Alex Ross's Blog, page 137

The voice of the opposition

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment banker and political operative, struck a chilling tone at the protest against The Death of Klinghoffer yesterday: "You will be made to destroy that set before we're finished. We are going to be back here—everyone here and many, many more—every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground." (You can see and hear him in the second video embedded in Michael Cooper's piece, linked above.) In 2011, Wiesenfeld, who has a long history of belligerent pronouncements, drew attention for attempting to block the awarding of an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner, whom Wiesenfeld compared to a "Kapo," or a Jewish concentration-camp functionary. Elsewhere, Justin Davidson and Philip Kennicott have thoughtful reassessments of the opera, which opens at the Met on October 20.

Nightafternight playlist for the advent of autumn

New and recent releases of interest.

— La Fauvette Passerinette: Peter Hill plays Ravel, Stockhausen, Anderson, Benjamin, Dutilleux, Sculthorpe, Douglas Young, Murail, Takemitsu, and Messiaen [including the première recording of the title work] (Delphian, available October)

— Tchaikovsky, The Seasons and Six Morceaux; Pavel Kolesnikov (Hyperion)

— Sibelius, Lemminkäinen Suite and The Wood Nymph; Osmo Vänskä conducting the Lahti Symphony (BIS)

— Stella di Napoli; Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano, with Riccardo Minasi conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra de Lyon (Erato)

— Gerald Barry, The Importance of Being Earnest; Barbara Hannigan, Katalin Károlyi, Hilary Summers, Peter Tantsits, Joshua Bloom, Alan Ewing, Thomas Adès conducting the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (NMC)

— Helen Grime, Night Songs and other works; Mark Elder and Jamie Phillips conducting the Hallé Orchestra and Hallé Soloists (NMC)

— Feldman, String Quartet No. 1, Structures, Three Pieces; FLUX Quartet (Mode)

— Unsuk Chin, Piano Concerto, Cello Concerto, Šu for sheng and orchestra; Sunwook Kim, Alban Gerhardt, Wu Wei, Myung-Whun Chung conducting the Seoul Philharmonic (DG)

— John Harbison, String Trio, Four Songs of Solitude, Songs America Loves to Sing; Camerata Pacifica (Harmonia Mundi)

— Wagner without Words; Liŷr Williams, piano (Signum)

Thought of the day

"'Hear their two hearts softly beat, / one moment more and their lips will meet. / What a sweet and charming picture, / love in glory, love in bloom, / don't you wish that we were in an eighteenth century drawing-room?' No."

                    — Adorno, "Commodity Music Analyzed"

End-of-summer miscellany

Tertulia is a new NYC chamber-music series combining the pleasures of sound and food. Opening night, Sept. 29, is at Harding's, with excellent young players from Decoda.... Composer-percussionist Andy Akiho is the winner of the 2014 Underwood Emerging Composers Commission, his sharply playful Tarnished Mirrors having won over many ears at last spring's NY Phil Biennial.... The Phil's very welcome Carl Nielsen Project comes to a close Oct. 1-3, with the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Before that, we'll have the American première of Unsuk Chin's Clarinet Concerto, with Kari Kriikku as soloist. A recording of Nielsen's First and Fourth is out now on Dacapo.... Chaya Czernowin appears in Miller Theatre's Composer Portrait series on Oct. 23. In the richly stocked IRCAM archives, one can hear the JACK Quartet play Czernowin's recent piece Hidden.... The site-specific opera collective The Industry is preparing its next project, a car-bound work called HOPSCOTCH.... The Carlsbad Music Festival runs this weekend, with David Lang occupying the lead spot and Dawn of Midi supplying high-end pop flavour.... Mark Swed has an early report on Esa-Pekka Salonen's latest creation, Karawane, a choral-orchestral setting of a canonical Dada text by Hugo Ball. For the moment, you can see and hear the première here.... The international new-music collective Wandelweiser, about which Steve Smith and Tim Rutherford-Johnson know a great deal more than I do, is gaining visibility on these shores, with the S.E.M. Ensemble presenting a Dante Boon recital this Sunday; a Chicago Wandelweiser Festival running this weekend; and various Wandelweiser composers featured in St. Paul Sept. 27-28. Irritable Hedgehog, whose Eva-Maria Houben disc was one of my favorites of last year, is releasing a new Jürg Frey album, again with R. Andrew Lee.... Open letter to Yale University Press: Let Kyle Gann's Ives book be published as he wishes it!

New arrival: Chéreau's Elektra

The Aix-en-Provence presentation of Elektra, Patrice Chéreau's final production, is now on DVD. My review is here.

Conversation with Laurie Anderson

At the New Yorker Festival, Oct. 12.

Recent purchase

This superb, wide-ranging volume, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz and published by University of Minnesota Press, gives me the chance to quote again from Willis's 1969 essay on Woodstock, one of the sharpest pieces the New Yorker has ever published: "What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be — and has been — criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can't be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution. In the meantime, we should insist that the capitalists who produce rock concerts offer reasonable service at reasonable prices."

The problem with the Kennedy Center Honors

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

JLA Sila

Courtesy of Q2.

Adorno/Benjamin

The Naysayers. The New Yorker, Sept. 15, 2014.

Acknowledgments: Leland de la Durantaye, Gary Smith, Ann Powers, Sasha Frere-Jones, Andrew Patner, Henry Finder, and, especially, Daniel Zalewski.