Alex Ross's Blog, page 195

Trinity talk

Many thanks to all who attended my talk on twentieth-century sacred music last night at Trinity Church. I was particularly happy to see David Elliott from WHRB and Bettina Norton from the Boston Musical Intelligencer. During the Q&A, I somehow digressed into telling the story of how I once began giggling helplessly during a performance of the Schnittke Requiem, in Boston in 1988, with the composer sitting some ten rows in front of me. I can only pray he didn't hear the disturbance; I certainly made no mention of it when I interviewed Schnittke at the Watergate in 1994. Today I spent many happy hours browsing through the awe-inspiring stacks of Widener Library, where I tracked down a copy — a signed copy, no less — of Joséphin Péladan's Le Fils des étoiles. Satie's extraordinary piano pieces of the same title played a role in my lecture; a full playlist is below. At a later date I will announce details of my new religious denomination, the Secret Order of the Invisible Temple of the Quietly Dissonant Hexachord.

PLAYLIST:

Frank Martin, Agnus Dei from Mass for Double Choir; Westminster Cathedral Choir (Hyperion)

Janáček, Agnece Bozij from Glagolitic Mass; Michael Tilson Thomas conducting (Sony)

Salvatore Martirano, Agnus Dei from Mass; John Oliver Chorale (New World)

Britten, Agnus Dei from the War Requiem; Britten conducting (Decca)          

Bernstein, Agnus Dei from Mass; Bernstein conducting (Sony)

Wagner, Prelude to Act III of Parsifal; Thielemann conducting (DG)

Satie, Le Fils des étoiles; Reinbert de Leeuw, piano (Philips)

Schoenberg, beginning of Die Jakobsleiter; Boulez conducting (Sony)

Schoenberg, beginning of Moses und Aron; Boulez conducting (DG)

Stravinsky, Adoration of the Earth from The Rite of Spring; Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting (DG)

Stravinsky, Psalm 150 from Symphony of Psalms; Bernstein conducting (Sony)

Cage, Ryoanji; Robert Black, Eberhard Blum, Iven Hausmann, Gudrun Reschke, John-Patrick Thomas, Jan Williams (Hat Art)

Feldman, Rothko Chapel; California EAR Unit, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus (New Albion)

Stockhausen, Gesang der Jünglinge

Ligeti, Requiem; Jonathan Nott conducting (Teldec)

Penderecki, Utrenja II: The Resurrection of Christ; Andrzej Markowski conducting (Polskie Nagrania)

Ustvolskaya, Composition II, “Dies Irae”; Reinbert de Leeuw conducting (Philips)

Pärt, Credo; Neeme Järvi conducting (Chandos)

Pärt, Da pacem Domine; Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (Harmonia Mundi)

Messiaen, the Angel Musician scene from Saint François d’Assise; Kent Nagano conducting (DG)

Messiaen, "Zion Park" from Des Canyons aux étoiles; Reinbert de Leeuw conducting (Naïve)

Omitted as time ran out: Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Requiem for a Young Poet, Glass's Satyagraha, Reich's Tehillim, Gubaidulina's Offertorium. Naturally, this was only a limited cross-section of a vast subject; I decided to focus in particular on the intersection between modernist and avant-garde traditions and religious subject-matter — what I called the "dark sacred" or "negative sublime."

Scholars vs. the NYPL (updated)

A great many New Yorkers who conduct research on a regular basis are protesting the New York Public Library's "Central Library Plan," which, at a cost of three hundred million dollars, would entirely reshape the library's great main building on 42nd Street. Three million books are to be moved to offsite storage in New Jersey; a circulating library and computer center would take over the space currently dedicated to one of the world's major book collections. In a petition against the plan, Joan Scott, of the Institute for Advanced Study, writes, "NYPL will lose its standing as a premier research institution ... and become a busy social center where focused research is no longer the primary goal." If you wish to read more about the recent sequence of events at NYPL, go to the blog of Caleb Crain.

Update: Anthony Marx, the president of NYPL, has issued a statement in response to the uproar over the renovation plans. In part, it says: "Currently, there are approximately three million volumes in the closed stacks under the Rose Main Reading Room...I want to state unequivocally that there is no scenario in which fewer than two million volumes, about 95 percent of which would be from those closed stacks, will remain on-site at 42nd Street...Research materials that will remain on-site in the Central Library Plan will represent at least 90 percent of current research usage... [For the retrieval of off-site books] 24-hour turnaround is made possible by major service enhancements already in the works."

Harry Kessler's diaries

Diary of an Aesthete. The New Yorker, April 23, 2012. (Nineteen pages of excerpts available on the magazine's iPad edition. Note that the first of these was written in English; the diaries switch to German only in early 1891.)

There's more to be said about the musical revelations in this astounding book: Kessler's account of the Rite of Spring premiere, his meetings with Mahler and Cosima Wagner, his collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal on Der Rosenkavalier, his wartime conversations with Richard Strauss. I'll have some excerpts soon. The complete diaries are being published in a nine-volume edition from Klett-Cotta; the final volume will appear next fall, together with a CD-ROM edition.

