Alex Ross's Blog, page 253

Testing, testing....

I'm experimenting with a new kind of audio player, an HTML5 gizmo, which is supposed to work on iPads, iPhones, and other advanced devices. What should happen, if I've written the code correctly, is that if your browser does not accept HTML5 then it will fall back to my old audio player. We will see!

Clemens non Papa's Ego flos campi, from Stile Antico's Song of Songs (Harmonia Mundi).

Rachmaninov in Valhalla

On my way up to the Bard Music Festival last weekend, I stopped in at the Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, to pay my respects to Sergei Rachmaninov. Árni Heimir Ingólfsson recently told me about visiting the grave, and I decided to make my own pilgrimage. Kensico is a vast, verdant burial ground a little north of the city; Lou Gehrig, Danny Kaye, Tommy Dorsey, David Sarnoff, and the New Yorker's Peter Arno are among the notables who reside there. Rachmaninov lies in a secluded...

Berg on Strauss and Mahler

Berg's graphic analysis of the career trajectories of Strauss and Mahler, in a letter reproduced in Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey. If Berg had lived to hear Capriccio and the Four Last Songs, perhaps he would have granted Strauss a little uptick at the end....

Rival disasters

Not surprisingly, competing entries for the title of Worst Recording Ever Made have surfaced elsewhere on the Internet. Bob Shingleton puts forward a weirdly misconceived East German rendition of Mikis Theodorakis's Axion esti; Marc Geelhoed has serious trouble with a CD of Ezra Pound's music; David Weininger mentions Ferenc Fricsay's Symphony of Psalms; Lisa Hirsch (dis)likes Lorin Maazel's Tosca; Anastasia Tsioulcas proposes Stefan Zucker (although humorously bad performances and cult...

Wagner at war

The website Wagner Opera has uploaded to YouTube a scene from the 1941 Nazi propaganda film Stukas, in which a clinically depressed fighter pilot hears Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth, becomes rejuvenated, and merrily goes back to bombing the British. It's hard to know whether to be amused or disgusted by the footage; both reactions seem apt. As I noted in The Rest Is Noise, Hitler had thousands of wounded soldiers shipped to Bayreuth during the war so that they could be spiritually healed by...

The worst recording ever made?

Competition for the title is intense, but I would ask that serious consideration be given to this CD of Wilhelm Furtwängler's Piano Quintet, which appeared on the Bayer label in 1996. The work itself is an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length. The performance is wretched. The recording is badly made. The notes are delusional. And it goes on and on and on — for seventy-three minutes and...

Tristan Perich

The technology behind Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony is fascinating; more important, the music is fairly electrifying. It reminds me of Terry Riley's rough, ecstatic music of the late nineteen-sixties, in the Rainbow in Curved Air period. It's not for every taste, but what music is? The final movement is infinite; when you're ready to move on, you switch the gizmo off.

Met preview

Tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's 2010-11 season are now on sale for members and subscribers; the general public can purchase single tickets starting on Sunday. The most tensely awaited items on the agenda are the first two installments of Robert Lepage's production of the Ring: Das Rheingold, which opens Sept. 27; and Die Walküre, which arrives on April 22. With less trepidation I am looking forward to the ridiculously belated Manhattan premiere of Nixon in China (Feb. 2) and to...

Return to Marlboro

Over the weekend I made a brief visit to Marlboro Music, which I wrote about last year (the essay will reappear in my new book, Listen to This). The place is happily unchanged in almost every particular, although the absence of the late David Soyer is strongly felt. Mitsuko Uchida, who serves as co-director with Richard Goode, has been in residence the entire summer; on Saturday night, she performed, for the first time in her career, Schumann's Dichterliebe, in the company of the tenor

Batter my heart (redux)

Oppenheimer's Act I aria from Doctor Atomic, sung by Gerald Finley in rehearsal with the Met Orchestra under Alan Gilbert. Audio courtesy of the Met, originally posted October 2008.

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