Alex Ross's Blog, page 140

Iván Fischer profile

Notes of Dissent. The New Yorker, June 2, 2014.

Salonen: the Apple ad

More here.

Update: A brief comment on the New Yorker website.

Spring for Music 2014

Climate Change. The New Yorker, May 26, 2014.

Noted

"Ideology, always masked, changes its face with ease. It is a hydra-mirror whose severed head quickly reappears, presenting the adversary who thought himself victorious the image of his own face."

          — Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror

Guy Barash

The composer's début album, Facts about Water, is now out on Innova. There will be a related concert at Roulette on May 21, with readings by the author Nick Flynn, with whom Barash often collaborates.

Pärt speaks

Arvo Pärt, who will be celebrated at Carnegie Hall on May 31, gives an interview to Will Robin. On the Russian action in Ukraine, the composer is blunt: "It cannot be called anything else but a crime. It is more than a crime.”

Driving to Winnipeg

I've had a bit of an adventure the past couple of days. An overheated bathroom ceiling fan at a radar facility caused O'Hare Airport, in Chicago, to be shut down for several hours on Tuesday — so news reports said — and I was unable to fly on to Winnipeg as planned. The snarl was big enough that not even Alberich-Wotan could get through: social media indicated that Eric Owens was stranded somewhere in the same complex. The good folks at United Airlines told me that there was only a middling chance I would make it the following day in time for my Winnipeg Arts Council event, and so I decided to rent a car and drive. After a nine-hundred-mile marathon, during which I listened to Tristan, Parsifal, three iterations of Become Ocean, and some fifty Dylan songs (including "Red River Shore," in sight of the river in question), I arrived at the Manitoba Theatre Centre with twenty minutes to spare. I spent the night by the banks of the Mississippi, in Winona, Minnesota, and drove up from there through North Dakota, which was not at its most picturesque. The man at the border was skeptical of my behavior, but let me pass. Many thanks to Bill Richardson for elicting conversation from an exhausted and barely coherent author, and to all those who showed up.

Zubel on Kairos

When I visited Warsaw last winter, I was happy to pick up several recordings containing music of Agata Zubel, one of the most gifted of younger Polish composers. There is now a strong compilation on the Kairos label, the principal item being her grittily expressive Beckett setting NOT I. The composer herself, a vocalist of high accomplishment and distinctive timbre, sings in this work and in Aphorisms on Miłosz; Clement Power conducts the Klangforum Wien in a program that also includes Labyrinth and Shades of Ice.

Total Spring

All of this year's Spring for Music concerts are now archived at WQXR. Two events in the series especially stand out: the Seattle Symphony program mentioned below, and the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus's powerful revival of R. Nathaniel Dett's The Ordering of Moses. But all are worth hearing. Tony Tommasini, in the Times, properly mourns the demise of the festival: "What made Spring for Music exceptional is something that should be commonplace in classical music. Orchestras from across North America, large and small, major and regional, were selected to participate based on the artistic merit and adventurousness of the programs they proposed. Shouldn’t this be true of all orchestra programs? Shouldn’t the seasonal offerings of ensembles everywhere be a weekly succession of musical adventures?" Apparently not.

On the eve

On January 6, 1933, three weeks before Hitler took power, Howard Hanson led the Berlin Philharmonic in an all-American program. Included was the third movement of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony. "The audience demanded a repetition of Still's scherzo," the Times reported.