I've been listening to recordings by the Italian conductor and composer — no relation to the filmic Coppolas, evidently — who specialized in French repertory but seemed to render everything with lucidity and vigor. (Pristine's recent release of Schumann, Wagner, and Strauss is a case in point.) Coppola's account of the overture to Reyer's Sigurd, above, makes you think that the opera is worthy of revival — although you'd need a conductor of similar gifts, not to mention another Georges Thill.
Wagnerism
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Fremstad
"The 'Liebestod' as Fremstad sang it was a paean to annihilation," Samuel Chotzinoff said of her legendary Isolde under Mahler, at the Met in 1908. "By her rapturous otherworldly smile as she gazed at her dead lover, she illuminated the hidden idea of the story — that it was not King Mark who had stood between her and Tristan, but life itself."
Nightafternight playlist
New records of interest.
— Das Ewig-Weibliche: Marlis Petersen sings Goethe Lieder; with Jendrik Springer, piano (Harmonia Mundi)
— Nicholas Ludford, Missa Regnum mundi, Richard Pygott, Salve regina; Blue Heron (Blue Heron)
— Wolfgang Rihm, Astralis and other choral works; RIAS Kammerchor (Harmonia Mundi)
— Prokofiev, Sixth Sonata, works of Saint-Saëns and Liszt; Behzod Abduraimov (Decca)
— Britten, War Requiem; Ian Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Sabina Cvilak, Gianandrea Noseda conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (LSO Live)
— Terrestre: works of Saariaho, Donatoni, Carter, Boulez, Fujikura; Claire Chase, members of ICE (New Focus)
— Saint-Saëns, Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1; Geoffrey Burleson (Grand Piano)
— Barbara Monk Feldman, The Northern Shore, In the Small Time of a Desert Flower; Sabat/Clarke, Aki Takahashi (Mode)
— Beethoven, Sonata No. 32, Ligeti, Etudes Books I and II; Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch, available May 15)
— John Luther Adams, songbirdsongs, Strange Birds Passing; Calithumpian Consort, NEC Contemporary Music Ensemble (Mode)
— William Bolcom, Gospel Preludes; Gregory Hand, organ (Naxos)
— Nicholas Deyoe, with throbbing eyes; Formalist Quartet, red fish blue fish (populist)
Into the Streets May 1st miscellany
Occupy Guitarmy is seeking a thousand musicians for a May Day march from Bryant Park to Union Square. The setlist includes "¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!"... Tom Service has launched a Contemporary Classical guide at the Guardian website. "Contemporary" is broadly defined as "born in the past hundred years," plus Elliott Carter.... On the first weekend in May, Line Upon Line Percussion in Austin, Texas, will present a Xenakis festival, with performances of Pléïades and Persephassa and a JACK Quartet show. Watch a preview clip.... A cool Ensemble ACJW program at (Le) Poisson Rouge this Sunday: selections from The Art of Fugue intermingled with Michael Gordon's The Low Quartet, Feldman's Durations I, Reich's New York Counterpoint, David Lang's Wed, and Andriessen's Workers Union.... A few other notable NYC-area events in the coming week: a David Daniels / Mark Morris collaboration at Princeton on May 3; a new piece by Tristan Perich with Yarn/Wire at ISSUE Project Room tomorrow night; the big Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival at BAM May 2-4; a Kaija Saariaho program with ICE at Roulette on May 2; Joseph Lin and the Camerata Notturna in a Bachian concert on May 5.... Last Sunday, Norman Scribner, the founding leader of the Choral Arts Society in Washington DC, bid farewell with the German Requiem. The Post ran a profile of the conductor and, of course, an Anne Midgette review. Scribner's son David is a gifted DC-area chef.... The spring 2012 issue of the excellent experimental-music magazine Signal to Noise has an absorbing piece, by William Gibson, on Nonesuch new-music LPs of the 60s and 70s: it includes the essential detail that Richard Taruskin played viola da gamba on the recording of Eric Salzman's The Nude Paper Sermon.... Was Kevin Puts's Silent Night the best American composition of 2011, as a distinguished Pulitzer Prize jury concluded? Judge for yourself by listening at NPR or at the Minnesota Opera website.... I know nothing about the product, but I enjoyed this ad for Klispch headphones, with the St. Louis Symphony's Danny Lee playing the Kodály solo cello sonata.
