Alex Ross's Blog, page 77

Miscellany

The richly appointed new season of Mostly Mozart includes Ashley Fure's The Force of Things, John Adams and Lucinda Childs's Available Light (with sets by Frank Gehry), Bernstein's Mass, Michael Pisaro's A wave and waves, and a big new outdoor choral piece by John Luther Adams.... JLA's Become Desert, the quasi-sequel to Become Ocean, has its première at the Seattle Symphony March 29-31 and travels to Berkeley's Cal Performances April 7-8. He writes about the new score in Slate.... From March 22 to 24, the Wandelweiser-oriented series A Place to Listen in Victoria, BC, presents a Gentle Traces Festival, with Antoine Beuger at the center of the festivities.... On March 10, the SEM Ensemble will reprise their famous performance of Feldman's For Philip Guston at their Willow Place headquarters in Brooklyn. I reviewed their 1995 traversal of the piece for the New York Times.... In conjunction with Carnegie Hall's 1960s festival, MoMA is devoting a series to the avant-garde film score. There's some fabulously rare material on offer here, including Jean Mitry's Symphonie mécanique, with a score by Boulez.... From March 14-18 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC, the choreographer Jody Oberfelder and the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra present Kurt Weill's Zaubernacht, using the recently rediscovered original Weill orchestrations.... Meredith Monk's new work Cellular Songs plays at BAM March 14-18... The very belated world première of Jón Leifs's Edda II: The Lives of the Gods takes place at the Iceland Symphony on March 23. There will be a broadcast on March 29....  Analog Arts presents all twenty-one completed parts of Stockhausen's KLANG in Philadelphia April 7-8.... Opera Omaha's adventurous ONE Festival includes Missy Mazzaoli's Proving Up, Cherubini's Medea, and Handel's Ariodante.... Among this year's offerings at Microfest in LA are Daniel Corral's Polytope and Harry Partch's Daphne of the Dunes — the latter receiving its first live performance.

Semiramide and Parsifal at the Met

Split Personality. The New Yorker, March 12, 2018.

A Martirano moment

Salvatore Martirano's hallucinatory anti-war piece L's GA, in which a narrator recites Lincoln's Gettysburg Address while inhaling nitrous oxide and helium, was given a potent revival tonight at an LA Phil Green Umbrella concert, with the performance artist Ron Athey in the starring role. The program, under the direction of John Adams, also included Anna Thorvaldsdottir's AURA, Andrew McIntosh's luminous new brass-ensemble piece Shasta, and Julius Eastman's Evil Nigger.

Christophe Rousset and the French Baroque

Palace Intrigue. The New Yorker, Feb. 26, 2018.

A Nightafternight playlist

Lully, Alceste; Judith Van Wanroij, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Ambroisine Bré, Douglas Williams, Étienne Bazola, Bénédicte Tauran, Lucía Martín Cartón, Enguerrand de Hys, Christophe Rousset conducting Les Talens Lyriques and the Chamber Choir of Namur (Aparte)

Claude Balbastre, Pièces de Clavecin, Book I; Christophe Rousset (Aparte)

Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet, Landfall (Nonesuch)

Ondřej Adámek, Sinuous Voices, Conséquences particulièrement blanches et noires, Ça tourne ça bloque; Daniel Kawka conducting the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain (Aeon)

Lou Harrison, Young Caesar; Adam Fisher, Hadleigh Adams, Bruce Vilanch, Nancy Maultsby, Delaram Kamareh, Timur, Marc Lowenstein conducting the LA Phil New Music Group and the Los Angeles Master Chorale (The Industry)

John Luther Adams, Everything That Rises: JACK Quartet (Cold Blue)

Sándor Veress, String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, String Trio; Doelen Quartet (Cybele)

Will you be my Alban Berg Valentine?

LULU: Although for my sake a man may kill himself or kill others, my value still remains what it was.

                                                                    — Lulu

Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine, Another Alban Berg Valentine, Yet Another Alban Berg Valentine, Return of Alban Berg Valentine, Nothing says forever like an Alban Berg Valentine, Alban Berg Valentine (10th anniversary edition), Alban Berg Valentine (2017 edition).

LA Phil 2018-19

The 2018-19 season announcements for American orchestras have, for the most part, presented a bleakish picture of the state of the art. One index of backward thinking is a lack of female composers. If an orchestra is programming few female composers, it is almost certainly playing little new music, since any serious consideration of the music of our time would have to include a large number of women. If an orchestra is programming no female composers — as is the case, in announcements so far made, for the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the Houston Symphony — something is very wrong. (Chicago has yet to announce its MusicNOW series.) Lisa Hirsch, a longtime monitor of such trends, is keeping tabs; Zoë Madonna muses intelligently on the wider issues, providing a link to a wise Twitter thread by Douglas Shadle. All this relates to issues I brought up in my Florence Price column last week. A lack of non-white composers is another index of backward thinking. If an orchestra is confining itself to music of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the lineup is going to be as white and male as an alt-right torchlight parade.

