Iowa's Bernard Sherman has a helpful summary of recent artistic protests against an apparent rise in neo-nationalism, racism, homophobia, and media censorship in Viktor Orbán's Hungary. András Schiff and Ádám Fischer are in the lead.... Pristine Classical, having lavished much attention on Toscanini, is delving into Furtwängler's wartime recordings. I have never bought the theory that Furtwängler was making clandestine musical protests against the Nazis, but there is undeniably a palpable agony in his account of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth in March, 1942.... The OREL Foundation, dedicated to music suppressed by the Third Reich, is shedding light on the composer Walter Arlen, who emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1939, at the age of eighteen. The setting of Czesław Miłosz that you can hear at the end of Michael Haas's essay is exceptionally beautiful.... It's good to see Sieglinde blogging again. I agree on two recent points: I loved Sondra Radvanovsky's velvety, long-breathed Tosca, flat notes notwithstanding, and I failed to see the greatness of Willy Decker's Traviata, handsome stage pictures notwithstanding.... I've added more remembrances of Milton Babbitt to the tail end of my memorial post. See especially Rakowski and Iverson. I was interested to see that Babbitt's conservative, anti-Communist streak earned him a mention on the right-wing blog Power Line. Will we see more coverage there of challenging modernist music? ... The Los Angeles Philharmonic has put forward a bracing 2011-12 season: the world premiere of John Adams's oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary; the first performance of Shostakovich's operatic fragment Orango; commissioned works from Georg Friedrich Haas, Enrico Chapela, Richard Dubugnon, Anders Hillborg, James Matheson, Philip Glass, Oscar Bettison, and Joseph Pereira; a Don Giovanni with designs by Frank Gehry; and, more predictably, a Dudamel Mahler cycle.
