Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Stockhausen's LICHT in Amsterdam

Infinity Opera. The New Yorker, June 24, 2019.

Gay life

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I've assembled some of my writing on gay topics, going back to the first piece I wrote for The New Yorker, in 1993. The photo is from my marriage to Jonathan at Toronto City Hall, 2005.

Love on the March. Nov. 4, 2012.

Gay Berlin, Jan. 26, 2015.

Oscar Wilde, Aug. 9, 2011.

Willa Cather, Oct. 2, 2017.

Corigliano's First Symphony, May 30, 2019.

Gay opera, July 27, 2017.

Julius Eastman, Jan. 15, 2017.

Women, gays, and classical music. Oct. 3, 2013.

Beyond the gay-marriage victory, March 25, 2013.

Gay-rights victories, Nov. 7, 2012.

Thomas Mann, March 11, 1996.

In memoriam River Phoenix, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1993.

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

Corigliano's First Symphony

Revisiting a Symphonic AIDS Memorial, New Yorker website, May 30, 2019.

Nightafternight playlist

George Benjamin, Lessons in Love and Violence; Stéphane Degout, Barbara Hannigan, Gyula Orendt, Peter Hoare, Samuel Boden, Benjamin conducting the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House (Nimbus)

Sibelius, Kullervo; Helena Juntunen, Benjamin Appl, Thomas Dausgaard conducting the Lund Male Chorus and BBC Scottish Symphony (Hyperion)

Pierluigi Billone, FACE; PHACE (Kairos)

Antón García Abril, Six Partitas; Hilary Hahn (Decca)

Kaija Saariaho, True Fire, Trans, Ciel d'hiver; Gerald Finley, Xavier de Maistre, Hannu Lintu conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Ondine)

Carl Hockh, Violin Sonatas; Mikołaj Zgółka, Jarosław Thiel, Aleksandra Rupocińska (NFM)

Antony Panteras, Collected Works Vol. II (2005–2018); various performers (Immediata)

Salieri footnotes

Salieri's Revenge. The New Yorker, June 3, 2019.

I first had the idea for writing an article about Salieri back in 2012, when, while researching my lecture on "Black Wagnerism," I came across the libretto of Salieri's final opera, Die Neger. When I discovered that that opera includes an interracial love story, one that ends happily with an onstage kiss, I began to think twice about Salieri's place in music history. I am grateful to Timo Jouko Herrmann, John Rice, Christophe Rousset, and Andrea Harrandt of the Musiksammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek for their assistance during the peculiarly long gestation time for the resulting piece.

Rousset's recording of Tarare, Salieri's collaboration with Beaumarchais, is being issued next week by Aparte. Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques have previously recorded Salieri's operas La grotta di Trofonio, Les Horaces, and Les Danaïdes. Some other notable recordings: Il mondo alla rovescia, from the Arena di Verona (Dynamic); Andreas Staier's disc of the two piano concertos, with Concerto Köln (Teldec); Cecilia Bartoli's album of Salieri arias (Decca); Diana Damrau's disc of Salieri, Mozart, and Reghini arias (Virgin); Riccardo Muti's video of Europa riconosciuta from La Scala (Erato); Falstaff with the Madrigalists of Milan (Chandos); L'Arte del Mondo's La scuola de' gelosi (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi); the Requiem in C Minor, with Lawrence Foster and the Gulbenkian Foundation (Pentatone); and the Mannheim Mozart Orchestra's two bracing volumes of overtures (Hänssler).

A brief bibliography:

Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Morio Verlag, 2019)

Herrmann, Antonio Salieri und seine deutschsprachigen Werke für das Musiktheater (Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag, 2015)

Mozart, Salieri, Cornetti, Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, ed. Herrmann (Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag, 2016)

John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Volkmar Braunbehrens, Maligned Master: The Real Story of Antonio Salieri (Fromm, 1992)

Ian Woodfield, Cabals and Satires: Mozart's Comic Operas in Vienna (Oxford UP, 2018)

David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 (Oxford UP, 2012)

Jessica M. Abbazio, Antonio Salieri’s "La calamita de’ cuori" (1774): Sources, Form, Context (PhD. diss., University of Maryland, 2016)

Thomas Betzwieser and Arthur Groos, "Exoticism and Politics: Beaumarchais' and Salieri's 'Le Couronnement de Tarare' (1790)," Cambridge Opera Journal 6:2 (July 1994), pp. 91–112.

Christopher H. Gibbs, "Writing Under the Influence?: Salieri and Schubert's Early Opinion of Beethoven," Current Musicology 75 (2003), pp. 113–40.

John Spitzer, "Musical Attribution and Critical Judgment: The Rise and Fall of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b," The Journal of Musicology 5:3 (Summer 1987), pp. 319–56.

