Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Agenda 3/1 - 3/6

This week's picks: the Singapore Symphony at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, playing Chen Yi's almost brand-new Cello Concerto as well as He Zhanhao and Chen Gang's violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers, a charming relic of the Mao Zedong era (Yo-Yo Ma and Gil Shaham are the soloists); on Thursday, the Collegiate Chorale presenting Fidelio, with the radically slimmed-down Deborah Voigt in the title role; on Thursday and Friday, the New York Collegium doing the St. Matthew Passion, with bariblogger Tom Meglioranza as Jesus; on Saturday, the Gregg Smith Singers giving a concert at St. Peter's, including Dmitri Tymoczko's brilliant self-referential cantata The Agony of Modern Music (texts by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Bernstein); and, on Sunday, three masters of Persian classical music — Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Hossein Alizadeh, and Kayhan Kalhor — performing at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I've been listening avidly to this same group's CD Faryad, and thinking about how a global definition of "classical music" benefits all parties. If the term "classical" makes people think of Kayhan Kalhor as well as Bach, I have no problem with it. The group will also be in Atlanta on March 10, Boston on March 12, Cleveland on March 18, and Chicago on March 20; details here.

Milton Bizzabbitt

A tip from a young New York composer led me to Gizoogle, a site that translates any given Google search or web page into Snoop language. Snoop language is, for those who don't know, a sort of additive English dialect devised by the eminent hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg. Here is the opening paragraph of Milton Babbitt's militant new-music manifesto "Who Cares If You Listen?" as rendered by Gizoogle: "This article might have been entitled 'The Wanna Be Gangsta as Specialist' or, alternatizzles n perhaps less contentizzles 'izzle Composa as Anachronism.' For I am concerned wit perpetratin' an attitude towards tha indisputable facts of tha status n condition of tha booty of what we wizzill, fo' tha moment, designate as 'serious,' 'advanced,' contemporary music, aww nah. His rappa expends an enormous amount of tizzle n energy — and, usually, considerable money — on tha creation of a commodity W-H-to-tha-izzich has little, no, or negative commodity value puttin tha smack down. ‘E is, in essence, a 'vanity' brotha. One, two three and to tha four. He general public is largely unaware of n uninterested in his music. Tha majority of performa shun it n resent it. Conseqizzles tha music is shawty performed, n T-H-to-tha-izzen primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience perpetratin' in tha main of fellow professizzles in da club." I think I finally get it!

In memory of a friend

     ...I'm for and with myself in my otherness,
     in the eternal return of earth's fairer children,
     the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,
     the loved, the lover, and their fear of life....

                                           — Robert Lowell, "Obit"

Ravi Desai, il miglior fabbro, died on Feb. 19 at the age of 35.

Brahms and death

This is the Radu Lupu CD that I celebrated in my latest New Yorker column as one of the most beautiful piano records ever made. Brahms described his Intermezzos Opus 117 as "lullabies of my sorrow"; the first in the set embodies this emotional doubleness, being at once an innocent, pure, almost childlike thing and a message of practically infinite sadness. Lupu plays it so well because he does not try to enhance by artificial gestures the complexities that lie behind the simple surface; instead, he lets us find them for ourselves. There is a certain symbolism in the key structure of this piece. The "A" section is in E-flat, which is Beethoven's "heroic" key, the key of the Eroica and the Emperor. Yet outward heroism has been completely stripped away; only a steady current of inward power remains. Strauss' great farewell, "Im Abendrot" in the Four Last Songs, uses E-flat in a similar way. But the middle section is in E-flat minor,  which is for many composers the key of death. It is the chord on which Tristan dies; it is the key of the funeral march of Tchaikovsky's Third Quartet; it is the chord on which Elektra falls lifeless in her eponymous opera; it is the key of every movement of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet, that requiem for requiems. In Brahms, the most quietly shattering moment comes when a C sounds miles deep beneath an E-flat-minor chord in the middle range, approximating the harmony of Tristan's death (a Tristan chord with no exit). Somehow the music pulls itself back from that abyss, and the opening music sounds again, with gentle vines of slow sixteenth notes wrapped around it. What happens in the final bars is beyond description.

