Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Street Symphony's Bach

Photo: David Zimmerman.

Street Symphony, a remarkable Los Angeles-based organization led by the violinist-activist Vijay Gupta, stages performances and workshops in homeless shelters, jails, and other places where classical musicians seldom appear. Previously, I'd seen them at the Midnight Mission, a shelter and recovery center on L.A.'s Skid Row. On Saturday night, I witnessed a different kind of Street Symphony event, this one at Inner City Arts, a specialized arts school. It was oriented toward the general public, although many associates and allies of the group were in attendance. The program consisted of Bach's Cantata No. 82, "Ich habe genug," interspersed with monologues by Linda Leigh, a longtime Skid Row resident who has established herself as a poet, teacher, and activist. The performance was a singularly intense and moving occasion; the only point of comparison that came to mind was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's legendary account of "Ich habe genug," in Peter Sellars's staging. The soloist was the bass-baritone Scott Graff, a member of the L.A. Master Chorale. When, in 2017, I wrote a column about Street Symphony, Scott was giving vocal lessons to a recovering addict named Brian Palmer. Two years later came the tragic news that Brian had died, at the age of forty-four. He was present in the performers' thoughts last weekend, and in mine.

Leigh's effortlessly delivered, deeply affecting stories — about an educational trip to South Korea; about her experiences of birth, abortion, and miscarriage; about her conversations with rideshare drivers who pick her up on Skid Row  — intersected potently with the raw, roiling emotion of Bach's cantata. No attempt to explicate or justify the connection was made, and none was needed. In purely musical terms, this was a superb account of Bach's great work, one that would have graced any festival setting. Graff sang in precisely articulated, lyrically flowing style; Gupta and the oboist Aaron Hill provided expert, vibrant solos; Jin-Shan Dai, Alex Granger, Eva Lymenstull, and Adan Fernandez handsomely filled out the ensemble. In conjunction with Leigh, though, it became something quietly transcendent. Afterward, Gupta mentioned that Bach's music would originally have been heard in conjunction with a sermon in church. Leigh's monologues were a sermon of a kind, though they were free of dogma. In the wake of the Supreme Court's catastrophic assault on the rights of women, the evening offered a kind of refuge, one free of easy consolation.

Worth noting

From Andrew Marantz's article “The Illiberal Order," in this week's New Yorker:

There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. “Orbán doesn’t need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” He acknowledged that the U.S. has safeguards that Hungary does not: the two-party system, which might forestall a slide into perennial single-party rule; the American Constitution, which is far more difficult to amend. Still, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today. “I’m sorry to tell you, I’m your worst nightmare,” Dessewffy said, with a wry smile. As worst nightmares went, I had to admit, it didn’t seem so bad at first glance. He was sitting in a placid garden, enjoying a lemonade, wearing cargo shorts. “This is maybe the strangest part,” he said. “Even my parents, who lived under Stalin, still drank lemonade, still went swimming in the lake on a hot day, still fell in love. In the nightmare scenario, you still have a life, even if you feel somewhat guilty about it.”

AMOC at Ojai

Anything Goes. The New Yorker, July 4, 2022.

For Mr. Baron

Martin J. Baron, the imperturbable admiral of fact-checking at The New Yorker, died today at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Baron, as he was invariably addressed, had a thirty-five-year tenure at the magazine, during which time he must have conversed, in his decorous and unhurried way ("In the next passage, Mr. Pollini, we would like to say . . ."), with most of the significant figures of the late twentieth century. I remember once looking through one of the two immense Rolodexes on his desk and finding cards for Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. If I had written, say, that Rimsky-Korsakov was a superb orchestrator, he would call up Richard Taruskin and ask whether it would be fair to say that Rimsky-Korsakov was a superb orchestrator. (This is an exaggeration, but only a mild one.) He worked on most of my articles from the mid-1990s until his retirement, in 2010, and I owe infinitely much to his knowledge, his meticulousness, his gentleness, and his sympathy. In 1997, as the New York Times reported, he nearly missed his own sixtieth-birthday party because he was immersed in my essay on Schubert. I wrote in the acknowledgments to The Rest Is Noise: “Martin Baron is the greatest fact-checker that ever was and ever will be. (Leave on author.)" The last phrase is a long-standing New Yorker locution, indicating an item that cannot be checked by normal channels and is left to the writer's discretion. The son of a longtime St. Louis Symphony violinist, Martin had a profound love for classical music, and for Schubert above all. I offer the above in his memory.

Wagnerismi

The Italian translation of Wagnerism, by Lorenzo Parmiggiani and Andrea Silvestri, is now available from Bompiani. It joins the Spanish version, by Luis Gago (Seix Barral), and the German version, by Gloria Buschor and Günter Kotzor (Rowohlt). I am well aware of how taxing this book must have been to translate, and I am deeply grateful to all of the above.

Hungarian steam locomotives

Courtesy of the Avant-Garde Project.

The German opera system

Marx in Chemnitz.

Aida in Chemnitz. The New Yorker, June 20, 2022.

A Milton Babbitt moment

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Schoeck, Elegie; Christian Gerhaher, Heinz Holliger conducting the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Sony)

Alvin Singleton, Four String Quartets; Momenta Quartet (New World)

Johanna Beyer, Music for Woodwinds; Arizona Wind Quintet, Daniel Linder (New World)

Mouton, Missa Faulte d'argent, Motets; Stephen Rice leading the Brabant Ensemble (Hyperion, out July 1)

Muhly, Stranger, Lorne Ys My Likinge, Impossible Things; Nicholas Phan, The Knights (Avie)

John Williams, Violin Concerto No. 2, selected film themes; Anne-Sophie Mutter, Williams conducting the Boston Symphony (DG)

Georgia Rodgers, September; Apartment House, Zubin Kanga (another timbre)

Bach, St. Matthew Passion; Julian Prégardien, Stéphane Degout, Sabine Devieilhe, Hana Blažiková, Lucile Richardot, Tim Mead, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Christian Immler, Raphaël Pichon leading Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Schubert, Die schöne Müllerin; Gerald Finley, Julius Drake (Hyperion)

Gabriel Kahane, Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch)

Wagner-Welt Bamberg

After Dortmund, I spent more than a week in Bamberg, hovering around the Bamberg Symphony while they presented two Wagnerish concerts: a multimedia presentation titled Die Welt mit Wagner, produced by Clemens and Nick Prokop; and Der Ring ohne Worte, a version of Lorin Maazel's symphonic condensation of the Ring with supplemental Wagnerian texts recited by the great German actor Jens Harzer. In advance of the latter, which incorporated writings of Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Charlotte Teller, Alexander Blok, Elfriede Jelinek, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walther Rathenau, and Wagner himself, I presented my first and quite possibly my last lecture in German. I am deeply grateful to the Bamberg Symphony for having invited me to participate in these endeavors. I was able to make several side trips to see opera in neighboring cities; a report will be forthcoming in The New Yorker.