Alex Ross's Blog, page 62

Kentridge's Wozzeck

Mind Storms. The New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2020.

Abrahamsen, Czernowin, Neuwirth

Queens of the Night. The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2020.

Apex 2019

"Aus LICHT" at the Holland Festival.

At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2019, which also mentions highlights of the decade now ending.

The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Lara St. John.

Some notable music books of 2019: Andrew Patner's A Portrait in Four Movements (University of Chicago Press), Arní Heimir Ingólfsson's Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, Mark Stryker's Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press), Nicole Grimes's Brahms's Elegies (Cambridge UP), Susan McClary's The Passions of Peter Sellars (University of Michigan Press), Mark Berry's Arnold Schoenberg (University of Chicago Press), Damon Krukowski's Ways of Hearing (MIT Press), Oliver Soden's Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs), Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (FSG), Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Patrick Keefe's Say Nothing, Andrew Marantz's Antisocial, and Amy Waldman's A Door in the Earth, among others.

Leaves of Leifs

Ten years ago, I excitedly greeted Arní Heimir Ingólfsson's biography of Jón Leifs, even though it was in Icelandic and I understood nary a word. It took a little while, but Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, Arní's English-language adaptation of his book, is now available from Indiana University Press. It's a thoroughly absorbing study of a formidable and sometimes troubling figure who possessed one of the more original musical voices of the twentieth century. None other than Björk supplies a blurb: "He pioneered in notating glaciers and orchestrating eruptions, sometimes masterpieces (sometimes not), but he had the courage to embrace the cliché and show us the way."

Video of the day: Fuck Wagner

Nightafternight playlist

Facce d'Amore: Arias of Cavalli, Handel, Boretti; Jakub Józef Orliński, with Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo D'oro (Erato)

Olga Neuwirth, ...miramondo multiplo..., Remnants of Songs, Masaot / Clocks without Hands; Ingo Metzmacher conducting the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, with Håkan Hardenberger; Susanna Mälkki conducting the ORF Radio Symphony, with Antoine Tamestit; Daniel Harding conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Kairos)

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, "For Violin and Orchestra," A. G. Madsen, "Nachtmusik"; Ryan Bancroft and Nicholas Collon conducting the Danish National Symphony, with Christine Åstrand and Per Salo (Da Capo)

Zosha Di Castri, Tachitipo and other works; Ekmeles, ICE, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Julia Den Boer (New Focus)

Ockeghem, Complete Songs, vol. 1; Blue Heron (BHCD)

Avet Terterian, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4; Kirill Karabits conducting Bournemouth Symphony (Chandos)

Scott Cazan, Dyads (a wave press)

Ravel, Miroirs, La Valse, Stravinsky, Petrushka, The Firebird; Beatrice Rana (Warner)

Preliminary end-of-year list

Early selections for my list of Notable Recordings of 2019.

— Bruckner, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

— Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21; Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with the Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer (DG)

— Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony)

— Prism II: Bach, Fugue in B Minor, Beethoven, Quartet Opus 130; Schnittke, Third Quartet; Danish Quartet (ECM)

— Andrew Norman, Sustain; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG, digital only)

— Speak, Be Silent: works of Chaya Czernowin, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Mirela Ivičević, Liza Lim, and Rebecca Saunders; Riot Ensemble (Huddersfield Contemporary Records)

— Morton Feldman Piano; Philip Thomas (another timbre)

— George Benjamin, Lessons in Love and Violence; Stéphane Degout, Barbara Hannigan, Gyula Orendt, Peter Hoare, Samuel Boden, Benjamin conducting the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House (Nimbus)

Bell, water, power

Thought of the day

"The people who are in control, the worst of the worst who are attacking us with anger, brutality, deception, exploitation, suppression, intimidation . . . those people, like myself, are old. They’re at the end of their time, too. And it’s almost like the thrashing of Tyrannosaurus rex. Its tail is crushing and wiping and swiping. It’s hitting people and other creatures and hurting them. But it’s dying."

— Genesis P-Orridge to Randall Roberts, in the LA Times

Miscellany

Admirers of John Schaefer's long-running and hugely influential WNYC show New Sounds are reeling in shock from the station's decision to cancel the program — or, to quote a stomach-churning locution in an internal e-mail, “sunset the New Sounds brand." Laurie Anderson's succinct reaction: "Why would they do that?"... The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, creator of one of the twentieth century's more formidable string-quartet cycles, is the focus of the third annual Bard Music West festival, an extension of the Bard Music Festival in upstate NY. It runs Oct. 18-19 at Noe Valley Ministry, in San Francisco. The Chronicle's Joshua Kosman has a preview.... From Oct. 23 to Oct. 26, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College jointly present Unit Structures, a conference and mini-festival around the magnificent legacy of Cecil Taylor.... The reinvigorated Monday Evening Concerts series in LA has announced an enticing 2019-20 season: Feldman's For Philip Guston, Xenakis's Pléïades, Reich's Drumming, an Éliane Radigue mini-festival, a Davóne Tines recital, an Anne Carson/Beckett evening, recent works by Trevor Bača and Caroline Shaw, and so forth.... A similarly seductive WasteLAnd Music season leads off on Nov. 8 with a Matt Barbier evening of "sludge, debris, virtuosity, and fascination," as evidenced in works of Timothy McCormack, Michelle Lou, and George Lewis.... In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes about Lena Herzog's unclassifiable and singularly haunting Last Whispers, which plays at Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ, Oct. 16-20.