Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Hammered ring

Did Mark-Antony Turnage have a bit of fun with Hammered Out, his recent Proms commission? Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler, drew attention to the fact that the opening minutes of the work bear an uncanny resemblance to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies." Nothing in Turnage's commentary indicated a Beyoncé connection, but once you listen to the mash-up above — and see the mischievous expression on David Robertson's face — you'll find it hard to believe that the composer didn't have "Single Ladies" on heavy rotation in his studio. The entire piece is basically Variations on a Theme of Beyoncé. The Proms performance will be online through Wednesday. Turnage's next opera, Anna Nicole, drops in February.

Hiatus

Excuse me while I disappear, at least until September.

Pre-hiatus miscellany

Stephen Hough illuminates the topic of string vibrato.... Ethan Iveson writes a brief history of jazz blogging.... Lisa Bielawa recounts the latest rendition of her Chance Encounter, on the Tiber in Rome.... Matthew Guerrieri sums up the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, which I was sad to miss.... David Fanning declares Mieczysław Weinberg's 1968 Holocaust opera The Passenger, recently given its belated stage premiere at Bregenz, a masterpiece. Stephen Walsh concurs. A New York production may ensue.... OMG OMG Cosima Wagner is on Twitter!!! (All entries are taken verbatim from her diaries, with day and month matching.) ... Huguette Clark, the reclusive 104-year-old daughter of the Gilded Age millionaire William Andrews Clark, has been found living in a drab hospital room somewhere in New York. Musical relevance? Her half-brother founded the L. A. Philharmonic.

James Levine v. Lotte Lenya

I've received advance copies of the Met's CDs and DVDs honoring James Levine. The first item I put on was the 1979 telecast of Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with Teresa Stratas as Jenny and Astrid Varnay as the widow Begbick. In this production, which was directed by John Dexter, Varnay gave her final run of performances with the company, thirty-eight years after her electrifying stage debut, in Die Walküre. The great soprano talked about Mahagonny in her delightful and perceptive memoir, Fifty-five Years in Five Acts, which appeared in 2000. Much of her account is dominated by her dislike of Dexter, whom she refers to as "Foulmouth." She has much kinder words for Levine, whom she describes as "ultra-professional." One anecdote is very funny. Lotte Lenya was observing the rehearsals, and at one point she began berating Levine for conducting "O moon of Alabama" at too slow a tempo. Varnay relates: "Jimmy looked nonchalantly up at the stage and quietly said, 'Those hookers are very tired.'"

Listen to This update

 

I've sent off my final corrections, and the book is done. I'm now at work assembling the Audio Guide and also arranging musical samples for the audiobook version, which I read myself. On my book tour this fall, I'll give a lecture based on the second chapter, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues."

Photo by Tyondai Braxton.

Rachmaninov in Valhalla

On my way up to the Bard Music Festival last weekend, I stopped in at the Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, to pay my respects to Sergei Rachmaninov. Árni Heimir Ingólfsson had told me about his recent visit to the grave, and I decided to make my own pilgrimage. Kensico is a vast, verdant burial ground a little north of the city; Lou Gehrig, Danny Kaye, Tommy Dorsey, David Sarnoff, and the New Yorker's Peter Arno are among the notables who reside there. Rachmaninov lies in a secluded grove with his wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Irina Wolkonsky. An Orthodox icon rests at the foot of the cross:

A thoughtful soul had recently deposited a bottle of Russian lager and two cigarettes:

According to Kensico's history, Valhalla, a little town just to the east of the cemetery, was so named in 1861, at the instigation of "the local postmaster's wife, a student of literature, mythology and Wagnerian operas." She must have been well up on her Wagner to have known about the role of Valhalla in the Ring cycle, none of which had been performed in 1861; Das Rheingold did not have its premiere until 1869. Here's a picture of the Valhalla fire department (insert your own jokes):

 

Previously: At the Grave of Zemlinsky, At the Grave of Schnittke, At the Grave of Fibich, At the Grave of X. Scharwenka, At the Grave of Enescu

Berg on Strauss and Mahler

Berg's graphic analysis of the career trajectories of Strauss and Mahler, in a letter transcribed in Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey. If Berg had lived to hear Capriccio and the Four Last Songs, perhaps he would have granted Strauss a little uptick at the end....

