Alex Ross's Blog, page 219

Breathe

This is a little outside my accustomed zone, but I found it mesmerizing: "Breathe," by the Finnish accordionist Antti Paalanen, from his album Breathbox.

For Father Mike

End-of-summer hiatus

Personal announcement

Malcolm and Daphne Ross, without whom Noise would scarcely have been possible, celebrate fifty-five years of marriage today.

Personal announcement (2)

Jonathan Lisecki, my brilliant filmmaker husband, has finished shooting his first feature, Gayby. It's an expansion of the short of the same title, which was won various awards and appeared in over a hundred festivals all over the world. Last month the Gayby feature was selected as IndieWIRE's project of the day.

Books received (3): Xenakis

In the new book Performing Xenakis, edited by Sharon Kanach, Kevin McFarland of the JACK Quartet writes about the group's famous performance of Tetras:

Performing Tetras, on the other hand, feels more like like an extreme sport [in contrast to ST/4]. It could be that some of the more difficult cerebral challenges of playing the work have thoroughly entered muscle memory for me after dozens of performances, but the energy required from the moment our quartet started learning the piece is decidedly very physical. However, I still experience some level of conflict between the physicality of action and the kind of mental control that must be established. There is a kind of conscience or nagging voice-of-reason that tells me I could be producing the same sonic result if my technique were more focused, and my energies more direct, in other words if my body was much more relaxed and everything was functioning like some sort of well-oiled machine. However, in a handful of performances where I have attempted to do just this the result was somehow deeply unsatisfying. To give a successful performance of Tetras I have become convinced that I must give literally everything I have, so that by the end of the intensely loud and explosive tremolo glissandi concluding the piece, when the dynamic drops drastically and the tempo asymptotically approaches complete stillness, the energy dissipates in a way that is not entirely controlled but dissolves into space precisely because nothing is left. That is not to say that energy is not metered out and paced, because it is crucial that the absolute maximum level of output is reached only a minute or so before the end of the piece. However, there are not very many places to fuel up along the way either, if one's tank is not to end up prematurely out of gas.

Miscellany: The Cavalli craze, etc.

In 2008, Opera Omnia put on a feisty staging of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea at (Le) Poisson Rouge, then brand-new. The company is back with a new production, of Cavalli's Giasone, which has lately become something of a pop hit; I wrote about the Yale Baroque Opera Project's staging in 2009. The Opera Omnia show opens at LPR tomorrow and runs through Sept. 7.... A new company called Opera Moderne is setting up shop at Galapagos in DUMBO. The inaugural program, tonight, consists of Libby Larsen's Songs from Letters, George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, and Britten's searing vocal scene Phaedra. Next May the company is planning a rare stateside performance of Gustave Charpentier's opéra-vérité masterpiece Louise.... Also tonight is a showing of Nixon in China in the Met's Summer HD Festival in Lincoln Center Plaza.... The Cage-Wagner nexus? Robert Moran's Buddha Goes to Bayreuth, which will have its premiere at the Ruhr Triennale on Oct. 1, manipulates sixty-four chords from Parsifal according to the I Ching. Cage's Ryoanji is also on the program.... Those who live in or near Woodstock NY will have a chance to hear Othmar Schoeck's sublime vocal cycle Notturno at Maverick Concerts on Sept. 4. The Daedalus Quartet is joined by Andrew Garland, baritone.... The pianist Daniel Beliavsky has made a documentary film about the composer Donald Harris, a somewhat overlooked figure in the American modernist tradition; it recently aired on CUNY TV. Above is a video of Beliavsky playing Harris's Sonata (1957).... Are you, like me, trying to come to grips with Spotify, the new streaming music service? Steve Smith, quite possibly the wisest music critic in America, assesses its strengths, limitations, and moral quandaries in characteristically deft fashion.

Believe it

Tonight I will join Brandon Stosuy and Tyondai Braxton for a public discussion on the occasion of the Believer's new Music Issue. The event takes place at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There will also be performances by such nü-classical and ghoul-classical* luminaries as Nadia Sirota, Ted Hearne, Tristan Perich, Philip White, Jacob Cooper, and Mellissa Hughes. As it happens, both Brandon and Ty were present for my adventure in DJing last year, and Ty generously lent his guitar chops to the Listen to This video, which has now racked up an amazing 150 million hits on YouTube.

*My preferred alternatives to "alt-classical."

Discords

Shattíla by the Palestinian composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi.

More from Zofia Posmysz

I have a post at the New Yorker's website in which the author of The Passenger relates her memories of music at Auschwitz. (Apologies for the fact that Movable Type currently won't allow us to display Polish characters in proper fashion.)