Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Ives at 150

Happy birthday, Mr. Ives! Jeremy Denk marks the anniversary.

Chou Wen-chung at 100

In the spring, Columbia University hosted a centennial concert for the late Chou Wen-chung, a composer who first won notice as a student of Varèse and later established his own identity through mediations between East and West. His output was not large, yet it exhibited unfailing craftsmanship and unflagging inspiration. On Sunday October the 13th, you can see a webcast of that Columbia concert, with the Continuum ensemble under the direction of Joel Sachs. Featured is the American premiere of a recently rediscovered piece titled In the Mode of Shang.

For Leif Segerstam

Peter Gelb vs. the operas of Elliott Carter

The New York Post's Page Six section, a space that infrequently turns its attention to classical music, reports on a bizarre attack that Peter Gelb recently unleashed on Zachary Woolfe, the classical critic of the New York Times. At a donor event on the Upper East Side, Gelb apparently said: “There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics — not all critics, some critics — about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience and should be available to more people and some critics might [prefer to] keep it sacred, in some ways, for themselves." He went on to claim that "some critics" were promoting “the operas of Elliot [sic] Carter or pieces that I don’t believe would have popular success." This is nonsense, on several levels. First, Elliott Carter wrote only one opera, the forty-seven-minute-long What Next?, and I'm unaware of anyone campaigning for it to be performed at the Met. (Perhaps it could appear on a double bill with Morton Feldman's Neither.) The remark exhibits Gelb's basic indifference to contemporary music. Second, Woolfe is hardly an inflexible advocate of modernist complexity; Gelb seems to have confused him with the late Charles Wuorinen. Third, the Met is lavishly covered in the pages of the Times, and it's rather ungrateful for the company's leader to attack it on that score. Finally, after nearly two decades at the Met, Gelb ought to have developed thicker skin when it comes to bad press. It's a recurring syndrome: recall his 2012 attempt to shut down adverse coverage of Met productions in Opera News. Instead of conjuring imaginary media conspiracies, Gelb should focus on serious challenges, of which there is no lack.

Nightafternight playlist

New releases of interest, à la manière de Steve Smith.

Brahms, Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, Pieces Op. 116-119; Igor Levit, with Christian Thielemann conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Sony)

Weill, Symphonies No. 1 and 2, The Seven Deadly Sins; Joana Mallwitz conducting the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, with Katharine Mehrling, Michael Porter, Simon Bode, Michael Nagl, Oliver Zwarg (DG)

Ives, Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-4, Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Stefan Jackiw, Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch)

Corelli, Violin Sonatas Op. 5; Rachel Barton Pine, Brandon Acker, John Mark Rozendaal, David Schrader (Cedille)

Michelle Lou, near distant, molt, Opal, heart/lung, Telegrams, Burial, crocodiles, Sections 1-20, untitled three part construction; Ensemble Inverspace, line upon line percussion, scapegoat, gnarwhallaby, Distractfold, Ensemble 2e2m, WasteLAnd, Trio K/D/M (Kairos)

Mozart, Requiem and other sacred pieces; Chadi Lazreq, Ying Fang, Beth Taylor, Laurence Kilsby, Alex Rosen, Raphaël Pichon conducting Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Beethoven, Sonatas Op. 106 and Op. 2 No. 3; Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)

Lanzilotti, forever forward in search of the beautiful and other works; Gahlord Dewald, Roomful of Teeth, Brian Horton, Lanzilotti, Johanna Novom, Jesse Blumberg, Argus Quartet, JoAnn Lamolino, Tommy Yee, Morfbeats (Bandcamp)

Mazzoli's The Listeners, Tesori's Grounded

Downward Spirals. The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2024.

Meeting Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 today, was one of our most musical Presidents. He took an interest in the Suzuki method of string education and enrolled his daughter, Amy, in classes. On November 20, 1977, according to the Carter Presidential Diary, he went to St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, in Northwest Washington, to attend a violin recital by students of the local teacher Ronda Cole. At the time, Amy was enrolled at Hardy Middle School, across Foxhall Road. I was nine years old and lived down the street. A crowd showed up to greet the President, my family included, and he shook our hands when he arrived. A little later, before the recital began, I wandered inside the church and found myself in a meeting room. As I recall, three men were standing there: two in suits, presumably Secret Service, and, off to one side, the President, presumably waiting to make a last-minute entrance. If I hadn't been a little boy, I doubt I'd have been allowed in, but the two men paid me little heed. Along one wall was a table on which were laid foodstuffs for a post-concert reception. I gazed somewhat awestruck at the President; I also gazed at the table. Carter looked at me, looked at the spread, and said, "Would you like a brownie?" I nodded, and was presented with a brownie. There was no mistaking the quiet kindness that emanated from the man. The recital itself was a bit excruciating, but that's beside the point. Happy birthday, Mr. President!

