Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Jay Greenberg

Interesting discussion at AC Douglas, Steve Hicken, and Marcus Maroney of the Juilliard composing prodigy Jay Greenberg, who was interviewed on 60 Minutes this Sunday (I didn't see the show). I wrote briefly about Jay in my student composers column earlier this year. It's difficult to evaluate someone so young, and I deliberately kept my comments to a minimum in order not to overhype an extraordinary young man who has yet to make the hazardous transition to maturity. I hope Jay is able to keep an even keel through the storm of publicity that 60 Minutes will bring. The social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible. Then, the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile. As I once wrote in the Times, if Mozart were alive today, he'd be dead. How about a TV profile of a grown-up composer — say, Steve Reich on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2006, highlighting his mammoth influence on every form of contemporary music?

Snap review: Andromeda

The Venice Baroque Orchestra's presentation of Andromeda liberata, by Vivaldi and others, was the first early-music event I'd heard at Zankel Hall, and, as others have hinted, Baroque bands take to the space like cats to leftover Thanksgiving turkey. You don't have that feeling of listening through the wrong end of the telescope: the music is full, present, vibrant. For many reasons, this was a very good night. Only the time-stopping aria "Sovvente il sole" sounds like top-drawer Vivaldi, but it's a beautifully crafted score that actually builds romantic suspense as Andromeda and Perseus work through their relationship issues. Andrea Marcon's orchestra was, as expected, a potent mix of precision and swing. Simone Kermes, who sang Andromeda, is an unusual and powerful talent — a lyric soprano with an edgy, forceful way of shaping a phrase and an obvious urge to make the scenery nervous, if not to chew it outright. Ruth Rosique stepped in at the last moment as Cassiope and showed a gleaming, pure voice. Marijana Mijanovic, Enrico Onofri, and Max Cencic were also strong. It was great to hear the audience getting involved in the show as it went on. Early on, some righteous ignoramus actually shushed his neighbors after an aria, but by the end people were cheering after every number. Overall, the evening passed what my friend Jason Royal calls the Zankel Subway Rumble test: I only noticed the N / R train once. There's an excellent DG recording to match.

Boston update

I recently reported that James Levine, newly ensconced at the Boston Symphony, seemed to be the object of widespread adulation in Beantown, despite (or even because) his heavy investment in new-music programming. Alas, there are now scattered signs of unease, although so far the contemporary programming doesn’t seem to be the cause of the trouble. Instead, oddly enough, Levine is drawing criticism from audiences because of his rehearsal style. From the beginning of its history, the BSO has regularly opened rehearsals to the public. As Richard Dyer recently wrote in the Boston Globe, conductors have traditionally made these open rehearsals little more than run-throughs — essentially, extra performances for a reduced fee. Levine, bless his stubborn soul, is actually rehearsing during the Open Rehearsal. Writes Jean Natick to the editor of the Globe: “The Boston Symphony Orchestra open rehearsal on Nov. 11 conducted by James Levine was a disaster. My friends and I understand that Levine is a perfectionist, but I do not understand why there had to be such an extraordinarily large number of interruptions… If this type of rehearsing is to be the norm, we suggest that there be no admission charge or no audience. It would have been appropriate for Levine to acknowledge the audience at least once.”

This attitude is perplexing. Does Ms. Natick want a great orchestra, or merely a mediocre one? Great orchestras are made in rehearsal. Perhaps the gripping intensity of the Eroica that night was owed to the extra burst of rehearsal in the afternoon. Plus, isn’t it interesting to hear how a one-in-a-million musician like Levine rehearses? In defense of Ms. Natick, the conductor’s comments on the podium are apparently all but inaudible, so that to the audience it does sound like nothing more than stopping and starting. Dyer suggests that Levine be given a small microphone so his comments can be heard. And, yes, a little hello or goodbye to the onlookers wouldn’t hurt.

Where's Pablo?

Present somewhere in this throng are Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Satie, Milhaud, Man Ray, Miró, Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Aaron Copland, the Prince of Monaco, and the Princesse de Polignac.

