In the flesh

Reviewing Schola Cantorum Boston.
Boston Globe, December 16, 2014.

You belong with

This Year's Model (or, That's What They Don't See). On In C, Taylor Swift, Heinrich Heine, Nazarene painters, Duke Ellington, and the canon.
NewMusicBox, December 12, 2014.

Universal adapter

Reviewing Charles Rosen, The Complete Columbia and Epic Album Collection.
Boston Globe, December 7, 2014.

Arrival gate

Boston: Passports and Layovers. Reviewing the Lorelei Ensemble and Roomful of Teeth.
NewMusicBox, December 5, 2014.

Something borrowed, something blue

Reviewing Odyssey Opera.
Boston Globe, November 24, 2014.

Squeeze theorem

Reviewing an evening with Michael Pisaro.
Boston Globe, November 13, 2014.

Organic fruit

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 11, 2014.

Reflecting telescope

Reviewing Richard Goode.
Boston Globe, November 4, 2014.

Back issues

I haven't updated this space for several months now, for a lot of reasons. I've been writing elsewhere. I've been trying to compose. I've been out of town. I've been....

Eh, who am I kidding? This is why I haven't been updating:

Which is not to say I haven't been working, though. So, in a bout of real-work avoidance, I've at least gone back and filled in a bunch of links from the interregnum—Boston Globe reviews, NewMusicBox articles, other appearances here and there. I've also compiled a master list of all the "Score" columns I've written for the Globe over the past couple years. (Links to that list and my NewMusicBox articles are now in the sidebar, too.) Critic-at-Large Moe (pictured above, on left) would like you to know that he, too, has not been idle.

Anyway, a drink. This one is named in honor of Henri Poincaré, since I was reading a biography of him, and full of grapefruit, because I love grapefruit.

3-Sphere

First, make some grapefruit-infused gin: add the peel (no pith) and juice of one grapefruit to 500ml of gin, let it steep for a week, then strain it through a coffee filter.

Then, combine:

2 oz. grapefruit-infused gin
1 oz. grapefruit juice
½ oz. Cocchi Americano
a couple dashes of grapefruit bitters

Stir with cracked ice and strain into the closest thing you have to a non-Euclidean glass.

XL Tall

Reviewing Dinosaur Annex.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2014.

Reverb and chorus

Boston: A Fight for Love and Glory—Pipeline! at 25. Reviewing Crazy Alice, Quintaine Americana, Kudgel, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, and Bulkhead.
NewMusicBox, October 16, 2014.

Δισσος μυθος

Sounds Heard: Christian Wolff, Pianist: Pieces.
NewMusicBox, October 14, 2014.

Chic and unique with lots of kick like a cleat

Reviewing Mark Padmore and Jonathan Biss.
Boston Globe, October 14, 2014.

Diplomatic passage

An interview with David Grubbs.
Boston Globe, October 9, 2014.

Blink comparator

Reviewing Stefan Jackiw and Anna Polonsky.
Boston Globe, October 7, 2014.

Dress for success

Reviewing the Parker Quartet.
Boston Globe, October 2, 2014.

Makers' Mark

For Guerilla Opera, every production is a premiere.
Boston Globe, September 20, 2014.

Afterimage

Reviewing the Eroica Trio.
Boston Globe, September 16, 2014.

Alternating current

Reviewing Akiko Hatakeyama.
Boston Globe, September 11, 2014.

This powerful magnet, that left 'em stagnant

Sound and Fury. Reviewing Jan Swafford's Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.
The American Scholar, Autumn 2014.

Look and feel

Style Points.
NewMusicBox, August 27, 2014.

Spin the dial

Sounds Heard: The Things We Did [This] Summer. Pulitzer Prize Fighter, BMOP, Lewis Spratlan, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, Neil Cicierega, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
NewMusicBox, August 5, 2014.

Book of Judges

Tanglewood: Sessions and Lessons on Successful Composition. Further thoughts prompted by the 2014 FCM.
NewMusicBox, July 28, 2014.

Piece work

Reviewing the 2014 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
Boston Globe, July 23, 2014.

Out of this world

Reviewing Thomas Hampson and Wolfram Rieger.
Boston Globe, July 18, 2014.

Pipe and Drum

Reviewing Aston Magna.
Boston Globe, July 13, 2014.