Why, incidentally, does the key of E-flat minor seem to have a morbid sound? I once asked the St. Lawrence Quartet this question, with reference to the Tchaikovsky quartet, and they guessed that it has to do with the difficulty of playing E-flat minor on string instruments. Berlioz's orchestration manual calls this key "almost impracticable." Modern players don't have much trouble with it, but they still have to negotiate some awkward fingerings. The open strings, which produce the cleanest, brightest sound, are basically out of play. B-flat minor and A-flat minor have similar "dark" reputations, for not dissimilar reasons. Perhaps the hint of struggle puts a pall over the music — a deathly pall, if you like. This isn't an issue on the piano, where E-flat minor is theoretically interchangeable with any other minor triad. But the primeval key-associations linger, producing an intuitive shudder even in listeners who do not think they know the difference.

The dreaded redesign

Better? worse? To me, it "breathes".... Leon Dominguez, aka Sieglinde, has been on a tear lately, with raging posts on opera etiquette or lack thereof.... Jason Kottke, master of the coolest links, has bravely quit his day job and is soliciting funds for his blog. Support him if you can.... Please note a new link under "Links & News" to the right — Opus 1 Classical, a UK-based site that lists forthcoming musical events in cities around the world. It's incredibly helpful.... I was going to work up a post on the Gotham Chamber Opera's Ariadne in Crete, but Charles "Boss" Michener says in the New York Observer all that need be said. "Communist Albania" indeed. Good singers, though; Caroline Worra might be a new soprano powerhouse.... Lynn Sislo of Reflections in D Minor passionately defends Classical Etiquette. I don't agree, but I like her style, which, paradoxically, flies in the face of Classical Etiquette.... Endtroducing Pack! I first encountered Patrick Bringley on the Dylan message boards when I was researching my piece on the Maestro. Obviously the world's youngest, smartest Dylan fan, he gave me the precious quote, "Do you have to be from Elizabethan England to appreciate Shakespeare?" He worked two summers ago as my research assistant, looking up crazy articles on Uruguayan twelve-tone music and making uncomfortably sharp comments on my book. Now he's making his career as a poet, and he has a totally unique voice.... For NYC'ers, an extra plug for the NOW Ensemble show at Tenri Cultural Institute on Saturday night. It hasn't been very widely listed, and it should be good. Say "The Rest Is Noise" at the door, and you will get a weird look.

Record of the year

When I saw on Carl Wilson's site that Brian Joseph Davis had put out a limited-edition EP of quotations from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia performed in the style of agitprop punk, I had to put down my $20 to get me some. It arrived today, and it made me glad. Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces that Adorno's assaults on mass culture are punk-rock rants at heart; the Minima Moralia EP brings that conceit to hilarious, dubious life. Davis plays squalling guitars; Dawn Unwanted drawls the lyrics. The pick hit is "Every Work of Art Is an Uncommitted Crime," one of my favorite lines from the Meister's writings. The song consists of that one line, repeated over and over, followed by screaming. I bow in the presence of genius.

Lupu, Anderszewski

"Four Hands"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Feb. 28, 2005.

When Beethoven played the solo part in the première of his Third Piano Concerto, in 1803  he introduced a bewitching effect that lingered in the memory of his pupil Carl Czerny. The Largo movement begins with a luminous them  in the key of E. Beethoven applied the sustaining pedal throughout, so that the music became a haze of resonating tones—a “holy  distant, and celestial Harmony,” Czerny said. According to the musicologist Leon Plantinga, Beethoven composed the Third Concerto just after he wrote his “Heiligenstadt Testament,” in which he confessed that he would rather retire from society than publicly admit his deafness. There were many moments during Radu Lupu’s recent traversal of the five Beethoven piano concertos, with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, when that withdrawn  wounded figure came to life. In the Largo, you could almost see Beethoven walking away from his stormy C-minor world—or, if you prefer, walking from his world toward ours.

Lupu, a gentle genius of the piano, was born in Romania in 1945. With his scraggly beard, shy manner, and piercing eyes, he looks less like a jet-set virtuoso than an unsung radical poet, the kind you would expect to find huddled over gnomic manuscripts in the corner of an obscure café. In his youth, he played as loud and fast as anyone; he won the Van Cliburn Competition in 1966 with a thunderous performance of the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, evidence of which exists on a VAI recording. In the following years, Lupu disavowed showpieces and devoted himself to the high Austro-German repertory, from Mozart to Brahms. In 1970, he made a recording of Brahms’s Intermezzos Opus 117 that is in my personal pantheon of the most beautiful piano records ever made. At a Carnegie recital in 1996, Lupu offered as his last encore the slow movement of Schubert’s “Little” A-Major Sonata, and it wasn’t so much a performance as a glimpse of a perfect world. No pianist gets a lovelier tone out of the instrument. How he does it is a bit of a mystery: the piano is, after all, an impersonal machine of levers and hammers. But an A above middle C sounds different under Lupu’s finger. It glows from within.

