Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Iceland Symphony

"Passion by Way of Iceland And the Idiosyncratic"

by Alex Ross

The New York Times, February 29, 1996

The lonely residents of Iceland had never seen a symphony orchestra when the Icelandic composer Jon Leifs conducted the Hamburg Philharmonic on tour in 1926. The island nation had no full-time orchestra until the founding of the Iceland Symphony in 1950. It might not seem possible for such a remote place to have cultivated a first-class orchestra in so little time, but the Iceland Symphony, under the direction of Osmo Vänskä, defied expectations with a sensational Carnegie Hall debut on Tuesday night.

Part of the fascination of the program came from the presence of Leifs's own bizarre, beguiling music. He was born in 1899 and spent his early career in Germany, but his works drew on Icelandic folk music from the start. With its organumlike bass lines in parallel fifths and grinding intervals of the tritone, the native idiom supplied a stark, austere vocabulary; Leifs added his own idiosyncratic touches, including dark, weird orchestration and brutal percussion. The "Galdra-Loftur" Overture, although early, is typical of his ungainly, dissonant, unmistakably original sound-world.

The program then took a dip with Grieg's Piano Concerto. Ilana Vered tossed off a splashy, crude, overpedaled account of the solo part. But one began noticing the orchestra's fine qualities: smooth, burnished string tone, bright, focused winds and handsome, well-behaved brass, an excellent balance overall.

The orchestra sounded no less accomplished in Sibelius's Second Symphony, but by the end of the first movement it became evident that the true hero of the evening was Mr. Vänskä. This 43-year-old Finn, who has also done great things with the provincial Lahti Symphony in Finland, is an expert interpreter of Sibelius, as he has proved in various recordings for Bis. On the strength of this concert, I would say he is something more: a real master of orchestral drama who produced one of the finest Sibelius performances I have encountered.

Mr. Vänskä delivers an exceptionally clear, decisive beat, but he also imposes continual gradations of tempo, harking back almost to a Wagnerian style of conducting. His restless indications for dynamics produce an unending flow of crescendo and diminuendo. At the same time, his Sibelius is absolutely unsentimental and anti-Romantic, with crisp attacks and abrupt fades. What resulted was a performance of cold passion: tense, severe, fiercely expressive. It was staggeringly good.

Perhaps this was simply an exceptional night for an orchestra on its first North American tour. But if Mr. Vänskä regularly leads performances like this back in Reykjavik, Iceland loses nothing in its isolation.

Dresden and Prague, 1995

"Struck by History in Dresden and Prague"

by Alex Ross

New York Times, June 6, 1995

Dresden is famous as the city that was destroyed. Arriving for the Dresden Music Festival recently, a first-time visitor had the well-known catastrophic pictures in mind: the landscape photographed from above, obscured by firestorms and the lowering hulks of Allied bombers. It is staggering now to walk through the city center and see the old buildings restored to former glory, as if the smoke had cleared and left everything unharmed. The handsome sprawl of the Semper Opera conjures very different images, of turn-of-the-century Dresden, when Strauss's operas had triumphant premieres and special "Rosenkavalier" trains arrived from Berlin. Dresden is a life-size replica of itself, eerily perfect. One can forget that the original is gone.

Prague, 75 miles to the south and west, has famously survived. All the detritus of foreign invasion has been cunningly absorbed into an omnivorous cultural fabric. Even the hideous monuments of Communism have somehow become part of the city's stylistic crazy quilt. General dilapidation adds authenticity. The continuities are tremendous, in music as well as architecture: "Don Giovanni" is performed in the theater where Mozart first conducted it in 1787, and a memorial to the composer Josef Suk is presided over by his grandson, who bears his name.

In recent weeks, these two great cities offered strikingly like-minded music festivals, testifying to the resilience of tradition and also to the terrible vulnerability of individual creative personalities. Dresden commemorated the 50th anniversary of the bombing of February 1945; Prague marked its 50th Prague Spring, a festival that originated as a celebration of German withdrawal.

In his third year heading the Dresden festival, Michael Hampe, the longtime manager of the Cologne Opera, emblazoned the festival programs with the stark word "Apocalypse" and commemorated World War II with an intriguing array of 20th-century programming: Britten's "War Requiem," Strauss's "Friedenstag," Schoenberg's "Survivor From Warsaw" and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's scorchingly anti-militaristic "Soldaten," among other works. Mr. Hampe's introductory essay in the program led off with Thomas Mann's vision of a defeated Germany, "Ringed round by demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring into horror."

Zimmermann was a composer who typified Germany's agonized post-war self-examination, collecting horrors in a chaos of styles before killing himself in 1970. Willy Decker's brilliant production of "Die Soldaten" at the Semper Opera was a brightly colored and almost playfully cartoonish treatment of an opera that can easily wear out audiences with its relentless pessimism. Where a production at the New York City Opera made its greatest impact in the onslaught of the opening, Mr. Decker saved his masterstroke, a vertiginous tilting of the boxlike set, for the end. Just as revealing was an excellent chamber concert the following night at the Dresden Center for Contemporary Music in which Zimmermann's sober, modernist craftsmanship came to the fore.

"Die Soldaten" met with a certain amount of bafflement, but long ovations greeted Marco Marelli's new staging of "Tristan und Isolde," with Deborah Polaski and Wolfgang Schmidt in the leads. The production was less than ideal: Ms. Polaski's huge tone lacked lyric breadth, Mr. Schmidt bleated pathetically and Mr. Marelli filled the stage with pulsating translucent cubes and psychedelic coloration redolent of the seedier side of late-night German television. But Christof Prick and the Staatskapelle Orchestra counterbalanced these shortcomings with a subtle, intimate, expressive account of the score. Even greater splendors followed a few nights later, when Claudio Abbado led the Berlin Philharmonic in searching interpretations of Beethoven's heroic Third and anti-heroic Eighth Symphonies.

Whether resounding to Zimmermann or Beethoven, the restored Semper Opera is a fabulous, ennobling presence. Even the all-conquering Berliners looked around a few times in awe. An accident of ideological good works has given the city an astonishing collection of musical venues. Future festivals will reunite them with works from Dresden's glorious Baroque heydey, including unknown scores from the libraries of Elector Augustus the Strong.

The Prague Spring Festival, which ended Saturday, drew upon a similar 20th-century legacy, including the inevitable "War Requiem." Both festivals turned attention on music of Jewish composers persecuted by the Nazis, but where Dresden offered the work of survivors -- Schoenberg's "Survivor of Warsaw" and Korngold's Symphony in F sharp -- Prague explored works of Czech composers interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then killed at Auschwitz.

These concerts were promising on paper but disappointing in fact. The Czech Philharmonic, once a magnificent ensemble under the direction of the Theresienstadt survivor Karel Ancerl, has passed into the hands of the workmanlike Gerd Albrecht and no longer plays with savage brilliance. Mr. Albrecht selects interesting repertory, but his program of Viktor Ullmann's "Cornet Christoph Rilke" and a suite of arias and interludes from Zemlinsky's opera "Traumgorge" did not represent the best of either composer.

A further drawback was the lack of recent music by Czech composers. The chief contemporary music presence was American: Peter Kotik's S.E.M. Ensemble, playing Varese, Cage and Feldman in Spanish Hall on Thursday. Mr. Kotik, who left Czechoslovakia in 1969, told me that many younger Czech composers were dutifully following prevalent trends but failing to fashion distinct identities. The Communist regime seems to have sapped musical spirit. Miloslav Kabelac, a composer touted as the Czech Shostakovich, did not make a strong impression here in concert or on several CD's obtained from Czech stores.

One can find more delight in Prague's musical byways, the myriad concerts advertised in flyers handed out on street corners. There was, for example, a program devoted to the Czech Baroque master Jan Dismas Zelenka, who, as it happens, worked most of his life in Dresden and was also heard in the neighboring city. This modest effort by the Myslivecek Chamber Orchestra took place in St. Nicholas Church, a gaudy and frightening edifice raised by the Jesuits. Zelenka was himself Jesuit-trained, and the errant, darksome splendors of his music resonated uncannily with the surroundings.

Listening to music in American concert halls, one is always prepared for the great comedown: the final, ecstatic world-denying sigh of "Tristan und Isolde," then the taxis and the crowds and the subway. This does not happen so much in Prague and Dresden. Out in the old theater square after the Dresden "Tristan," it seemed for a moment that the 20th century had never existed. Another night, after a concert high above the Elbe, musicians glided past on old bicycles, violas strapped to their backs. Down the hill was the Friedrich Schiller House, and a light went on upstairs. Whether anyone was actually home, it was hard to tell.

