More Cool Stuff

Tyler Cabot's excellent profile of the composer Ricardo Romaneiro is up at the Esquire site. What's great is the illustration of Romaneiro's method--you can see how his compositions start as conventional notation and then, through a series of computerized translations, morph into a multi-colored map that is quite beautiful. Romaneiro's music--both his "electronica" and "classical" works--can be heard on his myspace page.

Ten Books, Two Women

The Times Book Review has announced its list of the ten best books of the year. Eight of them are by men, including all five of the novels (and Philip Roth was not among them).

Congrats to Alex Ross for making the list with The Rest is Noise. That book is a wonderful introduction to the music--classical music, I suppose one should say--of our time, written with the warmth and pluralistic outlook that grace his columns and blog. It's reassuring to know that the Times Book Review sees its worth. If anyone can bring this kind of music back into the cultural conversation, it's Ross.

The rest of the list looks equally worthy. Still, it's a surprise to see so few women on it.

A Veritable Musical Orgy

Well, that's what the reviewer at ResMusica says about a concert in Luxembourgh of excerpts from the Ring performed by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and conducted by the "truly inspired" Christian Thielemann. It's disappointing that as far as I can tell Thielemann won't be performing in New York City this season.

Measha: Come Back Soon!

I had tickets--front row, egad--for last night's recital by Measha Brueggergosman (proud native of New Brunswick, Canada) at Carnegie's Zankel Hall. It was one of the most enjoyable vocal recitals I've heard in a long time. Measha (prounounced "Me-sha," in case you were wondering) sang a program of cabaret songs by "serious composers"--Britten, Schoenberg, Bolcom--with some songs by Satie, Poulenc and Rorem sprinkled in. She sings this music with complete ownership, aided by her big personality and charming presence. Her voice sometimes sounds small, but since she expanded it convincingly in the spiritual she sang as an encore, it is hard to know whether that is a built-in feature or whether she was tailoring the size of her voice for the hall. It's a sweet, expressive voice, and her diction, especially in English, is superb; she makes every song a story, and conveys each song's spirit--playfulness, wistfulness, desire, sorrow--with real authority and conviction. She is such a delight that all I can ask is for her to come back to New York soon--real soon!--and put on another recital like this.

DG Online

Alex Ross has a great post on Deutsche Grammophon's new web store. One thing I'd like to add: if you are interested in doing as he has and downloading Kurtag's Stele, please avail yourself of the opportunity of also buying another "track" on that same CD, Stockhausen's magnificent Gruppen. This is one of the pieces that made a Stockhausen fan out of me; it's music that's planned to the last hemidemisemiquaver, but still manages to sound improvisatory (and dig the part for electric guitar). I hope that the DG people will add more from their large Stockhausen catalogue.

Plug

I'm now the Development Director for the Opera Company of Brooklyn, a dynamic group that secures opera's future by nurturing young singers and building new audiences. OCB likes to go where no opera company has gone before, and tonight it's putting on Tosca at a new development in Brooklyn, Northside Piers--in the building's garage (which will be suitably outfitted for the performance). There's a nice preview in today's Daily News.

Great News

First Sirius, then digitally-projected telecasts in movie theaters, and, now, on-demand television: the Met will be making its movie-theater transmissions available to homes with on-demand cable service, according to Variety. (The taped performance will then be made available for broadcast on PBS.) The first such transmission will be "Romeo et Juliette" in January. How cool is this? This is a win for everybody. The Met's initiatives in making their live performances more accessible have been imaginative and masterly. (via ArtsJournalMusic.)

How It Should Be Done

There are many reasons why Parterre Box is the best opera blog: it has juicy gossip, catty comments, and perceptive reviews. Like this review of Maria Guleghina as Norma, written by the avowed Guleghina partisan who goes by the caro nome of Gualtier Malde. Note how he discloses his fanaticism at the outset, and then proceeds to give an unblinkered account of how his idol fared. His long familiarity with her art allows him to write with great insight about both her strengths and failings--and with real style, too:

"Guleghina is often happiest when she can hurl her voice like steel javelins at the music - preferably in the higher range. Some of these vocal assaults miss the target but the energy and force is always exciting. However as Norma, Guleghina attempted many soft attacks, sustained piano singing and modulated phrasing. This in itself was admirable but years of daredevil oversinging are hard to shake off for one role. These piano phrases - including the opening and ending phrases of 'Casta Diva' - suffered from hollow, unsteady tones and fell short of the intended pitch."

Gualtier Malde's admission of his partisanship actually makes this a more balanced and convincing review.

The TLS Goes to See "Beowulf" ...

... and likes it! Carolyne Larrington, an Old-English scholar, has seen more film adaptations of the tale than anyone knew existed. "Zemeckis’s Beowulf is in touch with critical debate about the poem," we learn. And: "Beowulf [the film] tells us quite a lot about twenty-first-century anxieties about masculinity and power, and about the ways in which we reframe stories from our national past, but it is also rip-roaring fun." Read the whole thing here.

I Play Language Cop

When did an actor's performance in a movie start getting characterized as "work"? My first recollection of hearing this term is probably from some point in the 1990s--something like Mary Hart saying on "Entertainment Tonight" that some actor was up for an Oscar for "his work" in some movie. I dismissed it as an irritating kind of Hollywood press-release-ese, with its inferiority-complex-driven need to sound serious and substantial. (I guess a "performance" sounds somehow less authentic than a good day's "work.") But all the same, it's pretentious blather. There is nothing wrong with saying that a performer gives a "performance." I'm not denying it's work--of course it is work, but what is being analyzed or praised or trashed or in some way experienced by the viewer is not the work, but the performance.

That's why I get put on edge when I come across an actual writer, and not a publicist or entertainment reporter, using this term, as in this example: " ... L[aura] Linney ... does her naughtiest, most secretive work yet." That's from David Denby's review of The Savages in the December 3 New Yorker. Denby is such an effective stylist that he just gets away with this, but, gosh, I wish he had phrased it differently. Why not just say she is naughty and secretive? Saying she does naughty and secretive work makes it seem as though she's a CIA agent.

This is Cool

A very clever YouTuber has videoed Rainer Wehinger's "listening score" to Ligeti's 1957 electronic piece Artikulation and syncronized it to the music. Wehinger's score is a work of abstract beauty; following it to the music opens up a new understanding of Ligeti's procedures. (I especially like how Wehinger gives a shaded background for reverberating tones but leaves the space behind the more clipped or spliced tones blank.) I owe a tip of the hat to Musicareaction for the link.