Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Thought of the day

"They gaily speak about differences between America and Italy. 'Take Caruso and Bing Crosby,' she says. 'You don't need such a big voice, if you are rich.'"

            — Bertolt Brecht, "The Goddess of Victory"

A Mattie Barbier moment

From Barbier's new album threads, which was recorded at The Tank. Video filmed at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Adams's Antony and Cleopatra

Immortal Longings. The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2022.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Andrew McIntosh, Little Jimmy, I have a lot to learn, Learning; Yarn/Wire (Kairos)

Mahler, Symphony No. 5; Semyon Bychkov conducting the Czech Philharmonic (Pentatone, out Oct. 14)

Mozart, Piano Sonatas; Robert Levin (ECM)

Odeya Nini, ODE (out Oct. 7)

Tristan: works of Liszt, Henze, Wagner, and Mahler; Igor Levit, Franz Welser-Möst conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Sony)

Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 7, Flute Concerto No. 1; Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City Of Birmingham Symphony and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, with Kirill Gerstein and Marie-Christine Zupancic (DG)

she / her / hers: works by Milica Paranosic, Jessica Meyer, Gabriela Lena Frank, Adah Kaplan, Valerie Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Melissa Dunphy, Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, Jessie Montgomery, Ana Sokolović, Laura de Rover; Lara St. John (Ancalagon)

Meyerbeer, Robert le Diable; John Osborn, Nicolas Courjal, Amina Edris, Erin Morley, Nico Darmanin, Marc Minkowski conducting the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine and the Chœur de l'Opera National de Bordeaux (Bru Zane)

Schulhoff, Shapeshifter: Piano Concerto and other works; players from the Colburn School, including James Conlon leading the RVC Ensemble (Delos)

A Bára Gísladóttir and Skúli Sverrisson moment

Via the Louth Contemporary Music Society.

New horizons in negative dialectics

For Queen Elizabeth II

The late Queen was not known for making ostentatious progressive gestures, but her decision to send a telegram of condolence to Peter Pears after the death of Benjamin Britten, in 1976, was a quietly significant one. Britten ended his life in a position of exalted privilege, holding a peerage that the Queen had bestowed on him. Yet homophobia had shadowed him all along, and shaped perceptions of his work after his death. The telegram implicitly honored a gay relationship in what may have been an unprecedented way. I always thought warmly of the Queen for this ̉reason — that, and the fact that she somewhat resembled my mother, who adored her.

SF Opera centenary

San Francisco Opera, which just inaugurated its centenary season with the world première of John Adams's Antony and Cleopatra, is also offering what looks to be a riveting series of archival streams. Up now are offerings on a Slavic theme: Jenůfa with Elisabeth Söderström (1980), Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Anja Silja (1981), and excerpts from a 1945 Boris Godunov with Ezio Pinza.

An Anna Korsun moment

Messiaen on Rachmaninoff

Noise reader Vinny writes: "Here is a tale related to me by one of my college professors, Gerald Levinson, from his times studying with Messiaen. Messiaen had invited his corps of students to dinner. Conversation at the table was vibrant and had managed to swing towards judging the merits of Rachmaninoff. Loriod turned to Messiaen and asked, 'What DO we think of Rachmaninoff?' There was a two-minute pregnant pause while he considered. Then he rendered: 'We approve.'"

On a relevant and doleful note, Vinny has created an amazing online catalogue of Dies Irae quotations.

Rachmaninoff at Bard

Rachmaninoff in Valhalla.

Chart-Topper. The New Yorker, Sept. 5, 2022.

Monumentum pro Riccardo

A tribute to Richard Taruskin, on the New Yorker website.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson, The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird)

Kate Molleson, Sound within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century (Faber)

Andrew Mellor, The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture (Yale UP)

Mark Clague, O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (Norton)

Rebecca Mitchell, Sergei Rachmaninoff (Reaktion)

Philip Ross Bullock, ed., Rachmaninoff and His World (University of Chicago Press)

Richard Will, “Don Giovanni” Captured: Performance, Media, Myth (University of Chicago Press)

Brigid Cohen, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press)

Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press)

Wagner-Abteilung:

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Richard Wagners Amerika: Eine Ausgrabung (Königshausen & Neumann)

