Alex Ross's Blog, page 159

Return to Southbank

I am back in London to deliver another overstuffed lecture at the Rest Is Noise Festival. This one, scheduled for 10AM Sunday, will somehow deal with the postwar avant-garde, Britten, and minimalism. A full schedule of the weekend's talks, centered on Britten, is here. Coming up on Oct. 6 is Gruppen . My final talk in the series will be on Dec. 7, on the same weekend as the London première of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain.

City Opera on the brink

Michael Cooper reports in the New York Times: "City Opera’s board voted Thursday to start bankruptcy proceedings next
week and wind down the company’s affairs if it fails to raise $7 million
by Monday." The company's million-dollar Kickstarter drive seems to have picked up momentum with the breaking news, although it still has a long way to go.

Sound choices

Great news: the remarkable Jeremy Denk has been named a MacArthur Fellow. As I wrote back in 2005, "Who needs music critics when performers write like that?" Congratulations also to the jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer.

Levine

A video accompanying Michael Cooper's story about James Levine's return to the Met podium.

Minnesota unbound?

Oestreich: "The players are planning a fall season of their own, beginning with
concerts on Oct. 4 and 5 featuring the pianist Emanuel Ax, according to
their Web site.
What is more, said their spokesman, Blois Olson, there has been 'soft
interest' from unspecified quarters in the notion of having the players
stage their own Sibelius concerts with Mr. Vänskä at Carnegie, free of
management involvement, as unlikely as that may seem."

Papal Wagnerism

Pope Francis made news with the publication of a long interview accorded to Father Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica. For one thing, he sets forward a potentially transformative perspective on gay issues: “A person once asked me, in a
provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with
another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he
endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn
this person?’ We must always consider the person." While he does not offer an explicit revision of Catholic teaching, his stance that "I am no one to judge" is in itself a significant departure, as is his insistence that the Church has focused too much on gay issues, abortion, and contraception. I can't help recalling what I wrote in "Love on the March" last year: "It may be, as John Cardinal O’Connor once intoned, that the Catholic
Church will be teaching that homosexuality is a sin 'until the end of
time.' Recent history suggests, however, that change can happen
blindingly fast."

I also can't help noticing that the Pope talks about Wagner. In part, this is by way of naming some of his favorite works of art and music. He mentions the Furtwängler La Scala Ring and the 1962 Knappertsbusch Parsifal as prized recordings. (He is known to be a Furtwängler enthusiast; earlier this year, Angela Merkel presented him with a Furtwängler box set.) But he also makes a broader point about intellectual rigidification and self-deception, using Wagner's works as points of reference: “When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses
sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded
about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses
encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy
surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act
of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the church
must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand
themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.”

These are surprising analogies, to say the least. If I'm not mistaken, Pope Francis is comparing "decadent Thomist commentaries" to Klingsor's magic garden — a seductive illusion covering a wasteland. Could the Pope's emergent philosophy of unadorned compassion have been influenced in some small way by Parsifal, that attempted renovation of religious thought through musical ritual? "Through pity, knowing"? "Redemption to the Redeemer"? Possibly, but there are limits to his aestheticism: "Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is
written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing." This is a remarkable man.

Video of the day: Alex Hills

Alex Hills's Alles is a "simultaneous cover of the 'California über Alles' by the Dead Kennedys and Nico's cover of 'Deutschland über Alles.'" The piece appears on The Music of Making Strange, a new compilation of Hills's music from Carrier. The composer's website is here.

Miscellany for the end of summer

The Park Avenue Armory is inaugurating a recital series in its newly renovated Board of Officers Room. The first performer (Sept. 29, Oct. 1) is none other than Christian Gerhaher, one of the supreme Lieder singers of the day. In late October, Anton Batagov will play Feldman's Triadic Memories.... The Spektral Quartet is raising funds for a new-music ringtone project (silly video alert)... A stylish new look for NewMusicBox.... The admirable Sonnambula consort returns to St. Luke's on Oct. 2, with "masterworks of the English Renaissance."... This Thursday, the French Institute / Alliance Française in New York presents a collaboration between the artist Xavier Veilhan and the electronic composer Eliane Radigue.... On Sunday, Tim Rutherford-Johnson curates a concert of Some Recent Silences at Kings Place in London.... The fearless Bay Area pianist Sarah Cahill has a new disc called A Sweeter Music, on an anti-war theme. There's a release party in Berkeley on Sept. 22. This week Sarah will also be performing at San Quentin, as part of the prison's arts program; she will be playing works composed by Henry Cowell while he was an inmate.... Another record worth noting: Bella Ciao, a compelling fantasia on ancient Roman Jewish melodies by the hard-to-describe Brooklyn-based ensemble Barbez. They present the record tomorrow at LPR, with Yotam Haber joining in.... Zerbinetta, the mysterious author of the essential opera blog Likely Impossibilities, has revealed herself as the musicologist Micaela Baranello.... Alan Rusbridger's marvelous book Play It Again is now out in the US. The piano-playing, empire-shaking author appears at the New York Public Library on Sept. 25.

Kubrick and Ligeti

Space is the Place. The New Yorker, Sept. 23, 2013.

This short piece on the music of 2001, anticipating the New York Philharmonic's presentation of the film, appears as part of the redesign of our Goings On about Town section. I'll be writing occasional mini-essays for the section; these take the place of the more abbreviated Critics' Notebooks.

I allude to Julia Heimerdinger's fascinating paper "'I have been compromised. I am now fighting
against it': Ligeti vs. Kubrick and the Music for
2001: A Space Odyssey," which appeared in the Journal of Film Music in 2011. Some of her findings: 1) Jan Harlan, acting on Kubrick's behalf, tried to contact Ligeti after the director discovered his music, and was told by the composer's housekeeper that he was away; 2) Kubrick's associates did obtain licenses from Ligeti's publishers and from record and radio companies, although they were not forthcoming about the pivotal role assigned to the music in the film; 3) Ligeti learned about the use of his music not from his publishers but from members of the Bavarian Radio Chorus; 4) he attended a showing of the film with stopwatch in hand, furiously scribbling down timings — thirty-two minutes in all; 5) many years later, Kubrick was annoyed to hear Ligeti saying on the BBC's Desert Island Discs that the director had stolen from him, and threatened to sue for libel. Heimerdinger concludes that Kubrick did follow the correct procedures, despite some shady negotiating tactics, and that Ligeti's accusation of theft "was not valid." Despite all these difficulties, Ligeti admired Kubrick's films and the employment of music in them, as his longtime assistant Louise Duchesneau has attested.

Previously: Ligeti's Third Quartet.

The opera crisis at 332

"Pieces that reference an Opera Crisis date back a bit further," writes Jon Silpayamanant in the latest post on his invaluable site. Indeed they do! Christoforo Ivanovich, in "Le memorie teatrali di Venezia," pessimistically surveys the state of opera in Venice: "Profits at the door, the basis of the business investment, instead of growing are diminishing, evidently endangering the continuation of this noble entertainment." This is from 1681. In a few years, this crisis will be as old as Elina Makropulos. (Quoted from Ellen Rosand's splendid Opera in Seventeenth-century Venice.)