Pleasures and regrets

I've missed a slew of concerts because of a bout of flu — the Look and Listen festival and the Jacob TV shows, among others. (I've also fallen far behind on mail, new CDs, life, etc.) I did make it to the Met for Mark Morris's Orfeo, which I'll be writing about next week, and which I liked intensely. I'd recommend that New Yorkers go see it, but the remaining performances — indeed all performances in the Met's final week — have sold out. This week brings the usual dense cluster of new-music events, several of them free and open to the public at the Skirball Center at NYU: the American Composers Orchestra has its annual readings on Tuesday and Wednesday, City Opera presents Vox 2007 on Saturday and Sunday (here are video previews of Robert Aldridge's Elmer Gantry and Gordon Beeferman's The Rat Land), and the On the Edge opera showcase happens on Saturday night. There's also David Hanlon's Hold the Applause concert on Sunday, at VIM: Tribeca. Hanlon, you may remember, won the Rest Is Noise Classical Apocalypse 1970 contest.

Looking for Captain Ives

William Ives, Charles's Ives ancestor, arrived in Boston in 1635, just fifteen years after the voyage of the Mayflower. It is often stated in the literature that William Ives was a ship's captain, but I'm having trouble verifying this claim. There happens to be an entire blog devoted to William Ives and his descendants, and this entry suggests that Ives was a captain of the Colonial Militia, not of a ship; his stated profession was farming. The master of the ship Truelove, on which Ives arrived in America, was one Jo. Gibbs. For your information.

But skip the Il Divo

A good deal at Barnes and Noble: buy two classical CDs, get a third free.... A blog called Classical Convert looks at the music from the point of view of one who's twenty-six and started listening at twenty-three. He acknowledges: "Some modern stuff is full of weird combinations of notes which people will complain just sounds like garbage can lids clanking/cats wailing/people dying."... The redesigned site of Nico Muhly has a "news" feature that is suspiciously blog-like. Listen there to the "Agnus Dei" of his Bright Mass, and follow the link to his Guardian essay on English choral music (commissioned by guest editor Björk).... I was unable to include in my LA Phil piece Esa-Pekka Salonen's analysis of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "By the second sentence you have lost everybody. First sentence ["The world is all that is the case"]: OK, mm-hm, could be. Second sentence ["The world is the totality of facts, not of things"]: I'm not so sure."

Once upon a time

Courtesy of the WFMU blog, a completely astounding video of John Cage live on the CBS show I've Got a Secret, 1960.

Very big Bang

Canpile_2 An e-mail from Bang on a Can brings news that this year's Bang on a Can Marathon is going to be over twenty-four hours long, beginning on the night of Saturday, June 2, and ending after sundown on June 3. The venue is the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. There will be music by John Luther Adams, Louis Andriessen, Christopher Adler, Derek Bermel, Jeffrey Brooks, Don Byron, Mary Ellen Childs, Mark Dancigers, Franco Donatoni, Brian Eno, John Fitz Rogers, David M. Gordon, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, John King, Phil Kline, David Lang, Alvin Lucier, Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Matt Tierney, JG Thirlwell, Galina Ustvolskaya, Edgard Varèse, Lois V Vierk, Julia Wolfe, Marcelo Zarvos, and Evan Ziporyn, and performances by Bang on a Can All-Stars, Iva Bittová, Bagpipe Orchestra, Robert Black, The Books, Don Byron, Clogs, Dälek, David Cossin, Eighth Blackbird, Ethel, Dominic Frasca, Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, Michael Harrison, Hartt Bass Band, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Vijay Iyer Quartet, Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Manorexia, Mashriq, Meehan/Perkins Duo, Juana Molina, Patti Monson, Now Ensemble, Odd Appetite, Milind Raikar, Real Quiet, red fish blue fish, Steven Schick, Mark Stewart, Mike Svoboda, TACTUS, Talujon Percussion Quartet, World Saxophone Quartet, Yo La Tengo, and the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Phew.

Saved by the bel

La Cieca has linked to this charmingly bad video of a sixteen-year-old Peruvian pop-star wannabe, who, in subsequent years, transmogrified into Juan Diego Flórez, the consummate bel-canto tenor of his generation. Moral: you never know where talent is going to come from.

Tristan Björk Agenda

Tonight in NYC, the Wordless Music series presents Real Quiet and the Books; ICE plays NYU composers at Merkin; and the Mannes Contemporary Music Festival opens. Tuesday night the NEC Percussion Ensemble invades Zankel, ICE presents Huang Ruo at Mo Pitkin's, a Paul Moravec piece is premiered at Mannes, and New York New Music Ensemble does Eight Songs for a Mad King. Wednesday you may choose among the LA Phil's Tristan Project, opening night of Mark Morris's Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met, Björk at Radio City, a Kyle Gann piece at MicroFest 2007, Reich's Drumming free at Mannes, ICE at the Tank, and the radically kitschy music of JacobTV at the Whitney at Altria. Thursday it's an all-Annie Gosfield program at Merkin and the opening night of the 2007 Look and Listen festival. Friday brings the Juilliard Student Composers Concert: works by Wei-Chieh Lin, Cristina Spinei, Daniel Colson, and Ryan Gallagher. Saturday night the Talea Ensemble makes its debut, with works of Anthony Cheung, Alexandre Lunsqui, Sciarrino, Harvey, and Grisey: Room 309 at Juilliard, 8PM. And on Sunday evening the excellent Jenny Lin is joined by Cornelius Dufallo and Yves Dharamraj for an all-Silvestrov program at Atrium.

Listening to:
TIC: Works by the Common Sense Composers' Collective (Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Ed Harsh, Randall Woolf, Dan Becker, Carolyn Yarnell, John Halle), as played by the New Millennium Ensemble (Albany)
— Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1, Dissonance, Bad Smells (Acute)
— Gershwin, Piano Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, Cuban Overture; Jon Nakamatsu, piano, with Jeff Tyzik conducting the Rochester Philharmonic (Harmonia Mundi)
— Kalevi Aho, Tuba Concerto and Contrabassoon Concerto; Øystein Baadsvik and Lewis Lipnick, soloists, with the Norrköping Symphony and Bergen Philharmonic (BIS)

Slava

Mstislav Rostropovich, an overwhelming life force in the form of a cellist, died today in Moscow. Tim Page, in a fine appreciation in the Washington Post, quotes something that Rostropovich said to him in a 1982 interview: "There is too much emphasis on technical perfection nowadays, and not enough on what music is actually about — irony, joy, human suffering, love." And here's a vivacious chat that Charles Michener had with Rostropovich for The New Yorker in 2002: "When I am thirty-five years old, I feel life is so long—so lonnng! After that, so short!”

Sink down

Tristan

Photo: Kira Perov

Some tickets remain for the L.A. Philharmonic's Tristan Project at Lincoln Center, none of them below $175. If you don't have that much cash lying around, you can still immerse yourself in Tristan via WNYC's week-long Tristan Mysteries series. Quoth the website: "Highlights include interviews with playwright Terrance McNally; anthropologist Helen Fisher; adult film actress/'Vivid Girl' (and Wagner fanatic) Savanna Samson; choreographer Mark Morris; and acclaimed video artist Bill Viola" — not to mention the bløgôsphëre's own Danny Felsenfeld, explaining the phenomenon of the "Tristan chord" with reference to music from Debussy to Radiohead. I wrote about the Paris Opera incarnation of the Sellars/Viola/Salonen Tristan in 2005, and I've done a quick survey of Salonen's CDs for the New Yorker website. If you're curious about Gustavo Dudamel, Salonen's successor in LA, you can hear him with his future orchestra via a webcast on KUSC on Sunday at 4PM Pacific time. An iTunes release of this same January 2007 concert, featuring Kodály's Dances of Galánta, Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman), and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, will arrive next month. Some random photos from my last L.A. trip follow the jump.

Continue reading "Sink down" »

Dr. Mew

If you will permit me a kitty moment, I'd like to acknowledge the memory of Dr. James R. Richards, the author of the ASPCA Complete Guide to Cats, which we own. He died in a motorcycle accident on Tuesday — trying to swerve out of the way of a cat.

Hey man, slow down

Jessica Duchen has repeated the now legendary Joshua Bell experiment with the violinist Tasmin Little in London, watching crowd reaction as the star musician busks on her Stradivarius: "....it becomes clear that it's the young people, children and teenagers, who are the most interested, responsive, willing to stop and likely to give their money — even though they, no doubt, have the least resources. As for the well-heeled, grey-haired clientele that we are always told make up the majority of audiences for classical concerts, they are the most likely to turn away, lips pursed in snobbish disapproval...." On a related theme, read about Lisa Bielawa's Chance Encounter project, a site-specific work to be performed in public spaces in downtown Manhattan next September, and follow her musings at her blog.

Not for all

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Looking for the perfect Mother's Day gift for that mom who loves Schoenberg? The Schoenberg Center in Vienna can cover your needs. The Schoenberg Shop is offering Schoenberg T-shirts (mit Aphorismen), pencils, mousepads, and postcards. Also check out Schoenberg on YouTube. And, of course, Schoenberg Webradio and Schoenberg Jukebox are still going strong.

Philharmonic cryptogram (expanded)

ConductorA story by Dan Wakin in the New York Times reveals that the New York Philharmonic has devised a new post of "principal conductor" to go alongside that of music director, and that it also plans to appoint a composer-in-residence, found a new-music group, and present mini-festivals. These are all intelligent moves, signalling, as I suggested in my piece this week, that the Philharmonic is making serious strides toward artistic renovation (with the LA Phil perhaps providing inspiration). It’s potentially a good structure for an orchestra — not to have one star director plus a stream of guests, but two regular conductors working side by side. Ideally, they would have contrasting personalities and tastes, suited to different audiences (Brahms-loving subscribers, youthful new-music-listening types). Trouble is, no names are being put forward to fill in the blanks. The second-banana role would seem tailor-made for a younger conductor such as Alan Gilbert or Ludovic Morlot, but neither is mentioned. Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic president, is said to have "ruled out" Riccardo Muti and Daniel Barenboim for the lead post and further stated that "no conductors had been approached" about either job. A strange cliffhanger. [If you're confused by the details, Matthew Guerrieri has a helpful chart.] Notice, though, a bright statistic at the end: "Over the last four seasons, the orchestra has recorded a steady increase in ticket sales, raising the percentage of tickets sold to a projected 86 this year, from 73."

In my LA Phil article, I mention how it no longer makes sense to generalize about the hidebound attitude of the American orchestra. With such partnerships as David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony, Robert Spano in Atlanta, Marin Alsop in Baltimore, James Levine in Boston, and Osmo Vänskä in Minneapolis, many orchestras are striking out in fresh directions these days, programming more new music and devising new kinds of programs. I might also have mentioned the Detroit Symphony, which is set to present a festival called 8 Days in June, bringing Beethoven and Stravinsky together with Wynton Marsalis and Chuck D. The Brooklyn Philharmonic, which had a brief golden age under Spano in the nineties, is again presenting lively programs under Michael Christie, who also seems to be doing good things at the Phoenix Symphony. The Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW series, currently under the joint direction of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Osvaldo Golijov, is reportedly attracting big crowds (including, as you can see in the photo, young dudes drinkin' beer, like this one). Atlanta, too, has had encouraging results with its new-music programming. When I asked for specifics, the orchestra reported that under Spano attendance has risen 7% to 76%, and that when big works by such locally admired composers as Jennifer Higdon, Golijov, and Michael Gandolfi have appeared on the programs the attendance has been higher than the average: respectively, 86%, 95%, and 92%. (In Minnesota, attendance has gone from 58% in 2002-3 to 72% in 2005-6.) When new music becomes a selling point — and we're not quite there yet — we will be living in a new world, or, rather, a world like Mozart's.

This modernizing trend originated on the West Coast in the nineteen nineties, when Esa-Pekka Salonen arrived in Los Angeles and Michael Tilson Thomas came to San Francisco. There was a particular day in June when you could feel the atmosphere changing — I'll never forget it.

Random notes agenda

Princetontiger_3 After writing about New York new music a couple of weeks ago, I've heard tell of several more ensembles and series based in the city, links to which have been added to my new music page.... The Newspeak ensemble plays tonight at Princeton, in a program including Judd Greenstein's What They Don't Like (For Chuck D), Samson Young's Efflorescentric Aftermath (Game Boy Music II), and David T. Little's sweet, light, crude. You can listen live at the Princeton music department website at 8PM.... Princeton seems a happening place these days, what with grad composers such as Little, Greenstein, Christopher Tignor, Miriama Young, Andrew McKenna Lee, and Gregory Spears, broad-minded elders such as Steven Mackey and Paul Lansky, electronic projects such as the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, and groundbreaking theoretical explorations by Dmitri Tymoczko (listen here as Tymoczko demonstrates how charming music can be concocted by imposing efficient voice-leading rules on a random collection of notes).... Tonic may be gone, but lively-sounding things are transpiring at The Tank, a space I've yet to visit. Amp Music is presenting a new-music series called Inflections. And this Saturday, Wet Ink plays with, er, Glissando bin Laden. Note also Tranzducer at Lemurplex in Brooklyn. And Roulette is back in action; this Thursday they host the Amsterdam-based, frequently recorded Barton Workshop.... The ICE Ensemble begins its epic nine-program assault on New York with a solo flute show tomorrow night at Galapagos, part of the Darmstadt series.... Kalamazoo's Opus 21 plays Saturday at Symphony Space, presenting premieres by Richard Adams, Anna Clyne, Mark Dancigers, Dennis DeSantis, and Bill Ryan. On Friday, John Adams conducts the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie. Adams spricht: "The model of the composer as lonely outsider, the Schoenberg or the Adrian Leverkühn that Thomas Mann so vividly sketched, is not the ideal for me...." Lastly, Laurie Anderson plays at the Paris Bar at the National Arts Club on Saturday.

EPS/LA

Img_0324 "The Anti-Maestro," my big article on Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker. Like most longer pieces in the magazine, it is not available online. (Here is where I ritualistically mention that a subscription to this very fine publication is not a bad deal.) Toward the end there's a section describing how the orchestra went about picking as its next music director the extraordinary young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel (pictured above, with Salonen in his scandalous cerulean jacket). Later in the week I'll have a follow-up piece on Salonen's recordings on the New Yorker website; here's a discography, corrections and additions to which would be welcome. Here's also a link to my 1994 NY Times piece on Salonen. The LA Phil is headed New York's way; next Sunday at Lincoln Center the orchestra will perform Salonen's Helix alongside the Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand (with Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and on May 2 they'll do two performances of the epic Tristan Project — unfortunately coinciding with the debut performances of Mark Morris's Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met and Björk's first shows in New York — together with a Fleming Abend. Tomorrow night, Miller Theatre augments the Nordic atmosphere by hosting Present Music from Milwaukee in a program of the complexly layered, wildly entertaining music of Kimmo Hakola. Disney Hall, meanwhile, will be loaned out on Wednesday night to some kind of televised singing competition.

Honored guest

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I'd like to thank to Justin Davidson for keeping the blog burning while I was on Esa-Pekka-related semi-hiatus. We're still waiting for that full-time Davidson blog.

Playlist
— Strauss, Four Last Songs and scenes from Salome and Capriccio, Nine Stemme and Antonio Pappano conducting the Covent Garden Orchestra (EMI)
— Terry Riley, Reed Streams (Elision Fields) [w/ amazing live 1970 L'Infonie performance of In C]
— Handel, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Natalie Dessay et al, Emmanuelle Haïm leading Le Concert d'Astrée (Virgin)
— Handel, Floridante, Marijana Mijanovic, Joyce DiDonato et al, Alan Curtis conducting Il Complesso Barocco (Archiv)
— Björk, Volta (Atlantic) [genius!]
— Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 5, Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony (Telarc)
Me and My Toy Piano, Rodney Lister live at Boston University (unreleased)

Weillenya

Speaklow1 By Justin Davidson

The Broadway show Lovemusik, which opens at the Biltmore Theater next week, chronicles the agonized, fitful, tender, ugly and ultimately indispensable relationship that bound Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. In the show — which features many Weill songs, including a few that only full-time Weillologists are likely to know — the composer explains to the singer that there is really no distinction between music and love, between the sonic and the erotic. For the stage,  Alfred Uhry condensed a letter that Weill wrote to his not-yet-wife in 1926:

When I feel this longing for you, I think most of all of the sound of your voice, which I love like a very force of nature, like an element. For me all of you is contained within this sound; everything else is only a part of you; and when I envelop myself in your voice, then you are with me in every way. I know every nuance, every vibration of your voice, and I can hear exactly what you would say if you were with me right now - and how you would say it. But suddenly this sound is again entirely alien and new to me, and the it is the greatest joy to realize how affectionately this voice caresses me.

— from Speak Low (When You Speak of Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya; edited and translated by Lys Simmonette and Kim Kowalke

The Lovemusik website has a short clip of Weill singing "Speak Low" in his Freudian croon. I won't comment on the show itself until my theater critic colleagues have reviewed it — except to say that Donna Murphy closes it with a wrenching rendition of "September Song."

Thank You for Forcing Me to Sing Opera

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By Justin Davidson

We all know that music education has essentially vanished from public schools, but Michael Schwartz, the director of the music program at Great Neck South High School on Long Island, apparently didn't get the memo. Year 38 of the school's live annual opera performance features "The Magic Flute," with sets, costumes, orchestra — the whole shebang. Sung in German, no less! The recitative's been abbreviated, the spoken dialogue abridged and translated into English, and a couple of arias transposed to accommodate a teenage tenor's range, which changes daily. Other than that, it's all there.

Yes, of course, Great Neck is one of the country's wealthiest suburbs. Not every school can field an orchestra  (an oversize one, for Mozart), fit the singers out with wireless body mikes, or attract teachers as tireless as Schwartz or vocal director Pamela Levy. Not every school can cast a Pamina who has been taking singing lessons since she was in first grade. But what other schools could do is help kids connect with music through having them perform it. Eleventh grader Jordan Rochelson, Great Neck South's Papageno, is a natural stage animal, but he told me that he started out with zero interest in opera. He said: "Now I’m so happy that a love of classical music has been instilled in me . . . um, forced on me, I guess.”

More on this story here, including an impressive clip from last year's "Carmen," as sung by Nikki Blonsky (who went on to win a starring role in the forthcoming movie version of Hairspray).

Over to you, Mitt Romney

The French music site Altamusica has posed several questions to the French presidential candidates, including this one: "One often hears that classical music is elitist. What do you think?" Nicolas Sarkozy, of the conservative UMP party, responds (my rough translation): "The music called 'classical' is by definition the most popular because it is that which has transcended time, fashion, and society to reach us. The music of Mozart and Beethoven was perhaps revolutionary, seen as elitist in the time of their contemporaries, but how can one pretend that it isn't popular? The number of people who have heard this music over several centuries is simply incalculable! Even the music that certain cultural functionaries call 'musiques actuelles', even the most contemporary rock groups, draw their harmonies from the tonal system invented by Bach and Rameau." That's a pretty good answer, though, as far as right-of-center (i.e. left-of-Hillary) European-politician music criticism goes, it doesn't quite beat Merkel on Wagner. (Via Clive Davis.) — Alex

Live From New York, It's Garbage Time!

Sound_grammar_2 By Justin Davidson

While I was hanging out in the hallway outside the Soundcheck studio at WNYC, waiting for my moment at the mike, John Schaefer was on the air, talking by phone with the freshly minted Pulitzerian sax man Ornette Coleman. The honor apparently carries an odd assortment of privileges and responsibilities. In the first category: during the live  broadcast, Coleman put John (and all of New York City) on hold for a couple of minutes - and John did not just move on to the next caller. In the second: the reason Coleman walked away was that his building super was at the door. Something to do with taking out the garbage, it seems. Some things are more urgent than others.

But then this is the guy who managed to win a Pulitzer without first bothering to get nominated for one. John, who was on the jury, tells the story. As jurors huddled for a weekend in March to go through the hundred-plus scores and recordings, someone noticed that despite the official desire for submissions in jazz, film music and other genres, Coleman's latest CD, "Sound Grammar," wasn't in the pile. Another juror, ex-Timesman John Rockwell, sent someone out to scare up a copy.

This was also the year when the paper that employs both of the non-winning finalists in the criticism category, music critic Mark Swed and art critic Christopher Knight, neglected to nominate either. (They did the honors themselves.)

Flórez KOs Marky Mark

Img_6346 I know readers of Noise like nothing more than some freshly crunched data, so let's get to it. Via Sieglinde I found this Variety article about the Metropolitan Opera's boffo box-office grosses. The March 24 Barber of Seville simulcast brought in $853,836, placing it #18 in movies in theaters that weekend. Granted, a ticket price of $18 raised the grosses, but, still, it's impressive to see that Gioachino Rossini's zany comedy, in its 191st year of release, garnered a per-screen average of $3,104. As this Box Office Mojo chart shows, only two movies, The Namesake and Journey From the Fall, made more per screen on that particular Saturday. 300, The Shooter, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and all the rest did worse on average — and almost all had multiple showings while Barber played once. Remember that massive promotional campaigns backed these films. How would they have done if they had the same budget as the Met marketing department? — Alex

Addendum: The Old Hag airs a couple of complaints about the HD broadcsts, while An Unamplified Voice waxes critical.

Next, Lethal Weapon?

Only at Soho the Dog: Strauss and Mahler Re-enact Your Favorite Movie Moments.

Bonehead-of-the-Week Quiz

Kittywithmachinegun By Justin Davidson

On a video that was shot last summer but recently surfaced on the web, a German army training officer instructing a green recruit in the proper use of a machine gun tells him to imagine himself in the Bronx. The soldier snickers. "A black van stops in front of you. Three Afro-Americans get out and insult your mother in the most vulgar way." (That last phrase sounds less prissy in German, though the use of the term "Afro-Amerikaner" is a surprisingly genteel touch, in this context.)

The gunner opens fire, and, obeying orders, also yells an English obscenity, one that likewise attacks the dignity of his imaginary interlocutors' mothers.

Here's the quiz: Officials both in the US and Germany are outraged because a) the officer is training his charge to fire indiscriminately on civilians; b) he is suggesting that soldiers should respond to verbal abuse with deadly force; c) he is eliding the difference between war and crime-fighting; d) he appears to have learned his strategy from training manuals such as "Grand Theft Auto"; e) the scenario presumably takes place in the context of a German military occupation of the US; f) none of the above.

The correct answer is f). The irrepressible Al Sharpton focused on the fact that the mother-insulters in the scenario are black, while Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión complained that the video reflected unjust assumptions about his turf. "Clearly these folks don't know anything about African-Americans or the Bronx," he complained.

Now it should be noted that the worst thing Carrión's imaginary constituents did in the scenario was to use foul language. I appreciate the borough president's main point, which is that the Bronx is a peaceable part of the city and a good place to do business, but I believe that vulgar comments on the sexual practices of mothers can still occasionally be heard on the streets of New York. The most appalling thing about the scenario has nothing to do with prejudice, or with a more thorough knowledge of the Bronx, but with the idea that a soldier is being trained in techniques of wild, panicked shooting in a densely populated area.

On the bright side, perhaps Don Imus could have a second career as a cultural sensitivity consultant for the German Army.

Here we go again

Conductor My colleague and friend Tony Tommasini has a good piece in tomorrow's New York Times in which he applauds the LA Phil for selecting Gustavo Dudamel as its next music director and then turns his attention to the ongoing director search at the NY Phil. He notes that Riccardo Muti is being mentioned as a leading candidate for the post. He says, however, that Alan Gilbert would be a more "refreshing" choice. I agree, but I have a sad sense of déjà vu, for back in January 2001 we faced an eerily similar situation: the Philharmonic was then said to be leaning toward Lorin Maazel, but Tony thought that the orchestra should consider David Robertson. Experience teaches that when those of us in the scribbling classes call for younger, progressive Conductor X to be picked over older, conservative Conductor Y it becomes all the more inevitable that Conductor Y will get the job. (In New York, at least.) Recently I joked to Tony that we might be better off using reverse psychology: "Riccardo Muti would be an audacious, visionary choice! Alan Gilbert would be a tiresome regression into the past!" The Philharmonic may yet surprise us, though. Is Riccardo Chailly remotely possible? Many people in various camps would like that outcome. Or, if the flirtation with Muti once again fizzles out, there's always the "interim conductor" option, at which point Daniel Barenboim might enter the picture. In any case, expect some sort of announcement fairly soon. — Alex

Boston not so rich after all (?)

A few weeks back, I noted that the Boston Symphony appeared to be flush with cash. An article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe reports, however, that the orchestra has been running deficits for three years in a row. What gives? Writes Edgers: "Two years ago, the BSO's board established a special $40 million endowment fund to pay for music director James Levine's ambitious and expensive programming. But because of the way the BSO draws off that endowment, the symphony won't be able to cash in on a significant amount of the earnings for some time, [managing director Mark] Volpe said." When the fund is removed — let's jokingly call it inaccessible money for inaccessible music — a seeming surplus becomes a deficit. The orchestra adds: "In truth, the current BSO endowment" — now a whopping $370 million — "is not yet sufficient to provide the endowment interest income needed for the future financial stability of the organization in today's challenging economic and market environment." So the orchestra is set to launch a major new fund-raising campaign. Do these deficits spell trouble for the BSO? Or are they a more transient phenomenon? Discussion continues at Edgers's blog.

What year are we in?

