Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Advisory

The new season of The Wire begins on Sunday night. Alongside old themes of street crime, police work, and city politics, the greatest TV show in history introduces a new subject: education.

More: Jacob Weisberg writes a spot-on paean to the show.

Don't be too hard on yourself

The New York Times Magazine is publishing excerpts from Susan Sontag's diaries. Here is an entry for April 20, 1965:

another project: Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen. Buy records, read, do some work. I've been very lazy.

As all-devouring as Sontag's intellect was, this project apparently defeated her in the end.

Agenda

With clear skies prevailing, downtown New Yorkers should check out a Sound Art concert in Washington Square Park today at 3PM. The impressive lineup includes sampling virtuoso Carl Stone, dissonant-chromatic rock band Jerseyband, the hypnotically inventive composer-vocalist Joan La Barbara, the crack young percussion ensemble So Percussion, electronic composers Luke DuBois and Daedelus, and Princeton professor Paul Lansky, one of the reigning geniuses of electronic music.

Update: Steve Smith has a report on the event, and Darcy James Argue has a photojournal. I caught an early portion of the proceedings, enjoying the combination of experimental sound and summer sun on a patch of grass nearby. Lansky's Ride, with speaking voices and nature murmurs bubbling up from a molten flow of electronic sound, was mesmerizing. Read to the end of Steve's post for news of another sound-art event — in a Starbucks, of all places. I also recommend an upcoming S.E.M. Ensemble concert at the Spiegeltent downtown, although I won't be able to attend, because it's opening night at the Met.

What are you playing?

I've had this bee in my bonnet for a while, but why in God's name is it so difficult for orchestras to put complete season schedules on their websites? I am looking in every corner of the Montreal Symphony site for a chronological listing of what Kent Nagano is doing in his inaugural season, et je ne trouve rien. Contrast the fast-rising Nashville Symphony, which has a link on its front page to "entire 2006 / 07 season." Thank yew! ... Addendum: Paul Wells has a report on Nagano's opening concert in Montreal, for which bells were rung in churches across the city. Nagano likes the Ustvolskaya-Beethoven combination; I heard him do almost the same program with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin in 2002 (with Ligeti's Lux aeterna in place of The Unanswered Question).

Barge of the future

On October 7, in the gently rocking confines of BargeMusic (not pictured), I will host Composers on the Edge, a New Yorker Festival event. The concept is to round up some inventive young artists who are airing out the definition of what it means to be a composer in this frazzled day and age. The panel includes Mason Bates, who divides his time between composing and DJing; Corey Dargel, whose work hovers on the border between art song and art rock; Nico Muhly, steeped in Renaissance polyphony, minimalism, and Björk; and Joanna Newsom, a harpist-songwriter who absorbed twentieth-century repertory at Mills College. I fear that Prof. Heebie McJeebie will have a heart attack if he ever hears about the manifest aesthetic impurity of these young people's efforts, but for most others it ought to be a lively evening — more like a concert with intermittent talk than a panel discussion. Tickets go on sale at noon today.

Update: As of 2:30PM, it's sold out.

Post-hiatus miscellany

1) In the Kooky Klassical department, a man on the David Letterman show plays Mozart's Symphony No. 40 by rollerblading past rows of wine bottles. (Courtesy of Pierre Ruhe.) [Update: John Burke plays the perfect-pitch card and points out that it's been transposed to C minor.] 2) Charles Downey at ionarts has put together an excellent fall opera preview, with emphasis on novel repertory and premieres. I'd suggest adding John Adams's A Flowering Tree in Vienna. 3) Steve Smith disintegrates Paul McCartney's new "classical" album in Time Out NY: "An hour of singing boys is something only Michael Jackson could love." 4) Various new blogs have been added to the Music Blogs list.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson discography

