Alex Ross's Blog, page 211

Miscellany: Motown education, Carter 103, etc.

Earlier this week, the celebrated tenor George Shirley was the richly deserving recipient of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his NewMusicBox essay on the music-education crisis in Detroit public schools. I'm embarrassed to admit that I missed the piece when it was first published, last year. It's an extraordinarily revealing account of how Detroit's once-mighty music-education program had a transformative effect on countless students, including many major players in the history of Motown. A must-read, from beginning to end.... Paul Griffiths, also an ASCAP-Deems Taylor winner for his ever-excellent Miller Theatre program notes, noted the other day that if Schubert had lived to Elliott Carter's age he would still have been composing in the year 1900. The great man has produced a stack of new scores, some of which will be premiered at concerts next month, around the time of his 103rd birthday; Boosey has the rundown.... On Sunday night at Galapagos in Brooklyn, Orpheus joins forces with composer-singer Gabriel Kahane — the first event in a new series that seeks an atmosphere of dressed-down intensity.... Make Music NY, the midsummer outdoor music jamboree, is launching a winter-solstice counterpart, Make Music Winter. Phil Kline's Unsilent Night is the inspiration, and on this occasion Kline will introduce a new boom-box piece, called Peregrine.... WQXR has launched an amusing initiative called Beethoven Awareness Month, with posters instructing one to Obey Thoven. (As Allen Ginsberg might have said, "Please, master.") On Sunday there will be a Beethoven sonata marathon at WNYC's Greene Space, with such luminaries as Jonathan Biss, Joyce Yang, Alessio Bax, Jeremy Denk, Inon Barnatan, and Timothy Andres (a phenomenal pianist).... Brian Current conducts Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto on Dec. 8 and 9.

Passenger news

Photo: Bregenzer Festspiele / Karl Forster.

In my column on Mieczysław Weinberg's The Passenger last summer, I noted that the Lincoln Center Festival had plans to stage the piece in a future season. It turns out that that production, whose date is not yet public, will not be the opera's only American appearance. The Houston Grand Opera is ready to announce that it will present The Passenger in 2014, in the powerful David Pountney staging that previously played in Bregenz and London. Michelle Breedt is slated to reprise the role of the Aufseherin, Lisa; Joseph Kaiser will portray her husband, Walter; Melody Moore is Martha; Morgan Smith is Tadeusz; and Patrick Summers will conduct.

A Messiaen moment

At Olivier Latry's all-Messiaen recital at Alice Tully Hall the other night (Steve Smith was there), the encore was "Prière après la communion," from the composer's great final organ cycle, Livre du Saint Sacrament. Latry's prior Messiaen recordings, brilliant but a little too efficient, had not been high on my list — for the Livre, I've long preferred Almut Rössler, on Motette — but Latry's playing on this occasion was beautifully patient and thoughtful. If you want a more outré visualization of the piece, try this video by Darren Motise.

Bad Bayreuth poetry

Go FORTH, oh friend! go forth across the sea
To hear the music of the master hand,—
The music that shall sound in every land
The mightiest paean of the century.
And when by Wagner's grave you chance to be,
Put there for me, and for the wondering band
Of loitering pilgrims who entrancèd stand,
A lusty branch of some wild flowering tree.
No simple garden flower to him be brought
Who walked with Gods in wonder and in light,
And matched with majesty of human thought
A music wrought of mortal love and might,—
Who of the singing spheres an echo caught
To teach the lesson of eternal right.

— "Bayreuth, 1891," signed "A. E. P.," The Critic

Alas, there's a lot more of this kind of thing out there.

Is this the Sibelius Eighth?

Photo: Markus Jokela.

I got an e-mail today from the Finnish music critic Vesa Sirén, alerting me to an article that he wrote for the Helsingin Sanomat a couple of weeks ago, and that has now appeared in the paper's English-language edition. It concerns some orchestral sketches by Jean Sibelius, dating from the period when he was working on his Eighth Symphony. It was long assumed that the composer had destroyed almost all materials relating to the symphony, but several years ago the scholar Nors Josephson, after studying a trove of sketches, came to the conclusion that many fragments of the work had survived. Sirén and the Sibelius scholar Timo Virtanen — whose view of the material is more cautious — recently had several passages copied out and brought them to John Storgårds, the conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. On this page you can watch a video of the try-out that ensued. It's rather astonishing music, alternating between piercing dissonances and a spare, chantlike kind of writing. You get tantalizing glimpses of a musical landscape stranger and more unstable than almost anything in Sibelius's published output. Are we actually listening to the mythical Eighth? Whatever this is, it is thrilling to hear.

My Favorite Records: Björk

After coming across an old list of Thomas Mann's favorite records — part of a Saturday Review of Literature survey of the musical tastes of "laymen of note in public affairs" — I had the idea of trying out a "My Favorite Records" feature on this blog. There are, of course, many such lists floating around; the genre goes back at least as far as 1942, when the BBC introduced "Desert Island Discs." This version will reach out to Noted Persons not directly involved in classical music who have an ear for the classical sound, although the lists can and should include everything. Björk has generously agreed to kick things off. I have known her since 2004, when I profiled her for The New Yorker (the article is reprinted in Listen to This). She is amazing. Her album Biophilia is out now from One Little Indian / Nonesuch.

