Alex Ross's Blog, page 216

Nebraska moonrise

The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie in Red Cloud, Nebraska. I'm on a road trip to see opera in Kansas City and Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a long detour into Cather country.

Red Cloud, Nebraska

Moonrise on the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.

Paperbacks

Maulina can scarcely contain her excitement at the sight of the paperback editions of Listen to This, my second book, which, I'm happy to say, will receive an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award next month. The UK version, on the right, is out now; the American version will be published on Oct. 25.

For Steve Jobs

Writing is a lonely and sometimes unpleasant business. The machines that the late Steve Jobs helped to create at Apple have made the act of writing seem a little warmer, a little less deranged. Since 1987, all of my work has been done on Apple computers — my college thesis, my first piece of journalism, my first New Yorker essay, The Rest Is Noise, the little tribute I'm writing now — and I am eternally grateful for the help.

Pop notes

Portishead at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Twenty years ago (sigh), my favorite band was the Bay Area post-punk outfit Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. I went to see them four or five times when I was living in Berkeley in 1990-91, always getting excited when they pulled out the trombone. A few years later, I reviewed them for the New York Times, and also covered the allied weirdness of Caroliner. After a dormant decade, the Thinking Fellers are back in circulation; they played at All Tomorrow's Parties over the weekend, and you can hear the result at NPR. "Hurricane" remains sublime.... I saw Portishead at Hammerstein Ballroom last night — always a great place to hear music, with the ghost of Mary Garden's Salome haunting the corridors — and was hypnotized along with the rest of the sell-out crowd. "Machine Gun," whose pulsing ostinato somehow reminds me of the second movement of Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony, was the ferocious highlight. There was some classical relevance to the expedition, since Adrian Utley, one of the band's master texturalists, has collaborated with Will Gregory on a score for Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which will play at the White Light Festival later this month.... Here's a Nate Chinen piece on Anthony Braxton, who is the subject of a four-day festival at Roulette starting tonight.... Have you heard anything created by people under forty, Mr. Ross? Well, a friend pointed me into the intriguing world of Nicolas Jaar, a Brown University undergraduate who describes himself as "haunted by Mulatu Astatke and Erik Satie." I also like Jace Clayton's work on the collaborative project El Resplandor, a sonic imagining of a remake of The Shining in Dubai.... Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is one of many artists moving unaffectedly between indie-pop and classical worlds. She has a winning piece called Proven Badlands on yMusic's Beautiful Mechanical CD, and she's been collaborating with David Byrne and the Asphalt Orchestra on a series of songs that should see the light of day at some point; they have an incredibly infectious number called "I Am an Ape."... Heck, I've even been listening to a bit of black metal, which Sasha Frere-Jones surveys in this week's New Yorker. It's important to keep in mind that Bernard Gann, guitarist of Liturgy, is the son of Kyle Gann. Under the tutelage of Brandon Stosuy, I've fallen cautiously in love with the overawing noise of WOLD, from southern Saskatchewan. Their only public show to date, in Long Island City, is documented in Brandon and Matthew Barney's book Tubal Cain. This is the sum of my current non-classical knowledge.

CD of the Week: Nicholas Phan's Britten

Sonnet XXX from Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo; Nicholas Phan, tenor, and Myra Huang, piano (Avie 2238).

Audio player for iPad and iPhone:

Miscellany: Anna Nicole, Philippa Schuyler, etc.

In recent months, Bob Shingleton of On an Overgrown Path— the most consistently original and independent-minded of classical bloggers — has been posting about the African-American composer and pianist Philippa Schuyler, who drew attention in the nineteen-forties as a child prodigy. Happily, Bob's posts have inspired a BBC program, to air on Oct. 14.... Anyone pining for a little more Arts Florissants can tune in Sunday to Medici TV, where there will be a live stream of the group performing Monteverdi's First Book of Madrigals. This is the beginning of a major project to perform and record Monteverdi's entire madrigal output. The stream can also be seen at Arts Florissants' media site, which contains an amazing trove of video, audio, scores, and texts.... Axiom is serving up a juicy program at Juilliard on Oct. 13: Grisey's Vortex Temporum, Lindberg's Action — Situation – Signification, and Birtwistle's Silbury Air.... The reënergized Brooklyn Philharmonic previews its season on Oct. 12 at the World Financial Center, with Corey Dargel, Mellissa Hughes, and Mos Def participating. Read Steve Smith's interview with artistic director Alan Pierson.... I watched the new DVD of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, and I agree with the drift of this Parterre review. Despite a tendency toward caricature in the libretto, it's a punchy, powerful work, exceptionally savvy in its manipulation of pop material. American opera houses should be giving it a close look. The Royal Opera performance proceeds with enormous zest; Gerald Finley's portrayal of the supremely sketchy Howard K. Stern is alone worth the price of admission.... On a personal note, I'm proud to say that my husband's forthcoming feature film Gayby is up for Indiewire project of the month.

Reich 75

A very happy seventy-fifth birthday to the great Steve Reich.

Atys at BAM, Anna Bolena at the Met

The beginning of the Sleep Scene from the Harmonia Mundi recording of Lully's Atys, with Gilles Ragon as Sommeil and William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants. A DVD of the latest production is coming in November.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you'll see in this week's issue my column on two major operatic events of the early fall: Lully's Atys, as seen under the direction of William Christie at BAM; and Donizetti's Anna Bolena, as seen on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera. At one point I use Vincent Giroud's translation of a famous phrase from Jean de La Bruyère ("to keep the mind, eyes, and ears in a constant state of enchantment"); it appears in Giroud's excellent new book, French Opera: A Short History.

Audio player for iPad and iPhone:

Morlot's debut

Reports of Ludovic Morlot's first concerts with the Seattle Symphony suggest not only that he's off to a strong start musically but that he has begun to reshape the orchestra's image with the wider Seattle public. Belying his sober reputation, Morlot surprised and charmed the crowd at his gala debut with a bit of theatrics during Ravel's Boléro, leaving the podium for a few iterations of the theme and joining the violin section. More important, he's been making an insistent case for his modern-leaning programming, in line with the new house slogan, "Listen boldly." (In a piece for the Guardian last year, I commented that no major orchestra seemed prepared to advertise itself as the Museum of Modern Art does, as "radical," "provocative," or "bold"; I'm happy to see that the Seattle Symphony has become an exception.) Bernard Jacobson wrote up the gala for the Seattle Times and then praised a sizzling-sounding program of Stravinsky's Rite, Gershwin's American in Paris, and Varèse's Amériques. Gavin Borchert of the Seattle Weekly, while distinctly unenthusiastic about the choice of Friedrich Gulda's Cello Concerto for the gala, said that the orchestra sounds "as good as I've ever heard them." David Mermelstein covered Morlot's debut for the Wall Street Journal, and Thomas May has a Change in Seattle.