Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

A certain amount of excitement

The Met's Live in HD broadcast of Peter Grimes on Saturday afternoon will have a segment live from the Aldeburgh Cinema, together with a BBC feature about Britten's life in the town.

Mahler in Montana

© 2008 Allen S. Lefohn. Click to enlarge.

The above photo appears in the latest issue of Symphony, accompanying an article by Jennifer Melick. I found it a striking image, and asked the photographer, Allen Lefohn, for permission to reproduce it. It shows an outdoor concert last summer by the Helena Symphony, in Montana. The population of Helena is 30,000; it would appear that about half that number were in attendance. This orchestra, which is led by Allan Scott, has an annual budget of under $600,000, but they don't lack for adventure; they recently played Nielsen's Inextinguishable, and they're in the middle of a Mahler cycle.

The latest music of the future

Peter Neubäcker, pioneer of the widely used Melodyne pitch-correction software, has a new program, Direct Note Access, which allows you to enter into a recorded track, separate out notes within chords, and change them at will. Watch his rather amazing demonstration at Musikmesse Frankfurt, as he casually rewrites Mozart at the touch of a button. Like most technological advances, this one could be either grossly abused or put to thrilling creative ends. One thing's for certain: Neubäcker is a brilliant man. (Via Larry Hardesty.)

"Stuffy" art form fuels outlaw sexuality

The New York Post says that Gov. Spitzer asked his staff to bring a "classical music CD" to Room 871 on that fatal night of destructive passion. Let's hope it was Tristan und Isolde.... Now playing on YouTube are Scott Bradley's 1940s-era cartoon scores Puttin' on the Dog and The Cat That Hated People, both containing instances of 12-tone writing. (Via Bob DuCharme.) ... Phil Lesh talks to Elliott Carter on Counterstream Radio, March 14.... Sheng player Wu Wei in action.... Two interesting shows this weekend at The Tank: on Saturday night, the Jack Quartet plays Xenakis, Lachenmann, and Rihm, and on Sunday Jacob Cooper introduces his opera Timberbrit, about the Tristan-esque tragedy of Justin and Britney.... And the winner is — Lang Lang.

Salsa cookies

Last year I mentioned the curious televised aftermath of John Cage's 1963 Satie marathon — a joint appearance on the quiz show I've Got a Secret by John Cale, one of the participating pianists, and Karl Schenzer, the only audience member who sat through the entire performance. Now, inevitably, you can see the clip auf YouTube. "I just wanted to give myself to the composer's work," Schenzer says on the show. He is definitely Schenzer, not Schanzer. (Via Jeremy Schlosberg.) Bonus track: a toweringly brilliant English-language version of Carmina burana. (Via Daniel Felsenfeld, via John Corigliano. Hit reload when you reach the page to ensure proper synchronization.)

The Wire

The final episode didn't cause me to change my mind.

Grimes 2008

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

Few operas are as rooted in one place as Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” which has rumbled back to the Metropolitan Opera, in a new production by John Doyle. The title character, a dark-souled fisherman who goes mad after his apprentices die, was the invention of the poet George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh, on the eastern coast of England, in the later eighteenth century, and apparently based Grimes on a detested local character. Montagu Slater, the opera’s librettist, wove his elaboration of the tale into various Aldeburgh settings. And Britten, a resident of the same town for most of his adult life, brilliantly evoked its sights and sounds in his music—the crying of gulls, the creaking of buoys, the endless booming of the waves. The obvious way to stage “Grimes” is to re-create Aldeburgh and let Britten’s flawless score do the rest. This was the approach taken by Tyrone Guthrie, who first directed the opera at Covent Garden, in 1947, two years after the première, and who later brought a vividly detailed version to the Metropolitan Opera, in 1967. That classic production played at the Met as recently as 1998, and, while it showed its age, it remained a deeply absorbing experience: you were pulled into a kind of tragic picture postcard.