Rival disasters

Not surprisingly, competing entries for the title of Worst Recording Ever Made have surfaced elsewhere on the Internet. Bob Shingleton puts forward a weirdly misconceived East German rendition of Mikis Theodorakis's Axion esti; Marc Geelhoed has serious trouble with a CD of music by Ezra Pound; David Weininger mentions Ferenc Fricsay's Symphony of Psalms; Lisa Hirsch (dis)likes Lorin Maazel's Tosca; Anastasia Tsioulcas proposes Stefan Zucker (although humorously bad performances and cult objects don't quite count). John McLaughlin Williams, meanwhile, speaks in defense of the Furtwängler Quintet, and says that there's a better recording out there. (Oh my, this one is even longer.) I have little argument with the entity above, sent along by Timothy Andres; it is a scientifically informed attempt to create maximally undesirable music, and it succeeds. Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and Dave Soldier are the perpetrators. Read more here.

Wagner at war

The website Wagner Opera has uploaded to YouTube a scene from the 1941 Nazi propaganda film Stukas, in which a clinically depressed fighter pilot hears Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth, becomes rejuvenated, and merrily goes back to bombing the British. It's hard to know whether to see this footage as ridiculous or disgusting; both reactions seem apt. As I noted in The Rest Is Noise, Hitler had thousands of wounded soldiers shipped to Bayreuth so that they might be spiritually healed by Wagner. Yet he was not the only one seeking to harness Wagner's music to the war effort: Toscanini, whose anti-fascist animus ran deep, pointedly conducted all-Wagner concerts during the war years, and, at a huge Red Cross benefit concert at Madison Square Garden in 1944, paired Wagner with his beloved Verdi, adding Sousa at the close. Joseph Horowitz notes that in the souvenir booklet for that concert the Valkyries were depicted as Allied bombers in formation.

Available this fall: Listen to This, a book of my writings from the New Yorker.

The worst recording ever made?

Competition for the title is intense, but I would ask that serious consideration be given to this CD of Wilhelm Furtwängler's Piano Quintet, which appeared on the Bayer label in 1996. The work is an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length. The performance is wretched. The recording is badly made. And it goes on and on and on — for seventy-three minutes and twenty-three seconds, to be exact. It's the only disc of late-Romantic chamber music that makes me laugh out loud. I provide an audio sample to back up my case.

In the interest of equal time, here is Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the Coriolan Overture:

Tristan Perich

The technology behind Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony is fascinating; more important, the music is fairly electrifying. It reminds me of Terry Riley's rough, ecstatic music of the late nineteen-sixties, in the Rainbow in Curved Air period. It's not for every taste, but what music is? The final movement is infinite; when you're ready to move on, you switch the gizmo off.

Update: Perich and his new work will be the focus of an event at Roulette on Aug. 20. Music of Reich, Gordon, Shawn Greenlee, and Daniel Wohl is also in the mix. It looks to be severe.

Met preview

Tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's 2010-11 season are now on sale for members and subscribers; the general public can purchase single tickets starting on Sunday. The most tensely awaited items on the agenda are the first two installments of Robert Lepage's production of the Ring: Das Rheingold, which opens Sept. 27; and Die Walküre, which arrives on April 22. With less trepidation I am looking forward to the ridiculously belated Manhattan premiere of Nixon in China (Feb. 2) and to Nicholas Hytner's production of Don Carlo (Nov. 22). It's unfortunate that Peter Stein has withdrawn from the new Boris Godunov (Oct. 11), but the cast, led by René Pape, is formidable. Other presentations seemingly worth seeing: a Così fan tutte (Nov. 9) with William Christie in the pit; La fanciulla del West (Dec. 6), returning in time for the hundredth anniversary of its Met premiere; a Pelléas (Dec. 17) notable for the Met debut of Simon Rattle; Willy Decker's coolly sensual Traviata (Dec. 31), imported from Salzburg; Sondra Radvanovsky essaying the lead role of Tosca (Jan. 10); Andris Nelsons conducting The Queen of Spades (March 11); the first-ever Met production of Rossini's Le Comte Ory, with the starry team of Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato, and Diana Damrau; a welcome revival of Capriccio (March 28), with Renée Fleming on her Straussian home turf; a no less welcome revival of Wozzeck (April 6); and DiDonato's local debut as the Composer in Strauss's Ariadne (May 7).