It was strange, at first, to see this most confiding of pianists holding forth in front of the august Cleveland Orchestra. Yet the intimacy remained. I’ve rarely witnessed an orchestra and a soloist listening to each other so intently: this was a conversational give-and-take, not a tug-of-war between pre-set tempos. Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland’s conductor, often kept the dynamics muted to chamber-music levels, so that Lupu never had to fight to be heard. In a classic Cleveland sound-mirage, string pizzicatos and soft woodwind tones seemed to emanate from the piano.

The Beethoven concertos are complex, multitiered constructions, in which the piano and the orchestra often head toward the same destination along separate paths: sonata and symphony are superimposed. Although Lupu was sometimes in danger of floating away into his own private pianosphere, he periodically called upon his old competition-winner style to produce a burly, quasi-orchestral sound. The transition from the slow movement of the “Emperor” Concerto to the finale was as electric as I’ve ever heard it: a meditative murmur of pedalled tones—“holy, distant, and celestial” again—gave way to a blunt oration of accented chords. The two sides of Beethoven’s personality achieved perfect balance: as if with a gunshot, the poet became a hero.

If Lupu resembles a venerable underground artist, Piotr Anderszewski, a Polish-Hungaria  pianist who has risen to prominence in the past few years, looks like a hip young thing in an Antonioni movie. At his recent recital at Zankel Hall, Anderszewski walked onstage wearing Beatles bangs, a loose black jacket, and leather pants. He is thirty-five, and he’s a serious, searching musician. If Lupu saunters through the music as if on a forest walk, Anderszewski whips around every corner like a spy  Balancing out his edgy flair is a gift for pure cantabile playing, nearly at the Lupu level.

The first musical impression is of a forceful, steely personality. In the opening movement of Bach’s “French Overture,” the sound bordered on the harsh. Possibly, Anderszewski miscalculated the acoustics of Zankel, which can give a tinny ring to fortissimos. There was more than a bit of Glenn Gould in the accenting of inner voices, in the highlighting of each line of counterpoint. This was proper in Bach, but peculiar in the first movement of the Chopin Third Sonata, which is something other than a fugue. Too many young pianists these days feel compelled to defamiliarize, interrogate, and otherwise discombobulate music of the Romantic repertory, as if the ghost of Stravinsky were admonishing them not to get too sentimental. I had heard the German pianist Lars Vogt operate in icy fashion on the Grieg Concerto the previous month. Anderszewski seemed on the verge of doing the same to Chopin. But, fortunately, he had more up his sleeve.

The great Largo of the Third Sonata encapsulated the narrative power of Anderszewski’s playing. At first, an odd stress on accompanying chords in the left hand threatened to enervate the right-hand theme. Then, in the trio, anxiety gave way to grace, as if the pianist had finally found his way inside the music. The tone turned liquid, an arpeggio became an aria, and time stopped. Anderszewski succeeded in sustaining momentum at a daringly slow tempo—the kind of effect that Sviatoslav Richter made his specialty. When the first theme returned, the urge to deconstruct had been exorcised, and the lyric spell was unbroken to the end.

Anderszewski is one of several younger pianists that Carnegie Hall is showcasing in Zankel this season. Till Fellner, who made a lucid and songful recording of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” for the ECM label, played  recital in December, and, if he seemed temperamentally ill-suited to the grandiose Liszt B-Minor Sonata, he was thoroughly at home in Bach’s Fifth French Suite. Jonathan Biss appears at Zankel on March 8th. He is a formidable musician who exerts a subtle intellectual pressure on seemingly straight-ahead readings of the classical and Romantic repertory. Paul Lewis, Alessio Bax, and the composer-pianists Fazil Say and Lera Auerbach are others who might thrive in  Zankel’s music-of-the-future atmosphere.

