Alex Ross's Blog, page 256

Finley alert!

Medici.tv is currently streaming Don Giovanni live from Glyndebourne. Gerald Finley is the Don, sporting a look somewhere between Marcello Mastroianni and Robert Evans.

Ah, the sixties....

From a 1968 New York Times article on mixed-media events in the New York downtown scene:

  

USCO, or the Us Company, was a collaboration between the poet and media artist Gerd Stern and the electrical engineer and audiovisual designer Michael Callahan, who got his start as the first technical director of the hallowed San Francisco Tape Music Center. Let's hope that the psychedelic Confidets campaign figures in a future season of Mad Men.

Mozart by Andres

Photo: Metropolis Ensemble.

Will Robin reminds me that the Metropolis Ensemble has uploaded audio of most of its May 20th concert at the Angel Orensanz Center, on the Lower East Side. Of particular interest is Timothy Andres's astonishing performance / recomposition of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto. The score is missing most of the left-hand piano part (you can follow along in the New Mozart Edition, with the solo beginning on p. 9); Andres, in a fine display of creative bravado, decided ...

Miscellany: Dead or alive pt. 176, etc.

Naxos chief Klaus Heymann, in interviews with Tim Smith and Anne Midgette, sounds bullish on the future of classical recording, although the picture remains chaotic.... Heather Mac Donald, in a long piece for City Journal, also strikes a mainly optimistic note. But if the public "could not be more unequivocal" in rejecting modern music, why have we recently seen sell-out shows of Xenakis, Ligeti, and Varèse? ... In August, Annie Gosfield and Roger Kleier guest-curate a month of concerts at...

Varèse does jazz

Last night at Tully Hall, Lincoln Center Festival's two-part Varèse festival opened with a slew of sensationally precise performances by the International Contemporary Ensemble, So Percussion, and Musica Sacra, all under the direction of Steven Schick. I had the score of Déserts with me, and was astounded by the degree to which every detail came to life. (Tully's super-bright acoustics certainly helped.) Claire Chase, ICE's director and the soloist in Density 21.5, got a hero's welcome...

First record

To the joy of the błøǧösphère, Timothy Mangan has returned to blogging, after the untimely demise of his previous site. He reprints a 2009 post titled "First Record," showing his first purchase as a record collector: Karajan's Bruckner Fourth. As it happens, my first purchase was Bruckner, too: a Vox Turnabout LP of Jascha Horenstein conducting the "Pro Musica Symphony, Vienna" (aka the Vienna Symphony) in the Symphony No. 9. I was all of ten when I bought the record, and had little idea...

Report from North Korea

DJ Mandyczewski, one of The Rest Is Noise's fearless foreign correspondents (he prefers to use a pseudonym), recently ventured into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and took the above video at the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang. He writes: "The sonic landscape is amazing. In certain respects it reminded me of the Muslim world, where the call to prayer and Koran recitations are playing constantly, reminding you of the value/belief system and its binding force. Every morning...

Varèse approaches

On Monday and Tuesday, the Lincoln Center Festival will unleash (R)evolution, a survey of the works of Edgard Varèse. First, the International Contemporary Ensemble, under the direction of Steven Schick, will present pieces for small groups of instruments and the Poème électronique. Then Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, fresh from their Ligeti triumph, will give the two big works for orchestra, Arcana and Amériques, together with Nocturnal, Octandre, and Ionisation.

In the...

You have my attention

Here's one way to begin a CD:

That's Christine Brewer singing the beginning of the Recognition Scene from Elektra. Donald Runnicles conducts the Atlanta Symphony on a new Telarc CD of Strauss scenes.

For Charles Mackerras

The Australian papers are reporting the death of Charles Mackerras, one of the most keenly musical conductors of our time. He had a gift for leading a kind of performance in which nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen and yet everything goes radiantly right. I remember his 1993 Rosenkavalier in San Francisco, with Felicity Lott as the Marschallin and Frederica von Stade as Octavian, as one of those perfect nights. He leaves behind a pile of great recordings: the masterly Janáček...