Alex Ross's Blog, page 274

Ebène Quartet (in brief)

Four Play. The New Yorker, April 6, 2009.

At the audio-rich Instant Encore site, you can hear two recent Ebène concerts from the Friends of Chamber Music in Portland, Oregon: an all-Beethoven program and one of Haydn, Fauré, and Schubert (with "Misirlou" encore).

O Internet

The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, who made that nifty video promoting their best-selling CD of Music for 18 Musicians, again prove themselves the new-music YouTube masters with a trailer for their upcoming release In C Remixed.... Sound Mind, the blog of Toronto critic John Terauds, points to streaming HD video from Indiana University. There's a complete production of Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, among other things.... The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, in celebrat

Gergiev's Prokofiev

I've been waiting twenty years to hear a live performance of Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, one of the black masterpieces of twentieth-century music. Last night I finally got my chance, courtesy of Valery Gergiev, who has begun what promises to be a gripping four-concert survey of Prokofiev's symphonies and concertos with the London Symphony at Lincoln Center. An almost unbearable tension underpinned the performance: the Londoners played with frenzied concentration, yet Gergiev imposed a coolly

Trovatore, Sonnambula at the Met

In this week's New Yorker, I write about new productions of Il Trovatore and La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera and comment briefly on the company's 125th-anniversary gala. In the past few years, my columns have all available for free online, but this one can be read only by New Yorker subscribers. You can also read the magazine via the Digital Edition.

Ax what you can do

Drew McManus notes that Emanuel Ax waived his fee for a recent appearance at the financially troubled Columbus Symphony. "We didn't ask him," Columbus's executive director told the Columbus Dispatch. In the article, Ax continues his crusade against the alleged "rule" forbidding applause between movements of a concerto or symphony. On his blog, he wonders why concert audiences behave this way when opera audiences applaud after arias. It's a good question, with no logical answer. The argument that

In the beginning was the Word

"In principio erat Verbum," the first movement of Arvo Pärt's In principio, from the eponymous CD (ECM New Series 2050).

Dylan 33

Bob Dylan has given an interview about his forthcoming album, Together Through Life, and, in a typically playful, oblique way, he addresses questions of periodization and musical meaning: "Some people preferred my first-period songs. Some, the second. Some,
the Christian period. Some, the post-Columbian. Some, the
Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see
that my audience now doesn’t particularly care what period the songs are
from. They feel style and substance in a

Molto forzando e feroce

Lot 198 of an upcoming auction at Bonhams, in London, is the manuscript of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho. In this notorious sequence the strings end up playing a chord consisting of the notes E-flat, E-natural, F, and G-flat. Norma Herrmann, the composer's third wife, has put up for sale a large batch of manuscripts and memorabilia, including letters from Ives, Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams, and various other composers and musicians; a plaintive note from Orson Welles, inquir

Composer rumble

"Subterranean Rumble Caused by Composers Contemporary with Lully," from François Couperin's L'Apothéose de Lulli; William Christie and Christophe Rousset, harpsichords (Harmonia Mundi 29012269)

Tully note

Tony Tommasini, in a generally warm review of Pierre Boulez's recent concerts with the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall, describes their rendition of Stravinsky's Pulcinella as "listless" and "stodgy and blurry." I agree. As Tony says, the problem may simply be that Boulez doesn't believe in the music. After all, just a few years ago he declared that Stravinsky "began so well" and then became "an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one." But there's also the matter of the hall. At