Sabine Zurmühl, Cosima Wagner: Ein widersprüchliches Leben (Böhlau)

Raphael Gross, Katharina J. Schneider and Michael P. Steinberg, eds., Richard Wagner und das deutsche Gefühl (Deutsches Historisches Museum / wgb)

Anno Mungen, Hier gilt's der Kunst: Wieland Wagner, 1941–1945 (Westend)

Laurence Dreyfus, Parsifals Verführung, trans. Wolfgang Schlüter (Faber)

The Schindler House at 100

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

The great Schindler House in West Hollywood is celebrating its centennial this summer. Through September 25, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, which presents programming and exhibitions at three Schindler buildings in the Los Angeles area, is offering a richly layered, historically conscious show titled Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making. It is co-curated by Jia Yi Gu, the MAK Center's director, and the historians Gary Riichirō Fox and Sarah Hearne, with support from Allie Smith, Ann Basu, Stratton Coffman, and Tristan Espinoza. Participating artists include Kathi Hofer, Carmen Argote, Fiona Connor, Julian Hoeber, stephanie mei huang, Andrea Lenardin Madden, Renée Petropoulos, Gala Porras-Kim, Stephen Prina, Jakob Sellaoui, and Peter Shire. Documentation of the exhibition's "rotating vitrine" can be found here. I urge anyone in the LA area to make a visit and, if possible, to support the house, which needs various restoration projects. The Friends of the Schindler House are the owners of the property itself.

A Kyle Motl moment

From Hydra Nightingale.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, Stucky, Silent Spring; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

Mother Sister Daughter: Music from Santa Lucia convent in Verona and San Matteo convent in Arcetri, alongside pieces by Antoine Brumel, Maistre Jhan, Leonora d'Este, and Joanna Marsh; Laurie Stras directing Musica Secreta (Lucky Music)

Wadada Leo Smith, String Quartets Nos. 1-12; RedKoral Quartet, with Smith, Alison Bjorkedal, Anthony Davis, Lynn Vartan, Stuart Fox, Thomas Buckner (TUM)

Farewells: songs of Henryk Czyż, Tadeusz Baird, Karol Szymanowski, Paweł Łukaszewski, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Stanisław Moniuszko; Jakub Józef Orliński and Michał Biel (Warner)

Messiaen, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus; Bertrand Chamayou (Warner)

Rachmaninov, Piano Sonata No. 1, Moments Musicaux, shorter pieces; Steven Osborne (Hyperion)

Paweł Szymański, Misterium Mostu; Radek Nowicki conducting the Polsko-litewski Chór Sąsiedzi (Kaimynai) (Fundacja Pogranicze)

Nørgård, Symphonies Nos. 1-8; Thomas Dausgaard, Sakari Oramo, and John Storgårds conducting the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Oslo Philharmonic, with Ulla Munch, the Danish National Vocal Ensemble, and the Danish National Concert Choir (Dacapo)

Mary Halvorson, Amaryllis and Belladonna; Halvorson, Patricia Brennan, Nick Dunston, Tomas Fujiwara, Jacob Garchik, Adam O’Farrill, Mivos Quartet, Olivia De Prato, Maya Bennardo, Victor Lowrie Tafoya, Tyler J. Borden (Nonesuch)

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 11; Rafael Payare conducting the San Diego Symphony (Platoon)

An Ig Henneman moment

Of Outside the Rain has stopped, Henneman writes: "Pianist/improviser Cecil Taylor’s intuitive, energetic, loosely structured flow is an important source of inspiration for this composition. Endless, nearly exhausting variations, caused by material I often employ as an improviser. Open strings are an essential colour throughout the composition. The Luna String Quartet was a great sparring partner in developing the material. The title is a sentence taken from Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love, which stuck in my memory."

Lubitsch

From Lady Windermere's Fan.

Laughter in the Dark. The New Yorker, Aug. 15, 2022. 

I'm grateful, as ever, to Daniel Zalewski, who edited this article, and to Neima Jahromi, who checked it. Much thanks also to Joe McBride, Dave Kehr, the staff of the MoMA Film Study Center, the staff of the Margaret Herrick Library, Kim Hendrickson at Criterion, and, of course, Nicola Lubitsch.

