Alex Ross's Blog, page 88

The fate of the critic in the clickbait age

A Cultural Comment for the New Yorker website.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's new concerto

L. A. Rhapsody. The New Yorker, March 20, 2017.

Brecht/Eisler: Kriegsfibel

The Eclipse of 1927

"At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature.... Then — it was all over till 1999."

            — from the diary of Virginia Woolf, June 30, 1927

What's Off

In recent years, orchestra and concert-hall websites have been infected with a virus called What's On. This is a style of divulging concert information that avoids the traditional calendar format and instead presents a horizontal or vertical dribble of events day by day. It works well enough if you are looking at the next few days of programming — the template seems designed for people on mobile phones who want to know what the New York Philharmonic is playing tomorrow night — but when you try to skip ahead a month or two you may find yourself slogging through week after week of listings before being kicked back to your point of departure. For example, if you want to look at April events on the Elbphilharmonie website, you must first click on "What's On," then click on the current month, then click the arrow for April, then click on a particular date to see what's happening. The website for the new Boulez Saal does offer a calendar option, but it works badly. You click on Concerts, then on Calendar View, then advance to April. Yet when you look at a particular event and then try to return to the calendar, you lose your place and lapse back into early March. You must click on Calendar View again, move to April again, etc. This is intensely annoying. Why is it so difficult for organizations to put a clean, legible calendar on the main page? The LA Phil website is a model of clarity. I click on Calendar, I hit the arrow for April, and all the info is right in front of me. Or I can click on Full Season Schedule and see every work, composer, and performer on offer — a feature that can be maddeningly difficult to find on other websites. (As it was in 2005.) Carnegie Hall is also fairly easy to navigate. Lincoln Center, on the other hand, is a stupefying mess. At the moment, their Calendar option causes my browser to crash.

Do You Be

A Stefan Prins moment

A video trailer for Prins's huge PIANO HERO series.

An Amirkhanian moment

I'm listening to the Other Minds disc Lexical Music, containing some of Charles Amirkhanian's classic text-sound compositions of the seventies. Church Car is not included, but the video above is a delightful extension of the tradition.

Melchior Lechter, Tristan window

Kate Soper's Ipsa Dixit

Singing Philosophy. The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017.