Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Worth noting

From Andrew Marantz's article “The Illiberal Order," in this week's New Yorker:

There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. “Orbán doesn’t need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” He acknowledged that the U.S. has safeguards that Hungary does not: the two-party system, which might forestall a slide into perennial single-party rule; the American Constitution, which is far more difficult to amend. Still, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today. “I’m sorry to tell you, I’m your worst nightmare,” Dessewffy said, with a wry smile. As worst nightmares went, I had to admit, it didn’t seem so bad at first glance. He was sitting in a placid garden, enjoying a lemonade, wearing cargo shorts. “This is maybe the strangest part,” he said. “Even my parents, who lived under Stalin, still drank lemonade, still went swimming in the lake on a hot day, still fell in love. In the nightmare scenario, you still have a life, even if you feel somewhat guilty about it.”

AMOC at Ojai

Anything Goes. The New Yorker, July 4, 2022.

For Mr. Baron

Martin J. Baron, the imperturbable admiral of fact-checking at The New Yorker, died today at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Baron, as he was invariably addressed, had a thirty-five-year tenure at the magazine, during which time he must have conversed, in his decorous and unhurried way ("In the next passage, Mr. Pollini, we would like to say . . ."), with most of the significant figures of the late twentieth century. I remember once looking through one of the two immense Rolodexes on his desk and finding cards for Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. If I had written, say, that Rimsky-Korsakov was a superb orchestrator, he would call up Richard Taruskin and ask whether it would be fair to say that Rimsky-Korsakov was a superb orchestrator. (This is an exaggeration, but only a mild one.) He worked on most of my articles from the mid-1990s until his retirement, in 2010, and I owe infinitely much to his knowledge, his meticulousness, his gentleness, and his sympathy. In 1997, as the New York Times reported, he nearly missed his own sixtieth-birthday party because he was immersed in my essay on Schubert. I wrote in the acknowledgments to The Rest Is Noise: “Martin Baron is the greatest fact-checker that ever was and ever will be. (Leave on author.)" The last phrase is a long-standing New Yorker locution, indicating an item that cannot be checked by normal channels and is left to the writer's discretion. The son of a longtime St. Louis Symphony violinist, Martin had a profound love for classical music, and for Schubert above all. I offer the above in his memory.

Wagnerismi

The Italian translation of Wagnerism, by Lorenzo Parmiggiani and Andrea Silvestri, is now available from Bompiani. It joins the Spanish version, by Luis Gago (Seix Barral), and the German version, by Gloria Buschor and Günter Kotzor (Rowohlt). I am well aware of how taxing this book must have been to translate, and I am deeply grateful to all of the above.

Hungarian steam locomotives

Courtesy of the Avant-Garde Project.

The German opera system

Marx in Chemnitz.

Aida in Chemnitz. The New Yorker, June 20, 2022.

A Milton Babbitt moment

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Schoeck, Elegie; Christian Gerhaher, Heinz Holliger conducting the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Sony)

Alvin Singleton, Four String Quartets; Momenta Quartet (New World)

Johanna Beyer, Music for Woodwinds; Arizona Wind Quintet, Daniel Linder (New World)

Mouton, Missa Faulte d'argent, Motets; Stephen Rice leading the Brabant Ensemble (Hyperion, out July 1)

Muhly, Stranger, Lorne Ys My Likinge, Impossible Things; Nicholas Phan, The Knights (Avie)

John Williams, Violin Concerto No. 2, selected film themes; Anne-Sophie Mutter, Williams conducting the Boston Symphony (DG)

Georgia Rodgers, September; Apartment House, Zubin Kanga (another timbre)

Bach, St. Matthew Passion; Julian Prégardien, Stéphane Degout, Sabine Devieilhe, Hana Blažiková, Lucile Richardot, Tim Mead, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Christian Immler, Raphaël Pichon leading Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Schubert, Die schöne Müllerin; Gerald Finley, Julius Drake (Hyperion)

Gabriel Kahane, Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch)

Wagner-Welt Bamberg

After Dortmund, I spent more than a week in Bamberg, hovering around the Bamberg Symphony while they presented two Wagnerish concerts: a multimedia presentation titled Die Welt mit Wagner, produced by Clemens and Nick Prokop; and Der Ring ohne Worte, a version of Lorin Maazel's symphonic condensation of the Ring with supplemental Wagnerian texts recited by the great German actor Jens Harzer. In advance of the latter, which incorporated writings of Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Charlotte Teller, Alexander Blok, Elfriede Jelinek, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walther Rathenau, and Wagner himself, I presented my first and quite possibly my last lecture in German. I am deeply grateful to the Bamberg Symphony for having invited me to participate in these endeavors. I was able to make several side trips to see opera in neighboring cities; a report will be forthcoming in The New Yorker.

Anthony Davis's X, Brett Dean's Hamlet

Outsiders. The New Yorker, June 6, 2022.

Wagner-Cosmos Dortmund

I am taking part in Theater Dortmund's third Wagner-Cosmos festival, which examines links between Wagner and French culture. The program for the weekend includes Spontini's Fernand Cortez, a work that had a considerable impact on the young Wagner; Ernest Guiraud's final opera Frédégonde, a fruit of musical Wagnérisme (video on demand at Takt1); and Die Walküre, the first installment of a new Ring production by the formidable German director Peter Konwitschny. I spoke yesterday on Baudelaire and the origins of French Wagnerism; I also heard fascinating talks by Klaus Pietschmann, Anno Mungen, Arnold Jacobshagen, and Inga Mai Groote.