Clips_fitzcarraldo_2"The American classical-recording industry is in big trouble. The crisis has been building quietly for nearly a decade, as Mozart and Bach have lost ground steadily to [pop names redacted].... [During decade X] serious music was plummeting from 12 percent of the market in [year redacted] to a low of less than 5 percent—and it is falling. [Name redacted] predicts that 'there will be a total collapse of the American classical-recording system within five years unless someone figures out a more economic one.' Falling sales percentages reflect the story of youth turned off by the concert hall's irrelevance, a shrinking number of serious-record stores, a union that has almost priced orchestras out of the market, radio stations dominated by pop releases, a record-buying public that responds to a few glittering names, a repertory glutted by old war-horses.... [Label name redacted] has been reducing its releases, from 111 in [redacted] to 70 in [redacted]. Only about 60 [name redacted] records — close to half [its] annual output — contain newly released material.... Perhaps five [label] releases break even in their first year.... Many important records now sell 4,000 a year where they once would have reached 7,000 or 8,000.... 'The people who make money in this business can be counted on the fingers of one hand.'.... [Best-selling budget-label orchestra X] owes its good fortune to the combination of subsidy from its board and a special dispensation from the musicians' union.... Americans are convinced the foreigners will never recoup their investment.... 'getting across to the kids'.... exposed breast.... nude blonde.... None of these marketing ploys looks like a real solution to the accelerating plunge in sales of classical records... There exists a primal apathy toward classical music in America — on the part of buyer and seller alike.... Only so many Beethoven Fifths can be absorbed. In [year redacted] the public seems to be absorbing less and less of anything classical."

Hint: I was two.

Anyone who correctly guesses which avant-garde composer committed suicide in a fit of cultural despair on the very day the above article appeared will win a miniature score of Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, an extra copy of which I bought in a moment of absent-mindedness. — Alex

Update: Fifteen minutes after the above was posted (around midnight), we have a winner: David Hanlon. Yes, the year is 1970, the date is Aug. 10, the composer is Bernd Alois Zimmermann. The article, unsigned, comes from Newsweek.

The Glass Schooner

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By Justin Davidson

In the past, Frank Gehry has excelled at adapting his architectural language to other expressive needs: visual art in Bilbao, symphonic music in L.A., rock music in Seattle, science at MIT. In each case, you know you're looking at a Gehry, but you also know you're using a museum, or a concert hall, or an academic center. For his New York debut, he had a trickier task: finding the right form for a business as changeable and insubstantial as Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. You know . . . they're the ones who make websites that . . . well, you know.

In the last decade or so, big-money media, new and old, has brought the New York skyline a new cluster of stylish midtown behemoths - buildings named after Conde Nast , Reuters, Time Warner, the New York Times, Hearst and Bloomberg. Gehry's IAC is both more modest - in that it only rises eight stories and lurks over by the Chelsea piers - and showier, in that it's a Gehry, it's made from curved panes of glass, and it's the color of ermine. So how does Gehry translate Diller's vaporous business into architectural form? By making it look like a fully rigged schooner on a southwesterly course. Huh?

This seems like a desperation gimmick, using a hobby for inspiration rather than responding thoughtfully to the function of the building itself. The result is pleasant and cool, but it seems destined to drift into curiosity status before long.

I've got a more extended assessment here.

Sanjaya Studies

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American Idol fans out there will want to absorb this pertinent symposium on Sanjaya. I particularly like the notion that Sanjaya is the herald of an American Caligula. It's about time.... Only four days remain until Schreker Day. Fifth Avenue will be blocked off for the parade.  — Alex

Bird Stuff

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By Justin Davidson

William Kentridge's "Magic Flute"

Operaman

Piano_kellogg_wn_main_1211_2 By Justin Davidson

For better or worse, everyone is expecting Gerard Mortier, the grand poobah-designate of New York City Opera, to transform the company, which is precisely what everyone expected from his predecessor Paul Kellogg, and from his predecessor Christopher Keene. Kellogg is now the old guard - not, I suspect a role he would have cast himself in, and not one he's particularly well suited for. When he took over a decade ago, he moved with Gelb-like efficiency to put his stamp on a company that had been slammed by the AIDS-related deaths of Keene and many other members. City Opera was demoralized, financially and artistically shaky, and on many nights the house was depressingly empty (a trend abetted by Keene's penchant for programming operas that many people enthusiastically avoided).

Kellogg took the following steps, which almost nobody objected to: He doubled the number of new productions and started gradually replacing dated stagings of standard repertoire, most successfully with Mark Lamos' exquisite "Madama Butterfly." He moved all weekday performances back to 7:30. He brought in several productions each year that had been developed at the other house he ran, Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY. He started systematically presenting Handel operas and other baroque works, including Stephen Wadsworth's never-to-be-forgotten staging of "Xerxes" with Lorraine Hunt (no Lieberson, then) and, in his New York City stage debut, David Daniels. Besides Daniels, Kellogg also introduced Lauren Flanigan, Amy Burton, Mark Delavan and Anthony Dean Griffey to New York audiences.

Kellogg did not make City Opera much of a force in creating new operas, but he did recommit the company to American and 20th century work. And after commissioning the atrocious triptych of one-acters collectively called "Central Park," he wisely decided not to trust his own taste in contemporary opera. Instead, he imported certified crowd-pleasers: Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking," Mark Adamo's "Little Women," Rachel Portman's "Little Prince," Tobias Picker's "Emmeline." He inaugurated VOX, the annual full-orchestra reading of new operas, some of which have gone on to full-fledged productions.

Such a catalog of good decisions makes the eyes glaze over, I know, which is why Kellogg will likely be better remembered for two more exciting initiatives, one a failure that some applauded, the other an accomplishment that many detest. The first is his relentless and unfulfilled desire to be the company's Moses, leading City Opera out of Lincoln Center and into a hall of its own. The second is the temporary solution to the acoustical problems of the company's current home: electronic enhancement, which Kellogg has always insisted is not a euphemism for amplification. Tony Tommasini, for one, has never bought it. I'm agnostic about both things. The pursuit of another house turned out to have been an enormous waste of time, especially since Mortier plans to let it drop, but there was no way of knowing that ahead of time. And I've never had the sense that the electronics in the New York State Theater have made much audible difference at all, though I'm aware that varies a lot depending on where you're sitting.

Here's my wish for Mortier: that by the time he cedes to the company's next savior, he has not only stirred up  traditionalists' scorn, inspired some colorful headlines and presided over a couple of magnificent moments, but that he has also compiled something approaching Kellogg's more boring but beneficent record.

Unused epigraphs 2

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"...I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck."

— Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Tomorrow's Fishwrapper

Fish_wrapper1_2 By Justin Davidson

As a lowly scribe with limited financial acumen (hence my career choice), I’ve been struggling to make sense out of the news that my corporate overlords at Tribune have accepted a buyout offer from the striped-shirted, Lincoln-bearded real estate mogul Sam Zell. As a print journalist and an observer of the classical music world, I work in not one but two industries that are boldly confronting their past and gingerly backing into the future. Not even operagoers with memories of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her salad days have a more intense sense of nostalgia than newspaper people; not even the recording industry has been more muddled about how to make a transition from a solid piece of packaging to an online product.

I firmly believe that the human need for a constant flow of good, thoughtful writing about the world around us – including the arts - is as fundamental as the craving for music. What’s mystifying is that those whose mission in life it is to satisfy the seemingly equally basic need for porn are so much more successful in translating demand into revenue.

Meanwhile, the best minds in the newspaper industry are industriously reacting to the declining number of paying customers by giving diehards less and less reason to pay for the product we’re putting out. The current strategy is bifurcated. Online, we're saying: "You like getting news for free? Great, we're doing what we can to give you more." And in print, we're saying: “You think you’re not interested in today’s newspaper? Wait until you see tomorrow’s. That’ll be really dull.” If that seems as crazy to Zell as it does to me, I’ll greet him with flowers.

Meanwhile, Jack Shafer, the saturnine media critic at Slate, is bleak about the Zell deal and the promise of a Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). This was the paragraph that caught my eye:

If I worked for Tribune, I'd say forget the ESOP and begin looking for a new job. I'll bet the company’s best journalists are already packing their keyboards. The last good journalist out won't have to turn out the lights. The electric utility will already have shut off the power.

I sure hope he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Fiddler again

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By Justin Davidson   

Gene Weingarten followed up his piece about Joshua Bell busking in the Washington Metro with an online chat in which he remarked that this story got "the largest and most global response of anything I have ever written" (thanks in part to the classical music blogosphere). He received more than 1,000 e-mails, many from people who declared themselves in tears at the end of the article, and even I got a few missives from readers who got there via The Rest is Noise.

Some interactors resented the obvious conclusion to the outpouring of indifference that Bell received: many of us go through our lives blinkered, hurried and ironclad, unwilling to let a chance encounter with something beautiful cause a hiccup in our routines. Others wondered whether the results would have been different in another city, another station, at another time of day. I don't know about that, but I'm sure they would have been different in a place where people had some reasonable expectation of an artistic experience: The Mall in Washington, D.C., Washington Square in New York, the square in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Thoth has found such a site in Central Park, where people habitually move at a stroll rather than a scurry.

At an American Symphony Orchestra League conference in Los Angeles last year, I suggested that orchestras should take opportunities to get out of their womb-like halls, occupy a shuttered Main Street Woolworth's, create storefront chamber music and rehearsal space, colonize a local pedestrian mall with impromptu outdoor performances. Esa-Pekka Salonen disagreed; he had once led an ensemble on a train platform for some reason, and been startled to see that the Bell phenomenon applies on a large scale, too: crowds rushing for the 7:14 don't even notice the presence of an orchestra, let alone stop and listen. So clearly, it's counterproductive to bring music where people don't expect and don't want it to be. The answer is not to retreat to the concert hall and erect a barrier of prices; it's to take advantage of those public spaces that American urban planners have fitfully and not always competently supplied (that's a whole other discussion) and find ways to consecrate them temporarily to music.

Unused epigraphs

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"War is war, l’art pour l’art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business, — all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age."

— Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

The new-music explosion

Club Acts. The New Yorker, April 16, 2007.

Link-heavy online follow-up.

Dudamel to LA

Mark Swed has the big scoop: Esa-Pekka Salonen will step down as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, after a seventeen-year tenure that has transformed the American orchestra business, to be replaced by the young Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel. I'll have more to say in a future New Yorker. Justin ponders here; Tim Mangan's thoughts are here; Kosman thus. — Alex

The Fiddler of L'Enfant Plaza

By Justin Davidson

Now here is an astonishing piece of music criticism conceived and written not by a music critic at all but by the Washington Post's resident humorist Gene Weingarten. Who but a man who makes people laugh for a living would think of talking Joshua Bell into playing for quarters during rush hour at L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C.? The question at hand: How many commuters, as they plodded their weary way past the virtuoso with the multimillion dollar fiddle, would recognize that they were hearing something special? How many would notice that there was a fiddler at all?  And how much money would land in the Stradivarius' open case? I won't steal Weingarten's thunder by giving away the answers, but knowing them is just the beginning in an essay that ranges from Ellsworth Kelly (what if you hung one in a restaurant?) to Immanuel Kant (what is beauty, anyway?), surveillance, The Cure and the definition of personal space. But after I got to the end of the article, the main philosophical problem that continued to haunted me was, Why didn't I think of doing this story?

Miscellany

According to Soho the Dog, the Virginia Beach Symphony has changed its name to Symphonicity — a word that can be found in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, no less. The announcement was made on April 1, but so far no April Fool's retraction has been made. In response, the New York Philharmonic has renamed itself Philharmongous.... Re: the heartbreaking Joshua Bell story above: OK, maybe classical music is dead after all. [But ACD makes a crucial point: evening rush hour might have been a different story. L'Enfant Plaza is the stop for a lot of hulking government agencies. When you're expected at your desk at the FAA, you can't dawdle to Bach.] — Alex

Reality check 2

Clips_fitzcarraldo_2I (Alex) have received a variety of responses to my statistical provocation below, ranging from “Way to go, amigo” to “Dude, are you kidding?” One astute reader questioned my comparison of CD sales in 1990 to CD sales in 2005, saying that cassettes were a huge part of the market back in 1990. (LPs were largely out of the picture.) Indeed, when you factor in 442 million cassettes shipped that year, my proposed increase disappears, although, when you look at all media, including downloads, it comes back. The same reader queried the citation of “units shipped,” pointing out that record companies ship more — sometimes far more — than they sell. In fact, the quoted figures are said to be “net after returns,” but it’s good to be wary of RIAA’s accounting. My aim in all this is not to promote utopian notions of a "boom" but simply to test the claim that there has been a recent and dramatic decline both in the number of classical recordings released and in the quantity sold. I don’t see evidence of such a drop. Instead, I hear rumors of a rise. The math is very simple: major labels have shrunk, but independents have amply compensated. Some of our British friends have romantic relationships with places such as EMI and Decca that Americans do not necessarily share. For a lot of us, the majors are the likes of Nonesuch, ECM, BIS, Hyperion, and Harmonia Mundi. When their new releases arrive, I put them straight into the CD player, expecting to hear something good, and I am disappointed less often than not. There's a business model for you: making good records.

Handelbangers

Farinelli

By Justin Davidson

London is drowning in Handel operas at the moment, each of New York City's major companies is doing one - "Flavio" is at City Opera, "Giulio Cesare" at the Met - and the 250th anniversary of his death is bearing down on us, promising further overdoses. It does make me wonder sometimes whether the Handel boom isn't a bubble. I wouldn't go as far as Andrew Huth, who in today's Guardian entertainingly expresses the opinion that the devotion to Handel operas is one more aspect of the dutiful and virtuous approach to music:  I like them because they must be good.  With alarming flair, Huth goes on to say that we're only hearing a bastardized version of the operas, anyway, because real castrati sounded nothing like the wan and plodding countertenor or the pants-wearing mezzo of today.

Whatever gender-bending solution we choose, it won't be the real thing until some enlightened Home Secretary decides that our streets could be made safer by castrating a few hoodies and teaching them to sing.

Now there's a way to crush a whole flock with a single boulder. Huth's strategy would (literally) expose youth to opera, harness classical music's crime-fighting potential, take historically informed performance practice to its logical endpoint, restore government support for the arts, and inculcate good Italian diction in British inner-city youth. On the other hand, it doesn't address the most severe vocal shortages facing opera today. How about rounding up prostitutes and sentencing them to careers as dramatic sopranos?

 

Even Oratorios Have to End

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By Justin Davidson

I am in the early stages of an Arthur Schnitzler binge, intoxicated by his Mahlerian mix of neurosis, melancholy, and Viennese Jewishness. The original German of many of his works is, miraculously, online, which means I don’t have to troll the bookstores for dog-eared paperbacks. The opening of his novella Leutnant Gustl finds the inner monologuer of the title sitting in a concert. His temper, bad to begin with, gets progressively fouler, leading to disastrous consequences.

How long is this going to last? Must look at my watch. Probably shouldn’t do that in such a serious concert. But who would see? Anybody who noticed would probably be paying about as much attention to the music as I am, so I don’t have to worry about being embarrassed. Only quarter to ten? It feels as though I’ve been sitting in this concert for three hours.  I’m not used to this. What am I hearing, anyway? Have to glance at the program. Oh, yes: an oratorio! I thought it was a mass. Such things belong in church. The good thing about church is that at any moment, you can leave. If only I were sitting on an aisle. Well, patience, patience! Even oratorios have to end. Maybe this one is very beautiful, and I’m just not in the mood. And why should I be the mood? When I think that the reason I came was to amuse myself! I should have given Benedek my ticket. He enjoys this kind of thing. He himself plays the violin. But then Kopetsky would have been offended. He was really very kind, and he meant well: a good man, Kopetsky. He’s the only one you can really count on. His sister’s up there, singing with all the rest. Must be a hundred virgins, all dressed in black. How am I supposed to pick her out? Since she was singing, Kopetsky got a ticket, but why didn’t he go himself? They sing very nicely, by the way. Quite impressive. Definitely. Bravo! Bravo! Fine, I’ll applaud along with everyone else. The guy next to me is clapping like an insane man. Could he really have loved it so much? The girl up there in the loge is very pretty. Is she looking at me or at the gentleman over there with the full blond beard? Ah, a solo! Who’s that? Alto: Miss Walker. Soprano: Miss Michalek. This one’s probably a soprano. I haven’t been to the opera in a long time. In the opera I always have a good time, even when it’s boring. Day after tomorrow, I could actually go back to “La Traviata.” Yes, but by then I could be a dead body. Oh, nonsense. I don’t even believe that myself.

I quote this passage at length because I am impressed with the mixture of empathy and irony with which Schnitzler, a man who knew from music, describes the reactions of a character who dutifully goes to hear some and is thoroughly bored and distracted. He has a good reason for this, and for thinking that he might be dead before the next "Traviata" rolls around: The good lieutenant has a duel in the offing. He does not appreciate the way in which the unnamed oratorio provides the soundtrack for his foreboding, but the reader does - in retrospect, at least.

Literary devices, aside, I think it would behoove all of us who love classical music (or profess to) to try to understand the Gustls of the world – by which I mean not Hapsburg army officers with morbid fixations, but those who schlep to concerts only to feel narcotized by decorum and swaddled in reverence. What richly meandering interior monologues lie behind the glazed eyes of that gentleman in Row S, the one in the tweed suit? Surely part of the musician’s task is to break through that defensive haze of thought. And you never know: the right music just could save that person's life. 

(The translation, by the way, is mine. If you have the time and inclination to check it, you should probably get a real job. If you already have one and you still have the time and inclination to check it, the original German is here.)

    - Justin Davidson

DJs Without Borders

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By Justin Davidson

Has anybody, anywhere, ever on the radio treated music with less snobbishness or all-embracing love than John Schaefer, who is celebrating five years as the host of "Soundcheck" on WNYC? Mention a Karl Weigl symphony, a didgeridoo rhapsody or a piece of vintage bluegrass to him, and chances are he has heard it,  broadcast it, and interviewed the creator or performer. He does have a few gaps in his knowledge and enthusiasm, however, and to fill those in, he has a staff that includes a classical music guy, an indie rock guy, and  a Brazilian producer who deals with world music.

Philip Glass once asked him whether there was any kind of music he didn't like. "I told him there are two things I won't listen to: Broadway shows and country music. As soon as I had said that, I realized that I could name three country tunes right off that I thought were really cool." John, John: don't you like anything on Broadway? Not even "Memory"?

On the face of it, a daily hour-long talk show about music that doesn't cater to any one taste group seems like an odd idea, and John was a little unsure about it when it started, too. But it's grown - and grown on him - and that 2 pm dead time now seems like the ideal slot for high adventure.

I marked the show's unlikely birthday with an article in Newsday. If you're within the WNYC listening area, you already know that it can be heard at 93.9 FM. If you're out there in that mysterious land beyond the Hudson River, you can hear "Soundcheck" on XM Satellite Radio. If you don't have a subscription or you live in, say, Talinn, the show streams to the web live and  old shows are archived and available.  Listen, and be enlightened. 

Advisory

Justin Davidson will carry on here for the next week or so while I address various tasks. — Alex

Belated April 1 post

The not infinitesimal minority who enjoy both classical music and American Idol sat bolt upright when Ryan Seacrest mentioned on last night's show that an April 25 Idol event would take place at "prestigious Walt Disney Hall, home of the LA Philharmonic." Will the orchestra be involved? I consulted an inside source and discovered that Sanjaya and Esa-Pekka are set to kick off the proceedings with a quick rendition of the "Trinklied" from Das Lied von der Erde. — Alex

Reality check

Clips_fitzcarraldo_2 Martin Kettle, The Guardian: "Twenty years ago, the giant corporations that dominated the classical recording industry were turning out around 700 new releases every year. Today, just two are still in the business. Production is down to around 100 new discs a year — many in the crossover repertoire that purists would not accept as 'classical'  at all — and falling.... The only dispute about classical recording is whether it is dying or dead."

Millions of CDs shipped in 1990, according to the RIAA ("net after returns"): 286.5

Percentage of classical (according to RIAA consumer surveys, genres self-described): 3.1

Millions of classical CDs presumed shipped in 1990 (applying the above percentage to the total): 8.88

Millions of CDs shipped in 2005: 705.3 (does not include digital downloads)

Percentage of classical: 2.4

Millions of classical CDs presumed shipped in 2005: 16.9

Millions of units downloaded in 2005 (all genres): 383

Reported percentage of classical music in iTunes sales: 12

Number of new releases listed in the November 1988 issue of Gramophone magazine: 284 CDs and LPs, 19 Compact Disc Videos. Includes such titles as Baroque Weekend, Best of Baroque, Baroque Favourites, and Movies Go to the Opera.

Labels represented on the Nov. 1988 list: Abbey, Amon Ra, ASV, CBS, Chandos, Conifer, CRD, Decca, Dell’Arte, DG, EMI, Gamut, Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, John Goldsmith, Kingdom Records, Music Discount Centre, Nimbus, Olympia, Philips, Pinnacle, PRT, RCA, Saydisc, Target, Unicorn-Kanchana, Virgin Classics.

Number of new releases listed in the March 2007 issue of Gramophone: 401 CDs, 35 DVDs. Plus 66 more CDs and 14 more DVDs in the North American section. Total: 516.

Labels represented: Accent, Accord, Alia Vox, Allegro, Altara, Alto, Ambroisie, Andromeda, APR, Arbiter, Ars Harmonica, Artek, Arthaus Musik, ASV, Atma, Audiomax, Audite, AVI, Avie, Bel Air Classiques, Berlin Classics, BIS, Bluebell, Bongiovanni, Bridge, Brilliant Classics, British Music Society, Calle Classics, Calliope, Capriccio, Caprice, Carus, Cello Classics, Challenge, Chandos, Christophorus, Classics for Pleasure, Claves, Cold Blue, Columna Musica, Concert Artist (oops!), Coro, CPO, CRD, Cybele, Dacapo, Daphne, Decca, Delphian, Deutsche Grammophon, Digital Classics, Divine Art, Doremi, Dramatico, Dux, Dynamic, Easypcbands, Edicions Albert Moraleda, Editions Hortus, EMI, Enchiriadis, Endeavour Classics, Etcetera, Eufoda, Euroarts, Fineline Classical, Forum, Fuga Libera, Genuin, Globe, Glossa, Great Opera Performances, Guild, Hallé, Hänssler Classic, Hardy Classics, Harmonia Mundi, Hat Hut, Hevhetia, Hungarton, Hyperion, Immortal, Istituto Discografico Italiano, K617, Kairos, Lancashire Sinfonietta, Licanus, Lindberg, Linn, Loft Recordings, LSO Live, Lyrita, MDG, Melodiya, Membran, Meridian, Milan, Mirare, Mode, Music & Arts, Musique en Wallonie, Myto, Naïve, Naxos, New World, Nimbus, NMC, Oboe Classics, Oehms, Olive, Ondine, Onyx, Opus Arte, Orfeo, Paradizo, Pentatone, Phaedra, Piano 21, Pneuma, Ponto, Praga Digitals, Priory, Profil Medien, Proprius, Quantum, Ramee, Raumklang, Regent, Regis, Resonance, RVTE Musica, Sain, Signum, Sisyphe, Skarbo, Somm, Sony Classical, Stradivarius, Tacet, Tahra, Tall Poppies, TDK, Telarc, Testament, Timpani, Tudor, Ultraphon, Urania, Verso, VAI, Virgin Classics, VMS, Walhall, Warner Classics, Wergo, West End, Wigmore Hall Live, Zig Zag Territories.

Some significant labels not included in the above list: Albany, Centaur, Channel Classics, col legno, Cantaloupe, Danacord, Delos, Donemus, Dutton Laboratories, ECM, Gimell, innova, Koch, New Albion, Nonesuch, Orange Mountain, Phoenix, Starkland, Tzadik.

Classical crossover releases listed: 0.

Composers not reviewed in Nov. 1988 who were reviewed in March 2007: Adams, Alexiadis, Andriessen, Antoniou, Araujo, Bassani, L. Berkeley, M. Berkeley, Börtz, Boulez, Cannabich, Cavalli, Ceuleers, Chapí, Comes, Dallapiccola, Davies, Deng Yuxian, Du Ming-Xin, you get the point.

Conclusion: The major labels are much smaller than they used to be. But classical recording is bigger than ever.

More here and here.

Alex Ross

Historical query

People with long memories might be able to help me with this. How many new-music ensembles were there in New York in 1965, just before examples of the type really began proliferating? I count two — the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and the Group for Contemporary Music. Now there are more than forty. — Alex (alexrossny chez gmail dot com).

A Writer's Passover

Posted by Justin Davidson

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told, or books weren't written, humans would live like the beasts, only for the day.

Reb Zebulun said, "Today we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story." The whole world, all human life, is one long story."

Children are as puzzled by passing time as grownups. What happens to a day once it is gone? What are all our yesterdays with their joys and sorrows? Literature helps us remember the past with its many moods. To the storyteller yesterday is still here as are the years and the decades gone by. In stories time does not vanish. Neither do people and animals. For the writer and his readers, all creatures go on living forever. What happened long ago is still present.

I.B. Singer, Zlathe the Goat, quoted in A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices.

Helena in brief

Strauss in Space. The New Yorker, April 9, 2007.

The "Internet wag" in question is Jonathan Wellsung, as quoted by Maury D'Annato. Information about the upcoming Western Hemisphere premiere of Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang — actually the first American performance of any Schreker opera — can be found here. — Alex

Clarification

By Justin Davidson

There's been some confusion about who, in our hocketing blog duet, is singing what line. In order to untangle the counterpoint, I've gone back and added my byline to the top of my posts.  Everything else is by Alex.

Mashup Nation

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By Justin Davidson

A brief little eon ago, when I was a student composer and inmate of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center (which looked pretty much as it did in its glory days, pictured above), I would make electronic music using the following Paleolithic techniques: Use a tape recorder to grab street noises, a few seconds from an LP or the rumble of a purring cat;  copy these nuggets of sound onto quarter-inch tape, which I could then slice with a razor blade, splice with adhesive tape, slow down, speed up and run through various primitive processors. It was monkish work, solitary and laborious, and once I had made some headway, the prospect of repeating any of it discouraged me from revisions. Already then, there was a computerized alternative, which involved spending so much time entering lines of code that I would forget all about music. Two weeks of typing would yield a couple of constipated bleeps.

