Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Mistakes at the LA Phil

It's unfortunate that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, one of the world's leading orchestras, has been suffering from muddled leadership on the part of its board of directors. When Deborah Borda left the LA Phil's top administrative post in 2017, the board had the opportunity to promote Chad Smith, the orchestra's longtime chief of programming. Instead, it brought in Simon Woods, who had had success in previous jobs but who lacked Smith's vision and imagination, not to mention his deep knowledge of the organization. Woods's early departure, announced Monday, gives the board a second chance to make the right choice.

Petrenko in Berlin

Safe Space. The New Yorker, Sept. 16, 2019.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent recordings of interest.

Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)

Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony)

Clara Schumann, Piano Concerto, Piano Sonata in G Minor, and other works; Isata Kanneh-Mason with Holly Mathieson conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Decca)

Mark Andre, hij 1 and 2; Mariano Chiacchiarini conducting the WDR Symphony, Marcus Creed conducting the SWR Vocal Ensemble (Wergo)

Weinberg, String Quartets Nos. 11–13; Silesian Quartet (Accord)

Ronald Stevenson, Piano Works vol. 2; Kenneth Hamilton (Prima Facie)

Luke Bedford, Through His Teeth; Opera Factory Freiburg (bastille musique)

Christopher Cerrone, The Pieces That Fall to Earth; Lindsay Kesselman, Theo Bleckmann, Christopher Rountree conducting wild Up (New Amsterdam)

Catherine Lamb, Point / Wave; Cristián Alvear (another timbre)

John Luther Adams, Become Desert; Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony (Cantaloupe)

in manus tuas: works of Andrew Norman, Caroline Shaw, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir; Lanzilotti, Karl Larson, Sarah Mullins (New Focus)

Korngold at Bard

Surround Sound. The New Yorker, Aug. 19, 2109.

A Trevor Bača moment

Ashley Walters performing Bača's Nähte at a WasteLAnd event, Nov. 16, 2018.  Walters will play the same piece live at Outhaus in LA on Aug. 1, as part of a three-day Underwolf Records festival (July 31 – Aug. 2). Many more videos from WasteLAnd's recent concerts are now online, including works of Liza Lim, Chaya Czernowin, Richard Barrett, Katherine Young, Nicholas Deyoe, and Andrew McIntosh. I especially recommend Klaus Lang's missa beati pauperes spiritu, which I was lucky to witness live; I am somewhere behind Michael Pisaro.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Melissa Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America (Boydell and Brewer)

Cate Haste, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler (Basic Books)

Shayne Carter, Dead People I Have Known (Victoria UP)

Mark Stryker, Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press)

Walter Everett and Tim Riley, What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (Oxford UP)

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (FSG, out 8/27)

Katherine M. Kuenzli, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale UP)

The Karl Muck affair

For the New Yorker website, I've written a Cultural Comment on two recent books that describe the absurd and frightening Karl Muck hysteria of 1917-18. Above is a cartoon from the period. One rumor pegged Muck as Wagner's illegitimate son, prompting a poem from Lincoln Kirstein: "Karl Muck conducts the symphony; a steel svelte villain, he— / Ma says he's Wagner's bastard son ('Daddy, what's bostordy?')" Other eminent German- and Austrian-born musicians suffered consequences during the First World War, including Ernst Kunwald, who was interned; Frederick Stock, who temporarily stepped down from the Chicago Symphony; and Fritz Kreisler, who stopped performing for the duration of the war.

Miscellany

"No musical administrator is more widely respected or well liked than Ara Guzelimian," I wrote on this blog in 2007, shortly after Ara left Carnegie Hall to become Dean of Juilliard. Ara recently announced that he will step down from Juilliard next year, and the song remains the same. During his tenure, Juilliard has diversified and deepened its mission while retaining an exalted status among American conservatories. I look forward to seeing what institution will profit next from Ara's wisdom and warmth.... The keen critic and Bruckner authority Richard Lehnert has left Stereophile after thirty-four years of service as the magazine's copyeditor. He's written a delightful memoir of his adventures in editing.... The Louth Contemporary Music Society, whose leader Eamonn Quinn won the Belmont Prize last year, has an entrancing new CD out, KLANG, on which the Goeyvaerts String Trio plays Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Sounds on Schön Berg La Monte Young.... On August 10, Indexical will take over much of the Californian city of Santa Cruz, as Carmina Escobar leads a daylong event entitled Feast of Beams, Keepers of Light. Indexical is seeking musicians, dancers, artists, surfers, and bicyclists.... The NYC activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished ends its season on July 11 with a program devoted to climate change and its effect on communities of color.... Composer and YouTube analyst Samuel Andreyev has a fine segment on Ruth Crawford Seeger's awesome Quartet.

Monk's ATLAS, Davis's Central Park Five

Earth Songs. The New Yorker, July 1, 2019.

Thought of the day

"When Wagner 'thinks,' he stumbles."

                                            — Nietzsche

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.