Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Noise over New York

Details of the 2007 New Yorker Festival have been announced. I will be doing two events: one, on Saturday, October 6, is an interview with Peter Sellars, who will need no introduction, and the other, on Sunday, October 7, is "The Rest Is Noise," a whirlwind tour of the mayhem and majesty of twentieth-century music, with sound samples, photographs, and impeccably choreographed dance routines. Well, I'm not so sure about the latter; we'll see how it goes. Tickets, $25 for each, go on sale at 12 PM on Saturday, September 15, and can be purchased through Ticketmaster. I will also be appearing at a book signing from 1 to 2 PM on October 7, in the vicinity of the great Joan Acocella. Some early copies of my book will be available for sale.

Modern technology

My new cellphone ringtone is Adams's Harmonielehre.

Encore: Tchaikovsky's Structures 1a

Michael Tilson Thomas has long been known for his innovative programming at the San Francisco Symphony, but he surely outdid himself in a recent program at the Edinburgh Festival, at least as it was described on the poster (scroll down):

Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man
Sibelius, Andante for Strings
Strauss, Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Sibelius, Piano Concerto No. 3
Strauss, Symphony No. 1, "Winter Dreams"

(Link provided by The Standing Room.)

Ultimate Hatto

If you think you know everything there is to know about the curious matter of Joyce Hatto, you might want to read Mark Singer's article in this week's New Yorker.

Thoughts on Pavarotti

When I first heard Pavarotti live, in Tosca at the Met in 1992, he was already past his prime, but I still got a generous helping of the honeyed timbre, the liquid legato, the pinpoint diction. Then entering his global-pop-star, hanging-with-James Brown period, Pavarotti was increasingly implausible on stage, the theatrical illusion punctured the moment he lumbered into view, in the manner of a politician doing a cameo on a comedy show. There was no hunger to succeed. You had to go back to the classic recordings of the seventies — three of the best are L'Elisir d’amore, Turandot, and La Bohème, all on Decca — to understand why he caused such a stir when he came on the scene. The finest singers not only hit the notes but erase the difference between notes and words. Singing is most thrilling when it becomes a kind of heightened talking. That’s what happens in Pavarotti's “Che gelida manina” or “E lucevan le stelle” or "Una furtiva lagrima": the beauty of the sound envelops you, but you’re not conscious of the artifice of art. It’s as if someone were making conversation in a dialect of dreams.

On television and through greatest-hits collections, Pavarotti entranced millions who may never have given thought to opera before. The pity is that the Three Tenors and the crossover projects that followed had nothing to do with opera as theater. It became a matter of a big man hitting high notes with a smile. Some people have argued that the Three Tenors may actually have harmed opera: for a lot of younger people, the art form ended up looking like Eurokitsch, not something to be taken seriously. Then again, the tremendous growth in opera around the world — American companies have proliferated into the hundreds in the past several decades — couldn't have been hurt by the Pavarotti phenomenon.

Was he the “last opera star,” as some have declared? By no means. He was sui generis. We don't lack for starry singers at the moment. Plácido Domingo seems indestructible. Anna Netrebko, Roberto Alagna, and Angela Gheorghiu are grabbing headlines with diva/divo antics; younger tenors such as Juan Diego Flórez, Rolando Villazón, Marcello Giordani, Ramón Vargas, Salvatore Licitra, and Giuseppe Filianoti are winning ovations. The Met, which underwent prolonged financial struggles during the period when Pavarotti was its biggest draw, now sells out night after night. Opera seems to be getting along fine without its most gigantic presence; indeed, we may be moving into a period where platinum-selling vocal celebrities are no longer needed. But a handful of bel canto arias will always belong to Pavarotti.

For international reactions, see Opera Chic.

Pavarotti

Remember him in his prime.

When I first heard Pavarotti live, in Tosca at the Met in 1992, he was already past his prime, but I still got a generous helping of the honeyed timbre, the liquid legato, the pinpoint diction. Then entering his global-pop-star, hanging-with-James Brown period, Pavarotti was increasingly implausible on stage, the theatrical illusion punctured the moment he lumbered into view, in the manner of a politician doing a cameo on a comedy show. There was no hunger to succeed. You had to go back to the classic recordings of the seventies — three of the best are L'Elisir d’amore, Turandot, and La Bohème, all on Decca — to understand why he caused such a stir when he came on the scene. The finest singers not only hit the notes but erase the difference between notes and words. Singing is most thrilling when it becomes a kind of heightened talking. That’s what happens in Pavarotti's “Che gelida manina” or “E lucevan le stelle” or "Una furtiva lagrima": the beauty of the sound envelops you, but you’re not conscious of the artifice of art. It’s as if someone were making conversation in a dialect of dreams.