Even with Zankel in the mix, it’s no easier to get to Carnegie Hall. Hundreds of gifted pianists emerge from conservatories each year, and the major concert venues cannot accommodate them all. The more resourceful players are discovering that entrepreneurship is no artistic sin. Daniel Beliavsky, a doctoral student at N.Y.U., has begun making recordings for the Internet-based label Sonatabop. He favors sumptuous textures and swaying tempos, harking back to the Russian tradition: his heavy rubato in the Schubert Impromptus probably made his teachers blanch. Indeed, on bonus tracks to his CDs, Beliavsky carries on amusing dialogues with an austere pedagogue named Ulysses Kidgi, who preaches “anonymous perfection.” Kidgi is a figment of Beliavsky’s imagination, but his pedantry is all too true to life. Beliavsky is also a composer, and the première performance of his piece “The Animals Race!” will take place on March 9th, at Merkin Hall.

Soheil Nasseri, a native of Santa Monica, California, has garnered a few enthusiastic reviews, as well as a story chronicling his adventures in downtown night life. (A classical guy who hangs out with hip-hop promoters—freaky!) But he can’t attract attention at the big agencies that dominate the touring circuit. In the fall, he rented Alice Tully Hall to play five Beethoven sonatas; passing moments of insecurity were offset by warm, elegant, unaffected musicianship. To fill his days, Nasseri has been immersing himself in an ambitious music-education project, playing Beethoven sonatas in schools all over the city. He may lack the big recital dates, but he has what other pianists only dream of: fresh-faced, fascinated audiences almost every day of the week.

Agenda 2/22 - 2/27

I'm beset by California envy again, wistfully reading the prospectus of the 11th Other Minds Festival, which begins on Thursday in San Francisco. Several principal personalities of what is variously called "experimental," "downtown," "avant-garde," or "post-minimalist" music will attend. As a proponent of Lower Midtown Music, I'm inclined to look at this us-vs.-them jargon with a skeptical eye, but it makes for a useful rallying point, if nothing else. The line-up includes Phill Niblock (whose guitar piece Sethwork was one of the highlights of Sounds Like Now last fall); veteran Bay Area sound-poet Charles Amirkhanian; hip-hop-inflected violinist-composer Daniel Bernard Roumain; a concert in celebration of left-wing firebrand Marc Blitzstein, whose centenary seems to have been overlooked on this more politically fearful coast; John Luther Adams, topographer of spacious, imaginatively detailed soundscapes (and not to be confused with the composer of Nixon); and Bang on a Can's Evan Ziporyn.

But there's plenty to see at home this week: an American Composers Orchestra concert on Wednesday night, including a premiere by former Bay Area stalwart Ingram Marshall (his vocal-electronic piece Hymnodic Delays is a digital-age masterpiece); Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, semistaged with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at Lincoln Center on Thursday; a show by Antony & The Johnsons later that night (that's a link to Antony's lustrous new CD, not to the sold-out show*); two concerts by the bright young NOW Ensemble, both featuring Judd Greenstein's fantastic new piece Folk Music, the second with blogger-composer Mark Dancigers; and — could you ask for a more perfect warm-up for the Oscars? — a Sunday Met Chamber Ensemble concert including Kurtág's Hommage à R. Sch. and Berg's Chamber Concerto. If I were a supernatural being, I would also attend Wet Ink w/ Charles Gayle on Wednesday, the Philharmonia Baroque at Zankel on the same night, and Per Tengstrand at Scandinavia House on Thursday. Fans of dramatically batty, diction-free, intermittently gorgeous tenor singing will also want to hear José Cura in Samson at the Met on Thursday or later. Last night's premiere left me personally less than gobsmacked, but knowledgeable opéramanes in my circle were transported.

* "Indirection!" — Miss Gould

The fire this time

Jeff Chang's book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, new from St. Martin's, has received a huge amount of attention in the pop-music press, and with good reason. I couldn't say it any better than whoever wrote it up for the New Yorker's Briefly Noted column: "The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it. Robert Moses unleashes the destructive juggernaut of the Cross-Bronx Expressway; landlords set fire to worthless tenements; police stand by and do nothing; and, against a backdrop of gang warfare, peacemaking d.j.s lay down the heavy beats and spidery loops around which a rapping, dancing, graffiti-painting culture grows. This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written. Chang is blind to no one’s greed or viciousness, but he retains an idealistic view of a music that speaks the truth about the alternately stultifying and horrifying urban landscapes that the parents who hate hip-hop have made." OK, that was me. Chang blogs here.

Rampant narcissism

A warm welcome to San José Mercury News readers who've read Rich Scheinin's delightful story on classical blogging. He has some very kind words for this site, and, more importantly, for such bløgõsphëric powerhouses as Twang Twang Twang, Trrill, The Standing Room (I was joking with the é, TSR), Lisa Hirsch, and Vilaine Fille. See "Music Blogs" to the right for an extended list. The key quote is Lisa's: "There are a lot more people out there who can write intelligently about music than have outlets to write about it." Ain't that the truth!