Aldeburgh 1995

by Alex Ross

New York Times, July 2, 1995

The cane-backed wooden chairs in Snape Maltings, the Aldeburgh Festival's acoustically miraculous concert hall, are exact copies of the seats at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany. In other respects, too, Aldeburgh, founded by Benjamin Britten in 1948, resembles Bayreuth: it is the legacy of a strong-willed composer who wished to insure the authentic presentation of his works. In Britten's final years, Aldeburgh was notorious for Wagnerian intrigues. After Britten's death, Michael Tippett spoke witheringly of a "mausoleum atmosphere."

Traces of that atmosphere remain, but Aldeburgh has changed much in recent years. The buoyant presence of Oliver Knussen, who directs the festival with the Britten specialist Steuart Bedford, has made all the difference: Aldeburgh is now a 20th-century music festival of wide scope and generous spirit. Last month, the strongest spotlight fell on two living composers, one from Finland and one from England. They made powerful impressions as separate personalities, and together they told a heartening story of a younger generation's increasing independence from compositional dogma and polemics.

At first sight, the 37-year-old Magnus Lindberg seemed an odd choice for composer-in-residence. Unlike such past visitors as Witold Lutoslawski and Hans Werner Henze, Mr. Lindberg is still a composer in process. He made his name little more than 10 years ago with works of remarkable density and ferocity, partaking as much of the spirit of free jazz or punk rock as of classical tradition. He has also worked at Pierre Boulez's Ircam, the Paris bastion of electronic music, and thus comes from a Bayreuth of a different stripe.

In the last decade, however, Mr. Lindberg has inched closer to the fundamentally tonal world of Britten's music. He has not, to be sure, made the kind of abrupt volte-face now common among composers trained in the European avant-garde or American academic Serialism. He has not suddenly thrown away his charts and graphs and begun writing unadulterated C major. His recent music is closely linked to his radical early works.

What distinguished this composer from the outset was his way of ordering difficult materials into simple stories. His signature early piece, "Kraft," showed breathtaking dramatic energy, an extroverted rhetorical flair that brought to mind a latter-day Richard Strauss. It opened with lashings of percussion, shrill tutti chords and shrieking figuration on the clarinet. It descended slowly into silence, at times mimicking the widely spaced twitterings of chance music. Eventually it wheeled back to grand unisons, all but Beethovenian in their insistence.

Mr. Lindberg has a gift for what the literary critic Frank Kermode called "the sense of an ending." An atmosphere of fulfillment gathers in the final pages of his scores. There is an intricate technique underlying this gift, although it cannot be understood merely in technical terms. Mr. Lindberg uses computer programs to organize the vast range of notes he hurls on paper. Rather than give them each equal value, as in the 12-tone system, he favors some over others. By means of computer analysis, he discovers the fundamental or ground note that underlies any given complex chord or sequence of tones.

The slow unveiling of these fundamental tones over the course of a work gives visceral rather than intellectual pleasure. Then order begins to emerge from chaos. In the orchestral soundscape "Kinetics," an earth-shaking low C enters about two-thirds of the way through the piece. In the marvelous tone-poem "Joy," lush chords that would have delighted Scriabin come rushing in toward the end. The experience is somewhat like wandering lost in a labyrinth and then discovering a luminous exit.

Two works heard at Aldeburgh -- "Corrente" for chamber orchestra and the Clarinet Quintet, magically performed by the London Sinfonietta and the Nash Ensemble -- further demonstrate Mr. Lindberg's method. "Corrente" plays with repetitive rhythms that bring to mind Stravinsky and the American Minimalists; deep chiming chords at the close make sense of the decorous melee of overlapping patterns that came before. The quintet dissolves graceful, long-limbed melodic lines into gently shimmering intervals of a major third.

"Aura," played by the BBC Symphony under Mr. Knussen's direction, offered something more. Laid out in four continuous movements, it sways back and forth repeatedly between frenetic developmental activity and widely spaced static chords, recalling the vibrant tensions of Lutoslawski's late music. It is unmistakably of symphonic proportions: the grim, shuddering beat of the first movement brings to mind Mahler's Ninth Symphony (or Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem"), and the movements that follow have aspects of a slow movement and scherzo.

One goal is uppermost in mind. After some glittering quasi-Minimalist passage work at the beginning of the finale, preceding sections are recalled and amplified; there is a climactic orchestral free-for-all, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, soft, luminous chords appear on the strings. They are uncannily like the final chords of Sibelius's "Tapiola," with ghostly string harmonics attached. They are surprising but also splendidly logical. Here ends a grand utterance in the Romantic tradition, refracted through all the technical possibilities of the late 20th century.

The work of a much younger composer featured at Aldeburgh offered something in its way even more impressive: a musical world fully formed and richly appointed by the age of 23. Thomas Adès, a composer, pianist and conductor who is writing at a mad pace and being performed everywhere, reminds people of the young Britten.

The comparison may not be exaggerated. Mr. Adès (pronounced ADD-us) is a virtuoso in the deepest sense who can accomplish anything he wants. He draws on the widest possible compositional palette: colliding rhythms out of Conlon Nancarrow, a stylistic playfulness akin to Gyorgy Ligeti's recent music, bits and pieces of the English Renaissance, splashes of pure sentimental Romanticism. "Arcadiana," a suite for string quartet, includes a surpassingly lovely movement entitled "O Albion" that bears only the slightest trace of youthful irony.

Impossibly, it all works. The thorniest textures are executed with extreme lucidity; the lyric stretches are genuinely tuneful; the whole weird succession of events makes perplexing sense. This is true not only of "Living Toys," a chamber-orchestra piece performed at Aldeburgh, but also of "Arcadiana," "Still Sorrowing" and the Chamber Symphony, which I studied courtesy of Mr. Adès's publisher, Faber Music.

Dangers lie ahead for Mr. Adès. The nearly unanimous praise may not last. He has been pantingly described as "the new bright young thing of contemporary music"; he has also already been dismissed as another clever young man going nowhere. English musical culture, rich in so many ways, has a damaging tendency to pounce on young talents and suffocate them with attention. It happened to Mr. Knussen and George Benjamin, two greatly gifted composers whose productivity has slowed. In a certain way it happened to Britten himself.

Yet a community that smothers is better than a community that ignores. England and Finland are peculiarly musical nations, and great music arises only when musical culture reaches a point of saturation. Other fresh voices are crowding forward: Kaija Saariaho and Jouni Kaipainen, Simon Holt and Julian Anderson. The music of the future, it seems, is coming from the continental edges. There will never be another Bayreuth, but if we are lucky there will be a few more places like Aldeburgh.

Vertigo

by Alex Ross

New York Times, October 6, 1996

 

Nearly four decades after its commercially indifferent first run, ''Vertigo'' has become the most widely celebrated of Alfred Hitchcock's films. It is prized not simply for its razor-sharp suspense technique but also for its air of mystery, its tragic dimension, its literary layering of memory and obsession. Scholars have compared it to Proust, ''Tristan und Isolde'' and the Orpheus myth; critics have voted it Hitchcock's masterpiece. Robert Harris and James Katz, the film restorers who previously revived ''Lawrence of Arabia'' and ''Spartacus,'' have completed the canonization by releasing ''Vertigo'' in a 70-millimeter, digital-sound version, which opens today (with a video to follow early next year).

It would be heresy to suggest that the greatness of ''Vertigo'' is owed to anyone but Hitchcock, whose fingerprints cover every aspect of the production. But there is a second genius at work in ''Vertigo,'' and his voice will be heard more clearly in the restoration. Mr. Harris and Mr. Katz refurbished not just the images but also the sound, bringing digital technology to bear on the Bernard Herrmann score, whose original tape turned up in a vault nearly intact. Herrmann was an absolute master of the strange art of film scoring, and in a career that stretched from ''Citizen Kane'' to ''Taxi Driver,'' the 1958 ''Vertigo'' was probably his peak.

How much, indeed, of this film's famous atmosphere is owed to Herrmann? Close your eyes and think of one sequence, and you may well remember Kim Novak's somnambulistic tour of San Francisco, from a chapel to a graveyard to a picture gallery. It is the music as much as the lighting and the filters that gives those scenes their eerie shimmer. None of which is to detract from Hitchcock's glory; he knew the nature of the talent he had engaged, and he created extraordinary opportunities for Herrmann to make his mark. ''Vertigo'' is a symphony for film and orchestra.

