Alex Ross's Blog, page 97

The state of journalism

This segment of John Oliver's show Last Week Tonight is far too brutally accurate to be funny. Even the throwaway jokes are precisely sourced: for example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution indeed cut its full-time film critic in 2007, along with the remainder of its arts-critic staff. (Pierre Ruhe, at one time the AJC's excellent classical critic, is now the director of artistic planning at the Alabama Symphony.) One irony missed in the Spotlight parody at the end: the Boston Globe took great pride in that film, and yet it has been cutting back on arts criticism because it's not "clicky" enough.

A Zubel moment

Mascagni's Iris at Bard

Puccini Plus. The New Yorker, July 25, 2016.

For Maulina

Dada 100

At the first public Dada-Soirée, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, on July 14, 1916, Hugo Ball read aloud his Dada manifesto — "How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada" — and recited several of his sound poems, including "Karawane," reënacted above. This week critics of the New York Times have an overview of Dada's influence. Esa-Pekka Salonen's recent choral-orchestral work Karawane, an elegantly barbaric setting of Ball's poem, is one sign of Dada's lingering presence.

Music for Black Lives Matter

Photo: Jonathan Bachman / Reuters.

Will Robin writes in The New York Times about a Dream Unfinished concert in New York next Wednesday, titled . The program, under the direction of James Blachly and John McLaughlin Williams, includes music of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Ethel Smyth, together with a new work by Courtney Bryan, to a text by the African-American poet Sharan Strange. Listen here to Bryan's Sanctum, premiered last year, which features the voices of Ferguson activists.

Also worthy of note is Tyshawn Sorey’s Josephine Baker: A Portrait, which Zachary Woolfe described in the New York Times as "one of the most important works of art yet to emerge from the era of Black Lives Matter." The première, with the remarkable soprano Julia Bullock, took place in Ojai in June; a video is available on YouTube. Mostly Mozart will present the piece at Lincoln Center on August 24.

A Holmboe moment

This recording of Vagn Holmboe's Tenth Symphony, with Sixten Ehrling conducting the Gothenburg Symphony, appeared in 1977 on a Caprice LP; on the flip side was Nystroem's Sinfonia Breve. A decade later I picked up a copy for my WHRB radio show "The Twentieth-Century Symphony." Sadly, the pairing never seems to have made it to CD, although you can find a fine reading of the Tenth in BIS's complete survey of the Holmboe symphonies, with Owain Arwel Hughes conducting. I love the work's opening gesture, a kind of tremor that turns into sound.

Nightafternight playlist

— Linda Catlin Smith, Dirt Road; Mira Benjamin, violin, Simon Limbrick, percussion (another timbre)

— Taylor Brook, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Andrew Greenwald, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, Kate Soper, Nadja; Mivos Quartet (New Focus)

— David Lang, the national anthems, the little match girl passion; Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon cond. (Cantaloupe)

— Ursula Mamlok, vol. 5 (chamber works); Holger Groschopp, Kolja Lessing, Parnassus, Heinz Holliger, Spectrum Concerts Berlin (Bridge)

— Michael Pisaro, Continuum Unbound; Pisaro, Greg Stuart, Patrick Farmer, Joe Panzner, Toshiya Tsunoda (gravity wave)

— William Lawes, Complete Music for Solo Lyra Viol; Richard Boothby (Harmonia Mundi)

A Ken Ueno moment

Music as a weapon

Sonic Hate. The New Yorker, July 4, 2016.