Alex Ross's Blog, page 269

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider play "Beloved, Do Not ...

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider play "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged." Part 2 here.

Mahler is blogging

Courtesy of Universal Edition.

Photo: Alexandra Samur.

The unsinkable Pierre Ruhe

Some readers may wonder why this site is perennially obsessed with the
career of the Atlanta-based music critic Pierre Ruhe. It's not for any
personal reason; I had a nice dinner with Pierre the last time I was in
Atlanta, but I don't know him well. Rather, the ups and downs of
Pierre's career, which you can follow by browsing these posts,
stand in for the general twilight struggle to maintain music criticism
in American newspapers and magazines. Perhaps, after all, the profession is
destined f

Dame Mitsuko

The supremely gifted Mitsuko Uchida has been named Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Transmutations

Last Friday night, as part of the Muslim Voices Festival,
the Persian classical singer Parissa gave ethereally powerful performances of mystical poems of Rumi, with accompaniment by the composer and
tar player Iman Vaziri and the tombak player Dara Afraz. Among the lines she sang were these: "How should I know how it all happened / Since how is drowned in the Howless?" The somber major-key melody with which she closed, a majestic slow march, rang in my ears all weekend.

Photo: Shahram Sharif.

Photo: Shahram Sharif.

Walkabout

 John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles pleased most critics when it opened at the Metropolitan Opera at the end of 1991. I was not among them; in a review for The New Republic I described the opera as "nowhere music," a miscellaneous pastiche of Romantic and modernist styles. I recently listened again to a recording of the work and found myself liking it a great deal more. Even if the composer's voice remains at times elusive, the craftsmanship and vitality of the writing make a powerful i

High Line

A one-and-a-half-mile stretch of long-unused elevated railroad tracks is now open as one of New York's most remarkable parks. The little amphitheater below, with Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel buildings in the background to the left, would make a nifty performance space:

A few more shots at sunset:

 

The origin of "Mahler Grooves"

Growing up in Washington DC, I rode a school bus that passed the intersection of Canal Road and Arizona Avenue, where an old railroad bridge crosses overhead. For much of the nineteen-seventies the bridge support was emblazoned with the legend MAHLER GROOVES, next to a painting of a French horn. I recounted this story in a New Yorker article in 1995, and received a lovely note from Dr. Stephen Chanock, of the National Cancer Institute, who corrected my account (I had remembered it as "Mahler Li

Noise of Gowanus

From an Issue Project Room Soundwalk with Betsey Biggs.