Where would you put Mr. James Joyce?
Lists are dumb, but they have a certain persuasive power. I remember poring over a list of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time that Roger Ebert included in one of his video guides of the nineteen-eighties: it led me to Aguirre, Wrath of God, Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven, and the film that will forever head my personal list — The Third Man. Roger, a writerly hero of mine, dislikes making such lists, but acquiesces in the drill when the proprietors of the Sight and Sound poll come calling. This time, with his customary devotion to the visionary impulse (“Our civilization is starving for great images" is his favorite Werner Herzog saying), Roger has admitted The Tree of Life to his pantheon. No one is asking me, but I'd be tempted to pick, in addition to the above, Andrei Rublev, Vertigo, Chinatown, Touch of Evil, Playtime, The Godfather Part II, La Dolce Vita, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's only nine; I want to think about The Tree of Life a little longer.
Ojai 2013
From an Ojai Festival press release: "[Mark] Morris will present his extraordinary Mark Morris Dance Group in a two-part evening of dance to the music of Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinsky, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Charles Ives. Mr. Morris will lead an evening of social dancing, and will narrate Sir William Walton’s Façade, a highly entertaining series of musical settings to verses by Dame Edith Sitwell. There will be a late-night concert of music by John Cage. Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki will perform a two-piano recital featuring Olivier Messiaen’s haunting Visions de l’Amen. One program will feature Lou Harrison’s Suite for Symphonic Strings and John Luther Adams's evocative For Lou Harrison. The trio The Bad Plus will perform its own highly original version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The Festival will conclude with a two-part concert that features Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Percussion, Henry Cowell’s transfixing Atlantis, and Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Piano and Gamelan." Yes.
Kessler on music
A portrait of Kessler by Edvard Munch.
In last week's New Yorker, I wrote about Journey to the Abyss, Laird Easton's English translation of the early diaries of Count Harry Kessler. As promised, I have typed up some music-related passages from the diaries — namely, Kessler's dinner with Mahler; the origins of Der Rosenkavalier; Shaw on Mozart; the androgynous Schoenberg-Nijinsky ballet that never was; the premiere of The Rite of Spring; a glimpse of Richard Strauss's anti-war stance during World War I; and the Mahler performance in Zurich that seemed to herald world revolution. There are more musical gems to be found in the diaries, which, in a better world, would have been a runaway bestseller.
March 18, 1907, Vienna:
Sat with the Mahlers in the loge for the premiere of Iphigenie in Aulis. Afterward stayed up late at Hartmann's with the Mahlers, the Molls, Burchardt, etc. Someone said that good art is never popular. I replied, "Not true! For example, Wagner." Then someone asked why certain great artists had found a public and others not. Mahler said that with Wagner it was because he had been the first great composer who painted nature. The romantics, Weber, etc., made a beginning, but Wagner had carried this to completion. With him as in nature everything remains in flux. Nowhere is there a conclusion, nothing returns in exactly the same way as in earlier music. This is what distinguishes post-Wagnerian, modern music above all from pre-Wagnerian music. One brings back the same motifs, to be sure, but in a completely new performance [Kessler writes Durchführung; "development" might have been preferable]. So you can avoid boring the public and you have the same flux as in reality.
Parisian footnotes
In this week's New Yorker I write about a few recent musical events in Paris. A rare production of Auber's La Muette de Portici, at the Opéra-Comique, is the main focus, but I also look in on the Orchestre de Paris, Cité de la Musique, and IRCAM. I just missed Cavalli's Didone at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and Nixon in China at the Châtelet; you can watch a video of the latter online.
As the above photo attests, Jean Nouvel's design for the Philharmonie, the big concert hall at Cité de la Musique, is beginning to take shape. Projected to open in 2014, the hall will host the Orchestre de Paris and various other series that currently unfold at the Salle Pleyel. As I note in the column, programming at Cité de la Musique is extraordinarily impressive. You can browse through the 2012-13 season here: one particularly ingenious program combines pieces from the Well-Tempered Clavier, on the harpsichord, with portions of Shostakovich's great cycle of Preludes and Fugues; Andreas Staier and Alexander Melnikov are the players.