United nations

Boston: SICPP's Love and Geometry. Reviewing the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice.
NewMusicBox, June 26, 2014.

Hue and cry

Reviewing Nino Jvania and Stockhausen's Natürliche Dauern.
Boston Globe, June 18, 2014.

Flip the switch

Boston: Bromp Treb Busts the Matrix.
NewMusicBox, June 16, 2014.

Nice 'n' Easy

Reviewing Grand Harmonie's Il re pastore.
Boston Globe, June 16, 2014.

Positive to Great

The Radical Virtuoso. A profile of Paul Jacobs.
Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2014.

Eager to please, ready to fight

Reviewing the Borromeo Quartet and Lawrence Lesser.
Boston Globe, june 15, 2014.

Ghost in the Shell

Reviewing Ken Ueno's Gallo.
Boston Globe, June 2, 2014.

Voice leading

Boston: Caroline Shaw's Common Cause. Reviewing A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth.
NewMusicBox, May 21, 2014.

Wheel and spoke

Sounds Heard: Meredith Monk, Piano Songs.
NewMusicBox, May 13, 2014.

Elementary

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, May 6, 2014.

Calling cards

Who invented "Heavy Metal"? On musical genre names.
Boston Globe, May 4, 2014.

Magnetic moment

Boston: Practice Sessions. Reviewing Keeril Makan's Letting Time Circle Through Us and Bernard Rands' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
NewMusicBox, April 15, 2014.

Boats against the current

New England's Prospect: Beyond the Sea. Reviewing Matthew Ritchie's Monstrance/Remonstrance.
NewMusicBox, April 8, 2014.

Return key

Reviewing Emmanuel Music and Russell Sherman.
Boston Globe, April 1, 2014.

Screen Gems

New England's Prospect: The Gift of Sound and Vision. Reviewing Ben Russell and Robert A. A. Lowe.
NewMusicBox, March 28, 2014.

Concentration

Reviewing the Arditti Quartet.
Boston Globe, March 25, 2014.

The Go-Between

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yefim Bronfman, and Christoph von Dohnányi.
Boston Globe, March 17, 2014.

Tokens of esteem

Reviewing Marc-André Hamelin, Anthony Marwood, and Alexander Fiterstein.
Boston Globe, May 5, 2014.

Friends and relations

New England's Prospect: The Agnosticism of Boston's Equilibrium Concert Series. Reviewing Boston Modern Brass.
NewMusicBox, March 3, 2014.

Swing shift

Reviewing Quatour Ébène.
Boston Globe, March 3, 2014.

Hot House Flowers

Reviewing Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace.
Boston Globe, February 25, 2014.

Unwrapped

New England's Prospect: Boston Symphony Chamber Players Celebrate 50 Years.
NewMusicBox, February 18, 2014.

Thicker than water

Drinks below! But first, some catch-up:

New England's Prospect: Three World Premieres. Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
NewMusicBox, January 28, 2014.

Reviewing Kirill Gerstein.
Boston Globe, February 3, 2014.

Score: Toshirō Mayuzumi, on screen and in the right-wing arena.
Boston Globe, February 9, 2014.

Score: "Will You Walke the Woods So Wilde" and the ways of musical celebrity.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2014.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing West Side Story.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2014.

While you read, here's a little something—chewy and fruity in equal parts—to get you through this last stretch of winter and into spring.

Thorolf's Bowl

1 oz. aquavit
1 oz. Cynar
1 oz. lemon juice
½ oz. blood orange-rosemary cordial (see below)
dash of orange bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into something that'll look good sitting on your sacrificial altar.

For the blood orange-rosemary cordial:

1 cup blood orange juice
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon rosemary
½ cup or so of blood orange peels (without the pith)

Combine in a pot and bring to a boil; simmer until reduced to about a cup of liquid. Strain out the rosemary and peels.

Death and Transfiguration

Score: Luciano Berio and heroic mythology. O King, the Sinfonia, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Boston Globe, January 25, 2014.

I also forgot to link to last week's effort:

Score: A real-life diva gave Tosca some of its flavor. A menu via Sarah Bernhardt and Auguste Escoffier.
Boston Globe, January 18, 2014.

Group theory

New England's Prospect: Fellow Travelers. Reviewing the Fifth Floor Collective.
NewMusicBox, January 24, 2014.