 

Herrmann was born in New York in 1911; he made his name first as a composer at CBS radio. He arrived in Hollywood with the young genius of the airwaves Orson Welles. His first effort at film scoring was ''Citizen Kane.'' Like Welles, he was viewed with intense suspicion by the film community; his life in Hollywood was fraught with difficulties, many of his own making. He was a passionate, irascible, unpredictable character who often treated film people with contempt. He wished more than anything else to make his name as a composer of concert music and a conductor on the international circuit.

If Herrmann thought himself a failure at the end -- he died in 1975 on the night of the last recording session of ''Taxi Driver'' -- then he sadly undervalued his achievement. Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930's and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. In place of lush melodies, he wrote short, obsessively repeated figures, static collections of chords, parodies of past styles. The sound was original, even experimental, but also useful: it wonderfully matched Welles's electrifying fast style.

It took a while for Herrmann and Hitchcock to come together. The director tried many times to engage Herrmann before finally signing him for ''The Trouble With Harry,'' the first of nine collaborations. Hitchcock, too, had long been impatient with the busily illustrative type of score perfected by Central European emigres like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. While making ''Lifeboat,'' he was heard to complain that the audience would wonder where the music was coming from, out there in the middle of the ocean. (''Ask Hitchcock where the cameras come from,'' the composer David Raksin famously replied.)

Hitchcock was not deaf to music; he simply wanted to make its use more pointed. He always enjoyed experimenting with ''live'' sources for music on film. In ''Rope,'' for example, Farley Granger's guilt-ridden character nervously plays Poulenc at the piano. In ''Rear Window,'' a cocktail-piano sound streams in from an adjacent apartment. In Herrmann, Hitchcock found a composer whose music would blend into the action with the same uncanny directness, but now on a different level. Herrmann would address the unconscious regions, summon atmosphere and dread. Music would play its own starring role; at times, it would take over the action.

 

"Vertigo" fired Herrmann's imagination because its byzantine plot perfectly matched his Gothic sensibilities. A retired police detective afflicted by vertigo is hired to follow and protect a woman named Madeleine who seems to be suicidally possessed by a spirit from the 19th century. Although he discovers that she has been playacting as part of an elaborate murder plot, his intensifying obsession causes history to repeat itself in terrifying cycles. The scenario has resonances with any number of doom-drenched Romantic and Symbolist dramas. It also closely resembles an operatic model: ironically, Korngold's youthful masterpiece, ''Die Tote Stadt.'' (In that opera, too, a man tries to make over a woman in the image of his dead beloved.)

Right from the famous title sequence of ''Vertigo,'' we are in the presence of something marvelous. Saul Bass created a hypnotic design of spirals rotating in space, overlaid with a few uncanny shots of Kim Novak's eyes. The music rotates in tandem: endless circles of thirds, major and minor, interspersed with shuddering dissonances. Herrmann did not invent this off-center tonality; it was used often by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and Ravel. But the relentlessness is all Herrmann's. The music literally induces vertigo: it finds no acceptable tonal resolution and spirals back on itself. Herrmann has told us what the movie is about.

It cannot be said that Herrmann always understood perfectly what Hitchcock was getting at. In commenting later that Jimmy Stewart was too easygoing an actor to pull off the lead role of Scottie, he sorely misjudged both Mr. Stewart's skill and Hitchcock's master conception of the ordinary collapsing into madness. And in any case, it was Herrmann's job to help summon the extraordinary emotions of an ordinary man. He supplied Desire and Doom; he kept away from the early, extended stretches of dialogue in which Scottie's affable exterior is established, his mind not yet invaded by the icy, ghostly figure of Madeleine.

Indeed, Hitchcock significantly inserts ''live-on-camera'' music into two of the Herrmann-free scenes. As the film-music scholar Royal S. Brown points out in his invaluable book ''Overtones and Undertones,'' Scottie's bright, sensible ex-fiancee, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, is twice accompanied by background gramophone music: first an overture by J. C. Bach, then Mozart's Symphony No. 34. She tries to use Mozart as a therapeutic device, drawing Scottie back to the rational world. She also tries to win back his love. But he does not respond: Herrmann's music, which exclusively represents his deeper emotions, remains silent.

Compare these witty but emotionally static scenes with the long, 15-minute sequence in which Scottie trails the woman alleged to be Madeleine. The images are beautifully shrouded in a strange, foggy light, but they say relatively little by themselves. You see Scottie driving through the streets of San Francisco; Madeleine buying flowers; more driving; Madeleine walking through a chapel and a cemetery; driving again; Madeleine looking at a painting, and so forth. There are a couple of brief bits of dialogue as Scottie gathers information about the places he is visiting, but essentially ''Vertigo'' becomes a silent film.

Except, of course, for the music, which plays almost without a break and gives the whole sequence its air of ineffable mystery. What is going on is difficult to describe: Herrmann shifts fluidly but uneasily among a few simple, cryptic chords, augmentations of familiar triads. Wistful hints of melody circle back on themselves instead of building into thematic phrases. The orchestration is dominated by high or low instruments (notably, violins and bass clarinets). The sequence is profoundly eerie but also very beautiful: it is neither tonal nor dissonant.

This music of expectation, which also somehow communicates a visitation from the past, returns with ever-darkening effect several times later in the film. Herrmann moves into even more obscure territory in a scene where Scottie and Madeleine together visit a grove of giant sequoias. Here Herrmann writes ''cluster'' chords: piled-up collections of tones that would be shockingly dissonant if they were not shiveringly low and soft. It is a measure of Herrmann's venturesomeness that more than a few measures in this sequence could have been composed by the solitary American experimentalist Morton Feldman.

When Scottie declares his love for Madeleine (or Judy, as she comes to be known), Herrmann faces a very different challenge, which is to write love music circumscribed by destructive obsession. In the stretch of music entitled ''Scène d'amour,'' he turns to Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' as an example. One hears citations not only of the sweeping phrases of the ''Liebestod'' (''Love-Death'') but also of the savage leitmotif of daylight, the black-as-night Prelude to Act III and the delirious ecstasy of the central love scene.

Film composers are often accused of derivativeness. Their borrowings are sometimes shameless, although the time constraints of the Hollywood production schedule make certain shortcuts understandable. Herrmann's use of Wagner, however, is a matter of deliberation and subtlety. The main melodic contour is his own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction. He is jogging the memory of those who know ''Tristan'' and the subconscious of those who don't. His veiled citations indicate in their own way the unstoppable recurrence of the past. Once again, the score is not an illustration of the film but a metaphor for it.

Herrmann's ''Scène d'amour'' also steers clear of sentimentality. Even at its most ecstatically upward-rushing, it is troubled by passing dissonances, undercut by harmonic rootlessness. All of it is the music of Scottie's mind, and this character is, in the last analysis, completely mad. Mr. Stewart delays that realization with all his practiced reasonableness; the final tableau atop the San Juan Bautista Mission tower is all the more stunning in its finality. Herrmann, steeped in Victorian melodrama, gets to write a fanfare for the triumph of Fate. With all dialogue finally out of the way, the whole orchestra rises to its feet to proclaim, ''This man is lost.''

 

The "Vertigo" score vastly enriches the images it accompanies, but it has also found a life outside the film. As an excellent complete recording on the Varèse Sarabande label testifies, it can be heard on its own terms -- if not quite as a coherent narrative, then as a mesmerizing succession of fragments. Herrmann is a puzzling paradox: most of his ''serious'' compositions don't quite come off, yet his film scores can be taken seriously as concert music. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the rigorously European-trained conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, proves as much with a new Herrmann anthology on the Sony Classical label.

Alas, the original 1958 recording suffered from less than ideal conditions. Herrmann could not conduct it himself because of a musicians' strike; most of it was recorded in London, the rest in Vienna. The playing sometimes sounds ragged and murky, at least on current copies.

The restoration may tell a different story: Mr. Harris and Mr. Katz have discovered a clear original tape, partly in true stereo, and revamped the whole soundtrack in digital sound. Royal treatment indeed for a mere movie score -- but there is none greater than ''Vertigo.''