Miscellany

A Stockhausen Moment is upon us: Southbank Centre is presenting a festival entitled Stockhausen: Cosmic Prophet, with the LICHT opera Donnerstag as its centerpiece, while the Holland Festival is preparing to unveil aus LICHT, a three-day condensation of the entire LICHT cycle (May 31-June 10).... The lineup for this year's Dog Star Orchestra series in and around Los Angeles (June 6-22) has been posted. It coincides with two other major new-music events in LA: the revival of Meredith Monk's ATLAS at the LA Phil (June 11-14) and the première of Anthony Davis's The Central Park Five at Long Beach Opera (June 15-23).... The New York Philharmonic's Music of Conscience festival (May 22-June 8) includes a revisiting of John Corigliano's First Symphony, his AIDS memorial, and David Lang's new Fidelio-inspired opera prisoner of the state.... As a prelude to the Philharmonia Orchestra's Weimar Berlin series, which begins on June 9, a nattily outfitted Gavin Plumley has put together an absorbing sequence of introductory videos. Esa-Pekka Salonen will bring much of this material to the LA Phil next season.... Sally Blackwood, Liza Lim, Peggy Polias and Bree van Reyk, all Australian-born composers, have written "Opera and the Doing of Women," a clarion call for gender equality in the opera sphere.

The Shed

Culture by the Yards. The New Yorker, May 28, 2019.

Bookshelf

New publications of interest.

Mark Berry, Arnold Schoenberg (University of Chicago Press)

Damon Krukowski, Ways of Hearing (MIT Press)

Oliver Soden, Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Lorraine Plourde, Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City (Wesleyan)

Michael Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (Yale UP)

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs) [for emphasis]

Linda Catlin Smith

The new issue of musicworks, which some kind person sends me regularly from Toronto, has an evocative profile, by Monica Pearce, of the American-Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, whose spare, crystalline music has found an international following in recent years, thanks in part to the British label another timbre. The composer and author Allen Shawn, who taught Smith in high school, describes her early efforts: "I felt from the very first encounter that she was a composer. The connection between her and the notes she put down was so deep . . . She meant what she wrote, and she heard it and she felt it, and she needed it. That connection was the manifestation of a part of her that was essential, that she had to put on paper; and to me, that's a composer." The issue also has absorbing profiles of Wadada Leo Smith and Samuel Andreyev, by Alexander Varty and Nick Storring respectively.

Weinberg's "Kaddish"

On the New Yorker website, a strong recommendation for the City of Birmingham Symphony's new recording of Mieczysław Weinberg's Symphonies No. 2 and 21. The latter, dedicated to victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, stands revealed as one of Weinberg's greatest works — fully the equal of the later symphonies of his longtime friend and mentor Shostakovich.

The Weinberg discography has expanded greatly since I wrote about The Passenger in 2011. Of the twenty-two symphonies — the last was unfinished at his death — only three have yet to make it to disc: the Ninth, the Eleventh, and the Fifteenth. David Fanning, whose full-length Weinberg biography, co-written with Michelle Assay, is eagerly awaited, tells me that the Ninth looks particularly promising based on his study of the score, although the expense of presenting it would be considerable, since no performance materials exist.  Having been through the others — recordings can be found on Neos, Naxos, Chandos, Toccata Classics, and Melodiya — I especially recommend Nos. 6, 12, 13, and 20, though every one of these works is worth hearing. Another essential disc is Melodiya's compendium of the concertos for violin, cello, and flute (No. 1), with Leonid Kogan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexander Korneyev, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra led by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. For Chandos, Urban Claesson gives a gorgeous performance of the 1970 Clarinet Concerto, with Thord Svedlund conducting the Gothenburg Symphony.

Dozens of other Weinberg releases have arrived in recent years. Forces from the Nationaltheater Mannheim have delivered an urgent account of Weinberg's final opera, The Idiot, for SWR. Unofficial recordings of The Portrait and Lady Magnesia are in circulation, though I have not heard them. The Quatuor Danel's traversal of the complete quartets for cpo remains an exceptional feat; the Silesian Quartet is challenging it with a new series on the Accord label. I recommend starting with the Quartets Nos. 4-6. Gidon Kremer has made several superb Weinberg recordings for ECM, as I noted in a 2017 column. Linus Roth and José Gallardo essayed the complete violin-and-piano works for Challenge Classics; Allison Brewster Franzetti has four discs of the piano music on Grand Piano; and Josef Feigelson has surveyed the cello music for Naxos. 

Furtwängler's wartime recordings

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website, May 2, 2019.

The last grandchild

Verena Wagner Lafferentz died on April 19, at the age of 98. She was the last surviving grandchild of Richard Wagner — and it is astonishing to contemplate that the grandchild of a man born in 1813 was alive until last week. (Not quite as astonishing, to be sure, as the fact that two grandsons of John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States, born 1790, are still with us.) Mark Berry makes the striking observation that Verena must have been one of the very last living people to have known Hitler personally. Hitler doted on the Wagner grandchildren from the late 1920s onward, and while Wieland received most of his attention he appears also to have enjoyed Verena's company. Her husband, Bodo Lafferentz, was a high-ranking SS officer who oversaw the Strength Through Joy program that brought wounded soldiers to Bayreuth during the war. In later years, Verena appears to have felt no responsibility to help us understand Hitler or to shed light on her family's complicity in the regime. At least she avoided dying on the Führer's birthday.