Doyle, celebrated for his recent presentations of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, has banished the Moot Hall, the nets, the scurrying boys, the lanterns glimmering in fog, and other familiar bits of Grimesiana. Instead, he and his set designer, Scott Pask, confront audiences with a kind of gritty abstraction of coastal life. High wooden walls dominate the stage, their surfaces weathered and sooty. Doors and windows open to disclose various townspeople, their bodies silhouetted against gray-green or sky-blue backgrounds. There are fishermen’s hats and other costumes redolent of the sea, but the garb lacks a strong sense of period; the supporting characters, so vibrantly differentiated in Slater’s words and Britten’s music, tend to blend in with the chorus. Even Grimes is sometimes hard to pick out from the mass of singers, who keep pressing forward in formation, like a black-clad, puritan army.

It’s a handsome-looking show, though it’s studiously, perhaps excessively, grim. Britten filled his score with hymns, dances, and delicious little throwaway tunes, which create a rich illusion of daily bustle; without a façade of ordinary life onstage, the explosions of violence lose their shock value. Still, “Grimes” profits from being seen without the usual quaint clutter. You come face to face with the opera’s darkest elements: not just the much analyzed psychology of Grimes, who may or may not be guilty of abusing his apprentices, but also the psychology of the crowd, which lustily passes judgment on the fisherman without having heard the evidence. And those walled sets serve as a superb sounding board for the chorus, which gave the performance of the night.

Donald Palumbo recently took over as the Met’s chorus master, and the wisdom of that choice was already apparent in the “Orfeo ed Euridice” last May. He has taken a gifted ensemble and imposed discipline and direction: fuzzy enthusiasm has given way to precise intensity. In “Grimes,” he has done wonders again. At the climax of the work, the townspeople deliver an anthem of rage that includes the line “Him who despises us we’ll destroy!” After reaching an initial fortissimo, the dynamics drop to a whisper, and the chorus repeats those words in an obsessive staccato, with the strings playing pizzicato in tandem. On opening night, it was sometimes hard to tell voices and strings apart, and that fusion of choral and orchestral sound symbolized the unanimity of hatred to which Grimes is subjected. Even scarier was the blending of bass voices and horns toward the end of the sequence—a noise like howling wind.

Anthony Dean Griffey, as Grimes, had the challenge of keeping his head above that sea of sound. A lyric tenor of unusual sensitivity, he lacks the ripping dramatic force that was the trademark of the great Jon Vickers, who sang Grimes at the Met some thirty times between 1967 and 1983. But Griffey never failed to make himself heard, and several times he seized attention not with stentorian tones but with a slender thread of lovely sound, as in the abbreviated aria “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades,” in Act I. When Grimes’s propensity toward violence kicked in, Griffey fearlessly veered to the opposite extreme, letting his voice fray into a thuggish rasp. These changes of mood happened so abruptly that some members of the audience jumped. In all, it was a convincing portrayal of a damaged and dangerous man.

Even finer was Patricia Racette’s performance as Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress who tries and fails to rescue Grimes from his anger and self-pity. This character can sometimes come off as annoyingly pure-hearted, a Julie Andrews character gone off course, but Racette teased out layers of complexity. “Ev’ry day I pray it may be so,” Ellen sings in Act II, as she tells the doomed apprentice that Grimes appears to be making a “new start.” Racette tinctured the line with pessimism and melancholy, even acid irony. Likewise, in the Act III aria “Embroidery in childhood,” she conveyed Ellen’s inner agony, the sense that by trying to save Grimes she has doomed him, all the while maintaining the neo-Baroque elegance of Britten’s vocal line.

