Alex Ross's Blog, page 246

Bernstein's A Quiet Place

Disquiet. The New Yorker, Nov. 15, 2010 (subscribers only).

Napoli at night

Miscellany: Timberbrit, etc.

Unfolding now in the great town of Ann Arbor is ONCE. MORE., a celebration of the legendary ONCE festivals of the 1960s. Laura Kuhn, of the John Cage Trust, performs Cage's Indeterminacy this afternoon; music of the co-founders, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, is included in a concert tonight. Much more over the weekend. A sumptuous fiftieth anniversary guide is available online.... Anne Midgette ponders a very peculiar court case: a sixty-year-old violinist's lawsuit against Young Concert Artists.... Electoral stat: Meg Whitman spent $163 million in her unsuccessful attempt to become governor of California; the 2010 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $161.4 million. (Via Bryant Turnage.) ... Jacob Cooper's opera Timberbrit, a celebration of the comparatively brief but presumably intense love of Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, has a revival at the Incubator Arts Project Nov. 18-20.... New works of Alexandra Gardner at Roulette on Nov. 18... Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger's Requiem for fossil fuels, first seen in 2007, comes to the World Financial Center Winter Garden on Nov. 12, in a full multi-channel version.... That same night, Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain will shake EMPAC in Troy, New York; Alan Gilbert and the NY Phil will unleash Adams's Harmonielehre on Carnegie Hall; and Nicholas Phan will sing Purcell and Britten at Zankel. There is no wrong move.

Napoli

Same book, different cover

The UK edition of Listen to This, from Fourth Estate, appears on November 25th. I'll be making several appearances in London that week, including a "chacona" lecture at the British Library (11/30, 1PM) and a reading at Foyle's (11/30, 6:30PM).

Name that totalitarian tune

Back in July I posted a video of an outdoor musical performance at the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang, North Korea. DJ Mandyczewski, my source for that material, has tracked down the name of the song performed: it's "천리마선구자의노래," or "Song of the Chollima Pioneers." The lyrics begin: "Our Paekdu spirit overflowing / We build a new society on our own / Comrades, let's go, flames of innovation are flaring." Apparently North Korea recently held a competition in which school orchestras and bands played the song: one example is above, and others are here and here. Thanks, DJ M.!

Lamento everywhere 2

The end of the jet-set conductor

"The Dude abides. Not for long, though." Tim Mangan wonders about Gustavo Dudamel's absences from the LA Philharmonic. The specifics can be debated, but a larger point seems clear. With the complicated cultural and financial pressures now circling orchestras, the modern music director needs more than ever to be on the scene. This means showing up for more than the standard twelve weeks; leading school concerts; participating in fund-raisers; giving interviews; meeting prospective audiences at campus events; attending other people's concerts; appearing at gallery openings and other cultural gatherings; and generally being a visible citizen of the city. More than ever, each orchestra needs to convince its community of the music's power, and the chief conductor is—or should be—the best person to make the case. The old international star system is fading; it's local fame that counts.

Dark Waves engulf Chicago

The composer John Luther Adams has received several high-profile performances in recent years, but none quite as prominent as the one that the Chicago Symphony is about to give him: tomorrow night, the mightiest of American ensembles will deliver the first of three renditions of the twelve-minute tone poem Dark Waves. As Marc Geelhoed observes, Chicago has effectively become JLA City. I will interview Adams tomorrow on the campus of Northwestern University, at 4PM. You can hear all of Dark Waves via the Listen to This Audio Guide; the conductor there is Jaap van Zweden, who also leads the work in Chicago. The program also includes a selection of Mahler songs, with Measha Brueggergosman, and Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. Prepare to be clobbered.

Miscellany: White Light, etc.

On Thursday, Lincoln Center's White Light Festival opens with two free events: the unveiling of Janet Cardiff's installation The Forty-Part Motet and a performance by the great Meredith Monk and her ensemble. Steve Smith recently wrote in the Times about Jane Moss's concept for the festival.... The cellist Joshua Roman is curating a lively, new-music-heavy series at Seattle's Town Hall. The next concert, on Nov. 7, features composer/performers from the Seattle Symphony, where Roman served for two seasons as the principal cellist.... Noted: Dan Johnson on Missy Mazzoli's band project Victoire. See the video here.... William Braun has written a wonderful appreciation of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson for Opera News.... Cage Against the Machine is a worthy campaign to make 4'33" the No. 1 Christmas hit in the UK. "On how many different axes would this have made Theodor Adorno's head spin?" asks Matthew Guerrieri, who's back in the game.