It ain't fiction, just a natural fact

Reviewing Jeremy Denk.
Boston Globe, January 14, 2014.

Two weeks into 2014, and this recital has already earned a spot on my year-end best list.

Wherefore, O wherefore

Score: Behind a Copland experiment, a ethnomusicological pioneer. On Joel Engel.
Boston Globe, January 12, 2014.

While you read, you can listen to me play (and occasionally stumble) through Engel's "A Nigun" (op. 19, no. 1):

Enduro

Score: the Atari 2600 and the Phrygian mode.
Boston Globe, January 5, 2014.

This might be my favorite one of these columns so far. Oh, and I forgot to link to one over the holidays:

Score: Paul Whiteman's Eighth Experiment in Modern Music.
Boston Globe, December 22, 2013.

One more? One more:

New England's Prospect: May All Your Christmases Be Weird.
NewMusicBox, December 23, 2013.

A yuletide respite, courtesy of Weirdo Records.

Call rival out, initially; swords cross in challenge! (9)

New Music Boxes: Another Year's Gone By.
An occasionally topical crossword for NewMusicBox, December 18, 2013.

Also, what with the holiday rush, I forgot to link to this month's Score columns:

Score: Walter Marchetti's precision troublemaking.
Boston Globe, December 14, 2013.

Score: Ceremon[ies] of Carols and the collecting impulse.
Boston Globe, December 7, 2013.

Score: the crafty respectability of John Knowles Paine.
Boston Globe, November 30, 2013.

Beat the clock

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
NewMusicBox, November 25, 2013.

Reviewing Discovery Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 26, 2013.

Something's coming

Guerrieri: Zeal and Patience (2013) (PDF, 73 Kb)



Hey, Matthew, did you pencil in a new Advent introit for this year and then forget to write it until the last possible minute?

Of course nooooeeeeeh, maybe.

To be sure, we hadn't been doing the last one for a while, and even the really-for-Lent substitution was getting a little musty, so out with the old, &c. I figured I'd put it up here for anyone whose church-music planning is as behindhand as mine.

In my apostatical way, I've always thought that Advent is the church-calendar equivalent of a cult movie. Most people just want to cruise right past it into Christmas, but there is a hardy band that's all "seriously, this is some of Carl Weathers' best work" (or whatever the theological equivalent of Carl Weathers is) and watches everybody else jump to yuletide conclusions with a kind of benevolent pity. But honestly, with Christmas colonizing more and more of the calendar—even as I was assembling Hallowe'en supplies this year, most stores already had Christmas displays—Advent is taking on the aspect of some weird temporal origami: a kind of of Marvel-comics-like pocket dimension, a pleasantly disconnected parallel limbo to the normal time-space continuum of conspicuous consumption.

Into the blue again

More concerts seen and considered:

Anniversary Waltzes: Kronos Quartet and Community MusicWorks in Providence.
NewMusicBox, November 18, 2013.

Reviewing Joshua Bell.
Boston Globe, November 19, 2013.

(Also, from last week: a NewMusicBox review of the new Alvin Lucier orchestra-works CD.)

I have two more articles to get out the door today, so of course I woke up and instead did this:

My skill at time management: same as it ever was.

Do You Remember?

Score: Musical memorials to JFK, explicit and implicit.
Boston Globe, November 17, 2013.

Cut-for-space fun fact: In 1965, the Beach Boys played a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—their first college performance on the east coast—headlining a fundraiser for a "JFK Room" at the school, "a room which would be filled with 'books written for Americans by Americans.'"

(Click to enlarge. Source.) I am not sure the JFK Room was ever actually built.

Done Changed

arr. Guerrieri: The Angels Changed My Name (2013) (PDF, 213 Kb)



Sometimes, you (and, by you, I mean I) want to color in an otherwise nice spiritual arrangement with every crayon in the chromatic box. In spite of myself, I think this one is not bad. I actually wrote it back in September, but gave it the benefit of two months of edits via rehearsal and, this past Sunday, performance (by this faithful crew). Which went well! Except for the recording, which is why there is a computer-realized placeholder until a) I get a good recording, or b) I tweak the realization so it's less clunky. (Unsurprisingly, neither is likely in the near-term.)