Kittygates, oBoeblogging, I'm Stalin, etc.

I haven't been to see Christo's "The Gates" in Central Park: this crazy modern art is usually over my head. But I've very happily visited The Somerville Gates, which might be characterized as Gates for kitties.... An oboe blog! And another! ... The unpredictable Fredösphere writes: "Terry Teachout and Alex Ross are the Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of the blogösphere, except without the genocide!" The exclamation point, he says, denotes irony, thank God.... A reader asks my opinion of a Details magazine piece on Maxim Vengerov. I was pretty stunned to see such an in-depth profile of a classical musician in a mainstream magazine. And it was good: Jeff Gordinier followed Vengerov on a trip to his childhood home in Siberia, working in observations about his personality and musicianship along the way. Whether it measured up to the Brazilian men's swimsuit portfolio that directly preceded it is hard to say. If magazines like Details decide that young classical performers are some higher form of cool — well, it won't solve all our problems, but it sure won't hurt.... Road to Stardom update: like, no way proudly eclectic "Jewbian" Akil should have lost out to "Orlando, Florida theme-park entertainer" born-again Timberfake Matthew. Not since Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome has there been such a scandale.

Applause: A Rest Is Noise Special Report

Note: This online essay was written in 2005. In 2010, I gave a lecture at the Royal Philharmonic Society in which I added new information on the history of concert-hall applause. You can download the text here.

Here is everything I have been able to discover about the history of applause between movements of symphonies and concertos. I’m sure there’s a musicologist somewhere who’s done an exhaustive study of the subject; Leon Botstein’s eagerly awaited History of Listening will probably reveal more. Below, I’ve combined some old posts with new material that I’ve dug up in libraries. Bernard Sherman has been very helpful in pointing me toward sources. The post rambles on at a length that will surely exhaust the attention span of all but the most terminally bored readers. Descend into the quagmire at your own risk.

More old reviews

Morton Feldman and Galina Ustvolskaya.

Music and the war

Between 1992 and 1996, I wrote about five hundred reviews and articles for the New York Times. I have no intention of putting all that old material on this site. Indeed, if there were a way to expunge a few of my neophyte efforts from the permanent record, I'd happily do so. My ill-considered attack on Bizet's Carmen, for example, did little to establish my credibility with the operagoing public. Some of the pieces, though, are worthy of preservation, not so much because they're electrifying in themselves but because reports of premieres and other happenings have archival value. In that spirit I put up my review of a marathon performance of Satie's Vexations. Here's another old Times piece: an essay on musical events surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I spent the summer of 1995 traveling across Europe, and this was my summary report. It turned out to be the jumping-off point for my forthcoming book. The wonderful headline — "In Music, Though, There Were No Victories" — was Jim Oestreich's invention.

The decorum debate goes on

AC Douglas responds to recent posts on this site (at least I think I'm in there somewhere): "Classical music critics writing today who champion such changes in our present-day classical music concert etiquette for the express purpose of making the classical music concert more inviting to, and comfortable for, the masses (one of those critics goes so far as to mindlessly suggest that we turn the promotion of classical music, and the classical music concert itself, into the rough equivalent of a circus act to make it more appealing to the masses) are simply as wrongheaded about the matter as they could possibly be, notwithstanding how well-intentioned their championing, and seem oblivious of the wholesale damage that would obtain were their proposals put into actual practice." Or not.

Marcus Maroney is afraid of applause run rampant: "If we begin to allow — and then to expect — clapping between movements of certain works, won't the behavior become equally 'regulated'? What will an orchestra think at the end of the first movement of the Emperor Concerto five years down the road when there's only silence after the last note?  Is the audience disinterested (why bother with the other movements...)?  Has the performance been bad (or just not as good as last time...)?  Did the pianist not end with enough 'flourish' (or is he just saving that last amount of expression for the true finale...)?" Maybe orchestras ought to be thinking about those things while they perform!

Drew McManus is on my side, and goes so far as to endorse mid-concert booing. He says: "In the end, all of this business with strict rules of conduct and aversion to booing has to come from a sincere lack of confidence among the bulk of orchestra patrons in their own understanding of classical music." There's the dark truth behind so-called concert etiquette. It lets audiences off the hook. Instead of delivering an informed, passionate reaction to each segment of the concert as it unfolds, they can sit in neutral silence until the end. A truly engaged audience would applaud warmly when it's called for, remain silent when applause is inappropriate, and boo when the performance falls obviously short. See opera.

