home in Zakopane). Olin Downes, the longtime chief music critic of the New York Times, appears in a number of the videos; he traveled widely in Europe in the summer of 1932, reporting and broadcasting, and, in an unusual arrangement, Rodzinski evidently served as his documentarian. For those with Times access, here is Downes's report of his visit to Szymanowski.