Alex Ross's Blog, page 156

Gubaidulina birthday miscellany

After a mysterious absence from the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, Andrew Patner, one of America's most authoritative and knowledgeable critics in any field, returns to the beat, with reviews of Susanna Mälkki at the Chicago Symphony and of an important revival of William Grant Still and Langston Hughes's Troubled Island.... Various concerts from the recent Donaueschingen Music Days can be heard on the SWR site here. Raphaël Cendo's new piece was sonically riveting, if perhaps a bit diffuse at first hearing; Enno Poppe's Speicher I-IV is also worth close attention.... This weekend in San Francisco, Lisa Bielawa stages another large-scale airfield composition — Crissy Broadcast, with more than eight hundred performers.... Some fascinating new material at Laura Kuhn's John Cage blog.... Q2 Music has two broadcasts of recent works by Caroline Shaw.... Lincoln Center's Eric Gewirtz notes that the two most recent Grawemeyer Award-winning pieces will have performances in New York next week: Michel van der Aa's Up-close will be heard at the White Light Festival on Monday night, and Esa-Pekka Salonen will lead the first of five performances of his Violin Concerto at the New York Philharmonic on Oct. 30, with Leila Josefowicz as soloist. Note also a Salonen CONTACT! event on Nov. 4.... Tim Rutherford-Johnson features an absolutely fascinating piano piece by the young Canadian composer Cassandra Miller, and hails a new choral work by same... To Tim I also owe news of the long-awaited complete recording of The History of Photography of Sound, Michael Finnissy's five-and-a-half-hour music drama for solo piano. Ian Pace undertakes the mighty task. More anon; I've listened only as far as Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets.... Read Michael Markham on Vivaldi, Berio, and Kanye West.... There's a round-up of reviews of Nico Muhly's Two Boys at ionarts. I discussed the London première here; I remain convinced it's a substantial, absorbing work, despite its flaws.... Anton Batagov gives three performances of Feldman's Triadic Memories at the Park Avenue Armory this weekend.

St. Louis vs. Boston

In advance of the World Series, the brass sections of the St. Louis and Boston Symphonies face off. There's a fabulous surprise cameo on the Boston side.

Previously: The joy in Boston.

Escalera

During my recent visit to the University of Oklahoma — many thanks to my hosts, Robert Scafe and Sanna Pederson, and to all who attended my Wagner-Nietzsche lecture — I made a quick visit to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. They have a striking exhibition of postwar Latin American and Caribbean art, drawn from the collection of the Art Museum of the Americas, in Washington. Above is Escalera VI, by the Paraguayan painter Margarita Morselli.

Video of the day: Mehdi Hosseini

Mohsen Saghafi comments: "The dialogue among the four solo string instruments attempting to be heard through the tumult of orchestral sounds is a musical metaphor for the cultural status of the tribes of Iran. In this piece, Hosseini reproduces the absurdity and multi-cultural aspect of societal and popular culture and conversations with the use of the orchestra. He represents the tumult of a society in which ethnic cultural elements are evident but cannot be easily heard."

Unrealized projects

The Resurrection of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a proposed monument by Frédéric Brou, sadly never came to pass, despite the best efforts of Léon Bloy.

Previously: At the grave of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

Baden-Baden 1927 (preview)

Back to the Future. The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013.

Baden-Baden 1927

Back to the Future. The New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013.

Video of the day: Mahagonny

Gotham Chamber Opera's production Baden-Baden 1927—re-creating the legendary quadruple bill of Milhaud's L'Enlèvement d'Europe, Hindemith's Hin und zurück, Toch's Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse, and Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel—opens next week. Paul Curran directs, with stage designs by Georg Baselitz; Helen Donath, in a rare New York appearance, takes the Lotte Lenya role in Mahagonny.

Appearance

On Friday, I'll give a lecture entitled "Siegfried Dionysus: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Adoration of the Earth" at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, OK. This listing describes the talk as a joint appearance with Richard Taruskin, but unfortunately he could not attend.

Video of the day: Marcos Balter

Balter's Strohbass appears on Hot (New Focus Recordings), an absorbing new disc by the saxophonist Ryan Muncy. Also featured are works by Georges Aperghis, Anthony Cheung, Aaron Cassidy, Chaya Czernowin, and Franco Donatoni. Muncy's collaborators are Nadia Sirota, Ben Melsky, Claire Chase, and Ensemble Dal Niente, who are presenting works of Johannes Kreidler in Chicago tomorrow.