Thanks to various resources, I was able to view fifty-two of Lubitsch's extant films. Kino Lorber's Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin is a particularly precious resource; if you don't know the movies contained therein, you will emerge with your view of film history substantially altered. My reading list included McBride's How Did Lubitsch Do It?, Ivana Novak, Mladen Dolar, and Jela Krečič's Lubitsch Can’t Wait, Henry Nora's Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder, William Paul's Lubitsch’s American Comedy, Kristin Thompson's Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I, Mason Kamana Allfred's Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity: Cultural Memory and the Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch, Rick McCormick's Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, Hans Helmut Prinzler and Enno Patalas's Lubitsch, Herbert Spaich's Ernst Lubitsch und seine Filme, Sabine Hake's Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, Barbara Verena Ottmann's The Lubitsch Touch: A Meta-Critical Study, 1923–1947, Jan-Christopher Horak's Ernst Lubitsch and the Rise of Ufa, 1917-1922, James Harvey's Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, Thomas Elsaesser's Weimar Cinema and After, and Gerd Gmünden's Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema 1933-1951. Essays of interest include Karsten Witte's "The Spectator as Accomplice in Ernst Lubitsch's Schuhpalast Pinkus," in Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel's A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades; Valerie Weinstein's "Anti-Semitism or Jewish ‘Camp’? Ernst Lubitsch's Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Meyer Aus Berlin (1918)," German Life and Letters 59:1 (2006), pp. 101-121; Gerd Gemünden's "Space Out of Joint: Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be," New German Critique 89 (2003), pp. 59-80; Horak's "Sauerkraut & Sausages with a Little Goulash: Germans in Hollywood, 1927," Film History 17: 2/3 (2005), pp. 241-260; and Stefan Drössler's "Ernst Lubitsch and EFA," Film History: An International Journal 21:3 (2009), pp. 208-228. Samson Raphaelson's magnificent essay "Freundschaft" appeared in the issue of The New Yorker dated May 11, 1981.

A note on the Wu Tsai Theater

Lincoln Center made a slightly startling announcement today: the auditorium at David Geffen Hall, which reopens in the fall, will be called the Wu Tsai Theater, after the business couple Claire Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai. The proliferation of naming opportunities in the arts-donor world has meant that in many places the auditorium bears a different name from the building itself, even when there is only one performance space. But the Geffen / Wu Tsai case is an especially odd one because the word "theater" usually denotes a site for dramatic performances, not concerts. It's as if the building on Lincoln Center Plaza now has competing identities.

It also bears mentioning that Joe Tsai, the co-founder and executive vice chairman of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is a figure of some controversy, especially in the world of professional sports, where he owns the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and the San Diego Seals. Some paragraphs from an April 2022 ESPN story are worth quoting:

In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. In China, Alibaba, under Tsai's leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a "campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance" through state-of-the-art racial profiling.

Tsai has publicly defended some of China's most controversial policies. He described the government's brutal crackdown on dissent as necessary to promote economic growth; defended a law used to imprison scores of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong as necessary to squelch separatism; and, when questioned about human rights, asserted that most of China's 1.4 billion citizens are "happy about where they are." ...

Alibaba is "effectively state-controlled," according to a recent study on the company by Garnaut Global, an independent research firm that analyzes the Chinese Communist Party structure and China's technology footprint.

Under Tsai's leadership, Alibaba funded companies that helped China build "an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency," according to a 2020 congressional report.

Those technologies have been used widely in the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has forced more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities into barbed-wire "re-education" camps, policies that have been described as cultural "genocide" by the United States, several other countries and human rights organizations.

The matter merits further discussion.

A Richard Barrett moment

Says ELISION's note: "In physics and cosmology a world-line describes the path an object takes through four-dimensional spacetime. Here, the journey is marked by the energies of fifteen different vortices that fling the listener and performer ever outwards into new sonic dimensions . . . 'world-line' described as a 'cycle' is not some kind of Baroque suite. Rather, its sections are conceptualised as universes in which a 'particle' of sound in one position can potentially find non-linear connection to any other sound. Theoretical physics proposes a way of imagining musical relations that are emergent in nature also allowing for the contingency of improvisation and split-second responses in a complex notational net."