Alex Ross's Blog, page 220

Tannhäuser update

At Parterre, Dawn Fatale amusingly anatomizes Sebastian Baumgarten's nonsensical production of Tannhäuser at Bayreuth. "All in all, it looks like a really sad theme night at Area," Mme Fatale concludes. The reference is a little before our time, but we think we know what she means.

Music After

Here's Daniel Felsenfeld on Sound Notion, talking about his Music After project — an attempt to mark the tenth anniversary of September 11th without speechifying, without sanctimony, without pro-forma lamentations. Instead, it's simply a marathon concert of and by creative musicians who were in downtown Manhattan when 9/11 happened — everyone from Elliott Carter and David Lang to Laurie Anderson and Justin Bond. I admit I've felt ambivalent about a lot of the musical tributes that have been announced. (The series at Trinity Wall Street, where the last music of the day will be Ligeti's Lux aeterna, is in a separate category.) Like so many New Yorkers, I have overpowering memories of that day, yet I've grown weary of "official" commemorative events, which can't avoid having at least a trace of politics attached. Listening to the German Requiem had a profound effect on me in the weeks after the attack, but I'm not sure I need a re-play now. Danny's idea of a space dedicated purely to local new music appeals to me strongly, and I hope that fund-raising proceeds apace.

Weinberg's The Passenger

Testament. The New Yorker, Sept. 5, 2011 (subscribers only).

Bonus track: The new Roulette.

Receding

The eye of Irene

Around 9AM, Tropical Storm Irene made landfall on Coney Island, in Brooklyn. The eye of the storm had collapsed some time before, but there was a remarkable brightening of the sky as the ex-hurricane passed over the city, together with an eerie, charged stillness in the air. Nothing quite like this has happened in anyone's lifetime, not even Elliott Carter's; the last such storm to hit New York directly was the hurricane of 1893.

It's gonna rain

A hurricane approaches. Helpful tip from Brecht and Weill: "Haltet euch aufrecht, fürchtet euch nicht" ("Hold yourselves upright, fear not"). From the "typhoon" scene in Mahagonny.

Maulina presents Huxley presents Gesualdo

Robert Craft's pioneering all-Gesualdo LP was recorded in the fall of 1955 for Sunset Records, an independent L.A. label. "This is probably the first time in LP history that the man who wrote the program notes got his picture on the cover," wrote the Saturday Review the following year. The Singers of Ferrara were Charles Scharbach, bass; Richard Robinson, tenor; Grace-Lynn Martin and Marilynn Horne, sopranos; and Cora Lauridsen, contralto. (For a few years in the nineteen-fifties Horne spelled her first name with two n's.) The recording sessions were supervised, interestingly, by the late, great David Raksin. Craft writes in his memor, An Improbable Life, that Raksin's girlfriend at the time was Peggy Lee. Did not know!

James Brown sings Kurt Weill

Alas, he apparently never did "Mack the Knife." For those who prefer a more traditional approach, there's Willie Nelson.

Lisztomaniacal

The Liszt bicentennial has brought a flood of records, and, with it, a flood of attention-getting record covers, apparently designed to remind everyone that Liszt was a Flamboyant Celebrity Artist, the Lady Gaga of his time. The cover for Lang Lang's forthcoming disc Liszt: My Piano Hero is becoming legend; Anthony Tommasini, in today's Times, aptly describes it as "something out of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." Lang Lang's former record label, DG, has struck back with this cover, which could almost be interpreted as passive-aggressive:

L2 isn't the only one offering a loopy Liszt look this year. There's also Khatia Buniatishvili, who apparently played the Sonata in B Minor with such gothic intensity that it killed a swan:

Kidding aside, there's some powerful, imaginative playing on this album, although I found a few of Buniatishvili's choices jarring. The Mephisto Waltz No. 1 is a jazzy tour-de-force.

DG has a compilation titled Liszt Wild and Crazy — a silly title but a fun neo-sixties graphic:

At the other extreme is this subdued cover for a forthcoming disc of the concertos with Daniel Barenboim at the piano and Pierre Boulez conducting. If I'm not mistaken, Boulez is about to say, "Daniel, cher ami, do we really have to do this?"

Alexander Krichel, a young pianist from Hamburg, seems to be thinking, "Gosh, I'm more handsome than Liszt in his prime!"

The cover of Nelson Freire's disc Harmonies du Soir is quite boring; the playing, however, is sublime. Freire, who has long given life to the old cliché "poet of the piano," has a way of connecting Liszt's gestures so that they form a naturally flowing narrative; you never feel hectored. This is the finest of the anniversary-year discs I've heard.

In memoriam Proper Discord.

O Canada

I'm very sorry to see that John Terauds, the classical critic of The Toronto Star (not pictured), is leaving its music pages and winding down his excellent blog, Sound Mind. As Susan Elliott notes in a Musical America item, Terauds will be moving to the business section of the paper. Although Arthur Kaptainis writes on a free-lance basis for the Montreal Gazette, and Robert Everett-Green, Colin Eatock, Elissa Poole, and others share the classical beat at the Globe and Mail, for the moment the only full-time staff classical critic remaining in Canada appears to be, as Susan says, Claude Gingras at the La Presse. It's a strange state of affairs for a country so rich in musical activity. (Colin had thoughts about the situation on his blog last week.) If I may make a little footnote to Susan's piece, one publication is missing from the scant list of those still employing full-time classical critics.