This tune has, itself, after a fashion, changed its name a fair amount. I used the version in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers (1880), which I think is the earliest version in print. (Marsh's book is a really interesting document of the push-pull of trying to write about the African-American experience for white 19th-century readers—the story is told pretty much exclusively through the eyes of white observers, but then Marsh includes biographical sketches of each of the Jubilee Singers, which is by far the most fascinating part of the book.) Probably working from Marsh's version, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor included an arrangement of "The Angels Changed My Name" in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, published in 1905; when Coleridge-Taylor sent a copy to his former teacher, Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, Stanford replied that the tune was, in his estimation, almost certainly Irish in origin. In 1939, Harry T. Burleigh reworked the tune into the hymn tune "McKee," altering the contour to fit the words "In Christ There Is No East or West," by English writer William Arthur Dunkerley. For his part, Dunkerley, too, enjoyed changing his name—he also wrote journalism under the name Julian Ross, and poetry and fiction under the name John Oxenham—a surname Dunkerley's daughter Elsie, a successful writer of children's books, also adopted.

A look that time can't erase

The New York Festival of Song celebrates Ned Rorem's 90th.
NewMusicBox, November 11, 2013.

We're putting the band back together

A double dose from yesterday's paper:

Previewing Gruppen at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

The performance itself was marvelous, incidentally.

Score: Mozart and Salieri, yet again.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

One little word shall fell him

Score: The pilgrim's progress of "Ein feste Burg."
Boston Globe, November 2, 2013.

The Fast and the Curious

Score: Jonathan Swift and the annoyance of music.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2013.

A talk with Krzysztof Penderecki.
Boston Globe, October 29, 2013.

Formula One

Reviewing Yuja Wang.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2013.

Politics by other means

Score: Marie Fel in the midst of the Querelle.
Boston Globe, October 19, 2013.

He was old, he was young

Reviewing Corey Cerovsek and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, October 15, 2013

Carry high the Blue and Gold

Attention, upper Midwesterners: I am pleased and flattered to be part of this year's Chippewa Valley Book Festival, which will find me at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this coming Monday, October 14 at 7:00 PM. I will be talking, of course, about the only book I have managed to write, which means some far-flung Beethovenian tangents. Fun for all ages! Unless the subject of the Minnesota Orchestra Association comes up, in which case the fun will rapidly turn NC-17 (language).

The Eau Claire Bears! I do hope to make a pilgrimage to Carson Park, in honored memory of Andy Pafko.

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian

Score: Mauricio Kagel's elegant sabotage.
Boston Globe, October 12, 2013.

I know I've been terrible about linking to my various writings in this space, but this "Score" column is something that's been going on for a few months now: the Globe lets me do a calendrical riff on something each week: a concert, an anniversary, a piece of repertoire. The list so far:

October 5: Jehan Alain and the Battle of Saumur
September 28: Carlo Gozzi and The Love for Three Oranges
September 21: The Legendary Pink Dots and the theology of psychedelia
September 14: Henry Brant's 100th
August 31: Frederic Fradkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's one and only strike
August 24: Duck That! and other musical birdcalls
August 17: Alfred Hitchcock's Waltzes from Vienna
August 10: Joseph Schuster and other mistaken identities
July 27: The precarious political life of Cardinal Francesco Barbarini
July 13: John Jacob Astor, piano salesman
July 6: The Lyricon and its adherents
June 29: Francis Hopkinson, revolutionary and composer
June 22: The Pythian Games and the birth of music competitions
June 16: Early music connecting Boston and Bloomsday
June 8: John Cage's Variations III
June 1: The Bach family, for multiple hands
May 27: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Hollywood moment
May 23: K. 550 and a Bollywood pioneer

Oh, how the ghost of you clings

Reviewing Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, October 7, 2013.

Werk ohne Opuszahl 1

As you might have noticed, this space has been quiet for some time now. That is because we have been preparing Soho the Dog HQ for the arrival of our newest critic-at-large. We are pleased to welcome Helena Beatrice Kim Guerrieri, 8 pounds, 1 ounce. Her in-depth opinions on all things musical will be posted here as she sees fit to make them known. I can tell you that, in the womb, she was particularly fond of drums and bel canto tenor squillo. The future seems loud.