THAI POP Siamese Soul, Volume 2 (Sublime Frequencies)

STEVE REICH Tehillim; Steve Reich and Musicians (ECM)

MAHLER Symphony No. 10 [performing version by Deryck Cooke]; Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI)

BERG Lulu; Teresa Stratas, Franz Mazura, Kenneth Riegel, Yvonne Minton, Pierre Boulez conducting the Paris Opera Orchesta (DG) [Björk loves the great John Dexter production of Lulu at the Met, which can be seen on a Sony DVD]

ALIM QASIMOV Azerbaijan: The Art of the Mugham (Ocora)

JONI MITCHELL Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (Asylum)

KATE BUSH The Dreaming (EMI)

NICO Desertshore (Reprise)

PUBLIC ENEMY It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam)

APHEX TWIN Drukqs (Warp)

PANASONIC, Panasonic EP (Sähkö)

BLACK DOG PRODUCTIONS Bytes (Warp)

JAMES BLAKE James Blake (Atlas)

YouTube extras: "Recently I have been guilty of watching a lot of YouTube," Björk says. She's been exploring Martha Argerich (1972 home movies, her "raw and feisty" Prokofiev Third) and Bartók playing his own music (selections from Ten Easy Pieces and Hungarian Peasant Songs, Rumanian Folk Dances).

Alleluia

In Rome last night, an impromptu chorus and orchestra bid farewell to Silvio Berlusconi. Last summer, I wrote about the Italian opera situation and Berlusconi's culture policy; I wish I could be in the house when Riccardo Muti conducts Macbeth at the Rome Opera later this month. Incidentally, that YouTube video of Muti's protest at Nabucco earlier this year has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Nightafternight playlist for the Beaver Moon

— Jonathan Harvey, Bird Concerto with Pianosong, other works; Hidéki Nagano, piano, David Atherton conducting the London Sinfonietta, etc. (NMC)

— Alex Mincek, Pendulum V, String Quartet No. 3, etc.; Wet Ink Ensemble, JACK Quartet (Carrier)

— Schubert, Piano Sonatas D. 850, 894, and 840, Impromptus D. 899, Drei Klavierstücke; Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)

— Byrd, Complete Fantasias for Harpsichord; Glen Wilson (Naxos)

— Gubaidulina, Fachwerk, Silenzio; Geir Draugsvoll, bayan, with Øyvind Gimse conducting the Trondheim Symphony, other performers (Naxos)

— Gubaidulina, In tempus praesens, Glorious Percussion; Vadim Gluzman, violin, Glorious Percussion, Jonathan Nott conducting the Lucerne Symphony (BIS)

— Haydn, String Quartets Opp. 71 and 74; Takács Quartet (Hyperion CDs)

— Joseph Calleja: The Maltese Tenor (Decca)

Feline perspectives: Alex Mincek

The magmatic textures of Mincek's Pendulum V — freshly recorded by Carrier Records, on a disc that also features the JACK Quartet performing the composer's formidable Third Quartet  — catch Bea slightly off guard.

Miscellany: Salzburg, Leonard Cohen, etc.

A change in leadership notwithstanding, the Salzburg Festival has announced another unadventurous, celebrity-driven lineup, with the overexposed Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann at the center of attention. Even Die Soldaten is no bold move at this point, and most of the composers in the "Salzburg contemporary" series are, ironically, dead. Heinz Holliger is the only living composer on the main orchestral programs. It's been years since I've seen a strong reason to go; I hope to see more fresh activity in future seasons. [Update: Tom Service spreads word that Salzburg will become much more interesting in the 2013-16 period, with commissions slated for György Kurtág (an opera on Beckett's Endgame), Jörg Widmann, Marc-André Dalbavie, and Thomas Adès — his long-awaited Buñuel opera, I assume.] ... The New York Public Library is now presenting the Rolex Arts Weekend, a lively array of performances and discussions across a wide cultural spectrum. Tomorrow will bring two Hans Magnus Enzensberger settings by Gregory Spears and a conversation with Osvaldo Golijov and José Van Dam; the Sunday lineup includes a performance of Ben Frost's Music for Six Guitars in the NYPL main reading room and a conversation with Brian Eno, Anish Kapoor, and Peter Sellars. Paul Holdengräber presides.... Accepting the Prince of Asturias Award, with Riccardo Muti in the background, Leonard Cohen delivers an extraordinarily eloquent speech.... Royal Holloway at the University of London has set up Early Music Online, a digital library of more than three hundred musical publications from the British Library.... ICE, which offers a George Lewis concert this weekend, is accepting submissions for the 2013 and 2014 editions of ICElab, its emerging-composer program.... Introducing New Music USA, a merger of the American Music Center and Meet the Composer... As Time Out New York notes, the next week or so is rich in Messiaenic organ concerts: Olivier Latry plays a Messiaen program as part of White Light tonight, and Jon Gillock performs the entire Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité at Church of the Ascension on Tuesday. Paul Jacobs, a Messiaen virtuoso, avoids the master on his St. Ignatius Loyola recital on Wednesday, instead emphasizing female voices: there are works of Nadia Boulanger, Jeanne Demessieux, Elgar, Wayne Oquin, and the African-American composer Florence Price.... High-end cuteness: Pablo Kitty, Kittengenic, and other Kitten Covers.