By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
Alex is winging his way westward with, it is rumored, an ember from the Olympic torch in his carry-on. So with thanks and congratulations to Alex and to Bob, I hereby turn this blog back over to its rightful blogger.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
It gives me enormous pleasure to report that Alex's already multi-laureled magnum opus The Rest is Noise was a finalist for a 2008 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category. And I can only assume that the winning book, "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945," by Saul Friedlander does even more for genocide than Noise does for music.
The prize in music went to David Lang's The Little Matchgirl Passion. You can listen to it here.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
My colleague at New York, Rebecca Milzoff, was treated to a dose of Franco Zeffirelli’s prodigious self-mythologizing last week. After the Met literally stopped the show (a performance of La Bohème) for a round of onstage festivities in his honor, Zeffirelli, 84, graciously confided to her that the affair “had the smell of ashes.” He was referring to future cinders, actually, to be produced by a metaphorical pyre in which his eight Met productions – “masterpieces,” in his opinion – will shortly perish.
It’s true that his beribboned, teeming, polychrome, and elaborately distressed décors are out of step with the Met’s sleeker, more moderne aesthetic, and that Peter Gelb has announced plans to start replacing them. But Gelb has also bestowed provisional immortality on two productions–La Bohème and Turandot. In many seasons, the Met has looked rather like a Zeffirelli museum, and the director would apparently like that arrangement formalized. Perhaps in the course of the current renovation, Lincoln Center might replace the plaza fountain with a statue of the great man, and lay at his feet a cornucopia of picturesquely expiring sopranos.
Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
OK, but can you sing Aida while conducting Moses und Aron?
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
What with Alex coming clean about his whereabouts, and the Olympics on the way, and Tibet in uproar, and Lang Lang about to create some controlled uproar of his own when he plays Tan Dun’s new piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic, and The First Emperor returning to the Met—what with all that, my mind turns to, well, Lower Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s. It strikes me that much of what gets called contemporary Chinese culture – and that will be on display as such in the opening Olympic ceremonies – was in fact incubated in New York.
Ai Weiwei, the Beijing-based artist who helped the Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron designed the bird’s-nest-shaped stadium where the ceremonies will take place, lived in New York during the 80s and early 90s. He may have absorbed a certain punk defiance at CBGB: “I designed the stadium as a toilet seat,” he said in an interview recently. “I don’t care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me.”
Then there’s Cai-Guo Qiang, the Olympic special effects designer, artist and fireworks wizard who is now getting a spectacular retrospective at the Guggenheim (the original, NYC one). He has lived in New York since 1995 (and Tokyo for ten years before that). And Tan Dun came to New York in 1986 as a graduate student at Columbia, lived in Chinatown and hung out with John Cage. (He now shuttles between Chelsea and Shanghai.) I guess when you’re coming from China, the barriers between Uptown and Downtown music, which seemed so impassable to so many composers at the time, look pretty puny.
One thing that makes these artists so alert to their own “Chineseness” may be the fact that they developed it abroad, in the way that, say Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Diaghilev were self-consciously Russian in Paris. I’m not sure if this is a good thing, but you might say that the opening Olympic ceremonies will be at least partly an American showcase.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
A friend in Beijing sent this remarkable photograph of construction on the robotic-pretzel tower that Rem Koolhaas designed for Chinese Central Television (CCTV). I like the juxtaposition of fantasy and dilapidation, the way it’s hard to tell whether this crazy building is being born or rusting away.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
Alarm Will Sound, Lennon, and the Shaggs. New York, April 7, 2008
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
Well, it took three replacement Tristans (one of whom rolled off the stage) a pair of nights that required two Isoldes, and countless doses of Sudafed, but Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt finally made it from ship’s deck to "Liebestod" together. I had the good fortune to be at the Met last night, and I can’t remember a more consistently mesmerizing performance of Tristan und Isolde. Heppner has lost a bit of the superhero ease he once had, but with his warm, elastic voice and controlled fervor, he insinuated himself so thoroughly into the role that it became hard to imagine wanting to hear it any other way. Perhaps to show what fine form she was in, Voigt hammered the odd high note with a little more gusto than strictly necessary, but you can’t begrudge her the pleasure she takes in producing that fine, rich blang! Heppner’s and Voigt’s timbres harmonized gorgeously, and in spite of these weeks of separation, their sense of breath and phrasing merged. They sang Act II in silhouette against a luminous, abstract backdrop, their voices bobbing on the surface of a dark orchestral tide controlled by James Levine.
You can have a magical Tristan und Isolde even if only Tristan und Isolde sing really well, but happily that wasn’t the case last night. Michelle De Young stepped back into the role of Brangaene, which she had planned to sit out in order to give Margaret Jane Wray a crack at it. Wray was sick (Curse you, Influenza!); De Young was splendid. So were Eike Wilm Schulte as Kurwenal, Stephen Gaertner as Melot, and the great Matti Salminen as an especially harrowed King Marke.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
Carnegie Hall, which long ago outgrew its reputation for stodginess, has been commissioning a stream of new music, and now it has started to stream the music it's commissioned. I'm starting with Kayhan Kalhor's beguiling Silent City. I hope the catalog lengthens, and that the available pieces acquire some online program notes.
By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
Some years ago, the phenomenal bassist Edgar Meyer interrupted an interview to go on a rhapsodic digression about a young composer and mandolin player who could deliver Bach better than anyone he had ever heard, and who, by the way, was also one of the key figures in a bluegrass revival. Some time later, I stopped in to see Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records, who sat me down, swore me to secrecy, and turned on his stereo. I think the gag rule can now be lifted because the subject of both Meyer's and Hurwitz's enthusiasm was Chris Thile, sometime member of Nickel Creek, and now allied with the Punch Brothers for their debut Nonesuch album, Punch. It's ambitious stuff, and Russell Platt has the word:
The central piece is Thile’s “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” a forty-minute, multi-movement fantasy that mixes the core sounds of bluegrass with jazz improvisations, Bach-style toccatas, Baroque “lamento” bass lines, whole-tone harmonies, and a couple of Straussian melodic swoons.