One of the more surreal and absurd things about expecting a child in 21st-century America—believe me, the competition is fierce—is that seemingly every pregnancy guide in the known universe insists on tracking weekly gestational development in terms of fruits and vegetables. Your fetus is the size of a blueberry! Your fetus is the size of a pear! Your fetus is the size of a casaba melon! Apart from making one's impending progeny sound like the product of some dystopian science-fiction hydroponics experiment, that isn't even accurate from a materials-science standpoint: I began to long for a pregnancy guide with at least enough integrity to say that our fetus was the size of, say, a haggis. At any rate, as we were running this gauntlet of comparative produce, I marked off the weeks by making a commemorative drink engineered around each week's fruit. This one was by far the best. It is surely only a coincidence that it is also by far the strongest. It is rather like parenthood itself: cool and sweet at first, but within minutes, you will be wondering just what it is you have gotten yourself into.

Helena B

2 oz high-proof rye whiskey
2 oz lemon juice
1½ oz peach liqueur (I like Mathilde)
1 oz black rum
1 oz pineapple juice

Shake all ingredients with a good handful of crushed ice, then turn, ice and all, into a big tall glass. Fill the rest of the way with seltzer.

Sync all devices

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, May 14, 2013.

Hopefully it's fixed by the time you click the link, but, if not, yes, Schubert's String Quintet is D. 956, not K. 956. At least I didn't give it a Hoboken number.

Every bright description of the promised land

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 13, 2013.

How It's Made

Reviewing Evgeny Kissin.
Boston Globe, April 23, 2013.

We've taken to you so strong

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, April 15, 2013.

The very model

Reviewing Stile Antico.
Boston Globe, April 8, 2013.

Viewfinder

Reviewing Jonathan Biss.
Boston Globe, March 25, 2013.

Incidentally, to the guy who stomped the end of Davidsbündlertänze into the ground by bellowing "BRAVO" while the last chord was still hanging in the air: please don't ever do that again. Thank you!

Competitions

Трудно высказать и не высказать
Все, что на сердце у меня.

It is hard to express, and hard to hold back,
Everything that is in my heart.

—Mikhail Matusovsky, "Подмосковные вечера" ("Moscow Nights")

The last time I heard Van Cliburn live was in 1998, at Tanglewood, when he played Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In the last-minute scramble for student seats in the Shed, I had ended up sitting next to a British conductor. The performance itself was mannered and decadent—the melodic line brought aggressively to the fore, the tempo wayward and undulating, even meandering. Cliburn got a standing ovation, which slightly puzzled my conductor friend. "But it wasn't very good," he said. "Yeah," I said, "but he's Van Cliburn." We both agreed that it was more than enough explanation.

The audience was, of course, applauding the reputation as much as the man. This is not to say that Cliburn, who passed away today, was some sort of fraud. At his best, Cliburn could take his place among the greats. And even that Tanglewood performance, for all its interpretive oddness, still had plenty to marvel at: the athletically glamorous sound, the rubato, the accented chords landing with the impact of a blacksmith's hammer. But the reputation inevitably preceded him, the machinery of celebrity so familiar that it obscured just how singular that reputation really was. Because Cliburn's fame, his image—the fair-haired conqueror, the national hero, the eternal prodigy—was actually quite strange. That he eventually could wear it with a kind of grace was not the least of his achievements.

Cliburn's reputation was made, of course, at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, but the reputation was built on something more than pianistic skill. The Russian public's reaction to Cliburn, after all, was not one of impressed acknowledgement, or hard-won respect; it was love at first sight. What was often missed in the translation of that reputation back into American terms was the fact that it was a product of Cliburn's nonconformity, his disinclination to stay within the bounds of musical propriety. I initially thought it an odd-couple pairing that both Glenn Gould and Van Cliburn made such sensations in the Cold-War-era Soviet Union, but the more I listened, the less odd it seemed. Gould's playing tended toward the hermetic, Cliburn's toward the hedonistic, but both of them also had a tendency toward the outré and the theatrical that seemed to connect with Russian audiences. Witness Cliburn, in concert in Moscow, performing Rachmaninoff's E-flat major Prelude, op. 23, no. 6:



One couldn't ask for a better example of a performer more in thrall to the musical flow, more eager to be buffeted by the music's implicated emotion, even sentimentality. The amount of rhythmic liberty Cliburn takes in that clip, the instances of subito-this-or-that, not to mention Cliburn's physical demeanor, verges on kitsch, but it never quite tips over, and the result is ravishing. Cliburn's playing possessed a special kind of fearlessness—risking vulgarity in the pursuit of an aura of heightened emotional earnestness.