This process of assembling sounds has become so seamless since then that it’s as if roads had been laid where once were only ruts. Making music – not just playing or writing it, but literally making it from scratch - has become collaborative in a whole new way. A singer in India warbles into a $20 microphone, a violinist in Budapest records a couple of folksy riffs, a Latin music enthusiast in Michigan offers a snatch of a vintage cumbia - and a kid with a laptop sitting in his bedroom in Bay Shore, NY or Talinn can weave them all into a sophisticated mix. It's called a mashup, and the whole arrangement is legal, flexible and free.

In this brave new world, two organizations have become essential: the Freesound Project and CCmixter. The first is a vast landfill of recorded sounds, over which composers can hover and pick at will. Topping the Freesound chart at the moment is a nightingale song, followed by another nightingale song; then the sampling classic known to legend as "The Amen Break" (a 1969 drum solo by George C. Coleman of The Winstons); an unearthly choir of Tibetan monks; and an apocalyptic wordless mini-opera called "IMPresora.wav,"  which sounds as if it is probably about machines taking over the world, getting drunk and going berserk. Actually, explains "Melack," who contributed the cut, it's "the sound of my old printer (epson stylus 600) when i switch it on. it is broken and it makes strange and amazing sounds, trying to clean the printhead and making other unknown operations... the low reverberation is produced by the printer plastic box." "Melack "signs off with the marching order for the new generation of composers: "listen, download, cut."

And then take the result to CCMixter, a worldwide composers' club - the Cedar Tavern of the virtual Village. The barkeep is one Victor Stone, of Berkeley, California. "We turn away a lot of musicians who think we’re just another music site," Stone told me when I called him. "We don’t allow people to post their back catalog of CDs, because re-mixers ignore fully mixed tracks. What they really want is a capella voices – no effects, just the voice." So, singers, post a song of yourself at CCMixter and there is a 90 percent chance that someone will use it in a new work of music. Bad singing is welcome. Stone elaborated: "Throw an a cappella into the piranha pool, and you'll see that producers are  hungry for decent vocals that they'll even take some of the painful squeezing noises."

(The CC, by the way, stands for Creative Commons, which is another righteous contributor to mashup culture, as well as the name of a legal concept. The simple but radical idea is summed up by the phrase "Some Rights Reserved." Free Creative Commons software allows artists and other creators of intellectual property to make their work available online and still protect themselves against someone else making a killing from it.)

Stone runs competitions from time to time, and he says that his own ultimate goal and that of the most active producers on the site is to make albums for the do-it-yourself label Magnatune, eventually get picked up by one of the majors and enter the commercial mainstream. But what appeals to me about the site is something else: the idea of musicians trading source material like Yu-Gi-Oh! game cards, and recognizing that new music can instantly be bent, refracted and processed it into something even newer. Here's an example of how it works: The virtuoso violist and friend of the blog Ljova, whom I heard do an impressive set with his improvisational Eastern European sort-of-folk ensemble at Joe's Pub, posts a set of separate tracks, and someone who goes by the handle Hepepe mixes the melody line with an Ethiopian chant and a few other samples into a piece called  "Self Portrait of Silence." Which of course someone else could recycle all over again.

Perhaps the future lies not in whiz-kid symphonists but in the kind of collaborative anonymity and taste for  intricate layering that filled the aiwaves of the Middle Ages with organum, parody masses and polyglot chansons.

Zalvader Ipako, 1903-2007

I am almost entirely certain that Paul Griffiths is putting us on with this obituary for a one-hundred-four-year-old Maltese composer named Zalvader Ipako — the post is dated to the week ending April 1 — but experience has taught me to hedge my bets. When I first encountered the name Alexei Stanchinsky, on a 1998 recital program by Thomas Adès, I initially assumed that Adès had amused himself by inventing a fin-de-siècle Russian composer-madman, but it turned out that Stanchinsky actually existed, and was very interesting indeed. I have a sinking feeling, though, that we will never get to hear Ipako's satirical revue Lenine! or the Tosca Violin Concerto. — Alex

Playlist:
— Ben Frost, Theory of Machines (Bedroom Community)
— Evan Ziporyn, Frog's Eye (Cantaloupe)
— Andrew Shapiro, Quiet Kissing EP (Airbox)
— Chris Lastovicka, Fortune Has Turned (Ahari Press)
— R. Luke DuBois, Timelapse (Cantaloupe)
— Slow Six, Noreaster (New Albion, forthcoming)

Not-so-Motley Crews

2671261020a_2By Justin Davidson

I'd like to pick a little more at the question of the link between what orchestras look like and what they sound like. Let's back up.  Nearly a month ago, I wrote a column in Newsday claiming that the Vienna Philharmonic's de facto reluctance to admit women was, besides being reprehensible on the face of it, a symptom of an intellectually moribund, radically preservationist mentality that also permeates the ensemble's music-making. Alex agreed (in the last paragraph). The writers of the most vitriolic e-mails I received did not. Missing the aesthetic argument completely, they suggested that if I was so hot for orchestral justice, I should look at just how diverse American orchestras are, which I did. Among the responses I got for that story was one published in The American Spectator, which opens ingratiatingly: "If there were a Moonbat award for the worst solution to a non-existent problem, Aaron Dworkin would win the prize hands down." Now the reason that Dworkin, the founding president of the Sphinx Organization and an agitator for more minority representation in orchestras, elicited that reaction was that I quoted him as saying, among other things: "We should look again at the current standard of screened auditions. I believe that more information about the candidate should be incorporated, in the same way that institutions of higher learning take cultural and racial background into account."

For the record, I don't agree with Dworkin on this point at all, for reasons encapsulated by 27-year-old flutist in the New World Symphony, Ebonee Thomas, who told me: "Sometimes, people assume I got where I got because I'm black. One thing that drew me to classical music was that most of the time, people really just want to know how you play." Screened auditions have been enormously successful in reducing the effects of prejudice; the fact that they're not a panacea is not a reason to scrap them.

But orchestras should be doing a better job developing minority apprenticeships, extending educational activities, forging more meaningful ties with community organizations, fundraising for subsidized instrument programs, and loudly advocating more music in public schools, starting in kindergarten. While they're busy doing that, the rest of us might give a little more thought to what drawing on a large, varied pool of musicians has already meant for American music, and what drawing on a larger, more varied pool could portend. It's got nothing really to do with race: Black flutists don't sound black any more than female violinist sound female, so let's leave that preposterous debate alone.

However, if American orchestras are especially versatile, stylistically eclectic and quick to learn new music, that's partly because so many of their musicians arrive at their jobs with an arsenal of musical experiences that audition committees aren't generally interested in hearing about. Bluegrass fiddlers, salsa-playing trombonists, percussionists who double as drummers in rock bands, violists who improvise in Hungarian avant-folk groups — these are some of the people who populate and enrich today's Philharmonics. And that's in a system that attracts its members from a relatively restricted segment of the population.

Widening the embrace of the symphonic world to include not just the perpetually yearned-for younger audiences but also a greater range of musicians would give orchestras access to that much more flexibility, that many more flavors of talent. Pursuing this goal has nothing to do with social justice or political correctness: it's pure self-interest.

Justin Davidson

I second the above. It's amusing to see The American Spectator, a magazine that generally ignores classical music, rushing to the defense of high musical standards. Try spelling Juilliard correctly for a start. I also laughed out loud at the line "the San Francisco Symphony and the U.S. Marines are beyond compare." Let's hope no one tells them MTT is gay. — Alex

Hello everyone

In the last hour or so this blog has been read in LA, Brooklyn, Phoenix AZ, Zalaegerszeg (Hungary), Vancouver, Hong Kong, Rancho Cucamonga CA, Toronto, Seattle, Kenmore WA, Herndon VA, Sydney, Paris, Bogotá, Kirkland WA, Boston, Chicago, Huntington Beach CA, Virginia MN, London, Taipei, Bellevue WA, Claremont CA, Redwood City CA, Bay Shore NY, Aliso Viejo CA, Beacon NY, Edgewater NJ, Asheville NC, Rochester, Tokyo, Houston, Pasadena, Helsinki, Bluffton SC, Santa Barbara, Male (Maldives), San Pedro CA, Miami, San Francisco, Tallinn, and Hamamatsu (Japan).

MTT Speaks! (So What Else is New?)

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By Justin Davidson

On April 1, radio stations in 18 states will start carrying “The MTT Files,” Michael Tilson Thomas’ reminiscence-laced excursion through the musical landscape as he sees it — and he has seen a lot. Why radio stations in the remaining 32 states (including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and most of the Eastern Seaboard) have not picked up the show, I’m not quite sure. True, it's yet another scion of the marriage of media strategy and cult of personality. Yes, it adds luster to the MTT brand, even as it promotes music in general. But it’s also very good radio.

Rather than leading listeners on a dutiful trudge through history, MTT tells stories of the “I remember when Stravinsky told me...” variety. Like any accomplished raconteur, he has buffed each memory to a blinding sheen of significance, poignancy, or wry humor — or all three. He has a well-stocked storehouse of anecdotes, but if I can recognize some of them from the half a dozen hours I have spent interviewing him over the course of ten years, I suspect his close friends have his stories cataloged and numbered by now.

Each show rambles pleasantly down a thematic boulevard, pointing out curiosities and ironies along the way. The first episode is about the shifting intersection of music and noise, and it begins, like most music history courses, with Gregorian Chant. When he is discussing music composed by people he never actually had a drink with, MTT has a tendency towards offhand generalizations and casual historical compression. “That’s how it was with all early music,” he declares: “a sense of serenity, whether the spiritual serenity of Gregorian Chant or, several hundred years later in the Renaissance, the serenity of the planets moving back and forth inside a cosmic space — the music of the spheres.” It would be pedantic to point out that this single sentence covers a period that also includes non-serene battle music, lusty dance tunes, the gnarled counterpoint of late 14th century motets, and chansons that enshrined permanent sexual frustration. After establishing his street cred by remarking that “by Mozart’s day, music was way more in your face than it had been before,” MTT finally gets to the heart of his argument: that the densifying, intensifying and increasingly overwhelming sound of 19th and 20th century symphonic music arose from the need to compete with the rising din of urban life. That, I’ll buy.

By the second half-hour, MTT is in more comfortable territory. He reports that the young Edgar Varèse (whom he knew) attended rehearsals that Stravinsky (whom Tilson Thomas also knew) conducted in Paris and was entranced by the level of disorganized cacophony produced by musicians who couldn’t make sense of what they were playing. Unfortunately, musicians eventually learned to play Stravinsky well, and Varèse had to write music that would emulate the chaos of those early read-throughs. We also hear the voice of John Cage (yup: old friend), rhapsodizing serenely about noise: “The Sixth Avenue traffic sound is extraordinary. It’s continuous, night and day. And I listen to it with the greatest pleasure. I prefer it to my own music, or to any music that I’ve ever heard. It’s absolutely unpredictable and never disappointing.” Which, you might say, makes it predictable.

Update: The first episode, "You Call That Music?!", can be heard in its entirety here.
 

Bullets and Bach

Here (via Salon's "Video Dog") is what it sounds like to live in Baghdad just now: a "Symphony of Bullets."

Justin Davidson

The Flying Dutchman Moors

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By Justin Davidson

Hamburg — that's the Free and Hanseatic City, not Hamburg, NY — is getting a dramatic new concert hall, which will look  like a glass galleon that has foundered on a warehouse. The design, by the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron incorporates a number of current architectural gambits. It invokes nautical imagery, as do Frank Gehry's new IAC headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Musem addition. It anchors (sorry, boating words are hard to avoid) a new harborfront district, as does Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. And it recycles an Industrial Age relic - in this case a disused 1960s warehouse - into a cultural showcase, as does Herzog & De Meuron's own Tate Modern in London.

I have to admit to some queasiness about the current enthusiasm for fitting out power plants, factories and warehouses as postindustrial pleasure domes. Isn't there something inherently decadent about taking the means of production and transforming into the means of consumption for the bourgeoisie?

Dime store liberal scruples aside, Hamburgers will enter the maw of the brutalist brick warehouse  from the long pier that juts into the harbor. They will then be wafted up through the structure to a vast window that offers a glimpse of the view to come, then turn a corner and ascend to a vast public plaza that sprawls across the warehouse roof or beneath the new structure's bottom, depending on how you choose to look at it. The hall itself is just a kernel of the complex, which includes an apartment building and a hotel, all sheathed in milky glass.

The auditorium merits a picture of its own:

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In a press conference at Carnegie Hall today, Jacques Herzog  remarked that he and his associates had learned more about designing symphonic spaces from the stadiums they've done (notably the Beijing Olympic bird's nest) than they had from the whole history of concert halls. Here, the stage, like a soccer field, is in the middle, rather than at one end, and the seats rise up along a bowl's precipitous walls. That enormous ceiling navel is apparently an acoustical feature. (The hole on top gives the hall a tent shape, which in turn suggests the canopied look of the exterior.) To me it looks perfect for sucking up sound, swirling it around the cupola, and then dropping it back down in an echoey cascade, but the record of Disney Hall suggests that acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota knows what he's hearing about. Christoph von Dohnanyi, chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra, which will make is home in the Elbphilharmonie, was there, too, and he made the most honest official statement about musical architecture I have heard in a long time: "Acoustics is like psychiatry  it's a starting science, and you have to be very lucky. But if it looks great, it sounds good, too."

Justin Davidson (click the link to send me an e-mail)

Update: Daniel Beckmann, from Toyota's firm Nagata Acoustics, writes to point out that the navel in the ceiling of the auditorium "is an outie, not an innie." Which is to say, that a giant sound-reflecting disc will hang from the ceiling, suggesting (here comes a radical metaphor switch) a flying saucer full of Beethoven-loving aliens. Anyone planning a trip to Hamburg, think about going in 2010.

Experiment in modern music

I obtained the track below from a service called IODA, which supplies select indie-label MP3s to bloggers (no money changes hands). The composer Alexandra Gardner is presenting a concert tomorrow night (3/29) at Greenwich House Music School. This piece, Luminoso, for guitar and sampled sounds, will be on the program. The guitarist is Enrique Malo Lop.

Download "Luminoso" (mp3)
by Alexandra Gardner
Innova Recordings

More On This Album

— Alex

I am merely a rumble of the holy voice, yo

George3_6 Let me briefly invade Justin's turf — Newsday critic and New Yorker contributor Justin Davidson is guest-hosting this week — is to say that I've written something for the blog of the 92nd Street Y. Next Sunday I'm appearing in the Y's Poetry Center series, where I will look at the poetic roots of two works that forever altered the musical landscape: Debussy’s Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" and Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. In Debussy’s case inspiration came from Mallarmé’s gloriously enigmatic long poem “The Afternoon of a Faun" —  “the motionless and weary swoon / Of stifling heat" —  and in Schoenberg's case it was Stefan George's "Rapture": "I feel the wind of another planet.... I dissolve in sounds, circling, weaving...." I’ll discuss how conventional harmony crumbled underfoot as the composers chased these elusive images. In addition to a lecture-plus-brunch deal, the Y is offering $10 for people under 35. One day I'll have a real photo. (Speaking of which, Steve Pyke, who's supplied some brilliant portraits to accompany my pieces, including this one of Ian Bostridge, has a show at Flowers gallery from March 29 to May 5.) — Alex

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By Justin Davidson

Don't be fooled by the professorial mien: Christopher Rouse likes his music as loud as any teenage headbanger does. He's the sort of composer who wouldn't trust a battalion of trombones to play out enough without some encouragement — half a dozen or more ƒs, say. Judging from Mark Swed's eloquent review, Rouse's  cloud-stirring Requiem, which had its premiere in Los Angeles over the weekend, sounds like it doesn't just honor the dead: it wakes them.

Rouse descends from a proud lineage of cacophonizers. The first episode of Michael Tilson Thomas's forthcoming public radio show, "The MTT Files" proposes that the ever-increasing noise factor in music comes from the need to compete with an ever more deafening urban environment. (More about DJ MTT anon.)  Rouse writes for a generation reared on stadium concerts, but he does so in the spirit of the late 19th century. Even when he emerged from the morbid mode that occupied him through the 1980s, he remained one of our loftiest, most passionate and most anachronistically sincere composers. Not for him the finely wrought irony of postmodernism, or its ethnic potpourris. He means what he screams.

I'm looking forward to the day when Rouse's monster of a piece finally slouches towards New York.

        Justin Davidson

A Time for Thoth

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By Justin Davidson

For most of us, March is a little early in the season for a loincloth, but a bracing spring breeze isn’t enough to deter Thoth - not the Ibis-headed Egyptian god, mind you, but the sandaled and feathered prayformer of his own soloperas. Thoth has been a fixture of Central Park for years,  his celebrity documented in  articles, interviews, and even a documentary that won an Academy Award in 2002. For a while, though, he was in  in exile from his preferred venue, Angel Tunnel near Bethesda Fountain, while it was being restored. Now the tunnel's open and he's back, his incantatory chants and droning violin reverberating off the gorgeously restored tile ceiling.

The music is mesmerizing. In a voice that ranges from a Tibetan monkish baritone to a pristine soprano, Thoth (a.k.a. Stephen Kaufman, who lives in Jamaica, Queens) sings his  ritual epics, while whirling, fiddling, and accompanying himself on bells wrapped around his ankles. Since the libretto is in a language of his own invention, it’s hard to know what exactly is going on in “The Herma: The Life and Land of Nular-In,” but then the same could be said for “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Whatever they mean, those are some funky phonemes.

Being a technologically adept mystic, Thoth maintains a website (which had been disabled by hackers the last time I checked) and a myspace page, where he chronicles the thrill of his return to Angel Tunnel. “I have noticed that I am having less visions than I was having at Trefoil Arch. I'm not sure I understand why.” (I think he means that’s a good thing.)

        Justin Davidson

Lincoln Center on My Mind

Juilliard_construction (Thanks to masck (old skool) for the photo)



By Justin Davidson

Thought I: Lincoln Center is Molting

Remember a few years ago, when the talk was that Lincoln Center's gaggle of constituent organizations would never stop bickering over the renovation plans, never raise the money, never take the plunge? The travertine dowager, it was said, would keep sinking elegantly into disrepair. But take a look at it now: Juilliard has shed its skin, in preparation for adding a whole new wing, including a glass-walled dance studio facing onto Broadway. It's more than a little ironic that the dismantling begins with Pietro Belluschi's Juilliard building, which architecture critics of the 1960s praised as the one true incarnation of modernism in a campus rife with aesthetic compromise. Ada Louis Huxtable, the dean of critics at the time, called it “a marriage of form and function in terms of rational simplicity and bare-boned solutions.” Neither Huxtable nor anybody else, however, has been leading protests or writing novella-length Op-Eds defending the building against depraved acts of renovation. Maybe that's because generations of Juilliard students have found the building more  a marriage of ugliness and unfriendliness in terms of labyrinthine confusion.

Thought II:  Long Way to Go

As I squirmed through New York City Opera's  superfluous new production of Rossini's "La Donna del Lago" (loosely translated as "The Lady who Jumped in a Lake"), I kept imagining the company's new director-in-waiting Gerard Mortier sitting rigidly in the audience, his Flemish frown getting longer and deeper by the minute. The company is usually better than this, and the lame-duck director Paul Kellogg should at some point get his due as a resourceful executive with good taste and an ear for talented young singers. Still, it's a long way from lame Rossini to the extravaganzas of vulgarity and bold vision that Mortier is famous for. Will he be able to sweet-talk some extra millions out of City Opera loyalists to support his plans, or will the company only be able to afford a few knockoff shockers?

Thought III: Mini-Moderne

Children are the cruelest critics. They need better music, better playing and better seats than adults do before they'll clap like they mean it, let alone jump to their feet. So I was delighted at the reception that the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert of "modern" music on Saturday got from the pre-tween crowd, including my own discriminating 9-year-old. "I liked that," he volunteered, which in today's praise exchange rate is equivalent to a wild, stomping ovation.  The young conductor James Gaffigan made his debut on that concert; I authorize his publicists to use my son's endorsement for marketing purposes.

And get this: the boy's favorite work was not by Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky or Copland. It was "Katydid Country," a movement from Mason Bates' symphony, "Rusty Air in Carolina." Composed in 2006.  Bates uses field recordings of the noisy bugs - a solo, plus a choir of millions - and turns them into an electronic rhythm section for his high-energy orchestra. (My son also enjoyed Webern's "Five Movements for String Orchestra," which the orchestra played three times.)  When I pointed to a photo of John Adams in the program (the Philharmonic did a lovely job with his "Tromba Lontana") and bragged that I knew him, my son answered coolly: "How come you don't know all the other composers, Dad?" There's your audience of the future.

        Justin Davidson

Lang Lang, Yundi Li

The Wow Factor. The New Yorker, April 2, 2007.

Reendtroducing Justin

Teachout1 I'm ensnared in a Teachoutesque jungle of work — among other things, working on my Esa-Pekka Salonen / LA Philharmonic piece (to appear April 30) and preparing for an April 1 lecture at the 92nd Street Y on Mallarmé, Debussy, Stefan George, and Schoenberg (party!). Stepping in for me next week will be guest-blogger Justin Davidson. Expect shocking revelations, convulsive hilarity, ageless wisdom.... The Rambler amusingly sums up the state of classical music, a topic that has become tiresome. When my desk is overrun with new recordings, when I can't decide which of ten new-music concerts to attend on a given night, to talk about the death of anything is ridiculous. I've sworn off before, though.... New York Times subscribers should be reading The Score, a bloggy symposium involving such major maverick composers as Michael Gordon, Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Glenn Branca, and, not least, Steve Reich.... The consensus is that Alan Gilbert made a powerful impression with his latest appearance at the New York Philharmonic.... In April, the Utah Symphony gives its first performance of Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars, as part of an ambitious American Horizons festival. I dream of one day hearing the piece live in Zion Park, with Reinbert de Leeuw conducting.... Noted on MySpace: Ryan Francis's Woman, Bird and Star.... Is it just me or is there a reference to Sibelius's Fifth at 0:34 of Sinatra's "Angel Eyes"? Not to mention the Schoenbergian fourth-plus-tritone at the beginning of "It's a Lonesome Old Town." Nelson Riddle in excelsis.

Pictured: Teachout, not Davidson.

My Rachmaninov

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Matthew Guerrieri, who gets some secret crazy music-news feed that the rest of us don't, notes that a twenty-one-year-old, scotch-drinkin', Jay-Z-listenin' Rachmaninov heir named Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker wants to reassert copyright control of his great-great-grandfather's works by publishing them in new arrangements. According to an Arizona Daily Star story, "Wanamaker said the family already has approached a few composers about doing the rearrangement." This is intriguing. What composers? I nominate the German avant-gardist Hans-Joachim Hespos, whose works have called for, among other instruments, an oil tank with a 5mm-thick casing and a welding torch [for more on this merry tunester, read Geelhoed]; Dean Drummond, curator of Harry Partch's array of microtonal instruments; and Milton Babbitt, who could create a very fresh-sounding Rach 3 with a quick serialization of dynamics.

But all this is moot, I'm afraid. Those who know my world-famous opera Tristan + Isolde will not be surprised to learn that I have also composed a corpus of works that bear a superficial resemblance to Rachmaninov's, although the differences are in fact profound — sufficiently profound that I am claiming retroactive royalties on all Rachmaninov performances to date as well as on all iterations of the Dies irae, together with Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker's daily allowance since birth. Above is a page from my glorious Symphony No. 2 (click on the image to make it bigger).

For a serious critique of copyright law run amok, read Gann. Rachmaninov will survive, but the idea of all these great new contemporary-classical web-radio stations shutting down is too depressing for words.

Rouse Requiem agenda

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Southern Californians, take note of the fact that the long-awaited premiere of Christopher Rouse's Requiem is happening at Disney Hall on Sunday, courtesy of the intrepid Los Angeles Master Chorale. David Salvage has an enticing preview. I have the score, and it looks to be a tremendous, floor-rattling experience. Britten's War Requiem is the obvious model: the traditional Latin texts are interwoven with poetry of Seamus Heaney, Siegfried Sassoon, Michelangelo, Ben Jonson, and Milton. A solo baritone recitation of Heaney's "Mid-term Break" begins the work: "I sat all morning in the college sick bay / Counting bells knelling classes to a close, / At two o' clock our neighbors drove me home." Then the chorus sings a dense, semi-archaic, motet-like setting of the Kyrie. At the end of that section, percussion instruments steal in pppp — snare drum, bass drum, timpani, cymbals, tomtoms, tam-tam — and build to a raucous ffff. A wild setting of the Dies irae begins, explosive percussion combined with a singing, shouting, chanting, glissandoing chorus. Only in the following Tuba mirum does the rest of the orchestra finally enter. I'll look for full reports by Swed, Rich, and Mangan. [Links added 3/26.] This is a work that ought to be done, indeed should have been done, in New York; it is indirectly a memorial to September 11. Rouse is generally an underrated composer, a great musical storyteller.

New York won't lack for events in the next few days. Mitsuko Uchida is playing Mozart with Colin Davis at the New York Philharmonic. The MATA Festival continues at the Brooklyn Lyceum. The awesome Gerald Finley sings at Zankel Hall on Friday. The same night, Wordless Music offers another genre-spanning event,  this one bringing together rock, electronic, and classical artists from Canada: Polmo Polpo, Toca Loca, and Social Music Work Group. And if you missed the sublime Music for 18 Musicians at Carnegie last fall, So Percussion reprise Steve Reich's masterpiece on both Friday and Saturday nights at Miller Theatre.

Dead or Alive: A Rest Is Noise Special Report

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In recent weeks I've had interesting adventures in the world of record-sales accounting, a landscape alien and forbidding to an aesthete such as myself. Back in January I noted with some amazement that the "classical" category reported a rise of 22.5% in album sales in 2006. Was this resurgence the result of blockbuster records by the "classical crossover" titans Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, and Il Divo, as one might first assume? I thought there might be more to the story — that increased sales of core classical repertory online and on iTunes could be contributing to the rise. Thinking along the same lines was Chris Anderson, whose brilliant book The Long Tail attacks the fallacy that "the only success is mass success" and posits that money is to be made in selling to niche markets. You can't, of course, get more niche than classical music.

