Alex Ross's Blog, page 255

We're breaking through

(Via Anastasia Tsiouclas.)

Der ferne Klang (Clinton-era staging)

Thaddeus Strassberger, who is directing the production of Schreker's Der ferne Klang that opens tomorrow at Bard, had considerable success with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots in the same venue last summer. Zachary Woolfe, of the Capital site, talks to Strassberger about his ideas, which seem intriguing. I must say, though, that a major opportunity has been missed. With the Chelsea Clinton nuptials transpiring the following day in nearby Rhinebeck, wouldn't it have been far more timely and...

Schreker and the Clintons

Tomorrow night, at Bard College upstate, Franz Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang will have its long-awaited American stage premiere. The following day, in the nearby town of Rhinebeck, NY, Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former President and the current Secretary of State, will be married. The two events have no obvious connection, so I decided to invent one. This is long-lost television footage of Bill Clinton performing an arrangement for saxophone and chamber orchestra of the...

Condoleezza's Mozart

Peter Dobrin reports on an unusual concert that took place at the Mann Center in Philadelphia last night: Condoleezza Rice performing the slow movement of Mozart's D-minor Concerto and Aretha Franklin singing "Nessun dorma," among other tunes. The video clip suggests that Secretary Rice won't be putting Mitsuko Uchida out of work any time soon.

Summer movie review: Inception

I saw the oneiric blockbuster Inception last night. Christopher Nolan, the director, often has unexpected musical moments in his films — Boito's Mefistofele figured in Batman Begins — and in this case the plot pivots on Edith Piaf singing "Je ne regrette rien." Hans Zimmer was the composer, and his score is interestingly obsessive in the way that it works over and stretches out various minimal motifs, including the brassy "heartbeat" element of Piaf's famous recording. The LA Times

Chord of the curse

I was whiling away a Saturday morning listening to Wagner's first finished opera, Die Feen — in preparation for my next book, Wagnerism, I'm going through the operas one by one — when a loud D-minor chord in Act II stopped me short. Namely, this:

Arindal, a king in love with the fairy Ada, has been put to a test: he must not curse his beloved, no matter what horrors she appears to have committed. When Ada seems to hurl their children into a flaming abyss, he fails...

The man who played with pulse

Reich and friends play Drumming at Maverick on July 31.

Eek! Another Bayreuth opening

Above is an image from Hans Neuenfels's rat-infested production of Lohengrin, which opened at Bayreuth earlier today. The customary explosion of boos greeted the directing team when they made their bows. On the webcast, I also heard, oddly, a few boos for Andris Nelsons, who, I thought, conducted with pulsing energy and palpable musical authority. Chancellor Angela Merkel was in the audience, and, amid the boos, she was observed to direct applause in Neuenfels's direction. "Das war...

Karajan conducts Ives

The invaluable historic-recordings site Pristine Audio recently posted several little-known recordings of Herbert von Karajan, encompassing all of his concerts with American orchestras on American soil: two programs with the New York Philharmonic in 1958 and one with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1959. (In 1967 he twice conducted the Cleveland Orchestra, in Lucerne and Salzburg.) The L. A. appearance, which took place at the Hollywood Bowl, is notable, or not, as one of the very few...

Here we go again

Kate Connolly writes in the Guardian about Eva and Katharina Wagner's first Bayreuth season, which opens on Sunday: "Fresh touches introduced by the sisters will include a new production of
Lohengrin [by Hans Neuenfels:], in which, Katharina Wagner has let slip, rats will be let
loose on a set designed to resemble an animal research laboratory." Perhaps the rats will discover the rotting rabbits from Schlingensief's Parsifal. Progressives are unimpressed, preemptively attacking the new...