The image comes from the richly stocked American Mavericks website, allied to the public-radio series of the same title. I've looked at this site many times, but I only just discovered that it has some spellbinding film clips relating to the avant-garde showman George Antheil, who began his career as one of the chief Futurist noisemakers of twenties Paris and ended it as a Hollywood film scorer, love-advice columnist, and amateur torpedo inventor. The page linked here contains an interview with Paul Lehrman, who's restored the film that Fernand Léger made to accompany Antheil's Ballet mécanique, scored for sixteen player pianos, masses of percussion, and airplane propellers. The real find, something I'd been hoping to see for years, is an excerpt from Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 film L'Inhumaine, which tells of a Faustian scientist who starts raising people from the dead in an effort to win the favor of a famous opera singer. Having not seen the entire film, I can't elucidate the plot further, but what's apparently happening in this scene is that a crowd is demonstrating for and against the imperious diva (Georgette Leblanc). Where does Antheil come in? Some of the crowd shots were actually filmed during his Paris debut, on Oct. 4, 1923, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

As Lehrman tells it — repeating the story given in Antheil's wildly entertaining and sometimes wildly inaccurate autobiography Bad Boy of Music — L'Herbier showed up with his cameras at the concert, anticipating that a photogenic riot would occur. In fact, the researches of ballet historian Lynn Garafola suggest that the whole thing was a setup. An advance piece in Figaro announced that the concert would be filmed and that a riot was not only expected but desired. Still, it's fun to see a high-class Parisian audience looking and acting like the crowd that went nuts during the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ten years before — yes, in the same space. I've tried and failed to glimpse the mesdames and messieurs named above; perhaps readers with high-tech equipment will have better luck.

On the same theme, see my old post about Edgard Varèse's appearance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Agenda 11/30-12/5

A good week for the music in NYC:

Nov. 29: Andromeda liberata, a concert-length serenata that may or may not be the work of Vivaldi, arrives at Zankel on the heels of a "wildly controversial" DG recording. Whoever wrote it (OK, I did), the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon are destined to make a glorious noise.
Nov. 30: The composers of Bang on a Can, whose work seems to deepen with the passing years, collaborate with electronic artist DJ Spooky and director François Girard on the theater piece Lost Objects. It has its gala premiere tonight at BAM, with performances to follow Dec. 2-4. Iron your black stretch T.
Dec. 1: Till Fellner, the deft young Austrian pianist whose Well-Tempered Clavier on ECM was almost too pretty, rolls into Zankel with Liszt, Beethoven, Haydn, and the Bach.
Dec. 2: Rodelinda at the Met. La Fleming, La Daniels, Mehta, Blythe, Relyea, the works. Stephen Wadsworth, who directed a smokin' Xerxes at City Opera with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson a few years back, will try to repeat the Handel magic. Also tonight: David Robertson conducts the NY Philharmonic in Bartok's Second Violin Concerto (with Christian Tetzlaff),  Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, and some crazy thing by Beethoven.
Dec. 3: The haughty hotties at Trrill are recommending the regal young Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman (pictured above), who sings tonight at Weill Hall a deliriously tasteful program of Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, Britten's Auden cycle On This Island, Montsalvatge's Canciones negras, songs of Copland and Bolcom, and, not to snub the Germans, Lieder of Joseph Marx. Essential: www.measha.com.
Dec. 4: The Arditti Quartet lights up Zankel with an irrepressibly tuneful program of Nancarrow's Third Quartet, Carter's Fifth,Ligeti's Second, and Helmut Lachenmann's Third, subtitled Grido ("Scream"). Same group plays diffferent program at LACMA in LA on Nov. 29 — part of the grand old Monday Evening Concerts series. (I found this out by Googling, not by looking at the Arditti's site or Colbert Artists' Arditti page. Similarly, there is a lack of good tour info on Till Fellner's page at ECM or the Venice Baroque Orchestra's page at DG.)
Dec. 5: I'm going on a wild new-music bender this afternoon, trying to see part or all of the following events: the premiere of Joshua Penman's Songs the Plants Taught Us at the New York Youth Symphony; an Arvo Pärt concert by the venerable Continuum ensemble, which played the composer back when he was a Soviet footnote; and Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Noted

1. Hot pic of the ninety-one-year-old Licia Albanese chez Trrill.
2. Tim Johnson on music and national identity.
3. Alex Abramovich and I will be talking about the Dylan book on WNYC's Soundcheck Wednesday Dec. 1 at 2PM. Alas, NBC's Passions is on at the same time.

