Alex Ross's Blog, page 215

Bach occupies Wall Street

Matt Haimovitz in Zuccotti Park, Oct. 16, 2011.

Muchness

What do Weinberg's The Passenger, Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, Stenhammar's Tirfing, Lully's Atys (conducted by Christie), John Estacio's Lillian Alling, Verdi's Macbeth (conducted by Muti), Smetana's The Kiss, Mozart's Mitridate, Dvořák's Vanda and The Jacobin, Porpora's Semiramide riconosciuta, Martinů's The Greek Passion, The Makropulos Case, La traviata, Les Pêcheurs de perles, The Rake's Progress, The Golden Cockerel, Francesca da Rimini, Lohengrin (recorded in Bayreuth this summer), Meistersinger, Rheingold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung have in common? They can all be heard on Internet radio today. Details at Operacast.

Peter Hill in New York

In the next couple of weeks there will be a crazed logjam of concerts in New York: the fourteen events of the SONiC Festival (starting tonight), the London Symphony's Missa Solemnis and War Requiem (kicking off White Light), Fabio Luisi's Met Orchestra concert, a Yuja Wang recital (you might have first read about her in the New Yorker), a free concert by Jordi Savall with Juilliard415, Paul Lewis's Schubert, the annual Vänskä visitation, an Ekmeles exploration of microtonal Gesualdo, a Parthenia program of modern pieces for viols, and so forth. On Sunday, there's a painful conflict between the JACK Quartet's SONiC marathon and a rare appearance by the severely undersung British pianist Peter Hill at Poisson Rouge. Hill's major achievement to date is his epic survey of the complete piano music of Messiaen, for the late, great Unicorn-Kanchana label (the discs were later reissued by Regis); no pianist in my experience has gone deeper into Messiaen's world. Hill is also the co-author, with Nigel Simeone, of the definitive Messiaen biography. At Poisson Rouge he'll offer a program of Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Bach. Tickets are $20.

CD of the week: Hahn's Ives

Ives, "In the Barn" from Violin Sonata No. 2; Hilary Hahn, violin, and Valentina Lisitsa, piano (DG B0016082).

Audio player for iPad and iPhone:

Miscellany: Mos Def, Jonathan Harvey, etc.

Over the weekend, the hip-hop artist Mos Def joined the Brooklyn Philharmonic for a performance in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Above is a video excerpt of their rendition of Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together. Mos Def will appear again with the orchestra tonight at the World Financial Center Winter Garden, in WNYC's New Sounds Live series; Q2 will stream.... The singular English composer Jonathan Harvey, who has long blended high-tech modernist methods with a strong inclination toward religious mysticism, is the focus of two far-flung events in the next two days. Tonight players from the St. Louis Symphony will present an all-Harvey program, as part of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts series. Tomorrow night the Berlin Philharmonic will give the premiere of Harvey's Weltethos, a monumental choral-orchestral work with a libretto by the great Swiss theologian Hans Küng.... Gabriel Kahane, whose new album Where Are the Arms is sounding lovelier by the day, performs with the Calder Quartet tomorrow at Largo in L.A.... On Oct. 21-23, An Die Musik in Baltimore will host the Baltimore Lieder Weekend, a series of concerts on the theme of "The Birth of the Lied." Schubert scholar Deen Larsen presides.... Earlier this year I wrote about the excellent Boston-based choir Blue Heron. On Oct. 15 and 16, in Cambridge and New York, they will present a sixteenth-century English and Spanish program in collaboration with Ensemble Plus Ultra.... A potentially significant premiere at the LA Phil on Oct. 20: Magnetar, a new concerto for electric cello by the bold young Mexican composer Enrico Chapela. The work takes its title from a rare kind of pulsar that possesses an immensely strong electromagnetic field.

Beijing chill

I made a visit to Beijing in 2008, curious to see if the then widespread cliché about China being the "future of classical music" had any basis of reality. In my piece "Symphony of Millions," which is reprinted in Listen to This, I came to the conclusion that the Chinese classical scene, while energetic and full of promise, was hardly the juggernaut that some Western observers perceived, and that a current of political fear ran beneath it. "If you are not free yourself, how can you interpret music freely?" a former music critic told me. Since the Beijing Olympics, that fear has moved more obviously to the surface. The latest episode involves the cancellation of Huang Ruo's opera Dr. Sun Yat-sen, which was to have had its premiere at the National Centre for the Performing Arts last month. The young American journalist and scholar Nick Frisch, who accompanied me around Beijing when I visited in 2008, has a must-read piece in the New York Times about the Huang Ruo affair. Particularly troubling is the fact that Carl F. Bucherer, a Swiss company with Beijing interests, abruptly withdrew support for upcoming Hong Kong performances of Huang's work. Nick also raises the question of whether the Philadelphia Orchestra has acted wisely in entering into a partnership with a Chinese arts bureaucracy that is inclined to place limits on creative freedom. All told, it's a hugely dismaying story.

The full Morty

The next release in Mode Records' Feldman Edition — a compilation of works for orchestra, with Brad Lubman conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin — will bring us tantalizingly close to having Feldman's entire published ouput available on recording. Chris Villars's most recent list of unrecorded pieces contained thirteen items. The new disc knocks off four of them: Structures (for orchestra), On Time and the Instrumental Factor, Voice and Instruments, and Orchestra. These are exceptional performances by Lubman and company, lacking the tentative, tiptoeing quality that sometimes mars large-ensemble attempts at Feldman. The program is filled out with a large-orchestra rendition of the graphic score Intersections I. Surely it's time now to record Feldman's arrangement of the "Alabama Song"!

Previously: American Sublime.

SONiC in brief

Sonic Youth. The New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2011 (subscribers only).

A Critic's Notebook about the SONiC Festival, a sweeping survey of composers under forty. The first concert is on Friday.

High noon in Kansas City

The astonishing lobby of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the new home of the Kansas City Symphony and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. I saw a production of Turandot and a performance by Laurie Anderson — details to follow in The New Yorker in a couple of weeks.

Tulsa sunrise