Alex Ross's Blog, page 236

Merci beaucoup, domo arigato

Belatedly, I'd like to offer thanks for two awards that The Rest Is Noise recently received: a Music Pen Club prize in Japan and the Grand Prix des Muses in France. I obviously owe a particular debt to the translators — Toshie Kakinuma and Laurent Slaars — who prepared the editions that won favorable notice. Slaars, not only a brilliant translator but also a singer who appears on several significant recordings by William Christie, accepted the Grand Prix on my behalf. The ceremony took place at the Fondation Singer-Polignac, with the great French music authority Claude Samuel presiding. As it happens, the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, figures prominently in my narrative as a benefactor of twentieth-century Parisian music. This reminds me that I must finally look into Sylvia Kahan's book In Search of New Scales, about Winnaretta's husband, Edmond de Polignac, Proustian aristocrat and codifier of octatonic composition. Kahan earlier wrote Music's Modern Muse, a splendid biography of the munificent princess.

Nietzsche plays #operaplot

The Omniscient Mussel has again unleashed her annual Twitter #operaplot competition, with Eric Owens serving as this year's judge and prizes on offer from dozens of opera houses around the world. The idea is to summarize a well-known opera — or an obscure one, if you dare — in, at most, one hundred forty characters. We should acknowledge that the godfather of #operaplot was the noted philosopher and aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his 1888 pamphlet The Case of Wagner, offered these jokey plot summaries of Wagner operas:

A Wagnerian ballet may drive one to despair—or virtue! [Tannhäuser.]

One should never know whom exactly one has married. [Lohengrin.]

Old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths. [Parsifal.]

"But why didn't you tell me this before! Nothing simpler than that!" [Tristan.]

It may have the direst consequences if one doesn't go to bed at the right time. [Lohengrin again.]

Let's hope that Miss Mussel will consider giving Prof. Nietzsche a posthumous honorable mention. He deserves no less.

A Frank Martin moment

Dylan in China

I'm not the first to point out that Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, has a dubious take on Bob Dylan's recent concerts in China. Much has been made of the fact that Dylan received approval to play in China only after the "content" of the shows had been approved—presumably, the setlists. (Here's the official statement.) Dowd professes to be outraged that Dylan failed to defy the regime with a string of protest songs. She writes, "The idea that the raspy troubadour of '60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout." She then asks why Dylan didn't offer "Hurricane," a tale of a man falsely accused, alongside comments about the detention of Ai Weiwei. She seems to assume that Dylan was barred from singing such songs, although I have yet to see evidence that the authorities asked for changes before approving the setlists, which included "Desolation Row," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

Let's recall that in 2008, at a concert in Shanghai, Björk caused a major controversy by shouting "Tibet! Tibet!" after a performance of "Declare Independence." It was a brave gesture, but the aftermath was frightening, and it led to a temporary ban on foreign musical acts. You can ask whether musicians should now be refusing to play in the PRC, but to expect an artist to issue incendiary statements while on tour is the worst sort of armchair moralism. In any case, Dylan almost never makes topical comments from the stage, and the notion that he would launch into a critique of the Chinese regime will amuse anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to him in the past twenty years. As for those protest anthems, they don't figure strongly on Dylan's setlists these days — here is an index of the songs he sang last year — and, as Adam Minter points out, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" wouldn't have been very relevant to the Chinese situation even if Dylan had trotted them out. ("Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call"?) Indeed, their residual Popular Front stylings might have been something of a comfort to the Party elders. Rather more unnerving, in the present climate, would have been a number from Dylan's sizeable religious catalogue. Strange to say, that's what he offered, at the beginning of each of his Chinese shows: "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking." The current version of the song includes these lines:

    Jesus is coming
    Coming back to gather his jewels
    We're living by the golden rule
    Whoever's got the gold rules

You'd almost think it was a deliberate gesture. Then again, Bob began his last show of 2010 — at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut — with the same song.

The corner of Strauss and Stravinsky

Yes, this is a real intersection in Silver Spring, Maryland. Neither composer would have been pleased, but the pairing has a certain pluralistic genius. Nearby in this suburban musical heaven are Brahms Avenue, Verdi Court, Beethoven Way, Schubert Drive, Copland Court, and Trebleclef Lane.

Stockhausen's Sonntag

Glimpses of the first complete production of Sonntag, from Stockhausen's Licht cycle, at the Köln Opera. Part I opens tomorrow night, Part II on Sunday, appropriately. The production is by La Fura dels Baus. (You can turn on translations in the "CC" setting on the video.)

Nightafternight playlist*

CDs in current rotation:

— Liszt,  Années de Pèlerinage; Louis Lortie (Chandos)
— Liszt, Piano Sonata, etc.; Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
— Restless, Endless, Tactless: Johanna Beyer and the Birth of American Percussion Music; Meehan / Perkins Duo and the Baylor Percussion Group (New World)
— Grażyna Bacewicz, Piano Quintets and Piano Sonata No. 2; Krystian Zimerman, etc. (DG)
— Ben Johnston, String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, 10; Kepler Quartet (New World)
— Donnacha Dennehy, Grá agus Bás, That the Night Come; Dawn Upshaw, Alan Pierson, Crash Ensemble (Nonesuch, out May 3)

— Meredith Monk, Songs of Ascension (ECM, out May 16)

— Mompou, Música Callada, Secreto; Jenny Lin (Steinway)
— Striggio, Mass in 40 and 60 Parts; I Fagiolini (Decca)

*Steve Smith, founder of the genre, explains it here. These aren't necessarily full-on recommendations, although they may become so; see my CD Picks.

Playlist*

CDs in current rotation:

— Liszt,  Années de Pèlerinage; Louis Lortie (Chandos)
— Liszt, Piano Sonata, etc.; Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
— Restless, Endless, Tactless: Johanna Beyer and the Birth of American Percussion Music; Meehan / Perkins Duo and the Baylor Percussion Group (New World)
— Grażyna Bacewicz, Piano Quintets and Piano Sonata No. 2; Krystian Zimerman, etc. (DG)
— Ben Johnston, String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, 10; Kepler Quartet (New World)
— Donnacha Dennehy, Grá agus Bás, That the Night Come; Dawn Upshaw, Alan Pierson, Crash Ensemble (Nonesuch, out May 3)
— Meredith Monk, Songs of Ascension (ECM, out May 16)
— Mompou, Música Callada, Secreto; Jenny Lin (Steinway)
— Striggio, Mass in 40 and 60 Parts; I Fagiolini (Decca)

*Steve Smith, founder of the genre, explains it here. These aren't necessarily full-on recommendations, although they may become so; see my CD Picks.

Gubaidulina at the Philharmonic

Anne-Sophie Mutter is currently playing Sofia Gubaidulina's In Tempus Praesens with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New York Philharmonic. Here is an excerpt from a video in which the composer and the soloist talk about the work.

Poll: America wants vast increases for PBS, NPR

On March 17th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio. In light of that development, it's interesting to note a new CNN poll — highlighted by the wise folks at Talking Points Memo — that studies popular perceptions and opinions of the federal budget. It turns out that Americans have a wildly exaggerated idea of how much money is spent on public broadcasting. The median guess yields a budget of $178 billion, which is 424 times larger than the reality. Just as interesting, a majority of Americans don't seem to have a problem with a budget of that size. Thirty-nine percent think that it should stay the same; nineteen percent think that it should be "decreased a little"; and fourteen percent think that it should be ... bigger. No fooling.