Alex Ross's Blog, page 28

Geoff Nuttall's last recordings

The late Geoff Nuttall, the best thing to happen to North American chamber music since Yo-Yo Ma met Emanuel Ax, remained joyously active in his last months, recording Haydn's "Emperor" and "Sunrise" Quartets with his beloved colleagues in the St. Lawrence Quartet. With Stephen Prutsman, the group also recorded Korngold's Piano Quintet. You can watch a music-rich memorial for Geoff that was held at Stanford in January. Peter Sellars delivers a wrenching, galvanizing elegy about seventy minutes in. Geoff's mission, Sellars says, was to ask, "How insanely refined and completely wild can this be in one simultaneous moment?"

Video commentary of note

Dave Hurwitz, "Why Black Composers Matter."

Santa Fe Opera

Alfresco. The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2023.

I've seen various premières and stagings at Santa Fe Opera over the years: Peter Lieberson's Ashoka's Dream, in 1997; Golijov's Ainadamar, in 2005, in the course of researching my long piece about Adams's Doctor Atomic; Rossini's La Donna del Lago, in 2013, in the course of profiling Joyce DiDonato; and John Corigliano's The Lord of Cries, in 2021. But I'd never really written about the company per se; hence this week's column. The main event is Yuval Sharon's production of Monteverdi's Orfeo, in a gorgeous new orchestration by Nico Muhly.

Ligeti at the Bowl

Ligeti's Lux Aeterna wafts through the Cahuenga Pass at a showing of Kubrick's 2001 with live orchestra and chorus (the LA Phil and the sublime LA Master Chorale, under Caleb Young's direction).

Previously: Kubrick and Ligeti.

A Stuart MacRae moment

Featured on the new Delphian disc Earth, thy cold is keen.

Roadside memorial, Santa Fe

Classical streaming revisited

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Ligeti meets Barbie

An unexpected and yet somehow inevitable conjunction.

Photo credit: Amanda Ameer.

Notes on Oppenheimer and Doctor Atomic

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Marx meets Mahler

Groucho Marx and Anna Mahler, that is.