Nightafternight playlist

Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21; Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with the Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer (DG, out May 3)

Schubert, Sonatas D958 and 959, Impromptus D899, Drei Klavierstücke; András Schiff (ECM)

Stefan Prins, Augmented: Generation Kill, Piano Hero, Third Space, Not I, and other works; Nadar Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Stephanie Ginsburgh, Yaron Deutsch (Kairos CD / DVD)

Black Composers Series, 1974–1978 (Sony)

Dominique Schafer, Vers une présence réelle and other works; Matthias Kuhn conducting the ensemble proton bern (Kairos)

Juri Seo, Respiri and other works; Argus Quartet, Joann Whang (Innova, out May 24)

Mr. Handel's Dinner: Concertos, Sonatas, and Chaconnes by Handel and His Inner Circle; Maurice Steger, La Cetra (Harmonia Mundi)

Pulitzer Prize 2019

Congratulations to Ellen Reid, whose opera p r i s m, on a libretto by Roxie Perkins, has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The première took place at Redcat, in Los Angeles, under the auspices of L.A. Opera and Beth Morrison Projects; I wrote about it here. I first encountered Reid's work when she contributed a memorable outdoor scene to Yuval Sharon's multi-composer Hopscotch project. Andrew Norman's Sustain was one of two finalists, alongside James Romig's Still. I heard Sustain at the LA Phil and found it be one of the strongest American orchestral works of recent years. I missed Romig's piece, which was recorded by New World, but will be sure to explore it. For an exploration of recent trends in the music Pulitzer, read Will Robin in the New York Times. After the surprise win last year by the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, it is tempting to say that the Pulitzer has reverted to the old routine. However, the likes of Reid, Du Yun, and Henry Threadgill hardly conform to academic models and represent a real diversification in terms of style and subject matter. The lack of a celebrity name will undoubtedly minimize attention this year, but these choices still matter.

Tyshawn Sorey

Shape-Shifter. The New Yorker, April 22, 2019.

Thought of the day

"Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise."

        — Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Bookshelf

Andrew Patner, A Portrait in Four Movements: The Chicago Symphony under Barenboim, Boulez, Haitink, and Muti, ed. Doug Shadle and John Schmidt (University of Chicago Press)

Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll Ap Siôn, eds., Rethinking Reich (Oxford UP)

Michael P. Steinberg, The Problem with Wagner (University of Chicago Press)

Timo Jouko Herrmann, Antonio Salieri: Eine Biografie (Morio)

Ian Woodfield, Cabals & Satires: Mozart's Comic Operas in Vienna (Oxford UP)

Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone)

Susan McClary, The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music (University of Michigan Press)

Jack Kohl, Bone Over Ivory: Essays from a Standing Pianist (Pauktaug Press)

Lawrence Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (University of California Press)

Miscellany

Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a three-concert festival of the noted Angeleno composer Igor Stravinsky. The lineup includes Funeral Song, Agon, The Rite of Spring, Requiem Canticles, Mass, Cantata, Orpheus, and Perséphone, the last staged by Peter Sellars.... On Saturday, the perennially fresh LA series Jacaranda presents works of James Tenney, Julius Eastman, Lukas Foss, and Frederic Rzewski, with SUNY Buffalo as the common thread.... Yo-Yo Ma brings his Bach Project to the US-Mexico border this weekend, playing the six solo suites in San Antonio and then making appearances in Laredo TX and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.... A busy cross-country week for loadbang: this weekend, premiere performances of Hannah Lash's The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep in Santa Fe and Albuquerque; then a Heather Stebbins composer portrait in Brooklyn; and, on April 18, a concert at Opera America featuring world premieres by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and George Lewis.... Loadbang member Jeff Gavett also performs with Ekmeles on May 10... Blank Forms celebrates the late Maryanne Amacher in Philadelphia this weekend.... On  May 4 in Chicago, the Spektral Quartet investigates the fascinating electroacoustic work of Christopher Trapani....  On April 20 at the DiMenna Center in NYC, the Talea Ensemble marks its first decade with a fairly awesome lineup of works by Grisey, Iannotta, Takasugi, Diaz de Leon, George Lewis, Cheung, Neuwirth, Fure, Thomalla, Diels, and GF Haas.... On April 29 in Eugene, Oregon, the undersigned will give a lecture at the University of Oregon's German and Scandinavian Department on the topic "Lords of the Ring: Wagner and Fantasy Culture."

Andrew, David

In the space of ten days in February, 2015, I lost two beloved friends: the music critic and radio host Andrew Patner and the journalist David Carr. I don't think of them as necessarily similar in personality — each was far too singular to resemble anyone else — but they had in common a superhuman capacity for friendship, galvanizing the world around them, brightening every room they ever entered. As it happens, two books memorializing them came into my hands today: All That You Leave Behind, a memoir by David's daughter Erin Lee Carr; and A Portrait in Four Movements, a compendium of Andrew's writings on the Chicago Symphony, edited by Doug Shadle and John Schmidt. I was honored to write a foreword for the latter, in tribute to the man I called, on the day he died, "one of the wisest, wittiest, most generous, most avid, most altogether vital people in the world of the arts." Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη, זיכרונו לברכה.

Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism

How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage, New Yorker website, April 1, 2019.