Ferruccio Busoni, Frank Martin

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Jan. 29, 2001

The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a surprising venue for a contest between God and the Devil, but in the early, snowy days of January the old one-on-one was fought again. First, the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff came to the New York Philharmonic for three performances of “Everyman,” with words by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and music by Frank Martin. Everyman, having clung too long to worldly temptations, sees that his time is up and reaches for the grace of God. The composer, with a few soft, shuddering chords, tells us that it is within his grasp. A few days later, the forces of darkness gained some ground: the Met presented Ferruccio Busoni’s “Doktor Faust,” an unsentimental, faintly diabolical rewrite of the Faust legend, in which the good doctor proclaims the supremacy of the self to the bitter end. As Faust expires, Mephistopheles, in the guise of a night watchman, wryly reports, “The weather is changing, frost is in the air.”

The intensity of “Doktor Faust” and “Everyman” seemed to catch audiences off guard. Perhaps we came with low expectations: Ferruccio Busoni and Frank Martin (pronounced “mar-tanh”) are hardly household names. They are problem cases for historians of twentieth-century music, who like to divide up composers by nationality and style. Busoni, an Italian who thought like a German, and Martin, a Swiss who worshipped Debussy and Bach, fall outside the usual categories. Though their paths apparently never crossed, they had much in common: they were both masters of the art of counterpoint, gravitating toward pre-Romantic purity at a time when many composers were seeking ultimate complexity. Lately, they have found new audiences, perhaps because they never quite found a place in the frightful century that has just passed.

Busoni was a mesmerizing personality, a Faust of the fin de siècle. He was born in Tuscany in 1866, and lived, variously, in Trieste, Helsinki, Berlin, and Zurich; he died in Berlin, in 1924. As a pianist, he came to be ranked as one of the four or five greatest virtuosos in history; as a teacher, he held sway over an impressive group of disciples, among them Kurt Weill; as a composer, he made the risky decision to concentrate all his energy later in life on a single magnum opus, “Doktor Faust.” His inspiration was not Goethe’s high-minded “Faust” but the gruesome puppet plays that he had seen as a child. At the same time, he made Faust into an autobiographical figure, a Nietzschean artist-hero who perplexed the pedants of his time.

The first page of the score takes us into the heart of the Busoni laboratory: it consists of nothing but the “white notes” of the C-major scale, floating around in eerie chordal clouds. Busoni had a spectacularly varied musical vocabulary at his disposal: he played off Renaissance polyphony, Baroque and Classical forms, Wagnerian music drama, whole-tone and chromatic composition, and the songs of the street. The wonder of the score is that, for all its echoes and near-quotations—was that Dvořák’s Cello Concerto? Brahms’s Third Symphony? something by Sibelius?—it really sounds like nothing else. It is a hazy dreamscape, crisscrossed with dancing figures.

The Met “Faust,” which runs through January 29th, is a co-production with the Salzburg Festival. Thomas Hampson repeated the success that he had with the title role in Salzburg, in 1999, although beauty of tone took precedence over vividness of character. Robert Brubaker, in the freakishly difficult role of Mephistopheles, maintained a bold, bright sound longer than anyone could reasonably expect. The conductor Philippe Auguin, stepping in for James Levine, whipped up a stylish performance with limited rehearsal time. Peter Mussbach’s production, with sets by Erich Wonder, remains, for long stretches, a trial by tedium; the opera is transplanted to a vaguely lunar landscape, through which Faust wanders in a dirty-old-man overcoat. Yet certain of Wonder’s images—the sinister elevated tracks that run through Faust’s laboratory, the apparition of air-traffic-control patterns in the sky, the tongues of flame that leap from the heads and fingers of the evil spirits—have a gnawing power.

Little of this, however, prepares you for the impact of the final scene. Busoni died before he could complete it, but his idea was that Faust should achieve a self-assisted resurrection. “In the freedom I have won,” he was to have said, “God and the Devil succumb.” On an Erato recording, under the direction of Kent Nagano, you can hear Antony Beaumont’s meticulous re-creation of what Busoni had in mind. But does that ending make moral sense? Can a man, even an educated German, redeem himself from a pact with the Devil? Instead of the Beaumont version, the Met used the original completion, by Philipp Jarnach, in which E-flat-minor chords signal a more conventional kind of doom. Wonder’s closing image is in the same spirit: Faust, alone in a vast snowy field, holding in his arms the corpse of his child. He shuffles to the back of the stage as the music fades to black. Best not to ask what becomes of him.