Schnittke interview, 1994

by Alex Ross

The New York Times, February 10, 1994

 

If you knew little of Alfred Schnittke or his music, you might say he is trendy, hip, in fashion. It is an understandable assumption, given the current spate of Schnittke performances: the world premiere of his Symphony No. 7 tonight by the New York Philharmonic, the American premieres last week of his Piano Sonata No. 2 by Boris Berman and his Symphony No. 6 by the National Symphony Orchestra, and a forthcoming performance of his "Faust Cantata" by the American Symphony Orchestra. Other recent works are being rushed to recordings. Not since Britten has a living composer been given this kind of attention.

But the man who sat patiently through an interview at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on Saturday morning has nothing to do with the world of trends. Soft-spoken, shy and physically frail from two recent strokes, this Russian-born composer is incapable of self-promotion. Unlike many composers before him, he does not conduct, and he has written perplexingly little for his own instrument, the piano. He has gained recognition only through the substance of his music, with its anarchic conjuration of musical history and its underlying eloquence.

Mr. Schnittke talked about the new symphonies he has written for the National Symphony and the New York Philharmonic in typically muted and gnomic terms. "I prepared something that was not exactly perfect," he said of the Sixth Symphony, speaking in Russian through a translator. "It seemed incomplete in a sense, and it's not clear if we've really heard it. I already cut one episode, and I'm thinking about other ways to change it." Mr. Schnittke's printed discussions of his music regularly speak of attempts, reports, experiments and sometimes failures.

As it happens, these new works, particularly the severe and enigmatic Sixth, are atypical of the 59-year-old composer's output as a whole. He first gained notice in the West with a style that seemed to match popular trends, so to speak, of the 1960's and 70's. It was not one style, but many: "polystylistics," he called it, a rampant musical eclecticism drawing on Baroque arpeggios, the Viennese waltz, 12-tone modernism and avant-garde procedures. There was an exhilarating expressive vibrancy to the blend, and more than a touch of dark comedy.

Some commentators, and some imitative composers, have mistaken this approach for mere nostalgia. "That's one of the major inaccuracies," Mr. Schnittke said. "The style was never focused on the past, nor, for that matter, on the future." The most remarkable aspect of his work is how a distinctive and recognizable voice emerges through an impossible variety of material. The composer of the present is emphatically, grippingly in control.

Mr. Schnittke's relation to the past remains very complex. He derived his polystylistic method from Mahler, Ives, Berg and Shostakovich, all of whom stitched together a musical language from disparate sources. If there was a formative moment in his career, it was his encounter in the early 60's with Shostakovich's monumentally chaotic Fourth Symphony, which had been hidden for three decades in the composer's desk. "What was most important to me," he said of the Fourth, "was not only the incredible technical accomplishments, but also the unexpected compositional choices, polyphony in the largest sense."

The first major work of Mr. Schnittke's mature period, his First Symphony of 1972, amplified the discoveries of the Shostakovich Fourth in every possible dimension. It is a good candidate for the wildest piece of music ever written. Gregorian chants, bits of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, motoric Baroque music and coffeehouse jazz collide in front of a dark and turbulent orchestral mass. It seems inconceivable that such a work was given a public performance in the Soviet Union of 1974, when other composers were setting Leonid Brezhnev's diaries to music. But Rodion Shchedrin, then head of the Russian composers' union, pushed the symphony past the bureaucracy.

"There was a great deal of tension and negative official reaction to the premiere," Mr. Schnittke recalled. "But at the same time it was in an incredible moment, important and positive for me. The reaction of the public astonished me: people went not only to the performance but to rehearsals." Mr. Schnittke was able to continue working without official support, although obstacles impeded him continually until 1985.

A tempting interpretation of this music is that it somehow represents or foreshadows the collapse of the Soviet state. Leon Botstein, the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, has indeed titled his Feb. 18 concert "The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror." Mr. Schnittke's reaction to this view was hesitant: "When I wrote, I wasn't thinking about events, although some connection with events is of course possible. There is the example of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad.' "

This last analogy is best interpreted as one of the Mr. Schnittke's characteristic ironical gestures. His music demands a deeper historical perspective. Just as strong as the connection to Shostakovich are the links to Mahler and Berg, whose music, Mr. Schnittke said, he "adores above everything else." He is of German as well as Russian descent, and one of his favorite stylistic modes is a wistful German Romantic lyricism; the introduction and coda of the Seventh Symphony furnish a strong example. He now lives in Hamburg, the birthplace of Brahms.

Another plausible reading of Mr. Schnittke is that he pessimistically mirrors the decline of the classical tradition itself, writing music for the end of music. He has encouraged this sort of thinking with some dire pronouncements of his own. "I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless," reads the program note for the Third Symphony. The Sixth Symphony, in four traditional movements, is an altogether frightening vision of music stripped to the bone; at one performance in Washington, several distressed young children were led out after the first movement.

But even though his music has taken on an increasingly grim tone, the composer is not a doomsayer: "In what I do, there is definitely going to be an exit and there is definitely going to be an answer to these questions, but at the same time there is a lot of rightful doubt about the forms and a nervousness about what the future holds for music." While he considers the possibility of a synthesis of classical and popular genres "pure utopia," he has dabbled in rock and jazz instrumentation, and enjoyed the orchestral music of Frank Zappa.

Might it be possible that Mr. Schnittke's music has been inspired by the eclectic, parodistic, fundamentally grave and serious compositions of Adrian Leverkun, the fictional hero of Thomas Mann's novel "Doktor Faustus"? "Yes, the book had an incredible influence on me," said Mr. Schnittke, becoming slightly more passionate than he had been for most of the interrogation. "I read it in the 50's when I was still a young man. I thought about it my whole life, but unfortunately never wrote anything connected with it."

There is, however, the "Faust Cantata," based on the same 16th-century source that the fictional Leverkuhn employs for his valedictory work. It has been expanded into a three-act opera, with a libretto drawing from various "Faust" sources; the Hamburg Opera will give the premiere in 1995. "Faust was a man both good and bad," Mr. Schnittke said of this 20-year-old project, "and that ambivalence draws me to the story."

Ambivalence, in the end, is what draws us into Mr. Schnittke's magic schemes; they match our best and worst imaginings. Despite continuing poor health, the composer forges ahead with ambitious plans: an opera based on the life of Gesualdo for the Vienna State Opera, and an Eighth Symphony for the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who led the dangerous premiere of the First in 1974. He is close upon the mystical symphonic number nine, and might deserve whatever greatness it mythically confers.

Schnittke's Faust

by Alex Ross

New York Times, July 6, 1995


LOCKENHAUS, AUSTRIA. Some dwell in darkness and others dwell in light, goes the line in "The Threepenny Opera." Shades of light and dark, anticipation and despair, divide the otherwise closely allied work of Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke, the dominant figures in contemporary Russian music. Unquestionably they belong together, having followed almost identical career paths. Both were born in the early 1930's; both pursued an avant-garde program in the 60's in defiance of the Soviet regime; both have drawn on a broad range of contemporary techniques without becoming beholden to any of them, and both have taken refuge in Hamburg, Germany, in the turbulent 90's.

Yet the differences are substantial, even irreconcilable. Mr. Schnittke has placed himself in the main line of German tradition; he has passed the ultimate hurdle of Germanic art by writing his own "Faust." At the same time his work is marked by devastating pessimism, a certainty that classical traditions have come to an end. Ms. Gubaidulina, by contrast, has sought freedom and escape; she has avoided standard genres, used non-Western instruments, inclined toward improvisation, and cultivated a complex form of religious mysticism.

So it seems appropriate that recent performances of these composers' works have taken place in very different surroundings. Mr. Schnittke's "Historia von D. Johann Fausten," perhaps the most important premiere of the last decade, appeared late last month beneath the modern hulk of the Hamburg State Opera. This week, Ms. Gubaidulina's music floats out over the quiet, otherworldly Austrian village of Lockenhaus, the home of Gidon Kremer's engagingly informal Kremerata Musica Festival.

The increasing bitterness of Mr. Schnittke's music perhaps can be explained by his deteriorating physical situation. In recent years he has suffered a series of severe strokes; he has yet to recover from the last, in June 1994. Yet his productivity up to that time had been phenomenal. "Faust" was one of two operas that received almost simultaneous premieres: The other was "Gesualdo," at the Vienna State Opera. Mr. Schnittke also completed his Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, a ballet based on Ibsen's "Peer Gynt," a Triple Concerto and various chamber, vocal and choral works.