Continue reading "Dead or Alive: A Rest Is Noise Special Report" »

Scelsi shrine

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Fans of Giacinto Scelsi may be interested to know that the Montreal artist Charles Stankievech has put together a multimedia installation called Timbral, in honor of Scelsi's music. It will be on display through the end of this week (March 24) at the Parisian Laundry in Montreal. Inspiration came from the famous story of Scelsi playing one note over and over in a psychiatric hospital, not losing his mind but finding the source of his mature style. Last summer, the artist was in residency on the Venetian island of San Servolo, long the home of the local insane asylum. To quote the press release: "Stankievech found a derelict piano once used for music therapy in the asylum, and, for an eleven-hour recording session, reenacted Scelsi’s timbral meditations, pounding away at a single note within the closed remains of the island’s thirteenth-century church."

Photo: Guy L'Heureux

Advisory

The Juilliard Bookstore, which is about to move from its present location to a temporary home on West 66th, is holding a 50% off sale on its stock of scores, CDs, and other merchandise. I picked up Ives's Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich's Fourteenth, Copland's Piano Quartet, and various CDs on the col legno and Kairos labels for a whole lot less than I ordinarily would have. Sale ends and store closes on March 24. Thanks, M. G_.

More characterful seafood in Strauss

The return of The Omniscient Mussel to the Met stage inspired composer-critic Russell Platt, editor of the New Yorker's classical listings, to devise the following supplemental list (in league with Peter Kolkay):

The Curious Bivalve (Die Liebe der Danae)
The Frisky Seahorse (Intermezzo)
The Nefarious Monkfish (Guntram)
The Epileptic Squid (Feuersnot)
The Incontinent Mollusk (Die schweigsame Frau)

I'm reminded of the Jellyfish in Spew's Gazebo of Ecstasy.

No turning back now...

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I'm on Amazon. (Via The Standing Room.)

Post-classical

Joshua Roman, the twenty-three-old lead cellist of the Seattle Symphony, gives a lively interview to Gavin Borchert: "I would love to see the classical-music industry crumble, just absolutely fall to bits. Because I think then we'd have to start over. We'd have to say, well, what is it? What is classical music? Is it this concert hall, is it these tuxedos? No, it's this music. And then we could start over from the beginning, build it up, find people who like the music. Like rock and roll started, like the punk movement started." (Via Utopian Turtletop.)

I personally find tuxedos to be a ridiculous and distracting choice of male concert fashion. They fail to convey the intended seriousness and instead make players look like uncomfortable groomsmen. Informal all-black attire would be better.

The new pragmatism

Nainfo_05_2I'd received a copy of Jody Redhage's all-contemporary album on the new label New Amsterdam Records, but I somehow hadn't realized that New Amsterdam was the creation of the composer Judd Greenstein, whose fine-spun, strongly flowing music I've mentioned a number of times on this site. The Redhage disc, which includes such standout NYC-area composers as Anna Clyne, Paula Matthusen, and Greenstein himself, is the label's debut release. Future releases will include an album by the brilliant violist Nadia Sirota, who's given numerous performances of Nico Muhly's Keep in Touch (most recently at the Muhly concert on Friday night), and also a compilation by the NOW Ensemble. It's great to see a young community of composers and musicians supporting each other. Nobody's playing the domineering genius (yet). On Friday I was talking to the veteran composer Scott Johnson, who commented that this latest scene has an appealing openness about it, an optimistic spirit. I think of it as pragmatism — music beyond ideology. Scott also pointed out a constant from the seventies to today: the largely invisible generosity of Philip Glass.

Speaking of whom, the MATA festival, which Glass co-founded in 1996, is running this week in Brooklyn. On Saturday at 6:45PM I'll be leading a conversation with some of the featured young composers — Christopher Tignor, Yotam Haber, K-Kalna, and Ned McGowan (if you're having a slow day, his music samples will wake you right up) — and I'll see if these same issues surface. All events will happen at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Fourth Avenue.

Going back to Greenstein: he's written a piece for soprano-blogger Anne-Carolyn Bird, which she will sing and Jocelyn Dueck will play on May 17 at the VIM series in Tribeca. The singer muses about a broader mission here and here; she hopes to raise money for a CD and concert tour through small contributions from new-music fans and the Internet community.

Bartók in Brussels

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Photo courtesy of Mwanji Ezana.

Proust predicts Messiaen

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"Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly."

Swann's Way (Kilmartin/Enright translation)

Photo taken at the Banff Centre last summer.

Covering the arts

LA Philharmonic violins turn up in Amsterdam; dog is left unattended. So is there a connection to those violins in Jersey? Has anyone seen William Barrington-Coupe? Where are Alberto Vilar and Kathy Battle? Expect Norman Lebrecht to tie it all together in his new book Violins of Doom: The Absolutely Final Death of Classical Music (This Time It's for Real).

Monk-Björk

Tune in at 3PM EST Friday for Sarah Cahill's interview with Meredith Monk and Björk. The broadcast officially kicks off the American Music Center's web station, counterstream radio. (It's also available on demand.)

Return of Agenda

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The New York Philharmonic's Hear & Now series — discussion and performance of a contemporary work, usually with the composer present — is one of the current bright spots in the organization. Alas, György Ligeti is no longer with us, but on Wednesday night Steven Stucky will quiz the conductor Alan Gilbert and the violinist Christian Tetzlaff on the subject of the late master's Violin Concerto. Thursday night the Met makes a long-delayed return to The Egyptian Helen, a Richard Strauss rarity that played briefly at the house in 1928. Deborah Voigt is the Face That Launched; the spectacular coloratura soprano Diana Damrau is Aithra; Jill Grove essays the opera obscurantist's favorite role, The Omniscient Mussel. Jonathan Biss, author of a formidable new Schumann recording on EMI, plays the same night at the Met Museum. Friday night at Zankel is the Nico Muhly concert, which finds the fierce young composer intermingling his own pieces with Renaissance choral works by Byrd, Weelkes, and Taverner. This is part of John Adams's In Your Ear festival. I've touted Muhly several times on the blog and in print; let Steve Smith do the honors this time. Handling the electronics will be the Icelandic sound magician Valgeir Sigurðsson, who figured in my Björk profile. (That's him in the picture above, standing on top of the Matthew Barney vehicle on the right hand side.) Valgeir released Muhly's superb record Speaks Volumes on his Bedroom Community label and has his own excellent-sounding album coming soon. He's got a show Sunday night at Tonic. That same night Gabriel Kahane, who's performed with none other than Thomas Quasthoff, brings his wry, haunting songs to Rockwood Music Hall. If I get my act together I will look in on the 70th-birthday David Del Tredici concert on Saturday night. I'd also like to see Myung-Whun Chung and the Orchestre Philharmonic de Radio France, the NOW Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and the poetic young pianist Inon Barnatan, except that they are all on Sunday afternoon.

Burying the lede

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Perceived storm clouds over Jersey.

What is it with the New York Times and these bloody violins in New Jersey? By my count, the paper has published at least twenty articles in the last three years on the subject of Herbert Axelrod's sale of Stradivarius and Guarneri string instruments to the New Jersey Symphony and that gentleman's subsequent legal difficulties. I don't think that any recent development in the American orchestral sphere has received such aggressive and exhaustive coverage. The saga was interesting up to a point, but I doubt it's still being "closely followed by the classical music world," as Dan Wakin states in his latest piece (and this post is not intended as a slur on his characteristically deft reportage). What struck me were these lines somewhere toward the end: "On the bright side, ticket revenue is expected to rise 10 percent over last year. Subscriptions are up as well." Now that's news. How did a "struggling," "troubled" orchestra manage to do that? Why are so many American orchestras reporting a similar rise in attendance? Dan? Anyone?

(Part of a continuing series on the undeath of classical music. More here, here, and, especially, here.)

Reader Jake Wunsch writes in reply to the above: "Not sure what's driving everyone else to the symphony, but for me and my friends (late-20's, little background in classical music) those cheap "Discovery Concerts" at Carnegie have been near ideal. The lectures are entertaining without being corny or simplistic; it's useful to hear some of the main themes in the first half so they're in our heads for the second; and the modern music they program is in some ways easier to relate to (and, let's face it, cooler to name-check) than the older stuff.... Educate us on what we're hearing, play modern music, and take down ticket prices to where they're comparable to rock shows."

From Tehran to Annandale

John Cage is moving to Bard College.

Blacking-box

A man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a corner.... It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a needle-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but they must sing and we must weep until the eternal gates swing open.

                          — W. B. Yeats, "The Golden Age"

My book's first chapter, a portrait of music circa 1900 as embodied by Strauss and Mahler, is called "The Golden Age" — somewhat ironically, because the twentieth century was a golden age for musical composition from beginning to end. The title was inspired by the above firework of Yeatsian prose, although I ended up not using it as an epigraph. The rhythm of the writing is beyond compare. Notice how the lulling iambic meter in the line that begins "but they must sing..." falters and goes in reverse with the opening of the eternal gates. There is also something fabulous about the way the passage is punctuated; every comma traces a little gesture in the air. Mahler's Fourth Symphony, as it happens, paints a very similar picture: the devil's fiddle in the second movement, the gates of heaven in the third.

Boston is rich

For the fiscal year 2005, the Boston Symphony posted a net gain of $36,079,800. It also reported contributions of $33,933,769. In other words, the orchestra would still have made a profit if it had depended on ticket sales, investment income, and other revenue alone. The orchestra's net assets are a jaw-dropping $380,208,088. (Data from Charity Navigator.)

Playlist in memoriam Antonella

— Betty Davis, Betty Davis (Light in the Attic, forthcoming)
— Tristan Murail, Winter Fragments, Argento Chamber Ensemble (Aeon)
— Roslavets, Chamber Symphony and In the Hours of the New Moon, BBC Scottish Symphony cond. Ilan Volkov (Hyperion)
— Schumann, Fantasie, Kreisleriana, Arabeske, Jonathan Biss (EMI)
— Brahms, First and Second Piano Concertos, Nelson Freire and the Gewandhaus cond. Riccardo Chailly (Decca)
— Horatiu Radulescu, Intimate Rituals (Sub Rosa)
— Schoenberg, Early and Unknown String Works, Rangzen Quartet and Christina Fong (OgreOgress)
— Berlioz, Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, London Symphony cond. Colin Davis (Philips, w/ Requiem, finally)

Styles for spring

The New Yorker website has received a long-awaited, très chic redesign.... New men's piano fashions in Shostakovich and Ligeti.... Hindemith and Milhaud gallivant dadaistically in 1927. (Bowler hat tip to Soho the Dog.)

Any day now

A composer of our acquaintance wonders when the 5 Browns, the cutesy multiple-piano family act, are going to play Julius Eastman's Evil Nigger. Or his Gay Guerrilla, for that matter. (The EAR Unit will play Eastman's Crazy Nigger, for four pianos, at REDCAT in LA on April 11.)

Cage in Iran II

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Here's a picture from the Night of John Cage in Tehran earlier today. Courtesy of Shervin Afshar.

Cage in Iran

John_cage_1Step aside, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Robert Spano: this year the prize for boldness in programming has to go to Nader Mashayehki, conductor of the Tehran Symphony, who, tomorrow night, will lead Tehran Conservatory students in a performance of Cage's Four6, as part of Bukhara magazine's Night of John Cage at the Beethoven Hall of the Iranian Artists' Forum. Mashayehki, a composer as well as a conductor, lived in Vienna for many years, studying at the Musikhochschule with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and leading the Ensemble Wien 2001. For more on the struggle to maintain an orchestra in Iran, read this AP story from last summer and this story from Der Spiegel. (Via Soho the Dog.)

Update: Shervin Afshar, curator of the Iranian blog Signal to Noise, writes to say that he will be attending the above event, and also sends news of the Limited Access Exhibition at the Parkingallery in Tehran — a mix of sound installations, videos, and live performances. Makan Ashkewari will present a Cagean work mixing his own vocals with radio/TV noises, and Shervin himself will perform a piece entitled The Blue Box. The exhibition runs from March 8 to March 15. If you're looking for something to do in Tehran (?), drop by and check it out.

Danke Denk

It's been a while since I've linked to the remarkable blog of the pianist Jeremy Denk. In his latest post he writes about buying a cup of coffee in San Francisco and walking through the city on a beautiful day. There's more to it than that, of course. Besides being a brilliant musician, Denk is simply one of the most interesting writers I know.

Heckle for harmony!

Priceless footage of a Birtwistle imbroglio outside the Royal Opera House in 1994. This one goes out to the commenters at NewMusicBox and Sequenza21. (Via Clownsilly.)

Missing Disney

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Idol commentary

The genius moment on tonight's somewhat dispiriting American Idol came when the erratic Leslie Hunt, having been eliminated in favor of a Jersey girl who can't sing at all and likes to flash her breasts, ad-libbed some new lines in her reprise of "Feeling Good": "Oh why did I decide to scat / America don't care for jazz...." Then again, America did seem to care for Melinda Doolittle's smokily beautiful rendition of "My Funny Valentine." America is, as ever, a mysterious place.

As usual, Jody Rosen has the nonpareil wrapup.

Strong statements

Who doesn't love them? Here are two. 1) Denis Dutton: "Based on a careful study of her correspondence and her radio interviews, it is my considered opinion that Joyce Hatto, in addition to being a lively, chirpy, witty, bright and positive person, was also a systematic, methodical liar." 2) Justin Davidson: "A decade after it supposedly committed itself to entering the 21st century, I believe that the Vienna Philharmonic has relinquished its claim to serious consideration as a dynamic cultural organization." I agree with both.

Boldness in Baltimore

Marin Alsop has announced a remarkable inaugural season with the Baltimore Symphony, giving notice that the orchestra is ready to take its place among such pace-setting American ensembles as LA, San Francisco, Minnesota, Atlanta, and St. Louis. There's a contemporary piece on almost every program, and no fewer than five composers have been invited to conduct their work on regular subscription programs: John Adams, Tan Dun, HK Gruber, James MacMillan, and Thomas Adès. The notion of the composer as celebrity soloist is an LA innovation, but Baltimore is taking it up in an especially vigorous way. Aaron Jay Kernis, Steven Mackey, John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, and Joan Tower are also featured. And tickets are cheap. With the aid of a $1 million grant, the orchestra is asking $25 for all subscription seats. My one criticism is that the choice of composers seems safe: no surprises here. But it's a great start.

The death of classical crossover

The Standing Room draws attention to an amusing passage in Vivien Schweitzer's Playbill story about the troubled New Hampshire Symphony: "Symphony officials had reportedly hoped to attract a large crowd for the season opener, billed as the New England premiere of Billy Joel's concerto, Symphonic Fantasies for Piano and Orchestra. 'That should have brought out tremendous crowds. A packed house,' trustee Lois Fonda told the Union Leader, but it didn't. 'It's just beyond me why there aren't enough people in New Hampshire who are appreciative of classical music. It's tragic. It really is,' Fonda added." Hmm. Perhaps the problem is that there aren't enough people in New Hampshire who are appreciative of Billy Joel's classical compositions, and, you know, that doesn't reflect poorly on New Hampshire. Another problem might be that New Hampshire has a lot of orchestras for a small state. Namely, the New Hampshire Symphony, the New Hampshire Philharmonic, the Greater Manchester Youth Symphony, the Nashua Symphony, the Granite State Symphony, the Lakes Region Symphony, the UNH Symphony, the Dartmouth Symphony, the Monadnock Festival Orchestra, the Nashua Chamber Orchestra, and the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra. Certainly it's asking a lot for Manchester, a city of 100,000, to sustain two orchestras. Putting on a proper performance of the Mahler Eighth would require one percent of the population to play or sing.

Good / crazy news at City Opera

Last week, ace operablogger La Cieca hinted that Gerard Mortier, head of the Paris Opéra, might succeed Paul Kellogg as general manager of New York City Opera. Rumor becomes fact, Daniel Wakin reports in the Times. Mortier, for those who don't know, is the firebrand intendant of European opera; before going to Paris, he ran the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, and, for ten controversial years, the Salzburg Festival. He has allied himself with some of the most congenitally irritating directors of the Regietheater or Verdi-in-the-toilets school, and also facilitated such grand achievements as the Peter Sellars productions of Saint François and L'Amour de loin and Mark Morris's L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato. Mortier's regime will probably have its ups and downs — is New York ready for The Pirates of Penzance set in Iraq? — but his work in contemporary opera is outstanding, and to have him competing with Gelb at the Met will create unprecedented excitement in New York musical life. What's happened to our sleepy little operatic backwater? Let the pandemonium begin.

Good news at the Met

At the Metropolitan Opera press conference this morning, Peter Gelb revealed that attendance is up nine percent from last season, after five years of decline; that 61 performances have so far sold out (as opposed to 22 in 2005-6); and — amazingly — that Saturday's movie-theater broadcast of Onegin ranked #8 in Canadian box office last weekend. Of next season's offerings, I'm looking forward to Philip Glass's Satyagraha, directed by the Improbable theater company; Adrian Noble's production of Macbeth; Mary Zimmermann's Lucia di Lammermoor, starring Natalie Dessay; and Stephen Wadsworth's Iphigénie en Tauride, with Susan Graham and Plácido Domingo. I'm unhappy that a revival of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy has been dropped in favor of the musically inferior First Emperor, but the Met has reason to make the change: it may be a dry run for a tour of China. More details at the Met site and La Cieca.

Glenn Gould in snow

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Photo by Sam Javanrouh. (Via Dave Shapiro.)

Mahagonny, Grapes of Wrath

Agit-Opera. The New Yorker, March 5, 2007.

To judge from Jeremy Eichler's review (and Heidi Waleson's in-person report), the better Mahagonny is in Boston. Unfortunately, the Kelly Markgraf video that I mention in my piece seems to have disappeared from YouTube.

Barrington-Coupe confesses

William Barrington-Coupe, né Coupe, has confessed to plagiarism in the Joyce Hatto case, though I don't believe his story for a minute. Read the Daily Mail for details of the man's shady career. AC Douglas asks a good question: Why didn't the pianists themselves notice that Hatto and Coupe were ripping them off? The answer is that few people outside a subculture of specialist record-collectors knew these discs. I've yet to talk to anyone who actually heard them. Hatto's "renown" has been much exaggerated in recent days.

Please stand by

Technical problems here at the blog have resulted in the disappearance of several posts. I'm trying to reconstruct them one by one. A response to this Slate piece is forthcoming.

Q & A

Justin Timberlake, Los Angeles CA: “If I wrote you a symphony, just to say how much you mean to me, what would you do?”

A: I would be extremely flattered, Justin! But do we really need another exercise in Classical-Romantic nostalgia? I would recommend a continuous one-movement form derived from a single motivic kernel.

Podium tedium

The Philadelphia Orchestra, which once had Riccardo Muti at its music director, has appointed Charles Dutoit, former conductor of the Montreal Symphony, to a four-year term as "chief conductor and artistic adviser." The New York Philharmonic is said to be interested in Muti once again (though, to their credit, they may also be thinking about Alan Gilbert). The Chicago Symphony has also flirted with Muti (although focus is now shifting to Riccardo Chailly). A lot of this is a bit déjà vu, isn't it? Next thing you know it will be time for the grand return of Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa....

Hattomania

For those who can't get enough Joyce Hatto, Andrys Basten has gathered a master page of links related to the great classical scandal of our time, or, at least, of the month. Twenty-three recordings by Hatto have now been identified, tentatively or definitively, as copies of releases on other labels. Wikipedia has the running tally. Although the Concert Artist website has gone blank, William Barrington-Coupe, Hatto's husband and the operator of the label, has denied to the Daily Telegraph that anyone but Hatto is heard playing on these discs. If there's any doubt in your mind, listen to the sound samples on Andrew Rose's page, where "Hatto" is heard on one channel and the actual pianist on the other. The motive behind this unprecedented escapade remains to be determined. Mr. Barrington-Coupe is the main focus of the investigation, but Hatto's letters to the critic Christopher Howell make it clear that the pianist herself was actively engaged in advertising other people's recordings as her own. One hilarious detail emerges from the radio interviews: Barrington-Coupe claimed that his fictitious London orchestra was a "group of Polish refugees, working for non-union rates." Two conspiracy theories can be dispelled: Hatto really did have cancer, as Jessica Duchen has determined, and she really could play the piano, as her 1970 recording of the Bax Symphonic Variations attests.

A little nightmare music / Blog explosion

With the passing of Anna Russell, you might have thought that the days of smart musical parody were over. But watch out for Igudesman and Joo. Their skit Rachmaninov's Big Hands is an instant classic. (Thanks to Matthew Van Brink.)... Funny also is the fake video "Pop Goes My Heart" from the Hugh Grant movie Music and Lyrics. Can't vouch for the movie itself. (Via Idolator.)... Welcome NYC's newest music blog, Feast of Music, written from the standpoint of a young Park Slope-based concertgoer. One of Pete's first posts rounds up all the student ticket deals available at New York's leading institutions. If you're in the demo, you can get $25-35 tickets at the Met, $12 tickets at the Philharmonic, and $10 tickets at Carnegie — the best seats available in each case. By the way, I keep adding new sites to my Music Blogs page. When I started Noise, in May 2004, I had links to only five other classical blogs: Jessica Duchen, Sandow, Gann, aworks, and The Rambler.... John Birge at Minnesota Public Radio advises that the orchestra and chorus heard in that Nike Mozart Requiem commercial are the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and St. Olaf Choir, conducted by Andreas Delfs. A fine performance, sneakers or no.

Acocella night

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I will be appearing at Housing Works Used Book Café with New Yorker dance critic and cultural observer Joan Acocella, discussing her objectively splendid new book Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints.

Helix on the beach

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Esa-Pekka Salonen appeared last Thursday at the Apple Store in Santa Monica, California, to discuss his orchestral piece Helix. Salonen demonstrated his composing methods at a pre-Intel PowerBook, holding a large crowd mesmerized. Salonen's new Piano Concerto can be heard at the New York Philharmonic website through March 2. Helix will be given its American premiere by the LA Phil on March 30, with an iTunes release slated to follow. More pictures below. 

Continue reading "Helix on the beach" »

Joyce Hatto unmasked

The riveting music story of the moment is the Joyce Hatto hoax. Gramophone, which also has a major article this month on music in China, has revealed that several recordings attributed to the late, cultishly admired British pianist are identical to discs previously issued on other labels — including, remarkably, Yefim Bronfman and Esa-Pekka Salonen's well-regarded 1990 recording of the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto. The possibility arises that many or most of Hatto's hundred-odd releases on her husband's Concert Artist label are stolen property. Not having heard any Hatto discs, I can't begin to judge what's real and what's not, but it's a safe guess that anything conducted by the elusive René Köhler (scroll down this page for Concert Artist's unverified biography) is a fake; in one case he's Salonen, in another he's Bernard Haitink. You have here the beginnings of an excellent case study in how reputations and mythologies affect musical perception. Jessica Duchen links to an internet discussion where one piano expert is quoted as saying that Minoru Nojima's Liszt playing is "too clinical" and expressing a preference for Hatto — not aware that he's discussing the same performance! The same gentleman appears to respond to a detractor with anti-Semitic remarks. I have a feeling the story will only get weirder from here on out.

For more (and you know you want it), read Classics Today, On an Overgrown Path, and Soho the Dog. Classics Today has tracked down several more plagiarized recordings: Hatto's complete Ravel set is in fact Roger Muraro's, her Messiaen Vingt Regards is Paul Kim's, her Saint-Saëns Second Concerto is Jean-Philippe Collard's. As someone somewhere has observed, the Hatto scandal may at least do the service of shining a light on a bunch of gifted pianists who have never achieved international celebrity. Here's my review of Muraro's astounding 2003 performance of Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux.

So ordered

Alex Wellsung has strong words for Met patrons who are stayng away from Jenufa: "Professing enjoyment of opera, living in the tri state area, and not seeing this should be grounds for finding someone criminally insane." One performance left.

Adams = 60

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Happy birthday to the great John Adams.

Photo: Deborah O'Grady.

By popular demand

No fewer than three people have forwarded the link to Nora the Piano-playing Cat.

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Grammy surprise

Among various worthy people who won Grammys last night, I'd like to single out John McLaughlin Williams and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, who won for a recording (with pianist Angelin Chang) of Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques. The Cleveland group recently sprang back to life after having been declared dead, and Williams is a long-time advocate of unsung composers. In 2003, he led a performance in Cleveland of Ervín Schulhoff's jazz oratorio HMS Royal Oak — a delightfully quirky piece that deserves to be on recording.... I had no idea there were so many opera companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. I came across that listing after discovering that Contemporary Opera Marin (website out of service) performed HMS Royal Oak last summer.... Is Daniel Barenboim too sexy? (Blame Geelhoed.)

Faust in the house

My waiter at breakfast saw the manuscript of my book's second chapter, entitled "Doctor Faust." She asked, "Are you a doctor?" Coincidentally, Dr. Faust is to be named president of Harvard.

Our point exactly

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Last night at Orchestral Hall in Minneapolis, Osmo Vänskä conducted Sibelius's In Memoriam and Fourth Symphony alongside Beethoven's Fifth. The performances were emblematic of Vänskä's style — exceptional care over details of articulation on the one hand, exceptional intensity on the other. The Fifth confirmed what an ongoing series of recordings on the BIS label has suggested — that Vänskä is that very rare conductor who can make Beethoven's symphonies sound absolutely fresh. I first encountered him live back in 1994, when he came to St. Peter's in Manhattan with the Lahti Symphony chamber ensemble; the program included Gubaidulina's Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings, in which the soloist is asked to let out a blood-curdling scream; Nielsen's Serenata in vano; Martinu's Nonet; and Franz Hasenöhrl's ingenious arrangement of Till Eulenspiegel for violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. There were about twenty people in the audience. I next saw Vänskä with the Iceland Symphony before a half-full Carnegie Hall in 1996. He returns to Carnegie next week with his increasingly world-class Minnesota players in two programs of Beethoven and Sibelius.