At IRCAM, I caught a concert devoted to nine young composers studying at the institute: Diana Soh, Tatiana Catanzaro, Elvira Garifzyanova, Heera Kim, Lisa Streich, Maxime Chandelier, Samuel Andreyev, Adam Maor, and Laurent Durupt. Each piece paired a solo instrument (the wind, string, and brass families were all represented) with electronics. I found Streich's PIETÀ especially riveting. A Swede with a predilection for religious and philosophical subject-matter, Streich here makes use of a cello outfitted with small motors on the outside of its body and microphones on the inside. One of the motors has strips of paper attached to it, which quietly strike the strings below the bridge as the wheel turns. The cello part — executed beautifully by Michael Bialobroda — leans on isolated phrases, sustained tones, and trills, rarely rising above a low dynamic and creating a mood of prayerful intensity. I was reminded of some of Sofia Gubaidulina's more experimental work, but the vision seems thoroughly original. I also admired Garifzyanova's Aurora Borealis, not least because of its persuasive structure. There was much else to like in the program, but these two pieces stood out. Young musicians from the Paris Conservatoire gave committed performances; particularly notable was the virtuosic trombone playing of Marc Abry, in Maor's BEYRUTH 15072006.
No musical soul who passes through Paris in coming months should miss the Debussy exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie; it closes June 11. I won't soon forget the astonishing experience of hearing Florent Boffard play Schoenberg's Klavierstücke Opus 11 in the presence of Monet's Nymphéas. As much as I enjoyed Les Arts Florissants' exquisite renditions of Charpentier's Leçons de Ténèbres, which I sped across Paris to catch the same night, I kept thinking back to that double explosion of sound and color. Boffard, who followed Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the pianist of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and now pursues an independent career, is a formidable and intense musician.
As for La Muette, I'd like to acknowledge a rich body of scholarly work on the opera and its context: the opening chapter of Jane Fulcher's book The Nation's Image; the corresponding chapter of Anselm Gerhard's The Urbanization of Opera; Sonia Slatin's 1979 essay "Opera and Revolution," from the Journal of Musicological Research; material on the remarkable tenor-revolutionary Adolphe Nourrit in Diane Hallman's Opera, Liberalism, and Anti-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century France; and the section on Auber in Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. Fans of French grand opera can now look forward to a staging of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable at Covent Garden, in December.
The Curse of the Gothic
As promised below, I attended a Sarasota Film Festival screening of The Curse of the Gothic Symphony, a documentary about the Australian premiere of Havergal Brian's mammoth First Symphony, the "Gothic," in 2010. It's a slightly overwrought but generally delightful movie, its appeal likely to extend beyond the fairly limited circle of people who believe that Brian is a neglected master of twentieth-century symphonic writing. The "curse" in question is the malign force that has allegedly hovered over and within the work since its inception, when Brian is said to have gone to bed certain nights and found upon waking that an unknown hand had scribbled devilish curses in his manuscript. Randall Wood, the director of the documentary, makes too much of the diabolical rumors, staging spooky reënactments of episodes from Brian's life and cueing lightning and thunder. Nonetheless, it does seem that the quest to present the "Gothic" in Brisbane — a nearly lifelong endeavor on the part of the broadcaster Gary Thorpe — encountered more than the usual obstacles: financing falls through, choruses fall behind schedule, presenters get cold feet, and a mood of perpetual panic sets in. Colorful personalities add fuel to the fire: John Curro, the conductor, goes around predicting imminent doom, and then, at the end, happily pronounces that he always knew it would work out.
Some of the best footage comes from a trip to the United Kingdom. In one scene we are privileged to observe a meeting of the Havergal Brian Society, at which the projected Brisbane performance and other pressing matters are discussed. At one point, a member asks what might be done to raise Brian's profile during the period of the London Olympics, to which another sagely responds, "I wonder if the sports audience is the most receptive." The genial Scottish critic Malcolm MacDonald follows the Brisbane saga from afar, comments on the composer's life and work (with the inevitable cat in his lap), and finally makes the journey Down Under for the big event. Then there is Olga Pringle, the composer's nonagenarian daughter, who is seen in her snowbound house in Ballater, Scotland, feeding blackbirds on her windowsill and suggesting that her father's mightiest creation might best be "put in a box and buried." We get a few glimpses of Brian himself, via BBC television footage; his personal motto, we are told, was "Nothing matters." Comic touches aside, the documentary is a fine portrait of obsession in action. Both the film and the symphony carry an epigraph from Faust: "Whoever exerts himself with endless striving / That man we can redeem."