The remainder of the cast added much human detail, even if Doyle’s staging allowed relatively little room for physical characterization. Felicity Palmer elicited some of the few laughs of the night with her pungent, sharp-elbowed incarnation of the opium- and gossip-addicted Mrs. Sedley, the one who whips the chorus into a rage. John Del Carlo exuded fatuous dignity as the lawyer Swallow. And the young New Zealander baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who has won something of an Internet following for his bare-chested outings in "Don Giovanni" and several contemporary operas, made a major Met début as Ned Keene, turning heads solely with his beautiful, room-filling voice.

Donald Runnicles, the conductor, drew grandiose, almost Wagnerian sounds from the orchestra, although I sometimes wished for sharper rhythmic edges and an extra tinge of ferocity. The Storm Interlude, in particular, suffered in comparison with an overwhelming concert performance that the London Symphony gave at Avery Fisher Hall four years ago, under Colin Davis’s direction. Still, Runnicles showed an instinctive understanding of Britten’s tempos and idiom; in particular, he conjured the wide-open, lonesome atmosphere that was partly missing from Doyle’s staging. If you couldn’t see Aldeburgh, you could certainly hear it.

Under the imaginative leadership of Peter Gelb, the Met has enjoyed a surge of attendance this season, with many performances selling out—good luck getting tickets for upcoming runs of “Tristan und Isolde” and “La Fille du Régiment.” But the company has had a harder time stirring interest in “Grimes,” which drew considerably less than a full house on opening night. Met audiences show inexplicable resistance to this opera: I remember the depressing sight of row upon row of empty seats when Philip Langridge gave a searing account of the title role ten years ago. Gelb has virtuosically marketed stars such as Anna Netrebko and Natalie Dessay, but the challenge with “Grimes” is to sell the work itself, to convince a cautious public of its beauty and power. It’s the same challenge Gerard Mortier will face when he begins importing thorny twentieth-century fare to City Opera next year. Perhaps ancillary events—lectures, literary readings, film showings—would make New York’s intellectual set aware that opera has more to offer than beautiful voices preening in front of sumptuous sets. When “Grimes” is broadcast on the Met’s Live in HD series, on March 15th, a national audience can see for itself that Peter Grimes’s descent into madness has the cosmic chill of the greatest scenes in Shakespeare.

Revisiting Stockhausen

The magazine Artforum has put together a remarkable tribute to Stockhausen, consisting of extended articles by Robin Maconie, Stockhausen's chief chronicler, and La Monte Young, giant of American experimental music, along with shorter tributes by Irvine Arditti, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Morton Subotnick, Maryanne Amacher, and Björk. There's much worth noting: Maconie's passionate defense of Stockhausen's post-9/11 commentary ("The opinion of a musician both of whose parents were victims of war — the mother by lethal injection, the father on the Eastern front — a survivor who worked the final six months of resistance as an orderly in a field hospital caring for and comforting American war victims of Allied phosphor bombs, speaking English to them and playing music to ease their suffering, deserves respect as the view of one who knows what war is about...."); Young's story of how he was afraid to show Stockhausen his long-tone Trio for Strings when he went to Darmstadt in 1959 ("Why didn't you show me this at the beginning?" Stockhausen said, after studying it for a long time); and Björk's rhapsodic account of how listening to Stockhausen opened her young musical mind ("...while classical teachers in my school kept moaning about the good old days of music ... [thinking] that with our sportsmanship, will and self-denial we could masturbate the old dead beast and perhaps it would groan for another few years"). I attempted to convince Björk to become Stockhausen Guest Blogger here after the composer's death; evidently, Artforum practiced stronger persuasion. Joseph Drew has been writing about Stockhausen in depth at ANABlog.

Update: Note an upcoming Alarm Will Sound show at The Kitchen (March 21 and 22) that will evoke an imaginary meeting between Stockhausen and John Lennon.