Beethoven was in the hall to check out Sibelius's stuff, although he declined to take a bow after his own piece:

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If you look closely you can also see Clownsilly.

Minneapolis from above

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Tailor

I join AC Douglas in mourning the death of the deliciously mordant Scottish actor Ian Richardson, most famous for House of Cards and its sequels. For me, he will always be Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, holding his own against Alec Guinness. One should also mention his dizzying turn as Mr. Warrenn — "Yes! No! Cancel that!" — in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. I once had the delight of seeing Richardson proceeding through the streets of Soho, in a slightly startling purple suit.

On the road

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Please direct all inquiries to Penelope while I trample out the vintage (Minnesota Opera) and find the next whisky bar (LA).

Update: New York's Daily Intelligencer generously sets aside internecine competition to praise this blog, though in the context of suggesting that we may be seeking "blogger cred" by starting to post kitty pictures. Be aware that catblogging has been integral to Noise since its inception in the spring of 2004 — predating, possibly, the existence of the Daily Intelligencer. We've been a bloggy stereotype all along, and happier for it.

Nike Lacrimosa

Reader Dave Lupack sends a link to a rather amazing Nike Air Jordan ad that apparently started running on TV tonight. On a lighter note, Bryan Falgout offers the one-man Turandot finale. Update via Maury: The Turandot artist's website can be found here, with more wackiness on display.

Voiding Vivaldi

If you're looking for classical-radio alternatives, here are two: Michael Wittmann's Das Internationale Elektron, on WMEB in Orono, Maine, and DJ Berlioz's Twelve-Tone Radio, on Wesleyan's WESU (Tuesdays from 4-5PM). On a future show, DJ Berlioz, aka Leon Hilton, promises to read aloud from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus over a recording of Beethoven's Opus 111. Ah, college days!

Playlist

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— Shostakovich Violin Concertos, with Sergey Khachatryan and Kurt Masur conducting the Orchestre National de France (Naïve) [what a sound!]
— Helmut Lachenmann, Concertini and Kontrakadenz, Ensemble Modern (Ensemble Modern Medien)
As steals the morn...: Handel arias and scenes, with Mark Padmore and Andrew Manze conducting the English Concert (Harmonia Mundi; to be released June 2007)
Alter Ego Performs Philip Glass (Orange Mountain)
— Beethoven Piano Sonatas vol. 2, Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)
— Tarik O'Regan, Voices (Collegium)
— Ricky Ian Gordon, Orpheus and Euridice (Ghostlight)
— Stravinsky Rite of Spring, Bartók Miraculous Mandarin, Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG)

The great divide

The critics of The Guardian are engaged in a lively debate on the topic "Can critics and artists be friends?" As Tom Service notes, American attitudes on this subject tend to be stricter than British attitudes. The late Harold Schonberg, during his long reign at the New York Times, forbade even the slightest hint of critic-musician fraternization, and also prevented composers from working as critics at the paper. I believe that such policies were misguided, emblematic of a sort of Cold War emergency seriousness in the arts arena, and they led to criticism that was not as smart or strong as it could have been. For, as many participants in the Guardian debate point out, knowing how artists think and work can greatly deepen a critic's perspective.

That said, I generally avoid meeting the people I write about. I tend to write profiles only of artists whom I've long admired, or with whom I feel a strong identification. I was an avid fan of John Adams for more than ten years before I met him — my college roommates were subjected to days and nights of Nixon in China — and I don't think meeting him changed how I heard his music. The same goes for Esa-Pekka Salonen, whom I'm writing about now. I'm with Andrew Clements in thinking differently about composers in general: I'm biased toward them as a species, having tried to write music myself. They are at the center of my work, and I need to know what they are thinking.

The irony underlying this discussion is that some of our strongest prejudices — favorable or unfavorable — are directed toward people we've never met. Lack of contact lets us idolize our heroes and demonize our foes. The advantage of meeting people within the profession is that you see them as they really are. The danger is that you may end up liking a lot of them, tolerating most of the others, and madly loving rather few. For myself, I want to preserve at least some of the fantasy of fandom.

Non-death #145

Charlotte Landrum of the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston sends along the news that the Gardner's weekly classical podcast, The Concert, is currently ranked #31 among all iTunes podcasts, ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and The Man Show. It's racked up almost one hundred thousand downloads in eighty-one countries. What strikes me about these blip-like appearances of classical music on the national radar screen — as in the case of the Liebersons' Neruda Songs, which reached #3 on Amazon's overall music chart — is that they take place almost entirely without the support of mainstream American media and big-league advertising. Imagine what might happen if Hollywood studios, TV networks, and national magazines actually showed a flicker of interest in the subject. By the way, I just noticed Robert Levine's review of the Neruda cycle on the Amazon site — "the Four Last Songs of the 21st century."

Paul Cantrell sagely replies: "[The plea for broader media coverage] is a double-edged wish. One of the reasons for the current flourishing of classical music is that it's largely grassroots and below the mass music radar. Mass production eats art alive, and that's what happens when the recording industry decides something is big business. Unnoticed popularity is an ideal state for us artists."

Byrne's drones

I was able to catch only the last night of the David Byrne festival at Carnegie. This was an evening entitled One Note, bringing together various kinds of music centered on a single tone: the "Sufi psych rock" of Haale, the work of Giacinto Scelsi as played by Alarm Will Sound (his Pranam II, together with an Aphex Twin arrangement and a souped-up Saltarello), and the Parisian avant-pop of Camille. I didn't get too much out of Haale's material, but the Scelsi was transfixing, and Camille and her collaborators Matthew Ker and Martin Gamet put together a performance that defies description — a dizzying stream of wistful chanson, nonsense patter, barks and meows, coloratura singing, cool jazz chords, spastic dancing, comic pratfalls, and avant-garde shrieks and shouts, all organized around an unchanging drone. Look for a report from Steve Smith. Mr. Byrne, who introduced the artists, made one audience member feel very cool when he recommended a particular Scelsi article.

Applause meter

Andrew Druckenbrod of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revisits the topic of applause between movements, an old chestnut at this blog. Leonard Slatkin is another major musician unopposed to applause whenever audiences feel moved to supply it. Recently, at an LA Phil performance in Disney Hall, I noticed that the audience provided a smattering of applause after each movement of the Mahler Seventh. A brief conversation with a couple of the musicians afterward revealed that they weren't terribly concerned about the issue. For them it was a positive sign, indicating that there were new people in the hall. Applause between movements at a chamber concert proved, however, disconcerting, and a request for silence was made before a performance of the Quartet for the End of Time.

Daphne in Japan

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News from Japan: the Nikikai Opera is about to give the Japanese premiere of Strauss's Daphne. (Via Peter Rolufs.)

Whitney Balliett

The sad news at The New Yorker today is that Whitney Balliett, the magazine's longtime jazz critic, died yesterday at the age of 80. Our website has posted two classic pieces: a Profile of Bobby Short and a piece on Sonny Rollins. Balliett's Collected Works sits on my shelf next to Andrew Porter's anthologies — the New Yorker's main legacy in music criticism.

"Banging hotness" reported at concert

Last weekend's performances of Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison's Decasia brought some lively reactions from non-specialist corners of the blogosphere. Felix Salmon, an old friend of Noise, was so entranced on Friday night that he went back to see both shows on Saturday. He wisely writes: "I think that one of the reasons why contemporary classical music has difficulty gaining traction among many people is precisely the need to listen to any given piece more than once, and the difficulty of doing so." For Gabriel Roth it was "one of the most powerful musical experiences I've ever had." Wild Koba judged the show to be "pretty friggin' spectacular," and marveled at the attractiveness of the crowd: "I was completely unaware that such banging hotness would be all over something as out as this." Wild Koba's readers should be warned that scoring at contemporary-music concerts is generally a dicey proposition, although it's a trend worth monitoring. There was even a modicum of hotness at last night's NY Phil premiere of the Esa-Pekka Salonen Piano Concerto — a brilliant, wild, startlingly Romantic piece, about which more later. Note the E-P Hear & Now event on Tuesday.

Menotti

5a52408r_1Opera Chic is reporting the death, at the age of ninety-five, of the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. He was a complex and inconsistent figure whose place in American opera history is nonetheless secure. The Medium, The Telephone, The Consul, and Amahl and the Night Visitors were huge phenomena in their day, holding audiences rapt on Broadway and via network television, and they remain part of the repertory of American opera houses today. Menotti's operas are, above all, pragmatic in their approach, using an eclectic assortment of styles to address various dramatic situations: Stravinskyan neoclassicism for the bustle of daily life, Puccinian melodies for the love scenes, Bergian dissonance for the tragedies, hymn tunes and folk melodies as appropriate. If they ultimately lack a really distinctive voice, they nonetheless hold the stage better than the works of many more intellectually celebrated figures. Virgil Thomson's review of The Medium is worth noting: "I have heard it three times and it never fails to hold me enthralled. Mr. Menotti's libretto and his music form a unit that is deeply touching and terrifying.... The play wrings every heartstring, and so does the music. I cannot conceive the whole work otherwise than as destined for a long and successful career." A 1950 Time cover story gives a sense of Menotti's celebrity at mid-century. Will Time mention his death?

Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress.

Glass = 70

Koyaan

Happy happy happy happy birthday to Philip Glass. As it happens, Schubert is 210, Justin is 26, George Benjamin is 47, and, closer to home, Sasha is slightly older than I.

Image from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi.

See Jenufa!

Why do Janácek's operas still fail to sell strongly at the Met? Last night's revival of Jenufa was well attended, but seats remain available in almost all categories for remaining shows in the run. It would be good if Peter Gelb's Met were to direct its prodigious energies at marketing twentieth-century masterpieces such as this — i. e., sell the music, not just the performers or director. The cast could not be bettered. Karita Mattila again glows with ardor and power in the title role (here's my review of her 2003 performance). Opposite her is the ageless, uncanny Anja Silja, whose Kostelnikca is frightening and heartbreaking in equal measure. Jorma Silvasti supplied a finely detailed, affecting portrait of Laca; Jirí Belohlávek conducted with great authority, obtaining some of the most incisive playing I've heard in the score. I still don't care for the production, particularly in comparison with the masterly Nikolaus Lehnhoff staging I saw in Berlin in 2002, but all told this is a tremendous night of theater, one of the Met's best shows of the season. (If you happen to have homosexual leanings, the Met is hosting Gay and Lesbian Singles night at Jenufa this Friday.)

The limits of my fame: when I announced myself at the Met ticket window as "Alex Ross," the youngish guy behind the glass cheerily said, "Just like the painter!" At one point I thought of asking the other Alex Ross to illustrate the cover of my book, drawing Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Steve Reich as caped superheroes, but I never got around to it.

Guzelimian's farewell

No musical administrator is more widely respected or well liked than Ara Guzelimian, who until the end of last year served as senior director and artistic advisor at Carnegie Hall. The programming during Guzelimian's tenure has been fabulous in quality and scope, and the 2007-2008 season, announced this morning, is typical of what he has achieved. The centerpiece is a seventeen-day festival entitled Berlin in Lights, with the Berlin Philharmonic playing alongside a welter of groups in classical, folk, pop, and electronic genres. The festival overlaps with a Thomas Adès residency; the Philharmonic will play a new Adès piece entitled Tevot. Another alluring Berlin program has Kurtág's Stele (also to be done at Juilliard next week) paired with the Mahler Tenth. Guzelimian is now Dean of Juilliard, although he will continue to host Carnegie's Making Music series. Jeremy Geffen, who has lately done imaginative work at the Saint Louis Symphony, is taking Guzelimian's place.

Takemitsu

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Toward Silence. The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2007.

Image from Kurosawa's Ran.

The classical comeback (cont.)

More on that 22.5% bump in classical record sales: reports from insiders suggest that the rise is not, in fact, due to crossover fare (Il Divo, André Rieu, the Dowland-howling Sting) but to the real thing (Mozart, Beethoven, Louis Andriessen). All categories of classical music are selling briskly on online stores such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and ArkivMusic as well as on iTunes and other MP3 outlets. There's a good article by Symphony's Jayson Greene on the phenomenon, with reference to the Long Tail effect. Everyone seems to agree that the uptick has come about because the Internet has made the music more readily available, and also more readily comprehensible. You no longer need to skulk through the doors of a sepulchral room at Tower Records (RIP) and paw through fifty Beethoven Fifths to find what you like. Online there are snappy reviews, lists of recommended starter recordings, and, most important, sound samples so you can try out any disc (not just a few featured releases) before you buy. The whole business is demystified. I'm proud to say I more or less predicted this in 2004, when I wrote that the iPod was going to break down classical stereotypes.

The question is, will the boom last, and will performing organizations benefit from it? Greg Sandow has been offering a gloomy outlook for symphony orchestras on his blog. His statistics on the ageing of the audience — a process that has been happening at a relentless pace since the 1950s — are indeed alarming. But I question Greg's habit of equating the health of long-established orchestras with the health of classical music at large. What about opera? Over half of professional American opera companies were established after 1970. If you compare the state of opera today to the state of opera in the sixties, as Greg does in his orchestra posts, you see dramatic growth, not decline. The audience for opera is younger, and, according to the NEA, one quarter is under the age of thirty-five. Or consider new-music ensembles. How many were there in the "golden age" of the sixties? A handful? Look now at the list I've compiled for this site, only a partial one of groups in NYC and across the country. This is a public that simply didn't exist forty years ago. As for orchestras themselves, most have reported a small rise in attendance after several years of decline, and, with hard work, that trend should continue. Although big-city orchestras may not be selling out all performances, as Greg says they were in the sixties, they are also giving more performances than ever before; it was in the course of the sixties that they converted to fifty-two-week contracts. The New York Philharmonic, founded in 1842, had given 6700 concerts by the end of the 1962-63 season, and now it's closing in on 15,000.

While updating my new-music ensembles directory — further suggestions for listings would be welcome, especially for groups away from the coasts — I made a couple of delightful discoveries. One was the ADORNO Ensemble in San Francisco, whose site is emblazoned with the beloved Adorno slogan "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime." Their programming looks superb. Also, I was intrigued to see that the Kansas City ensemble newEar recently played a piece by Paul Elwood entitled Stanley Kubrick's Mountain Home, advertised as "an unexpected combination of chamber and bluegrass music."

Atlanta departs website doghouse

In March of 2005 I chided the Atlanta Symphony for failing to divulge sufficient information about their programming on their website. I'm happy to report that the new site (a few months old, in fact) is much better, indeed positively exploding with information. Noteworthy is the fact that Altanta is eagerly promoting its new-music events rather than concealing them behind hedges of Tchaikovsky. Other energetic orchestra websites: Nashville (gearing up for a Glass at 70 celebration), Minnesota (the Beethoven is Back! promotion is amusing), Chicago (offering a download of "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" under the direction of the late Sir Georg Solti), San Francisco (currently holding a sale on remaining seats for the season), and Saint Louis (about to present a concert of Cage's Credo in US and Feldman's Samuel Beckett, Words and Music).

New-music miscellany

It's rare to find contemporary fare on classical radio these days, but Rob Deemer, based in Oklahoma City, has launched a weekly series called Composer Next Door on local station KCSC. Currently he's leading listeners on a "whirlwind tour" of music from various American regions: tomorrow's California show, typically eclectic, brings works by Pauline Oliveros, John Williams, Alex Shapiro, Morten Lauridsen, John Adams, and Per Bloland.... As part of Miller Theatre's Organ Festival, John Scott plays a free program of Ligeti and Jonathan Harvey at St. Thomas Church on Sunday at 5:15PM. Be prepared for some deliciously shocking sounds.... Sunday in San Francisco, a rare performance of Stockhausen's Hymnen (tape version) at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival.... Peruvian clarinetist Marco Mazzini is hosting an online competition for the most creative interpretation of Juan María Solare's free-tempo piece Convalacencia.... Jason Freeman's piece Graph Theory allows the listener to navigate among various optional modules of a score for solo violin, and your choices affect future performances of the piece.... Take note of Formerly Known As Classical, the Bay Area teen-aged new-music ensemble. One recent program was entitled Since We've Been Born, and featured music written since [gulp] 1988.

Confronting silence

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"Music is either sound or silence. As long as I live I shall choose sound as something to confront a silence. That sound should be a single, strong sound."

— Toru Takemitsu

Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists play works by the Japanese master at Zankel Hall tonight, including Nostalghia for strings, inspired by the sublimely mysterious Tarkovsky film. (I hadn't intended this image to parallel the Decasia still below, but so it does.)

Decasia returns

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Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison's film symphony Decasia is one of the first classics of the new century — an hour-long voyage of abstract wonder and subconscious dread. On Thursday it goes to Angel Orensanz in New York for a three-night run. I wrote about the experience of seeing Decasia in 2004.

Still by Laurie Olinder.

Oscar commentary

We endorse The Queen, Stephen Frears, Helen Mirren, Ryan Gosling, Eddie Murphy, and Jennifer Hudson.

DC classical saga

For anyone who's been following my sporadic reports on the struggle to maintain classical radio in our nation's capital, here's some good news: the public station WETA, as rumored, has returned to an all-classical format. There's life in the old corpse yet. Congratulations to WETA's management on making an enlightened decision. Paul Farhi explains the rather unusual deal in a Washington Post article: WETA-FM will assume the call letters of the now defunct commercial classical station WGMS as well as much of its staff. As ionarts observes, it's not the ideal outcome, but probably the best that could be hoped for. The new station is already up and running with a web broadcast and a blog, where a comments war has broken out between people celebrating the return of classical programming and people lamenting the loss of Car Talk.

Vernon Leftwich returns

Wacky coincidences department: I was taking a tour of the Hollywood Bowl this afternoon when I saw a photograph of a conductor named Izler Solomon. Who he, I asked myself. Signing on to the classical Internet (user name and password: Tristan Klingsor), I find that Soho the Dog had this very day answered exactly that question, in the midst of a meaty post on the Federal Music Project, which I wrote about a while back.

Send

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I started writing my book (or at least created a file) at 12:41AM on Oct. 14, 2001. I finished (or at least mailed the file) at 4:59PM today. The final word count, for those who have been following the saga, is 214,000 words—a mere pamphlet! I hope you all find it as riveting as Maulina does.

Kraft

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I'm back at Disney Hall for the first time since the hall opened in 2003. The image above is a severely underexposed shot of sunlight striking Disney's outer walls. A few seconds into Webern's Pieces Opus 10 — sharing a program with the Mahler Seventh, under Esa-Pekka Salonen's direction — the wonder of the place returned. No other hall in the world takes you so deep inside the sound. By "Kraft" I mean, of course, Magnus Lindberg's Kraft, one of Salonen's signature pieces as a conductor. In composer guise, the fantastic Finn unveils his Piano Concerto at the New York Philharmonic on February 1.

On Sunday, I'm talking at the forward-thinking Santa Monica series Jacaranda, which is presenting a concert-fundraiser. The topic will be, inevitably, the Twentieth Century.

Robert Ashley in brief

The Straight Story. The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 2007.

Read Steve Smith's excellent Times piece for more.

Morty day

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Push —> shove

With the book clock ticking down, I've fallen behind on e-mails, phone calls, blog links, and observations on the great what have you. Apologies to all; I'll be back in the mix soon. In the meantime, enjoy this grippingly awful clip of Il Divo singing "Somewhere" on Wheel Of Fortune. Could the Bernstein estate possibly obtain a restraining order? (Thanks to Jason.)

No way; way

An item by Tony Tommasini in today's New York Times notes that Peter Gelb of the Met has revealed three members of the cast of his 2010-11 Ring cycle: Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Ben Heppner as Siegfried, and Bryn Terfel as Wotan. According to MetManiac, the same season should bring Boris Godunov starring René Pape and the new opera by Osvaldo Golijov.

Who killed the death of classical music?

Troy Peters drew my attention to record-sales statistics for the year 2006. Most categories showed falling album sales over the past year. The category that posted the biggest gain, from 15.8 to 19.4 million units, was, er, Classical. You may credit Il Divo, Bocelli, et al, but they were there the previous year, too. I think there's more to the story. I'd like to see category breakdowns for Internet and digital sales.... More: A reader points me to the Long Tail blog, where Chris Anderson takes note of the rise and attributes it (as I suspected) to high classical volume on online sites. People are buying more classical records for the simple reason that the Internet has made them easier to get. If you don't know the Long Tail theory, it's well worth reading up on.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

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The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night was like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

— Wallace Stevens

For a long time, I wanted nothing more than to live in the world described in this poem. After a while, you realize that it isn't possible, or even desirable, but you still cherish the moments when total quiet descends. The way the opening line is broken into pieces later in the poem reminds me of a moment in the first movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony — when the first theme comes back in the recapitulation, the second half of the phrase materializing out of nowhere after a mysterious interruption.

Kurtág in depth

Marvelous, haunting piece by Mark Swed about the Hungarian master. Mark was at the Kurtág duo recital that I wrote about recently in The New Yorker; he has an uncanny ability to show up at any out-of-the-way event that I think I'm covering exclusively. If I hear about, say, a hitherto unknown Malaysian composer, a ninety-year-old woman who has written a ten-hour-long piano sonata on toilet paper, and I trek for days to her premiere in a muddy fishing village, Mark will inevitably be there, saying, "Oh, you heard about Ayu too?" But it's always good to see him; it means I've made a smart choice.

Gowanus Modern

Mvc050x_1 Last year I wrote in brief about Issue Project Room, the avant performance space on the Gowanus Canal. This month the Room is presenting an ambitious festival entitled The Independents, presenting artists in various disciplines (experimental composition, free jazz, noise rock, electronic, and  beyond category). The lineup includes such famous names as Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, Phill Niblock, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Zeena Parkins, and Charles Gayle. Of particular interest is an event on Jan. 24 — a presentation of Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch, a twenty-four-hour-long hyper-extension (de-telescoping?) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Mark Swed wrote eloquently about that installation when it played at Vienna's Wien Modern festival. In 2004 there was a rendition at Zeke's Gallery in Montreal. Make reservations early for all these events, Issue Project Room advises. The other big experimental event of the month is Robert Ashley's new opera Concrete at La MaMa, about which more later.

Picture courtesy of Zeke's Gallery.

More on Vienna

A very respectable member of the music business who has worked with the Vienna Philharmonic points out an error in the posting below. Werner Resel, whom I quoted, is the Orchestra Director of the Vienna State Opera, not the business manager of the orchestra itself (that would be the flutist Dieter Flury, who, it must be said, has also made obnoxious comments in past years). Further, readers are asked to consider that the Philharmonic is working hard to repair mistakes that it has made in the past, and that bringing women into its ranks is a high priority. To which it might be replied that, whatever the good intentions of more liberal-minded people in the organization, progress over the past ten years has been conspicuously slow.

Joy in Iran?

My first link from Iran: the blogger Signal To Noise has cited, perhaps ironically, my post Happy Shostakovich New Year.

Aw

Until today I had been cold to Ford nostalgia, but this story, about how the late president became friends with the gay couple who renovated his childhood home, made me melt.

Duck that metaphor

Richard Aldrich of the New York Times reviews Sergei Prokofiev's local debut, on Nov. 20, 1918: "It is for Prokofieff the mere breaking of a butterfly on a wheel to perform other men's music. But the gracious butterfly of Scriabine was metamorphosed into a gigantic prehistoric pterodactyl with horrid snout and crocodile wings which ominously whirred as they flew over the pianist. Ah! a Jabberwock, it was, not a butterfly!" How the art of criticism has declined.

Tan Dun's The First Emperor

Stone Opera. The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2006.

Happy Shostakovich New Year

Party_hat

"A blizzard is raging outside the windows as 1944 approaches. It will be a year of happiness, of joy, of victory, a year that will bring us all much joy. The freedom-loving Peoples will at last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, peace will reign over the whole world, and we shall live once more in peace under the sun of Stalin’s Constitution. Of this I am convinced, and consequently experience feelings of unalloyed joy."

             — Shostakovich, letter to Isaak Glikman, 12/31/43

Non-ironically, happy new year, everyone!

Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine.

Ugliness in Vienna

Here's a thoroughly disturbing report on neolithic sexual attitudes at and around the Vienna Philharmonic. Werner Resel, a former member of the orchestra and the current Orchestra Director at the Vienna State Opera, is quoted as having said, in an interview ten years ago, "The Vienna Philharmonic is an orchestra of white men that plays music by white men for white people." This same man would appear to be impeding the audition process for a female violinist, according to William Osborne's account, although, needless to say, the facts seem to be in dispute. No matter how beautifully the orchestra plays — and I don't think that it presently rises above any number of international rivals — it desperately needs new direction. Political correctness is not the issue. Stupidity is the issue. (Tip: Ljova.) (Correction to Prof. Resel's title added 1/3/07.)

Acutest at its vanishing

For most of today, Lorraine was at #3 on the overall Amazon music chart, ahead of Josh Groban, ll Divo, and all the American Idols. This is because NPR's Weekend Edition just did a story about Neruda Songs, in which I briefly participated, along with James Levine and Peter Lieberson. The composer spoke by phone from a Houston hospital, where he is being treated for lymphoma. As I wrote back in October, everyone's best wishes and quietest thoughts are surely with him.

Ceci n'est pas Messiaen

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Last year I put up a jesty little post about the potential musical ramifications of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, entitled "Paging Messiaen." Recently I received an inquiry from a media outlet asking where I had found that wonderful picture of Messiaen with a bird on his head. Apparently the above photo had popped up on their Google image search. With deep regret I had to inform them that this is not in fact a picture of Messiaen with a bird on his head, nor to my knowledge are there any pictures of Messiaen with a bird on his head. If anyone knows otherwise, do let me know, and I will pass the information along.

