I Play Assignment Editor

I'm just going to say it: Larissa MacFarquhar is the best profile-writer there is. No intellect is too forbidding, no cranky genius is too crazy, no idea is too recondite for her. Her recent profile of Louis Auchincloss--not online as far as I can tell--brought to life Auchincloss, his world, and his oeuvre, with subtlety and penetration.

So I began thinking ... whom I would like to see MacFarquhar profile next? And then I thought: Jaromir Jagr. OK, so you are thinking my hockey obsession has gotten the best of me. But hear me out. Jagr is the intellectual of hockey players. Who better than MacFarquhar to explain how he ticks, and, at the same time, illuminate the world of hockey?

It's late, and this could be one of those fevered ideas that will seem only embarrassing in the morning. But why not toss it out there into the noosphere and see what happens?

Nico Muhly: Correction

A kind reader emails me that The New Yorker did indeed post Rebecca Mead's Nico Muhly article on their website--it's just not accessible from their contents page. Here is the link. My apologies to The New Yorker for my snarky comment.

The reader who let me know of my error has her own blog. It reports on new music and shows how far is the reach of Nico Muhly's "ecumenical" (Mead's word) appeal. She has some fun Muhly stuff as well.

Nico Muhly

The New Yorker's web site still feels there is something to be gained by withholding content, so Rebecca Mead's beautifully written profile of the young New York-based composer Nico Muhly can only be found in the print version. Seek it out; it's worth reading, not just for its introduction to the work of this prodigy, but for Mead's masterly (one is tempted to say Rossian) descriptions of just how his music sounds. (She speaks of one of the techniques employed in Muhly's concerto for orchestra and electrified violin as "bouncing the bow across the strings to create an aural ricochet.")

Muhly is part of that current--I don't think it's quite right to call it a movement, as its practitioners would no doubt object to such a term--that locates in the space otherwise known as "classical" an aesthetic that encompasses influences and associations from across a wide musical spectrum. (One could place Schlimé in that space as well.)

The New Yorker web site does at least post a generous selection of Muhly's works. The aforementioned violin concerto, complete with those "aural ricochets," is featured. It's a languid piece that always seems about to veer into sheer prettiness but manages not to. It is clear that Muhly truly is an inheritor of both minimalism and the American eclectic tradition, but those tendencies are so deeply assimilated that the music never sounds derivative or recherché.

Muhly also has a web site, where he muses in an engagingly overstimulated way. And there's a MySpace page, which I leave you to find for yourselves.

Visualizing Hansel

Lorenzo Mattotti gets it: his beautiful, scary, mystery-laden images inspired by Hansel und Gretel are on view at the Gallery Met, which teamed up with New Yorker cartoonists to mount an exhibit in connection with the Met's new production. Mattoti's images capture the story's sense of foreboding, and the wide-angle perspectives make the viewer feel small, childlike, and vulnerable. The New Yorker web site has an online slide show of the drawings and paintings from the exhibit. Edward Koren's and Jules Feiffer's contributions are also atmospheric and not merely decorative, but Mattotti seems to feel about the story the way I do.