The Detroit Symphony is one notable exception to this trend, having included five women among twelve living composers in its 2018-19 season. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, not unexpectedly, is another. America's leading orchestra announced today its centennial season. It also unveiled a new website, causing me some dismay, but I'll leave that aside for now. (The latest iteration of my perpetual complaint about orchestra websites can be found here.) The orchestra has, first of all, commissioned more than fifty pieces from a splendidly diverse group of composers: Julia Adolphe, Daniel Allas, Timo Andres, Julianna Barwick, Eve Beglarian, Ethan Braun, Carolyn Chen, Anthony Cheung, Billy Childs, Unsuk Chin, Christopher Cerrone, Ann Cleare, Donnacha Dennehy, Paul Desenne, Natacha Diels, Bryce Dessner, Francesco Filidei, Ashley Fure, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Arnulf Herrmann, Anders Hillborg, Vijay Iyer, George Lewis, Michelle Lou, Dylan Mattingly, Nico Muhly, Jeffrey Mumford, Hitomi Oba, Gabriela Ortiz, Hermeto Pascoal, André Previn, Ellen Reid, Yann Robin, Christopher Rountree, Tyshawn Sorey, Miroslav Srnka, Christopher Stark, Steven Takasugi, Tina Tallon, Toivo Tulev, Pēteris Vasks, Freya Waley-Cohen, George Walker, Kamasi Washington, Lotta Wennäkoski, Julia Wolfe, and Pamela Z. A few of the bigger offerings: a piano concerto by John Adams, with the delightful title Why Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes; new orchestral pieces by Thomas Adès, Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, and Andrew Norman; the US premières of Kaija Saariaho's harp concerto Trans and Tan Dun's Buddha Passion; and a Chinese-opera piece by Du Yun.

Perhaps the most significant gesture of the entire season is the long-awaited revival of Meredith Monk's masterpiece ATLAS, under the direction of Yuval Sharon, completing his three-year term as the LA Phil's artist-in-residence. Sharon will also direct Cage's Europeras 1 and 2 — a project that ties in with a season-long concentration on the work of Fluxus. Esa-Pekka Salonen will lead a nine-day Stravinsky festival and begin a multi-season exploration of the music of the Weimar Republic (as he is doing at the Philharmonia). Zubin Mehta and André Previn return to their former stomping ground; Michael Tilson Thomas begins a deeper association with his hometown orchestra. Something I'm particularly excited about is a theatrical version of The Tempest, with Sibelius's extraordinarily inventive late-period score; this is an undertaking by Susanna Mälkki, the Phil's principal guest conductor. Gustavo Dudamel will be much in evidence in a season-opening LA Fest, which includes evenings devoted to Andrew Bird, Moby, and Herbie Hancock. Benjamin Millepied choreographs a new Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet. A series of programs examines the music of William Grant Still in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Eric Owens and Lawrence Brownlee sing a program of spirituals and arias. There will be installations, projections on the exterior of Disney, a celebratory street festival stretching from the hall to the Hollywood Bowl. Mark Swed, in the LA Times, risks hyperbole when he writes, "No orchestra has ever come close to the ambition of this centennial season." But it's hard to think of an immediate counterexample. 

Inuksuit in Tijuana

Making the Wall Disappear, New Yorker website, Jan. 31, 2018.

Florence Price

New World. The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2018.

Miscellany

The second edition of the Co-incidence Festival, an experimental-music gathering in Somerville MA, begins today and continues through Jan. 27. Michael Pisaro was the resident artist last year; he returns, but yields the spotlight to Joachim Eckert, who will stage a "sound bridge" event in the middle of Union Square.... Next month, Peter Margasak's Frequency Festival returns to Chicago: the lineup includes the Wet Ink Ensemble, ICE, a Julius Eastman concert, and the Bozzini Quartet, playing Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller, and Martin Arnold.... In the same period Bozzini will also appear at Principal Sound in London, playing Nono's Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima; the festival has a Nono-Feldman focus this year.... Speaking of Eastman, the Kitchen's That Which is Fundamental festival is now under way in NYC.... The San Diego Symphony is collaborating with Steven Schick and various area institutions in a percussion-centered festival called It's About Time (through Feb. 11). One notable event is a performance of John Luther Adams's Inuksuit that will involve percussionists on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border (Jan. 27).... Yarn/Wire presents a Raphaël Cendo program at NYC's Miller Theatre on Feb. 1.... The brilliant violinist Augustin Hadelich will play the Ligeti concerto next weekend with the Boston Symphony; Thomas Adès, who conducts, has written a new cadenza for the occasion....This weekend, Susanna Mälkki, who surely deserves one of the major music-director jobs now open (San Francisco?), returns to the LA Phil, leading a full-orchestral program with Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Cello Concerto and Strauss's Alpine Symphony; she then presides over a Green Umbrella featuring a Marcos Balter première and works of Verunelli, Filidei, and Lachenmann.