A Pascal Bentoiu moment

Dozens of attempts have been made at setting Hamlet to music; few have been deemed successful. One that deserves a second look is a 1974 adaptation by the Romanian composer Pascal Bentoiu. I found myself mesmerized by his approach, though I umderstood not a word. The second act can also be found on YouTube, courtesy of Thorsten Gubatz.

For Alexander Toradze

The pianist Alexander Toradze, one of the most formidable and passionate exponents of the music of Sergei Prokofiev, died on May 11 at the age of sixty-nine. I knew Lexo from several interviews over the years, and was charmed, as so many others were, by his amiable, boisterous personality. I last saw him in 2014, when he played Prokofiev's Third Concerto at one of Iván Fischer's midnight concerts with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. His recording of the Prokofiev cycle, with Gergiev conducting, is the one to which I usually turn.

More: A lovely remembrance by Joe Horowitz.

The South Dakota Symphony

Basin and Range. The New Yorker, May 23, 2022.

A Pulitzer for Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass, an immensely haunting piece for organ and ensemble, has won this year's Pulitzer Prize for music. Above is a video of the premiere, performed by members of Present Music, in Milwaukee. The other finalists were Andy Akiho, for his large-scale percussion score Seven Pillars, and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, for her string-orchestra work with eyes the color of time. I had the honor of serving on the jury this year, alongside John Luther Adams, Tania León, Du Yun, and Patrice Rushen. Several of Chacon's sound-art pieces can be seen in the current Whitney Biennial and also at the Vincent Price Art Museum, in East Los Angeles.

Let your fingers do the walking

A Guillermo Galindo moment

In 2012, as part of the John Cage centennial celebrations in San Francisco, the Mexican composer Guillermo Galindo collaborated with Mariachi Nueva Generación to produce a mariachi rendition of Cage's Variations II. The performance caused the audience some anxiety. I found the video at Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art, a fascinating exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum, in East Los Angeles.

Sioux Falls by night

A Raven Chacon moment

For Radu Lupu

The arch-magus of the piano died yesterday in Lausanne, at the age of seventy-six. For me, Lupu was the supreme living practitioner of his instrument, a musician and artist of the highest order. I wrote about him many times, always struggling to grasp the elemental mystery of his sound and style. None of the verbiage seems adequate in retrospect, but I tried my utmost. From a New York Times year-end piece in 1994:

Radu Lupu is a strange, wizardly presence at the piano, and his recital in January had the atmosphere of a seance. He indulged, as always, in eccentricities, but his lustrous tone and easeful grasp of the longer musical line mesmerized a Carnegie Hall audience. The final movement of Schumann's Fantasy in C turned into never-ending waves of lyric warmth, and the encore of Brahms's Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) was too beautiful for words. Ghosts of the Romantics hovered behind him.

From a Times review of a Carnegie recital in 1996:

It is difficult to describe exactly what happens when Radu Lupu's fingers meet the piano. There are no flamboyant gestures, dazzling technical feats, startling interpretive notions. No grand personality hurls the music at the listener. What happens first is that the piano gives out a narcotically beautiful tone; solitary lines or open intervals take on a luminous sheen. Subtle dynamic shadings, lucid inner voices, well-turned rhythms and songful phrasings follow — beyond that, nothing, or something uncannily like the music itself.

From a round-up of favorite Brahms recordings in 1996:

For many years, Radu Lupu has been in the habit of ending his piano recitals with selections from Brahms's final piano pieces, the Intermezzos (Op. 117) and the ''Klavierstucke'' (Opp. 118 and 119). Those moments are usually among the most memorable of any season. Each of these works makes a world from a handful of notes; Mr. Lupu plays them slowly, simply and with hypnotically lovely tone. His 1970's recordings, collected on a London CD, come as close to musical perfection as you could ask.

From a 2005 New Yorker column:

In 1970, he made a recording of Brahms’s Intermezzos Opus 117 that is in my personal pantheon of the most beautiful piano records ever made. At a Carnegie recital in 1996, Lupu offered as his last encore the slow movement of Schubert’s “Little” A-Major Sonata, and it wasn’t so much a performance as a glimpse of a perfect world. No pianist gets a lovelier tone out of the instrument. How he does it is a bit of a mystery: the piano is, after all, an impersonal machine of levers and hammers. But an A above middle C sounds different under Lupu’s finger. It glows from within.

I never met Lupu, but I heard some delightful stories about him. He was magnificently indifferent to the anxious routines of the classical business, refusing interviews. He made relatively few recordings, and none of them captured the mesmerism of his live appearances. Here's a passage from my 2008 piece about Mitsuko Uchida at Marlboro:

Her warmest words were for the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, whom she calls “the most talented guy I have ever met.” She describes how she once tried to get Lupu to visit Marlboro. “I got very excited, describing how people do nothing but play music all day long. But he said no. His explanation was very funny. ‘Mitsuko,’ he said, ‘I don’t like music as much as you.’ ”

I last heard Lupu in 2012, in Paris. After the Brahms D-minor concerto, he offered, as an encore, Op. 117 No. 1, a piece that lies as close to me as any. For many years, I had been waiting in vain for a chance to hear Lupu play it; on that night, it felt like a private gift, even though he had no idea I was there and probably had no idea who I was. Such is the relationship between great artists and all of us out here in the dark.