Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

A-AW5: Tristan Perich

When I attended La Monte Young's Trio at his Dream House in 2005, I sat between Perich and John Luther Adams. I realized this only later, not knowing either of them at the time.

A-AW4: Lisa Streich

The composer's website may be found here. Under "Music," you can hear various of her works, including PIETÀ, which I wrote about last year.

NY Phil Biennial

The New York Philharmonic has found a splendid way to mark the anniversary of the Rite. No, they're not playing the piece; rather, they have announced details of the new-music Biennial, to be held in late May and early June, 2014. In a culture saturated in nostalgia for a nineteenth-century past, the Rite signalled that new visions were not only possible but essential: it commenced a reordering of the repertory and of the very mindset of the classical orchestra. I can think of no finer tribute to the spirit of the work than to focus relentlessly on the new — and the Philharmonic, to its credit, is doing so.

A-AW3: Stefan Prins

For the third installment of Anti-Anniversary Week (explanation here), I'm reposting Stefan Prins's Generation Kill, which I encountered at the 2012 Donaueschingen Festival and chose as one of my events of the year. It's a musical meditation on video-game technology, social media, and drone warfare, in which live performers undergo instant manipulation by way of Playstation devices. "Meditation" is, in fact, not quite the right word; this is a work of fierce, unsettling tension, one that got under the skin even of a seen-it-all German new-music audience. Performing above are members of the Nadar Ensemble, with the composer himself supervising the sound mix.

Anti-anniversary week (2)

Anna Þorvaldsdóttir's Streaming Arhythmia, from her 2011 CD Rhízōma. As noted below, Anna will be featured in a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait next season.

Anti-anniversary week (1)

In joint tribute to Wagner, who famously said "Kinder! macht Neues!" ("Children, make something new!"), and to Stravinsky, the enfant terrible of 1913, I'll be featuring younger composers this week, with an eye toward those who seem to be finding new sounds and new fusions. Today, Raphaël Cendo's scratch data, performed by Tom De Cock. Cendo is featured in a concert by Ensemble Linea at CUNY this Friday. For Cendo at his black-metal wildest, see Introduction aux ténèbres.

Rite 100

It may not be entirely a coincidence that the centennial of the Rite of Spring scandal, which arrives on Wednesday, follows closely upon the Wagner bicentennial. At last fall's "Reassessing the Rite" conference, which I covered for The New Yorker, Annegret Fauser brought up the Wagner-Rite relationship, noting that in the weeks leading up to the première the French papers had been full of Wagneriana, including accounts of the legendary Tannhäuser riot at the Opéra in 1861. In a way, Fauser suggested, Paris audiences may have been primed to restage that affair: Stravinsky would be the new Wagner, the foreign musician of the future. It's a fascinating speculation — although, of course, Parisian audiences needed little historical prompting to go into culture-riot mode. Nijinsky's suggestive dancing in Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" had set off a brouhaha the previous year. (Incidentally, Fauser's new book Sounds of War makes a major contribution to our understanding of music during the World War II period.)

Suffering somewhat from anniversary fatigue, I'll let others carry the Rite baton this week. Will Robin is completing his season-long immersion at Reflections on the Rite; WQXR is hosting Rite Fever, with a twenty-four marathon scheduled for Wednesday; and NPR's Deceptive Cadence has had a string of interesting posts. Note this excellent overview of the Rite and jazz; it includes a link to Charlie Parker's Stravinsky homage at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1949. (Go all the way to the bottom of this page.) Note also the rise of the Zany Rite Video meme; Will has a collection of them, and has contributed his own striking kitty choreographies. The Bad Plus have added a node to the Rite-jazz nexus with their vivid arrangement of the score; in June, Mark Morris will make of it a dance called Spring, Spring, Spring, to be introduced at Ojai North. (The Bad Plus will also play the piece at Ojai proper, sans danse.) The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées will mark the anniversary by presenting Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky in two back-to-back Rite performances: the first of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer's re-creation of the original Nijinsky choreography, the second of Sasha Waltz's new Rite staging. [More: you can watch the Arte broadcast here.] In New York, of course, nothing is happening, although Stravinsky will be the focus of this summer's Bard Music Festival.

