Alex Ross's Blog, page 151

Words fail

From a press release on behalf of the Minnesota Orchestral Association: "'The fact that the organization’s deficit is substantially smaller in a year without any performances indicates the degree to which this business model is out of alignment,' said Board Chair Jon Campbell."

An Alkan moment

Little fanfare greeted the bicentennial of Charles-Valentin Alkan, on Nov. 30, but next Sunday the British pianist Jack Gibbons — seen playing Le Festin d'Ésope above — will honor the great Romantic outlier by performing the complete set of Twelve Studies in All the Minor Keys, Op. 39, at Merkin Hall. Back in 1996, in the same space, Marc-André Hamelin played the Concerto for Solo Piano, from the Op. 39 set. Gibbons may not match Hamelin's extreme virtuosity, but he seems to have technique commensurate to the task.

Washington, Milan

News from the nation's capital: Deborah Rutter, one of the most capable leaders in the perennially fraught orchestra business, is leaving her post at the Chicago Symphony in order to become the president of the Kennedy Center. The institution is a peculiar and problematic one, and Rutter will have her work cut out for her. She seems, however, an excellent choice. La Scala, meanwhile, has announced that Riccardo Chailly is to be its next music director. This, too, seems a wise move, although at La Scala one never knows what lies in store.

New in Victorian studies

Eliza Brown

From the Spektral Quartet's new disc Chambers.

Hanna Hartman

New Bresnick

Martin Bresnick's Prayers Remain Forever (2011), with Ashley Bathgate, cello, and Lisa Moore, piano, in performance at Bargemusic. Prompted by Kyle Gann.

Evensong at Magdalen

Notable music books of 2013

— Martin Geck, Richard Wagner: A Life in Music, trans. Stewart Spencer (Chicago)

— Nigel Simeone, ed., The Leonard Bernstein Letters (Yale)

— Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (Oxford)

— Alan Rusbridger, Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible (FSG)

— John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf)

— Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (Penguin)

— Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913-1976, Volume 6 (Boydell and Brewer)

— Stephen Walsh, Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure (Knopf)

— David Trippett, Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity (Cambridge)

— Balínt András Varga, From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (University of Rochester Press)

— Beth E. Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (University of California Press)

— Leslie Sprout, The Musical Legacy of Wartime France (California)

— Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham)

The end of Noise

I'm headed back to Southbank for the final weekend of the Rest Is Noise Festival. On Saturday, I'll give a talk about early-21st-century music, presenting four "case studies" (Georg Friedrich Haas, Liza Lim, Stefan Prins, John Luther Adams); and on Sunday I'll chat with Colin Greenwood, the brilliant bassist of Radiohead. Eternal gratitude to Jude Kelly, Gillian Moore, and all others who made the festival happen.