“Your silence will be considered your consent.”
— Laurie Anderson, "Another Day in America"
“Your silence will be considered your consent.”
— Laurie Anderson, "Another Day in America"
March 28, 2025 | Permalink
Peter Maxwell Davies's 1973 work Stone Litany is a setting of Norse runic inscriptions that are found on the walls of the great Neolithic tomb of Maes Howe, in the Orkney Islands. Davies's grouping ends with "MAKUS MATTR RÆISTRUNAR ThÆSAR," or "Max the Mighty carved these runes." Most commentators seem to take it as a happy coincidence that the composer found a version of his own nickname among the inscriptions. Having read through several transliterations of the complete graffiti, though, I have to conclude that Davies was having a bit of fun with his listeners. The name "Makus" does not appear. But in Barnes 15 / Farrer XXII, to use two competing numbering systems, the name before "carved these runes" is indecipherable, and Davies can be excused for making a convenient substitution.
July 10, 2025 | Permalink
An incomplete list, including several operettas. There is surely no need for any more operas about Gesualdo, unless, as Will Robin once suggested, someone wants to write an opera about a composer who goes insane while trying to write an opera about Gesualdo. To date, only one person has written an opera about a composer and then gone on to become the subject of an opera. But maybe we will one day see a work entitled Pfitzner.
Ignaz von Seyfried, Die Ochsenmenuett, 1823 (Haydn)
Friedrich von Flotow, Alessandro Stradella, 1837/44
Louis Niedermeyer, Stradella, 1837
Charles Luce-Varlet, L'élève de Presbourg, 1840 (Haydn)
César Franck, Stradella, 1841
Franz von Suppé, Franz Schubert, 1864
Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 1868 (Hans Sachs)
Flotow, Die Musikanten (La jeunesse de Mozart), 1870
Suppé, Joseph Haydn, 1887
Rimsky-Korsakov, Mozart and Salieri, 1897
Stanislao Falchi, Il trillo del diavolo, 1899 (Tartini)
Chopin arr. Giacomo Orefice, Chopin, 1901
Schubert arr. Heinrich Berté, Das Dreimäderlhaus, 1916 (Schubert)
Hans Pfitzner, Palestrina, 1917
Franz Lehár, Paganini, 1925
Paul Graener, Friedemann Bach, 1931
Bernhard Paumgartner, Rossini in Neapel, 1936
Peter Maxwell Davies, Taverner, 1972
Francesco d'Avalos, Maria di Venosa, 1992 (Gesualdo)
Alfred Schnittke, Gesualdo, 1993
Franz Hummel, Gesualdo, 1996
Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici, 1998 (Gesualdo)
Scott Glasgow, The Prince of Venosa, 1998 (Gesualdo)
Franz Hummel, Styx, 2001 (Handel)
Bo Holten, Gesualdo—Shadows, 2003
Luca Francesconi, Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer, 2004
Jonathan Harvey, Wagner Dream, 2007
Marc-André Dalbavie, Gesualdo, 2010
Gabriel Kahane, February House, 2012 (features Benjamin Britten)
Dante De Silva, Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, 2013
Michael Dellaira, The Death of Webern, 2016
Avner Dorman, Wahnfried, 2017 (features Siegfried Wagner)
Todd Machover, Schoenberg in Hollywood, 2018
Johannes Boer, La Tragedia di Claudio M., 2018 (Monteverdi)
Tarik O’Regan, The Phoenix, 2019 (about da Ponte, features Mozart)
Victoria Bond, Clara, 2019 (Clara Schumann)
Elliott Sharp, Die Grösste Fuge, 2024 (Beethoven)
Ella Milch-Sheriff, Alma, 2024 (Alma Mahler-Werfel)
Sarah Kirkland Snider, Hildegard, 2025
July 09, 2025 | Permalink
New and recent releases of interest.
Schoenberg, String Quartets Nos. 1–4; Webern Quartet, with Yui Futaeda (Etcetera)
Corelli, Concerto Grossi Op. 6; Georg Kallweit and Mayumi Hirasaki leading the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Pentatone)
Tania León, Horizons, Raíces (Origins), Stride, Pasajes; Karina Canellakis, Edward Gardner, and Dmitri Slobodeniouk conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)
Ginastera, String Quartets; Miro Quartet (Pentatone)
Liza Lim, A Sutured World, Annunciation Triptych II: Mary / Transcendence After Trauma, The Compass; Edward Gardner, Franck Ollu, and Christoph Poppen conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony, with Nicholas Altstaedt, Carin Levine, William Barton (BR Klassik, out July 25)
Jürg Frey, Out of Chorales, Polyphonie der Wörter, Shadow and Echo and Jade, Landscape of Echoes, Blue Bird’s Tune, Because I could not stop for Death; EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (Neu)
Hannah Kendall, Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2, shouting forever into the receiver, Where is the chariot of fire?, Tuxedo: Crown; Sun King, when flesh is pressed against the dark, Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, Even sweetness can catch the throat; Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting the Ensemble Modern, Wavefield Ensemble, loadbang, Jonathan Bloxham conducting the Hallé Orchestra, Anne Denholm-Blair, Jonathan Morton, Louise McMonagle (NMC)
Koechlin, Symphony No. 1, Au loin, 3 Mélodies; Patricia Petibon, Ariane Matiakh conducting the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen (Capriccio)
July 04, 2025 | Permalink
Bach's Colossus. The New Yorker, June 30, 2025.
