Alex Ross's Blog, page 188
June 14, 2012
Provincetown arts
"This hunky string quartet finds the common ground between Mozart and Rihanna." At last!
June 13, 2012
June 12, 2012
From the diaries of Tarkovsky
7 December, Stockholm
I feel ghastly.
Slava Rostropovich has arrived. He said he would certainly help, he'll hand my letter to Reagan.
White Light 2012
Lincoln Center's White Light Festival has announced its offerings for 2012. William Christie will lead Les Arts Florissants in Charpentier motets; Paul Lewis, placing himself in risky competition with Mitsuko Uchida, will essay the last three sonatas of Schubert; Emanuel Ax tunes in; Heiner Goebbels returns to the city; Cameron Carpenter plays organ works of Bach; Akram Khan and Fabulous Beast head a dance contingent; Mary Chapin Carpenter and the Latvian Radio Choir sing (not together); and Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philhamonia present the Mahler Ninth. It's especially good to see Joseph Drew and his Analog Arts project given a high-profile gig. I've been following Drew's work for years, often from afar, and last fall I caught his superb presentation of Stockhausen's Cosmic Pulses at the old ISSUE Project Room. (See Seth Colter Walls for a full report.) In all, it looks to be another variegated yet through-composed White Light season.
June 11, 2012
Indispensables
I've added Timothée Picard's monumental Dictionnaire encyclopédique Wagner (Actes Sud) to the small row of books on my desk. Bea is investigating.
The John Adams Passion
"Adams’s latest work, 'The Gospel According to the Other Mary,' had its première at the end of May, in Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. A Passion play in all but name, it is a huge, strange, turbulent creation, brushing against chaos. The modernist tradition of the dark sacred, of the radical sublime, is alive and well...."
From "Sacred Dissonance," The New Yorker, June 18, 2012. Audio extra on the iPad edition: “Who rips his flesh down the seams,” the opening chorus of Act II.
June 7, 2012
Cagey miscellany
The Cage just doesn't stop around here. Tonight at Greenwich House Music School the esteemed pianist Taka Kigawa plays various pieces by the master, including some of the Études Australes. On Saturday night, the Darmstadt series presents an all-Cage program at ISSUE Project Room, with rare performances of Hymns and Variations and Twenty-three alongside the familiar String Quartet in Four Parts. ISSUE's programming is very rich this month, with Philip Glass-led fundraisers June 13-15 and Stockhausen on Make Music day, June 21. Note also that there will be a Satie-Cage Vexations marathon that day — one of several around the world.... Michael Mizrahi appears on behalf of his acclaimed new record The Bright Motion at LPR on June 12; the viola's Nadia Sirota is also in the house.... Speaking of Sirota — I'm not sure if there's a relation here — Raphael Mostel tells of bringing Beate Sirota Gordon to the recent Marc-André Hamelin performance of the Busoni concerto; her father, Leo Sirota, gave the Viennese premiere, with Busoni conducting.... The Brooklyn Philharmonic finishes up a remarkable season in Bed-Stuy on Saturday, with a program of Beethoven, Andrew Norman, Lena Horne standards, and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def). The same night, David Robertson leads the second of two New York Philharmonic CONTACT! concerts, featuring Boulez, Michael Jarrell, and an Elliott Carter world premiere.... Wordless Music, a crucial addition to the NYC scene since 2006, comes to Millennium Park in Chicago this summer; the July 5 show, with the aforementioned Norman, looks particularly good.... Jacaranda in LA announces its 2012-13 season, with a Cage and Britten focus. Season after season, the twentieth century comes to life in Jacaranda's programs: only here can you get Vexations and Curlew River.... Here's a fun smackdown between Tony Scott and David Carr, both of the New York Times, on the subject of critical vs. popular taste.
Gayby everywhere
If I could be forgiven for straying off topic, I'd like to trumpet briefly a series of forthcoming events involving Gayby, the acclaimed feature-film debut by my husband, Jonathan Lisecki. (It has won, among other prizes, the audience award for Best Feature and the jury award for Best Acting Ensemble at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. Jonathan received his prizes from none other than the Twin Peaks Log Lady.) The movie is playing now at the Seattle International Film Festival. It shows in Hartford CT on June 9. On June 15 and 16 it will appear at the Provincetown Film Fest. That same day, the 16th, it will play both at Frameline in San Francisco — the great Castro Theatre — and at the LA Film Fest, where it will have a second screening on June 21. And on June 22 it will be featured at BAMcinemaFest, with a showing to follow in NYC's Rooftop series on June 23. "Hilariously bitchy but sweet," says the Village Voice.
June 6, 2012
Belated video of the day
The Staff Band of the West Group of Russian Forces in Germany, no longer extant, plays Sousa's Transit of Venus March, composed in 1883.
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