Update: Two pictures have quickly surfaced. From Ezra Padoa:

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And from Tom Hartley:

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Here we are now, entertain us

Once again, Entertainment Weekly gets through a supposedly comprehensive "best of" issue — 146 pages in total, covering movies, TV, music, books, and theater — without mentioning classical music. Granted, Malcolm Arnold is cited in small print among dozens of 2006 deaths, but you can be sure that he won a mention not for his nine symphonies but for his score to Bridge on the River Kwai. Jazz is also almost completely overlooked. I wouldn't harp on this if I didn't think EW was a smart magazine. Did anyone over there see Minghella's Butterfly at the Met, hear major new CDs by Adams and Glass, or feel the loss of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson? If market share is the sole consideration, it's worth noting that Lorraine's Neruda Songs CD is currently #71 on the overall Amazon music chart, beating out the Happy Feet soundtrack and Akon's Konvicted. The crazy news these days is that classical music is regaining popularity, and it's time for mainstream publications such as EW, Time, and Newsweek — not to mention the TV networks — to pay heed.

Mozart in Chamblee

On Saturday the Met will present the first of its live simulcasts, transmitting The Magic Flute in high-definition images and surround sound to some sixty theaters around the country. I'm not sure how the locations were selected*, but it's a remarkably even cross-section of red- and blue-state America, including Warrington, PA, Fort Myers, FL, Olathe, KS, Chamblee, GA, Fresno, CA, and Phoenix, AZ. Singer-blogger Campbell Vertesi, on seeing this list, complained that the Met was throwing away its resources on "communities that could give a rat's ass about opera," but, as it happens, many shows have already sold out, including those in the places named above. For more on the Met's initiative, read David Patrick Stearns.

*The required technology is most often found in the newer suburban multiplexes, Pierre Ruhe tells me.

Lost Someone

Namely, the titanic James Brown. Listen here.

Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination

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Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

— Wallace Stevens

Galina Ustvolskaya 1919-2006

Ustvol The remarkable St. Petersburg composer Galina Ustvolskaya died today at the age of eighty-seven. She studied with Shostakovich during the Second World War, and, at first, she imitated her teacher’s music, as did so many young Soviet composers. But in the late forties she forged her own style — austere, hieratic, an intermingling of skeletal counterpoint and crashing cluster chords. Shostakovich was fascinated by her, and, after the death of his first wife, Nina, he proposed marriage to her, without success. He also intensely admired her music, and consciously echoed it in developing his own late style. It was perhaps at the moment that Shostakovich submitted several of his works to Ustvolskaya’s scrutiny that centuries of male dominance of the art of composition finally came to an end. “I am a talent,” Shostakovich said to her, “you are a phenomenon.” In her youth, Ustvolskaya paid her dues by writing works on socialist-realist themes, but, in later years, she defied the official atheism of the Soviet system by addressing religious subjects: her trio of Compositions from the seventies carried the subtitles “Dona nobis pacem,” “Dies irae,” and “Benedictus qui venit.” I wrote more about this singular figure back in 1995. There are dozens of recordings of her music; a good place to start would be with the ECM disc Misterioso.

Brilliant-stupid band names

Sam Champion and PC Load Letter. The former are actually kind of great. The latter's page doesn't work, in good HP style.

And I am telling you

Excellent appreciation by Slate's Jody Rosen of Jennifer Hudson's monumental performance in Dreamgirls. We saw it last night at the Ziegfeld, about fifteen feet from the screen in Row B, and we haven't entirely recovered.

Kennedy speaks

Photo08big_3"There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art. For what I descry is a lift for our country: a surge of economic growth; a burst of activity in rebuilding and cleansing our cities; a breakthrough of the barriers of racial and religious discrimination; an Age of Discovery in science and space; and an openness toward what is new that will banish the suspicion and misgiving that have tarnished our prestige abroad. I foresee, in short, an America that is moving once again. And in harmony with that creative burst, there is bound to come the New Frontier in the Arts. For we stand, I believe, on the verge of a period of sustained cultural brilliance."

— John F. Kennedy, Sept. 13, 1960

Here's the kicker: these words appeared in a letter to the editor of Musical America!

Tom Hartley adds: "And the age of George W. Bush was also the age of Britney Spears."

Seeger's Law

“As in consonant writing the aim was the effective introduction of dissonance, so in dissonant writing the aim is the effective introduction of consonance.”

— Charles Seeger, "Manual of Dissonant Counterpoint"

Great moments in music history #391

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I took this picture at the world premiere of Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet, in Amsterdam, on June 26, 1995. The performers were the Arditti Quartet and the Grasshoppers helicopter display team of the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

Everything is saved

With another Metropolitan Opera premiere fast approaching — Tan Dun's The First Emperor — it's a good moment to revisit the first American opera that the Met presented: Frederick Converse's The Pipe of Desire. The US Opera site gives details about this legendarily obscure piece, which had its premiere in 1906 and three Met performances in 1910 and then dropped from sight. You can even read the first fourteen pages of the vocal score. The bucolic-tragic flavor of the plot is indicated in the dramatis personae, which includes Iolan, a peasant; Naoia, his betrothed; The Old-One, keeper of the Pipe; First Sylph; First Undine; First Salamander; and First Gnome. On that historic night in 1910, Louise Homer, Samuel Barber's aunt, sang Naoia, while Glenn Hall was the Salamander. The New York Times review commended Converse's score as "poetical and often beautiful in itself" but lamented "a great dearth of action upon the stage of any dramatic sort." Here are the final lines of the libretto, and if you can read them while remaining dry-eyed then there is probably nothing wrong with you.

IOLAN

The leaves fall softly from the trees
Dead, before dropping,
Like my old desires.
struggles to his knees in bewilderment
Not among men I lost--
Springs to his feet.  With realization.
'Twas in myself I failed.
He stands behind Naoia looking heavenward as if seeing her there.  Intense light.
Naoia! Naoia!
dying
It is not cold.
(He dies, falling upon Naoia's body.)

(The light gradually fades until at the last chord there is absolute darkness, during which the curtain falls.)

CHORUS OF ELVES

Nothing is wasted.

(Curtain.)

Movie note

The Queen is indeed one great movie.

Tower of doom

Things are getting grisly at Tower Records, all of whose stores will evidently be shuttered by next week. The classical room at the Lincoln Center location, where so many of us have wiled away so many hours, has become a storehouse for random stacks of nondescript records in all genres, the classical material sequestered in one corner. The opera room, where I once glimpsed James Levine hovering near the Schreker (false hope!), is full of boxes. The remaining CDs are surprisingly interesting and contemporary-oriented: apparently they've found back stock of high-quality labels like New World, Albany, cpo, and Innova. There were some fifty copies of cpo's disc of the Second Symphony of Louise Farrenc. For fifteen dollars, I picked up Arnold Dreyblatt's 1981 Federal Hall show with the Orchestra of Excited Strings (Table of the Elements), Donald Martino's Paradiso Choruses (New World), and Andrei Eshpai's A Circle — Apocalypse (Albany). The last is a wonderfully crazy late-period Soviet piece of all-over polystylistic tendencies, its resources including a lush, unreal quotation from La Valse, an apparent citation of "The Windmills of Your Mind," some up-tempo fusion jazz worthy of a blaxploitation movie, and rhythmically driving dissonant sequences representing "chaos and destruction." And that's just the first fourteen minutes.

The latest Alagna news

Bolle3 For those just tuning in, Roberto Alagna recently walked out of Aida at La Scala after being booed. The Guardian reports the tenor saying: "What if they had thrown stones at me, or some crazy person had attacked me? La Scala should have protected me. The show should have been suspended. Instead they carried on as if nothing had happened. After all, John Lennon ended up being killed." To Dan Wakin of the NY Times Alagna has suggested that "three mysterious figures made karate chop motions at him outside the stage door beforehand." No word on whether anyone was seen holding an umbrella. La Cieca has a link to a video of the episode, replete with a brilliant high B at the end of "Celeste Aida." So he did sing bravissimo! Except that the aria is in B-flat. The look on Ildiko Komlosi's face when Antonello Palombi steps in is precious. Meanwhile, according to Opera Chic, questions are surfacing about Palombi's rapid entrance; he apparently outran another stand-in who was in costume. [Update: This story indicates that Palombi was the proper stand-in.] And La Scala ballet star Roberto Bolle, pictured, has inserted himself into the brawl, agreeing with a reporter's suggestion that Alagna has envy of his "physique and glutes." Bolle goes on: "But I have to concede that Alagna has shown great courage. He has been a genius in his folly; he gave us a coup de théâtre that will remain in history and that has captured the attention of the media." I'm speechless.

The Mozart never stops

When I was writing about Mozart earlier this year, I heard rumors of a massive project, funded by David Packard of the Packard Humanities Institute, to place online the master's complete works. Confirmation was lacking at the time, but, via the nicely redesigned ArtsJournal, I've learned that the rumor is now reality: the Digital Mozart Edition is operational. Interest is already so intense that the site is apparently having trouble disgorging its contents — "We are overvelmed by the resonance of this website," a note says — although I did just succeed in obtaining my first pages of score, in the form of the Prologus from Apollo et Hyacinthus. It's Mozart, alright. Congratulations to all who made this marvel happen.

Eggs Rorem

Marc Geelhoed has deft reports on his recent trip to New York. Opera Chic has astounding new Alagna revelations. No Guru has new graphics. Matthew Guerrieri has egg recipes based on major twentieth-century American styles. I have a cold.

Panico alla Scala!!!

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The Roberto Alagna scandal has now inspired a brief graphic novel. I'm not sure what it's saying, but it looks great. Courtesy of the blog No guru, no method, no teacher. Much more news at Opera Chic — the tenor may be facing a lawsuit from La Scala and the Decca record company, and is striking back with a range of wild-sounding, possibly deranged accusations.

More: A translation from Rosario Gennaro: "A very good evening to all these gentlemen in coat and ties ... BUUU! ... Bring back 'La Gioconda'!!! ... Parbleu! They are booing me. Really????? These ignoramuses! ... Oh well sisters, I have had enough. I am leaving.... Hey Radames, what the $^*&&*# are you saying? ... Amneris, listen to me, let him go, he's completely cuckoo.... Yes, but how are we going to finish without the tenor.... No fear, young girls! Let me finish these two spaghetti and I'll take care of it.... I told you, we didn't have to worry.... Oh yes, thank goodness, I almost had a heart attack, my friend.... See, I am ready! It's no problem.... BRAVOOO!!!! That's how you sing. Not that 'Little Hercules'!"

Pape in brief

Royal Blood. The New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2006.

Grand Valley Music for 18

Last month I posted about the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble and its project of learning Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. After twenty-six rehearsals and classes and a field trip to New York, the performance took place on November 30. Bill Ryan, the group's director, sent me an MP3 of excerpts, and it sounds impressive:

Download 18excerpts.mp3

La Scala scandal

Milan-based Opera Chic posts breaking news on her blog: about an hour ago, Roberto Alagna stormed offstage after getting a round of boos for his rendition of "Celeste Aida." He then refused to return, causing his stand-in to take over while still dressed in T-shirt and jeans. There were shouts of "Shame! Shame!" and "This is La Scala!" as the new tenor tried to sing. Opera Chic will have updates through the night. I may be stuck home with a cold, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet I can still soak in the glamour, passion, and scandal of classical music.

11:47PM. Alagna speaks: "The audience didn’t understand, that’s why I left. I’m displeased, embittered, stunned: I sang all over the world, but standing in front of tonight’s audience, I felt like I was in another world. True audiences — audiences with fire and blood — were not at La Scala tonight. I sang beautifully, I was bravissimo. Too bad for those who didn’t understand. I shall never come back to La Scala: This is not a theatre, it’s a Roman Arena.... I sing with heart, with my blood...." La Cieca came back from vacation just in time.

More Alagna news.

McAdorno

In my review of John Adams's A Flowering Tree, I jokingly imagined a Central European review that accused the composer and other participants in Peter Sellars's New Crowned Hope festival of exhibiting a "Big-Mac-Ästhetik." Well, parody is almost always exceeded by reality. Mark Morris just received a review in Der Standard with the headline "Mozartburger von McTanz." I absolutely kid you not. Munching the metaphor down to the last pickle, the critic accuses Morris of purveying "Modern Dance Light" (i.e. Diet Modern Dance) and of offering "hundred percent fat free" product. Wait, is this greasy American fast food or faddish American health food? I guess it's all the same when you're an Austro-German culture chauvinist.

WGMS says goodbye to good music

The Washington Post reports that WGMS, DC's classical radio station, has been bought by the owner of the Redskins and is almost certain to switch to a sports-talk format. For some time, WGMS, the "good music station," hasn't been very good at what it does, focussing on a limited repertory and indulging in a lot of inane chatter. Still, it was the last thing left, WETA having converted to talk last year. I grew up listening to WGMS, back when the programming was at a far superior level (there was a great weekly show by the late Paul Hume). It's sad to see this happen, although with so many alternatives available on Internet and satellite radio it's hardly the end of the world.

Anyone who spins this story as an example of classical music's allegedly declining audience —  the "death of classical music" routine — will be engaging in pure fiction. WGMS, whatever its failings, has long enjoyed excellent ratings and is a profitable outfit, generating $9.7 million in advertising. Before it was downgraded to an inferior signal a year ago, its ratings were on the rise, according to Paul Farhi in the Post. Mark Fratrik, a broadcasting commentator, makes it clear why so many classical stations are being eliminated these days. To quote the Post: "One part of the problem, [Fratrik] said, is that classical works are long, which makes it more difficult for stations to fit lots of commercials onto the air. Moreover, he said, classical fans tend to be older, and advertisers pay a premium for younger listeners." So, it doesn't matter that a classical station has a healthy listenership and is profitable. The problem is that it doesn't allow advertisers to saturate the airwaves, so a listener tuning in during a short car ride can be injected with propaganda. More important, it doesn't have the right kind of listener — the young male that advertisers pathetically lust after, like Aschenbach panting on the beach in Death in Venice.

When WETA converted from classical to talk, its ratings dropped. Dan DeVany, the station's general manager, claimed then that he wouldn't have made the change if DC hadn't already had a classical station in WGMS. Now, asked whether he would reconsider, DeVany says: "I wouldn't want to speculate at this time. We're really happy with our [news-talk] format. We've been doing some good things." The CEO of WETA is Sharon Rockefeller, who is related by marriage to Nelson Rockefeller, who was instrumental in the founding of Lincoln Center. To put it bluntly, she is not doing a very good job of tending to Rockefeller's legacy.

More: An informed reader questions my optimism by pointing that since 1999 the classical audience has fallen by 29% in the Arbtiron format trends report. To which I'd reply: this decline is probably the result not of a shrinking audience but of a shrinking number of classical stations. The number of commercial classical stations in the US has dropped from 40 to 28 since 1998, according to this PlaybillArts story. Looking at the regional data on the Arbitron site, I notice a pattern: figures hold steady over time, then suddenly go down. For example, in the Mountain region, there's a drastic plunge from a share of 5.4 to 0.5 in 1999. In the Mid Atlantic region, the share held steady at around 1.9 until this year, when there was a decline. I doubt that these staggered drops are related to overall trends in classical listening. Rather, I'd guess that most of them could be correlated to abrupt closures of classical stations by profit-hungry conglomerates.

Accidental art

A Google query sent me back to the glorious trumpet bloopers page. The Portsmouth Sinfonietta rendition of Also Sprach Zarathustra is a dead ringer for Giacinto Scelsi. Also, it wouldn't be War on Christmastime without the Messiah on crack.

Apex 06

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Here are some of the best things I heard this year.

Preponderantly notational

— Peter Lieberson, Neruda Songs, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, James Levine, Boston Symphony (Nonesuch, 12/19)
— Arvo Pärt, Da Pacem, Paul Hillier, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (Harmonia Mundi)
— Debussy, Preludes Books I and II, Steven Osborne (Hyperion)
— Magnus Lindberg, Clarinet Concerto, Kari Kriikku, Sakari Oramo, Finnish Radio SO (Ondine)
— Nicolas Gombert, Missa Media Vita In Morte Sumus, Hilliard Ensemble (ECM)
— Sibelius, Complete Symphonies, Segerstam, Helsinki Philharmonic (Ondine)
— C. P. E. Bach, Symphonies Nos. 1-4, Andrew Manze, English Concert (Harmonia Mundi)
— Osvaldo Golijov, Ainadamar, Spano, Atlanta Symphony (DG)
— Philip Glass, Eighth Symphony, Dennis Russell Davies, Bruckner Orchestra Linz (Orange Mountain)
— Rachmaninov, All-Night Vigil, Hillier, Estonians (Harmonia Mundi, 2005; should have been on last year's list)

Also:  Shostakovich, Symphonies Nos. 1 and 14, Rattle, Berlin Philharmonic (EMI); Nico Muhly, Speaks Volumes (Bedroom Community); Shostakovich, Quartets Nos. 3, 7, 8, St. Lawrence Qt. (EMI): Julian Anderson, Book of Hours (NMC); Beethoven, Ninth Symphony, Vänskä, Minnesota Orchestra (BIS); Mozart, La Clemenza di Tito, Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi); Xenakis, Percussion Works (Mode); Adams, My Father Knew Charles Ives (Nonesuch); Silvestrov / Ustvolskaya, Misterioso (ECM); George Perle, Retrospective (Bridge)

Preponderantly non-notational (f/ Jonathan)

— Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City)
— Timberlake / Timbaland, FutureSex/LoveSounds (Jive)
— Hossein Alizadeh and Djivan Gasparyan, Endless Vision (World Village)
— Kelis, Kelis Was Here (Jive)
— Bob Dylan, Modern Times (Columbia)
— Ali Farka Touré, Savane (World Circuit)
— Brad Mehldau, House on Hill (Nonesuch)
— Cat Power, The Greatest (Matador)
— Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
— Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped (Geffen)

Singles: Timberlake / Timbaland, "My Love," "SexyBack"; Bob Dylan, "Ain't Talkin'"; Cat Power, "The Greatest"; Beyoncé, "Irreplaceable"; Kelis f/ Cheryl Evans and W. A. Mozart, "Like You"; Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins, "The Big Guns"; Tapes 'n Tapes, "Insistor"; Jennifer Hudson, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going"; Paris Hilton, "Stars Are Blind" (yes, I'm gay)

Live events:

— Sufjan Stevens singing "Seven Swans," American Songbook, Lincoln Center
Ian Bostridge singing Britten's Winter Words, Zankel Hall
— Kenji Bunch's Confessions of the Woman in the Dunes, Issue Project Room
Angela Gheorghiu in La Traviata, Met
— Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater, Opéra Bastille
— Handel's Solomon, René Jacobs, Lincoln Center
Madama Butterfly at the Met, opening night
Shostakovich Eighth, Gergiev, Maryinsky, Lincoln Center
Reich at 70, Carnegie
György and Márta Kurtág, Vienna

Happy composers

Missy Mazzoli writes an exuberant final report on the Composer Institute in Minneapolis:

In my laughably biased opinion, last night's concert at Minneapolis's Orchestra Hall was a huge success. Close to 800 people, two-thirds of whom were not regular subscription concert-goers, many of whom were under thirty, and at least five of whom sported colorful mohawks and multiple piercings, showed up to hear nine works they had never heard before, enthusiastically stomping and cheering throughout the night. As much as I want to believe that everyone secretly loves new music, that iPods are full of Andriessen, showers reverberate with the sound of Saariaho, and rampant indifference is just a cute way of keeping everyone's otherwise uncontrollable enthusiasm in check, I accept the fact that programming new music is a risk. It was a risk that paid off (in more ways than one) for the Minnesota Orchestra. Music directors from all over the country came to the concert with the idea of bringing this institute to their own orchestras, but the Minnesota Orchestra has the distinction of being the first to take this long-overdue risk with such successful results. Watching Osmo Vänskä conduct with such passion and precision you would have thought the world depended on every twist of his baton. For some of us, it does.

Meanwhile, Mark Swed and Out West describe the large, enthusiastic audience that showed up for Gerald Barry's Triumph of Beauty and Deceit at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Thomas Adès, who conducted, and who's used to relatively big crowds back home in England, expressed delight at the turnout. Yes, new music brings in audiences when it is presented with conviction and flair.

Bresnick in brief

Rags to Riches. The New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2006.

For more, with information about the Zankel concerts tonight and Saturday night, see Steve Smith.

Sleep sound

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And the country proverb known,
In your waking shall be shown
Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, 
And all shall be well.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Benjamin Britten died thirty years ago today.

What would Mr. Bing say?

The Met has a blog. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Tan Dun's The First Emperor. Suzanne Mentzer is showing incipient signs of blog addiction. (Speaking of which, my hiatus seems to be on hiatus.) Link courtesy of Campbell Vertesi.

Playlist

— Lou Harrison, Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day, UCSC Chamber Singers (Kleos Classics)
— Terry Riley aka Poppy Nogood & The Phantom Band, All Night Flight (Elision Fields)
— Peter Lieberson, Neruda Songs (Nonesuch, Dec. 19)
— Julian Anderson, Book of Hours (NMC)
— Debussy, Preludes, Steven Osborne (Hyperion)
— George Cacioppo, Advance of the Fungi (Mode)
— Meyerbeer, "Ah! mon fils, sois béni," Ernestine Schumann-Heink (Columbia/Sony)

Booklist

— John Rockwell, Outsider: On the Arts, 1967-2006 (Limelight)
— Howard Pollack, Gershwin (UC Press, Dec. 2006)
— Prokofiev, Diaries 1907-1914 (Cornell UP, Jan. 2007)
— Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge UP)
— Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock's Music (Yale UP)

Quo usque tandem abutere

On World AIDS Day, I'd like to remember my high-school Latin teacher, the fierce Vaughn Keith, who was also the lead singer of the obscurely famous DC punk band Judie's Fixation. Their hard-hitting anthem "Martyr Me" can be found on the 1978 compilation 30 Seconds Over DC. It holds up.

Hiatus miscellany

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For more coverage of New Crowned Hope and other Viennese developments, read Mark Swed and Anne Midgette. Mark got to see the "live" version of Leif Inge's mesmerizing 9 Beet Stretch, which I mentioned last month.... Who killed classical music? Was it Ron Wilford? Milton Babbitt? The Three Tenors? Greg Sandow? Jeremy Denk makes an awful confession.... Marin Alsop: "Classical music is pretty hip right now — young people have much more eclectic taste." Whether that's true or not, it's nice to hear something other than the usual moaning.... Excellent Steve Reich interview at Pitchfork. See how elegantly he navigates the question of whether iPod atomization is a good or bad thing, with a little help from Chuck Berry. PBS's NewsHour also ran a Reich segment last Monday; read the transcript here. The show deserves highest praise for putting a great American composer on the air.... Norman Lebrecht, who recently attacked classical bloggers for purveying "unchecked trivia," recently wrote, "The average age in U.S. podia, Cleveland apart, is pushing 70."  Henry Fogel has done the math and come up with an average age of 55.6. Perhaps Lebrecht was referring to the actual podia on which conductors stand...?

Art vs. pop

"For years they were telling me, ‘play commercial, be commercial’. I say play your own way. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing — even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."

— Thelonious Monk

“The one and only barometer of success is the box office.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

Adams, Kurtág in Vienna

Hold the Mozart. The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 2006.

Holiday hiatus

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I will be back in the new year, hopefully with the final manuscript of The Rest Is Noise in the hands of a miraculously patient publisher. Fortunately, I have two eagle-eyed editrices to help out in the race to the end. I'd like to take a moment to thank all who have read this blog since I started it, and all who written in with tips, quibbles, corrections, and kind words. The latest lead is from a reader who advises that the Austin High School Band is not the only marching band in Texas that has been giving whip-smart renditions of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony: the Cedar Park High School Band is another. (Shostakovich, it turns out, comes as a prepackaged Marching Band Concept, replete with T-shirts.) I'm also about to mark my tenth anniversary in my current job, for which I have to thank — with more depth of feeling than a few keystrokes in cyberspace can convey — the editors and readers of The New Yorker.

The Kurtágs: Vienna pt. 3

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Márta and György Kurtág, at the close of an astounding concert in the Mozart-Saal of the Konzerthaus. I'll write a column on this event and Adams's A Flowering Tree. Final snaps below. By the way, two other American classical bloggers have been covering Vienna this week: Charles Shere and Brian Dickie.

Continue reading "The Kurtágs: Vienna pt. 3" »

The aging of the new: Vienna pt. 2

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A fine mist settled over Vienna today, not unlike the mist that settled over the minds of many German-speaking critics as they were confronted with the alien loveliness of John Adams's A Flowering Tree. "Neo-neoclassicism," "Turning away from the aesthetic category of the new" — oh, come on, people! Must we keep fighting this Frankfurt School culture war? Schönberg lebt, aber Adorno ist gestorben! Anyway, below the fold are more moody snaps.

Continue reading "The aging of the new: Vienna pt. 2" »

"The city was a dream...": Vienna snaps

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Continue reading ""The city was a dream...": Vienna snaps" »

Webern love, Sugar Land Shostakovich

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The blogtastic Matthew Guerrieri says that this logo is being used to promote the Boston Conversatory New Music Festival (dudes, is there really such a thing as "neo-compressionism"?). I used to have an I [heart] ADORNO sticker on my 1989 Hyundai Excel, which suffered fatal internal wounds while crossing the great state of Montana in 1991. My love of Adorno died not long after, to be replaced by guarded respect. Guerrieri also has a totally astounding video of the Austin High School Bulldog Band, from Sugar Land, Texas, playing a fully choreographed program of Shostakovich and Schoenberg (Piano Concerto No. 2, Verklärte Nacht, Tenth Symphony). Here are other videos of the same program, with excited parental commentary and zoom shots. This is amazing on so many levels I can't even count.

Beethoven/Shostakovich

Cycles. The New Yorker, Nov. 20, 2006.

To Vienna

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...for New Crowned Hope.