Fans of the music of Frank Martin—let’s all meet for coffee sometime—have hit a lucky streak this season. In November, Robert Spano led the Brooklyn Philharmonic in a performance of the song cycle “Cornet Christoph Rilke’s Song of Love and Death,” with the mezzo-soprano Monica Groop as a formidable soloist. Spano, Brooklyn’s music director, is a phenomenon; even as his organization faces a potentially fatal financial crisis, he pulls together the most intellectually enticing and emotionally gripping orchestral concerts in New York. Then Quasthoff sang “Everyman” at the Philharmonic, with Kurt Masur conducting. A grand voice in a limited frame, Quasthoff seemed to embody the composer’s spirit, which is pale on the surface and potent underneath.

Martin was born in Geneva in 1890, and lived until 1974. The details of his life are unremarkable. In photographs, he resembles the cordial pastor of a sleepy Swiss hamlet. He was, however, one of the greatest religious composers of the last two hundred years, with Messiaen his only contemporary rival. Messiaen, a perfect Catholic, celebrated God with exuberance and panache; Martin, the good son of a Calvinist minister, argued for faith as a constant struggle. For many years, he refused to release his Mass for Double Choir, written in 1922, on the ground that it was unworthy of the Lord. In the past few decades, the Mass has gone around the world, entrancing audiences with the archaic majesty of its language. Martin had a gift for immersing himself in styles of the past without seeming to imitate them; in his youthful Piano Quintet, for example, he does not allude to Bach so much as meld with him. (An ASV recording of this work, with members of the Britten-Pears Ensemble, is one of the gems of the Martin renaissance.)

In the thirties, Martin adopted an idiosyncratic version of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, but he remained convinced that music had to have a tonal basis. He used twelve-tone rows to create what he called “gliding tonality,” a harmony of ambiguous relations and shifting centers. One of his slow movements is marked “mysterious and elegant,” and that phrase fairly sums him up. His first major work in the new idiom was “Le Vin Herbé,” a dreamlike, light-fingered retelling of the story of Tristan and Isolde. Large-scale sacred works followed—“In Terra Pax,” “Golgotha,” “Le Mystère de la Nativité”—along with an opera based on Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” which, to judge from fragments that appear on a Chandos recording, is an undiscovered masterpiece.

For now, Martin’s two great song cycles are his best ambassadors. “Song of Love and Death” is based on Rainer Maria Rilke’s cycle of prose poems, which conjure up, in hallucinatory detail, the fate of a Rilke ancestor who died fighting the Ottoman Turks. The poems are strong enough on the page, but Martin’s music, written in the midst of the Second World War, magnifies their air of foreboding to an almost unbearable degree. As the orchestration wavers between the delicacy of Ravel and the terror of Berg, the harmonic writing turns the screws of dissonance, creating a closed-in, panicky atmosphere. Even the spare final chords of the piece—B major darkening to minor—fail to ease the tension. Groop and Spano’s performance haunted me for days.

“Everyman” was a welcome contrast, edging emphatically toward the light. Quasthoff’s voice whispered and boomed, every word cutting cleanly through the air. Masur obtained better than routine playing from his orchestra. It’s interesting that “Everyman,” like “Cornet,” ends with the device of major-key chords lapsing into minor. Why, then, does this music carry the charge of redemption—the spiritual release that Busoni denied his Faust? God, it seems, is in the details. There is a D-major chord; the middle note of the chord goes down a half step; it is now D minor. But that middle note, an F, is sustained as the other tones slide down, and the harmony becomes D-flat-major, washing over us like a balm. From there, the process is repeated: middle note falls down a semitone; dark minor encroaches; then the middle note is held as the others fall. Before we know it, we are resting on the heavenly simplicity of C major. Consolation, pain, consolation, pain, final consolation. The long notes hold the music together like nails.

Did someone say turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sonic quiet

Several years ago I looked on in horror as MTV pundit Gideon Yago sweated through an interview all five ferociously smart members of Radiohead. The memory of that encounter made me more than a little nervous in advance of my New Yorker College Tour interview with Sonic Youth, which took place last Saturday. In addition, I had a certain personal investment: the band's Daydream Nation was the second rock record I ever bought, during my belated discovery of non-classical music in college, and it permanently rearranged my view of the musical universe.

