Previously: The marginal lament of a D.C. native.
October 27, 2024 | Permalink
In the remaining days of October you can listen at this link to Lim's A Sutured World, with Nicolas Altstaedt as the soloist and Edward Gardner conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony.
October 27, 2024 | Permalink
The pocketbook and certain little things talked loud and noble,
And got in the way; too many readers go by the headlines,
party men will muddle up the facts,
So a good many citizens voted as grandpa always did,
or thought a change for the sake of change
seemed natural enough.
“It’s raining, lets throw out the weather man,
Kick him out! Kick him out! Kick him out!
Kick him out! Kick him!”
Prejudice and politics, and the stand-patters came in strong,
and yelled, “Slide back! Now you’re safe, that’s the easy way!”
Then the timid smiled and looked relieved,
“We’ve got enough to eat, to hell with ideals!” ...
— Charles Ives
October 25, 2024 | Permalink
Joshua Kosman, retired San Francisco Chronicle critic, comments in his new newsletter on a recent performance of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Cello Concerto at the San Francisco Symphony, under the composer's direction: "I don’t want to start penning weekly rants about Salonen’s departure, or the short-sightedness that has led to that incomprehensible institutional failure. But there was no way to witness the excitement of this event — the outpouring of love directed from the hall to the stage, the ovation that brought Salonen and Eudeikis back for curtain call after curtain call, the enthusiasm with which this superb but not especially accessible work was received — and not wonder about the choices and priorities that have brought the organization to its current impasse."
October 24, 2024 | Permalink
Several significant premières took place during the 2024 edition of the Donaueschingen Festival, and, as usual, SWR has made the concerts available online. At around 1 hr 14m in the video above you can hear Chaya Czernowin's Unforeseen dusk: bones into wings, for six amplified voices, orchestra, and electronics — a minutely teeming natural soundscape, with the vocal soloists calling out in sometimes desperate, sometimes dreamlike tones. Also very much worth a listen is a concert featuring George Lewis's The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a majestically wild piece written for the great Roscoe Mitchell (with obbligato AI piano), and Simon Steen-Andersen's kaleidoscopic grosso, composed for Yarn/Wire. Mark Andre's sprawling, meditative piano-and-electronics work …selig ist…, which Jeffrey Arlo Brown previewed for the New York Times, can be heard here.
Previously: Donaueschingen 2012.
October 21, 2024 | Permalink
Happy birthday, Mr. Ives! Jeremy Denk marks the anniversary.
October 20, 2024 | Permalink
In the spring, Columbia University hosted a centennial concert for the late Chou Wen-chung, a composer who first won notice as a student of Varèse and later established his own identity through mediations between East and West. His output was not large, yet it exhibited unfailing craftsmanship and unflagging inspiration. On Sunday October the 13th, you can see a webcast of that Columbia concert, with the Continuum ensemble under the direction of Joel Sachs. Featured is the American premiere of a recently rediscovered piece titled In the Mode of Shang.
October 11, 2024 | Permalink
The New York Post's Page Six section, a space that infrequently turns its attention to classical music, reports on a bizarre attack that Peter Gelb recently unleashed on Zachary Woolfe, the classical critic of the New York Times. At a donor event on the Upper East Side, Gelb apparently said: “There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics — not all critics, some critics — about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience and should be available to more people and some critics might [prefer to] keep it sacred, in some ways, for themselves." He went on to claim that "some critics" were promoting “the operas of Elliot [sic] Carter or pieces that I don’t believe would have popular success." This is nonsense, on several levels. First, Elliott Carter wrote only one opera, the forty-seven-minute-long What Next?, and I'm unaware of anyone campaigning for it to be performed at the Met. (Perhaps it could appear on a double bill with Morton Feldman's Neither.) The remark exhibits Gelb's basic indifference to contemporary music. Second, Woolfe is hardly an inflexible advocate of modernist complexity; Gelb seems to have confused him with the late Charles Wuorinen. Third, the Met is lavishly covered in the pages of the Times, and it's rather ungrateful for the company's leader to attack it on that score. Finally, after nearly two decades at the Met, Gelb ought to have developed thicker skin when it comes to bad press. It's a recurring syndrome: recall his 2012 attempt to shut down adverse coverage of Met productions in Opera News. Instead of conjuring imaginary media conspiracies, Gelb should focus on serious challenges, of which there is no lack.
October 09, 2024 | Permalink