Alex Ross's Blog, page 182

Reporting live

The Lordly Hudson

Old complaint

Wouldn't it be great if the media were covering significant new works by living composers, instead of reporting the discovery of an exceedingly minor piece by Beethoven?

Miscellany: Rite at 100, Copycat, etc.

Tomorrow the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as part of Carolina Performing Arts's season-long Rite of Spring at One Hundred program, launches a four-day academic conference on the subject of Stravinsky's masterpiece. Richard Taruskin gives the keynote address; dozens of papers and panels ensue. Be sure to keep up with the Reflections on the Rite blog, hosted by Noise friend Will Robin.... A few years ago, an avid 78-RPM record collector named Guy Walker made a remarkable discovery at an estate sale in Manhattan: an acetate of Kurt Weill's 1939 World's Fair project Railroads on Parade, which was long thought to have gone unrecorded. A CD is about to be released; it's a fabulously odd artifact of its time, and a telling, if uneven, document of Weill's musical metamorphosis in America.... I've been reading with great sadness of the travails of the Minnesota Orchestra, whose musicians have been locked out after refusing to take a drastic cut. The blogger Song of the Lark has a riveting description of a concert that the musicians organized on their own, in league with their former music director Stanisław Skrowaczewski.... The Brooklyn Philharmonic opens its new season tomorrow with a concert that includes a reprise of Tim Fite's Copycat, a highlight of last season's mold-breaking programs. Here's a video excerpt.... The Seattle Symphony, hardly less innovative, presents a Sonic Evolution concert Friday night, with world premières by Alexandra Gardner, Arlene Sierra, and Kenneth Hesketh. Having just come from Donaueschingen, where just two of thirty-one featured composers were female, I'm happy to see the balance tilted in the opposite direction in Seattle.

Ich war ein Orchester

"I was an orchestra": another Donaueschingen protest against cutbacks in radio-orchestra funding.

Orchestra graveyard 2

Lust auf Kultur

The Donaueschingen audience during an intermission break on Saturday afternoon. The only other place where I've seen a crowd so avid for sonic adventure is Ojai.

Multilingual debate over the question of "Music for All."

Coming attractions: a new opera by Georg Friedrich Haas.

Orchestra graveyard

Outside the Donauhallen in Donaueschingen, a display of crosses representing defunct German orchestras.

Donaueschingen scandal

A dramatic protest against cutbacks in Southwest German Radio funding greeted the opening last night of the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the venerable new-music festival. The Southwest Radio Symphony Orchestra had gathered in the Baar-Sporthalle  and was about to play a program of works by Martin Smolka, Arnulf Herrmann, and Helmut Oehring. After an announcer introduced the Smolka live on the air, the composer Johannes Kreidler got up from the orchestra, holding a cello and a violin in his hands, and grabbed the microphone. After noisily strapping the violin and the cello together — this was symbolic of the proposed "fusion" of the radio orchestras of Stuttgart and Baden-Baden / Freiburg — Kreidler denounced the merger and smashed the instruments onstage. (They were fake, one assumes.) Armin Köhler, the director of the festival, spoke briefly in response, asking that the performance not be disrupted further. There were many boos and a few cries of "Abtreten!" ("Resign!") from the audience. I'm not quite sure what the radio audience heard, but there were no more announcements in the hall. A lively start!

Ludwig's woods

In the shadow of Neuschwanstein.