Alex Ross's Blog, page 81

A Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

— Nicholas Deyoe, Finally, the cylindrical voids tapping along, 1560, Lied/Lied, Immer wieder, Lullaby 6 "for Duane"; WasteLAnd, Ashley Walters, Aperture Duo, Batya MacAdam-Somer, Stephanie Aston (Populist)

— Sweet Anxiety: Ashley Walters plays music of Deyoe, Berio, Schweinitz, Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew McIntosh (Populist)

— Mozart, Requiem; René Jacobs conducting the IAS Kammerchor and Freiburger Barockorchester, with Sophie Karthäuser, Marie-Claude Chappuis, Maximilian Schmitt, Johannes Weisser (Harmonia Mundi, Nov. 3)

— Sciarrino, Complete Works for Violin and Viola; Marco Fusi (Stradivarius)

— Passage: works of Trapani, Iannotta, Yukiko Watanabe, Magdaleno, Filidei; Longleash (New Focus)

— Sibelius, Piano Music; Leif Ove Andsnes (Sony)

— Wadada Leo Smith, Solo Reflections and Meditations on Monk (TUM)

— Crazy Girl Crazy: Berio, Sequenza III; Berg, Lulu Suite, Gershwin, Girl Crazy Suite; Barbara Hannigan singing and conducting the Ludwig Orchestra (Alpha)

A Worthington moment

Hail! California

By, yes, Camille Saint-Saëns.

Noted

"A kind of Schengen zone of scholarship now exists among historians and musicologists, where people cross disciplinary borders without hindrance yet remain conscious of differences in language, custom, knowledge, and ways of going about their work."

— Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (University of Toronto Press)

MacArthur 2017

I'm elated to see that this year's slate of MacArthur Fellows includes Yuval Sharon and Tyshawn Sorey. I wrote about Sharon's staggering, city-spanning creation Hopscotch for The New Yorker in 2015. It remains one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen. Sharon's production of Annie Gosfield's The War of the Worlds is eagerly awaited at the LA Phil in November; next summer, he will become the first American to direct at Bayreuth. As for Sorey, I spent much of the summer listening to, and thinking about, his majestic, elusive work. I first wrote about The Inner Spectrum of Variables and then became bewitched by his latest album, Verismilitude (scroll down here). In a diseased culture, marvels still unfold.

Numminen sings Wittgenstein

In order to maintain mental health, I try to watch this video at least once a month.

Norma at the Met, van Zweden at the Phil

Shows of Force. The New Yorker, Oct. 16, 2017.

Word to the wise

Pierre Boulez's Répons at the Park Avenue Armory, with Matthias Pintscher conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Pierre Audi and Urs Schönebaum providing luminous atmosphere, is a fairly awesome thing. See it if you can: there is one more performance tomorrow night, Oct. 7.

A Schweinitz moment

Andrew McIntosh and Scott Worthington, two star composer-performers of the vibrant Southern California scene, play Wolfgang von Schweinitz's gargantuan Plainsound Glissando Modulation at WasteLAnd on Saturday, Oct. 7. The same two will return to WasteLAnd on Oct. 20 for a concert making the release of new albums by Nicholas Deyoe and Ashley Walters on the Populist label. More on that anon.

Thought of the day

The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn't change.

                        — Sun Ra