It was in contrast with his persona, shy and reserved, but Cliburn was always more at home at the piano (if not necessarily in front of an audience) anyway. One of my most indelible memories of him is seeing television footage from his performance at the White House in 1987, at the time his first public appearance in years. He played one of his favorite encores—the Russian pop song "Moscow Nights"—while singing along with Mikhail Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet delegation. While the Americans in the audience (I remember Nancy Reagan, in particular, who was sitting next to Gorbachev) looked pleased but slightly baffled, Cliburn was absolutely in his element. For all the celebrity, all the concert-opening performances of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Cliburn nevertheless seemed a little bit at odds with the American culture that lauded him; but, behind the keyboard, that quality was transformed into generosity and daring. Sometimes it came out mannered, but other times, it had an anchorite's ecstatic eloquence. That original Tchaikovsky concerto with Kondrashin, the Rachmaninoff concerti he recorded with Reiner, his terrific version of Rachmaninoff's second Sonata—Cliburn's best moments will remain both touchstones and, paradoxically, forever his own.

Ice Capades

Reviewing Gil Shaham and Akira Eguchi.
Boston Globe, February 12, 2013.

On the Page

Catching up on some recent reviews, since, now that I finally took down my festive holiday tree, I have to take it down from the blog, too.

Reviewing Corey Cerovsek and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, January 15, 2013.

Reviewing Randall Hodgkinson—and the premiere of Gunther Schuller's Piano Trio no. 3.
Boston Globe, January 16, 2013.

Sounds Heard: Ehnahre—Old Earth.
NewMusicBox, January 22, 2013.

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, January 22, 2013.

Reviewing Dinosaur Annex.
Boston Globe, January 29, 2013.

New Enlgand's Prospect: Object Oriented. Reviewing the Callithumpian Consort.
NewMusicBox, January 31, 2013.

Oh, and this happened, too.

I think that calls for a drink!

I never did make that Oxford Swig from the last post, but here's a new one. Warning: it is a seriously musty drink. Having spent far too much of my life in various librarial iterations of the name, I'm guessing that funk is now permanently in my blood, because I like that sort of flavor. Anyway—

Basement Stack

2 oz. Ransom Old Tom gin
1 oz. rainwater Madeira
½ oz. lime juice
¼ oz. maple syrup
A few drops of vanilla extract
a couple healthy dashes of Fee Bros. plum bitters

Stir it up with ice and then strain into something that won't tip over onto your book.

Ever wonder why old books smell the way they do? Wonder no more.

This night so chill

arr. Guerrieri: Still, Still, Still (2012) (PDF, 191 Kb)

This year's holiday card is a two-voice-and-piano arrangement of one of my favorite carols. Seriously, if I had to make out an intellectual Christmas list, "the chance to repeatedly harmonize an arpeggiated triad in increasingly odd fashion" would rank somewhere near the top. It's the simple things, really.

In the meantime, I am considering ringing in the new year with this concoction, courtesy of Jennie June's American Cookery Book (1866):

OXFORD SWIG

Put into a bowl a pound of sugar, pour on it a pint of warm beer, grated nutmeg, and some ginger, also grated; add four glasses of sherry and five pints of beer, stir it well, and if not sweet enough, add more sugar, and let it stand covered up four hours, and it is fit for use. Sometimes add a few lumps of sugar rubbed on a lemon to extract the flavor, and some lemon juice. If the lemon rind is pared very thin, without any of the white skin left, it answers better, by giving a stronger flavor of the lemon.

Bottle this mixture, and in a few days it will be in a state of effervescence. When served in a bowl fresh made, add some bread toasted very crisp, cut in narrow strips.

Last call

Over at NewMusicBox, critic-at-large Moe gets into the spirits of various seasons.

For your consideration

I'm traveling this week, so I'm a day late on a couple links. Over at NewMusicBox this week, I consider the composer's relationship with musical material from the vantage point of an early out.

Also, Ethan Iverson, a fellow Charles Rosen fan, asked for some reflections on his passing, which I was more than happy to attempt. If there's a more entertaining way to expand one's mind than a "Do the Math" post, I haven't found it; to be part of one is flattery indeed.

We had a friend, a talking man

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, November 20, 2012.

