Alex Ross's Blog, page 226

Bruckner Rock

Bruckner Week is upon us: tomorrow night the Cleveland Orchestra unfurls the Austrian giganticist's Fifth Symphony, in the first of four Lincoln Center concerts pairing Bruckner symphonies with works of John Adams. (In point of fact, the Eighth Symphony gets a concert unto itself.) While watching a YouTube video of Christian Thielemann conducting the Fifth, I noticed a forlorn comment: "i know seven nation army was inspired by this, but i dont hear the similarity." This refers to a 2003 song by the White Stripes. I'd never thought of it, but, sure enough, the main riff of the song comes straight out of Bruckner's principal thematic material in the first movement. You can hear the figure at 3:48 in the video above; I'm guessing the Whites were inspired especially by the ostinato that gets going in the coda of the movement. Hate to be blunt, but Bruckner rocks much harder. He rocks like Lewisian gneiss.

Bruckner in Santo Domingo

Susana Acra-Brache leads the final movements of Bruckner's Requiem and Te Deum in the Iglesia Regina Angelorum, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. John Berky, proprietor of an excellent Bruckner website, writes about the concert here.

Hi-yo Guillaume!

Rossini's towering William Tell, very rarely done in these parts (and absent from the Met since 1931), arrives at the Caramoor Festival tonight for the first of two performances. There are online notes by the Rossini authority Philip Gossett and by the conductor Will Crutchfield, who is a notable scholar in his own right. Crutchfield is including music seldom presented in performance – the trio and prayer from Act IV — while omitting a good chunk of the first part of Act III. "Something has to go if the opera is to finish in four hours," Crutchfield writes. The cast is led by Michael Spyres as Arnold, Julianna Di Giacomo as Matilde, and Daniel Mobbs in the title role. No harmonicas.

Previously: Taking Liberties, Angela Meade's Norma.

Horenstein speaks

The great Jascha Horenstein — whose 1970 Proms performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony is presently thundering from my stereo — talks to Alan Blyth about composers he knew, including Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Eisler, Bartók, Janáček, Nielsen, and Strauss ("icy-cold, every inch the emperor of music"). The video is in two parts; the second is here.

The latest on City Opera

Dan Wakin of the New York Times reveals details of New York City Opera's 2011-12 season, which will be formally announced next week. According to his sources, the season will include a new Christopher Alden production of Così fan tutte; a revival of Jonathan Miller's Glimmerglass staging of Traviata; the expected U.S. premiere of Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna; and an unspecified opera by Telemann. Locations are said to be BAM, John Jay College, and El Museo del Barrio. Wakin's story also includes bemused reaction from Julius Rudel, the former City Opera director who has publicly criticized the current management. City Opera itself did not comment. La Cieca, doyenne of New York opera bloggers, seems skeptical. We'll see what George Steel has to say next week.

Marlboro at 60

Video: Allen Cohen / Marlboro Music

Marlboro Music, the storied chamber-music summit in Vermont, celebrates this month its sixtieth anniversary. In the new few days, more than two hundred alumni of the institution will be converging on Marlboro for an unprecedented reunion.  There are commemorative photo exhibits at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library (through August 20), at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, and at the Drury Gallery on the Marlboro campus. Recent Marlboro performances can be heard on various radio outlets, including WQXR (Mondays at 9PM), WFCR in Amherst (Fridays from 2-3PM), WCRB in Boston, Vermont Public Radio, and American Public Media's Classical 24 and Performance Today. And in August Marlboro will be launching a new live-recording series: the first three releases, including a performance of Beethoven's "Archduke" with Mistuko Uchida, Soovin Kim, and the late David Soyer, will be available through ArkivMusic, in digital and CD form. I wrote about Marlboro in a 2009 essay that appears in my book Listen to This. The video above, featuring the finale of Dvořák's Serenade for winds, is the work of Allen Cohen, son of the late violinist Isidore Cohen, a longtime Marlboro mainstay.

The old, sad song

"Concert halls only rarely enjoy the crowds of yesteryear."

— report to the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1964, quoted in Eric Drott's new book Music and the Elusive Revolution.

Nightafternight playlist

— Gesualdo, Madrigals Book 6; Alan Curtis, Il Complesso Barocco (Pan Classics)
— Krenek, Symphony No. 4, Concerto grosso; Alun Francis, NDR Radiophilharmonie (cpo)
— John Adams, Son of Chamber Symphony, String Quartet; ICE, St. Lawrence Quartet (Nonesuch)
— Schumann, Humoreske, Busoni, Fantasia contrappuntistica; Jacob Greenberg (New Focus)
— Boris Papandopulo, Piano Music; Nicholas Phillips (Albany)
— Mozart, Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 27; Mitsuko Uchida, Cleveland Orchestra (Decca)
— Cavalli, Artemisia; various soloists, Claudio Cavina conducting La Venexiana (Glossa)

Atonys

Several people sent me a link to "Atonal Composers Gather for Atony Awards," an attempted satire of modern music at The Onion. Now, I love The Onion as much as any time-wasting American, but this is kind of a fail, as the kids say. I'll let go of the fact that Penderecki's name is mispronounced and the joke doesn't apply to his post-1975 music. But couldn't an intern have gone to Wikipedia and noticed that Stockhausen is dead? Or is this routine recycled from a few years ago? Either way, it doesn't hold a candle to Arnie Schoenberg and His Second Viennese School, never mind Bruno Heinz Jaja.

Books received (1)

University of California Press has put out a beautiful book containing all eleven issues of the legendary new-music magazine Source. Larry Austin edited the journal from the campus of University of California, Davis, between 1967 and 1973, eliciting crucial documents of the musical thinking of Cage, Feldman (his brilliant "Conversations without Stravinsky"), Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Frederic Rzewski, the young Steve Reich ("Music as a Gradual Process"), and many other luminaries of the late-twentieth-century American avant-garde. Even Stockhausen puts in an appearance, in dialogue with Ashley and Austin. Douglas Kahn edited the book with Austin. A perfect holiday gift for that nephew who can't stop listening to I am sitting in a room.