Alex Ross's Blog, page 96

The Benz Parsifal

The Benz company produced its Parsifal car from 1902 to 1905. Photo courtesy of Daimler AG.

Griffiths, Kurtág, Endgame

The latest issue of the journal Music and Literature pays deservingly lavish tribute to the critic, scholar, novelist, and librettist Paul Griffiths. One can read online a wide-ranging interview with Paul, in which he gives an unsparing perspective on the decline of music criticism: "Criticism, in the sense of an engagement that strives to elucidate and interpret rather than award points, seems to me to be integral to a shared culture and unsustainable without such a culture." Several pieces describe the genesis of Paul's Ophelia novel, let me tell you, and the subsequent adaptation by Hans Abrahamsen, one of the great works of recent years. I was particularly interested in Paul's report on recent festivities in Budapest marking the ninetieth birthday of György Kurtág. The event gave tantalizing glimpses of Kurtág's opera-in-progress, Endgame. A series of announcements and postponements of the première, at Salzburg and then at La Scala, has raised fears that the opera may never see the light of day, but the score is clearly at an advanced stage of composition and is already being rehearsed. In Budapest, Kurtág was seen coaching the contralto Hilary Summers on a setting of Beckett's poem "Roundelay," with which the opera will begin. According to Paul, the excerpt suggests that Endgame will be "more abrupt, more disrupted, to be delivered by voices less sure of where the next note, the next word, will be coming from, but that it will also be lit by the later lyricism." One can hear a snippet of the music and catch sight of the full score in a Euronews video, which also shows Kurtág to be in seemingly robust health. Paul reports that the opera is now "confidently expected" for Salzburg in 2018.

Noted

“Art’s a funny thing, doesn’t seem to have any connection with our lives, just gets itself made—and when it is good there’s no time in it at all. Kills time, that’s art. Brings up a lot of old ideas we thought were dead. Not dead at all. Time can’t kill anything, says art. Art kills time.”

                  — William Carlos Williams, A Voyage to Pagany

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

— John Adams, Scheherazade.2; David Robertson conducting the St. Louis Symphony, with Leila Josefowicz, violin (Nonesuch, released Sept. 30)

— Sibelius, Symphonies Nos. 3, 6, 7; Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra (BIS, released Sept. 9)

— Messiaen, Des Canyons aux étoiles; Alan Gilbert conducting forces from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, with Inon Barnatan, Daniel Druckman, Jeff Milarsky, and Philip Myers (eOne)

— Verismo: Anna Netrebko, with Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale de Santa Cecilia (DG)

— Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, Real Enemies (New Amsterdam)

— Bartók, String Quartets Nos. 1-6; Chiara String Quartet (Azica)

Miscellany

An important, dismaying read: Ethan Iverson on Steinway, John Paulson, and Donald Trump.... Earlier this month, a group led by the composer Ashley Fure unsettled the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music with GRID, or Gender Research in Darmstadt, an activist initiative highlighting the severe under-representation of female composers in Darmstadt's history. Fure's essay "Reflections on Risk" is a crucial document. In the midst of the furor, Fure's opera The Force of Things had its official première.... On the horizon: Infinite Now, a major operatic score by Chaya Czernowin, will have its première in Gent next April. Czernowin discussed the project in Darmstadt.... The Carlsbad Music Festival returns Aug. 26-28: the lineup includes two shows by SoCal new-music heroes wild UP, the acclaimed "West" program and a new one entitled "Future Folk" .... Listen on the BBC website to the recent Thomas Adès Prom, with Francisco Coll's Four Iberian Miniatures and the new orchestral version of Adès's Lieux retrouvés.... Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes about Linda Catlin Smith.... On Aug. 27, Rite of Summer will present John Luther Adams's Inuksuit on Governors Island in NYC. Amy Garapic directs more than sixty percussionists.... In Van, David Menestres examines the welcome surge of interest in Julius Eastman, with particular focus on the new Frozen Reeds release of Femenine (also touted by Hua Hsu on the New Yorker website).... Two longtime Noise friends are taking up new jobs: Marc Geelhoed, of Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Symphony, will become Director of Digital Initiatives at the Detroit Symphony; and Steve Smith, of Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe, will be Director of Publications at National Sawdust. Congrats to both! ... I neglected to post a link here to Will Robin's doctoral thesis, "A Scene Without a Name." Will, once my summertime assistant, is now teaching at the University of Maryland. Huzzah!

The lamentation of Dr. Faustus

A Cultural Comment for the New Yorker website on the endangered Thomas Mann house in Pacific Palisades and other émigré homes in Los Angeles. Photo: Schoenberg in his garden, from the Schoenberg Center.

Adès's Exterminating Angel

No Exit. The New Yorker, Aug. 22, 2016.

Nightafternight playlist

— Liszt, Transcendental Etudes, Concert Etudes, Grandes Études de Paganini; Daniil Trifonov (DG, released Oct. 7)

— Liszt, Transcendental Etudes; Kirill Gerstein (Myrios)

— Bacewicz, Complete String Quartets; Silesian Quartet (Chandos)

— Kristin Norderval, Ida Heidel, Nusch Werchowska, Parrhésie (Losen)

— Jürg Frey, String Quartet No. 3, Unhörbare Zeit; Quatuor Bozzini, Lee Ferguson, Christian Smith (Edition Wandelweiser)

— Peter Adriaansz, Attachments, Phrase, Fraction, Enclosures; Saskia Lankhoorn, Ensemble Klang, Trio Scordatura (Ergodos)

— Mozart, Piano Concertos K. 413-415; Kristian Bezuidenhout, Freiburger Barockorchester (Harmonia Mundi)

— Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli, Guerrero, Regina coeli, Victoria, Missa O quam gloriosum, Gaudent in coelis; New York Polyphony (BIS)

— Brahms, Violin Sonatas; Christian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)

No minor chords

In yesterday's New York Times David Segal complained about the arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that is being played at the Olympics in Rio. Ordinarily, I'm all for harmonic analysis in the mainstream press, but the article takes an irritatingly jingoistic tone, arguing that the presence of a few minor chords creates a "defeatist" atmosphere. To my ears, the harmonization reflects the influence of pop arrangements created for Whitney Houston and others. Listen, for example, to the chord under "free" in the version by that defeatist melancholic Mariah Carey. There is, of course, a long history of hysteria over allegedly unpatriotic treatments of "The Star-Spangled Banner," going back to the police action against Stravinsky's ill-fated arrangement. Yet John Philip Sousa got away with his blatant Wagnerization of the anthem.

An Eva-Maria Houben moment

The German composer will appear at Café Oto, in London, on Aug. 30, playing her works for piano.