Sabine Devieilhe, Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion: “Bach & Handel” (Erato) Sean Friar, NOW Ensemble: “Before and After” (New Amsterdam) Anthony Roth Costanzo, Justin Vivian Bond: “Only an Octave Apart” (Decca) All easygoing years are alike; each exhausting year is exhausting in its own way. For 2022, I can place my breaking point at West Elm Caleb. […]
Category: Columns
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Natural Instincts
Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard: “Mendelssohn Symphonies 1 & 3” (BIS) The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin: “Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3” (Deutsche Grammophon) Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, Yannick Nézet-Séguin: “Sibelius 3” (ATMA Classique) Yu Kosuge: “Four Elements: Water, Fire, Wind, and Earth” (Orchid Classics) Sarah Kirkland Snider, Gallicantus: “Mass for the Endangered” (New […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Vintage Prada and Snow
Lise Davidsen, Leif Ove Andsnes: “Grieg” (Decca) Christian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt: “Beethoven: Sonatas, Op. 30” (Ondine) Adam Tendler, Jenny Lin: “Liszt: Harmonies poétiques et religieuses” (Steinway) A line from Phoebe Stuckes that has (for lack of a better word) stuck with me in the turnover of a new year: “I want to be stinking drunk […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: Handel’s “Messiah”
“The effect is horrible: And everybody declares it sublime,” said George Bernard Shaw of the massed “Messiah” performances of the Victorian age. “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution…the audience stands up, as if in church, while the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus is being sung. It is the nearest sensation to the […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9
When I was in graduate school, I took an advanced musicianship class, which mainly demonstrated that I was not an advanced musician. One of the components was ear training and dictation. Our task was usually to notate a series of dense chords and tricky modulations the teacher played from the piano. One class, she played […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: “Eine Alpensinfonie”
When talking about films and filmmakers he admired, French New Wave legend François Truffaut said, “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: “The Four Seasons”
Here’s a reason to hate “The Four Seasons”: I last heard “Spring”—unbidden—as I passed through east London’s Walthamstow Bus Station during a routine commute home. Realizing that piping classical music into its stations was a cost-effective means to deter young people from hanging around, Transport for London started playing Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven in 2006. Since […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: “Boléro”
If you remember the 1980s, you remember Ravel’s “Boléro.” Although the work became a fixture on orchestral programs shortly after its premiere in 1928, the ’80s was arguably the decade of peak “Boléro” saturation, bookended by the soundtrack for the 1979 Dudley Moore comedy, “10,” and Frank Zappa’s 1991 album, “The Best Band You Never […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”
There’s a scene in UK sitcom “Peep Show” where Mark, a socially-awkward credit manager rapidly approaching middle age, finds himself at a history professor’s private soirée, despite his never studying history and living hundreds of miles away—all in the desperate pursuit of a woman who was nice to him, once, in a shoe shop. Professor […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: The “1812 Overture”
When Tolstoy began working on what would become War and Peace, his 1869 opus that moves fluidly between historical novel and philosophical treatise, he initially had a completely different story in mind. Rather than craft a constellation of parallel and intersecting histories between 1805 and 1820 (with a particular focus on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of […]