June 23, 2025 | Permalink
Emily Witt on the resistance to fascistic thuggery in LA: "The public reaction to the presence of the ICE agents is often hostile. One morning, I followed a Unión del Barrio alert to an Army Reserve center in the city of Bell, which, that morning, immigration agents were using as a staging area. A veritable hive of officials with covered faces was loading into a fleet of American-made vehicles with temporary license plates and dark windows, and rolling out into the city for their day of work. Outside, helpless to stop them, someone pulled up and simply leaned on his horn. Others tried to block the driveway with their cars, but the agents had another exit. One person shouted profanities. In the video of Nancy Urizar’s father, the anger of the strangers observing what was happening in the parking lot is also palpable. 'Fuck every single one of you motherfuckers,' one person says. 'Fuck every single one of you.'"
June 22, 2025 | Permalink
Joshua Kosman, in his On a Pacific Aisle newsletter, celebrates Esa-Pekka Salonen's final concerts with the San Francisco Symphony but cannot ignore the stench of incompetence that emanates from the orchestra's administrative offices: "Even after Salonen is gone, the Symphony will still be in the hands of those who drove him out. The choice of the next music director will be left to the very people who thought Salonen was dispensable; how much faith do you have in their judgment? Patrons will be asked to step up their support for an organization that will now offer them less reason to feel excited about or committed to what is happening in Davies Symphony Hall. And keep your eye on the orchestral personnel — on the vacancies that go unfilled and the high-profile departures that occur because San Francisco is no longer perceived as a good career investment. Angry? You’re goddam right I’m angry."
Salonen himself said from the stage, with typical pith: "You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”
June 18, 2025 | Permalink
This was the encore the last time I heard Brendel play, in 2008. Also lingering in my mind is his Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall in the nineteen-nineties. "Listening to him, the mind dances," I wrote then. A remarkable musician and man.
June 17, 2025 | Permalink
"For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiment — astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. But all the same I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced, and I congratulate you with all my heart on this wonderful discovery."
— Arthur Sullivan to Edison, 1888
June 12, 2025 | Permalink
Photo: Justin Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt's great-grandson.
In April of last year, I sent a note to Benno Herz, the program director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, asking if he knew that the Galka Scheyer House had come on the market. This is the hilltop gallery-home that Richard Neutra built in 1934 for Scheyer, a crucial figure in the propagation of modernism on the West Coast. I'd visited the house the previous year, at the invitation of its then owner, the late Frank M. Devine, and registered its significance. It is not only a major work in Neutra's output — part of his turn from modernist severity to a more open, mellow, landscape-oriented aesthetic — but also a landmark of Los Angeles cultural history, suggestive of Scheyer's spirited embrace of trends across the arts. Her primary calling was to advocate for the group she called the Blue Four —Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Feininger. Hence the name of her street in the Hollywood Hills: Blue Heights Drive. But she also supported younger talents such as John Cage and Maya Deren and threw herself into children's arts education. She was an astonishing and unclassifiable person who will have a chapter to herself in my forthcoming history of the German-speaking emigration in Los Angeles.
In 2016, another monument of that era, the Mann House, was in danger of being torn down when a minor miracle occurred: the German government purchased the house and converted it into a residency for writers, scholars, and thinkers. I idly wondered: could something similar happen to the Scheyer House? If anyone could work such a wonder, I knew it would be Benno. Amazingly, he did. He wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which caught the attention of a German art-lover, who proceeded to buy the house with the idea of turning it into an artists' residency. EscherGuneWardena Architecture will begin a restoration process later this summer. At the moment, as KCRW reports, the house is being occupied by the artist Beatriz Cortez, who lost her home in the Altadena Fire. On a rainy day last winter, I met Raymond Neutra, the architect's youngest and only surviving son, for a conversation at the Scheyer House; a short film of our talk, augmented by rich documentation of Scheyer's life, is soon to be released.
June 10, 2025 | Permalink
The arch-magus of ambivalence is being celebrated all over Germany today, most spectacularly in his home town of Lübeck, where the Lübeck Philharmonic will give a celebratory concert, the program beginning with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, which had a transformative effect on Mann when he first heard it in his youth. Doctor Faustus had that effect on me when I first read it at age eighteen; my own writing career stems in some way from the experience of that novel. I wrote about Mann for The New Yorker in 1996, 2016, 2020, and 2022. In the current issue of Studia Philosophica I have an essay titled "Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and the Inescapability of the Political." Alles Gute! In a certain sense.
June 06, 2025 | Permalink