In the end, it went pretty well, despite several dumb questions from the interviewer. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo have been playing together since 1981 (drummer Steve Shelley joined in 1984), and they muse on their long career with the ease and wit of people who have nothing left to prove. The most interesting part for me was when they talked about their creative process, which mixes conventional song-oriented work — filling in the outlines of an acoustic sketch — with a procedure much more like that of a jazz group or solitary composer. A lot of the time, they said, they simply set a process in motion — patterns and textures in collision — and see what emerges from the mix. They never talk about chords in the studio, they said; no one ever says, "OK, let's go to F." Yet the result is not nearly as dissonant as you might expect (ferociously dissonant as this band can be), because they nourish clear forms when they rise up. There's an obvious kinship with the working methods of the minimalists. Sonic Youth's new album, the semi-eponymous Sonic Nurse, has some of their sweetest melodies to date, alongside the usual hallucinatory soundscapes.

On the train back, I was happy to read in Arrive, the official magazine of Amtrak’s Acela Express, of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Quiet Car, which I rhapsodized in a previous post. (The irony of a Sonic Youth fan sitting in the Quiet Car is duly noted.) Quiet Car turns out to have been brainchild of Alma Goodwyn, pictured above. She is the deacon of a Philadelphia church and an activist on behalf of the homeless. After she worked with sympathetic passengers and conductors to create a Quiet Car on her regular commute, Amtrak made the institution official. “I just like to make things better if I can,” Goodwyn said. Alma Goodwyn is an American hero.

Give the gift of Popov

Leon Botstein's marvelous recording of Gavriil Popov's First Symphony, which I raved about back in September, is now in stores, on the Telarc label.

More non-breakthroughs

A few months back I noted how scientists are in the habit of touting musical "discoveries" which have long been commonplace among composers and musicologists. A new example arrives from The Guardian (link via Byzantium's Shores): "Why is Elgar's music for 'Land of Hope and Glory' so quintessentially English, while Debussy sounds so French? It is all because the music mimics the composer's native language, say scientists. The researchers studied the question because while many classical scores have a distinctly national feel, no one had put forward a good explanation for why that should be." No one? People have been obsessing over this question for centuries: writings on the subject would fill many volumes. Rousseau wrote in his Essay on the Origins of Languages: "At first there was no music at all other than melody, nor any other melody than the varied sound of speech, the accents formed the song, the quantities formed the meter, and one spoke as much by sounds and rhythm as by articulations and voices." Johann Gottfried Herder wrote prolifically on similar topics, noting how each country's language formed a body of folk song. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Bartók and Janáček were measuring with extraordinary precision how folk songs mirrored the rhythms of everyday speech and the qualities of particular languages. Unless there is some genuine methodological breakthrough that the writer has concealed, this is a non-event.

Cindy Adams moment

I looked out my window today and saw, many floors down, Bono holding a pizza on a truck. U2 was doing some sort of parade down Seventh Avenue. Only in New York.

Maestro North: James Levine in Boston

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2004.

James Levine is a happy man. Or so it seemed when I talked to him earlier this month, in his office at Symphony Hall in Boston. The man who leads the two most venerable institutions in American music—the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony—looked to be in good health. He spoke in rapid, enthusiastic, circuitous paragraphs, his eyes lighting up whenever he touched on a favorite score. Having just finished rehearsals for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Elliott Carter’s “Symphonia,” he was full of thoughts about how Beethoven was really the first contemporary composer and how Carter is really an old master. He was fine-tuning programs for the following season, lavishing special attention on a series pairing Beethoven and Schoenberg. He had figured out how to present Beethoven’s thorny “Grosse Fuge,” which rivals anything by Schoenberg in its capacity to make audiences fidget. With a grin, he said that he would play the “Grosse Fuge” twice in the same program, with the violin concertos of Beethoven and Schoenberg in between. He was hoping to create a time-warp effect in which Beethoven would be heard as both past and present. “We can’t make this into a piece from ‘back then,’ ” he said. “It’s a piece from right here and now.” Resting on his piano was the freshly printed score of Milton Babbitt’s “Concerti for Orchestra,” which he will conduct in January. “Come look at this,” he said, patting the music as if it were a healthy baby.

