Alex Ross's Blog, page 38

A Jessie Cox moment

Cox will present a collaborative work with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the DiMenna Center in NYC on Nov. 5. brin solomon recently interviewed him for VAN. I wrote about his music last year.

Arch-villain architecture

The view shared by Galka Scheyer and Harry Bosch.

A New Yorker commentary on the modernist villain's lair.

The new Geffen Hall

Vision Quest. The New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2022.

For Peter Schjeldahl

If it is possible for a critic to be a genius, then Peter was one. Just a few weeks ago, The New Yorker published one of his finest pieces ever, on Mondrian. It ended with a grandly dizzying sentence that contained the phrase "adamantine conundrum." This, I told him, was worthy of Wallace Stevens. He was a raucously, symphonically vital writer right to the end, immune to cliché and addicted to surprise. In person, he was quick, funny, honest, and wise. A couple of decades ago, in some now extinct diner in the East Village, we had a long conversation that touched on heavy matters, and in the course of it he said, "Faith is not panicking." Thank you, Peter, for everything.

Remembrances: The New Yorker, The New York Times

For Geoff Nuttall

Geoff playing a chacona, 2010.

One of the brightest, most generous lights in the American chamber-music world is gone: Geoff Nuttall, first violinist of the St. Lawrence Quartet, died today at the age of fifty-six, of pancreatic cancer. It's devastating news to the hundreds of musicians who've worked with Geoff over the years, whether as students or as colleagues. And it's devastating news to audiences, especially those in the area of Stanford University, where the quartet is based. One of my favorite experiences as a critic-reporter came in 2001, when I followed the St. Lawrence on the road, to El Paso, Texas, and Joplin, Missouri. I'd covered the quartet's New York début, in 1992, and wanted to check in on their progress. Geoff was at the heart of the group and the chief source of its spontaneous, viscerally musical spirit. Behind his regular-guy affect was an exuberant, unpredictable, wide-ranging mind. Barry Shiffman, the former second violinist of the St. Lawrence, tells me that Geoff remained active to the end, biking to and from his chemotherapy appointments and leaving Barry huffing in the course of strenuous hikes. He will be profoundly and permanently missed.

Late-period Wagner sonnet

Once Wagner was the idol of a girl
steeped early in his “endless melody,”
as storms were slyly starting to unfurl
in Meistersinger-land, her Germany.
When storm troops marched, that world was terror-tossed;
symbol of dread, the fierce Wagnerian sound
of Berchtesgaden signaled holocaust,
a battle cry piercing her underground.

In a new land, she would emerge matured,
at peace one day to know the old elation
hearing the Ring, soaring past pain endured,
singing redemption and conciliation.
At last, she gave her long-withheld applause
to music – pure, unmarred by human flaws.

  — Anne Marx, "With Wagner: Through Storm to Calm" (1980)

Otello at Opera Philadelphia, Medea at the Met

In Extremis. The New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2022.

Schoeck's Elegie

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

At the grave of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger

Previously: Toch, Lubitsch, Korngold, Salieri, Bruckner, Liszt, Georg Trakl, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Thomas Mann, Bach, Nietzsche, Monteverdi, Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Beckett, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky and Nono, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, X. Scharwenka, Elliott Carter, Enescu, Rachmaninov, Mahler and many others, Russ.

Thought of the day

"They gaily speak about differences between America and Italy. 'Take Caruso and Bing Crosby,' she says. 'You don't need such a big voice, if you are rich.'"

            — Bertolt Brecht, "The Goddess of Victory"