Alex Ross's Blog, page 251

New Yorker Festival update

Yo-Yo Ma is sold out; some tickets for my bass-lines talk remain.

Sibelius. Jean Sibelius.

Sibelius in 1939. White cat not pictured.

The Guardian's Tom Service has noticed that the opening bars of Sibelius's 1904 piece Cassazione bear a curious resemblance to the original James Bond theme, as composed by Monty Norman. For the benefit of Americans and other backward souls who lack access to the Spotify service, I've uploaded an excerpt from the Sibelius (first version), with the Bond theme following, in the brilliant arrangement by John Barry:

Osmo Vänskä...

Sibelius, Jean Sibelius

Sibelius in 1939. White cat not pictured.

The Guardian's Tom Service has noticed that the opening bars of Sibelius's 1904 piece Cassazione bear a curious resemblance to the original James Bond theme, as composed by Monty Norman. For the benefit of Americans and other backward souls who lack access to the Spotify service, I've uploaded an excerpt from the Sibelius (first version), with the Bond theme following, in the brilliant arrangement by John Barry:

Osmo Vänskä...

The original noise

The BBC iPlayer — which every summer makes me fall that much further behind in my CD listening — is offering a voluptuously apocalyptic Prom by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. The program consists of the Act I Prelude from Parsifal, Strauss's Four Last Songs with Karita Mattila, and a colossal entity that Rattle, in his introductory remarks, aptly named "an imaginary Eleventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler, or Seventeenth": Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Webern's Six Pieces...

Yo-Yo, Chacona

Juan Arañés's "Un sarao de la chacona," from Villancicos y Danzas Criollas; Jordi Savall leading Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya; Alia Vox 9834, also download.

Tickets for the New Yorker Festival go on sale at noon today. I have two events on the schedule: an evening of conversation and music with a promising young cellist named Yo-Yo Ma, on Saturday, Oct. 2, at 7PM; and a lecture entitled "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues," on Sunday, Oct. 3, at 4PM. I'm...

Pre-9/11 miscellany

New Yorkers who would prefer to mark September 11th with something other than gestures of political bombast or acts of cretinous desecration might venture out to Montclair, New Jersey, where the excellent and imaginative Peak Performances series is presenting Here There Be Dragons, a night of music from artists on the New Amsterdam label. The NOW Ensemble, William Brittelle, and Victoire perform.... Hannah Lash, whose Loading Dock Project I mentioned a couple of times over the summer, has...

SF/J, Björk, DJing

My 2004 profile of Björk — a personal favorite among articles I've written for The New Yorker, because Björk is one of the most purely, unaffectedly creative people I've met — appears in Listen to This. Sasha Frere-Jones, who covers pop music for the magazine and knows vastly more about it than I do, recently interviewed Björk in Stockholm, on the occasion of her receiving the Polar Prize. Sasha describes the experience via his Tumblr site, which supplants his long-standing blog. Their chat...

Music amid ruins

I found this curiously painterly photograph in the invaluable Archival Research Catalog of the National Archives. The caption reads: "Squad of American soldiers listening to one of their comrades playing the organ in the half-wrecked old church in Exermont, in the Argonne. France, October 11, 1918. Sergeant J. A. Marshall, ca. 1900 - 1982." It reminds me of Dmitri Baltermants's photograph "Tchaikovsky, Germany," which, for a long time, I wanted to use on the cover of The Rest Is Noise. It...

What is counterpoint?

Stéphane Delplace gives a wonderfully clear answer:

This is also a great way to film a piano. Via Roger Evans.

Berg at Bard

In this week's issue of The New Yorker I have a column — available to subscribers and digital readers only — on the Berg and His World festival at Bard College. Included also are discussions of Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound) and Othmar Schoeck's song cycle Notturno, two highlights from the welter of repertory surrounding Berg's oeuvre. I've uploaded two brief excerpts of these pieces. First, the bird-song passage from Scene 9 of Schreker's opera, which anticipates...