On television and through greatest-hits collections, Pavarotti entranced millions who may never have given thought to opera before. The pity is that the Three Tenors and the crossover projects that followed had nothing to do with opera as theater. It became a matter of a big man hitting high notes with a smile. Some people have argued that the Three Tenors may actually have harmed opera: for a lot of younger people, the art form ended up looking like Eurokitsch, not something to be taken seriously. Then again, the tremendous growth in opera around the world — American companies have proliferated into the hundreds in the past several decades — couldn't have been hurt by the Pavarotti phenomenon.

Was he the “last opera star,” as some have declared? By no means. He was sui generis. We don't lack for starry singers at the moment. Plácido Domingo seems indestructible. Anna Netrebko, Roberto Alagna, and Angela Gheorghiu are grabbing headlines with diva/divo antics; younger tenors such as Juan Diego Flórez, Rolando Villazón, Marcello Giordani, Ramón Vargas, Salvatore Licitra, and Giuseppe Filianoti are winning ovations. The Met, which underwent prolonged financial struggles during the period when Pavarotti was its biggest draw, now sells out night after night. Opera seems to be getting along fine without its most gigantic presence; indeed, we may be moving into a period where platinum-selling vocal celebrities are no longer needed. But a handful of bel canto arias will always belong to Pavarotti.

For international reactions, see Opera Chic.

Awesome Cage birthday agenda

Two events in NYC tonight mark John Cage's ninety-fifth: at the Kitchen, Avant Media presents multimedia realizations of Four6, Winter Music, Atlas Eclipticalis, and Song Books (the last three simultaneous); and at Saint Mark's in the East Village various luminaries read aloud tributes to Cage. Plus, WNYC has a 24-hour, 33-second tribute starting at noon... New York City Opera again launches its season with $25-a-seat Opera for All performances, beginning with La Bohème on Thursday night. Remaining nights are sold out.... When, some time ago, I decided to rename classical music Awesome Music, an uncomprehending world failed to embrace my nomenclatural revolution. But it would appear that awesomism is beginning to catch on. This Friday New Amsterdam Records is putting on a concert of Awesome Music Live, featuring performances by Judd Greenstein, Mark Dancigers, William Brittelle, and Tristan Perich. Tickets are $7.... Advance warning to Chicagoans: the International Contemporary Ensemble presents eleven concerts in eleven days starting September 22.... New blogs: composers Miguel Frasconi and Matthew Whittall.... Corey Dargel's show Removable Parts opens this weekend at HERE Arts Center. I will report next week on what promises to be a weird and wonderful operetta of voluntary amputation.

18 in the heartland

I've linked a couple of times to the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, from Allendale MI, who participated in the Reich workshop at Carnegie last year and also appeared at Bang on a Can's marathon in June, holding four hundred people transfixed at 4AM. The ensemble's recording of Music for 18 Musicians will be released by Innova on October 16, and they have a lovely preview video at their site and on YouTube. After watching, you will probably have no choice but to buy the CD. They will have an NYC event on Oct. 18.

Davidson's adieux

Justin Davidson bids farewell to his job at Newsday with a ringingly hopeful overview of the state of classical music. A generous shout-out notwithstanding, I agree with most every word. I especially like this thought: "I've never been sure why the appetite for apocalyptic stories about classical music seems to be unquenchable. Maybe it's that in populist America, we take pleasure in the thought that democratic culture can expunge an ancient tradition associated with the aristocratic." Hence the American media's love for the death-of fable. These days, ironically, mega-rich pop stars are more aristocratic in their values and habits than anyone involved in classical music.

It's a bird! It's a plane!

No, it's James Levine on a plane!

