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"As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase . . . and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea."
— Willa Cather, One of Ours
The finale of Haydn's "Rider" Quartet, Op. 74 No. 3; Takács Quartet (Hyperion).
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In Listen to This, I mention a few live performances that in one way or another had an overpowering effect on me: Robert Shaw conducting the Mahler Eighth at Carnegie Hall, Gidon Kremer leading an eerie chamber arrangement of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony at midnight in Lockenhaus, and a 1991 church-basement rock show featuring the bands Fugazi, The Ex, and Nomeansno. Many other events might have come to mind, not least Bernstein's Mahler Second at National Cathedral and any number of performances by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, but those were the three that occurred to me as I was writing. As Ben Sisario notes in today's New York Times, Fugazi, successor to the iconic hardcore band Minor Threat, have begun putting out a huge trove of live recordings, and that show with The Ex, at Sacred Heart Church in Washington DC, is slated for future release. It was maybe the most intense rock show I ever saw — a sensual riot of disciplined ferocity on the part of musicians and audience alike. The room was swelteringly hot, and at one point I retreated to the depopulated backstage area for a spell of relief. I found myself looking out from behind Fugazi as they played, a writhing mass of flesh in front of them, pandemonium pending. I don't know whether The Ex will be included on the release — for me, they were the killer element — but it will be fun to hear the tape all the same. Or will it? In an age where almost nothing escapes recording, is it better to let the electronic evidence fall away and rely upon our imperfect, impassioned memories?
On Saturday afternoon, the fetchingly named Le Train Bleu, an eclectic new group under the direction of Ransom Wilson, will perform John Luther Adams's songbirdsongs at Galapagos. It's an old-yet-new JLA piece, here presented for the first time in a large-scale version for six piccolists and five percussionists.... Both John Adamses figure in the program of the Ojai Festival next June. The schedule, devised by Leif Ove Andsnes, also includes Marc-André Hamelin playing the Concord Sonata, Barbara Sukowa singing Reinbert de Leeuw's Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, and Martin Fröst essaying all manner of clarinet music.... Michael Lorenz, writing in Acta Mozartiana, reveals the existence of a previously unknown godson of Mozart: Wolfgang Amade Nebe (1787-1839), who later became a Viennese civil servant.... The schedule for "After the End of Music History," a February symposium celebrating Richard Taruskin, has been announced.... Richard Dyer assesses James Levine's tenure in Boston and considers some of his possible successors.... There's been a welcome uptick of activity at Sedgwick Clark's Musical America blog.... On Nov. 30, Sotheby's will auction off another big batch of music manuscripts and rare books. The lot includes Schumann's composing manuscript for Szenen aus Goethes "Faust," the autograph of Schnittke's Peer Gynt, various Britten materials, and a Mozart sketch-leaf with bawdy canons ("Difficile lectu mihi Mars" and "Bona nox! bist a rechta Ox"), not to mention an inscribed typescript of Paul Celan's "Todesfuge."
On the right, Sgt. James S. Frederick, who fought with the First Wisconsin Cavalry in the Civil War, losing an arm during the assault on Fort Tyler in 1865; on the left, Rev. Basilios Lambrides, a Bulgarian-born, German-educated, American-based Greek Orthodox priest, who once helped to settle a potentially violent strike at a Utah copper mine by appearing among the miners in his vestments, holding his cross aloft. My parents have had slightly less dramatic lives, but I am ever grateful for their love. Happy Thanksgiving!
Has Leipzig turned Riccardo Chailly into a vampire, as this Decca cover vaguely implies? No matter; the playing on his new Beethoven cycle with the Gewandhaus Orchestra is consistently fresh and vital. It may not displace the titans of the discography, but it's a thoroughly distinguished contribution. Orchestra-watchers will be giving close attention to Chailly's upcoming appearances with the Boston Symphony, in January. (The BSO are redesigning their website, and let me make a request: please offer an easy link to the entire season schedule, with composers, works, and artists visible. As I've complained before, maddeningly few orchestras properly highlight their schedules. Presently, Nashville, LA, and St. Louis have it right.)
Jason Shure sends in this photo from tonight's performance of Robert Ashley's That Morning Thing at the Kitchen. I saw the opera on Sunday afternoon; having developed a slightly obsessive relationship in college with "She Was a Visitor," the closing section of the piece, I was thrilled not only to witness the music live but to participate in the performance, the audience being asked to sing along with the phonemes of the phrase. It was the last event in a heavy-duty weekend that also included Peter Maxwell Davies's Kommilitonen!, at Juilliard; Philip Glass's Satyagraha, in the HD Live broadcast from the Met; and Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, courtesy of the Baltimore Symphony. Each had its virtues, but it was the Glass that left me really stunned. The work possesses an extraordinary aura, and, as Glass commented during one of the intermission features, current events have a way of catching up to it. I've been fairly critical of the Met in recent months, but for this flawless, deeply felt production there can be nothing but praise.
I'm happy to report that Best Music Writing 2011, which I co-edited with Daphne Carr, is now arriving in bookstores; I signed some copies at Brookline Booksmith the other day. Two events will be held in New York to celebrate the contributors: one at powerHouse Arena, in Brooklyn, on Dec. 6, with Franklin Bruno, Wendy Lesser (writing on Georg Friedrich Haas), Jeremy Denk (lamenting brainless program notes), Nancy Griffin, Nitsuh Abebe, Lauren Puchowski, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Kelefa Sanneh, and Dave Tompkins; and the other at Housing Works Bookstore on Dec. 8, with Nate Chinen, Justin Davidson (on Beethoven), Joe Hagan, David Hadju, Jessica Hopper, Amy Klein, Jace Clayton, Caryn Ganz, and Chris Norris. An event at Politics and Prose, in Washington, DC, will follow in January.
