Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Apex 2022

Shoshone sunrise.

At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2022.

The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Davóne Tines.

Puts's The Hours, Giddens and Abels's Omar

A Day in the Life. The New Yorker, Dec. 12, 2022.

A Toscanini moment

The Korngold Symphony

 

Ross Alexander, left, in Captain Blood.

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Much thanks to Paul Sommerfeld, of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, for his kind assistance. Here Paul gives a lecture on the compositional process of Captain Blood, one of the sources for the Symphony.

A note on Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger's music books at the Villa Aurora.

I wrote about Lion Feuchtwanger's The Oppermanns for this year's New Yorker roundup of the Year in Rereading. I had previously read the novel in translation; this year I read it in German, as part of a small-scale Feuchtwanger marathon. The other novels in Feuchtwanger's Waiting-Room Trilogy — Success and Exile — also deserve to be back in print in English.

A Bekah Simms moment

Featured on Simms's new album Bestiaries (Centrediscs).

For Ned Rorem

The gentleman composer died yesterday at the age of ninety-nine. What I wrote about him in 2003: "To read Rorem’s writing is to feel the agony and the bravery of composing in America. Anyone who writes music for a living is a hero, and Rorem is more heroic than most, because he has compromised so little of what he holds dear. His prose will outlast the sneering of his critics, and his music is too mysteriously sweet to die away. To him should go the final word: 'The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.'"

A very long Missy Mazzoli moment

The invaluable OperaVision channel has made available a stream of Mazzoli's The Listeners, whose world première recently took place at the Norwegian Opera, in Oslo. My quick first impression is of a potent, chilling, and excruciatingly relevant work, perhaps comparable in impact to Kaija Saariaho's Innocence. The libretto is by Royce Vavrek, who also supplied the text for Mazzoli's first full-length opera, Breaking the Waves. Opera Philadelphia and the Lyric Opera of Chicago are the co-commissioners, and I look forward to seeing the opera live at one company or the other.

Bezuidenhout's fortepianos

The Shock of the Old. The New Yorker, Nov. 21, 2022.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns (McNally Editions)

Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Holly Rogers, Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction (Cambridge UP)

Jennifer Bain, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (Cambridge UP)

Stephen Walsh, The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Pegasus)

Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century (Random House)

Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books)

Greil Marcus, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography (Yale UP)

Kevin C. Karnes, Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (University of Chicago Press)

Eric Saylor, Vaughan Williams (Oxford UP)

A Jane Sheldon moment

A Jessie Cox moment

Cox will present a collaborative work with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the DiMenna Center in NYC on Nov. 5. brin solomon recently interviewed him for VAN. I wrote about his music last year.

Arch-villain architecture

The view shared by Galka Scheyer and Harry Bosch.

A New Yorker commentary on the modernist villain's lair.

The new Geffen Hall

Vision Quest. The New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2022.

For Peter Schjeldahl

If it is possible for a critic to be a genius, then Peter was one. Just a few weeks ago, The New Yorker published one of his finest pieces ever, on Mondrian. It ends with a grandly dizzying sentence that contains the phrase "adamantine conundrum." This, I told him, was worthy of Wallace Stevens. Peter was a raucously, symphonically vital writer right to the end, immune to cliché and addicted to surprise. In person, he was quick, funny, honest, and wise. A couple of decades ago, in some now extinct diner in the East Village, we had a long conversation that touched on heavy matters, and in the course of it he said, "Faith is not panicking." Thank you, Peter, for everything.

Remembrances: David Remnick, The New Yorker, The New York Times

For Geoff Nuttall

Geoff playing a chacona, 2010.

One of the brightest, most generous lights in the American chamber-music world is gone: Geoff Nuttall, the first violinist of the St. Lawrence Quartet, died today at the age of fifty-six, of pancreatic cancer. It's devastating news to the hundreds of musicians who've worked with Geoff over the years, whether as students or as colleagues. And it's devastating news to audiences across North America — from the Banff Centre, where the quartet first broke through, to Palo Alto, where it is based, and on to Charleston, where Geoff led the chamber-music series at the Spoleto Festival. One of my favorite experiences as a critic-reporter came in 2001, when I followed the St. Lawrence on the road, to El Paso, Texas, and Joplin, Missouri. I'd covered the quartet's New York début, in 1992, and wanted to check in on their progress. Geoff was at the heart of the group and the chief source of its spontaneous, viscerally musical spirit. Behind his regular-guy affect was an exuberant, unpredictable, wide-ranging mind. Barry Shiffman, the former second violinist of the St. Lawrence, tells me that Geoff remained active to the end, biking to and from his chemotherapy appointments and leaving Barry huffing in the course of strenuous hikes. He will be profoundly and permanently missed.

Late-period Wagner sonnet

Once Wagner was the idol of a girl
steeped early in his “endless melody,”
as storms were slyly starting to unfurl
in Meistersinger-land, her Germany.
When storm troops marched, that world was terror-tossed;
symbol of dread, the fierce Wagnerian sound
of Berchtesgaden signaled holocaust,
a battle cry piercing her underground.

In a new land, she would emerge matured,
at peace one day to know the old elation
hearing the Ring, soaring past pain endured,
singing redemption and conciliation.
At last, she gave her long-withheld applause
to music – pure, unmarred by human flaws.

  — Anne Marx, "With Wagner: Through Storm to Calm" (1980)

See also: Bad Wagner Poetry (although I would not place Marx's poem in that category)

Otello at Opera Philadelphia, Medea at the Met

In Extremis. The New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2022.

Schoeck's Elegie

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

At the grave of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger

Previously: Toch, Lubitsch, Korngold, Salieri, Bruckner, Liszt, Georg Trakl, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Thomas Mann, Bach, Nietzsche, Monteverdi, Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Beckett, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky and Nono, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, X. Scharwenka, Elliott Carter, Enescu, Rachmaninov, Mahler and many others, Russ.