I. It opens mid-motion, as if caught unraveling. A noise, brisk and grained, emerges from the second violin, bow hairs pressed against string. Col legno: The cello draws the wooden back of the bow upward and then down—a rustle makes itself heard and is gone. Now the second violin traces light, oblique arcs, upward, then […]
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Posted inBreaking
Emails Raise Questions About Conductor’s Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
“I found a great girl for your next stay in Paris,” the conductor Frédéric Chaslin wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in September 2013. Chaslin told the financier, who first pleaded guilty of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008, that the girl was a 21-year-old philosophy student who spoke three […]
Posted inEssay
Bartók and Janáček At the End of Liberal Society
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing, but a new order remained uncertain, two extraordinary musical works grappled with questions now central to our understanding of the 20th-century political catastrophe. Bartók’s “The Wooden Prince” (1914–16) and Janáček’s “Taras Bulba” (1915–18) help us understand the cultural and ideological forces that prepared the ground for totalitarianism and the end of liberal society […]
Posted inReview
The Days of Change
There is always something cathartic in Richard Strauss’s “Salome.” Perhaps it’s the portrayal of a woman’s wrath which is not entirely unjustified, given the seething remarks of her ill-fated love interest, in turn not so far off from how men talk to women on the site formerly known as Twitter these days. Perhaps it’s the ultimate comeuppance […]
Posted inProfile
The Sensations of Disconnection
It was a rainy afternoon in an autumnal London as conductor-composer Jack Sheen tuned the quietude of Gerard Grisey’s “Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil.” The performers, the London Sinfonietta and soprano Nina Guo, were receptive as he worked with them to uncover hidden acoustic relationships, finding sounds that were at once full and soft, […]
Posted inReport
The Rough Joy
Western classical music is often thought of as placeless: a grammar of sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere, drifting free of soil, climate, history, on some variation of Henry Russell Cleveland’s axiom from 1835, that “Music begins where language ends.” There is, we tell ourselves, a Schumann for all seasons. Africa, by contrast, is so […]
Posted inEssay
“Something that has to do with … leaving … ”
Between the winter of 1950–51, when he began mapping out a series of “Projections” in squares on graph paper, and the attenuating final breath of “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” in 1987, there were fewer than 37 years. Between then and the centenary that falls on January 12 this year, there have been 39. We have […]
Posted inEssay
Listening to Classical Music in Recovery
Long before I became addicted to—or had even tasted—alcohol, I was hooked on music. Ever since discovering classical music’s mood-altering effects at the age of ten, while listening to the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s “Requiem,” I had abused it like a hardened junkie, turning to it constantly to regulate moods over which I had increasingly little […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: Andrea Bocelli
Even by internet standards, opera fans have a gift for hyperbole. A soprano isn’t “good”; she “is the divine prima donna assoluta” or “shines eternal light into descending trills, chromatic scales, and laser Cs.” She doesn’t “miss a note”; she is “a HORROR SHOW!!! The WOBBLE is out of control.” But when American soprano Jennifer […]
Posted inEssay
Music From the Inside of the Sun
Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that […]