Any performance of Morton Feldman's mysterious and sublime Rothko Chapel is an event. Musica Sacra will present the work tonight at 7PM at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, as part of WNYC's New Sounds Live series. Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater is also on the program. Admission is free.
Audio: 1) Philip Brett conducting the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; with David Abel, viola, Karen Rosenak, celesta, and William Winant, percussion; New Albion NA039. By kind permission of New Albion. 2) The final minutes of my Feldman tribute on WHRB-FM, Dec. 17, 1989, with Magnus Lindberg's Kraft as the signature tune.
Carnegie Hall's Leonard Bernstein festival is heading into its final weeks: On the Town has a short run at City Center starting on Wednesday night, and Alan Gilbert conducts the Juilliard Orchestra in the Kaddish Symphony on Nov. 24. American Scholar offers a nice bit of Bernsteiniana online: an account of a memorable appearance that Bernstein made at Harvard in 1986, with Gilbert as his student presenter. Two others who helped to organize Bernstein's late-night soliloquy at Adams House were James Ross, then a music tutor and now on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Music; and Robert Kiely, beloved master of the house. Kiely recalls that Bernstein gave his speech while puffing on a cigarette and sipping Scotch from a dining-hall glass. His topic was terrorism.
Marin Alsop, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, will speak at the National Press Club tomorrow (Monday) at 1PM; there will be a live broadcast on C-SPAN. A press release promises that Alsop will "challenge business, philanthropic and arts leaders throughout the nation to stimulate a collaborative movement that leverages arts-based education programs to encourage positive social change in our communities." Read here about Alsop's OrchKids initiative in Baltimore.
Fulfilling hints by Andrew Patner and La Cieca in recent months, Gerard Mortier has withdrawn from New York City Opera. Mortier had set forth a remarkable plan for an all-twentieth-century opening season, but adequate funding failed to materialize, and Mortier walked out. What happens next for City Opera is anything but clear. Dark days may lie ahead for many artistic institutions; as Tim Mangan reported three days ago, Opera Pacific is shutting down, and, according to Mark Swed, the Pasadena Symphony is in trouble. This will hardly be the end of it. Sympathies to all those who are losing their jobs in difficult times.
— René Pape: Gods, Kings, and Demons (DG, out Nov. 11)
— Brahms, Symphony No. 1 and Schicksalslied; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir (SDG)
— Corigliano, Dylan Thomas Trilogy, with Thomas Allen and Leonard Slatkin conducting the Nashville Symphony (Naxos)
— Carter, Complete Piano Music, with Ursula Oppens (Cedille)
— Lully, Psyché, with Carolyn Sampson, Karina Gauvin, and Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs directing the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus (cpo)
— Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs (Columbia)
Reading:
— Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley)
— Eric Salzman, The New Music Theater (Oxford)
— Simon Morrison, The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford)
— Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven (Norton)
— Judith Tick (ed.), Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion (Oxford)
— Joseph Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (Amadeus)
The last time I heard spontaneous singing in Union Square was in the days after September 11, 2001 — an experience I wrote about here. The crowd on Tuesday night consisted largely of college students and people in their twenties; some were children when 9/11 happened. I doubt that many members of this exuberant throng were thinking about what happened in this city seven years ago, but, for various reasons, I certainly was. The young man in the foreground is holding up a rush edition of the Daily News: President Obama.
A quick search of YouTube reveals that young crowds across the country broke into the national anthem in the early morning hours. You can find videos for the East Village, Times Square, Berkeley, Portland OR, Amherst, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Madison WI, and Harvard Yard (with band), among others. Two obvious conclusions: 1) contra Palin, the entire country is "pro America"; 2) increased support for music education would be nice.
One more musical angle: Bob Dylan announced the outcome of the election by playing "Blowin' in the Wind."
The LA Philharmonic has set up a sumptuous website
in celebration of Esa-Pekka Salonen's final season as the orchestra's
music director. The audio portion of the site has some fifteen hours of
free music, emphasizing such Salonen specialties as Debussy, Sibelius,
Stravinsky, and Bartók. One noteworthy item: Steven Stucky's brilliant, intensely winning Second Concerto for Orchestra, which has yet to be commercially recorded. (Via ArtsJournal.)
It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
— Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
I'm appearing with Joshua Kosman tonight at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, and on Saturday afternoon at Northwestern School of Law's Thorne Auditorium, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. My Audio Guide is here.