Make Music NY 2012
Xenakis on the lake, 2010.
Make Music NY, the midsummer music bacchanal, has released some details of its 2012 edition, which falls this year on a Thursday. The most logistically ambitious offering is a Central Park Lake performance of Alvin Curran's Maritime Rites, with ninety musicians from West Point and Montclair State playing on rowboats. The Mass Appeal series carries on with what is billed as the American premiere of Prokofiev's Sonata for Unaccompanied Violins — the piece was originally intended to be played by dozens of violinists in unison. Satie's Vexations, all eighteen hours of it, will be heard in a version for vibraphones. (There will be various performances of the Satie-Cage marathon at Make Music events around the world.) In the pop zone, Punk Island returns, Colombian chiva buses make their way around the Upper East Side, and jazz combos work the High Line. More will be announced in coming weeks. The Make Music idea is slowly spreading in North America: Los Angeles, Denver, Baltimore, and Santa Fe are to introduce festivals this year, joining New York, Chicago, Pasadena, and Vancouver.
Previously: Symphony of the City, Make Music snapshots.
The Gothic in Florida
Arriving at the Sarasota Film Festival for showings of Gayby ("Wonderful ... as strong as anything at [SXSW] — Joe Gross, Austin American-Statesman), I've found an unexpected item of classical interest on the film schedule: The Curse of the Gothic Symphony, a documentary about the 2010 Brisbane performance of Havergal Brian's symphonic monster. I'll report after tomorrow's screening.
Miscellany: Dargel, Ashley, Mahler in Helena, etc.
Out of Town News, Harvard Square.
This weekend at Galapagos and (Le) Poisson Rouge, Le Train Bleu will put on a show called Prison Life, pairing Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together and Attica with Corey Dargel's More Last Words from Texas, the composer-vocalist's second setting of the final words of inmates about to be killed by the state of Texas. Dargel will also sing/speak the Rzewski pieces. Michael Gordon and Jacob TV fill out the program.... New York City Opera announces a limited but enticing group of works for the 2012-13 season: Adès's Powder Her Face, Britten's The Turn of the Screw, Rossini's Mosè in Egitto, and Offenbach's La Périchole. Performances at BAM and City Center.... Robert Ashley's The Old Man Lives in Concrete unfolds at Roulette April 25-28. There's a video of the composer talking to Richard Carrick.... Speaking of Carrick — his Either/Or Festival unfolds at the Kitchen on April 26 and 27. George Lewis has written a piece for the occasion.... John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles has a revival next week at the Manhattan School, in a reduced version.... A new group called The Declassified, inspired by the community-minded Carnegie / Juilliard program know as The Academy, will be launched in New York on April 26, with a concert at Bargemusic. A great many talented young players on this roster; I recognize quite a few from Marlboro.... The Yale Baroque Opera Project, the brainchild of the great Baroque scholar Ellen Rosand, presents Monteverdi's Return of Ulyssses May 4-5.... A few years back I noted a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony in Helena, Montana. Now the Helena Symphony is taking on the Eighth, mustering nearly five hundred performers. (Via Allen Lefohn.) ... Hannah Lash's Requiem Pro Avibus Mortuis, which "mourns the loss of birds that have either become extinct or endangered," has its premiere at Park Avenue Christian Church this Sunday.... Worth exploring: the John Cage Living Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts's online incarnation.
Trinity talk
Many thanks to all who attended my talk on twentieth-century sacred music last night at Trinity Church. I was particularly happy to see David Elliott from WHRB and Bettina Norton from the Boston Musical Intelligencer. During the Q&A, I somehow digressed into telling the story of how I once began giggling helplessly during a performance of the Schnittke Requiem, in Boston in 1988, with the composer sitting some ten rows in front of me. I can only pray he didn't hear the disturbance; I certainly made no mention of it when I interviewed Schnittke at the Watergate in 1994. Today I spent many happy hours browsing through the awe-inspiring stacks of Widener Library, where I tracked down a copy — a signed copy, no less — of Joséphin Péladan's Le Fils des étoiles. Satie's extraordinary piano pieces of the same title played a role in my lecture; a full playlist is below. At a later date I will announce details of my new religious denomination, the Secret Order of the Invisible Temple of the Quietly Dissonant Hexachord.