Photo: Kira Perov. From Bill Viola's Tristan.
The other night I subjected myself to Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, whose soundtrack consists largely of bits and pieces of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde (with the Act III prelude added during the credits). I'll leave the fisking of the filmmaking to the New Yorker's Richard Brody and say just a few words about the use of Wagner, which manages to be at once clumsy, unoriginal, and perverse. Clumsy, because von Trier dwells so relentlessly on the opening of the prelude that it turns into a kind of cloying signature tune; repetition robs the music of its capacity to surprise and seduce the listener. There are horribly inept cuts and rearrangements. (The explanation that "it's supposed to be vulgar" is for me insufficient.) Unoriginal, because the slow-motion effects at the beginning seem borrowed from Bill Viola's sublime Tristan video, and because the Wagner-plus-explosion ending recalls Buñuel's immeasurably superior That Obscure Object of Desire (where the music is from Walküre). Perverse, because von Trier's aestheticized vision of the end of the world — "visually splendid and sonically romantic," as Brody says — buys into a cheap conception of Wagner as a bombastic nihilist. The fall of the gods in Götterdämmerung is a quick epilogue to a superbly detailed political, psychological, and spiritual narrative of their decline. The music isn't glorying in their destruction but anticipating the approach of a better world; it marks a change of regime. As I wrote in an essay last spring, Wagner gives us hope, however vague. Von Trier gave me little more than an infinite yearning that the credits would soon roll.
Previously: Björk on the hatred of originality.
Earlier this week, the celebrated tenor George Shirley was the richly deserving recipient of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his NewMusicBox essay on the music-education crisis in Detroit public schools. I'm embarrassed to admit that I missed the piece when it was first published, last year. It's an extraordinarily revealing account of how Detroit's once-mighty music-education program had a transformative effect on countless students, including many major players in the history of Motown. A must-read, from beginning to end.... Paul Griffiths, also an ASCAP-Deems Taylor winner for his ever-excellent Miller Theatre program notes, noted the other day that if Schubert had lived to Elliott Carter's age he would still have been composing in the year 1900. The great man has produced a stack of new scores, some of which will be premiered at concerts next month, around the time of his 103rd birthday; Boosey has the rundown.... Gogol, an opera by Lera Auerbach, had its premiere at the Theater an der Wien two nights ago. Dirk Schümer, in the FAZ, praises the freewheeling quality of Auerbach's musical language — "violent eclecticism," he calls it — but concludes that Gogol's life was not eventful enough to sustain an opera.... On Sunday night at Galapagos in Brooklyn, Orpheus joins forces with composer-singer Gabriel Kahane — the first event in a new series that seeks an atmosphere of dressed-down intensity.... Make Music NY, the midsummer outdoor music jamboree, is launching a winter-solstice counterpart, Make Music Winter. Phil Kline's Unsilent Night is the inspiration, and on this occasion Kline will introduce a new boom-box piece, called Peregrine.... WQXR has launched an amusing initiative called Beethoven Awareness Month, with posters instructing one to Obey Thoven. (As Allen Ginsberg might have said, "Please, master.") On Sunday there will be a Beethoven sonata marathon at WNYC's Greene Space, with such luminaries as Jonathan Biss, Joyce Yang, Alessio Bax, Jeremy Denk, Inon Barnatan, and Timothy Andres (a phenomenal pianist).... Brian Current conducts Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto on Dec. 8 and 9.
Photo: Bregenzer Festspiele / Karl Forster.
In my column on Mieczysław Weinberg's The Passenger last summer, I noted that the Lincoln Center Festival had plans to stage the piece in a future season. It turns out that that production, whose date is not yet public, will not be the opera's only American appearance. The Houston Grand Opera is ready to announce that it will present The Passenger in 2014, in the powerful David Pountney staging that previously played in Bregenz and London. Michelle Breedt is slated to reprise the role of the Aufseherin, Lisa; Joseph Kaiser will portray her husband, Walter; Melody Moore is Martha; Morgan Smith is Tadeusz; and Patrick Summers will conduct.
Photo: Markus Jokela.
The Finnish music critic Vesa Sirén alerted me to an article that he wrote for the Helsingin Sanomat a couple of weeks ago, and that has now appeared in the paper's English-language edition. It concerns some orchestral sketches by Jean Sibelius, dating from the period when he was working on his Eighth Symphony. It was long assumed that the composer had destroyed almost all materials relating to the symphony, in an infamous burning of manuscripts at his home, but several years ago the scholar Nors Josephson, after studying a trove of sketches, came to the conclusion that some fragments of the work had survived. Sirén and the Sibelius scholar Timo Virtanen — whose view of the material is more cautious — recently had several passages copied out and brought them to John Storgårds, the conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. On this page you can watch a video of the try-out that ensued. It's rather astonishing music, alternating between piercing dissonances and a spare, chantlike kind of writing. You get tantalizing glimpses of a musical landscape stranger and more unstable than almost anything in Sibelius's published output. Are we actually listening to the mythical Eighth? Whatever this is, it is thrilling to hear.
Update: Sirén also reports on newly discovered letters between Sibelius and his copyist.