Ernest Newman, move over

Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911), the fourth and final volume of Henry-Louis de La Grange's epic biography, arrived in the mail today, to much excitement in this household. At 1758 pages, it's a touch long — the ratio of pages to days of Mahler's life is about 1.4:1 — but Penelope (pictured) is one of those for whom there is no such thing as too much Mahler. A quick survey suggests that in this expansion of his original French edition La Grange is pressing home the point that Mahler had a rather happier time in America than the standard mythology makes out (e.g., Gottfried Rosenbaum's immortal line in Pictures from an Institution: "Mahler diedt from America"). The introduction reveals that La Grange is not quite done: he is working on a revision of the first volume, which appeared in English back in 1973.

New opera at the Met

La Cieca reports on the Met 2008-09 season announcement, which I was unable to attend. She notes significant news in the realm of contemporary opera: John Adams's Nixon in China is scheduled for the 2010-11 season, in the classic Peter Sellars production; the Osvaldo Golijov opera, provisionally titled Daedalus, arrives in 2011-12; and Thomas Adès's The Tempest is slated for 2012-13. Adams's Doctor Atomic will, as was previously known, have its Met premiere next October, in a production by Penny Woolcock, who made the brilliant film of The Death of Klinghoffer. Some may be confused by the fact that Sellars is directing Nixon but not Atomic. As I understand it, Peter Gelb had fundamental disagreements with Sellars over the original Atomic production, but lines of communication remained open, so that Sellars came on board for Nixon's long-delayed Met debut. Some may also wonder why Nixon is showing up at the Met when Gerard Mortier had previously mentioned it for City Opera. I haven't done hard reporting on that issue, but it would appear that Gelb outmaneuvered Mortier on the Adams front. Round 2 to come.

Award

I'm deeply honored and delighted to report that The Rest Is Noise has won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. I'm seen here in the company of other winners: Tim Jeal, Mary Jo Bang, Edwidge Danticat, Emilie Buchwald, Sam Anderson, and Harriet A. Washington. Accepting the award, I talked about what book and music critics around the country have done to advance the cause of Noise, which was an unlikely mass-market proposition to say the least. I sometimes wonder whether my calling accomplishes anything in the bigger scheme of things, and, having now been on the receiving end of some critical enthusiasm, I certainly know that it can. So, huge thanks to the NBCC, which, in the last year or two, has done a brilliant job of organizing its members and promoting books in the face of savage cutbacks in newspaper coverage. They've presented readings and panel discussions in bookstores across the country, run a lively blog, and generally adopted an attitude of not going gentle into that icky night. Critics in other genres might emulate their example. To follow related issues, read ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program.

I've read two of the other finalists in the criticism category, and strongly recommend them: Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a remarkably incisive portrait of a supreme creative musician in action, and Joan Acocella's Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, the rare essay collection that is greater than the sum of its (already splendid) parts.

Giuseppe Di Stefano

One of the twentieth century's greatest, most impassioned tenors has passed away at the age of eighty-six, Opera Chic reports. Hearing him sing "E lucevan le stelle" on the Callas/EMI Tosca was my first great spine-tingling operatic experience. Listen to a sensational live rendition of the aria at La Cieca.

Brendel in brief

Alfred the Great. The New Yorker, March 10, 2008.

EPS farewell

The other day Esa-Pekka Salonen announced his final season with the LA Philharmonic. The most innovative conductor of the contemporary era is going out in the high and bold style to which LA audiences have become accustomed. Of particular interest is a series of concerts in January 2009 in which Salonen will conduct new works of Arvo Pärt and Louis Andriessen and the long-awaited Peter Sellars staging of Kaija Saariaho's La Passion de Simone. His last series begins on April 7, with a Green Umbrella concert of younger composers: Fang Man, Erin Gee, Enrico Chapela, and Brooklyn's Anna Clyne. He then leads a yet-to-be-titled work of his own devising and moves on to the grand finale: Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms, as directed by Sellars. That's not even the end of the season: John Adams curates some concerts in May, including a premiere by the very gifted composer-pianist Timothy Andres. (It's great to see the mighty LA Phil championing younger, relatively unknown composing talent.) And, lest anyone worry that the orchestra's modernistic tendencies will lapse when Salonen leaves, Ligeti's Atmosphères and Kurtág's Stele appear on Gustavo Dudamel's programs in fall 2008.