We're being bombarded by reissues of Rite recordings: Decca has released a twenty-disc box set, and Sony has remastered Bernstein's feisty NY Phil version, with extremely detailed notes by Jonathan Cott. I'd like to draw attention to Pristine Classical's superb new transfer of Stravinsky's own 1929 account, with the Walther Straram orchestra. As Richard Taruskin has pointed out in his centenary lecture, modern renditions of the Rite, vivacious and showily perfect, have robbed the work of some of its ominous energy; this recording, while full of mistakes and messy moments, has a raw, spooky power all its own. Back on the Wagner front, Pristine has done wonders for Furtwängler's La Scala Ring.

At the grave of Elliott Carter

Photograph by Jason Shure.

This is Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, which also holds Leonard Bernstein and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The headstone for Mr. Carter's wife, Helen, is just out of sight on the lower right; his parents, Elliott and Florence, are above him.

Previously: Dr. Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, X. Scharwenka, Enescu, Rachmaninov

Miscellany: Volkswagen Kraft, etc.

Reminders about archived concerts online: you can listen to the New York Philharmonic's Kraft at Volkswagen, a Curtis Symphony Turangalîla, Riccardo Muti's Franck Symphony with the Chicago (an account I praised last fall), and, of course, all of the Spring for Music events (don't miss David Carpenter's powerful reading of the Schnittke Viola Concerto, with the National Symphony)... Miller Theatre has announced a sterling twenty-fifth anniversary season: featured are John Zorn, Steven Schick, Kaija Saariaho, Joan Tower, Steve Reich, G. F. Haas, Rand Steiger, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, Roger Reynolds, Unsuk Chin, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and Liza Lim.... Taking issue with Leonard Slatkin's remarks about his much-lauded Spring for Music event, Kyle Gann has an excellent defense of the Ives First Symphony, which I, too, prize highly. The great recording is by Morton Gould, whose own Third Symphony is another Spring for Music highlight.... Congratulations to Derek Bermel, who has been named the new artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra.... Joyce DiDonato, diva de nos jours, is submitting the title of her "greatest hits" compilation to popular vote. I like "ReJoyce."

For Henri Dutilleux

The solitary French master, who maintained as high a standard for his work as any composer since Berg, died yesterday at the age of ninety-seven. Paul Griffiths has written a beautiful obituary for the New York Times. One way to remember Dutilleux, or to become acquainted with him, would be to pick up Esa-Pekka Salonen's superb new disc on DG.

Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music

Hilma af Klint, Parsifal Series.

 

My third book, a study of Wagner's sprawling influence on literature, the arts, intellectual life, and politics, will be published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.

Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

 

Here is the table of contents:

PRELUDE: Death in Venice

1. RHEINGOLD: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the “Ring”

2. TRISTAN CHORD: Baudelaire and the Symbolists

3. SWAN KNIGHT: Victorian England and Gilded-Age America

4. GRAIL TEMPLE: Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner

5. HOLY GERMAN ART: The Kaiserreich and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

6. NIBELHEIM: Jewish and Black Wagner

7. VENUSBERG: Feminist and Gay Wagner

8. BRÜNNHILDE’S ROCK: Willa Cather and the Singer-Novel

9. MAGIC FIRE: Modernism, 1900 to 1914

10. NOTHUNG: The First World War and Hitler's Youth

11. RING OF POWER: Revolution and Russia

12. FLYING DUTCHMAN: “Ulysses,” “The Waste Land,” “The Waves”

13. SIEGFRIED’S DEATH: Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann

14. RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES: Film from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Apocalypse Now”