Word counting

I have a couple of First-Four-Notes-related articles up this weekend:

On Beethoven's Fifth and other warhorses.
Boston Globe, November 18, 2012.

Five Books Inspired by Beethoven's Fifth.
Publisher's Weekly, November 16, 2012.

Also, this, which I forgot to link to earlier this week:

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage.
Musical America, November 13, 2012.

I will once again, and with pleasure, acknowledge this blog's debt to Tippett's opera.

Prospecting

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 12, 2012.

Scorrevole

The American Music of Elliott Carter. A composer of the American experience.
Boston Globe, November 11, 2012.

The image is from Carter's business card, given to me by Helen Frost-Jones, Carter's wife, following a question-and-answer session at Orchestra Hall in Chicago for the 1994 premiere of Partita. I had asked a question, probably impertinent and almost certainly dull, but, in retrospect, it was a supreme encouragement to have passed some small sort of muster with Carter's most devotedly fierce protector.

I've spent a lot of agreeable time writing about Carter and his music, including interviewing him back in 2008 (outtakes here), and spilling many words over the Tanglewood celebration of his centenary:

1. Punctuality
2: Genealogy
3: The stuff that dreams are made of
4: Identity politics
5: Role modeling
6: This Is Your Life
7: Either/Or
8: You've got a head start

Reading over those dispatches again, I find my impressions still evolving—for example, I've come to hear a lot of the passing neo-classical references in Carter's later music to be less an extension of a Coplandesque style and more a critique of it—but the idea of Carter as a composer profoundly concerned with capturing the energy and friction of a democratic society, an idea that first fully crystallized for me in that full-immersion festival, is one that remains at the core of why I love the music so much.

Ship to Shore

Reviewing Boston Lyric Opera's Madama Butterfly.
Boston Globe, November 5, 2012.

La Fête de Toussaint

For All Saints' Day, a chance to remember past articles that I was too lazy to link to:

Reviewing Sound Icon.
Boston Globe, October 23, 2012.

On William Morris, Leonard Bernstein, and the Chichester Psalms.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Reactor Corps. Reviewing the HONK! Festival.
NewMusicBox, October 15, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Talking Cures. Collage New Music plays Nathan, Carter, and Dargel.
NewMusicBox, October 9, 2012.

Reviewing Daniil Trifonov.
Boston Globe, October 8, 2012.

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, October 1, 2012.

New England’s Prospect: “The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves." Martin Pearlman's Finnegans Wake.
NewMusicBox, October 1, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Tracking Devices. The Northeastern/NEC Harry Partch Symposium.
NewMusicBox, September 27, 2012.

Reviewing Paula Robison and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, September 19, 2012.

Also, if you missed it, The First Four Notes now has its own shiny new website, complete with book-related news and additional (and ever-growing) Beethoven miscellany.

(Oh, and in the meantime, take a moment and a bit of money and help those drying out from Hurricane Sandy.)

Zärtlich—einen Schädelbohrer!

The best thing about a Schoenberg O'Lantern? With the lights on, it looks like a Schoenberg self-portrait:

Update (10/31): Arnold guards the premises:

Music of Changes

PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

—John Cage, "Seriously Comma" (1966)

One of the dilemmas of mental life is that people need to know of things that are untrue, and yet need to know that these things are untrue.

—Daniel T. Gilbert, Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick T. Malone,
"Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the
Rejection of False Information," Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, vol. 59, No. 4 (1990)

System 1 and System 2—that's what Daniel Kahneman calls them, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: the two tracks on which the brain operates. In simple terms: System 1 is intuitive, biased, judgmental, and nearly always on; System 2 is analytical, rational, reflective—and sluggish. When we make errors of judgment, it tends to be because System 1 has jumped to a conclusion that System 2 can't be roused enough to correct. It's why we have such poor intuition about statistics, about aggregate vs. anecdotal evidence, about the amount of randomness and noise in the data the world presents to us.

Randomness and noise: a wholly appropriate thing to talk about on John Cage's 100th birthday. I've been thinking about the musical implications of System 1 and System 2 lately. Implication #1: musical works that are widely considered "great" play to System 1's particular proclivities, leveraging music's basic capacity for simple tension and release to create the illusions of causality, connections, and narrative qualities that System 1 is primed to see in whatever stimulus comes its way. Implication #2 is related: music that appeals more to System 2, more intricate and calculated, more geared toward an active investigation of what musical relationships there are in the score, rather than what relationships only seem to be on the surface—well, a lot of people aren't going to like it. It's easy to consider serial music in this way: completely shunting aside the mechanisms of System 1 in order to try and shake System 2 awake. In a society like ours—capitalist/post-capitalist, consumption-based, driven by appeals, both earnest and cynical, to System 1's intuitive reflexes—that can be a hard sell.