Mithridates, he died old

Just how malignant was Tikhon Khrennikov, longtime head of the Soviet Composers' Union, who died last month at the age of 94? Can anything be said in his favor? Two recent pieces put the great denouncer in a different light. An obituary in the Economist paints a jarringly sympathetic picture, arguing that Khrennikov worked privately to protect composers even as he lambasted them publicly. The salient point is that on Khrennikov's watch composers generally suffered far less than their counterparts in other artists' unions, especially the Writers' Union. There are some tenuous assertions here, particularly concerning Khrennikov's alleged support of Alfred Schnittke, but it makes you stop and think. As does a long piece in the Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler, who interviewed Khrennikov in 2001. Declining the temptation to render a quick judgment, Eichler leads the reader deep inside the apparatchik's murky world.

The big question with Khrennikov is whether the composers would have been better or worse off without him. His political savvy might have prevented worse fates; then again, the leading composers managed to survive the Terror of the late thirties without Khrennikov's help. (Shostakovich was no idiot when it came to dealing with authority.) Perhaps, as someone who knew Khrennikov suggested to me, the vagueness of musical language was the true barrier against the kind of punishment that was meted out to writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, and Zoshchenko. In which case Khrennikov did nothing that many others might not have done just as well, perhaps even with a touch more humanity. After all, the major Soviet composers may have eluded execution and the gulags, but they tended not to live long. Shostakovich died at 68; Prokofiev at 61; Schnittke at 63....

Bartók in the Rockies

In the idyllic setting of the Banff Centre — where last summer I spent a happy if intense week working on my book — the Banff International String Quartet Competition is in its final day. You can follow the progress of the nine competing quartets at the CBC Radio 2 website and hear audio of many of the concerts.

Update: The winner is the TinAlley Quartet, from Australia.

Labor Day miscellany

Back-to-school reminder about student prices at Lincoln Center and elsewhere: Chamber Music Society, 50% off or $10 day-of; Great Performers, $20; Metropolitan Opera, $25-35 day-of; City Opera, 50% off or $16 day-of; New York Philharmonic, $12; Carnegie Hall, $10-15. So, what are the student prices to see Justin Timberlake and other Artists of the People?... Too Many Tristans has a diverting post entitled Greatest Classical CD Covers EVER? There's a sequel here.... A reader found a heroic tale on Craiglist. Apparently a patron at the San Francisco Ballet became fed up with people who were performing the lamentably familiar gesture of walking out as the dancers took their bows. The patron, an elegant grey-haired man, suddenly yelled: "WILL YOU PEOPLE SIT DOWN AND LET THE POLITE PEOPLE SHOW THEIR APPRECIATION?!" — slight pause — "YA ASSHOLES!" God bless you.... Nick Scholl on Jane Eaglen.... Make what you will of "Airports, Mortality, and the Truly Captive Audience," a 3000-word essay by American Idol runner-up Justin Guarini.... "Casta Diva" has become a political weapon, as Minnesota Public Radio's John Birge notes.... Molly Sheridan elegantly flushes this week's classical pseudo-story with the line "Beethoven — still dead!".... Variety reports that Jamie Foxx is to play a homeless L.A. cellist in a movie called Soloist. The script is based on a real-life character depicted by Steve Lopez in a series of LA Times articles. In one piece Lopez describes the cellist's visit to the LA Philharmonic; the film may contain a corresponding scene. Wouldn't it be nice if a Hollywood movie portrayed orchestral musicians as real people and not as misshapen stereotypes? Foxx, who studied piano in his youth and convincingly portrayed Ray Charles in Ray, seems to be approaching his task seriously; he is said to be taking intensive cello lessons with an LA Phil cellist.

— Don Giovanni, René Jacobs conducting (Harmonia Mundi)
— Music by Ralph Shapey; Miranda Cuckson, violin, and Blair McMillen, piano (Centaur)
— Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Claudio Abbado conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (Lucerne Festival Edition)
— Manu Chao, La Radiolina (Nacional)
— Alkan, Concerto for Piano, Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
— Measha Brueggergosman, Surprise: Songs of Bolcom, Schoenberg, and Satie, with David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony (DG)
— Howard Skempton, Ben Somewhen (NMC)

Copland v. McCarthy

After The New Yorker published my Copland article last week — an excerpt from Chapter 11 of The Rest Is Noise — a historian at the United States Senate generously wrote in to point out that the complete transcript of Copland's 1953 appearance before Joe McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations can be found at the Senate website (see S. Prt. 107-84, vol. 2, p. 1267).

London is Dudamelized

Let me the last of classical bloggers to link to this dizzying video of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra performing the Bernstein "Mambo" at the Proms. The same forces will be touring America in November; tickets for the San Francisco appearance go on sale at noon today. Good luck.