Levine is preëminent among American conductors, yet he remains a curiously contested figure. Some intelligent listeners of my acquaintance are perpetually dissatisfied with him, although they seldom agree whether his performances are too predictable or too idiosyncratic, too polished or too ragged. Fifth-hand rumors of the urban-legend variety swirl around him. Last spring, the Times quoted anonymous players who questioned Levine’s ability to give a clear beat on account of a tremor in his left arm. This kind of chatter inevitably catches up to any conductor who stays in one place for a long time. Although I’ve never been among the carpers, I’ve sensed that some of the zing has gone out of the thirty-three-year-old relationship between Levine and the Met orchestra. Uncertainty hangs over the entire house. The Met recently unsettled the music world by announcing that Peter Gelb, a record-company executive best known for crossover projects, would be its next general manager.

Small wonder, then, that Levine is happy to be in Boston. I attended his gala début, a thunderous account of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and returned for two other programs. It’s hard for an out-of-towner to generalize from three concerts, but Levine already seems to have added lustre to the scene. The orchestra is playing with a tonal beauty and rhythmic bounce that it long lacked under Seiji Ozawa. A performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in particular, had the same visceral precision that marks the conductor’s best nights at the Met. Levine’s empire of the just-so is moving north.

Can an institution be both élitist and populist? If any orchestra can pull it off, it’s the Boston Symphony, which, since its inception, in 1881, has carried itself like a grande dame of Back Bay who invites both fancy and scruffy people to her parties. The Boston audience is simply different from any other orchestra public in America. In one corner, Harvard musicologists cite Adorno; in another, sweatshirt-clad Longy School of Music students complain of insufficient legato; meanwhile, the sages of Brookline fondly recall Koussevitzky. Joseph Horowitz, in his forthcoming history of American classical music, notes that Isabella Stewart Gardner used to wear a Red Sox hatband to Boston Symphony concerts. Indeed, I saw more than a few Red Sox insignia at Symphony Hall the night after the World Series ended. As Goethe predicted in the text of the Mahler Eighth, “The unattainable here becomes fact.”

Levine thinks that the Boston audience is primed for something other than the usual cautious programming. “With Harvard here, with the New England Conservatory, with all the other schools, the number of people you meet who are warm and passionate and smart about the subject”—meaning music—“is maybe higher than anywhere else in the country. It’s not that New York doesn’t have it, but the community there is larger, more spread out. Boston is somehow just perfect for me.”

The city has been rewarded with some gorgeous performances. Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra” sounded almost unlawfully voluptuous, as Levine emphasized certain D-minor-like sonorities in the second movement that threaten to stop the Atonal Express before it leaves the station. Ligeti’s “Lontano,” too, was more serene and seductive than the composer’s avant-garde reputation might suggest: again, the conductor pointed up the half-familiar chords that are strewn about the score—some near-G-minor there, some maybe-D-major here. In the “Rite,” Stravinsky’s convulsive gestures hung in the air like violent paintings on a white wall, their energy at once intensified and organized. The atmosphere was electric throughout: Levine seemed to be choosing tempos a split second faster than what the orchestra had been given in rehearsal, so that the music had an unchecked, hurtling motion.

Because the late-Romantic and early-twentieth-century repertory was always Ozawa’s specialty, the orchestra’s strength in that area came as no surprise. Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, by comparison, sounded less stylistically secure, though still super-refined in the old Boston style. Levine told me that in the Classical and early-Romantic scores he wanted to work on clarity of articulation, which can be difficult to obtain with Symphony Hall’s resonant acoustics. “I really don’t like the ‘coerced blend,’ ’’ he said, referring to the sort of artificially smoothed-over textures that some conductors favor in Mozart. The “Prague” Symphony, admittedly, never quite roused itself from a slumber of sweet strings; the winds were too much at a distance. (Last month, I heard a more sharply characterized “Prague” from the American Classical Orchestra, at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, in New York.) The “Eroica,” by contrast, had real urgency, a disciplined roughness. These days, Levine is willing to sacrifice ultimate beauty in pursuit of a dramatic interplay of voices.

Perhaps the fact that the orchestra essayed Elliott Carter before intermission added to the punch of its Beethoven. This is one reason that Levine is stressing new music in Boston: he thinks it will have an invigorating effect on how the orchestra plays and on how the audience listens. His programming this fall is riskily biased toward the present. Two-thirds of the works are from the twentieth century, almost one-third from the past fifty years. What is more, Levine is avoiding the sort of neo-tonal music that audiences generally embrace; instead, he is in lockstep with the Old Guard of American modernism, the likes of Carter, Babbitt, and Charles Wuorinen, together with postwar European masters like Ligeti and Lutoslawski. It remains to be seen how the average listener will take this strict modern diet. I myself wish that Levine would lend an ear to John Adams and other less curmudgeonly characters, but there is no point in asking a conductor to advocate music he doesn’t believe in. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Bostonians will be willing to put up with a fair amount of atonal hurly-burly if it keeps their new star happy.

