I have been reading with much enjoyment Dialogues on Listening, Composing, and Culture, a new book of conversations between Julian Anderson and Christopher Dingle. I was, however, somewhat nonplussed to come across Anderson saying this of my book The Rest Is Noise: "It has its points and it’s lively, though there are huge areas of music, like Sibelius and Nielsen and all sorts of contemporary composers that are either barely mentioned, or neglected." One of my fifteen chapters is, in fact, devoted almost exclusively to Sibelius. Not only that, in a discussion of Tapiola I quote from Anderson's excellent article "Sibelius and Contemporary Music." So it goes.
Wagnerism
Love in the time of COVID
The LA Phil has released the first video in its SOUND/STAGE series, drawing on performances that were filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in early August. I attended a couple of the recording sessions and wrote about them in The New Yorker this week. I'm struck again by the bittersweet atmosphere, the tinge of melancholy, which hangs over the lovely musicmaking. That tinge strikes me as an honest and necessary. To spout clichés about "reimagining" concert formats, to issue boilerplate language about resilience and resourcefulness, ignores the elemental struggles that so many musicians are undergoing, not to mention the grief that has invaded so many lives.
The conjunction of Peter Lieberson's "Amor mio, si muero y tú no mueres" ("My love, if I die and you don't") with the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony brings to mind a personal memory. In college, I took a theory class with Lieberson, and one day he detoured from a close reading of Schubert's "Erlkönig" into a rhapsody over the Adagietto. I recall him listening along to Bernstein's DG recording, his eyes closed in bliss, the rigors of harmonic analysis momentarily forgotten.
Previously: Fervor, For Peter Lieberson.
A Harold Shapero moment
From a fascinating new disc of Shapero's orchestral music by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Of course this music is very heavily reminiscent of Stravinsky, but some passages are startlingly original, such as this recurring texture of shrill, spiraling winds and droning brass (matching 6:45 in the video):
The LA Phil returns to the Bowl
Solo for Orchestra. The New Yorker, Sept. 28, 2020.
