Alex Ross's Blog, page 26

The Krenek Residence

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The former Palm Springs home of Ernst Krenek, composer of Jonny spielt auf, Karl V, and two hundred and forty other published works, is on the market for $2,750,000.

Have some Maderna, m'dear

I am now the proud owner of the score of Bruno Maderna's 1972 orchestral piece Aura, nearly twenty inches in height. The USC Music Library has been giving away boxes of scores; I picked up this and Frank Martin's Passacaille, to form an odd pair. Maderna, the most generous and least disputatious of the Darmstadt avant-gardists, died young, at the age of fifty-three, and there is no telling what he might have done if he had lived to a grand old age. In his last couple of years, he composed Biogramma, notable for its glittering textures and intermittently songful lines; the chamber opera Satyricon, a proto-postmodern explosion of collage and pastiche; and the meditative, mystically inclined Ausstrahlung, written for the Persepolis festival of 1971. Aura, for its part, is an intricately structured work in which hectic episodes for minutely subdivided ensembles are interspersed with deep-breathing silences. At the end comes a haunting spell of controlled improvisation, in which horns, trumpets, and flute rotate through eighteen fragments over a slowly shifting mist of muted strings. Aura, Maderna playfully wrote, is "the essence of things, the essence of sound, and something like the aroma that pervades a room from the chicken cooking in the pot."

Kosky's Rheingold at the Royal Opera

Valhalla-on-Thames. The New Yorker, Oct. 2, 2023.

An Elis Hallik moment

The Estonian composer, born in 1986, has a new portrait CD of her works on Kairos, titled Born in Waves.

Current obsessions

A brief contribution to the New Yorker's Goings On About Town section, touching on three subjects that have lately caught my attention: the astounding life story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch; Lauritz Melchior's deft turn in the 1946 comedy Two Sisters from Boston; and Raphaël Pichon's sumptuous new recording of the Monteverdi Vespers, with the Pygmalion ensemble.

For Stephen Gould

The opera world is mourning the American tenor Stephen Gould, who died on Tuesday at the age of sixty-one. For nearly twenty years at Bayreuth he was a committed and accomplished exponent of Wagner's intractable lead tenor roles. I was present for his début there, in Tannhäuser, in 2004, and wrote: "He has a powerful, flexible, beautiful voice, and, wonder of wonders, he is a charismatic actor. He sounded just as vivid at the end of the opera as he did at the beginning, which is a sign that he has the stamina for the biggest Wagner roles." This proved to be the case. What's more, he was a widely loved colleague, noted for his thoughtful engagement with whatever peculiar scenarios directors devised for him.

A Chris Knox moment

Last Night of the Proms

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Sibelius Hall, Lahti

Lahti

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I am in Lahti, Finland, to give a talk at the Lahti Symphony's Sibelius Festival. I've been wanting to visit since I encountered Osmo Vänskä's revelatory BIS recordings with this orchestra in the early nineties — the original version of the Violin Concerto, the complete Tempest music, the first installments of what turned out to be a near-definitive cycle of the symphonies. I covered a Lahti chamber-ensemble concert for the New York Times in 1994 and later heard the full orchestra twice at Avery Fisher Hall. That a city with a population of under 120,000 has produced an orchestra of such quality is fairly stupendous. My topic here is "Sibelius in America," with emphasis on the somewhat extreme Nordic-he-man rhetoric of early supporters like Henry Taylor Parker, Olin Downes, and Lucien Price. Opposing that strain will be the cosmopolitan fandom of Morton Feldman, who, in a lecture at Darmstadt in 1984, famously prefaced a vocalization of the Fifth Symphony's swan theme with the remark: "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical."