Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Ragging Wagner

As a prelude to the merriment of WagnerWorldWide, here is Clément Doucet's immortal Bayreuthian medley "Wagneria," as orchestrated by Morten Gunnar Larsen and executed by his Ophelia Orchestra. You can buy a crisp recording of the piece on iTunes; it has given me no end of joy. And here's the original, recorded by Doucet in 1927: 

Wagneria

Doucet, who played in a famous duo with Jean Wiéner, also wrote "Isoldina," which Marc-André Hamelin and Alexandre Tharaud have lately taken up. In the same vein is Donald Lambert's astounding "Pilgrim's Chorus." The tradition of Wagnerian foolery goes back to Offenbach's "Symphonie de l'avenir" of 1860; highlights are Chabrier's Souvenirs de Munich, Fauré and Messager's Souvenirs de Bayreuth, Debussy's "Golliwog's Cakewalk," and, more recently, Peter Schickele's beloved Last Tango in Bayreuth.

Previously: Star-Spangled Wagner.

Quartets ahoy (2)

The Momenta Quartet plays Ushio Torikai's Four TEEN.

Quartets ahoy

The JACK play Aaron Cassidy's Second Quartet.

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, I write about a host of younger string quartets: the JACK, the Momenta, the Danish, the Kleio, the Tesla, the Catalyst, the Calder, and the Zaïde. Space did not allow for an identification of the "unnamed Juilliard foursome" mentioned at the start: this was Siwoo Kim, Francisco Fullana, Danny Kim, and Jay Campbell, delivering a whip-smart rendition of John Zorn's Cat O' Nine Tails. There will be no lack of quartet activity in New York in coming weeks: the most notable event is the Endellion Quartet's traversal of the entire Beethoven cycle at the Met Museum, in February. Keep an eye out also for the Spektral Quartet and the Eclipse Quartet.

Cecil Taylor 1995

New music at the NY Phil

A hefty quantity of new and modern music appears in the 2013-14 season announcement by the New York Philharmonic. Particularly notable is the introduction of a new festival rubric, the NY Phil Biennial, which promises to present, over a ten-day stretch, "a veritable playground of new and recent music from all over the world." It recalls the Philharmonic's Horizons series of the eighties. Christopher Rouse, the orchestra's composer-in-residence, is featured several times, not least with the New York premiere of his huge Requiem; there will be a showing of 2001 with live orchestral accompaniment; and Mark-Anthony Turnage, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Magnus Lindberg, Osvaldo Golijov, Thomas Adès, Krzysztof Penderecki, Julian Anderson, Anthony Cheung, Sean Shepherd, and, on the night of his hundred birthday, Benjamin Britten are given the spotlight. On the downside, many of these choices are unsurprising, and, as Lisa Hirsch notes, no women have yet been included.

Another Noise playlist

A number of people — namely, one person — asked me to post a playlist from my recent lecture at Southbank. It may be found below. These aren't necessarily my recommended recordings for each and every work, though I used many old favorites. Afterward, I was gently upbraided by Raymond Coffer for presenting outdated information about the suicide of Richard Gerstl. Dr. Coffer has recently published online his doctoral thesis on the fatal triangle of Gerstl, Schoenberg, and Mathilde Schoenberg. A summary of his findings may be found here; anyone who writes about the Second Quartet should take note of them. Dr. Coffer has cast doubt on the story that Gerstl burned some of his work before committing suicide, and he also notes that the act took place not at night but in the late afternoon.

Question of the day

Does Tchaikovsky count as "homosexual propaganda"?