Sandow on the prowl

Mr. Greg Sandow has been offering some good insights on his blog. 1) Writing about a new film called Copying Beethoven, he voices a complaint that I've had about almost every music-themed movie I've seen: "...it irks me that the people who plan these films do extensive research on costumes and furniture, but don't trouble to find out even the most basic things about how music in the eras they depict was actually performed." The idea that the Ninth Symphony scene in this film consists of people in period costumes miming Bernard Haitink's 1996 recording — on modern instruments, and in modern style — is reason enough to give it a miss. 2) Greg's critique of the Met's David Letterman appearance is also right on. You'd think the camera could have lingered a little longer on Juan Diego Flórez. AC Douglas is on the same page, which is a first. 3) Most important, Greg picks apart a Wall Street Journal article on audience-outreach ventures at American orchestras. I have a long, half-finished post on this subject, which has now been rendered unnecessary, although I'll offer the gist anyway.

Continue reading "Sandow on the prowl" »

Plastic People of the Universe

Amazing to report, the legendary Czech rock band, harbingers of Vaclav Havel's Velvet Revolution, will be performing on Saturday night at the Cutting Room on West 24th Street in Manhattan. I doubt that tickets are still available, if they ever were, but it's worth a try. The band is in town because Havel is in residence at Columbia. Read their astonishing story here. You might perceive a certain disparity between the Plastic People saga and the Ellen Willis broadside quoted below. Sometimes, the cultural revolution precedes the real one.

Muhly in America

Nico Muhly's entrancing debut album Speaks Volumes, which was released earlier this year by Valgeir Sigur∂sson's Bedroom Community label, is finally available on those iTunes we've heard about. You can preview excerpts at Muhly myspace and read more here. The composer will have a concert at Zankel Hall in March, with the St. Thomas Choir singing English Renaissance works that have inspired him. He'll also be the featured composer at the New England Conservatory's Preparatory School Contemporary Music Festival in January. He is currently conducting an Einstein on the Beach ballet in Paris. He's the real deal.

Classical chaos at DePauw

Last August, Eric Edberg, a cellist and professor of music at DePauw University (whence also Scott Spiegelberg), presented a "classical music in jeans" concert, the idea of which was to see what would happen if the audience were told that all rules of "classical etiquette" would be suspended. As you can see from this video clip, the results were pretty startling. Here are Edberg's meditations on his experiment. Worth reading are the comments to this post, in which members of the audience react to the experience. As Edberg concludes, "the more seriously committed, the more deeply in love with music the student I've talked to, the less they liked the audience-participation aspects of the evening. But with colleagues, at least the ones I've encountered, the more concerned they are with the incredibly shrinking audience for classical music, the more enthusiastic they are about the high attendance and the high energy at the concert." Horrified? Delighted? Let the debate rage on. (By the way, the audience for classical music is not "incredibly shrinking." American opera has seen long-term audience growth, and, at most major orchestras, attendance is currently on the rise.)

More: Excellent meditations from Helen Radice, leading to this lovely peroration: "Humanity has always asked and always will ask why we are here, what we are doing and where we are going; that's why we also have religion - and language - and science - and even intense sexual pleasure; all these things are ways in which we connect with ourselves consciously and intensely, and which distinguish us from other animals. Not always in high seriousness; sometimes we just want to enjoy ourselves, and that is human too, and part of music. A real artist knows when to be simple. To be clear, to know yourself and your work and what is really important in such a wide world, and to communicate it so it might help others, takes paradoxically a lot of work, personal conviction and life experience."

Ellen Willis

Sad news: the journalist, essayist, and feminist thinker Ellen Willis died yesterday at the age of sixty-four. Among many other things, Willis was the New Yorker's first pop critic, from 1968 to 1975. She had an intense feeling for the spiritual power of pop music and a merciless eye for its compromises. She wrote defiantly from the left end of the political spectrum, yet she was a realist on every front. And she had force. Here is the somewhat terrifying paragraph that clangs shut her report on the Woodstock Festival of 1969:

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be — and has been — criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can't be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution. In the meantime, we should insist that the capitalists who produce rock concerts offer reasonable service at reasonable prices.

From the collection Beginning To See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll, which should never have gone out of print. At the New Yorker website, read the entire Woodstock piece and an appreciation by Sasha Frere-Jones.

This strikes a chord

David Byrne, whose blog grows more interesting every day, defines bully culture: "...the attitude of winner takes all, bigger smashes smaller and do it if you can get away with it.... Every time a cop car from my local precinct runs a red light or speeds down a one way street the wrong way (just because they can, no other reason) and every time an SUV with darkened windows muscles other cars, bikers, old ladies and kids out of way — sometimes narrowly missing pedestrians as they run a red light.... Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor...."

Lebrecht weakly

A bit of a row has broken out between Bob Shingleton, the author of the UK music blog On An Overgrown Path, and Norman Lebrecht, the author of the 1997 tract Who Killed Classical Music? Lebrecht, in a column on classical blogging, chides Shingleton for spreading "unchecked trivia" in a post about a choral broadcast on the BBC, and declares that the "nutritional value" of classical blogs is "lower than a bag of crisps." Shingleton defends his account of the BBC imbroglio, and savors the delicious, Kettle Chips-worthy irony inherent in the spectacle of Lebrecht attacking other writers for mangling facts. In the very same column, Shingleton notes, the British sage confuses John Tavener (b. 1944) with John Taverner (d. 1545). I wonder what Henry Fogel might have to say about the claim that he was once hired to "abolish London orchestras." Update: Indeed, Fogel has something to say.

Featured state of the day: Montana

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For anyone who happens to be in a festive mood, here is the Symphonic Wind Ensemble of the University of Montana playing John Corigliano's Gazebo Dances.

God-bless-America agenda

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The gifted young singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, who aims to occupy the middle ground between Gershwin and Berg, appears tonight at Tonic. He'll be singing his Craigslistlieder cycle, culminating in the pathos-ridden tale of "a guy who puts ice cubes down people's shirts in return for exceedingly cheap rent in the East Village." He also sings at Joe's Pub on Nov. 19. A remarkable lineup of contemporary and late twentieth-century works is on deck for the Keys to the Future piano festival at Greenwich House. I'm especially excited about the Wednesday program, which includes Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch II, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Music for Piano, Philippe Hersant's Éphémères (Hersant is one of many excellent non-doctrinaire French composers who long dwelled in the shadow of the Boulez regime and are beginning to emerge), Arvo Pärt's revolutionary For Alina (his first "tintinnabulist" work), a Phil Kline world premiere (Mambo No. 1), and Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)" in the Chris O'Riley arrangement. Overlapping with the last night of the festival is a Lost Dog New Music Ensemble concert in Astoria, Queens: music of Stephen Hartke, Chinary Ung, and Marilyn Shrude. The concert is repeated on Sunday afternoon at Tenri. Speaking of Kline, the boombox-toting, Rumsfeld-dissing downtown master has a major premiere at Winter Garden on Friday night: John the Revelator, inspired by the Blind Willie Johnson classic. The same night, another Shostakovich series begins at Carnegie — this one worth your time because it brings all-too-rare performances of DDS's songs. On Saturday there's a Discovery Day, with talks by such experts as Laurel Fay, Caryl Emerson, and Gerald McBurney, together with a performance of the Blok cycle. Expect detailed discussion of Shostakovich's personality and music in place of the usual political jibber-jabber. That's on TV right now.

It can happen here

This is one of an unknown number of "robocalls" that have been received by registered Democratic voters in Virginia, telling them either that they will be arrested if they try to vote or that their polling place has changed. The RNC has also distributed fliers in African-American neighborhoods advising voters to skip the election. The FBI is investigating.

Reich cleanup

Blackcap_1 Pursuant to my Reich piece this week, I'd like to mention again Carnegie Hall's sumptuous Reich site and the Whitney's webcast of its four-hour Reich marathon. There's also a 1970 live performance from Berkeley in the archives of Other Minds.  Robert Gable found an Eight Lines on YouTube. If you click on Robert's link rapidly three times, you can make you own Reichian meta-canon (i.e., mess). Reich's own site has video and MP3s. Many interviews can be found on the web, including an in-depth conversation in the American Mavericks series and a talk with Jason Gross about the early tape pieces. For the New Yorker website I did a podcast. In the piece I mention the American Composers Orchestra, whose Jazz at Lincoln Center collaboration is coming up, with a Derek Bermel premiere. I also mention the excellent NOW Ensemble. Bang on a Can should need no introduction; they have a concert next month at Zankel, with a reprise of Thurston Moore's gloriously deafening Stroking Piece #1.

Pronunciation guide: RYSHE.

Steve Reich at 70

Fascinating Rhythm. The New Yorker, Nov. 13, 2006.

Zeal and activity

West Eighteenth Street, in the historic Chelsea district of Manhattan, has been heavily traveled by manic record collectors this weekend. Today is the last day of the WFMU Record Fair, most of whose patrons will probably also be stopping at the used-CD and -LP paradise of Academy Records. Yesterday at the fair I squeezed through crowds of pontificating post-punk pundits to browse the bins marked "Strange" or "Odd," where, naturally, the twentieth-century stuff could be found, in and amongst the works of Joe Piscopo. I came away with the Mainstream LP of the Manhattan Percussion Ensemble playing Roldán, Harrison, William Russell, Cowell, and Cage; Ralph Shapey's Praise, on CRI; and Babbitt's Composition for Four Instruments, also on CRI. For better or worse, I passed up the opportunity to plunk down $50 for the Obscure LP that includes John Adams's beautifully bizarre early piece American Standard (a kind soul once burned it for me). At Academy I found a long-sought Melodiya set of Shostakovich orchestral songs sung by Yevgeny Nesterenko. Now I am finally happy, for the moment.

Nobody knows anything

A favorite intermission topic: Do "crossover" phenonema such as the Three Tenors draw new audiences to classical music, or do they — as I've frequently heard insiders assert — serve only to cheapen the art? An interesting passage from David Patrick Stearns's profile of the brilliant young bel-canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee: "The world around Brownlee heard talent in his voice long before he did, starting with a choral director in his native Youngstown, Ohio. As with so many singers who hail from smaller metropolitan areas, the voice appeared before his interest in opera did. If anything drew Brownlee to this kind of singing, it was the Three Tenors, who inspired him to win vocal competitions with their blood-and-guts arias...."

Thank the Dead

Listening to the Hyperion CD of Robert Simpson's Second and Fourth Symphonies — culled from the wreckage of Tower — I noticed the legend "recorded with the generous assistance of The Rex Foundation, San Francisco." As new-music insiders know, this foundation, established by members of the Grateful Dead, has long been giving substantial grants to twentieth-century and new-music projects, mainly at the instigation of Phil Lesh, who studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College before joining the Warlocks, whence the Dead. I went to the Rex website and found that they recently donated $10,000 to the Lou Harrison Archive, whose website is well worth exploring.

Schiff on Beethoven

The admirable Guardian newspaper of London has redesigned its website, offering an exceptionally crisp presentation of its arts coverage alongside web-only and bloggy features. Here is the classical site. Currently at the top of the page are sound files for Andras Schiff's recent lectures on the Beethoven piano sonatas at Wigmore Hall (four up now, three more coming). The great pianist may sound a little stiff at first, but give him a chance to let his wry wit and musical intelligence show through. In the first lecture he digresses somewhat to tell the classic, possibly apocryphal tale of Maurizio Pollini's attempt to lecture on Schoenberg to Italian factory workers.

Allendale agenda

"New music is hard," writes Bill Ryan on the website of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, which will be performing Music for 18 Musicians on November 30. Look at the schedule to see just how hard these musicians will have worked on Reich's brain-altering masterpiece. (Addendum: NewMusicBox just published Mr. Ryan's account of his ensemble's recent trip to New York for the Reich workshop.)

When I Paint My Masterpiece (Not Quite Yet)

Randominnyc, who created amusement with his Hypothetical Sufjan Stevens Albums, now has Possible Titles for Negative Reviews of the Bob Dylan/Twyla Tharp Musical.

Zvezdoliki's adjectives

Folks who can read French might enjoy a blog with the lovely title Zvezdoliki, which linked to my Brad Pitt post with the headline "Ce blog vous propose ENCORE une grande expérience existentielle." The author recently went to hear the Mahler Seventh and came away with the impression of "une musique ambitieuse, classique, diluvienne, équilibrée, démesurée, criarde, torrentielle, cassante, grouillante, ricanante, éclatée, minaudante, incandescente, hyperconstruite, dansante, bruitiste, soldatesque, histrionnique, chaotique, galactique, stridente, disjonctée, hypercalorique, catastrophique, boursouflée, décadente, grattouillante, sifflante, caressante, stéréophonique, hypermnésique, respectueuse de la grande tradition allemande, incantatoire, linéaire, obsessionnelle, torpide, flamboyante, catatonique, hénaurme, moderne, percussive, néo-classique, plébéienne, cubiste, cryptique, dissonnante, pastorale, urbaine, humoristique, infernale, hurlante, joueuse, chuchotante, clapotante, tintinnabulante, beuglante, sarcastique, rutilante, éteinte, digressive, insubmersible, dépressive...." Precisely.

Last days of Tower playlist

— Olga Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest (Kairos)
— Xenakis, Orchestral Works, Vol. IV (Timpani)
— Hindemith, Die Harmonie der Welt (Wergo)
— Takemitsu, Piano Works, Roger Woodward (Explore)
— Takemitsu, Works for Flute and Guitar (Ondine)
— Giordano, Fedora (Decca)
— Robert Simpson, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 (Hyperion)

I can't believe that someone snapped up that copy of Wilhelm Kienzl's Don Quixote. I left it on the shelf, certain that it would survive to the next round of the discounting derby.

The demise of Tower is very sad, although I am having trouble shedding actual tears for a company that worked so hard to put small stores out of business. There's the beauty of the winner-takes-all economy: when the winner crashes, everybody loses. Could we see a resurgence of local stores and local chains? I bought my first LPs (Horenstein's Bruckner 9, Solti's Mahler 8) at Olssons's in Georgetown. Everyone thought at a certain point that Olssons's was doomed, caught between Tower and Barnes & Noble. But now they're expanding again. Why, as Tony Tommasini asked in the Times, can't we have a good independent store in NYC, perhaps one oriented toward classical and jazz, serving the audiences at Lincoln Center? Well, for one thing, rent. Increasingly, only national chain stores can afford to rent in Manhattan. So we may have to wait a long time.

Middletown agenda

The excellent and brave Flux Quartet plays a program of Ornette Coleman, Ligeti, Scelsi, Elliott Sharp, and Alvin Lucier (world premiere) at Crowell Hall, on the campus of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT. The following morning the Flux plays works by Wesleyan composers. This message has not been approved by Joseph Lieberman.

Humble recantation

In the past I have been skeptical of the work of Robert Wilson, but all decent critics should be willing to revise their opinions with the passage of time, and I do not hesitate to acclaim Wilson's latest production — a video of Brad Pitt standing in his boxer shorts in the rain, holding a squirt gun — as a work of transfixing genius. La Cieca may seem to have a point in describing the opus as bizarrely boring, but she needs to delve deeper into its layers of signification.

Clarification: This post is ironic.

Lieberson at 60

LiebersonpPeter Lieberson marked his sixtieth birthday on October 25. Given what this profoundly gifted composer has endured in recent months, he may not have wished for much in the way of celebration, but the occasion should not pass unnoticed. In a formidable catalogue of scores, a few favorites are the early Piano Concerto (No. 1), which fulfills in some way the wish that Stravinsky had written one more large-scale score along the lines of the Symphony in Three Movements; the rigorous, sensuous Drala, in which the composer really finds his own voice (alas, the DG recording is out of print); and, of course, the two recent song cycles, Rilke Songs and Neruda Songs, both written for the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The good news is that a Nonesuch recording of Neruda will be released on Dec. 19. (I contributed to the liner notes, so I won't be writing about it.) On a personal note: in my article "Listen to This," I referred to a college teacher who described my end-of-term submission as a “most interesting and slightly peculiar sonatina.” This was then-Prof. Lieberson, in a generous mood. It was a harmony seminar, and I remember how he devoted one afternoon to the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, marveling at the sensuousness of that sonic gift from husband to wife. Neruda Songs casts a very similar spell. I am sure that everyone wishes Lieberson the best.

Photo: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

On the internets

BeethovenAs AC Douglas and others have noted, the San Francisco Symphony has launched a major extension of its Keeping Score series, which I extolled in an early post on this blog. There's now a website devoted to Beethoven's Eroica, with parallel sites forthcoming for the Rite of Spring and Appalachian Spring. You can follow along in the score, trace transformations of the thematic material, read historical guides, and, in general, receive as good a class in music appreciation as is out there. All this serves as background for Michael Tilson Thomas's imminent PBS documentaries on Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Copland (check listings here).... Also impressive to behold is the internet home of the School of Music at UT Austin, which is now offering webcasts for almost all its concerts. On Sunday night you can hear an all-Debussy theater evening — the American premiere of Robert Orledge's new realization of the unfinished Fall of the House of Usher, the world premiere of Orledge's orchestration of Chansons de Bilitis, and L'Enfant prodigue. The event takes place in conjunction with the Claude Debussy International Congress. On Tuesday there's a webcast of Donald Crockett's music as performed by the UT New Music Ensemble. But why nothing for the UT Tuba/Euphonium Ensemble? Topic for Tuba News.... The revitalized Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is blogging. Ronen Givony, a CMS staffer, has also launched his own Wordless Music series, a fascinating attempt to bridge the gap between composition and progressive pop. The next event is on Nov. 15, with performances by A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Steven Beck, and Andrew Bird. Darcy James Argue had a report on the first show, of which I saw only the first part.

Hello Chicago

Sonic Impact, a two-day festival by the consortium New Music Chicago, starts tomorrow in the big-shouldered city. Seventeen ensembles will participate, including such national new-music stars as Eighth Blackbird and ICE, together with outfits that are new to me, such as HardArt groop, which aims to "save the world from bad programming and to try and get everyone to not take themselves so seriously," and admits to having "completely failed." Mark-Anthony Turnage is the guest composer.

Forthcoming from Universal Edition Wien

Believe it or not, the composing kitty video I linked to below has been removed on grounds of "copyright infringement."

Untold Reiches

Having touted Carnegie's Reich site, I should also point out that the Whitney has put recordings of the Oct. 15 Reichathon on its website. The TACTUS performance of Eight Lines and the Alarm Will Sound / So Percussion performance of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ are especially good.

Stay the course (or not) agenda

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On Wednesday night I'll appear with various critics at a Best Music Writing 2006 reading at Housing Works. This is the first year classical music has been admitted to Da Capo's yearly compendium; I'm honored to be at the cool kids' party. Thursday there's a John Zorn thing at Miller, with the ubiquitous Brad Lubman conducting and extended rock vocalist Mike Patton singing and/or making noise. On Friday, the widely loved St. Lawrence Quartet plays Weill Hall, with R. Murray Schafer's wildly theatrical Third String Quartet on the program. (Some adventurous orchestra should revive Schafer's 1968 collage classic Son of Heldenleben.) Scott St. John is replacing Barry Shiffman, who is now at the Banff Centre. Saturday has been identified by Steve Smith as this year's Night of Too Many Concerts. There is the local premiere of Reich's You Are (Variations) at Lincoln Center; there is Marilyn Nonken in recital at NYU; there is the Bowed Piano Ensemble at Jazz at Lincoln Center; there is John Holloway playing Bach partitas at Miller; there is Jonathan Nott conducting the NY Phil in Ligeti's Lontano and Bartók's First Piano Concerto (with Peter Serkin): and there is Aki Takahashi performing two sublime piano works by Morton FeldmanPiano and For Bunita Marcus — at Merkin. Anyone who has never heard Takahashi play the piano will be unprepared for the unearthly beautiful sound that she gets from the instrument. Agonizingly, I have to miss this, because I am covering the Reich series, but I strongly urge others to go. Finally, on Sunday, Valery Gergiev tramples out the grapes of wrath in the finale of his Shostakovich cycle: Symphonies Nos. 8 and 13, two long peals of thunder. If you happen to live in Seattle, the Seattle Chamber Players has an evening of world premieres by Baltic-area composers.

Photo of Takahaski: Ann Iren Ødeby.

Lisa Bonet ate no basil

Weird Al Yankovic's genius Bob video.

ICE v. McJeebie

Prof. Heebie McJeebie is at it again: "As a Professor, I've found that the more expertise I acquire, the less I enjoy what I hear." The beloved, feared, reclusive, possibly nonexistent academic interviews Claire Chase of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Chicago/New York group whose voyeuristic videocam staging of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King was one of the sharpest shows I saw last season. Of course, it wasn't quite at the tenured level....

Ear to the Earth (in brief)

Green Thoughts. The New Yorker, Oct. 30, 2006.

More about Elevated Harmonies here and here.

Clarification: For "above the roadway" read "above FDR Drive."

Man of the hour

Big, impressive Reich site set up by Carnegie.

Didion

11094435I dropped by 192 Books, my neighborhood bookstore, to find something to read in between endless rewritings of my book draft, and I came away with We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live, the Everyman's Library of Joan Didion's nonfiction work. The book contains, as no one needs to be told, some of the finest modern prose in the English language, and I'm relieved to put into storage those ratty, chewed-up, used-bookstore paperbacks in which I've read Didion's masterpieces in the past. (I'll save them for the country house that I will purchase when The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is chosen for Oprah's Book Club  and becomes a surprise runaway bestseller, Oprah having kept secret until now her passion for Xenakis.) The surprise for me was to come across "God's Country," which Didion published in the New York Review of Books in October 2000. I didn't read it at the time. It is a sustained analysis of the phrase "compassionate conservatism," and it is a chilling prophecy of things to come. Didion's writing brings to mind something Schoenberg once said to Oscar Levant: "I can see through walls."

If-not-for-Steve agenda

My concertgoing for the remainder of the week is taken up with Steve Reich events — the Young Artists Concert tonight, the grand concert on Saturday, Discovery Day and the Daniel Variations premiere on Sunday — and I'll have to miss other things that look distinctly promising. Tonight at Angel Orensanz the Metropolis Ensemble opens its second season with David Schiff's All About Love — "a panoramic meditation on love as expressed in different times and languages and from different points of view: male and female, gay and straight, from youthful ardor to mature resignation" — and Monteverdi's eternally entertaining Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. (Schiff is also a brilliant critic — read his piece on Reich in The Nation.) On Friday and Saturday nights, the incontestably kick-ass Alarm Will Sound will do $12 shows at the Kitchen, with repertory ranging from Johannes Cicconia to Nancarrow's player-piano pieces and on to Birtwistle. Two events at Joe's Pub: on Friday, Brad Lubman, who offered fiercely expressive video-linked acoustic-and-electronic music at the recent American Composers Orchestra show, plays with his band Electric Fuzz, and on Sunday Ethel presents music of John King. Meanwhile, the blögøsphère's Jeremy Denk serves up late-night Bach at the Kaplan Penthouse, possibly with naked supermodels, or so he hinted in a recent post. We do hear things have been getting pretty wild up in the Kaplan Penthouse lately: these innovative, late-night classical concerts are raging out of control, and the neighbors might have to call the police.

New Adams

A plot summary and MIDI excerpt from John Adams's opera A Flowering Tree are available at the composer's website.

Coolness in Venice

In the mail today I received a brochure for the fiftieth Contemporary Music Festival in Venice, part of the Venice Biennale. For opening night, the increasingly inventive and unpredictable Klangforum Wien put together the following marathon program: "Trinklied" from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Bernhard Gander's Bunny Games, Beat Furrer's spur, Enno Poppe's Salz, Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (a work that transfixes me every time I listen to it), Scelsi's Anahit, Xenakis's Psappha, Terry Riley's In C, and Feldman's Instruments I. Nice to see that In C is finally getting some respect behind the Euromodern iron curtain. (It was booed at Darmstadt in 1969.) The Biennale is so uncompromisingly avant-garde that they send out their promotional literature only after the events in question are over: the concert happened on September 29.

Hide the Takemitsu

The NHK Symphony's appearance at Carnegie, with a rare performance of Takemitsu's A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, falls on the same night as the opening of the Kirov Orchestra's Shostakovich series. Frustrated at having to choose between the two, I had the idea of going down to Philadelphia to hear the orchestra there. But, it turns out, the Takemitsu isn't on the program in Philadelphia. Nor in LA, San Francisco, or Boston. Is New York really the only city in the land where audiences can handle this gorgeous work by Japan's greatest twentieth-century composer? Must audiences elsewhere hear the Enigma Variations one more time? Sadly typical.

Update: Allan Ulrich writes in to point out that A Flock was given its premiere by the San Francisco Symphony in 1977.

Further update: Andrew Tunick has discovered a second city that's been deemed safe for Takemitsu: New Brunswick, NJ.

More on compression

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Several knowledgeable folks have written in on the subject of compression in pop production, which Sasha kicked up and I punted below. Mauro Graziani sent a link to an unsigned article on "The Death of Dynamic Range," which shows, in the form of waveform graphs, how "loudness wars" have squeezed dynamic contrast out of many pop recordings, creating a uniform wall of sound. The chart above, derived from Ricky Martin's 1999 album Ricky Martin, is a case in point. Nick Southall has more to say on the issue in Stylus. And Douglas Wolk sent along, per request, the text of his article "Compressing Pop," which was delivered at the EMP Pop Conference a few years back and published in Eric Weisbard's anthology This Is Pop. Douglas explains why people like to use the device: "Compression is like salt: a little of it makes everything sound better. Compressed voices sound more authoritative; compressed instruments sound more precise and energetic. Done properly, it gives sound more oomph." But: "Making CDs very loud means that you can't do much else with them. When a recording is ultra-maximized, its dynamic range is severely limited, and it loses what's called 'headroom' — the amount by which a recording can get louder than it is, the sound-engineering equivalent of available space. Without headroom, the entire recording starts turning into one dense, undifferentiated clump of sound." And he suggests why Timbaland's productions have had such blistering impact in recent years: they avoid sonic uniformity by interpolating sudden, yawning silences into the middle of tracks. 