Readers may wonder: Does this man practice what he preaches? Indeed I do. I now routinely applaud after each movement of a CD. (Joke borrowed from Patrick Bringley.)

Did April really have to turn on you?

Thank you, Douglas Wolk, for posting an MP3 of the mysteriously great Death of Samantha song "Rosenberg Summer." You made my day.

Medved's masterpiece

I’m always on the lookout for mentions of the music in unexpected places. I was paging through a copy of Michael Medved’s Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life at my local bookstore — purely out of morbid curiosity, mind you — when I came across a semi-striking fact: while the film critic-turned-moral philosopher was attending Palisades High School, in LA, he and other students collaborated with Roy Harris on a musical pageant titled Liberty? I can find no such work in the Harris worklist in The New Grove, but Medved assures us he wrote the libretto for it. In a commendable spirit of self-criticism, which he is welcome to extend to his more recent work, he calls his text “insufferable, incoherent adolescent whining.” He is not, incidentally, the only televised film critic to play a cameo role in the career of a major American composer. Harry Partch scholars know Roger Ebert as the author of a discerning review of Partch’s microtonal musical Water! Water! Ebert was the student critic for the Daily Illini at the time. Ebert, by the way, is one of my favorite critics working in any medium. When I was first starting out, I used his collected reviews as a model. That’s neither here nor there. This entire post is neither here nor there. That’s what blogs are for!

The Gould

Eleanor Gould Packard, who was the New Yorker's hugely formidable watchdog of English style, died on Sunday night. Hundreds of New Yorker writers have had the humiliating but rejuvenating experience of being sent back to school by Miss Gould's proofs. (Or should that be: "...the experience — humiliating but rejuvenating — of being sent back to school..."? She lives on in our anxious minds.) I am forever grateful for the education, and I will long savor the memory of that triumphant day when one of my pieces came back with fewer than ten spidery annotations per page. Miss Gould had written one extra word at the top: "Good." I wish I'd saved that proof.

Whatever

The irrepressible Tom Hartley learned on Greg Sandow's site that John Cage's 4'33" actually consists of three movements — "I. Tacet. II. Tacet. III. Tacet" — and was prompted to ask: "Has there ever been a performance of 4'33" where the audience applauded between movements?"  

Willkommen!

Herzliche Grüße an unseren österreichischen Lesern! "Das Blog von Alex Ross" has been cited on Austrian Broadcasting (ORF) Online, in a feature on Finnland als Musik-Mekka.

I had been intending to write a follow-up feature on Finnish CDs. Here is an abbreviated version. Two outstanding Sibelius recordings by Osmo Vänskä, extolled in my New Yorker piece, are the First and Fourth Symphonies (BIS CD-861) and the complete incidental music to The Tempest (CD-861). Those seeking a deeper adventure into Sibelius' mind can pick up the two versions of the Fifth Symphony, which document the composer tearing his work to pieces and then putting it back together in miraculously perfected form (BIS CD-863). It's both thrilling and terrifying to behold — like that scene in Ronin when De Niro performs surgery on himself. Einojuhani Rautavaara's best work is his Seventh Symphony, recorded by both Ondine and Naxos. Gestures of the late-Romantic symphony unfold behind a dreamlike scrim. The darker-hued music of Aulis Sallinen is well represented on BIS CD-41. The avant-garde strain in Finnish music, which retained a certain humor and razzle-dazzle lacking in continental European forms (ahem), reached its apogee in Magnus Lindberg's junk-metal concerto KRAFT, which I was lucky to see performed live at the 1999 Ojai Festival (whence came the bunny pictures). Esa-Pekka Salonen recorded the piece in the 80s and recently made another version for Ondine (1017-2). The opening isn't quite as coolly explosive as the old disc, but the rest is raucous enough to cause the neighbors to call the police.

Update: Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register, who was also present at that epic Ojai performance of KRAFT, reminds me that the instrumentarium included an array of radiators and brake drums dangling from a sycamore tree. At a climactic moment near the end, one of the Toimii jumped off the stage, ran down the aisle, banged on the auto parts with a mallet, and ran back to the stage. I'd like to clarify that the Toimii were no longer wearing their bunny suits at the time.