Lutosławski 100

From arts to leisure

Jim Oestreich, a longtime critic and editor at the New York Times, former mainstay of Wisconsin college football, announced yesterday that he would leave the paper at the end of the month. "I am excited about the prospect (finally) of balancing my life with a bit of teaching, other writing and maybe even a book project," he wrote, in an e-mail to colleagues. I'd like to pay personal tribute to a boss-turned-friend who supported and shaped my work when I first stumbled into criticism. Having a slow writerly metabolism, I was generally unhappy with the quick pace of the Times, but Jim gave me time to ponder Nordic symphonies, composer graves, and other odd obsessions. A Sunday piece that I wrote in the summer of 1995 became the germ of my book The Rest Is Noise; his avid interest made me think that I was onto something. More importantly, Jim unleashed on an unsuspecting world the essayistic brilliance of Richard Taruskin, first in Opus magazine and then at the Times. He has cultivated many other writers from the musicological field, showing that scholarship and journalism need not be poles apart. He has intensified the paper's coverage of early music and tirelessly fought the neverending battle for space. Although I'm confident that the Times can find an editor-critic to carry on what Jim has achieved, he will in many ways prove irreplaceable. My gratitude is very deep.

At the grave of Luranah Aldridge

The forgotten Afro-Swedish contralto, whom Gounod hailed as one of the most beautiful voices he had ever heard, lies in this area of Gunnersbury Cemetery, in London. Her headstone is no longer extant; I decided to consider the tree her monument. I will speak about her at the WagnerWorldWide Conference, in Columbia, South Carolina, on Jan. 31.

Spring for Music 2014

Full programs for the 2014 edition of Spring for Music — lamentably, the last — have been announced. The series begins on May 5, with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic performing Christopher Rouse's huge Requiem. On May 6, Ludovic Morlot will lead the Seattle Symphony in John Luther Adams's major new work Become Ocean; Varèse's Déserts and Debussy's La Mer fill out what is certain to be a spacious evening. On May 7, Michael Christie and the Rochester Philharmonic present a concert performance of Howard Hanson's opera Merry Mount. On May 8, Alexander Mickelthwate and the Winnipeg Symphony bring to town Derek Charke's Thirteen Inuit Throat Song Games, with Tanya Tagaq as soloist; Vincent Ho's percussion concerto The Shaman, with Evelyn Glennie; and R. Murray Schafer's First Symphony. On May 9, James Conlon marshals the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus in John Adams's Harmonium and R. Nathaniel Dett's 1931 oratorio The Ordering of Moses, which, as I recall, has some stunning passages. (I reviewed a 1993 performance for the Times.) And on May 10 it's Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony in the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, James MacMillan's Woman of the Apocalypse, and a new version of the Mozart Requiem. This series will be missed and mourned.

Lutosławski in brief

After Chopin. The New Yorker, Jan. 28, 2012.

Generation Kill (2)

 

Here is a new version of Generation Kill, Stefan Prins's ferocious study of joystick technology and drone warfare, which the Nadar Ensemble first performed at Donaueschingen last fall. My report on the festival is here.

London snow

Hiatus

Black Wagner and the Rest Is Noise

I have several appearances coming up this month. On January 19th, The Rest Is Noise, a year-long festival inspired by the book of the same title, opens at Southbank Centre in London. I'll give four allied lectures over the course of the year; the first of these, "The Big Bang," is at noon on the 19th, in Queen Elizabeth Hall. It will survey the emergence of radical new musical languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Expect audio snippets of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, and many others, though Salome, featured that night at the London Philharmonic, will be the center of attention. The following day I'll converse with Jude Kelly, artistic director of Southbank. Details are here. Happily, I'll also be able to hear The Minotaur at the Royal Opera. The next lecture, on collisions of music and politics, is on March 2. As I noted when the festival was first announced, I was not involved in the programming.

Meanwhile, I have been working on a new book, entitled Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. I can't say that I'm anywhere close to finishing, or even that I've created a big pile of paper, but I've unquestionably read a lot of books and taken a great many notes. On Jan. 31, I'll appear amid an intimidating lineup of scholars at the WagnerWorldWide Conference at the University of South Carolina, addressing the topic "Black Wagner: The Question of Race Revisited." The talk will focus especially on W.E.B. Du Bois, whose story "Of the Coming of John" is one of the most highly charged instances of literary Wagnerism, and on the almost completely unknown contralto Luranah Aldridge. Time will not allow for an examination of the Afro-Wagnerian dimensions of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained — a topic for another time, perhaps.