Whether this recent music is at the same level as his exuberantly eclectic, all-mocking earlier scores remains to be seen. The Eighth Symphony and "Peer Gynt" occupy a spacious Mahlerian canvas; the other symphonies, heard last year in New York City, are almost intolerably fragmented and forlorn. "Faust," based not on Goethe but on the anonymous original published in 1587, at first bears all the hallmarks of the composer's desolate style: Grinding pedal points, fractured triads, creeping solos for the like of double bass, contrabassoon and tuba, pained silences in the rest of the orchestra, a few abrupt cluster chords.

But Mr. Schnittke has been preparing this "Faust" for many years, and the final act makes use of the score written in 1983, before his change of course and decline in health. This is the "Faust Cantata," a tour de force narration of Faust's descent into hell. In an inspired anachronism, Mr. Schnittke casts the climax in the form of a diabolically melodious tango, with a contralto croaking in Brechtian style into a microphone and an electric guitar thundering underneath. He then retreats to chilling medievalisms for the admonitory epilogue. No Goethean redemption here: Faust's is a lurid life that ends badly.

Is this Mr. Schnittke's long-awaited masterpiece? It was difficult to tell in Hamburg. John Dew's production unleashed spectacular demonic imagery, mixing Dürer, Leonardo, Cy Twombly and Ken Russell. (In one scene Mephistopheles plays a pink piano.) The staging had enormous cinematographic and choreographic energy, but it distractingly one-upped Mr. Schnittke's densely allusive score. The conductor, Gerd Albrecht, chose to make a number of cuts, telescoping three acts into two parts and dissolving an extended ballet interlude into intermittent fragments.

The result, while grimly brilliant as pure theater, was not quite what Mr. Schnittke seemed to have in mind. One hopes the composer recovers to put his opera in final form; even if he does not, the torso heard in Hamburg stands as a major event in itself. Act III achieves a hurtling dramatic momentum that has not been seen in German opera since the death of Berg.

 

Mr. Schnittke did not attend the "Faust" premiere, an event heavily patronized by elements of high culture and big business. The contrast could not be more complete to the dressed-down concerts here in Lockenhaus, with its programs invented day by day. Ms. Gubaidulina has been very much in evidence; on Monday night she energetically whirled among an exotic array of Asian Russian folk instruments, leading an extraordinary performance by the improvisation group Astraea.

Alongside two like-minded colleagues, the composer Viktor Suslin and his son Alexander, Ms. Gubaidulina demonstrated that a carefully controlled improvisation can have an electricity unmatched by printed music. The two pieces on Monday moved from an anarchic free-jazz-like textures to steady ostinato beats or widely spaced lyric solos. They seemed no less fully argued than the notated works heard later in the evening, Ms. Gubaidulina's savagely concise 10 Preludes for cello and Mr. Suslin's softly chiming "Mitternachtsmusik."

In her way, Ms. Gubaidulina is no less eclectic than Mr. Schnittke. At passing moments, her music alludes to Russian Orthodox chant, Russian and Tatar folk tradition, Bach, even Webern. But the citations are all part of a viscerally evolving fabric in which recognition of sources is secondary. She refuses the intellectualism common to 20th-century composers; her work is wholly devoted to fullness of sound and richness of story. Its deep intelligence becomes apparent only on later hearings.

This is not to give one composer precedence over the other. Although Mr. Schnittke offers no way out, his journey into the depths of musical history is immensely enthralling. His accomplishment in "Faust" is singular; no composer before him has come so close to the story's primal terror. But Ms. Gubaidulina's music offers hope, which is something no less rare and more precious.

AMM

"Staying True to a Truly Esoteric Mission"

by Alex Ross

New York Times, May 7, 1994

The fringes of avant-garde experimentation are said to be a zone where trends burn bright and then vanish. The nearly 30-year career of AMM, a British improvisational group that has been on a rare American tour the last few weeks, shows otherwise. Rooted in free jazz, AMM first drew international notice on account of its association with Cornelius Cardew, one of the wild innovators of European composition in the 1960's and 70's. Its extraordinary first album ("AMM Music," now reissued on ReR Records) came out on Elektra, with production help from associates of Pink Floyd. Through various changes of personnel, the group has stuck to its esoteric avant-garde mission.

The core members remain Eddie Prévost, a drummer of extraordinary energy and inventiveness, and Keith Rowe, who draws unearthly sounds from an electric guitar laid out on a table. Their set on Tuesday night at Context Studios on the Lower East Side lasted about an hour; it ranged from minimal whispers of timbre to grinding, buzzing onslaughts. Mr. Rowe bent over the vibrating corpse of his guitar, manipulating metal implements and electronic gizmos. His favorite trick is to bring a transistor in proximity to the strings so that random radio transmissions show up like aural ghosts. Since Cardew's withdrawal from the group in the mid-seventies, the pianist has been John Tilbury, who seems to draw inspiration from sources as various as Cage, Feldman and Cecil Taylor.

There were sounds that came from absolutely nowhere; audience members in the back bobbed up and down, trying to figure out what was going on. Why the strains of a Bach cello suite seemed to float in from another room at the very end was a mystery best left unexamined. AMM has the rare power to inspire awe.

Tanglewood 1994

"A Messiaen Rarity Pays Homage to Utah's Topography and Birds"

by Alex Ross

New York Times, August 11, 1994

Reinbert de Leeuw's inspiring first summer as director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music reached a pinnacle on Sunday night with the geological, astronomical and ornithological splendors of Messiaen's "Des canyons aux étoiles." This 12-part epic poem for small orchestra is not heard as often as the same composer's "Turangalîla Symphony," but it certainly ought to be. I can think of no other work from the latter half of this century that affords such an excess of sheer beauty. It leaves its audiences in a state of exhilaration and touches more than once on the sublime.

"Des canyons aux étoiles" ("From the Canyons to the Stars") was commissioned by Alice Tully 20 years ago for the American Bicentennial. Following his own infallible whimsies, Messiaen chose to pay homage to the canyons and birds of Utah. Although the state responded gratefully by naming one of its peaks Mount Messiaen, the work is less a portrait of a particular landscape than of the richness of the mind contemplating it. Against the austerity of the canyons, Messiaen unleashed an orgy of exotic instrumentation: trumpeters play with wa-wa mutes and mouthpieces alone, the solo pianist draws resonances from silently depressed clusters, the percussionists wield a sand drum and a very prominent wind machine.

What surprised many listeners in 1974, however, was not the complexity of the instrumentation but the lyric directness of much of the music behind it. Having allied himself with the postwar avant-garde through the early 1960's, Messiaen here completed a return to the grand triadic sonorities of his youth, while holding in mind the chief rhythmic and harmonic discoveries of the late 40's. "Canyons" is his supreme synthesis, his most daring leap from raw experimental materials to the mystical wonderland of his inner world. "Zion Park," the paradisiacal vision that closes the work, might be the most beautiful and powerful thing he created.

Sunday's was not a perfect performance -- even though Mr. de Leeuw's tempos were slow, the Fellows of Tanglewood Music Center still had trouble with the fiendish rhythms, and Peter Serkin's technically brilliant piano solos did not resonate as the composer wished -- but the score made its proper impact. There was magic in the mere fact of hearing it in the new Ozawa Hall, with its back wall open on the summer night. After the great A-major revelation of "Zion Park," I walked out a few feet and looked up at the stars; they seemed a silent echo of Messiaen's final shimmering chord.

With its huge chaotic vistas and intimate lyric images side by side, "Canyons" seems to sum up also the musical world view of Tanglewood's new director of contemporary music: a man who has made definitive recordings of such diverse repertory as Antheil's manic "Jazz Symphony" and Satie's glacial "Gymnopedies" (at the piano, on the Philips label). As director of the Schonberg Ensemble and other Dutch groups, Mr. de Leeuw pioneered an influential programming philosophy that mixes composers from early and late in the 20th century, European and American, orderly and anarchic, without regard to rigid ideological divisions.

His programs, however, have shown a certain bias toward more imaginative members of the current European avant-garde. Louis Andriessen's works dominated the opening weekend, and Tuesday was given over to Mauricio Kagel, the master ironist of German musical tradition.