To pair Carter’s “Symphonia” with Beethoven’s “Eroica” was a delightfully brazen gesture. It was also an honorable acknowledgment of the almost ninety-six-year-old composer, who had yet to hear his biggest and probably best piece performed by a major American orchestra. Carter’s vast abstract canvas left me feeling ambivalent, as his work often does. The outer movements suffer from a lack of thematic variety; the endless scurrying motion of the writing leads to premature fatigue. Yet the middle movement, “Adagio tenebroso,” is deep, dark, powerfully affecting music. For once, Carter suspends his urge to juggle rhythms and writes spacious, stately paragraphs. Open fifths abound; ghosts of tonality glide about. (Yep, that’s an F-minor triad in bar 171.) Like the second movement of the Beethoven, this is clearly a funeral cortège, though who or what is being buried is anyone’s guess. The resemblance of the opening muted trumpet line to Ives’s “Unanswered Question” gave me the idea that Ives himself, or some other great, old, eccentric, freethinking American, was being carried to his grave.

As if in league with Levine’s campaign for endangered American modernists, New York City Opera recently gave the world première of Wuorinen’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” It is based on Salman Rushdie’s fable of imagination and repression in an India-like land; the terse, funny libretto is by James Fenton. Although Wuorinen has not renounced the twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen, surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and dances. Still, it’s a robust, extroverted work, and City Opera, which started its season with a ghastly production of Strauss’s “Daphne,” served it well. Mark Lamos’s Julie Taymor-ish staging was visually poetic; Heather Buck, Peter Strummer, Ethan Herschenfeld, and Joel Sorensen all gave satisfying performances, although they sometimes struggled to stay aboard the merry-go-round of Wuorinen’s pitch rotations. To adapt Oscar Levant’s remark about Gershwin, an evening with Charles Wuorinen is a Charles Wuorinen evening.

The great retaliation has begun...

O uncanny apparition! O terrible figure! We are trembling, etc. etc. Mme. Grisi Pasta, Leyla Devereux, and Hilli Heihmenn, three alleged old-school sopranos of Seattle, New York, and Atlanta, have unveiled Trrill: Florid Passages from Queer Opera Zealots. The co-authors of the site have declared themselves unhappy with the state of modern opera singing and have "decided to take a torch to every major opera house in America. We figured someone would get the message. It's gonna be like the Jedi Purge of the Old Republic! They'll all either die or go into hiding!" An early target is Anna Netrebko. Enjoy, at your own risk. The bløgösphère will never be so placid again. (The title of this post does have operatic relevance. Any guesses?)

Note also that New York critic and Italophile Marion Rosenberg has a new blog titled Vilaine fille. In which Anna Netrebko is also attacked. Poor girl. For now, I like her fine.

Through a glass darkly

Le Teachout posts this fascinating musicological digression by our incoming Secretary of State: "I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured. And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves." Don't we all love the tension that never resolves!  When was the last time an expert apostle of Absolute Music rose to such an exalted position of power? (No, not him; he hated Brahms.) I'd like to have it noted for the record that Brahms was a patriotic liberal who detested the religiously motivated bigotry of late nineteenth-century Vienna. In honor of Ms. Rice, I am now listening to the last of Brahms' Four Serious Songs: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal ... And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."

Subpoena / Angelina

I know, again with the Dylan. But I have to share something I found in Oliver Trager's Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, one of fifty-five books on Dylan published in the last two hours. One of my favorite Dylan rhymes has always been from the song "Angelina": "I was only following instructions when the judge sent me down the road / With your subpoena / ... Angelina." Turns out that none other than W. S. Gilbert perpetrated the same rhyme in Trial by Jury: "For to-day in this arena / Summoned by a stern subpoena / Edwin, sued by Angelina / Shortly will appear." Which is more unlikely, that this is a total coincidence or that Dylan whiles away his afternoons listening to Gilbert & Sullivan? Correct, the former.