Explaining why he focussed on Stravinsky in his farewell season, Salonen said: “Stravinsky was very fortunate. He lived a very long life and he was productive to the very end. And somehow, I cannot think of many other artists of any discipline with the same sort of imagination and fantasy as Stravinsky. And that’s what it comes down to, really: the point of the idea, the imagination. The technique, everybody can learn ultimately, to make something that looks or sounds like a work of art. But the quality of the idea itself is the very central issue here, and Stravinsky never had bad ideas." Miller Theatre in NYC will underscore that point when it puts on a five-concert Stravinsky Festival in April, centered on a presentation of the Psalms, the Mass, and Requiem Canticles at the Park Avenue Armory.

Reality television in 1757

"Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy." 

— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Modern music as seen from the White House

Timothy Goeglein, director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, resigned yesterday after he was found to be committing plagiarism in the pages of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Those who relish encounters between contemporary music and politics — encounters inevitably as weird as they are rare — will want to know that living composers play a peripheral role in the story. One of Goeglein's columns, lyrically titled "Life Can Be Beautiful If the Music Is," sang the praises of Gian Carlo Menotti. It turns out that the author borrowed liberally from a Robert Reilly article in Crisis magazine. The really striking passage in Goeglein's piece — seemingly of his own invention — is this: "In the world of contemporary classical music, no names rate higher than John Corigliano, John Adams and Richard Danielpour. They are names that classical music lovers know and respect. But how about creative individuals who strive for excellence in all the arts and whose achievements often go unreported and unfunded because they are seen as less avant garde? How do they comprise this renaissance in music, for instance, that gets beyond an endless succession of bar rests and back to inspired notation?" A good question! I am sure that listeners everywhere have had their fill of Danielpour's astringently experimental, evening-length silent pieces.

Fight of the century

Look under Event. 

Not in Pyongyang playlist

— Josquin, Missa Sine nomine and Missa Ad fugam; Tallis Scholars (Gimell)
— Heavenly Harmonies (music of Tallis and Byrd); Stile Antico (Harmonia Mundi)
— Rochberg, Symphony No. 1; Christopher Lyndon-Gee conducting the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony (Naxos) [See Sequenza21 review by Steve Hicken]
— Dowland, Lute Songs, Britten, Nocturnal; Mark Padmore, Elizabeth Kenny, Craig Ogden (Hyperion)
— Verdi, Aida; with Roberto Alagna, Violeta Urmana, and, well, Roberto Bolle (Decca DVD)
— Schumann, Symphonies 1-4, Mahler edition; Riccardo Chailly conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Decca)
— Leifs, Edda I; Hermann Bäumer conducting the Iceland Symphony and Schola Cantorum (BIS)

Another great bookstore gone

Very sad news: Dutton's, in Brentwood, California, will close its doors on April 30.

Headline of the day

"N.Y. SENDS GERSHWIN TO SECRETIVE COMMUNISTS," said CNN's main page earlier today.  It feels like 1956 again. There are, needless to say, divergent opinions about the New York Philharmonic's forty-eight-hour tour of North Korea, now underway. Norman Lebrecht has issued a flat-out denunciation, as has Terry Teachout. Matthew Guerrieri is skeptical, but at a softer dynamic. Greg Sandow believes the trip can do good. Jens Laurson and George Pieler think it might have done good if the program had been different. Condoleezza Rice weighs in: "I don't think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvořák is going to do in North Korea." Dan Wakin is providing reports on the Times arts blog; Steve Smith is also along for the ride. Kate Julian of the New Yorker talks to Lorin Maazel. Anne Midgette looks at North Korea's classical scene. Pete Matthews live-blogs the broadcast. I'll comment later on.