15. THE WOUND: Wagnerism after 1945

POSTLUDE

Wagner's birthday

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig two hundred years ago today. For the New Yorker website I have perpetrated a Wagner Birthday Roast, the second in a sporadic series of bicentennial commentaries. (The first was A Walking Tour of Wagner's New York.) I've written at least a dozen Wagner-centered pieces over the years; the one I'm happiest with, and the one I'd offer to anyone asking why this ever-problematic composer still matters, is my Walküre essay from 2011. Elsewhere on the Internet, I recommend Mark Berry's posts at Boulezian, the Wagnerian's Scrapbook, and Sam Hawke's perceptive essay on Wagner's politics at Social Justice First. A reminder that the WKCR marathon is in progress; also, you can listen to the entire 1953 Clemens Krauss Ring at Minnesota Public Radio. Happy birthday, old magician! May your third century be more peaceful than your second.

For Harold Shapero

The distinguished Boston-area composer, a deft practitioner of mid-century neoclassical style, has died at the age of ninety-three. He was the last living representative of the Copland generation, that remarkable phalanx of American composers who came to the fore in the thirties and forties. While others went in for brawny populist gestures, Shapero was always elegant and restrained, a faithful yet distinctive devotee of Stravinsky in his Symphony in C phase. Shapero's Symphony for Classical Orchestra, from 1947, is a masterpiece of its time and place — a "marvel," Leonard Bernstein once called it, in a letter to Koussevitzky. It deserves to be heard more often, or, indeed, heard at all. Tony Tommasini argued for its revival in 1999, but I'm unaware of any recent performances. I once had dinner with Shapero and his wife, the artist Esther Geller Shapero. For a composer of such exquisite habits, he was surprisingly boisterous in person. My condolences to Esther, to whom Harold was married for nearly seventy years.

More: Lisa Hirsch, in a lovely remembrance, recalls studying under Shapero at Brandeis. There are obituaries from Jeremy Eichler and Tony Tommasini.

Wagner everywhere but New York

A program from 1913, courtesy of Joan Matabosch.

Wagner's two-hundredth birthday arrives on Wednesday, and most of the world's major music cities will mark the occasion in some way. In Leipzig, Wagner's birthplace, there will be a celebratory concert, a staging of Götterdämmerung, and an afternoon coffee party; in Venice, where he died, La Fenice has a day of music and lectures. In London, as part of Wagner 200, the Philharmonia will give a special concert at Royal Festival Hall, with Andrew Davis conducting and Susan Bullock singing. In Berlin, you can see The Flying Dutchman; in Milan and Vienna, Götterdämmerung; in Hamburg and Copenhagen, Tannhäuser; in Santiago, Parsifal. The numerous Wagnerians of Barcelona may assemble at L'Auditori. Dresden will have a flurry of events next week, including a Thielemann / Jonas Kaufmann affair on May 21. In Paris, you can attend Götterdämmerung on the same night, and sing happy birthday to the old wizard at midnight. And Thielemann will conduct at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth on the birthday itself, with a no doubt wild street party to follow. 

Curiously, though, almost nothing is happening here in New York. Igor Stravinsky, a professed Wagner-hater, would have been delighted to know that Lincoln Center will be presenting, on the day of the bicentennial, a Bard College concert entitled Stravinsky and His World. Juilliard is holding an Elliott Carter memorial, which makes me think that when Carter was born Wagner had been dead for only twenty-five years. The only live Wagner event I can find is a vocal recital at the German Consulate, sponsored by the Wagner Society of New York; it is sold out. Also, WKCR, the Columbia radio station, is hosting a Wagner marathon, beginning at midnight on the 22nd. But the most Wagnerian thing you could do in the city next Wednesday, aside from listening to the confused Parsifal bells at Riverside, would be to recall Wagner's famous slogan "Kinder! macht Neues!" ("Children, make something new") and go see the Missy Mazzoli concert at (Le) Poisson Rouge. I will be spending most of the day on Amtrak — so it goes.