The Argentine-born Mr. Kagel often threatens to lose himself in abstruse deconstructive schemes, but his scores are saved by a raw melodic charm and a dire wit worthy of Karl Kraus. There were wonderful moments in his "Phantasiestuck" (for flute and piano, with invisible chamber accompaniment) and Piano Trio (full of errant Romantic chromaticisms, like Franck gone mad). But the tour de force was ". . . den 24,XII.31" for baritone and chamber orchestra, a dramatization of comical or sinister newspaper clippings from the day Mr. Kagel was born. An awesomely absurd finale reports the ringing of Christmas bells all over America by electric transmission from Bethlehem. Composers through the ages have sought to transcribe bell timbres, but until Mr. Kagel no one thought to combine the usual resonant percussion with a tape of live church bells and a man shouting "Ding, dong, ding, dong!" onstage.

Next to this neo-Dadaist extravagance, American works in the festival were strikingly subdued. On Sunday afternoon, Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa played John Harbison's Cello Concerto, a handsomely made and dazzlingly orchestrated three-movement piece that adds to the impressive roster of new works Mr. Ma has lately been inspiring, although I felt that the whole was a bit less than the sum of the parts. (The amazing Mr. Ma returned after intermission for Strauss's "Don Quixote." In a single day, with Strauss and Messiaen, Tanglewood got to hear the two greatest wind-machine works in the literature.)

And on Monday night there was a concert devoted mostly to Northeastern composers who draw in different ways on the inexhaustible legacy in the Second Viennese School. Namely: Elliott Carter's Quintet for Piano and Winds, a 1991 work that brings no surprises in its fierce, sober argumentation; Leon Kirchner's sweetly rhapsodic Piano Trio No. 2, an adaptation of his recent cello concerto for Mr. Ma, which seems to propose, quite persuasively, that the way to go beyond Schoenberg is to go back to Zemlinsky; Mario Davidovsky's gaunt, finely detailed "Romancero" for soprano, flute, clarinet and cello, and Ralph Shapey's characteristically grim, violent "Evocation No. 2" from 1979, with its unexpectedly delicate close.

Tanglewood's student musicians dedicated themselves to this vast range of new music with unstinting commitment. A few soloists stood out: Christopher Cooper, the noble horn player in "Canyons"; Barry Dove, the indefatigable percussionist in the Shapey; Thomas Lehmkuhl, the wildly inventive baritone soloist in the Kagel. One hopes the young artists go away from the festival without institutional biases toward the opposing camps represented. Mr. de Leeuw's catholic, discriminating taste made internecine polemics temporarily irrelevant.

Columns 2007

Tan Dun's The First Emperor

Stone Opera. The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2006.

Takemitsu

Toward Silence. The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2007.

Mahagonny, Grapes of Wrath

Agit-Opera. The New Yorker, March 5, 2007.

Lang Lang, Yundi Li

The Wow Factor. The New Yorker, April 2, 2007.

The new-music explosion

Club Acts. The New Yorker, April 16, 2007.

Mark Morris Orfeo

Underworld. The New Yorker, May 21, 2007.

Three Orchestras, Two Days

On the Road. The New Yorker, June 25, 2007.

Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland

Looking-Glass Opera. The New Yorker, July 30, 2007.

New York Summer Festivals

Escape to New York. The New Yorker, August 20, 2007.

Philip Glass's Appomattox

The Endless Scroll. The New Yorker, November 5, 2007.

Carnegie's Berlin Festival

The Out-of-Towners. The New Yorker, Dec. 3, 2007.

Selected Writing

 

Writing for The New Yorker, 1993-2016:

Essays

Mallarmé, April 11, 2016.

Orson Welles, Dec. 7, 2015.

Gay Berlin, Jan. 26, 2015.

Beethoven, Oct. 20, 2014.

Adorno and Benjamin, Sept. 15, 2014.

Henry Wallace, Oct. 14, 2013.

Shakespeare, Wagner, Aldridge, July 29, 2013.

Love on the March, Nov. 12, 2012.

Harry Kessler, April 23, 2012.

Gesualdo, Dec. 19 and 26, 2011.

Oscar Wilde, Aug. 9, 2011.

Ten Bars of the Ring, April 25, 2011.

Cage, Oct. 4, 2010.

Fictional composers, Aug. 24, 2009.

Marian Anderson, April 13, 2009.

Bernstein, Dec. 15, 2008.

Classical music in China, July 7, 2008.

Mozart, July 24, 2006.

Feldman, June 19, 2006.

The Record Effect, June 6, 2005.

Listen to This, Feb. 16, 2004.

Pop-music studies, July 14, 2003.

Verdi, Sept. 24, 2001.

Stravinsky, Nov. 6, 2000.

Bosie Douglas, July 24, 2000.

Shostakovich, March 20, 2000.

Richard Strauss, Dec. 20, 1999.

Bob Dylan, May 10, 1999.

Bret Easton Ellis, Jan. 11, 1999.

Wagner's anti-Semitism, Aug. 10, 1998.

Professor Moriarty, Aug. 11, 1997.

Pfitzner and Strauss, July 21, 1997.

Schubert, Jan. 27, 1997.

True Crime, Aug. 19, 1996.

Thomas Mann, March 11, 1996.

Mahler, Sept. 4, 1995.

In memorian Kurt Cobain, April 25, 1994.

Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat, April 12, 1993.

Profiles

Yuval Sharon and Hopscotch, Nov. 16, 2015.

Iván Fischer, June 2, 2014.

Joyce DiDonato, Oct. 7, 2013.

Michael Giacchino, May 7, 2010.

Mitsuko Uchida and Marlboro, June 29, 2009.

John Luther Adams, May 12, 2008.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Phil, April 30, 2007.

Music education, Sept. 4, 2006.

Peter Sellars and Doctor Atomic, Oct. 3, 2005.

Björk, April 23, 2004.

Radiohead, Aug. 20, 2001.

John Adams, Jan. 8, 2001.

St. Lawrence Quartet, May 21, 2001.

Thomas Adès, Oct. 26, 1998.

Valery Gergiev, April 13, 1998.

Musical Events columns (partial list)

Big Ears Festival, April 18, 2016.

Opera Startups, March 28, 2016.

Messiaen's Canyons, Feb. 22, 2016.

In memoriam Boulez, Jan. 18, 2016.

Goldbergs at the Armory, Jan. 11, 2016.

Premières: Great Scott, Bel Canto, Jan. 4, 2016.

Kentridge's Lulu, Nov. 23, 2015.

András Schiff on Schubert, Nov. 2, 2015.

Laurie Anderson, Oct. 19, 2015.

Otello at the Met, Oct. 12, 2015.

Twentieth-century symphonies, Aug. 31, 2015.

Harry Partch and Ethel Smyth, Aug. 10, 2015.

Steven Schick a the Ojai Festival, July 6 and 13, 2015.

Cav/Pag at the Met, May 11, 2015.

Dusapin's Penthesilea, April 27, 2015.

Paris Philharmonie, April 20, 2015.

Meyer Sound, Feb. 23 and March 2, 2015.

Early music at the Met Museum, Feb. 9, 2015.

Meredith Monk and Gabriel Kahane, Jan. 5. 2015.

Organ and Orchestra, Dec. 15, 2014.

Andris Nelsons in Boston, Dec. 1, 2014.

Klinghoffer at the Met, Nov. 3, 2014.

The Peter Sellars Passion, Oct. 27, 2014.

Netrebko at the Met, Oct. 20, 2014.

The Classical Cloud, Sept. 8, 2014.

Hollywood Bowl, Aug. 25, 2014.

NY Phil Biennial, June 23, 2014.

Spring for Music, May 26, 2014.

Liza Lim, April 28, 2014.

Igor Levit, April 14, 2014.

Carnegie's Vienna Festival, March 24, 2014.

Music in Warsaw, March 3, 2014.

Prototype Festival, Feb. 3, 2014.

Falstaff at the Met, Jan. 6, 2014.

Prokofiev's Gambler at the Met, April 9, 2001.

Golijov's Pásion, March 5, 2001.

Vivaldi, Feb. 19, 2001.

Busoni and Frank Martin, Jan. 29, 2001.

Marc-André Hamelin and Earl Wild, Dec. 18, 2000.

New music at Miller Theatre, Dec. 4, 2000.

Flimm's Fidelio at the Met, Oct. 30, 2000.

Jansons in Pittsburgh, Oct. 9, 2000.

The Flimm Ring at Bayreuth, Sept. 4, 2000.

Electronic music at the Lincoln Center Festival, July 31, 2000.

Glyndebourne and Aldeburgh, July 10, 2000.

CD collecting, June 5, 2000.

Lauren Flanigan and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, May 8, 2000.

