Alex Ross's Blog, page 268

Make Music New York

Symphony of the City. The New Yorker, July 6 and 13, 2009.

More at the New Yorker website; more on Betsey Biggs here.

Hiatus playlist

Playlist:

— David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (Har. Mundi)
— Sweelinck, Music for Harpsichord; Glen Wilson (Naxos)
— Sonic Youth, The Eternal (Matador)
— Ann Southam, Simple Lines of Enquiry; Eve Egoyan (Centrediscs)
— Mozart, Violin Concertos; Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica (Nonesuch)

Reading List:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World
Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side
Philip Hoare, Leviathan or, The Whale

Hiatus

Activity at this blog will subside over the summer while I travel to South America (Festival Malpensante in Bogotá; Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty in Brazil) and then go to work on my next book. Please read music critics and music blogs.

Playlist:

— David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (Har. Mundi)
— Sweelinck, Music for Harpsichord; Glen Wilson (Naxos)
— Sonic Youth, The Eternal (Matador)
— Ann Southam, Simple Lines of Enquiry; Eve Egoyan (Centrediscs)
— Mozart, Violin Concertos; Gidon

Elbphilharmonie rising

In 2007, Justin Davidson wrote here about Jacques Herzog's spectacular design for the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Despite delays and overruns, the hall is rising steadily from the waters of the Elbe, as a dedicated site documents, and is due to open in 2012. The site is somewhat spectacular in itself.

Marlboro

My long article on Marlboro Music appears in The New Yorker this week. It's available only to subscribers, newsstand buyers, and people in dentists' offices nine months hence. A post on our website contains two recordings from last summer's edition of Marlboro. I'll post some more pictures later in the week.

The great Iranian kemancheh player Kayhan Kalhor and th...

The great Iranian kemancheh player Kayhan Kalhor and the New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider play "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged." Part 2 here.

Young Maazel

Next week Lorin Maazel conducts his final concerts as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. The Mahler Eighth is his send-off. Noise reader Tammy Hepps has discovered a trove of reports of Maazel's child-prodigy years in an online archive of the Jewish Criterion, Pittsburgh's Jewish newspaper. At the time, Maazel was attending Peabody High School in Pittsburgh. One report reads: “For as long as Pittsburgh claims him, it can preen its feathers
proudly.  But it had better do so quickly

And the world was not calm

To tweet or not to tweet? Amanda Ameer checks in with David Lang and Hilary Hahn; Greg Sandow is pro; Matthew Guerrieri is con; Lisa Hirsch takes a historical perspective. Although I enjoy reading mid-concert reports by Steve Smith and others, I might be in the old-fogey camp on this one. When Parissa sang last Friday night, the sight of a guy in front of me Twittering away punctured the mystical state into which I had been transported. (It had nothing to do with the Iranian election, which was

You have been warned

A shocking, mind-altering season announcement from Baltimore's Mobtown Modern. Alexandra Gardner does always seem a little too normal! Video produced by Molly Sheridan.

silently moving, a silent ship

— Ulysses, "Proteus"