Has it actually been 15 days since the last post? Yes? Okay. Must improve. A few random updates:
Courtesy of Alex Ross, we now have das Mahlerblög, with Mahler’s publisher Universal Edition sitting down with the likes of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, and Daniele Gatti to schoot the breeze about Gustav.
The Chicago Symphony’s Dvorak Festival (DVOUR DVORAK 2009) is entering its final week, and there’s a lively discussion on CSO Resound’s Facebook page about how you would go about commemorating that on a recording. So go become a FAN. The page is maintained by some daffy arts administrator.
The League of American Orchestras had its annual conference in Chicago last week at the historic (by which I mean ART DECO EVERYWHERE) Palmer House Hotel, and it came off pretty well, I think. A panel on the future of philanthropy was notable for Boeing’s representative cutting through the ambiguous conference haze and saying, “You should know that corporations don’t exist to fund your arts organization.” Boeing, by the way, sponsors eighth blackbird’s concerts at the Harris Theater, ICE’s frequent Chicago apperances, and underwrote Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Nixon in China in 2006. There was, of course, a conference blog.
Looking ahead, the CSO announced its MusicNOW series for next season, and the stylistic net seems to be getting wider all the time. An 85th birthday concert for Pierre Boulez in February 2010 features commissions from Dai Fujikura and Johannes Boris Borowski, along with four (count ‘em) works of Boulez’s own (Structures II, Messagequisse, Dialogue de l’ombre double and Anthemes II). Pierre-Laurent Aimard gets credit for the assist and CSO musicians take on the other soloists duties.
Beyond Boulez are concerts and demonstrating that stylistical widening I was talking about are works by Richard Rodney Bennett and Frederick Rzewski, as well as Gyorgy Kurtag, whose Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova should be fantastic. The master’s Scenes from a Novel showed up in 2002 and left me spellbound. And the series closes with a bill split between John Luther Adams, composer of some of the slowest-moving music ever written, and Osvaldo Golijov, also a composer of some of the slowest-moving music ever written. Beer and pizza to follow.
Sign up for EMI Classic’s Club and you can hear new releases from the Artemis Quartet (Piazzolla), Piotr Anderszewski (the pianist’s Carnegie Hall recital), and Paavo Jarvi’s extremely intriguing Mahler movements disc, with Mahler’s four stand-along movements played by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Those would be Blumine, cut from the First Symphony; Todtenfeier, a draft of the Second Symphony; the finished Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony; and Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of “What the Wild Flowers Tell Me.” Purists will be outraged, and the impure among us can have, as usual, a good time.
Lastly, Jonathan Lethem has a new novel out in October, titled Chronic City. (Excerpt here.) Since it is 480 pages, I think it is officially a tome, having crossed over from mere book status somewhere around page 425.
I love that line on John Luther Adams’s site spelling out one piece’s duration:
“6 hours.”