Boulez at 75, April 10, 2000.

Bach anniversary, March 6, 2000.

Anne-Sophie Mutter, Feb. 7, 2000.

Harbison's Gatsby, Jan. 10, 2000.

Tristan at the Met, Dec. 6, 1999.

Millennium symphonies at the NY Phil, Nov. 29, 1999.

Bolcom's View from the Bridge, Feldman's Second Quartet, Nov. 1, 1999.

Busoni's Faust in Salzburg, Aug, 23, 1999.

Central Park at Glimmerglass, Aug. 9, 1999.

The Ring in San Francisco, July 12, 1999.

Cleveland Orchestra, May 31, 1999.

Ian Bostridge's Schubert, May 17, 1999.

Messiaen's Canyons, April 5, 1999.

The Great Pianists series on Philips, March 29, 1999.

Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, March 8, 1999.

Korngold and Elgar, Feb. 15, 1999.

Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter, Dec. 21, 1998.

Tchaikovsky, Nov. 30, 1998.

Miller's Figaro at the Met, Nov. 16, 1998.

Previn's Streetcar Named Desire, Oct. 5, 1998.

In memoriam Schnittke, Aug. 31, 1998.

Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, July 13, 1998.

Ockeghem and others, June 1, 1998.

Robert Wilson's Lohengrin, March 30, 1998.

Oscar-nominated scores, March 9, 1998.

Colin Davis's Sibelius, Jan. 12, 1998.

Tilson Thomas in San Francisco, Nov. 17, 1997.

Oasis and Radiohead, Sept. 29, 1997.

Peter Lieberson and Lorraine Hunt, Aug. 18, 1997.

Gubaidulina, June 16, 1997.

Pavement, May 26, 1997.

Wozzeck at the Met, March 10, 1997.

The Great American Symphony, Feb. 17, 1997.

The Battle of Britten, Dec. 16, 1996.

Talk of the Town, etc.

Concert Rage, March 26, 2001.

Stanley Kubrick Was My Friend, Too, Aug. 2, 1999.

In memoriam Sinatra, May 25, 1998.

The Finnish Crescendo, April 28, 1997.

David Helfgott, March 17, 1997.

Introduction to the Music Issue, Aug. 26, 1996.

Selected pieces for The New York Times, 1992-97

Ligeti in Boston, New York Times, March 20, 1993.

Satie's Vexations, New York Times, May 10, 1993.

Brooklyn Youth Chorus, New York Times, December 12, 1993.

Interview with Schnittke, New York Times, February 10, 1994.

Elektra w/ Jones, Rysanek, Voigt, New York Times, April 4, 1994.

AMM, New York Times, May 7, 1994.

Reinbert de Leeuw at Tanglewood, New York Times, August 11, 1994.

Esa-Pekka Salonen interview, New York Times, Nov. 27, 1994.

Feldman's Guston, New York Times, May 13, 1995.

Galina Ustvolskaya, New York Times, May 28, 1995.

Dresden and Prague, New York Times, June 6, 1995.

London 1995, New York Times, June 24, 1995.

Thomas Adès at Aldeburgh, New York Times, July 2, 1995.

Schnittke's Faust, New York Times, July 6, 1995.

Music in World War II, New York Times, Aug. 20, 1995.

Boulez at 70, New York Times, April 16, 1995.

Orson Welles, New York Times, Jan. 21, 1996.

Osmo Vänskä and the Iceland Symphony, New York Times, Feb. 29, 1996.

Mann in Love, The New Yorker, March 11, 1996.

MTT's Mavericks Festival, New York Times, June 19, 1996.

Herrmann's Vertigo, New York Times, Oct. 6, 1996.

Babbitt's Clarinet Quintet, New York Times, Oct. 16, 1996.

Other publications

Wallace Stevens, Slate, Jan. 8, 1998.

"Young Adorno," Transition, 1996.

Schnittke 1992, The New Republic, Sept. 28, 1992.

Britten on WHRB, 1988.

Summer hiatus

With two long articles to write and a book to finish (for real), I bid you a temporary adieu.

Pump pump

The Finnish Music Quarterly (see below) also has a deliciously wry account of Finland's woebegone history in the Eurovision song contest. The writer is Kati Sinisalo:

We Finns are Eurovision losers. A nation of zeros... Nothing seems to help. Dance music, dirges, ethno-chants, folk songs, disco, reggae, Spanish music, and others have been tried. Fiddle scraping, flute playing, behind bumping, and tango dancing have been tried in vain.... The annual European festival of kitsch music is a bit of a sore spot for us Finns. On the one hand, people sniff at the contest, on the other hand, '...What if we finally did succeed this year?'

...What was the idea in 1976 when Pump pump performed by Fredi and Friends was chosen to be Finland's representative? The refrain sung in English was 'Let your hip go hippety pump pump / That's the way we dance 'til we die ... ay ay ay...." But the Finnish original fit the choreography even better; a large man bumping his behind into small women backup singers while singing 'Bum against bum bump bump, now that's something'.... [see photo]

Did the audience perhaps not really get the message of Kojo's wheezing protest song against the neutron bomb called Nuku pommiin? After all, it was in Finnish, so few people understood the critical lyrics and the irony of the Finnish title, which means 'oversleep' but literally means 'sleep into the bomb'.... Rikki Sorsa's Reggae OK (1981) was not OK either. Nor did Pave Marijanen's Yamma, Yamma go down well with European pop fans; it came in last place in Sweden in 1992.

There's a happy postscript. Finland's Eurovision ignominy gave way to sudden triumph last month, when Lordi soared to first place on the wings of their anthem "Hard Rock Hallelujah."

The grass is much, much greener

The new issue of the Finnish Music Quarterly reveals that the Finnish government is spending 359.5 million euros on the arts this year, of which 60.5 million goes to music. Orchestras are receiving state grants of 12.26 million. Believe it or not, these grants have been described as inadequate, and there are plans to increase them. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen recently signed a law stipulating that orchestra subsidies should increase by 37% per year over a three-year period. One in five Finns attends an orchestra concert in any given year.

The population of the U.S. is sixty times larger than that of Finland. The current appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts is $124,406,353, or 99 million euros. So the ratio of Finnish per-capita arts spending to American per-capita arts spending is more than two hundred to one.

Barenboim in Chicago

"Farewell Symphony"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, July 3, 2006.

On June 17th, Daniel Barenboim ended his decade-and-a-half run as the music director of the Chicago Symphony with a gritty, impassioned performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Before launching into the work, Barenboim delivered a speech in which he reflected bemusedly on the business of conducting. The celebrated Argentine-Israeli maestro—who has held posts on several continents, maintained a virtuoso piano career, written and lectured widely, and led the remarkable West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together Israeli and Arab players—spoke aloud the prosaic paradox that so often puzzles newcomers: the conductor is the center of attention, yet he makes no sound. He is, Barenboim said, “permanently dependent on the ability and willingness of the musicians to play in a certain way.” A conductor deserves his title, Barenboim went on, only when he has acquired the players’ trust. Pride filled Barenboim’s voice as he declared that he had gained that trust—for much of his tenure, there was resistance from factions in the orchestra—and that he had just received the unofficial title of Honorary Conductor for Life. He then gave the downbeat for Beethoven’s D-minor Allegro ma non troppo. The sound that flowed around him, grimly eloquent at the outset and electrically triumphant at the end, drove home the point.

While most of us incrementally fall to pieces over time, conductors tend to get better with age. Eventually, their legend precedes them; the respect that they have accumulated over the years does as much work as the movement of their hands. This explains how the physically shattered, emotionally unstable Otto Klemperer was, in his later years, able to deliver one staggering performance after another; musicians wanted to write themselves into his saga. Claudio Abbado is another conductor who has recently ascended to the stratosphere, seemingly incapable of giving non-transcendent performances. Barenboim is now sixty-three, and, although he had gravitas even in his youth, something in his work has deepened.

I had an adverse reaction when I first heard the great Chicago orchestra under Barenboim, a decade ago. There was a crude and chaotic quality to the sound: you could still hear the vehement aesthetic of Georg Solti, Barenboim’s predecessor, but it lacked Solti’s precision. Barenboim conducted with a broad beat, trying at times for profound effects that either he was unable to articulate or the orchestra was unwilling to execute. Now he no longer pushes so hard, for his personality has melded with the orchestra’s. His musicianship is old-fashioned; he doesn’t go in for glossy perfection, instead favoring sinewy textures, earthy rhythms, freely singing lines. He is at his best in the Viennese classics, in Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner, where he sways to his heart’s content between song and structure.

