In this week's New Yorker, I have a column (not online) about "Reassessing the Rite," the four-day Rite of Spring conference at the University of North Carolina. Carolina Performing Arts' Rite-inspired series continues this week with a Brooklyn Rider program. As before, I recommend Will Robin's allied Rite blog. Also in the issue is a Critic's Notebook about Joyce DiDonato's brilliant new Baroque album, Drama Queens. She sings in the big room at Carnegie on Sunday.
Links
Wunderreich
On my last German trip, I made a detour to Neuschwanstein, which I'd never visited. Yes, it's a tourist trap, but it's also a staggering vision — the most extreme, although by no means the most faithful, expression of Wagnerian fervor. As you can see from the scaffolding on the left-hand side, the castle is undergoing renovation. When I walked by, the construction workers were blasting "Call Me Maybe." So it goes....
Bach, mourner-in-chief
This Saturday, the musical forces of Trinity Wall Street will give a benefit performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor. According to the press release, "The event will benefit the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, which is gathering donations to provide essential living supplies to New Yorkers in need – including food, water, blankets, baby supplies, and other emergency items. The Mayor’s Fund retains no administrative fee, and 100 percent of donations are being dispersed to relief efforts and organizations to provide essential living supplies to storm victims in the New York City area." Julian Wachner will conduct. I think back to the Bach Collegium Japan's rendition of the Mass at Carnegie last year, in the wake of the terrible Tohoku earthquake. Once again, it will probably seem as though Bach had heard the bad news in advance.
If your taste goes more toward the Pop Music that the kids like so much these days, my friend Brandon Stosuy, of Pitchfork, has helped to organize a benefit at St. Vitus, in Brooklyn, tomorrow night. The lineup includes Neon Indian, Buke and Gase, Believer/Law, Bloodyminded, and Walter Schreifels.
For Elliott Carter
Photo: Pascal Perich.
The American master, seemingly inextinguishable, died this afternoon, at the age of 103. An entire world of culture dies with him — a landscape of memory that included Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, Ives, Gershwin, even Gustav Holst. As recently as July, Carter remained astoundingly undiminished, as this delightful video with Alisa Weilerstein attests. Allan Kozinn has the Times obituary; Russell Platt has thoughts on the New Yorker website; Tim Rutherford-Johnson gathers other memorials. I wrote about Carter mostly recently on the occasion of his hundredth birthday.
Donaueschingen, etc.
In this week's issue of The New Yorker, I have a column about the 2012 edition of the Donaueschingen Music Days (not online) and a long essay about gay rights and culture (available here). The election is tomorrow — if you're American, please vote. It has become fashionable in some circles to say that there is no difference between the candidates, but this is not the case.
Strange Halloween
Another post-Sandy photoblog at the New Yorker website.
Eerie night
Tenth Avenue in Chelsea.
Miscellany: Rite at 100, Copycat, etc.
Tomorrow the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as part of Carolina Performing Arts's season-long Rite of Spring at One Hundred program, launches a four-day academic conference on the subject of Stravinsky's masterpiece. Richard Taruskin gives the keynote address; dozens of papers and panels ensue. Be sure to keep up with the Reflections on the Rite blog, hosted by Noise friend Will Robin.... A few years ago, an avid 78-RPM record collector named Guy Walker made a remarkable discovery at an estate sale in Manhattan: an acetate of Kurt Weill's 1939 World's Fair project Railroads on Parade, which was long thought to have gone unrecorded. A CD is about to be released; it's a fabulously odd artifact of its time, and a telling, if uneven, document of Weill's musical metamorphosis in America.... I've been reading with great sadness of the travails of the Minnesota Orchestra, whose musicians have been locked out after refusing to take a drastic cut. The blogger Song of the Lark has a riveting description of a concert that the musicians organized on their own, in league with their former music director Stanisław Skrowaczewski.... The Brooklyn Philharmonic opens its new season tomorrow with a concert that includes a reprise of Tim Fite's Copycat, a highlight of last season's mold-breaking programs. Here's a video excerpt.... The Seattle Symphony, hardly less innovative, presents a Sonic Evolution concert Friday night, with world premières by Alexandra Gardner, Arlene Sierra, and Kenneth Hesketh. Having just come from Donaueschingen, where just two of thirty-one featured composers were female, I'm happy to see the balance tilted in the opposite direction in Seattle.... Some other notable NYC events in the next few days: Phil Kline's Zippo Songs and Out Cold at BAM; Gabriel Kahane at Carnegie Hall; the American Composers Orchestra's season opener; the Argento Chamber Ensemble's presentation of Mozart's Requiem, with Georg Friedrich Haas interludes; Bunita Marcus's 60th birthday at Roulette; the New York New Music Ensemble playing Jonathan Harvey; Stockhausen's Cosmic Pulses at White Light; and, of course, The Tempest.
