Alex Ross's Blog, page 158

Nightafternight playlist

New releases of interest.

— Eva-Maria Houben, Piano Music; R. Andrew Lee (Irritable Hedgehog)

— John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (Cantaloupe)

— Density (works of Reich, Balter, Lucier, Glass, de León, Varèse); Claire Chase (New Focus Recordings)

— Bach, Goldberg Variations; Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch)

— Kinan Azmeh, Elastic City

— Schumann, Waldszenen, Piano Sonata No. 2, Gesänge der Frühe; Mitsuko Uchida (Decca)

— Nicholas Ludford, Missa inclina cor meum, John Mason, Ave fuit prima salus; Blue Heron (BHCD)

— Britten, The Complete Works (Decca)

READING LIST

— Martin Geck, Richard Wagner: A Life in Music (Chicago)

— Timothée Picard, Verdi-Wagner: Imaginaire de l'opéra et identités nationales (Actes Sud)

— William Kinderman, Wagner's Parsifal (Oxford)

— Joseph Auner, Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries (Norton)

— John Potter and Neil Sorrell, A History of Singing (Cambridge)

— Elfriede Jelinek, Rein Gold (Rowohlt)

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

Miscellany: Vänskä's farewell, etc.

The Music Critics Association of North America has launched a new web journal, Classical Voice North America, with reviews and stories by many experienced observers. This multi-author piece has a useful roundup of premières across the continent (though I have issues with the second paragraph).... Yuri Temirkanov's views on female conductors make Vasily Petrenko's sound progressive... With the Verdi bicentennial at hand, Anne Midgette writes of her love for the composer, and Zachary Woolfe interviews Riccardo Muti about Macbeth and the rest. Muti conducts the Requiem on the big day, Oct. 10; the Chicago Symphony will have a live webcast.... Michael Cooper and Robin Pegrebin have a riveting and often disconcerting account of the end of City Opera.... Dal Niente, in Chicago, features works of the young German neo-conceptualist Johannes Kreidler on Oct. 15.... Caroline Shaw, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, is featured in concerts on Oct. 15 and 16 at the Brookfield Place Winter Garden downtown, under the aegis of John Schaefer's New Sounds Live series.... This weekend Osmo Vänskä is leading the Minnesota Orchestra musicians in three farewell concerts. Tonight's will be broadcast on MPR. The encore at last night's concert was, of course, "Valse Triste." There are, however, stirrings of a last-minute, or after-midnight, rescue.

Video of the day: Wallace Stevens

So many emotions

A companion video for my Joyce DiDonato profile, and, perhaps, an oasis of calm amid chaos: "Tanti affetti," from La Donna del Lago, at the Last Night of the Proms, 2013.

More: A New Yorker website post pegged to the profile.

So much feeling

A companion video for my Joyce DiDonato profile, and, perhaps, an oasis of calm amid chaos: "Tanti affetti," from La Donna del Lago, at the Last Night of the Proms, 2013.

In other news

Vänskä resigns

Osmo Vänskä, the hugely gifted music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, has resigned. He led two of the most remarkable orchestral performances I've ever heard: a 1996 rendition of the Sibelius Second Symphony, with the Iceland Symphony; and the famous Kullervo in 2010. That the Minnesota Orchestra Association has allowed this conductor to depart strikes me as a management failure of historic proportions. Do the musicians deserve equal blame? No, as Lisa Hirsch explains. Interestingly, Graydon Royce, in the Star Tribune, reports
that the orchestra's "musicians are exploring the possibility of going to Carnegie Hall on their own, and bringing Vänskä with them in November." They will present concerts this week with Emanuel Ax. The question now hanging in the air is whether the musicians could possibly divorce themselves from the MOA and set themselves up as an independent ensemble.

Black Monday

New York City Opera prepares to file for bankruptcy. The Minnesota Orchestra Association announces that it is cancelling the orchestra's Carnegie Hall concerts, making Osmo Vänskä's resignation very likely. The best account of what happened to City Opera is Fred Cohn's, for Opera News. We await the definitive story of the Minnesota debacle, but, as in the case of City Opera, the activities of the board of directors will require close scrutiny. Lisa Hirsch has a succint formulation: "If
an opera company or symphony orchestra finds itself in financial
trouble, it's rarely because the musicians can't play and the costumers
have forgotten how to sew."

Joyce DiDonato, opening nights

I have two pieces in this week's issue of The New Yorker: a profile of Joyce DiDonato, in which, among other things, the almighty Kansan mezzo takes kickboxing lessons from a Breaking Bad extra; and a review of opening nights at the Met and at the seemingly now expiring New York City Opera. Even at seventy-five hundred words, my piece on Joyce leaves out much; she was tremendously generous in letting me observe so many aspects of her life and work, from a guided tour of her childhood in Prairie Village to her rehearsals last summer in Santa Fe.

Picture of the day

Max Abramowitz, the architect of Philharmonic Hall (now known as Avery Fisher Hall), with an "unidentified model." If only some of this Mad Men style had gone into the building.