Making the Wall Disappear, New Yorker website, Jan. 31, 2018.
Links
Miscellany
The second edition of the Co-incidence Festival, an experimental-music gathering in Somerville MA, begins today and continues through Jan. 27. Michael Pisaro was the resident artist last year; he returns, but yields the spotlight to Joachim Eckert, who will stage a "sound bridge" event in the middle of Union Square.... Next month, Peter Margasak's Frequency Festival returns to Chicago: the lineup includes the Wet Ink Ensemble, ICE, a Julius Eastman concert, and the Bozzini Quartet, playing Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller, and Martin Arnold.... In the same period Bozzini will also appear at Principal Sound in London, playing Nono's Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima; the festival has a Nono-Feldman focus this year.... Speaking of Eastman, Bowerbird and the Kitchen's That Which is Fundamental festival is now under way in NYC.... The San Diego Symphony is collaborating with Steven Schick and various area institutions in a percussion-centered festival called It's About Time (through Feb. 11). One notable event is a performance of John Luther Adams's Inuksuit that will involve percussionists on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border (Jan. 27).... Yarn/Wire presents a Raphaël Cendo program at NYC's Miller Theatre on Feb. 1.... The brilliant violinist Augustin Hadelich will play the Ligeti concerto next weekend with the Boston Symphony; Thomas Adès, who conducts, has written a new cadenza for the occasion....This weekend, Susanna Mälkki, who surely deserves one of the major music-director jobs now open (San Francisco?), returns to the LA Phil, leading a full-orchestral program with Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Cello Concerto and Strauss's Alpine Symphony; she then presides over a Green Umbrella featuring a Marcos Balter première and works of Verunelli, Filidei, and Lachenmann.
Nightafternight playlist
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New releases of interest, in the manner of Steve Smith.
— Debussy, The Complete Works (Warner Classics)
— George Walker, Symphony No. 5, "Visions"; Ian Hobson conducting the Sinfonia Varsovia (Albany)
— Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Wolff, Resistance; Philip Thomas, Apartment House (HCR)
— Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread (Nonesuch)
— Paganini, Twenty-four Caprices; Augustin Hadelich (Warner Classics)
— Schubert, Winterreise; Mark Padmore, Kristian Bezuidenhout (Harmonia Mundi)
— Steve Reich, Pulse / Quartet; International Contemporary Ensemble, Colin Currie Group (Nonesuch)
— Elizabeth Maconchy, Héloïse and Abelard; Hannah Francis, Tom McDonnell, Philip Langridge, James Gaddarn
conducting the Croydon Philharmonic Choir and English Symphony Orchestra (Lyrita, re-release)
— Zemlinsky, Eine florentinische Tragödie; Wolfgang Koch, Heidi Brunner, Bertrand de Billy conducting the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony (Capriccio)
Wagnerian
A fiftieth-birthday present to myself: an overlong, often unreadable, but nevertheless continuous first draft of my third book, Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. Minnie and Bea are warily supportive.
Previously: Benchmark, Birthday poem.
Street Symphony
The People That Walked in Darkness. The New Yorker, Jan. 1, 2018.
Philip K. Dick's fan letter to Christa Ludwig
From The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, vol. 5.
