From her new album HĪBER, on dacapo.
Wagnerism
Love in the time of COVID
The LA Phil has released the first video in its SOUND/STAGE series, drawing on performances that were filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in early August. I attended a couple of the recording sessions and wrote about them in The New Yorker this week. I'm struck again by the bittersweet atmosphere, the tinge of melancholy, which hangs over the lovely musicmaking. That tinge strikes me as an honest and necessary. To spout clichés about "reimagining" concert formats, to issue boilerplate language about resilience and resourcefulness, ignores the elemental struggles that so many musicians are undergoing, not to mention the grief that has invaded so many lives.
The conjunction of Peter Lieberson's "Amor mio, si muero y tú no mueres" ("My love, if I die and you don't") with the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony brings to mind a personal memory. In college, I took a theory class with Lieberson, and one day he detoured from a close reading of Schubert's "Erlkönig" into a rhapsody over the Adagietto. I recall him listening along to Bernstein's DG recording, his eyes closed in bliss, the rigors of harmonic analysis momentarily forgotten.
Previously: Fervor, For Peter Lieberson.
A Harold Shapero moment
From a fascinating new disc of Shapero's orchestral music by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Of course this music is very heavily reminiscent of Stravinsky, but some passages are startlingly original, such as this recurring texture of shrill, spiraling winds and droning brass (matching 6:45 in the video):
The LA Phil returns to the Bowl
Solo for Orchestra. The New Yorker, Sept. 28, 2020.
For Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the greatest public figures of our time, died today at the age of eighty-seven. Like many people, I am more or less speechless with sadness, but I wanted to offer up some music in her memory. In 2012, she wrote up a list of her favorite recordings, which I published on the New Yorker website. On it was Matthias Goerne's Schubert album An mein Herz, which she said she listened to at home while working. The recording of "Du bist die Ruh" embedded above appears on that disc. Ginsburg had a lifelong love of opera, and I got to witness her enthusiasm first hand at the Santa Fe Opera in 2013, while I was working on a profile of Joyce DiDonato. I know without having to ask that Joyce is one of dozens of opera singers befriended by Justice Ginsburg who are now devastated by her death — as is everyone who still believes in an American ideal. זיכרונה לברכה: may her memory be a blessing.