At a meeting with a group of journalists today, Alan Gilbert, the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, divulged some details of his first season, which gets underway next fall. Also in attendance were Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic's president, and Matías Tarnopolsky, the artistic administrator, both seconding Gilbert's commitment to combining traditional repertory with contemporary work — what the conductor calls a "museum plus laboratory" approach. The orchestra is not yet ready to announce the entire season, but Gilbert did describe his opening-night gala program: a new piece by Magnus Lindberg, Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi with Renée Fleming as soloist, and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Lindberg — pictured above — will be the Philharmonic's composer-in-residence, a position that lasts two years. The Finn will write another new work for Gilbert's opening season and also direct one of two programs by the Philharmonic's new-music ensemble, which commences operations next season. Lindberg and Gilbert are looking at a long list of potential composers for commissions, including a number of little-known younger Americans. Other items of interest: Valery Gergiev will lead a three-week Stravinsky festival in spring 2010; Thomas Hampson will serve as Artist in Residence, curating several programs; and, in a sign of his commitment to the city, Gilbert will lead all of the Philharmonic's summer parks concerts. Overall, the feeling was good. Dan Wakin has more.
An excerpt from Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, with Kari Kriikku, clarinet, and Sakari Oramo conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony; Ondine 1038.
Listening to the New York Phil play Copland at a Young People's Concert the other night, I realized I'd omitted a favorite tidbit from the Audio Guide for my book: the derivation of Queen's "We Will Rock You" from the Fanfare for the Common Man. The sonic evidence is, I believe, incontrovertible:
Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, Sony 63082.
Judd Greenstein is among New York's most gifted younger composers. I extolled his piece Folk Music sometime in the early days of this blog, and have followed his work closely since then. I couldn't possibly have predicted, though, the latest turn his career has taken: Folk Music is now serving as the soundtrack for the Obama-Biden Tax Calculator. The recording is from the NOW Ensemble's recent disc on the New Amsterdam label. (Hat tip: Dan Johnson.) On Oct. 29, NOW plays with composer-vocalist Corey Dargel at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, on the same evening the Jack Quartet plays Xenakis quartets.
As regular readers know, I strive to be strenuously fair and balanced in political matters. In the interest of equal time, I offer this video of Sarah Palin's magisterial explication of the Wall Street bailout, with an ingenious, speech-based accompaniment somewhat in the manner of Steve Reich's Different Trains. The pianist is Henry Hey:
In November, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present an imaginatively programmed festival entitled Night Fantasies: works of Crumb, Ligeti, Debussy, Carter, Berg, Schumann, Messiaen, and various others, on a nocturnal theme. Klaus Lauer, of the Römerbad festival in Germany, serves as guest curator. To spread word, CMS has created a striking short video of musicians in Manhattan at night. The soundtrack is the "God-music" from Crumb's Black Angels, with a slight admixture of Chopin and Ligeti.
Opening at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn tomorrow: Darmstadt's Essential Repertoire festival, celebrating American experimental and minimalist music of the postwar era.
The Rest Is Noise, after which this blog is named, is now in paperback. To mark the occasion, I'm introducing a Glossary of terms that appear in the book, with audio illustrations. Hopefully this webby feature will offer a helping hand to readers who stumble over the tritone, the cluster, and the like. I have also greatly expanded the Audio Guide, so that there are now some three hundred audio examples, dozens of photos and archival documents, and assorted videos. (Many thanks to Billy Robin, who worked with me on both features and assisted with various other projects over the summer; Jeff Seroy, who let me record weird modes on his piano; Matthew Guerrieri, Kyle Gann, and Tiffany Kuo, who answered queries; and Andy Mouldovan, who made the audio icon.) I will make more appearances on behalf of the book this fall, though nothing like last year's craziness. On Oct. 30 I'll be at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, talking to Joshua Kosman; on Nov. 1 I'll give my twentieth-century audiovisual tour at the Chicago Humanities Festival; on Nov. 10 I'll speak on Messiaen at ASU in Tempe, AZ; and Nov. 24 I'll appear at the 92nd Street Y.
Oppenheimer's Act I aria from Doctor Atomic, sung by Gerald Finley in rehearsal with the Met Orchestra under Alan Gilbert. Audio courtesy of the Met. Live transmission on Oct. 13.
Terry Teachout writesabout Edison-cylinder recordings of the presidential candidates of 1908: William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Bryan, the Democrat, opposes imperialism in the Philippines and supports a guarantee of bank deposits; Taft, the Republican, disagrees.