Mendelssohn on Mull

Quartet Island. The New Yorker, Oct. 7, 2024.

For Fredric Jameson

The great philosopher and critic Fredric Jameson died today, at the age of ninety. His writings, almost impossibly voluminous and still growing year by year, accomplish a magnificent balancing act between intellectual rigor on the one hand and aesthetic perception on the other; a strong political commitment undergirds the whole, yet his devotion to dialectical thought prevents him from ever approaching dogma. You read him not only for the grand formulations but also for the passing insights; he was, in realms of art, a skeptical enthusiast, and thus a brilliant critic. I took a seminar with him in 1987-88, on post-Marxist cultural theory; it was a turning point in my intellectual development, perhaps the turning point, and I am still rewriting the paper on Mann, Adorno, and Doktor Faustus that I produced under his aegis. A few years ago, I exchanged notes with him about Wagner, for whom he had an acute appreciation. He once wrote that the ending of the Ring "is paradigmatic of all great art in the way in which it foregrounds not this or that solution (bound in any case to be ideological), but rather the contradiction itself." The above is from Kasper Holten's Copenhagen Ring, which he especially admired. Ruhe, ruhe ...

An Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti moment

The titular album, an exceedingly beautiful one, appears on October 4.

Sag Hallo zu meinem kleinen Freund

Benno Herz, the program director at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, drew my attention to a curious error that has routinely surfaced in stories about the so-called Scarface Mansion — the sprawling Montecito villa that Bertram Goodhue designed in 1906 for the real-estate tycoon James Waldron Gillespie, and that Brian De Palma later used as a location for his gangster epic starring Al Pacino. Such publications as Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Post have claimed that this nine-acre estate once belonged to Thomas Mann. One account alleges that Mann "entertained Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill there." This is all absurd. Mann did well by his royalties, but he could never have afforded a property on the scale of El Fureidis. He owned only one house in America — the one at 1550 San Remo Drive, designed by J.R. Davidson at his behest. He had earlier occupied houses in Princeton, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades. He never lived in Santa Barbara, though he did visit Lotte Lehmann there. I do not believe he ever met Churchill, much less entertained him. I have no idea how all this started, but, as Benno points out, it could lead to some entertaining deepfakes.

Beim Schlafengehen

Schoenberg at 150

 

Some twenty concerts are happening on the great man's birthday, according to the Schoenberg 150 website. Included are no fewer than four performances of Gurre-Lieder — in Montreal, Vienna, Milan, and Hamburg. (I'm now watching on an Elbphilharmonie stream of the last.) Especially notable is a pair of Schoenberg events at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine. The only American celebration listed at Schoenberg 150 is one at the Westside Conservatory in Los Angeles. Schoenberg's son Larry will be speaking, and Viennese pastries will be served. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!

At the grave of George Mackay Brown

Stenness

A Mozart moment

A Murnau moment

From Der letzte Mann, 1924.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Photo: Dmitrij Leltschuk.

The Cellist of Auschwitz, New Yorker website, Aug. 9, 2024.

Yuval Sharon to direct the Ring at the Met

The Met announced today that Yuval Sharon, the hugely inventive director of Hopscotch and various other theatrical wonders, will be in charge of the company's next production of Wagner's Ring. The first installment of the staging will appear in the 2027-28 season; the cycle will be presented complete in the spring of 2030. Lise Davidsen is slated to sing Brünnhilde, in her role début. This will come in the wake of Sharon's production of Tristan in the 2025-26 season, also featuring Davidsen. Given Sharon's thorough knowledge of Wagner – he has directed Lohengrin at Bayreuth, Die Walküre in Karlsruhe, and Götterdämmerung in Detroit — this Ring promises to be something quite different from the dramatically inert and intellectually vacant version that Robert Lepage inflicted on the Met some years back. Sharon develops his theatrical philosophy in his forthcoming book A New Philosophy of Opera.

Press releases are of no general significance, but it's worth noting that Met made the announcement in a rather curious fashion. The headline is about a contract extension for Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company's music director; the Sharon Ring is mentioned in a sub-headline. "The extension encompasses a new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle," it is stated — an actively bizarre way of framing the biggest project any opera house can undertake. Only two short paragraphs are devoted to Sharon; the rest consists of hype of Nézet-Séguin's activities. Davidsen is not quoted. Perhaps Nézet-Séguin will be singing all the other parts as well as conducting.

Carolina Uccelli's Anna di Resburgo

After Long Silence. The New Yorker, Aug. 12, 2024.