Alex Ross's Blog, page 238

Sydney

The Sydney Opera House has been overtaken by the YouTube Symphony. Hey, that's Anna Wittstruck in the video! She was in an arts-writing class I taught a couple of years ago.

Bach in the outback

Over the weekend I drove from Sydney to Bourke, about a thousand kilometers inland, and back again. Along the way, I listened to nothing but cantatas of Bach.

This wild camel had been lounging in the middle of the road with two mates, and moved with some reluctance.

"Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden."

"Christ lag in Todesbanden." Shortly after taking this picture, I checked into a roadside motel and was shocked to see news of the Japanese earthquake. It looked like the world ending.

"Es ist vollbracht."

Tree of sorrow

Kings Park, Perth. More on the Dorizzi brothers here.

Palmy days of empire

Salome everywhere

Gustave Moreau at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Music and politics

Reverberations. The New Yorker, March 14, 2011.

Bonus track: Andris Nelsons.

Australian semi-hiatus

For most of this month I will be in Australia, serving as a guest lecturer/curator for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Because I'm traveling not as a journalist but as a temporary associate of the ensemble, it won't be appropriate to write about the experience—and, alas, I can't cover this notable group in the future. However, I may occasionally supply non-ACO-related tidbits from Down Under. At the moment I am in Melbourne, enjoying a glorious bout of late-summer weather. I'm sad to miss a string of significant events back home, including the remainder of Tully Scope, the new Thomas Adès quartet, Andris Nelsons's Boston Symphony debut, and Ecstatic Music.

Bernstein on Beethoven

Terry Teachout writes here about Bernstein's famous Omnibus TV programs, which have finally appeared on DVD.

Levine departs Boston

The melancholy news came today that James Levine will resign his post as the music director of the Boston Symphony at the end of the current season. He just withdrew from his only remaining regular-season concerts; one assumes that he will make farewell appearances at Tanglewood next summer, health permitting. It's a sadly premature ending to a tenure that began with great promise, as I reported in the New Yorker in 2004. Levine seems determined to focus on his Met commitments, most crucially the new Ring cycle. Boston, meanwhile, has announced the formation of a search committee for a new music director. Let the guessing game begin!

For Philipp Naegele

Marlboro Music, the venerable chamber-music retreat in the foothills of Vermont, recently lost two of its mainstays. The violinist and conductor Blanche Honegger Moyse, who died on Feb. 10 at the grand age of one hundred one, was one of Marlboro's co-founders; she is fondly remembered in the Brattleboro Reformer. And the violinist and violist Philipp Naegele, who was present for the first Marlboro gathering in 1950 and spent more than fifty summers there, passed away on Jan. 31 at the age of eighty-three; Marlboro's own website memorializes him. When I spent time at Marlboro in 20o8, I didn't have a chance to meet Madame Moyse, but I did get to know Philipp. The youngest son of the German painter Reinhold Nägele, a beneficiary of the Kindertransport in 1939, he was an extraordinarily learned and thoughtful man whose passion for music directed almost every sentence he spoke. He was especially devoted to Shostakovich and had long campaigned for the Shostakovich quartets to be brought into the Marlboro repertory. (The Russians were the only truly musical people, he told me.) He also had an intense and idiocyncratic appreciation for the Austro-German late-Romantics — Mahler, Strauss, Schreker, and others. I remember him arguing, late one night at the Marlboro coffee shop, that Salome was in fact a feminist opera, although the youthful din made it hard for me to make out all the particulars of the thesis. When I last saw him, at Marlboro last summer, he spoke of a profound experience he'd had listening to Mahler's Seventh Symphony while recovering from heart surgery. He heard it as a "quasi return to life," its convulsions and mysteries giving away to "visions of transcendent joy and vitality," as he wrote in a subsequent e-mail. Whenever I hear the piece in the future, I will think of Philipp alone in his IC room in the dead of night, listening to Mahler and coming back to life.