Alex Ross's Blog, page 273

Swed anoints Idol

The liveliest contestants on this year's American Idol are Allison Iraheta, a sixteen-year-old with an arrestingly smoky chest voice, and Adam Lambert, a glam twentysomething with an upper register to rival David Daniels's. Well, not quite, but he's the favorite in this household. Who was the first music critic to take notice of America's unlikely new sweetheart? Naturally, Mark Swed of the LA Times, who, back in 2004, heard Lambert in some kind of ungodly Ten Commandments musical and singled h

Audio Guide reminder

Sound samples related to The Rest Is Noise can be found here.

Marian Anderson

Voice of the Century. The New Yorker, April 13, 2009.

St. Louis drama

A plane carrying most of the St. Louis Symphony landed at LaGuardia at 6:08 last night, many hours later than scheduled and a little over two hours before curtain time at Zankel Hall. HK Gruber, who was to have performed his own work Frankenstein!, never made it. Nonetheless, the concert went ahead as advertised, with David Robertson singing rather than conducting the Gruber. Sarah Bryan Miller reports.

EPS farewell

On April 19, Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct his final concert as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, bringing to a close one of the most significant relationships in recent orchestral history. KUSC, the LA classical station, will provide comprehensive coverage. This Sunday at 4PM the station offers a two-hour documentary about the EPS era; it will be streamed live on the KUSC website. An April 11 concert, with Salonen's new Violin Concerto, and the grand finale, with Stravinsky

In C for free

One day only, at Amazon's MP3 site.

NYC new-music weekend

The MATA Festival this year takes up residence at (Le) Poisson Rouge, everyone's favorite classical-cool hangout. Tonight it's the NOW Ensemble and David Moore; tomorrow, SO Percussion. Tickets are $10-15. On Sunday night the same venue hosts Keys to the Future; the minimalist-flavored program includes works of Howard Skempton, Ryan Brown, David Lang, John Adams, Nico Muhly, and Steve Reich. David Robertson and the great St. Louis Symphony — which has so far resisted the downward trends that

Strong argument

Linda Ronstadt recently spoke to Congress on behalf of government support of the arts. Americans for the Arts has a pdf
of her testimony. (Via Culture Monster.)

CD of the week: Stile Antico

Clemens non Papa's Ego flos campi, from Stile Antico's forthcoming CD Song of Songs (by kind permission of the Harmonia Mundi label). The disc arrives on April 14; the group will make their North American debut at the Boston Early Music Festival on June 12. The Tallis Scholars, long-reigning masters of Renaissance polyphony, sing at St. Mary the Virgin in NYC on Thursday; they have a superb new Josquin CD.

Yes, you can make it a ringtone

iTunes is offering the first movement of Cage's 4'33" as its Discovery Download this week. Opinion in the comments section is strongly divided. My favorite: "NOTHING more Classical than the sound of absolutely nothing." Except, of course, for the sound of absolutely everything.