Alex Ross's Blog, page 254
August 6, 2010
Dr. Faustus library
Apropos of nothing, I offer a picture of my collected copies of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, a book that that has had, as the author might have said, an almost uncanny effect on me. The paperback on top was purchased at Second Story Books, in Washington DC, circa 1985. It remains the most intense reading experience of my life. Below that is a 1948 copy that I found on the Internet. It is inscribed by Hans and Hilde Jacobi to their friend Poldi. I wonder if this could be the Hans Jacobi...
August 5, 2010
Watertower sunset playlist
— Haydn, London Symphonies; Marc Minkowski conducting Les Musiciens du Louvre (Naïve)
— Rosso: Italian Baroque Arias; Patricia Petitbon, soprano, with Andrea Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra (DG)
— Louis Couperin, Suites; Christophe Rousset, harpsichord (Harmonia Mundi)
— Beethoven, Piano Concertos; Paul Lewis, piano, with Jiří Bělohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony (Harmonia Mundi)
— My Mexican Soul: Alondra de la Parra conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas...
August 4, 2010
Off-topic: A defense of freedom
Mayor Bloomberg spoke on Governors Island yesterday, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, eloquently defending the idea of building an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site. The plan has been attacked by demagogues seeking, as often before, to manipulate the events of September 11th for political gain. Bloomberg said:
Should
government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house
of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That...
August 3, 2010
Video-game music
Last week, Anne Midgette wrote an interesting piece about the latest revenue-enhancing craze in the orchestral world: concerts devoted to video-game music. As Anne says, the notion that this kind of event will recruit new subscribers is questionable, but I suppose you never know what will get people interested. If the video above — a trailer for a PBS special — successfully captures the video-game-concert experience, I would pay good money not to have to see it. By the way, foreign readers...
August 2, 2010
Miscellany: Marlboro at 60, etc.
Marlboro, Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode's deep-thinking music camp, is celebrating this summer its sixtieth anniversary. Radio's Performance Today celebrates with a week of live performances from Marlboro, including an "Archduke" Trio with Uchida, Soovin Kim, and the late, great David Soyer. Next weekend, Nicholas Phan and Dame Mitsuko perform Dichterliebe.... Worth a listen: Oliver Knussen's three-part Proms program of Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistle, Colin Matthews (his richly...
August 1, 2010
July 31, 2010
Chord of the curse 2
The other day I wrote about a spooky harmonic progression that shows up in Wagner's early opera Die Feen and recurs in Strauss's Salome. It occurred to me that the sequence has old roots: at the beginning of Carlo Gesualdo's madrigal Moro, lasso ("I die, alas, in my suffering") a chord of C-sharp major gives way to one of A minor. In the above video, the madrigal is sung by the Gesualdo Consort of Amsterdam. The shadowy Renaissance master is much in the air these days: as I mention just...
July 30, 2010
Fictive music update
Welsey Stace's novel Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, a darkly comic tale of early-twentieth-century British music with resonances from the twisted life of Carlo Gesualdo, has been winning rave reviews in the UK. "Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power and the polish of
this subtle tale of English music in the making," writes Norman Lebrecht in the New Statesman. Jessica Duchen interviews the author at her Standpoint blog. I am proud to say that I figure in the...
CD of the week: Mackerras's Mozart
The finale of the "Haffner" Symphony, from a two-CD album of Mozart's Symphonies Nos. 29, 31, 32, 35, and 36, with the late Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Linn CKD 350 (available for download as MP3s or CD-quality files). This was Mackerras's final recording.
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