The great hypocrisy

Andrew Sullivan: "Earlier this week, secretary of state Condi Rice and First Lady Laura Bush attended a State Department ceremony for the new global AIDS coordinator. His name is Mark Dybul. Money quote from USA Today: 'At a State Department ceremony this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly acknowledged the family members of Mark Dybul, whom she was swearing in as the nation's new global AIDS coordinator. As first lady Laura Bush looked on, Rice singled out his partner, Jason Claire, and Claire's mother. Rice referred to her as Dybul's "mother-in-law."' There you have it. Among decent elite Republicans, there is often great acceptance of gay people as individuals, and of their families and spouses. 'Mother-in-law' is itself an affirmation of marriage for gay couples; and the secretary of state just used those words. And yet her party officially regards gay unions as, in James Dobson's words, a prelude to the 'destruction of the earth'. So which is it, guys? Let us know some time, will you?"

News from Iceland

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I asked Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, the leading expert on the music of Jón Leifs, to say something about Leifs's Edda I, which will be given its long-delayed world premiere by the Iceland Symphony on Saturday. He writes: "It's a truly massive piece, not only for its dimensions — seventy minutes, large choir, two soloists and orchestra — but for the demands it makes on the performers. The choir in particular is hard pressed, with lots of impossible runs, atonal leaps and exhausting tessitura, including a bunch of top Cs for the sopranos and a couple of low Cs for the basses. There's even an alto F-sharp, which is just funny. The text is Leifs's own collage of Eddic poetry describing the creation of the world. Most of it is descriptive, with movement titles such as Day, Night, Sun, etc., but then again, programmatic 'nature' pieces were always what Leifs did best. And of course there's the usual array of bizarre percussion, ancient Nordic lurs, and even an ocarina." More can be found at this out-of-date Leifs site and in my Björk piece (somewhere in the middle). And here's my 1996 review of the Iceland Symphony's magnificent Carnegie Hall debut.

Update: A producer at Iceland radio tells me that Edda I will be webcast on Oct. 19 at 3:27PM Eastern time.

Jay Greenberg, step aside

Kyle Gann has uncovered, on the archives of YouTube, a brief but striking untitled composition for one electronic keyboard. It is risky to attempt an analysis of such an intricate musical conception after only a few auditions, but I am ready to hail this fluffy young composer's work as a captivating and utterly fresh synthesis of late twentieth-century minimalist tendencies with the chromatic language of canonical European modernism. Observe the remarkably fluid yet unexpected way in which he or she segues from relaxed, recumbent "long-tone" sonorities of the La Monte Young / early Terry Riley type to a more agitated, distracted, quasi-Webernian vocabulary, all by way of an interlocking network of fleet-fingered — or should one say fleet-pawed — interval leaps. Toward the end, a surprisingly dark atmosphere develops, as a sudden plunge to low E-flat conjures up the funerary mood of Tristan's death. All registers are kept active and the thematic material is handled with superb economy. The gestures have the freedom of improvisation, yet everything seems deliberate. The ending is hauntingly abrupt, almost cavalier. A miniature masterpiece. Meow.

Axis of failure agenda

This week offers the fall season's first full-on train wreck of overlapping events. On Wednesday, the august London Symphony plays Beethoven's Ninth while Peter Serkin gives an enticing Takemitsu and Bach recital at Zankel Hall. On Thursday, Red Light New Music plays two shows at The Stone, with premieres by Daniel Vezza, Christopher Cerrone, A. Vincent Raikhel, and Scott Wollschleger (whose older piece The Cold Heaven I liked), together with Grisey's Vortex Temporum. Ear to the Earth, a festival of eco-conscious environmental sound, continues all week; on Friday you can hear the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and several young electronic composers at 3LD (notably Anna Clyne, who was the standout of last May's Underwood New Music Reading Sessions), and on Friday and Saturday you will have various chances to hear Suspended Sounds, in which the songs of extinct and endangered birds are manipulated by the likes of Morton Subotnick, Joan La Barbara, Joel Chadabe, and Alvin Curran. Also on Friday is a fascinating-looking program by the ACO, with works by Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra, Michael Gatonska, Brad Lubman, Evan Ziporyn, and "composer on the edge" Corey Dargel. The LSO Beethoven cycle wraps up the same night. On Saturday, the Ensemble Dissonanzen presents works inspired by the sculptor Lucio Fontana at the Guggenheim (including, of course, John Cage's Fontana Mix), while Matmos and So Percussion play a Steve Reich-inflected program at Symphony Space. Sunday brings a Reichathon at the Whitney (free with musuem admission; there will also be a live webcast) and the premiere of Elliott Carter's new Wallace Stevens cycle by the Met Chamber Ensemble. Okay?

Imitation, sincerity, flattery, etc.

As far as I know, Steve Reich's seventieth birthday went unmentioned on American television, but there was one gesture that might be intepreted as an oblique homage: the music for the opening sequence of the first episode of NBC's show Heroes bore a distinct resemblance to Different Trains. The composers for the show are Wendy and Lisa, aka Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, Prince's former collaborators.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned out

Tears of a Clownsilly, a dependable source of classical hilarity, has a video of Dudley Moore's classic Pears-and-Britten routine — a mildly modernistic arrangement of "Little Miss Muffet."

Sunday morning miscellany

Atonal

David Byrne reviews Sufjan Stevens.... Things I would do if I could be everywhere at once: attend the Oct. 14 world premiere of Jón Leifs's massive oratorio Edda I in Iceland, seventy years after it was composed.... Matthew Guerrieri digs up the insignia of the Salvador Army's Atonal Quick Reaction Infantry Battalion, and wonders how this outfit got its name. He also notes that Randol Schoenberg, grandson of Arnold, will be very handsomely rewarded for his work in winning back Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for the Bloch-Bauer family. Cosmic justice at work: his grandfather retired on a UCLA pension of $38 a month and was rejected by the Guggenheim Foundation when he applied for a grant to finish Moses und Aron. I can't resist linking again to Randol's astounding resumé, which contains the phrases "Nazi-looted Picasso painting," "NASCAR reality show," "Music-Related Problems in Combinatorics," and "Charlie Sheen."... Many thanks to all who came out to my New Yorker Festival event last night with Joanna Newsom, Nico Muhly, Corey Dargel, and Mason Bates, and, especially, thanks to the participants. Joanna played "Emily" from her new album Ys, Nadia Sirota and Antony (on tape) performed Nico's Keep in Touch, Corey and his band played "Boy Detective," "Don't Let Me Disappoint You," and "Gay Cowboys," and Isabelle Demers performed Mason's Digital Loom. I liked the fact that the evening ended with Joanna speaking in praise of Judith Tick's biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Steve, Barbara, Gustavo

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I got my first taste of the citywide Reich festival last night by way of BAM's dance tribute — Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker's quadruple bill of Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase, and Clapping Music, together with Akram Khan's staging of the almost-new Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings, a gorgeous, borderline-Romantic score, of which more anon. Of the upcoming Reich events, the one that cannot be missed is the mainstage Carnegie bill of Electric Counterpoint (with Pat Metheny), Different Trains (with the Kronos), and Music for 18 Musicians (with Reich and his ensemble). This is for me the most exciting thing on the entire New York season schedule, at least until Karita Mattila and Anja Silja sing Jenufa at the Met. Some $47 parquet seats are still available, together with $28 seats in the balconies.... The Cleveland Orchestra gala at Carnegie was, as Tony Tommasini's Times review suggests, a technically impressive but somehow slightly snoozy affair. Tony mentions that the start of the second half was uncomfortably delayed by noisy late entrances in one of the high-priced boxes. As far as I could tell, the trouble was at least partly caused by Barbara Walters.... There are still tickets available for a New Yorker Festival appearance by the brilliant Argentinian musician Gustavo Santaolalla, who helped engender the Rock en español movement, produced the CD of Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre, and won an Oscar for his Brokeback Mountain score.

Scoring on the internet (not the GOP way)

I've often wished for an easy way to find and purchase scores online, and, lo, it has arrived: Study Scores, an offshot of Amazon. Scores are brutally expensive in general, but there are some bargains to be found here, as well as sizeable discounts: the Mahler Tenth is marked down from a ridiculous $125 to a marginally less ridiculous $78.74. A couple of years ago, in a triumph of bargain-hunting, I picked up that same score for $5.98 in a Half Price Books on the outskirts of Houston. Nearly as thrilling as the time I plunked down one dollar for Boulez's First Piano Sonata in Twenty-Nine Palms, California (ikyn). As Sieglinde reminds me, Indiana University's Cook Music Library has a collection of scores online, and, as Lisa Hirsch informs me, there's a choral music library here.

Noise, population

It seems that almost every major city these days has its own left-of-center new-music ensemble, determined to give the ol' classical music a fresh profile. This ionarts post on Steve Reich alerted me to the existence of the wonderfully named, DC-based Great Noise Ensemble, which is giving a Reich concert on October 7. And an e-mail from Brede Rørstad led me to the Music Population Project, an Oregonian chamber group that gives free concerts in non-traditional venues. Brede also sent along a link to 9 Beet Stretch, a stretched-out, twenty-four-hour-long version of Beethoven's Ninth. It's remarkably soothing.

Wacky CNN headlines

"Bush: Dems shouldn't be trusted to run Congress."
"Report: Foley had cybersex before vote."

(Via Josh Marshall.)

S(t)eveN(t)Y

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Happy birthday to the marvelous Steve Reich, who turns seventy today. The occasion will not pass unnoticed: the Boosey & Hawkes Reich page lists performances tonight in Bristol and London, UK; Vancouver, Canada; Freiburg, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; Evanston, Illinois; Brooklyn, NY (at BAM); and the Synagoge in Graz, Austria. A huge Reich @ 70 festival is unfolding all this month in NYC, with events at Carnegie, Lincoln Center, BAM, and the Whitney.

Peter Gelb's new Met

Metamorphosis. The New Yorker, Oct. 9, 2006.

For Shostakovich

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Amid the Met hoopla last Monday we New Yorkers overlooked the hundredth birthday of Shostakovich. Many ironically happy returns, Dmitri Dmitrievich! I am reading the second edition of Elizabeth Wilson's classic oral history Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. Enthusiasts who own the first edition are going to have to cough up money for the update, since it is richly stocked with fresh interviews and late-breaking information. The most striking thing I've found so far is a summary of Alexander Benditsky's dissertation on the Fifth Symphony, which reveals that the work is infested with references to Bizet's Carmen. It's long been noticed that the second theme of the first movement alludes to "Amour, amour" in the "Habanera"; Benditsky lists numerous other resemblances, notably one between the martial motive at the beginning of the Finale and Bizet's "Prends garde à toi" ("Beware, beware"). Why on earth would Shostakovich be making references to Carmen? As it turns out, Elena Konstantinovskya, who had an affair with the composer in 1934-35, and who was briefly imprisoned during the Terror, went to Spain and married the Soviet photographer and filmmaker Roman Karmen (a train of events that figures in William Vollmann's novel Europe Central). Karmen! All this time interpreters have been trying to figure out what the Fifth reveals about Shostakovich's attitude toward Stalin; how ironic that he might really have been thinking about his love life.

Two major Shostakovich series are slated for the fall. Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra will complete their two-season survey of the fifteen symphonies at Lincoln Center — Nos. 11 and 6 on Oct. 23, Nos. 12 and 14 on Oct. 24, and Nos. 8 and 13 on Oct. 29. The orchestra will play the same programs in the gorgeously appointed Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor on Oct. 20-22, and various Shostakovich symphonies earlier in the month at the new Orange County Performing Arts Center. Carnegie Hall, meanwhile, is enlisting Mariinsky Theater singers to survey Shostakovich's little-heard but hugely significant output of songs on Nov. 10-12.  There will be a Shostakovich Discovery Day during the day on Nov. 11, with additional performances, lectures by Laurel Fay and Marina Frolova-Walker, and a film screening.

Judenplatz

Teju Cole, whose blog is a fascinating mixture of cultural and sociopolitical commentary, tells a remarkable story of walking at night through the back streets of Vienna while listening to Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.

PSA

This Saturday, the Housing Works Book Café in NYC, whose proceeds help people with HIV and AIDS find shelter, holds its second annual Open Air Book Fair, from 10AM to 6PM, on Crosby Street south of Houston. The inventory includes thousands of records that the management (which includes the former saxophonist of Miss Teen Schnauzer) has been saving for the sale. Housing Works Thrift Shops will also be offering clothing on a twenty-dollars-a-bag basis.

The compression syndrome

Via Sasha, a fascinating article on why modern pop records are, to quote the Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Harrison Birtwistle, "so effing loud." I've taken a lot of post-Oasis pop off my iPod because the contrasts in loudness are so irritating. If the machine is on shuffle play, I'll be deafened by a switch from Josquin to Justin, even when the volume is set relatively low. [The iTunes Sound Check feature, which supposedly puts everything on the same level, doesn't seem to solve the problem.] This practice is to music as steroids is to sports. I haven't noticed excessive decibel-boosting on classical releases, but the same syndrome may be at work in live performance: everyone knows orchestras play louder than they ever used to, and concert-hall designers are favoring super-bright acoustics.

Update: Reader Akimon points out that you can create special settings in the iTunes preamp area ("Quiet Oasis," for example) and apply these to large tracts of your library, putting a lid on the rampant compression.

Last-minute agenda

Tonight at Gallerie Icosahedron in New York, the much-liked Now Ensemble presents a concert of music by Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, Mark Dancigers, and William Brittelle — the last-named presenting the world premiere of his new work Michael Jackson, "a six-minute work written in an effort to juxtapose the brutally crucified public figure with the artistic persona created through the music he performed and (occasionally) wrote."

Berlin opera scandal #157

The New York Times tells of the ongoing uproar over a Mohammed-bashing production of Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Various German notables — everyone from Wagner-loving Chancellor Merkel to Mehmet Yildrim, the secretary-general of the Turkish-Islamic Union — are decrying the Deutsche Oper's decision to cancel Hans Neuenfels's staging, which is in the shock-schlock tradition of the rotting-rabbit Parsifal and the Osama bin Laden version of The Nose. Paul Moor, writing up the affair in the subscription-only Musical America, reports that a few days ago the Deutsche Oper sent e-mails to journalists asking them to keep quiet about the cancellation — an offensive request that only fueled the frenzy. Moor adds: "Hans Neuenfels, a leading figure on central Europe's Regieoper scene, has a reputation for provoking audiences; he outraged Salzburg Festival audiences, for instance, by introducing such anachronistic folkways as cocaine-snorting into that most Viennese of operettas Die Fledermaus. His Idomeneo staging ... ended with the depositing upon four straight chairs lined up downstage of the decapitated heads of four of history's gods: Poseidon (a.k.a. Neptune, part and parcel of this opera's plot), Jesus, Buddha, and ... Mohammed." The situation is idiotic to the core, but, yes,  Neuenfels must be defended; millions have died fighting for democracy so he can put his pap onstage. Let's hope the scandal progresses to the point where President Bush speaks in defense of Neuenfels's cocaine deconstructions.

It is worth noting that Neuenfels's notion of using opera to send petty polemical messages betrays the great dream of reconciliation that is at the heart of Mozart's work. Consider what Pasha Selim says toward the end of The Abduction from the Seraglio, as he foregoes the vengeance that is rightly his:

SELIM: Now, are you trembling, are you ready for your sentence?
BELMONTE: Yes, Pasha, vent your rage on me.
SELIM: You are mistaken. I despised your father far too much ever to be able to follow his example. Believe me, it is a greater pleasure to repay with good deeds an injustice suffered, than to punish evil with evil. Take your freedom, take Constanze and be more humane than your father.

And what Titus says in La Clemenza di Tito (suggested by Grant Barnes):

I believe the stars conspire
to oblige me, in spite of myself,
to become cruel.
No; they shall not have this satisfaction.
My virtue has already
pledged itself to continue the contest.
Let us see, which is more constant,
the treachery of others
or my mercy.

Esa-Pekka Salonen discography

In reverse chronological order.

AS COMPOSER

Salonen, Foreign Bodies, Wing On Wing, Insomnia; Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Anu & Pia Komsi, sopranos (DG, 2005)

Salonen, LA Variations, Five Images After Sappho, Giro, Mania, Gambit; Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Dawn Upshaw, soprano, and Anssi Karttunen, cello (Sony Classical, 2001)

Salonen, Mimo II, YTA I-III, Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra, Floof; Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, with Jorma Valjakka, oboe, Mikael Helasvuo, flute, Tuija Hakkila, piano, Anssi Karttunen, cello, Pekka Savijoki, alto saxophone, and Anu Komsi, soprano (Finlandia, 1994)

AS CONDUCTOR

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin, Mussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain; Los Angeles Philharmonic (DG, 2006)

Beethoven, Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, Anders Hillborg, Eleven Gates; Los Angeles Philharmonic (DG iTunes, 2006)

Lutoslawski, Symphony No. 4, Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 and Leonore Overture No. 2; Los Angeles Philharmonic (DG iTunes, 2006)

Schumann, Piano Concerto; Dresden Staatskapelle, with Hélène Grimaud, piano (DG, 2006)

Saariaho, L’Amour de loin; Finnish National Opera Orchestra and Chorus, with Dawn Upshaw, Gerald Finley, and Monica Groop (DG DVD, 2005)

Hindemith, Symphonic Metamorphoses, The Four Temperaments, Mathis der Maler Symphony; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Emanuel Ax, piano (Sony, 2005, Europe only)

Lindberg, Kraft, Piano Concerto; Toimii Ensemble, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Ondine, 2004)

Beethoven, Choral Fantasy, Arvo Pärt, Credo; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Hélène Grimaud, piano (DG, 2004)

Hillborg, Clarinet Concerto and Violin Concerto; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Martin Fröst, clarinet, and Anna Lindal, violin (Ondine, 2003)

Adams, Naive and Sentimental Music; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Nonesuch, 2002)

Lindberg: Cantigas, Cello Concerto, Parada, Fresco; Philharmonia Orchestra, with Anssi Karttunen, cello (Sony Classical, 2002)

Marsalis, All Rise; Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 2002)

Saariaho, Château de l'âme, Graal Théâtre, Amers; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony, Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, Finnish Radio Chamber Choir; with Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Gidon Kremer, violin, and Anssi Karttunen, cello (Sony Classical, 2001)

Goldmark and Sibelius, Violin Concertos; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Joshua Bell, violin (Sony Classical, 2000)

Bach Transcriptions: Arrangements by Mahler, Elgar, Webern, and Stokowski; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 2000)

Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Placido Domingo and Bo Skovhus (Sony Classical, 2000)

Shostakovich, Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Yefim Bronfman, piano, and Thomas Stevens, trumpet (Sony Classical, 1999)

Corigliano, The Red Violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, with Joshua Bell, violin (Sony Classical, 1999)

Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre; Sibylle Ehlert, Laura Claycomb, Charlotte Hellekant, Jard van Nes, Derek Lee Ragin, Graham Clark, Steven Cole, Richard Suart, Willard White, Frode Olsen, London Sinfonietta Voices, and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1999)

Revueltas, Sensemayá, Ocho por radio, La Noche des los Mayas, Homenaje a Federico García Lorca, Ventanas, First Little Serious Piece, Second Little Serious Piece; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1998)

Mahler, Symphony No. 3; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Anna Larsson (Sony Classical, 1998)

Bruckner, Symphony No. 4; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1998)

Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, String Quartet No 2 (version for string orchestra); Stockholm Chamber Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1997)

Debussy, Images, Prélude à 'L’Après-midi d’un faune', La Mer; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1997)

Bernard Herrmann, Film Scores: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, Marnie, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Torn Curtain, Fahrenheit 451, Taxi Driver; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1996)

Lutoslawski, Symphony No. 2, Fanfare for the L.A.Philharmonic, Piano Concerto, Chantefleurs et Chantefables; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Paul Crossley, piano, and Dawn Upshaw, soprano (Sony Classical, 1996)

Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1996)

Ligeti, Works for voices and instruments, including Mysteries of the Macabre, Aventures, and Nouvelles Aventures; Philharmonia Orchestra, the King’s Singers (Sony Classical, 1996)

Dallapiccola, Il Prigioniero, Canti di prigionia; Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Jorma Hynninen, Howard Haskin, Sven-Erik Alexandersson, Lage Wedin, Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir(Sony Classical, 1995)

Bartók, Piano Concertos Nos. 1-3; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Yefim Bronfman, piano (Sony Classical, 1995)

Debussy, Nocturnes, La Damoiselle élue, Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Dawn Upshaw, soprano (Sony Classical, 1994)

Sibelius, Kullervo; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Marianna Rørholm, Jorma Hynninen, and the Helsinki University Chorus (Sony Classical, 1993)

Lars-Erik Larsson, Förklädd gud, Pastoralsvit, Violin Concerto; with Hillevi Martinpelto, soprano, Håkan Hagegård, baritone, Erland Josephson, narrator, Arve Tellefsen, violin, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir (Sony Classical 1993) [thanks to Allan Ulrich]

To the Edge of Dream: Works of Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Takemitsu; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1993)

Schoenberg, Piano Concerto, Liszt, Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Emanuel Ax, piano (Sony Classical, 1993)

Stravinsky, Petrushka, Orpheus; Philharmonia Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1993)

Nielsen, Flute and Clarinet Concertos, Saul and David Prelude, Springtime in Funen; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir, with Hakan Rosengren, clarinet, and Per Flemstrom, flute (Sony Classical, 1993)

Prokofiev, Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet; Berlin Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1993)

Saariaho, Du cristal, ...à la fumée; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Petri Alanko, flute, and Anssi Karttunen, cello (Ondine, 1993)

Rachmaninov, Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Yefim Bronfman, piano (Sony Classical, 1992)

Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex; Vinson Cole, Anne Sofie von Otter, Simon Estes, Hans Sotin, Nicolai Gedda, Patrice Chéreau, the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1992)

Sibelius, Lemminkäinen Suite, En Saga; Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony Classical, 1992)

Mahler, Symphony No. 4; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Barbara Hendricks, soprano (Sony Classical, 1992)

Prokofiev, Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, Stravinsky Violin Concerto; Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Cho-Liang Lin, violin (Sony Classical, 1992)

Takemitsu, To the Edge of Dream, Vers, l’arc-en-ciel, Palma; London Sinfonietta, with John Williams, guitar (Sony Classical, 1992)

Stravinsky, Pulcinella, Renard, Ragtime, Octet; London Sinfonietta (Sony Classical, 1991)

Stravinsky, Apollo, Concerto in D, Cantata; Yvonne Kenny, John Aler, London Sinfonietta Chorus, London Sinfonietta, Stockholm Chamber Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1991)

Ears Open!: Works of Lindberg, Salonen, Kaipainen; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony (Finlandia, 1991)

A Nordic Festival: Works of Sibelius, Grieg, Nielsen, Järnefelt, Alfvén, Leifs; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1991)

Berwald, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Musica Sveciae, 1991)

Haydn, Symphonies Nos. 22, 78, and 82; Stockholm Chamber Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1991)

Nielsen, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 6; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1991)

Stravinsky, Capriccio, Symphonies for Wind Instruments, Concerto for Piano and Winds, Movements; London Sinfonietta, with Paul Crossley, piano (Sony Classical, 1990)

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Symphony in Three Movements; Philharmonia Orchestra (Sony Classical, 1990)

Stenhammar, Serenade, Chitra, Midwinter; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir (Musica Sveciae, 1990)

Hindemith, Kammermusik No. 3, Merikanto, Konzertstück, Lindberg, Zona, Zimmermann, Canto di speranza; London Sinfonietta, with Anssi Karttunen, cello (Finlandia, 1990)

Nielsen, Symphony No. 2, Pan and Syrinx, Aladdin Suite; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (CBS, 1989)

Strauss, Metamorphosen, Prelude to Capriccio; New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra (CBS, 1989)

Grieg, Excerpts from Peer Gynt; Oslo Philharmonic, with Barbara Hendricks, soprano (Sony Classical, 1989)

Lindberg, Kinetics; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Finlandia, 1989)

Sibelius and Nielsen, Violin Concertos; Philharmonia Orchestra and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Cho-Liang Lin, violin (CBS, 1988)

Stravinsky, Firebird, Jeu de cartes; Philharmonia Orchestra (CBS, 1988)

Messiaen, Des Canyons aux étoiles, Couleurs de la cité céleste, Oiseaux exotiques; London Sinfonietta, with Paul Crossley, piano (CBS, 1988)

Lindberg, Kraft, Action — Situation — Signification; Toimii Ensemble, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Finlandia, 1988)

Nielsen, Symphony No. 5, Maskarade Overture; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (CBS, 1988)

Lindberg, Ritratto; Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finlandia, 1987)

Nielsen, Symphony No. 1, Little Suite; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (CBS, 1987)

Sibelius, Symphony No. 5, Pohjola’s Daughter; Philharmonia Orchestra (CBS, 1987)

Lutoslawski, Les Espaces du Sommeil, Symphony No. 3, Messiaen, Turangalîla-Symphony; Los Angeles Philharmonic (CBS, 1986) [Lutoslawski pieces reissued with Symphony No. 4 on a Sony CD in 1994]

Tomasi, Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, Jolivet, Concerto No. 2 for Trumpet and Concertino; Philharmonia Orchestra, with Wynton Marsalis, trumpet (CBS, 1986)

Nielsen, Symphony No. 4, Helios Overture; Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (CBS, 1986)

Works of Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Borodin; Bavarian Radio Symphony (Philips, 1985)

A Swedish Serenade: Works of Wiren, Larsson, Söderlundh, Lidholm; Stockholm Sinfonietta (BIS, 1984)

Saariaho, Verblendungen; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (originally recorded in 1984, released by BIS in 1997)

Rautavaara, Regular Sets of Elements in a Semi-Regular Situation; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (originally recorded in 1982, released by Ondine in 1995)