Alex Ross's Blog, page 189

Boesch sings Waits

In my New Yorker column last week — on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christian Gerhaher, and Florian Boesch — I mentioned the last-named singer's cover of Tom Waits's "Take It with Me." The video is above. (Boesch has presented a program in which he combines Waits's songs with Schumann's.) Also, I never got around to linking to this blog post on the New Yorker website, in which I attempt to give a brief overview of Fischer-Dieskau's recordings, and pick a few personal favorites.

Previous administration

Here is how Winthrop Sargeant, the former music critic of The New Yorker, wrote about a Hunter College concert of works by Ralph Shapey, Charles Dodge, Richard Wernick, and others, in March of 1968: "Two or three times a season, conceiving it to be my duty, I drop in on an avant-garde concert to see whether anything in the area is getting anywhere. Nothing ever is, but at least I have the satisfaction of feeling that I have kept in touch.... It seems to me that this sort of activity has become a campus fad analogous to the goldfish-swallowing of a generation or so ago.... The foundations that irresponsibly hand out grants for this kind of thing are tax-exempt, and as a citizen and tax-payer I object to paying my share of what they do not." Harumph!

Weekend on Golgotha

Back from L.A., I'm writing now about John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a huge new Passion oratorio that contains some of the strongest — and also some of the strangest — music of the composer's career. The wavy line in the score above is for the Golgotha chorus, "yelling, mocking, abusive." More in The New Yorker a week from Monday.

Begging your pardon

The artist is, in fact, Jeremy Denk....

Oliveros 80

Best wishes to Pauline Oliveros, a deep listener and deep composer, who turns eighty today. There will be a celebratory concert at ISSUE Project Room on Saturday night.

Driving in LA playlist

— Jonathan Harvey, Wagner Dream; Claire Booth, Gordon Gietz, Matthew Best, Dale Duesing, Martyn Brabbins conducting the Ictus Ensemble (Cypres)
— Cage, Works for Percussion Vol. 2; Third Coast Percussion (Mode)
— Carl Loewe, Songs and Ballads; Florian Boesch, Roger Vignoles (Hyperion)
— Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde; Fritz Wunderlich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Josef Krips conducting the Vienna Symphony (DG, live 1964)
— Britten, War Requiem; Ian Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Sabina Cvilak, Gianandrea Noseda conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Choir of Eltham College (LSO Live)

At the Getty Museum (site of the picture above) I picked up a copy of Karen Painter and Thomas Crow's 2006 anthology Late Thoughts, with a fascinating John Deathridge essay on Wagner's "Unfinished Symphonies," a John Rockwell piece on Weimar Republic opera, and a conversation between Frank Gehry and the late, greatly lamented Ernest Fleischmann.

Picture of the day

Westward

I'm in Los Angeles for the premiere of John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary, the LA Phil production of Don Giovanni, and Anne LeBaron's Crescent City. Meanwhile, in this week's issue of The New Yorker I have a column about the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and two of his younger baritone successors, Christian Gerhaher and Florian Boesch.

Die Flabbergast

Via David Denby.

Notes on the Cleveland Salome

The Cleveland Orchestra's concert performance of Salome at Carnege Hall last night had many splendors, and yet I came away mildly dissatisfied. I should confess at once that I was long ago diagnosed as a Salome nutcase; I began my book The Rest Is Noise with an extended description of the opera's 1906 Austrian premiere, and evaluated more than thirty Salome recordings for the Gramophone Collection. The perspective of the obsessive is not always the most useful; nonetheless, here it is.

There is no question that Nina Stemme possesses one of the supreme dramatic-soprano voices of the moment — perhaps the voice — and it was a thrill to hear her in a New York venue in a signature role. (She has sung Senta and Ariadne a few times at the Met.) She sailed through the part with a coolly gleaming tone that grew immense in the final scene. Friends report that they had trouble hearing her from upper balconies; I had no such trouble down in the orchestra. At the quietest dynamics she assumed the slender purity of a lyric voice. She easily mastered the role's sprawling range, delivering brilliant high Bs and making handsome mezzo-ish sounds around and below middle C. The infamous low G-flat on "Todes" was more stated than sung, yet it registered strongly. All the same, I found the portrayal too composed, too detached. There was little engagement with the deranged opulence of Wilde's imagery, with the fundamental transition from lust to murderous rage. Perhaps Stemme was made cautious by the stage setup, which had the singers on risers behind the orchestra; the urge to focus mainly on the mechanics of her singing must have been strong, especially with so many opera mavens scrutinizing her.

Eric Owens made a magnificent first stab at Jochanaan, giving warmth and vigor to a character whom Strauss confessed to finding somewhat ridiculous. Rudolf Schasching was a standard-issue Herod of the ranting, hammy type, albeit one who went at his duties with considerable verve and wit. Once again, the opportunity to cast the role with a more flexible, lyric voice was missed. Jane Henschel was a cutting, funny Herodias, Garrett Sorenson an appealingly ardent Narraboth. The Cleveland played spectacularly all night, but Franz Welser-Möst, undeniably an idiomatic Strauss conductor, seemed in a peculiar rush. I kept wanting him to stop and savor the incomparable atmospherics of the score; the five-note dissonances that moan in the brass as Salome sings "Ah! ich habe deinen Mund geküsst" simply came and went, causing few shivers. A less helter-skelter pace might also have enabled Stemme to dig more deeply into her role. The ovation that erupted in the audience after the final blows suggested that almost everyone enjoyed the evening more than I did. Certainly, I don't doubt for a moment that Stemme is an astonishing vocal phenomenon.