Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

For Larry Kramer

A truly great man is gone. When I was coming out of the closet in 1990—isolated, fearful, semi-suicidal—his words were a blazing torch to me. Perhaps he saved my life, as he did the lives of thousands of others. There is no need to wish for his memory to be eternal.

The Met and Bang on a Can marathons

Intermission. The New Yorker, May 25, 2020.

Igor Levit

The Fearless Pianist. The New Yorker, May 18, 2020.

Archives of the new

Three notable contemporary operas can be seen online on a short-term basis. The Metropolitan Opera is streaming Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin, in the production by Robert Lepage. While this staging pales somewhat in comparison to the Peter Sellars original, it does justice to the score and is riveting from start to finish. The stream ends at 630pm ET on May 7. Opera Philadelphia, meanwhile, is reprising Philip Venables's Denis & Katya, one of the highlights of the 2o19 season, and LA Opera and Beth Morrison Projects are streaming Du Yun's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel's Bone, in lieu of the live production they had planned for this spring.

Víkingur Ólafsson, Liza Lim

Rally of the Birds. The New Yorker, May 4, 2020.

Yours in Brahms

Grieving with Brahms, on the New Yorker website, April 16, 2020.

For Krzysztof Penderecki

Krzysztof Penderecki, who died on March 29th at the age of eighty-six, was a composer who made a huge impact on me when I first heard his classic pieces of the sixties and early seventies.  Alas, I found the vast majority of his later music to be of much lesser interest, though I attempted many times to warm to it. I turn the microphone over to Tim Rutherford-Johnson, who has studied Penderecki's music in depth.

Yuval Sharon's Sweet Land

Midnight Trains. The New Yorker, April 6, 2020.

Go here to watch the video of Sweet Land.

Photos above and below by Casey Kringlen.

Video of the day: Toronto's Appalachian Spring

Bayreuth in Milwaukee

The Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 13, 1891.