Alex Ross's Blog, page 18

A Komitas moment

In commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, Ruzan Mantashyan and Kirill Gerstein perform Komitas's "Antuni." Gerstein is launching a formidable new project entitled Music in Time of War, combining late works of Debussy with Armenian songs and dances of Komitas Vardapet. Accompanying the recording, which also features Mantashyan, Katia Skanavi, and Thomas Adès, is a 170-page book that addresses the historical frame: the First World War and the contemporaneous murder of more than a million Armenians. 

Elitist pop culture

The point has been made before, but Mark Swed shows that it is worth repeating: "Both [LA Opera events] raised the question of what makes opera elite, as opposed to, say, a Lakers game. Wealth or privilege, say the lexographers at Oxford, a university where wealth and privilege have sway. As I write, tickets purchased on the L.A. Opera website for the Wednesday performance of La Traviata range from $89 to $329. The next night, the Lakers take on the Denver Nuggets at Crypto.com Arena. Cash in your crypto (if you still can) for nuggets of gold: Tickets on the Lakers website begin at $249, rising to five grand. Event parking at the Music Center is $10, a quarter of the price Crypto.com charges for a Lakers game."

I wrote in 2014: "The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons. They live full time in the unreal realm of the mega-rich, yet they hide behind a folksy façade, wolfing down pizza at the Oscars and cheering sports teams from V.I.P. boxes. Meanwhile, traditional bourgeois genres are kicked to the margins, their demographics undesirable, their life styles uncool, their formal intricacies ill suited to the transmission networks of the digital age. Opera, dance, poetry, and the literary novel are still called 'élitist,' despite the fact that the world’s real power has little use for them. The old hierarchy of high and low has become a sham: pop is the ruling party."

At the grave of Arnold, Justine, and Alma Rosé

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Alma Rosé died in Auschwitz, and so her remains are not here, but her memory is present. Her uncle is a short walk away.

Previously: Grieg, Feuchtwanger, Toch, Lubitsch, Korngold, Salieri, Bruckner, Liszt, Georg Trakl, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Thomas Mann, Bach, Nietzsche, Monteverdi, Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Beckett, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky and Nono, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, X. Scharwenka, Elliott Carter, Enescu, Rachmaninov, Mahler and many others, Russ.

Schoenberg in Berlin

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The Berlin Philharmonic has been giving due honor to Arnold Schoenberg on the 150th anniversary of his birth, not only playing a fair number of his works but also remaking the lower lobby into a Schoenberg exhibition. It would have been wonderful to see something similar at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in a city where the composer lived longer than he did in Berlin. I always wonder, though, why German-speaking countries fail to honor Schoenberg's decision to change the spelling of his name when he reconverted to Judaism in Paris in 1933. The dropping of the umlaut was not merely a matter of convenience; it had a more personal dimension. In August 1933, in a postcard to Alban Berg, he calls himself "Schoenberg" while his wife, Gertrud, still writes "Schönberg."

Notes on noise

But soft, what noise? The isle is full of noises. I hear a noise of hymns. A noise like of a hidden brook. An Heavenly noise. A mighty noise. His voice was like a noise of many waters. Make a joyful noise. Make some noise. Bring the noise. The art of noise. Addicted to noise. Cum on feel the noize. Noises off, noise within. Infernal noise! Oh, the noise, oh the noise! Inexplicable dumb shows and noise. Signal to noise, white noise, pink noise, thermal noise, background noise, random noise, statistical noise. The noise of time ...

What Is Noise? The New Yorker, April 22, 2024.

An Otto Wagner moment

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The Kirche am Steinhof, Vienna.

An Adolf Loos moment

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Villa Winternitz, Prague.

The eclipse of 1927 (reprise)

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"At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature.... Then — it was all over till 1999."

            — from the diary of Virginia Woolf, June 30, 1927

Zemlinsky in Prague

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A performance of Eine florentinische Tragödie at the Prague State Opera, the final installment of the invaluable four-year Musica Non Grata series.

The Mäkelä Ubiquity

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website, on the occasion of Klaus Mäkelä's appointment as the future music director of the Chicago Symphony.