This week the Met also announced the release of grandiose CD and DVD box sets celebrating James Levine's forty years with the company. Prices are steep—$200 for the CDs, $300 for the DVDs—but the offerings are generous: twenty-two complete operas in all, including such collectible performances as a 1979 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with Teresa Stratas and Astrid Varnay; a 1994 Elektra with Hildegard Behrens and a bloodcurdling Brigitte Fassbaender (I heard that one recently on satellite radio and it nearly caused me to drive off the road); a 1980 Don Carlo with Renata Scotto, Sherrill Milnes, and Tatiana Troyanos; the world premieres of The Ghosts of Versailles and The Great Gatsby; Schoenberg's Moses und Aron; and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's achingly beautiful portrayal of Dido in Les Troyens. These are self-evidently performances in which Levine takes particular pride, and the achievement is indeed staggering. Let's hope the coming season finds the conductor returning to good health.

Return to Marlboro

Over the weekend I made a brief visit to Marlboro Music, which I wrote about last year (the essay will reappear in my new book, Listen to This). The place is happily unchanged in almost every particular, although the absence of the late David Soyer is strongly felt. Mitsuko Uchida, who serves as co-director with Richard Goode, has been in residence the entire summer; on Saturday night, she performed, for the first time in her career, Schumann's Dichterliebe, in the company of the tenor Nicholas Phan. The program also included Beethoven's C-Minor String Trio and Bartók's Sixth Quartet. On Sunday there was an eclectic concert of the "only at Marlboro" variety: Adolf Busch's Drei Lieder, for voice, viola, and piano; Schumann's Six Pieces in Canonic Form, in the arrangement by Debussy for two pianos; Schubert's "Auf dem Strom"; and Dvořák's Sextet.

Phan and Uchida's Dichterliebe was a subtle, wide-ranging interpretation, one that gathered intensity by degrees. You often hear a Dichterliebe in which the singer and pianist seem to be mad as hatters right from the start; Uchida, by contrast, played the opening phrase of "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" straightforwardly, with little rubato, and then introduced just a bit of hesitation in the repetition, as if to telegraph the upheavals to come. Phan, too, began almost placidly, a couple of aching pauses at the top of the register hinting that all was not well. This tenor, noted for his Handel, Mozart, and Britten, may not seem a natural for the cycle, but, a few cautious low notes aside, he took hold of the music with unerring musicality, precise diction, and conversational command of German. The crucial turn came in "Und wüssten's die Blumen," taken at a helter-skelter tempo; Phan incisively etched the desperate lyrics, and Uchida's coda, after "She has torn my heart in two," felt like a precisely calibrated explosion. The pianist's reading brought one revelation after another; it was bracingly free of received ideas and recital clichés. She plans to revisit Dichterliebe at Salzburg next summer, in league with Ian Bostridge. Phan will sing Purcell and Britten at Carnegie in November.

The other performances last weekend showed the benefit of Marlboro's extended, nearly endless rehearsal process. Dina Nesterenko, Kyle Armbrust, and Marcy Rosen offered a fiercely focused reading of the Beethoven; Bella Hristova, Robin Scott, Vicki Powell, and Rosen caught the violently changing moods of the Bartók, with the final movement striking very deep; Cynthia Raim and Amy Jiaqi Yang gave a seamless, hypnotic account of the Schumann-Debussy; and the Dvořák Sextet, with Ying Fu, Miho Saegusa, Rachel Ku, Kim Kashkashian, Angela Park, and Andrew Janss, bounced and swayed irresistibly. The public concert series, which has been drawing standing-room-only crowds, concludes on Sunday, with the traditional performance of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy.

