The harpsichordist and ensemble leader William Christie could quite easily be mistaken for a patrician, 1960s-era CIA operative out of Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost. Yesterday morning, he was wearing a fitted black suit, blue shirt, beige pocket square, and polka dot socks, and spoke in aristocratic American English that clearly recalled his days studying […]
Posted inInterview
Sound Travels Surgically
Suzanne Farrin’s “La Dolce Morte” sets love poetry Michelangelo wrote to the young nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, after their meeting in 1532. The monodrama was performed again on December 8-9 2017 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Vélez Blanco Patio. The countertenor Eric Jurenas performed the central role in collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble. […]
Posted inEssay
Marble and Marzipan
40 years ago, Wolfgang Hildesheimer wrote a long-form essay, Mozart, that freed his namesake from the marble of statues and the marzipan coatings of candies. The open-ended structure of the work makes so much new writing look older than its years. Every time a new book comes out, it eclipses 10 older ones. One may […]
Posted inEssay
Silence, Breaking
When I was 12 years old, James Levine began his tenure as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My father was a cellist there. This is not an essay about abuse—I never met James Levine. This is an essay about what happens when knowledge is warped by a cult of interpretive genius. It is […]
Posted inReview
I Tried To Study With “Classical Music for Studying” Videos
While discussing what would or would not be permitted in their Kallipolis, the hypothetical philosopher’s state, Plato and Socrates decided that music should for the most part be banished altogether. Today, music can accompany you at every single moment of your life: YouTube is full of classical concerts and playlists for sleeping, running, waking up, […]
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Juste
While this might not be the moment that all of us have been waiting for, it’s certainly titillating to catalogue another casualty report in the Harpsichord Wars. In March, Mahan Esfahani hurled a set of observations (some say accusations) against the mainstream harpsichord world, among them shortsightedness, conservatism, as well as a pervasive fear of […]
Posted inEssay
Before Leaving this Place
When Gounod brought his “Faust” to London five years after its world premiere in 1859, there was one devil lurking in the details: venerated baritone Charles Santley was singing Valentin—the soldier brother of Marguerite who is killed by his sister’s lover (and the work’s title character)—but despite his fame he had no aria to sing. […]
Posted inInterview
Movement/Stasis
One of Jessica Ekomane’s works imagines what a church bell might sound like inside a baby’s mouth; another explores our perception of rhythm through a spatial field with quadrophonic sound. The later example was from a performance at the We Make Waves festival a couple of weeks ago in Berlin, an event that was fully […]
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Music Of An Earlier Time
Wait, is it the Monteverdi year? Help. I can’t get on social media without seeing Instagram theorbos, videos of madrigals by fellow early music noobs, or another of review of “Orfeo” pretending it’s a new work. In particular, Sir John Eliot Gardiner (known by some as Jiggy) has made a splash this year by taking […]
Posted inInterview
Suspended States
In October, Erstwhile Records released a recording of the Swiss composer Jürg Frey’s six hour tape piece “l’àme est sans retenue I.” I took this opportunity to revisit and translate a conversation we had in August 2016 via Skype. VAN: Your piece “A Memory of Perfection,” for solo violin, takes its title from an interview […]