In the mail today I received a brochure for the fiftieth Contemporary Music Festival in Venice, part of the Venice Biennale. For opening night, the increasingly inventive and unpredictable Klangforum Wien put together the following marathon program: "Trinklied" from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Bernhard Gander's Bunny Games, Beat Furrer's spur, Enno Poppe's Salz, Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (a work that transfixes me every time I listen to it), Scelsi's Anahit, Xenakis's Psappha, Terry Riley's In C, and Feldman's Instruments I. Nice to see that In C is finally getting some respect behind the Euromodern iron curtain. (It was booed at Darmstadt in 1969.) The Biennale is so uncompromisingly avant-garde that they send out their promotional literature only after the events in question are over: the concert happened on September 29.
