September 28, 2014 • 7:49 am Comments Off on A Taste of Josquin
To the extent that anything can be said to be the work of Josquin des Prez — so popular in his time, the gold standard of quality, that his “output” increased enormously after his death thanks to a flurry of false attributions.
Martin Luther remarked: “Josquin is the master of the notes, which must do as he dictates, while other composers must follow what the notes dictate.”
Filed under: Renaissance music
September 25, 2014 • 11:12 pm Comments Off on Become Ocean on CD
I had the fortune of spending an afternoon with the composer John Luther Adams in New York City last May, shortly after his Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral work Become Ocean received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall. (My article on this Seattle Symphony commission appears in the current issue of Listen magazine.)
And now the SSO’s recording with music director Ludovic Morlot has been released on Cantaloupe.
The spatial conception that informs JLA’s music really needs to be experienced in live performance, but you can get a decent impression of his aesthetic from the recording. This week NPR is making it available to listen to online for free.
Filed under: American music, John Luther Adams, Seattle Symphony
September 22, 2014 • 1:12 pm Comments Off on The Awesome Patricia Racette
Congratulations to Patricia Racette on receiving the San Francisco Opera Medal.
From Roger Pines’s recent interview with the soprano:
The city of San Francisco offers endless joys to Racette. She and her wife, mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton, have a ritual of taking their 16-year-old toy poodle, Sappho, to Ocean Beach. And, of course, the years have brought Racette many friends here: “Some of them I’ve known for the entire 25 years, and others have come into my life over the past few years. The only downfall is that I’m always here to work and find myself challenged with not enough time amidst rehearsals and performances to see everyone as much as I’d like!”
And then there is the San Francisco audience, for whom Racette feels immense affection: “There is both loyalty and passion, and I’m quick to remind that we do feel the energy of the audience when we’re on the stage. It really is palpable– you can just tell when the crowd is ‘with you.’ I’m lucky enough to sing around the world, but when I come back to San Francisco, I know that I’m home.”
And here she discusses her current role as the lead in Susannah at SF Opera:
Filed under: San Francisco Opera, singers
September 20, 2014 • 4:51 pm Comments Off on Seattle Symphony’s Dvořák-Fest Begins
Daniil Trifonov: (c) Dario Acosta
My review of the Seattle Season’s opening concert of the season — including pianist Daniil Trifonov’s spectacular SSO debut — is now live on Bachtrack:
Music by Antonín Dvořák was included on Ludovoc Morlot’s first-ever programme leading the Seattle Symphony, which took place in October 2009. At the time – two years before coming on board as music director – Morlot was a visiting conductor, and he offered the barest sampling of his thoughts on Dvořák (three of the Legends).
Filed under: conductors, piano, review, Seattle Symphony
September 20, 2014 • 9:12 am Comments Off on Absolute Literary Materialism
In his recent New Yorker profile of the Scottish writer James Kelman, James Wood contends that the no-frills, “absolute materialism” of Kelman’s prose — which he likens to Karl Ove Knausgård’s obsessive detail over daily rituals — “is rarely boring”
… partly because, like Knausgård, he simply proceeds AS IF the subject matter were interesting; and partly because, in writing as in most areas, limitation increases focus, and tends to irradiate necessity as if it were a luxury. This is the principle of prison writing, both in the literal sense (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) and in the figurative sense (Kafka’s allegories of imprisonment.
Filed under: aesthetics, literary criticism
September 19, 2014 • 4:26 pm Comments Off on Pollock and Cage
Animator Léo Verrier’s new Jackson Pollock-themed short (above) leads Colin Marshall to compare this film fantasy of the birth of Pollock’s famous technique with the real thing: “Chance may have led him to discover this practice, but it hardly means he gave up control.”
Marshall quotes another filmmaker, the maverick Stan Brakhage, on Pollock, who recalls a trip to visit the painter:
But they [some New York painters] were like commenting and the used they words ‘chance operations’ which was no bother to me because I was hearing it regularly from John Cage. And the power and the wonder of it and so forth . . . but this really angered Pollock very deeply and he said ‘Don’t give me any of your “chance operations”.’ He said, ‘You see that doorknob’ and there was a doorknob that was about fifty feet from where he was sitting that was in fact the door that everyone was going to have to exit be. and drunk as he was, he just with one swirl of his brush picked up a glob of paint, hurled it and hit that doorknob smack-on with very little paint over the edges. And then he said, ‘And that’s the way out.’
Meanwhile, in If Jackson Pollock Wrote Music, Kyle Gann explores the connections between Pollock and composers John Cage and Morton Feldman:
In the middle of the 20th century, the arts exploded into a new and unsettling realm of abstraction. Paintings were no longer paintings of something; they were simply paint. Music, too, was no longer about melody; it had abandoned the grounding in tonality that had been its mainstay for centuries. For some composers, notably John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, music was now about sound the way paintings were about paint.
Filed under: aesthetics, art, art history, film, modernist composers
September 17, 2014 • 8:50 am 1
The remarkable American composer George Walker started out his career with the intention of becoming a concert pianist, but the racism of the era hampered those plans.
And more’s the pity, given the evidence captured on Albany Records’ ongoing series of releases of Walker as composer and performer.
Here are some more YouTube uploads where you can sample Walker’s artistry at the keyboard:
Chopin: Polonaise in A-Flat Major, Op. 53:
Robert Schumann: Fantasia in C, Op. 17- First Movement:
September 15, 2014 • 11:01 am Comments Off on Titian’s Dog
In a recent article in The American Scholar — “Carnival of the Animals” — Jan Morris joins Ruskin in admiring the menagerie of non-human creatures in Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings.
“I have counted in his pictures 20 species of animals and at least 11 sorts of birds,” writes Morris, “plus a winged lion, a basilisk, cherubs, peculiarly multi-antlered stags, and sundry angels.”
This reminded me of another Venetian painter and his love of nature: the great Tiziano Vecellio. I spent an ecstatic afternoon last month at the exhibition Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Art at the Scottish National Gallery, which brought together Titian’s two Diana paintings as well as The Death of Actaeon — all part of his monumental mythological cycle of poesie canvases based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a vast commission by Philip II of Spain.
The detail above is from Diana and Actaeon (1556-59) and shows the goddess’s lap dog (a spaniel?) yelping at the male intruder who has unwittingly (so Ovid’s account goes) chanced upon the nude Diana and her nymphs as they are bathing in a spring.
Titian, Diana and Actaeon
Titian’s sequel painting narrates the denouement in which Diana curses the hapless Actaeon, causing him to be transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. Given this context, the nearly comic effect of Diana’s little toy dog shown in a frenzy is all the more startling.
Titian, Death of Actaeon
Filed under: aesthetics, art, art history, Titian
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MEMETERIA by Thomas May 