Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

COVID-19 live streams

As musical organizations shut down regular activity because of the coronavirus pandemic, a number of groups will offering video streams of concerts without audience. Here is a selection.

April 8

7pm CET: Igor Levit Hauskonzert.

745pm CET: Quarantine Soirée with the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

6pm ET: Experimental Sound Studio presents Quarantine Concerts on Twitch, with Asha Rowland and Lykanthea.

For Krzysztof Penderecki

Krzysztof Penderecki, who died on March 29th at the age of eighty-six, was a composer who made a huge impact on me when I first heard his classic pieces of the sixties and early seventies.  Alas, I found the vast majority of his later music to be much lesser interest, though I attempted many times to warm to it. I turn the microphone over to Tim Rutherford-Johnson, who has studied Penderecki's music in depth.

Yuval Sharon's Sweet Land

Midnight Trains. The New Yorker, April 6, 2020.

Go here to watch the video of Sweet Land.

Photos above and below by Casey Kringlen.

Video of the day: Toronto's Appalachian Spring

Bayreuth in Milwaukee

The Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 13, 1891.

Kate Soper's unwritten operas

Nothing on the spring schedule had whetted my anticipation more than Kate Soper's The Romance of the Rose, which was to have had its premiere at Peak Performances on April 2. It has been postponed, along with everything else. Soper is taking to YouTube to post a few fragmentary musical ideas and share insights from her keen literary-musical imagination. In the first of these, above, she reads a passage from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, with self-generated vocal accompaniment. I wrote about Soper's Ipsa Dixit in 2017.

Video of the day: Hannigan sings Nono

In a video from the Gothenburg Symphony, Barbara Hannigan sings Luigi Nono's Djamila Boupacha, written in honor of the young Algerian militant who was tortured and raped by French forces in 1960. That piece is also the first item on the new Hannigan / Ludwig Orchestra album La Passione, which also includes Haydn's Symphony No. 49 and Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.

Deepening crisis

As the coronavirus shutdown continues, organizations in the classical-music world are now beginning to carry out temporary layoffs or furloughs of their musicians and staff. Last night I heard from the president of the Oregon Symphony that the orchestra was laying off its players and half of its staff — a hundred people in total. It has been reported that the Winnipeg Symphony has laid off more than a hundred workers. Musicians from Opera Australia are protesting a similar decision by the administration. And today the Metropolitan Opera announced the cancellation of the remainder of its season and the furloughing of its full-time union employees, orchestral players included — meaning that they will not be paid past March but that they will continue to receive health benefits. Many more announcements of this kind will follow in coming days. The layoffs mean that musicians and staff can file for unemployment. But there will be questions, to put it mildly, about whether such drastic measures are necessary, particularly in the case of the bigger-budgeted organizations. The assiduously well-informed Zach Finkelstein will have a new story soon on his blog. Zach has pointed out that the question in many cases will not be about the hard economic reality — a seemingly large budget can be burned through very quickly — but about communication and understanding.

It is hard not to feel a certain terror for the future of the arts. I certainly have never lived through anything like this.

Buy music, don't just stream it (playlist)

When Napster trained a generation to see music as a free commodity, decimating the record industry, we were assured that musicians would continue to make money via touring. Now that the coronavirus has put a stop to live performance, musicians have very little to fall back on. The culture favors streaming, but artists notoriously earn almost nothing from streaming. Music-lovers who are not facing immediate financial danger might want to help out artists by buying records instead of streaming them — digitally or physically.

This Friday, March 20, the estimable Bandcamp site will forego the 15 percent that it usually takes from sales, meaning that all proceeds will go directly to artists. To celebrate this generous gesture, I've picked a few recent contemporary-classical releases on Bandcamp that are worth hearing. You can always sample the embedded tracks and determine whether or not you agree.

— Feldman, Piano Music; Philip Thomas (Another Timbre)

— Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)

— Anna Höstman, Harbour; Cheryll Dvuall, piano  (Redshift)

— in manus tuas; recital by violist-composer Anna Leilehua Lanzilotti

— nocturnes and lullabies: music of Nicholas Deyoe, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Rebecca Saunders, Philip Cashian, Linda Catlin Smith, Maura Capuzzo, Marc Sabat; Richard Valitutto, piano (New Focus)

— David Lang, the loser; Rod Gilfry, Conrad Tao, Bang on a Can Opera Ensemble (Cantaloupe)

— Linda Catlin Smith, Drifter; Quatuor Bozzini, Apartment House (Another Timbre)

— Cenk Ergün, Sonare & Celare; JACK Quartet (New Focus)

— Michael Pisaro, Fields Have Ears, with Philip Thomas, piano (Another Timbre)

Go to NewMusicBox for a symposium on the new music world's response to the virus.

Dutchman and Agrippina at the Met

Phantom Vessel. The New Yorker, March 23, 2020.

Music during a pandemic

Coronavirus Concerts, on the New Yorker website, March 14, 2020.