Batter my heart (redux)

Oppenheimer's Act I aria from Doctor Atomic, sung by Gerald Finley in rehearsal with the Met Orchestra under Alan Gilbert. Audio courtesy of the Met, originally posted October 2008.

Previously: Countdown.

Dr. Faustus library

Apropos of nothing, I offer a picture of my collected copies of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, a book that that has had, as the author might have said, an almost uncanny effect on me. The paperback on top was purchased at Second Story Books, in Washington DC, circa 1985. It remains the most intense reading experience of my life. Below that is a 1948 copy that I found on the Internet. It is inscribed by Hans and Hilde Jacobi to their friend Poldi. I wonder if this could be the Hans Jacobi who wrote prolifically for the German, French, and American cinema from the twenties until the sixties. Then there's a paperback German copy, the excellent John Woods translation, and the critical edition with commentary. Readers who felt that Doctor Faustus was mentioned a few too many times in The Rest Is Noise will be relieved to know that in Listen to This it shows up only once, on the next-to-last page, in the midst of a discussion of the fearsome finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony.

Watertower sunset playlist

— Haydn, London Symphonies; Marc Minkowski conducting Les Musiciens du Louvre (Naïve)
— Rosso: Italian Baroque Arias; Patricia Petitbon, soprano, with Andrea Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra (DG)
— Louis Couperin, Suites; Christophe Rousset, harpsichord (Harmonia Mundi)
— Beethoven, Piano Concertos; Paul Lewis, piano, with Jiří Bělohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony (Harmonia Mundi)
— My Mexican Soul: Alondra de la Parra conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas (Sony)
— Ginastera, Popol Vuh and other works; Gisèle Ben-Dor conducting the London Symphony, Jerusalem Symphony, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales (Naxos)
— Wagner, Wagner, Wagner

Off-topic: A defense of freedom

Mayor Bloomberg spoke on Governors Island yesterday, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, eloquently defending the idea of building an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site. The plan has been attacked by demagogues seeking to exploit the events of September 11th for political gain. Bloomberg said in part:

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan. Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans.... On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’

The entire speech is worth reading: Bloomberg articulates an American ideal that is in danger of being lost. He also articulates something essential about the spirit of New York, harking back to the city's early days as a Dutch colony.

Previously: Requiems.

Video-game music

Last week, Anne Midgette wrote an interesting piece about the latest revenue-enhancing craze in the orchestral world: concerts devoted to video-game music. As Anne says, the notion that this kind of event will recruit new subscribers is questionable, but I suppose you never know what will get people interested. If the video above — a trailer for a PBS special — successfully captures the video-game-concert experience, I would pay good money not to have to see it. By the way, foreign readers may not be familiar with PBS, our Public Broadcasting Service. In theory, it is a publicly funded television channel devoted to programming that the commercial networks avoid. When I was a kid, classical music appeared fairly often on PBS stations: I remember being transfixed (and also bewildered) by a showing of the complete Patrice Chéreau Ring from Bayreuth. These days, you're more likely to get hit with André Rieu or Andrea Bocelli. Then again, when I was a kid, I couldn't go on the Internet and watch Salome on a Franco-German channel.

Miscellany: Marlboro at 60, etc.

Marlboro, Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode's deep-thinking music camp, is celebrating this summer its sixtieth anniversary. Performance Today celebrates with a week of live recordings, including an "Archduke" Trio with Uchida, Soovin Kim, and the late, great David Soyer. After the "Archduke," you can hear Uchida recount the epic music-stand prank that I described in my Marlboro piece last year. Next weekend, Nicholas Phan and Dame Mitsuko perform Dichterliebe.... Worth a listen: Oliver Knussen's three-part Prom of Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistle, Colin Matthews (his richly melancholy new Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz), Luke Bedford, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Schumann. The link expires tomorrow.... Jeremy Eichler, in the Boston Globe, delivers a clear-eyed assessment of El Sistema.... A download of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble's Music for 18 Musicians can be had on Amazon for a mere five bucks.

CD review: Chopin, Larcher, Bach

Uncanny Voices. The New Yorker, August 9, 2010.

Plus: Audio Footnotes.