Alex Ross's Blog, page 185

Stockhausen, Cage

My review of Stockhausen's Mittwoch, in Birmingham, and of Cage's Europeras 1 and 2, in Bochum, appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker. If you're reading on the iPad, you can see an excerpt from the Helicopter String Quartet.

Malick's music

Near Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

The New Yorker's Richard Brody alerted me to the fact that the new Terrence Malick film, To the Wonder, will make prominent use of the prelude to Wagner's Parsifal, apparently in a scene set at Mont-Saint-Michel in France. Online reports suggest that the soundtrack will also include Pärt's Fratres, Berlioz's Harold in Italy, Haydn's The Seasons, Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, Dvořák's "New World" Symphony, Górecki's Third Symphony, Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus, and Rachmaninov's The Isle of the Dead. Malick's deployment of the Rheingold prelude in The New World is possibly the most idiomatic use of Wagner in cinema history.

Previously: The music of The Tree of Life.

Saving the Ives home

During my hiatus, I missed a crucial story — the fight to preserve the longtime home of Charles Ives. Norman Lebrecht first mentioned the threat to the house on his blog in early August; more recently, there have been been reports in the Danbury News Times and the Wall Street Journal . Watch the Ives Society's Facebook page for updates.

Video of the day

Ernst Busch sings "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer," from G. W. Pabst's Threepenny film.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

On Sunday night I crossed the Atlantic for a quick three-day tour, with an emphasis on Wagner and the avant-garde. Details will follow in The New Yorker a week from Monday.

Monday morning: Wagner's "Asyl" in Zurich. The villa was much smaller when Wagner lived there. I also dropped in at the Zürcher James Joyce Stiftung and had the honor of meeting the distinguished scholar Fritz Senn. For anyone who is obsessed with both Wagner and Joyce, Zurich is a paradise of associations.

Monday evening: the view from the KKL, Lucerne. James Gaffigan leads the Lucerne Symphony in the world première of Wolfgang Rihm's symphonic cycle Nähe fern.

Tuesday morning: the glorious Wagner villa in Tribschen. Kudos to the museum for not having the Siegfried-Idyll on continuous loop.

Tuesday evening: Jahrhunderthalle, Bochum. Cage's Europeras 1 and 2 are produced by the Ruhrtriennale. Unfortunately, the brevity of my visit prevented me from taking in the rest of Heiner Goebbels's imaginative musical programming for the festival: Robert Wilson reading the Lecture on Nothing, Orff's Prometheus, Kent Nagano conducting Ives, and Goebbels's new piece When the Mountain changed its clothing.

Wednesday: Argyle Works, Birmingham, England. The Birmingham Opera gives the long-delayed world première of Stockhausen's Mittwoch, the one with the helicopters. It was worth the wait. Read a spate of reviews at The Rambler.

At the grave of Dr. Koussevitzky

I have a column on the Tanglewood festival in this week's New Yorker. In the same issue is a profile of Christian Tetzlaff by the perennially acute Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler, in whose company I visited the site above.

Hiatus

Hiatus resumes

The Herrmann factor

There's much chatter in the film world over the new British Film Institute poll, which shows that Vertigo has supplanted Citizen Kane as the most admired film ever made. I can't help noticing that while the name of the top-place film has changed the composer remains the same.

When all is ruin once again

Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats lived in the nineteen-twenties. Sadly, it is now closed because of flood damage.