Alex Ross's Blog, page 239
February 22, 2011
Inuksuit videos
John Luther Adams's Inuksuit at the Armory was about as heavily videographed as an Animal Collective show, and material has begun to show up on YouTube. Above is my own rudimentary one-minute video. Someone's also uploaded a neatly filmed 23-minute excerpt. (Mark Morris glides through the frame about six minutes in.) More will follow. But no recording, even the most sophisticated, will begin to capture the head-spinning richness of the sound in the room. In fact, these videos are highly misleading when it comes to the sonic dimension. They do, however, give a sense of the visual impact.
February 21, 2011
Rothko Chapel agenda
Performances of Morton Feldman's shudderingly beautiful Rothko Chapel are all too rare in these parts. I attended renditions by Continuum and Florilegium in 1994 and by the Vox Vocal Ensemble in 2002; if there were others in New York in the past twenty years, I missed out. Suddenly, though, we're having a Rothko moment. On Thursday, AXIOM and the Clarion Choir will perform the work as part of the Tully Scope festival, which also includes a Cage/Feldman ICE show tomorrow. If you're tired of forking over piles of money for elitist pop culture, tickets are $25-50, after which other events in the series cost $20. Out on the West Coast, MTT and the San Francisco Symphony present Rothko four times this week, with Mozart's Requiem following. (Thus spake Morty: "For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.") And, over the weekend, Da Camera will give three performances in the actual Rothko Chapel, in Houston, with the great Kim Kashkashian playing the viola part.... Ethan Iverson participates in a concert of works by Vivian Fine, Louise Talma, and Miriam Gideon, at Carnegie on Feb. 23.... Joan La Barbara and Ne(x)tworks explore Cage's Song Books at Greenwich House on Feb. 25.... Grisey's Le Noir de l'étoile, derived from the sounds of pulsars, descends on EMPAC, in Troy NY, on Feb. 26, and comes to Tullyscope on March 4. Les Percussions de Strasbourg are the messengers.... The soulful young pianist Inon Barnatan will present a typically inventive program in the People's Symphony series on Feb. 26. If you're tired of forking over, etc., tickets are $13.... "Mörder!" Opera Boston is reviving Hindemith's Cardillac, with Sanford Sylvan in the lead role. Matthew Guerrieri explains.
February 20, 2011
February 18, 2011
Turn on the dark
Photo: James Ewing.
The Tune-In Festival is now under way at the Armory. Tonight is the monster program of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain, Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate, Bach's Chaconne in D Minor, and Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Sunday brings the local premiere of John Luther Adams's Inuksuit, with more than seventy percussionists spread around the giant Drill Hall.
Tuning in
Photo: James Ewing.
The Tune-In Festival is now under way at the Armory. Tonight is the monster program of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain, Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate, Bach's Chaconne in D Minor, and Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. Sunday brings the local premiere of John Luther Adams's Inuksuit, with more than seventy percussionists spread around the giant Drill Hall.
February 16, 2011
Miscellany: Muti stand-up, etc.
Best wishes to the irrepressible Riccardo Muti for a speedy recovery. (Video via AC Douglas.) ... The Detroit Symphony season is hanging by a frayed thread. There's amazing venom toward the musicians in the comments to Mark Stryker's stories. All the outrage would make you think the orchestra was siphoning off millions of dollars of public funds, like a sports team.... Young Concert Artists celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with a free twelve-hour marathon at Symphony Space on Saturday. A hundred alumni, included Emanuel Ax, Ursula Oppens, Jeremy Denk, Sasha Cooke, and the Borromeo Quartet, will participate. Return to Symphony Space on Monday for the Music of Now marathon, with a tribute to the great Gunther Schuller, and on Tuesday for a discussion with the no less great Meredith Monk.... Marin Alsop is the new leader of the São Paolo Symphony.
February 15, 2011
Spring for Music
Spring for Music is a multi-year festival of North American orchestras that will have its first outing at Carnegie Hall in May. It aims to celebrate inventiveness in programming and also casts a welcome spotlight on ensembles outside the Big Five group, if that designation still has any meaning. (I'm especially happy to see the Alabama Symphony selected for next year: I wrote about them in 2007.) Spring for Music is running a Fantasy Program Contest, the winner of which will have his or her entry broadcast on Performance Today. As of this writing, a program pairing Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra with John Williams's Superman score is in the lead, but several others are coming up fast. You can vote for programs you like and against programs that you consider silly. The contest closes on Thursday. Tickets also go on sale that day; all seats are $25.
Update: The New Jersey Symphony just announced its 2011-12 season, and there's happy news for those of us who have long been waiting to hear Busoni's Piano Concerto live: that monumental work will appear on the New Jersey's Spring for Music program in May 2012, with Marc-André Hamelin undertaking the infamously difficult solo part. As far as I can tell, the work was last done in New York in 1989.
February 14, 2011
Return of Alban Berg Valentine
LULU: 'Once I loved a student
With a hundred seventy-five scars . . . '
— Lulu, Act I
Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine, Another Alban Berg Valentine, Yet Another Alban Berg Valentine.
February 12, 2011
Hands off the twentieth century!
Max Frankel, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has written a piece comparing John Adams's Nixon in China to his own experiences as a reporter in China in 1972. He comes to the conclusion that composers, playwrights, and, it seems, filmmakers should let a century pass before attempting to portray a particular historical event. Apparently, it's just too soon for dramatic works about the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Cold War, or, of course, Watergate. Frankel derives his century rule from, he says, Shakespeare, with reference also to Verdi's habit of setting his historical operas deep in the past. What Frankel fails to acknowledge is that composers often gravitated to the deep past because they were not permitted to address more contemporary themes. In 1857, Verdi set to work on an opera titled Gustavo III, depicting the assassination of the King of Sweden in 1792. It was inspired by an Auber opera that had enjoyed great success at the Paris Opéra in 1833, only four decades after Gustav's death. The Neapolitan censors, however, rejected the idea as incendiary; in its final incarnation, as Un ballo in maschera, the opera was set in seventeenth-century Boston. We can only imagine what Verdi might have done if he had had perfect freedom in his choice of subjects; the results may well have proved disconcerting to the politically connected pundits of his day. "Respectful patience" is really not the right phrase for Giuseppe Verdi.
February 9, 2011
Alex Ross's Blog
- Alex Ross's profile
- 425 followers