Recordings by the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Mozart, Don Giovanni (DVD, rec. 1990 / released 2005)
Handel, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (DVD, rec. 1990 / released 2006)
Fauré, Pelléas et Mélisande (DG, 1990)
Handel, Messiah (Harmonia Mundi, 1991)
Motets of Heinrich Schütz (Koch, 1991)
Schumann, Mignon Lieder, Kerner Lieder (Koch, 1992)
Bach, Anna Magdalena Notebook (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Monteverdi, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Purcell, The Fairy Queen (Virgin Classics, 1993)
Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (Harmonia Mundi, 1993)
Handel Arias (Harmonia Mundi, 1994)
Handel, Susanna (Harmonia Mundi, 1995)
Charpentier, Médée (Erato, 1995)
Handel, Ariodante (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Handel, Theodora (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Handel, Theodora (Glyndebourne DVD, 1996)
Handel, Arias for Durastanti, etc. (Harmonia Mundi, 1996)
Respighi, Il Tramanto, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (Sony, 1996)
Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (Erato, 1996)
Britten, Phaedra (Erato, 1996)
Songs of Mahler and Delage (Moab Music Festival, 1997)
Handel, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (Harmonia Mundi, 1998)
Harbison, At First Light (Archetype, 1998)
Live from Wigmore Hall (BBC, 2000)
Adams, El Niño (Nonesuch, 2001 + DVD)
Mozart, Idomeneo (EMI, 2001)
Bach Cantatas (Nonesuch, 2003)
Mahler, Symphony No. 2 (San Francisco Symphony, 2004)
Handel Arias (Avie, 2004)
Lieberson, Rilke Songs etc. (Bridge, 2006)
Harbison, North and South, etc. (Naxos, 2006)
Peter Lieberson, Neruda Songs (Nonesuch, 2006/7)
Songs by Mahler, Handel, and Peter Lieberson (Wigmore Hall Live, 2007)
Spanish Love Songs (Bridge, 2007)
Brahms and Schumann Lieder (Wigmore Hall Live, 2008)
Lorraine at Emmanuel: Music of Bach and Handel (Avie, 2008)
Recital at Ravinia Festival (Harmonia Mundi, 2009)

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in memoriam

"Fervor"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Sept. 25, 2006.

On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was hardly a household name, and lacked even the intermittently twinkling, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly intense kind of grief.

I was one of those people. In recent years, I found it hard to assume a pose of critical distance from this artist, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her, and failed. It felt wrong to call her “great” and “extraordinary,” or to throw around diva-worship words like “goddess” and “immortal,” because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. Nonetheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard. She was incapable of giving a routine performance—I saw her twelve times, and each appearance had something explosively distinctive about it—and her career took the form of a continuous ascent. New Yorkers saw her for the final time last November, when she came to town with the Boston Symphony to perform “Neruda Songs,” composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.

She was born Lorraine Hunt, in San Francisco, the daughter of two exacting Bay Area music teachers. She grew up studying piano, violin, and viola, settling on the viola as her main instrument. She made relatively few public appearances as a singer in her youth, but when she did she invariably caught people’s attention. At a concert by the Oakland Youth Orchestra, in 1972, she stepped forward to deliver an aria from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson and Delilah,” and Charles Shere, in a perceptive review for the Oakland Tribune, described a now familiar spell being cast for perhaps the first time: “She simply stood there and sang, hardly even opening her mouth, with an even range, secure high notes, and marvelous control of dynamics in the swells.”

By 1979, she was the principal violist of the Berkeley Symphony. When the orchestra decided to mount a production of “Hansel and Gretel” at San Quentin State Prison, she volunteered for the role of Hansel. Under these fittingly unconventional circumstances she made her operatic début. She took up singing full time while studying in Boston in the early eighties, drawing notice first for her precisely expressive accounts of Bach cantatas at Emmanuel Church and then for her work in radical opera productions, by Peter Sellars, of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” She rose to fame in Europe in the mid-nineties, mainly on the strength of an instantly legendary performance in Sellars’s production of Handel’s “Theodora” at the Glyndebourne Festival, in 1996. She made a belated Metropolitan Opera début in 1999, in John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby.” The ovations that greeted her Dido in “Les Troyens” at the Met, in 2003, signified her assumption of diva status.