Nearer, my God, to Miscellany

The abiding coolness that is MATA holds its annual festival April 18-20, chez Roulette. The lineup includes a foursome faceoff between the men of JACK and the women of Quartet New Generation; a composer/performer evening featuring, amid much else, Cecilia López's Mechanical Music for Sheet Metal; and a SIGNAL concert that includes a world premiere by the notable young Italian composer and organist Francesco Filidei and Mellissa Hughes singing texts of Charles de Gaulle, via a work by David Coll. With regret, I will miss it all, because of Gayby at the Sarasota Film Festival.... The music series at the Met Museum, now under the aegis of Limor Tomer, has announced an appetizing 2012-13 season.... The pianist Jenny Q. Chai has put together a lively, ecumenical program for her recital at Zankel Hall on April 19.... On the 24th, the composer and critic Russell Platt, my esteemed New Yorker colleague, curates an evening at New York Festival of Song.... The Inuksuit fundraiser continues. Note also a fundraiser for a new Trimpin project.... Contemporary Austrian doings in NYC: Ensemble Moto Perpetuo plays the Haas "dark" quartet at Experimental Intermedia tonight; Klangforum Wien appears twice at the Austrian Cultural Forum next week.... On July 20, the Festival de Beaunes will present the world premiere of a previously unknown opera fragment by Vivaldi — the first two acts of a setting of Grazio Bracciolo's libretto Orlando furioso, dating from 1714. This is not the same work as the Orlando furioso that Vivaldi wrote in 1727, although that score does recycle two numbers from the earlier one. Federico Maria Sardelli, who made the discovery, will conduct.... Inevitably, the Titanic observances have already proved overblown and prematurely exhausting, but (Le) Poisson Rouge's presentation of Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic, on the anniversary of the disaster, is worth noting. Imagine — when the Titanic went down, Elliott Carter was only three....

Site and Sound

The architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, author of the new book Site and Sound: The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls, looks in on various performance spaces around the world in the video tour above. Site and Sound, which emerged from four years of research and travel, will be a crucial resource for anyone assessing the state of the hall-building art: I was particularly fascinated by the overview of all the frenzied recent activity in China. I should disclose that I know the author and shared a rowboat with her during Xenakis on the lake.

D. 960 symposium

A longtime friend of Noise who joined me at last night's Mitsuko Uchida recital at Carnegie Hall — the final three sonatas of Schubert, rendered with unflagging strength and at times breathtaking sensitivity — sends along this collage of various pianists playing the opening of the great B-flat sonata. The entrants seem to have been arranged approximately in order of ascending strangeness. Sviatoslav Richter will take the prize, surely? Don't be so certain...

Noise in Latvia

Viss cits ir troksnis is now available from Jānis Roze.

Mavericky footnotes

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, I write about the San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks festival at Carnegie Hall — a largely triumphant undertaking that drew encouragingly big, responsive crowds. Back in 1996, I reviewed Michael Tilson Thomas's first "mavericks" jamboree for the New York Times; although the series was then entitled "An American Festival," with subsections called "Soundscape USA" and "An Afternoon with America's Musical Visionaries," MTT was already deploying the m-word. At the start of my New Yorker column, I make the ritual terminological complaint: "If Madonna, Sarah Palin, the Dallas basketball team, and the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun are all mavericks, then everyone is, and no one." Originally, I wrote this:

        . . . then so is the period at the end of this sentence   .

On reflection, it seemed a not very New Yorker thing to do, but I enjoyed the conceit while it lasted.

Sedge Clark has a fuller description of that amazing So Percussion Cage-o-rama, not to mention valuable reminiscences of MTT's 1973 Four Organs performance at Carnegie Hall, the last great Skandalkonzert of the twentieth century. Justin Davidson waxes intelligently enthusiastic about the Mavericks series in New York. The American Mavericks site set up by American Public Media in 2003 remains a superb resource; I particularly treasure this feature on George Antheil's Ballet mécanique, which allows you to watch the Antheil scandal scene in Marcel L'Herbier's film L'Inhumaine.

I'm happy to report that the two-CD set of the complete works of Carl Ruggles — recordings originally made for CBS, under MTT's aegis, back in 1980 — just arrived in the post from Other Minds. The official release date is April 24. Collectors have been clamoring for a CD reissue of these LPs more or less since the CD was invented, to no avail. At some point I will try to write down more thoughts about Ruggles's Sun-treader, which really stunned me on this occasion; I hope that a CD is on the way. MTT has already recorded the piece twice — with the Buffalo Philharmonic, for the Ruggles set, and with the Boston Symphony, for DG — but a successful capture of one of the latest performances would, I think, prove to be definitive.

Adieu Paris

I managed slightly more than five events in four days:

— Paavo Järvi conducting the Orchestre de Paris in Haydn's Symphony No. 85, Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 (with Radu Lupu), and Brahms's Symphony No. 4, at Salle Pleyel;

— Auber's La Muette de Portici at the Opéra-Comique;

— the beginning of a Debussy-Schoenberg recital by Florent Boffard, amid the Monet water lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie (in conjunction with the superb exhibition Debussy, Music, and the Arts, through June 11);

— that same night, with a crucial assist from an exceptionally forceful cab driver, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants performing Charpentier sacred works at Cité de la Musique;

— a program of new pieces by younger composers involving solo instruments and electronics, at IRCAM;

— and Bach's St. John Passion at Cité de la Musique, with Christoph Prégardien conducting Le Concert Lorrain and the Nederlands Kamerchor.

I also had the great pleasure of meeting, for the first time in person, my marvelous French translator, the singer and writer Laurent Slaars. A full report of my Paris visit will appear soon in The New Yorker.

American Mavericks, 2012 edition

Joyful Noise. The New Yorker, April 16, 2012.