Alex Ross's Blog, page 271

Busch, Serkin, Schubert, heaven

The Andante moderato from Schubert's Fantasy in C, with Adolf Busch, violin, and Rudolf Serkin, piano, in Small Queen's Hall, London, May 6, 1931. From the set Franz Schubert: Chamber Music, on the greatly missed Andante label.

Salonen / Gehry update

Esa-Pekka Salonen will not appear at tonight's New York Public Library event because he is suffering from a back problem and is unable to travel. So it will be be an evening centered on Frank Gehry, although we'll certainly talk about Salonen's achievement and how it relates to Disney Hall.

Anniversary

 

"I have four razors and a dictaphone."

— Andrey Tarkovsky, Diaries, 1979

This blog, which began
with the quotation above, is now five years old. I hadn't intended it
to be a regular thing — the title came from my book in progress, and I
simply wanted to reserve the address — but it took on a life of its
own, thanks to a lively, buoyant readership. To mark the unhistoric
occasion, I've collected some favorite posts from years past: Das Lied von der Brad, 12-Tony, Tiny Valhalla, Bayreuth Pilg

Salonen, Gehry, and company

Next Monday, May 11, Frank Gehry and Esa-Pekka Salonen will make back-to-back appearances at the New York Public Library. Gehry goes first, fielding questions from Barbara Isenberg, author of the new book Conversations with Frank Gehry. I will chime in with a few queries about Disney Hall. Then I will interview Salonen, who conducts a Polish-Finnish program at the New York Philharmonic next week. Paul Holdengräber, director of the Live from the NYPL series, will moderate. The event begins at 7P

More on music, torture, and war

Last year I wrote an online piece about the use of music as a psychological weapon, with reference to Suzanne Cusick's disturbing study of the aesthetic dimension of American torture. Lara Pellegrinelli, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, delves at length into the issues raised by Cusick and other authors. New from Indiana University Press is Jonathan Pieslak's book Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War, which examines how soldiers have employed music both as an instrumen

No eels

The Mahler symphonies are descending on New York en masse, courtesy of the Staatskapelle Berlin. The New Philharmonia Orchestra of Newton, MA supplies helpful translations of Mahler's tricky score markings. (Via Evan Eisenberg.)

CD of the Week: La fida ninfa

"Deh, ti piega, deh, consenti," from Vivaldi's La fida ninfa, with Topi Lehtipuu as Narete and Jean-Christophe Spinosi conducting the Ensemble Matheus; Naïve 30410.

Trailblazers

NewMusicBox,
the online magazine of the American Music Center, celebrates today its tenth
birthday. Heartiest congratulations to Frank Oteri and his team
for having the vision to launch the site at a time when "classical"
music seemed foreign to the Internet and for maintaining it in
consistently imaginative fashion. To mark the anniversary, NewMusicBox
has put up a rich trove of new material — personal reflections from Oteri, a video by Molly Sheridan, and short essays by various new-music per

Colbert alert

Sources at Boosey & Hawkes say that Steve Reich's Double Sextet is scheduled to be heard on tonight's edition of The Colbert Report. If the host stays true to form, he may complain that Reich's diddle-daddle music won a Pulitzer while geniuses on the order of Foghat have gone unrecognized.

Marathons, etc.

The season of new-music marathons is upon us. The Bang on a Can Marathon falls on May 31 this year; Make Music NY is on June 21; and throughout the month of May the Brooklyn space Galapagos and the New Amsterdam label present Undiscovered Islands, with contributions by the likes of Sarah Kirkland Snider and Missy Mazzoli. This weekend, venturesome Chicagoans will lap up Northwestern University's twenty-six-hour Music Marathon, with proceeds benefiting the People's Music School. The event begins