Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise - Music

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Lahti

I am in Lahti, Finland, to give a talk at the Lahti Symphony's Sibelius Festival. I've been wanting to visit since I encountered Osmo Vänskä's revelatory BIS recordings with this orchestra in the early nineties — the original version of...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest. Monteverdi, Vespro della beata Vergine; Renaud Brès, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Céline Scheen, Adrien Mabire, Perrine Devillers, Zachary Wilder, Marouan Mankar-Bennis, Antonin Rondepierre, Pierre Gallon, Raphaël Pichon leading the Ensemble Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi) Tchaikovsky, Symphony...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Liszt

The Greatest Showman. The New Yorker, Sept. 11, 2023.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Dream mattress

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Reinhard Febel moment

Reinhard Febel · slumberland Recently I revisited a 1988 Wergo disc devoted to Febel, who emerged in the nineteen-eighties as the practitioner of a quizzical, deconstructive approach to traditional tonal materials. At the time, I was particularly fascinated by his...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Notes on the Wagner Group

Photo: Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times. A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Revisiting Olin Downes

Continuing to catch up on recent issues of American Music, I read with great interest Carol A. Hess's article "'If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!': Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties," in...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Catherine Lamb moment

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The price of Price

In "Capitalism and the Future of American Classical Music Scholarship," an article for the Winter 2022 issue of American Music, musicologist Douglas Shadle writes about the challenges of performing Florence Price's music in the wake of an acquisition of her...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The end of Mostly Mozart

Requiem for a Festival. The New Yorker, Aug. 28, 2023.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Paulus Spongopoeus Gistebnicenus moment

In the 2001 edition of the New Grove, Gistebnicenus, also known as Pavel Jistebnický Spongopeus, was described as "arguably the most prolific Bohemian composer of his time."

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Geoff Nuttall's last recordings

The late Geoff Nuttall, the best thing to happen to North American chamber music since Yo-Yo Ma met Emanuel Ax, remained joyously active in his months, recording Haydn's "Emperor" and "Sunrise" Quartets with his beloved colleagues in the St. Lawrence...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Video commentary of note

Dave Hurwitz, "Why Black Composers Matter."

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Santa Fe Opera

Alfresco. The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2023. I've seen various premières and stagings at Santa Fe Opera over the years: Peter Lieberson's Ashoka's Dream, in 1997; Golijov's Ainadamar, in 2005, in the course of researching my long piece about Adams's...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Ligeti at the Bowl

Ligeti's Lux Aeterna wafts through the Cahuenga Pass at a showing of Kubrick's 2001 with live orchestra and chorus (the LA Phil and the sublime LA Master Chorale, under Caleb Young's direction). Previously: Kubrick and Ligeti.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Stuart MacRae moment

Featured on the new Delphian disc Earth, thy cold is keen.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Roadside memorial, Santa Fe

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Classical streaming revisited

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Ligeti meets Barbie

An unexpected and yet somehow inevitable conjunction. Photo credit: Amanda Ameer.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Notes on Oppenheimer and Doctor Atomic

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Marx meets Mahler

Groucho Marx and Anna Mahler, that is.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Biber in Sierra Madre

This Sunday, Los Angeles-area listeners will have a rare chance to hear Heinrich Biber's complete Rosary Sonatas, in the hands of the composer-violinist Andrew McIntosh. Maxine Eilander, on Baroque harp, and Ian Pritchard, on organ and harpsichord, will join him....

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Erstaunlich

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: At last a gentler day is dawning

I remain stuck on the new Cyrille Dubois album, which will certainly be one of my favorites of the year. Here, a meltingly lovely aria from Halévy's Les mousquetaires de la reine.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest. Liszt, Transcendental Etudes; Yunchan Lim (Steinway) So Romantique!: arias by Auber, Godard, Dubois, Thomas, Boieldieu, Halévy, Clapisson, Donizetti, Gounod, Luce-Varlet, Bizet, Silver, Delibes, Saint-Saëns; Cyrille Dubois, tenor, with Pierre Dumoussaud conducting the Orchestre National...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Am Grabe Tab Hunters

I had not realized his mother was German.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Frank's Frida y Diego, the Busoni Concerto

Lives of the Artists. The New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2023.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Haydn sings

Cyrille Dubois's bewitching new album So Romantique! includes an aria from Charles Luce-Varlet's L'élève de Presbourg, an opera about, yes, the young Haydn: "Come, O pure-breathed melody, / Come, azure-winged enchantress, / My heart yields to your sweet command. /...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Riley at 88

Here's video of a remarkable birthday tribute to Terry Riley recently organized by Evan Ziporyn: a live collaboration among eighty-eight people in sixty locations across twenty-three countries and six continents. The collective composition was called Poppy@88, after Riley’s 1967 piece...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Ernst Jünger

Aesthete of Steel. The New Yorker, July 3, 2023.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Liszt moment

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Andrew McIntosh's Fixations

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: In praise of John Williams

I greatly enjoyed speaking with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of the New Yorker Radio Hour, about the monumental film-scoring achievements of John Williams. I interviewed the composer in 2020, and visited him again a few...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Headline to remember

In my book Wagnerism, I mentioned the existence of a Russian mercenary group called Wagner, little imagining that it would grow in magnitude to the point of threatening a coup. Exactly what role the composer Wagner played in the formation...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Log-cabin minimalism

The MELA Foundation, which administers the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, is seeking donations to preserve the log cabin in which Young was born, in 1935, in Bern, Idaho. I'm amazed to hear that it still stands,...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Schindler's Program

For the journal Nonsite I've written an article about the origins of R. M. Schindler's "Modern Architecture: A Program," his visionary manifesto of 1912-13. While examining the Schindler Papers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I made an apparent...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Sciarrino, Saariaho

Sonic Signatures. The New Yorker, June 19, 2023.

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Marie Jaëll moment

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest. Byrd, Mass for Five Voices and other works; Owain Park leading The Gesualdo Six (Hyperion) Spontini, La Vestale; Marina Rebeka, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Tassis Christoyannis, Aude Extrémo, Nicolas Courjal, David Witczak, Christophe Rousset conducting...

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Uncollegiality at the Met

Zachary Woolfe writes about a strange recent incident at the Met: "Before 'Flute' opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s production, which raises the pit almost to stage level, lets the musicians see what’s going...