His last three Chicago concerts, which took place on consecutive nights, featured not only the Beethoven Ninth but also the Ninth Symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner, plus Pierre Boulez’s “Notations,” Elliott Carter’s “Soundings,” and Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy,” with the conductor at the piano in the last two. Nobody ever said that Barenboim was meek. The concerts caused considerable excitement in Chicago, even among those who had never loved the conductor. Some listeners resisted his habit of insistently programming the likes of Carter and Boulez; others resented his pro-Palestinian statements, or criticized him for failing to evangelize to younger audiences. Nonetheless, spare tickets were going for five hundred dollars and up. On the last night of the series, a young man was seen out on Michigan Avenue waving a fistful of twenties, to no avail.

The Mahler Ninth felt like a recapitulation of Barenboim’s Chicago career. The first movement was rocky at times, orchestra and conductor never quite settling on a central pulse—that stuttering-heartbeat rhythm that signifies the composer’s knowledge of his own approaching death. Yet the playing was passionate in the extreme. There was an engaging wildness in the middle movements, together with more disagreements about tempo. (Some musicians have long been frustrated with Barenboim’s habit of setting new tempos on the spur of the moment.) Finally, in the great Adagio that brings the symphony to a close, the picture snapped into focus; the heat of emotion remained, but the music coalesced into one long, glowing line. The audience contributed to the spell: during the tender cello solo that leads into the Adagissimo coda, an uncommon silence filled the hall, the sound of thousands holding their breath.

The Bruckner Ninth was cooler in mood, befitting a composer who carved out his music as if it were cathedral limestone. The performance advertised the fact that Barenboim has left the Chicago Symphony in splendid shape. People always marvel over the Chicago brass, and with good reason: they have no equal. Each time another f was added to Bruckner’s stepwise crescendos, you could hear the gradation clicking into place, and the sound towered ever upward without cracking. But the Chicago strings are also world-class these days. They have acquired that darkly throbbing tone that used to be the sole property of the Berlin Philharmonic. They seemed especially in synch with Barenboim’s roving beat; when he rocked backward on his feet, making the gestures of a drowning man, and then recovered to deliver a punching downbeat, they trembled and dug in with him.

The Carter and Boulez pieces were vividly executed, although neither ranks among the composers’ best. “Soundings” is quirky and jokey, while “Notations” is a feast of fabulous orchestration. Moreover, the choice of two acclaimed modernists who came of age before 1950 to represent the music of our time exposed one major limitation in Barenboim’s world view: he shows little curiosity about most contemporary music, and colleagues like Esa-Pekka Salonen and David Robertson leave him far behind in their quest for the new. Ultimately, Barenboim is a fiery traditionalist, who can revitalize the most familiar scores. There was nothing conventionally festive about his Beethoven Ninth; tension was maintained throughout, the bass Robert Holl struck a minatory tone in the first minutes of the finale, and even the closing recitation of the “Ode to Joy” had a desperate edge, as if the possibility existed that all men might not be brothers.

During the fifteen-minute ovation that followed the Beethoven, Barenboim went around shaking hands with—or, in many cases, hugging and kissing—all ninety-one members of the orchestra. In the process, an ovation that had initially been directed at the conductor became an ovation for the players, with waves of applause rising up for the longest-serving veterans. You forgot the maestro, and focussed on those who had made the sounds. Barenboim could not have made a more graceful exit.

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who died on June 12th at the age of eighty-three, was perhaps the most famous of living composers in his last years, yet he was reportedly haunted by the feeling that he would be forgotten after his death. He will not be. His legacy is a string of near-perfect pieces—among them “Lontano,” the Requiem, the Horn Trio, the Violin Concerto, and the Études for Piano—and the composer’s outwardly quizzical, secretly passionate personality is felt in every bar. Picking over a huge scrap heap of material, ranging from otherworldly avant-garde noises to fragments of Schubert and Brahms, Ligeti created works that resemble organic machines, as beautiful as they are alien. A long, painful illness prevented him from realizing his dream of writing an opera called “Alice in Wonderland,” stemming from his love of Lewis Carroll. But his entire output is like the Alice stories come to life: the music that plays on the other side of the looking glass, mocking and transcending the ordinary world.

Rich, Ligeti, jazz, Alice

Alan Rich, whose excellent essay/review collection So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic will be out next week from Amadeus, writes a brief obit of Ligeti, consisting mainly of quotations from an interview Rich conducted with the composer in 1993. This passage is particularly striking: "You know, we have certain drawers. There is a drawer of so-called classical music and jazz is in a different drawer and pop and rock, but there are places where the drawers mix. So I have my love for jazz even I don’t play jazz. When Stravinsky wrote his Piano Rag Music, his ragtime was also very, very deep... In fact I dare to say that the real musical style of the 20th century, the real big thing that happened was jazz, this melding of African rhythmic thinking and English, Irish melodies... more important, I feel, than many of the deep learned music." Also worth reading is Paul Griffiths's 1996 interview with Ligeti, which the critic has posted on his website (click on "Snippet of the Week"). There is tantalizing mention of the Alice opera that was not to be. The Alice books hold nearly as much fascination for composers as do Faust and The Tempest: Unsuk Chin, a formidable composer of vaguely Ligeti-ish tendencies, has written her own Alice, to be heard in Munich next June; Tony Tommasini recently reported on Peter Westergaard's Alice-in-progress; and, of course, there are David Del Tredici's Alice pieces, culminating in the ten-year-old, yet-to-be-performed opera Dum Dee Tweedle.

Finnissy at Sick Puppy

Richard Dyer's report of Michael Finnissy's recital in Boston — part of Stephen Drury's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, or Sick Puppy) at NEC — makes me wish I'd made the trip up north. Finnissy is a recent discovery for me; I picked his choral disc Maldon as one of my favorites of last year, and I've been taking in his monumental piano cycle History of Photography in Sound, whose movements include "My Parents' Generation Thought War Meant Something" and "Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets." The music completely defies categorization, ranging from unadorned folkish tonality to monstrous polyrhythmic dissonance. Some mad conviction or conspiratorial world-view (or simply superb technique) holds the disparate pieces together. It would be something to hear the cycle in NYC. Ditto Alvin Curran's similarly vast and all-consuming Inner Cities. Sick Puppy continues this week with more Finnissy, a rendition of In C, and a climactic marathon.

Fifteen ways of looking at Shostakovich

Rachel Kiel, a student at Wesleyan, writes in with a poetic set of word-associations for the Shostakovich String Quartets:

The First Quartet is a blade of grass.
The Second Quartet is a pocket knife.
The Third Quartet is a captive bird.
The Fourth Quartet is an old train car.
The Fifth Quartet is a piece of blue glass.
The Sixth Quartet is a worn dress.
The Seventh Quartet is a red crayon.
The Eighth Quartet is a forest fire.
The Ninth Quartet is a paper fan.
The Tenth Quartet is the bottom of the ocean.
The Eleventh Quartet is a bullet.
The Twelfth Quartet is a sleeping lover.
The Thirteenth Quartet is a horse's skull.
The Fourteenth Quartet is a strand of black hair.
The Fifteenth Quartet is an empty room.

Word to the wise

The brilliant young composer-pianist Timothy Andres, whom I wrote about a couple of years ago, will play at Juilliard's Rose Hall on Friday. Program includes Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, Crumb's Little Suite for Christmas, Bartók's Dance Suite, and recent pieces by Alex Temple and Nico Muhly. Tickets are $15 at the door, $10 for students. There are some new MP3s on Andres's website — see especially the lovely flute-viola-harp trio I Found It in the Woods.

Update: Richard Dyer was at the recital.

More YouTube

Anya Grundmann sent along this video of a, uh, heavily embellished Mozart cadenza by Gilles Apap. And The Rambler has a roundup of twentieth-century/contemporary items.

Welcome to the Noise

My blog has been selected as a Featured Typepad Blog, which means that there will be many people clicking on this site for the first time, exclaiming "Ew! Classical music?!," and clicking away. I am not the famous comic-book Alex Ross, nor am I the dead Scots golfer. Here is an article that says what I'm more or less about as a writer, here is some stuff on rock/pop, here are some fine, fine music blogs, and here is a list of recordings that might make a good introduction to "classical music," which I have decided to rename Awesome Music.