Update: I asked on Twitter whether any American orchestra or opera house was performing Wagner on the day of the anniversary, and so far not much has come up. The closest is the Dallas Symphony, which played an all-Wagner program this weekend. The Boston Wagner Society is presenting a concert at Old South Church; the Seattle Opera is holding a Sing Along; and  the New Century Chamber Orchestra will play Siegfried Idyll in San Francisco on May 23. This is not in the nature of a lament; anniversaries are generally overdone, and Wagner gets enough attention. Still, it's curious.

See also: The Ring in 2013.

The Morningside Mysterium

What do the brothers Wesendonck, Guardian Life Insurance, Confucius Plaza, the Roerich Museum, Grant's Tomb, West Point, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Temple of the Grail have in common? Needless to say, they are all part of "A Walking Tour of Wagner's New York."

Nelsons to Boston

Major news from the Boston Symphony: the impassioned young Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons has been chosen as the orchestra's fifteenth music director, succeeding James Levine. "I am deeply honored and touched that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has appointed me its next music director, as it is one of the highest achievements a conductor could hope for in his lifetime," Nelsons says in the press release. "Each time I have worked with the BSO I have been inspired by how effectively it gets to the heart of the music, always leaving its audience with a great wealth of emotions." Last summer in the New Yorker, I wrote about Nelsons's memorable appearances with the BSO at Tanglewood. I also heard his splendid Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 2011. I believe him to be a very strong choice — indeed, about the best that the orchestra could have made. Daniele Gatti was also considered a candidate for the post, but Jeremy Eichler, in recent Globe reviews, pointed out an "airless," mannered quality that I, too, have noticed in Gatti's work. Nelsons is a more natural, spontaneous musician, not to mention more widely liked, and his energy will be welcome in Boston.

More: Full stories from Geoff Edgers and Zack Woolfe.

Let there be Steve

I'm delighted to see among ASCAP's Concert Music Awards honorees the furiously hard-working and keen-eared Steve Smith, New York's leading new-music authority and one of the most gifted critics in the country. Many other worthy names appear on the announcement, but Steve deserves a solo bow.

Wide-eyed kid

Ninth anniversary issue

"I have four razors and a dictaphone."

                  — Andrey Tarkovsky, 1979

Miscellany: Wagner in Oman, etc.

"Richard Wagner is one of the more controversial opera composers," writes the Times of Oman, previewing the Royal Opera House Muscat's presentation of The Flying Dutchman, via the Latvian National Opera. It's refreshing to see a writer avoid the usual superlatives, even if one might quarrel with this or that formulation ("Many of his operas aren't divided into acts the most operas are, but are one long piece").... Laurie Anderson is curating two Synth Nights at the Kitchen; tonight's show features Annie Gosfield, whom the New Yorker's Russell Platt has immortally dubbed the "Carl Nielsen of Second Avenue." Tristan Perich occupies the space May 16-17... On May 14, the New York Philharmonic will perform Magnus Lindberg's Kraft at a German automotive complex; medici.tv will have a live broadcast. The conjunction is fitting, since Lindberg's score calls for discarded auto parts... Keep an eye and ear out for the Look & Listen Festival, May 17-19. The lineup of performers includes JACK, M6, Bridget Kibbey, Claire Chase, Nadia Sirota, James Austin Smith, and the Momenta Quartet.... I've updated my CD Picks.... I should have mentioned below that the Spring for Music concerts are, as in past years, being broadcast and archived on WQXR.... Having appeared in Spring for Music, the Buffalo Philharmonic will return home for June in Buffalo, which this year presents a particularly fascinating lineup of resident composers (Raphaël Cendo, among others) as well as a contemporary-oriented Performance Institute under the direction of Eric Huebner.... The Guardian's Tom Service has completed an epic, fifty-part survey of contemporary music with an essay on Stockhausen. All the posts are worth reading; the main page is here.