Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Miscellany

A Stockhausen Moment is upon us: Southbank Centre is presenting a festival entitled Stockhausen: Cosmic Prophet, with the LICHT opera Donnerstag as its centerpiece, while the Holland Festival is preparing to unveil aus LICHT, a three-day condensation of the entire LICHT cycle (May 31-June 10).... The lineup for this year's Dog Star Orchestra series in and around Los Angeles (June 6-22) has been posted. It coincides with two other major new-music events in LA: the revival of Meredith Monk's ATLAS at the LA Phil (June 11-14) and the première of Anthony Davis's The Central Park Five at Long Beach Opera (June 15-23).... The New York Philharmonic's Music of Conscience festival (May 22-June 8) includes a revisiting of John Corigliano's First Symphony, his AIDS memorial, and David Lang's new Fidelio-inspired opera prisoner of the state.... As a prelude to the Philharmonia Orchestra's Weimar Berlin series, which begins on June 9, a nattily outfitted Gavin Plumley has put together an absorbing sequence of introductory videos. Esa-Pekka Salonen will bring much of this material to the LA Phil next season.... Sally Blackwood, Liza Lim, Peggy Polias and Bree van Reyk, all Australian-born composers, have written "Opera and the Doing of Women," a clarion call for gender equality in the opera sphere.

The Shed

Culture by the Yards. The New Yorker, May 28, 2019.

Bookshelf

New publications of interest.

Mark Berry, Arnold Schoenberg (University of Chicago Press)

Damon Krukowski, Ways of Hearing (MIT Press)

Oliver Soden, Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Lorraine Plourde, Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City (Wesleyan)

Michael Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (Yale UP)

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs) [for emphasis]

Linda Catlin Smith

The new issue of musicworks, which some kind person sends me regularly from Toronto, has an evocative profile, by Monica Pearce, of the American-Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, whose spare, crystalline music has found an international following in recent years, thanks in part to the British label another timbre. The composer and author Allen Shawn, who taught Smith in high school, describes her early efforts: "I felt from the very first encounter that she was a composer. The connection between her and the notes she put down was so deep . . . She meant what she wrote, and she heard it and she felt it, and she needed it. That connection was the manifestation of a part of her that was essential, that she had to put on paper; and to me, that's a composer." The issue also has absorbing profiles of Wadada Leo Smith and Samuel Andreyev, by Alexander Varty and Nick Storring respectively.

Weinberg's "Kaddish"

On the New Yorker website, a strong recommendation for the City of Birmingham Symphony's new recording of Mieczysław Weinberg's Symphonies No. 2 and 21. The latter, dedicated to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, stands revealed as one of Weinberg's greatest works — fully the equal of the later symphonies of his longtime friend and mentor Shostakovich.

The Weinberg discography has expanded greatly since I wrote about The Passenger in 2011. Of the twenty-two symphonies — the last was unfinished at his death — only three have yet to make it to disc: the Ninth, the Eleventh, and the Fifteenth. David Fanning, whose full-length Weinberg biography, co-written with Michelle Assay, is eagerly awaited, tells me that the Ninth looks particularly promising based on his study of the score, although the expense of presenting it would be considerable, since no performance materials exist.  Having been through the others — recordings can be found on Neos, Naxos, Chandos, Toccata Classics, and Melodiya — I especially recommend Nos. 6, 12, 13, and 20, though every one of these works is worth hearing. Another essential disc is Melodiya's compendium of the concertos for violin, cello, and flute (No. 1), with Leonid Kogan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexander Korneyev, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra led by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. For Chandos, Urban Claesson gives a gorgeous performance of the 1970 Clarinet Concerto, with Thord Svedlund conducting the Gothenburg Symphony.

Dozens of other Weinberg releases have arrived in recent years. Forces from the Nationaltheater Mannheim have delivered an urgent account of Weinberg's final opera, The Idiot, for SWR. Unofficial recordings of The Portrait and Lady Magnesia are in circulation, though I have not heard them. The Quatuor Danel's traversal of the complete quartets for cpo remains an exceptional feat; the Silesian Quartet is challenging it with a new series on the Accord label. I recommend starting with the Quartets Nos. 4-6. Gidon Kremer has made several superb Weinberg recordings for ECM, as I noted in a 2017 column. Linus Roth and José Gallardo essayed the complete violin-and-piano works for Challenge Classics; Allison Brewster Franzetti has four discs of the piano music on Grand Piano; and Josef Feigelson has surveyed the cello music for Naxos. 

Furtwängler's wartime recordings

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website, May 2, 2019.

The last grandchild

Verena Wagner Lafferentz died on April 19, at the age of 98. She was the last surviving grandchild of Richard Wagner — and it is astonishing to contemplate that the grandchild of a man born in 1813 was alive until last week. (Not quite as astonishing, to be sure, as the fact that two grandsons of John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States, born 1790, are still with us.) Mark Berry makes the striking observation that Verena must have been one of the very last living people to have known Hitler personally. Hitler doted on the Wagner grandchildren from the late 1920s onward, and while Wieland received most of his attention he appears also to have enjoyed Verena's company. Her husband, Bodo Lafferentz, was a high-ranking SS officer who oversaw the Strength Through Joy program that brought wounded soldiers to Bayreuth during the war. In later years, Verena appears to have felt no responsibility to help us understand Hitler or to shed light on her family's complicity in the regime. At least she avoided dying on the Führer's birthday.

Nightafternight playlist

Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21; Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with the Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer (DG, out May 3)

Schubert, Sonatas D958 and 959, Impromptus D899, Drei Klavierstücke; András Schiff (ECM)

Stefan Prins, Augmented: Generation Kill, Piano Hero, Third Space, Not I, and other works; Nadar Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Stephanie Ginsburgh, Yaron Deutsch (Kairos CD / DVD)

Black Composers Series, 1974–1978 (Sony)

Dominique Schafer, Vers une présence réelle and other works; Matthias Kuhn conducting the ensemble proton bern (Kairos)

Juri Seo, Respiri and other works; Argus Quartet, Joann Whang (Innova, out May 24)

Mr. Handel's Dinner: Concertos, Sonatas, and Chaconnes by Handel and His Inner Circle; Maurice Steger, La Cetra (Harmonia Mundi)

Pulitzer Prize 2019

Congratulations to Ellen Reid, whose opera p r i s m, on a libretto by Roxie Perkins, has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The première took place at Redcat, in Los Angeles, under the auspices of L.A. Opera and Beth Morrison Projects; I wrote about it here. I first encountered Reid's work when she contributed a memorable outdoor scene to Yuval Sharon's multi-composer Hopscotch project. Andrew Norman's Sustain was one of two finalists, alongside James Romig's Still. I heard Sustain at the LA Phil and found it be one of the strongest American orchestral works of recent years. I missed Romig's piece, which was recorded by New World, but will be sure to explore it. For an exploration of recent trends in the music Pulitzer, read Will Robin in the New York Times. After the surprise win last year by the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, it is tempting to say that the Pulitzer has reverted to the old routine. However, the likes of Reid, Du Yun, and Henry Threadgill hardly conform to academic models and represent a real diversification in terms of style and subject matter. The lack of a celebrity name will undoubtedly minimize attention this year, but these choices still matter.

Tyshawn Sorey

Shape-Shifter. The New Yorker, April 22, 2019.