Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Have some Maderna, m'dear

I am now the proud owner of the score of Bruno Maderna's 1972 orchestral piece Aura, nearly twenty inches in height. The USC Music Library has been giving away boxes of scores; I picked up this and Frank Martin's Passacaille, to form an odd pair. Maderna, the most generous and least disputatious of the Darmstadt avant-gardists, died young, at the age of fifty-three, and there is no telling what he might have done if he had lived to a grand old age. In his last couple of years, he composed Biogramma, notable for its glittering textures and intermittently songful lines; the chamber opera Satyricon, a proto-postmodern explosion of collage and pastiche; and the meditative, mystically inclined Ausstrahlung, written for the Persepolis festival of 1971. Aura, for its part, is an intricately structured work in which hectic episodes for minutely subdivided ensembles are interspersed with deep-breathing silences. At the end comes a haunting spell of controlled improvisation, in which horns, trumpets, and flute rotate through eighteen fragments over a slowly shifting mist of muted strings. Aura, Maderna playfully wrote, is "the essence of things, the essence of sound, and something like the aroma that pervades a room from the chicken cooking in the pot."

Kosky's Rheingold at the Royal Opera

Valhalla-on-Thames. The New Yorker, Oct. 2, 2023.

An Elis Hallik moment

The Estonian composer, born in 1986, has a new portrait CD of her works on Kairos, titled Born in Waves.

Current obsessions

A brief contribution to the New Yorker's Goings On About Town section, touching on three subjects that have lately caught my attention: the astounding life story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch; Lauritz Melchior's deft turn in the 1946 comedy Two Sisters from Boston; and Raphaël Pichon's sumptuous new recording of the Monteverdi Vespers, with the Pygmalion ensemble.

For Stephen Gould

The opera world is mourning the American tenor Stephen Gould, who died on Tuesday at the age of sixty-one. For nearly twenty years at Bayreuth he was a committed and accomplished exponent of Wagner's intractable lead tenor roles. I was present for his début there, in Tannhäuser, in 2004, and wrote: "He has a powerful, flexible, beautiful voice, and, wonder of wonders, he is a charismatic actor. He sounded just as vivid at the end of the opera as he did at the beginning, which is a sign that he has the stamina for the biggest Wagner roles." This proved to be the case. What's more, he was a widely loved colleague, noted for his thoughtful engagement with whatever peculiar scenarios directors devised for him.

A Chris Knox moment

A Cassandra Miller moment

If anyone in these disenchanting days is writing music more brazenly beautiful than Cassandra Miller's, I do not know the name. Perfect Offering, its title taken from Leonard Cohen, is based on a recording of bells in rural France, finding instrumental analogues for the bells' rich acoustical properties. The Explore Ensemble, seen above at Wigmore Hall, features the work on a recent Huddersfield Contemporary Records release that also contains pieces by Lisa Illean, Lawrence Dunn, and Rebecca Saunders. Meanwhile, the Black Truffle label has a new Miller album pairing Traveller Song and Thanksong, with performances by the composer, members of London's Plus-Minus Ensemble, and the Quatuor Bozzini. I wrote about Miller's dumbfounding viola concerto I cannot love without trembling earlier this year.

A Robert Fayrfax moment

One more pricey NYC venue

PAC NYC, a $500-million performance space at the World Trade Center, opens tonight. Since classical music plays a fairly minimal role in its programming, I won't be covering it. I do wonder, though, what purpose the venue really serves, aside from giving billionaires another opportunity to congratulate themselves on their largesse. Does PAC NYC fill a need not already satisfied by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Park Avenue Armory, the Shed, etc.? Might the half-billion dollars have better been invested in extant performing-arts organizations? Laurie Anderson, who is performing during the opening week, struck an appropriately skeptical tone in an interview with the New York Times: “Sometimes a place opens and it never finds its audience. I always like it when it’s opened up to the people who live in the neighborhood, but nobody lives in that neighborhood — it’s mostly abandoned offices now. So how do you make a community out of a bunch of empty offices? We’ll see. Maybe you make it by bringing music that’s just so incredible that everybody wants to get on the subway and go down there. That would be great.” Whether a revival of Cats will meet that standard remains to be seen.

The decline of Lincoln Center

I received an unusually large quantity of responses to my recent column about the demise of Mostly Mozart. All of them agreed that something has gone woefully wrong at Lincoln Center. Some of the notes came from musicians and administrators who have had negative experiences with Lincoln Center's new leadership. I also heard from people who live in the Lincoln Center area, affirming that the noise levels from summer events have become hellish. I'd like to highlight a letter that is printed in this week's issue of The New Yorker, from Sol Gaitán, of Cliffside Park NJ. It reads in part: "The implication of 'Summer for the City' ’s programming appears to be that people from particular backgrounds primarily want to be exposed to what they’re already familiar with: that Black people only want hip-hop, Latinos only want salsa, and young people only want standup and 'games spaces.' I feel disrespected. I am Colombian, but I don’t want to hear cumbia all the time. I want to learn about and be acquainted with the unfamiliar. Minorities are complex, and are as prepared as anyone else for 'an encounter with something radically other—a world distant in time or space,' as Ross characterizes classical music. It is depriving people of an opportunity for such encounters, not the performance of this music, that is paternalistic and élitist."

Photo: The Nike World Basketball Festival at Lincoln Center. "#JustDoIt," tweeted Lincoln Center's president and CEO.