Fog and sun

On my blessedly boring Fire Island vacation I did little but sit and read: Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing, Robertson Davies's The Cornish Trilogy (a grateful tip of the hat to Danny Felsenfeld), Within a Budding Grove, the galleys of Joseph Horowitz's forthcoming Artists in Exile, Milan Kundera's The Curtain, and Simon Callow's Hello Americans. The only music I listened to in earnest was La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, courtesy of Kyle Gann. Hello deluge!

On vacation

I'll be back at the end of the month. Sometime in the interim, Noise will receive its two-millionth hit. Of course, some blogs out there receive two million hits merely for posting a photo of Lindsay Lohan's used Kleenex, but for a classical guy it's nothing to sneeze at. As ever, warmest thanks to all those who have read this blog since May 2004. (Terry Teachout was the first to notice it.) Next week The New Yorker publishes a second excerpt from my book, dealing with Copland and the Cold War.

Watch out, Harry Potter

I've sent in final corrections to my book. After seven years, it's off to the presses. Among the various slip-ups that were detected in the late stages, the most amusing has to be the image of John F. Kennedy hanging out with the "Brat Pack." Emilio Estevez should be so lucky! Needless to say, I can't wait to see the thing in fixed and finished form, with the jacket (I'm honored to have blurbs from Emanuel Ax and Björk, among others), the index (Abbado to Zweig), and the photo spread (including Schoenberg watering plants in his garden). I've posted the schedule of my slightly mad book tour. At some point I will probably have to take down the ridiculous college-era picture that adorns my "appearances" page. The so-called "multimedia tour" will be a whirlwind survey of twentieth-century music with the aid of iTunes samples, photographs, and, of course, impressions. I am particularly proud of my rendition of Jackie Kennedy at the premiere of Connotations.

"Death is all-powerful...."

Tikhon Khrennikov, longtime head of the Union of Soviet Composers, one of Shostakovich's most vociferous denouncers in 1948, has died at the age of ninety-four. Would that Shostakovich had lived so long instead.

Who needs Salzburg?

New York's exceptionally rich musical summer continues this week and the next. Starting tonight, Mostly Mozart stages four performances of Mark Morris's Mozart Dances, with Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki as piano soloists. There will be a PBS broadcast at 8PM on Thursday. Coinciding with the last Morris is the first of two renditions of Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion, with the amazing Schola Cantorum from Caracas. Note that a late-night "Orquesta La Pasión Jam Session" will transpire in the Allen Room after Sunday's performance, with Cristina Pato on bagpipe. On Monday the Swiss Radio Chorus and I Barocchisti of Lugano —  representatives of Ticino, Switzerland's Italian-speaking canton — perform Monteverdi's Vespers. Tuesday the galvanic Osmo Vänskä arrives to conduct a program of Mozart, Prokofiev (his First Violin Concerto, with Joshua Bell), and Beethoven. On Thursday, Frans Brüggen takes on Schubert. The festival closes on August 24 and 25 with Louis Langrée leading the Schola Cantorum and Festival Orchestra in Mozart's Requiem. You can read behind-the-scenes anecdotes of all this activity at the blog of oboist James Roe.

Listeners with an experimental bent can stay on the plaza, where, on August 21, Lincoln Center's Out-of-Doors Festival presents works by Pauline Oliveros and Henry Brant. Oliveros's Worldwide Tuning Mediation is, a press release explains, "an interactive 'sound-a-long' in which the voices of the audience in attendance are joined with audiences’ voices from eight countries received and distributed via free103point9 on-line radio, to become the instrument. This will be followed by an EHRES (Extreme High Risk Entertainment System) performance with Oliveros on accordion/electronics and fellow artists Ione, (spoken word/electronics), John D.S. Adams (modular electronics) and Norman Adams (cello/electronics).... Those wishing to participate can visit the Deep Listening website to get a score and register in advance." There follows Brant's Dormant Craters, which Out-of-Doors commissioned in 1995. Sixteen percussionists perform on gamelan instruments, steel drums, timpani, chimes, cowbells, Chinese wood blocks, kitchen pan covers, and tin pots. Brant is still going strong at age ninety-three, although he will not be conducting the performance as originally advertised. I will miss all this; starting Friday I'm taking my first long vacation since 1999.