“Lorraine’s a bit of a nut,” people in the music business used to say. They were referring to her Northern California nature—her spiritual pursuits, her interest in astrology, her enthusiasm for alternative medicine. She sometimes unnerved her colleagues with her raucous sense of humor and her braying laugh. In retrospect, her alleged eccentricities seem essential to the evolution of her art. She broke through the façade of cool professionalism that too often prevails in the classical world, showing the kind of unchecked fervor that is more often associated with the greatest pop, jazz, and gospel singers. She was often compared to Maria Callas, but she might have been a shade closer to Mahalia Jackson.

The voice was primally beautiful, rich in tone and true in pitch. It had a wonderful way of materializing from the instrumental background, as if from the ether. In “Ombra mai fù,” from Handel’s “Xerxes,” the first note begins like an extra resonance around the strings. There was something calming and consoling about the mere fact of that sound. “Time itself stopped to listen,” Richard Dyer wrote in his obituary for the Boston Globe. Central to the singer’s repertory was a group of arias that I think of as her benedictions, her laying on of hands: “Ombra mai fù,” with which she made an overpowering first impression on New York operagoers in City Opera’s 1997 production of “Xerxes”; “As with rosy steps the morn,” from “Theodora,” which she made into an anthem of beatitude; Bach’s “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen,” which, in an uncomfortably haunting Sellars staging, she sang while attired in a hospital gown; and the African-American spiritual “Deep River,” her signature encore. Listening closely, you could hear how immaculately crafted these performances were. Their emotional transparency was rooted in the fact that each expressive inflection was joined seamlessly to the next.

Loveliness was only the point of departure. She could also communicate passion and pain and a fearsome kind of anger. Her Xerxes whipped around to deliver an up-against-the-wall tirade in “You are spiteful, perverse, and insulting.” There was an apocalyptic quality to her rendition of “La Anunciación,” her centerpiece aria in John Adams’s Christmas oratorio, “El Niño.” When she sang Britten’s cantata “Phaedra” at the New York Philharmonic, she froze listeners in their seats with her high monotone chant of the words “I stand alone.” And as Irene, a spiritual leader of the martyrdom-bound Christians in “Theodora,” she made her voice into a kind of moral weapon. There is a DVD of the Glyndebourne “Theodora”—it is one of three essential recordings, the others being the Nonesuch CD of two Bach cantatas and the Avie CD of Handel arias—and the pivotal moment comes in the air “Bane of virtue, nurse of passions . . . Such is, prosperity, thy name.” In other words, money kills the soul. The phrase “thy name” is sung eighteen times, and by the end the voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword. Deployed in the right way, this sound could bring down a government.

Having run the gamut from angelic serenity to angelic wrath, this most complete of singers concluded her career with a very human demonstration of love. She met Peter Lieberson in the summer of 1997, on the occasion of the première of his opera “Ashoka’s Dream,” in Santa Fe. They fell in love and eventually married, and Lieberson began to write with his wife’s voice in mind. By reputation a brilliant practitioner of twelve-tone technique, he had always had a secret yen for sensuous, late-Romantic harmony, and in “Neruda Songs" that desire came rushing to the surface. This is some of the most unabashedly lyrical music that any American composer has produced since Gershwin. It is also courageously personal music, the choice of Neruda poems seeming to acknowledge the fragility of Lorraine’s health. The final song, “Sonnet XCII,” begins, heartbreakingly, with the words “My love, if I die and you don’t—” The music is centered on a lullaby-like melody in G major, and it has the atmosphere of a motionless summer day. The vocal line ends on a B, and afterward the same note is held for two slow beats by the violas, as if they were holding the hand of the singer who came from their ranks. The composer is holding her hand, too. The last word is “Amor.”

Personal announcement

Malcolm and Daphne Ross, without whom Noise would scarcely have been possible, celebrate fifty years of marriage today.

Unbelievable

Robert Christgau, the man who co-invented serious writing on rock and pop, has been fired from the Village Voice. (For more, read Jody Rosen, who plausibly compares Christgau's influence to that of Pauline Kael.)