"Angelina," which can be found only on the "official" Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, is one of Dylan's greatest, spookiest songs. No one  has ever been able to say what it really means, but one line after another gently rocks the mind: "It's always been my nature to take chances / My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances ... Do I need your permission to turn the other cheek / If you can read my mind, why must I speak? ... There's a black Mercedes rolling through the combat zone ... I see pieces of men marching, trying to take heaven by force / I can see the unknown rider, I can see the pale white horse ... Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases / Past the tree of smoke, past the angel with four faces / Begging God for mercy, weeping in unholy places / Angelina." Apparently the song spooked Dylan himself, for he never touched it after making the recording.

Don't get me started on "The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar," from the same early-eighties period: "Prayed in the ghetto with my face into the cement / Heard the last moan of the boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent / Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated / Just me and an overweight dancer between walls that have deteriorated..." Kids, don't ever mix coke with the Book of Revelation.

Update: A reader points out that the rhymes in "Angelina" — concertina, hyena, subpoena, Argentina, arena — can all be found in standard rhyming dictionaries. Perhaps it's a coincidence after all. Too bad Dylan couldn't find a way to work in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Derridiadem

When Jacques Derrida died, I thought of writing a mini-essay on my college experiences as a Derrida-head, until I realized that every Ivy-League-y blogger born between 1965 and 1975 was doing the same. I sort of wish I'd spent my years as an English major reading actual English books, but Derrida was, as Marlene Dietrich says of Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, some kind of a man. This gorgeously written appreciation by Leland de la Durantaye makes me want to dig my "passionately tattered" copy of Of Grammotology out of the storage space.

Agenda 11/16-21

The following concerts might be great.

Nov. 16: Brenda Patterson, a mezzo I've heard good things about, sings an offbeat program at Tully Hall, including Haydn's Arianna a Naxos cantata, Crumb's Apparition, some Ives songs, and the world premiere of Edward Bilous' Night of the Dark Moon. More about Patterson here.
Nov. 17: Three rival new-music concerts tonight. American Composers Orchestra presents a typically all-over program, everything from Morton Feldman to Sondheim to Randall Woolf's new work Women at an Exhibition (with film by Mary Harron and John C. Walsh). Also, Wet Ink is presenting another show at Bowery Poetry Club, again with the Zs. I went to Wet Ink back in September and was bewitched by the Zs' collective composition Bump, which is now available on Planaria Records. (You can listen to a sample here.) And the freewheeling postsomething double-bassist / composer Stefano Scodanibbio plays at Columbia's Italian Academy.
Nov. 18: Soheil Nasseri plays Beethoven sonatas at Weill Hall. Nasseri is an exceptionally elegant pianist who also has a serious commitment to music education, giving morning mini-recitals at schools all around New York.
Nov. 19: Joel Sachs leads another of his famous "Who dat?" programs with the New Juilliard Ensemble. Works of Josef Bardanashvili, Stefano Gervasoni, Wei-Chieh Lin, Paul Desenne, and Virko Baley. Alice Tully Hall, 8PM, free (but you have to pick up tickets at the Juilliard Box Office).
Nov. 20: Because of my Evening of Conversation with Sonic Youth down in DC, I'll be sadly missing Kremerata Baltica's all-Shostakovich concert at Carnegie, which includes the crushingly powerful Symphony No. 14. This will be great.
Nov. 21: The first of two Bartok programs by the Orion Quartet, at the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. $72 for both concerts is a good deal. Bartok bangs.
 

Work in progress

This announcement will probably be of limited interest to the wider readership, but I am in the process of revising the list of fellow bloggers in the column to the right. I've wanted for a while to expand my links, but I have aesthetic objections to the sort of endless, featureless list  that appears on some other pages. Therefore, I've created separate pages for "Music Blogs" and "All-Over Blogs," with descriptive phrases to be attached to each. So far, I've heard at least one quiet yelp of discontent from elsewhere in the bløgösphère. Rest assured that I will continue to refine the categories and descriptions. Please, dear Reader, patronize the fine sites that I've listed.

AC Douglas writes to ask for a phonetic rendering of the term "bløgösphère." I'm happy to oblige. It's pronounced VLOHNKH-yow-shpairrrrr (with a sharp trilled "r" at the end). A debt is owed of course to The Fredösphere.

Feline perspectives: Copland

Penelope listens to the grandly populist Third Symphony. The sound of the heartland was forged in Manhattan.