Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

An Odeya Nini moment

From her performances of I See You, during Wild Up's Darkness Sounding festival.

For Hans Küng

The great liberal theologian has died at the age of ninety-three. I immediately thought of his remarkable 1982 essay on Parsifal, mention of which I sadly cut from the final draft of Wagnerism. It is a passionate and personal interpretation, one to which Wagner scholars might object. It is worth reading and pondering all the same:

Only if redemption takes place now in the world (as demonstrated by Parsifal) and is not simply redemption of the world, will the theological discussion of redemption lose its ideological character. Only if redemption past, redemption present and redemption future remain unsevered, will it be possible to make good its liberating humane potentiality. Then the talk of renunciation itself, this so often abused and misunderstood category of Christian asceticism, loses its false connotation. Instinctual renunciation is then no longer an individualistically limited, moralizing postulate of private self-castigation. In an age of short supplies of raw materials and squandermania, renunciation assumes the character of dire social urgency: the recantation of the will to power and success in favor of sympathy with man and nature. Sympathy as an appeal and motivation for an alternative political practice. Renunciation is a challenge to humane commitment, in order that man remains man and this world remains habitable for man and animal!

Pope Francis has talked about Wagner in vaguely similar terms.

An Eastman moment

From Wild Up's vibrant new recording of Femenine.

A Sebastian Hilli moment

Un moment Mouton

On Mank and Orson Welles

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Das Lied in Cincinnati

Worth watching especially for Sean Panikkar's contribution.

Andrew McIntosh recital

Featuring music of Leslie Lang, Nicki Chen, Brandon Becker, Tim Feeney, Jacob Grabbe, Eric Lennartson, Daniel Newman-Lessler, Adam Zuckerman, Sara Brown, Nicholas Deyoe, Takemitsu, Bartók, and McIntosh himself.

Proustian CDs

Music Regained. The New Yorker, March 22, 2021.

Miscellany

Two video streams from the Bavarian Radio Symphony give a foretaste of the incipient Simon Rattle era in Munich. The first pairs Messiaen's Et Exspecto with a premiere by Ondřej Adámek; the second makes an unexpected but very Rattlean link between Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary to Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain.... I hugely enjoyed a recent concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, not only on account of a Thomas Adès premiere (Shanty — Over the Sea) and an intense performance of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa, but also because of the happy explosions of bravos and applause, signs of musical life resuming Down Under.... Also worth exploring: the 2021 edition of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.... A few months back I heard from Scott Spillman, an editor at the Colorado Encyclopedia, asking if I knew anything more about Jack Bradley and Charles Burrell, two Black musicians who joined the Colorado Symphony in 1946 and 1949 — among the first to be hired by a major American orchestra. I'd mentioned Bradley in an article last fall. I had no new leads, but Scott found much more: follow the links in this entry for the Colorado Symphony.... Congratulations to Hannah Edgar, who, with the help of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, will be writing reviews for the Chicago Tribune.... On Tuesday I will talk about Wagner and Wagnerism in conjunction with SF Opera's online Ring Festival. My interlocutor will be none other than Tony Kushner.