After writing 9,000 words on the “Ring” cycle, I thought that maybe I’d finally be done thinking about it. For a while, I was. Then, after what would be a two-month break in my obsession, I decided to return to something I wanted to write about at the time but never got to. During the […]
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Unwind, Unwound
Taken to orchestral concerts as a child, I was restless. The complexity and vast architectures of a typical Romantic symphony made me think of the music as some fractal maze, wholly illegible in its ever-shifting textures and bombastic pronouncements of brass-laden grandeur. It felt like sound and fury signifying nothing. Then came the slow movement. […]
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They Toll For Thee
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
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A Feast of Symbols
Lighting up mid-conversation, Murat Erginol sat at a coffee shop in the breezy, open-air halls of Atatürk Culture Center, Istanbul’s premier performing arts complex. Erginol, wispily bearded and quick to smile, is, among other accolades, first violinist of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Turkey’s many privately sponsored ensembles. Then rehearsing “The Four Seasons” by […]
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Democracy of Dreams
Earlier this year, my piano teacher—by my side through the years I spent inching through “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” treating Bach’s counterpoint like moral instruction—sent me a lullaby she had composed for my daughter, who was not yet born. The audio arrived by text message one morning. She wrote that she had been thinking about the […]
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The Long and Winding Road
It didn’t take long for a planning fail to become a planning win. As an American who’s lived in the UK for almost 13 years, booking trips to visit family should have been second nature, but I’d screwed up my return flight booking between Austin and Glasgow, and had no choice but to rebook entirely, […]
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The Götterdämmerung of It All!
I’ve long accepted the fact that I am one of tens of thousands of people who suffer from Wagner derangement syndrome. Many people listen to or watch the works of Wagner, but only an errant few become lifers. Given the sheer baggage of Wagner and the irksome coincidence of our shared surname, this is, of […]
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A Scene Through The Screen
Settling into my seat—a leftover single seat between two couples in a row of five in the top balcony—I look down on the Polaroid-shaped frame of the Metropolitan Opera stage. The sight is familiar. I’ve seen the upright rectangle of the stage, the bursting chandeliers, and the deep red of the auditorium seats many times […]
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God’s Time
On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts […]
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Sitting Down, Standing Up
His very first composition journal is dated 1983, one year after completing his university studies in Vienna and so the first year he could properly consider himself a composer. Peter Ablinger was forever putting things in varying piles and compartments, time and space very much included. “Sometimes I think I might have been an archivist […]