Alex Ross's Blog, page 85

Miscellany

In the New York Times, Michael Cooper writes about the leadership search at the LA Phil, noting that two superb candidates are already on the premises: Gail Samuel and Chad Smith. The board may be tempted to bring in a glamorous-seeming outside presence, but chances are very good that no newcomer will be able to do nearly as well as those who have been embedded with this singular institution for so many years. Its ascent has not been the work of Deborah Borda alone. The LA Phil has attracted many superlatives lately. I will call it the least broken orchestra in the world — and you know what they say about things that aren't broken....  Excerpts from Judd Greenstein's opera A Marvelous Order, dramatizing the conflict between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs over the urban landscape, can be heard at the River to River festival, June 15-19.... The Make Music NY festival lost a promised grant and has found itself $10000 short. They have launched an Indiegogo campaign so the 2017 edition can go ahead on June 21. Make Music is one of the best things that have happened to New York musical life in the past decade; consider helping them a little.... The first two issues of Sounds Like Now, a UK new-music magazine edited by the more or less omniscient Tim Rutherford-Johnson, are now on the virtual stands.... The Plush Festival, organized by Adrian Brendel in the eponymous Dorset village, is being co-curated this year by none other than Harrison Birtwistle. The first of three summer installments unfolds this weekend, with Mark Padmore singing Sir Harry's Songs from the Same Earth alongside Schubert Lieder.... In the July issue of Opera, John Allison has a tantalizing review of Tero Saarinen's choreographed production of Sibelius's Kullervo, which played at the Finnish National Opera in May. He suggests that it could travel to Lincoln Center or the Edinburgh Festival. Let's hope.

An Ellen Arkbro moment

For organ and brass by Ellen Arkbro

Miscellany

Lisa Bielawa has written an imaginative TV/video opera entitled Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser, unfolding in twelve episodes. They will go online tomorrow at KCET and LinkTV, and the series will have its broadcast premiere on June 13. Josh Kosman has a preview in the San Francisco Chronicle.... The Los Angeles Percussion Quartet has a splendid new record entitled BEYOND, conveying works of Daníel Bjarnason, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Chris Cerrone, Ellen Reid, and Andrew McIntosh — an interesting mix of Icelandic and Southern California composers. There will be live concerts at National Sawdust on Thursday and at USC on June 16.... The seventy-fifth birthday of Petr Kotik, a stalwart of New York and international experimental music, will be celebrated on June 21 at LPR. George Lewis, Philip Glass, and Alex Mincek will be on hand to discuss this remarkable musician, composer, and advocate. I profiled Kotik for the New York Times back in 1993.... Listen here to a recent Jeremy Denk recital in Duisburg, with a marvelous set devoted to ragtime-inspired pieces. As a consequence, the final two movements of Schubert's great B-flat Sonata, which can sometimes seem anticlimactic, take on new rhythmic vibrancy.... Justin Davidson, author of Magnetic City, has had two noteworthy pieces in New York in recent weeks: one on the status quo at the Met and the New York Philharmonic, another in defense of the beleaguered business of criticism.

JFK at 100

Well, we can always hope.

Katherine Ruth Heyman plays Scriabin

Heyman, one of Scriabin's most energetic American champions (and an early influence on the peculiar cosmology of Ezra Pound), was herself a prolific composer; her music might be worth exploring.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest, in Steve Smith style.

— James Weeks, Mala Punica; Exaudi (Winter & Winter)

— BEYOND: Daníel Bjarnason, Qui Tollis; Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Aura; Christopher Cerrone, Memory Palace; Ellen Reid, Fear-Release; Andrew McIntosh, I Hold the Lion's Paw; Los Angeles Percussion Quartet (Sono Luminus)

— Liza Lim, How Forests Think, Aaron Cassidy, The wreck of former boundaries; ELISION Ensemble (Huddersfield Contemporary Records)

— John Luther Adams, Canticles of the Holy Wind; The Crossing (Cantaloupe)

— Pierluigi Billone, ITE KI MI, Equilibrio. Cerchio; Marco Fusi, viola and violin (Kairos)

— Stravaganze d'Amore!: The Birth of Opera at the Medici Court; Raphaël Pichon leading Ensemble Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

— Lou Harrison, Violin Concerto, Grand Duo, Double Music (with Cage); Angel Gil-Ordoñez conducting the PostClassical Ensemble, with Tim Fain, violin, and Michael Boriskin, piano (Naxos)

— Grand Opera: Meyerbeer arias; Diana Damrau, with Emmanuel Villaume conducting the Orchestre et Choeur de l'Opéra National de Lyon (Warner)

— The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary MET Performances 1966-67 (Metropolitan Opera 22-CD set)

A Jean Huré moment

Alas, no recording seems to exist of this extraordinary music from Huré's La Cathédrale, in which all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sound simultaneously, in advance of Berg's Altenberg Lieder (though not, to be sure, of Jean-Paul-Égide Martini's Sapho). I can find almost no information about the work. Was it based on the Huysmans novel?

Eight days in April

This was my itinerary for the last eight days of April — a memorable stretch of concert- and operagoing.

April 23: Chaya Czernowin's Infinite Now at the Opera Vlaanderen in Gent.

April 24: Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I reviewed the Salzburg première last summer; I found Tom Cairns's production quite a bit clearer and more involving at the ROH.

April 25: John Adams conducting the BBC Symphony and various other forces in his own Doctor Atomic, at the Barbican. Gerald Finley gave another absolutely staggering performance as Robert Oppenheimer.

April 26: Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta in recital at Wigmore Hall. Their limpid, spontaneous account of the Ravel Sonata for Violin and Cello came as a welcome respite after three days of operatic apocalypse.

April 27: Kirill Gerstein in recital at the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg.

April 28: Eliahu Inbal leading the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg and various other forces in Mahler's Eighth Symphony, at the Elbphilharmonie.

April 29: Roman Trekel and Oliver Pohl in recital at the Boulez Saal, Berlin.

April 30: Daniel Barenboim conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the last three symphonies of Mozart, Boulez Saal. Review of the Elbphilharmonie and Boulez Saal here.

The death of criticism, 1936 edition

“Because this year has not brought an improvement in art criticism, I forbid once and for all the continuance of art criticism in its past form, effective as of today. From now on, the reporting of art will take the place of an art criticism which has set itself up as a judge of art – a complete perversion of the concept of 'criticism' which dates from the time of the Jewish domination of art. The critic is to be superseded by the art editor. The reporting of art should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description. Such reporting should give the public a chance to make its own judgments, should stimulate it to form an opinion about artistic achievements through its own attitudes and feelings.”

     — Joseph Goebbels, Nov. 27, 1936, as translated in George Mosse's Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich.

Elbphliharmonie, Boulez Saal

Temples of Sound. The New Yorker, May 22, 2017.