For a long time, Cage's music was an even harder sell than even the most hardcore modernist serialism. And more and more, I think this is because, paradoxically, Cage was a much better composer than he has customarily been given credit for. Cage the thinker is lauded, but Cage the craftsman was just as formidable. He knew how music was put together. He knew the techniques and the forms, the tension and release. He knew, in other words, how to make music appeal to System 1—which is why his music is so shocking. Serialism, at least harmonically, is selectively constructive, bypassing System 1 in order to attempt to power up System 2. But Cage's music is destructive: it fully engages System 1, only to fully undermine it. It presents, on a carefully-constructed platter, an opportunity to imagine a musical narrative, then drops the platter on the floor, smashing it to bits.

It's the pattern that Gilbert, Krull and Malone talked about in the paper quoted up at the top there. Through a elegantly tricky experiment—presenting subjects with nonsense sentences, arbitrarily assigning them as true or false, then interrupting the subjects' comprehension with an unrelated task before testing them on their recall—they demonstrated that, in order to disbelieve something, we actually believe it first: the mind doesn't immediately decide whether things are true or false, it automatically assumes everything is true at first, and only (very briefly) later sorts out those things that aren't. As Kahneman sums it up: "System 1 is gullible and biased to believe. System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy." We believe in order to disbelieve.

It strikes me that Cage's music is playing with this gullibility more often than not. His use of chance and indeterminacy, for example: parameters of musical events are turned over to chance, by design, with the audience's full knowledge, and yet we still try and make an illusory musical story out of it. Presented with randomness, we infer causality; presented with the unrepeatable, we infer purpose and statement. Cage doesn't just leverage System 1's capacity for musical myth-making, he gets in our face with it, dissects it in front of us. Listening to Cage, we make all the assumptions that we make about music while, at the same time, being forced to confront the fact that they're just assumptions, and largely unsupported ones at that.

No wonder it makes people uncomfortable. The leading image of Cage during his centennial year has been a combination of inventor and ringmaster, whimsically rewiring music history one roll of the dice at a time. But he was out to shake people up, no matter how much the birthday celebrations domesticate him. He was an anarchist and a radical. From the foreword to A Year from Monday:

My ideas certainly started in the field of music. And that field, so to speak, is child's play.... Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution.

"To forget that the moon is made of green cheese is to lose a precious piece of one's childhood, but to act as though one believes this assertion is to forego the prospect of meaningful adult relationships," Gilbert et al. note. "A ubiquitous paradox for natural thinking systems is that they must possess, but must not deploy, a wide range of false information." For Cage, musical information was as false as any, but he figured out how to bring the paradox to the forefront in such a way that, he hoped, listeners would stop being so gullible, about music, about the world. "Once we give our attention to the practice of not-being-governed," he wrote, "we notice that it is increasing."

Max factor

Reviewing Donald Crockett's The Face.
Boston Globe, September 3, 2012.

Come September, they can't remember why

Because it has been a summer of STUFF and TASKS I have gotten dangerously lax about keeping up with even my own output. Some items you might have missed:

Sick Puppy 2012: opening concert (Boston Globe, June 18, 2012); closing marathon (NewMusicBox, June 28, 2012).

Reviewing Bruce Brubaker.
Boston Globe, July 3, 2012.

Reviewing Gerhard Oppitz.
Boston Globe, July 21, 2012.

Reviewing the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Boston Globe, July 27, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Output and Gain. Reviewing the Bang on a Can 2012 Summer Institute marathon concert.
NewMusicBox, August 2, 2012.

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, August 6, 2012.

Having It All.
NewMusicBox, August 10, 2012.

2012 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: part one (Boston Globe, August 13, 2012); part two (NewMusicBox, August 16, 2012).

Also there are book-related things afoot; see the post below.

In the meantime, if your summer has been anything like the summer here at Soho the Dog HQ—i.e., cheerfully chaotic, mysteriously overscheduled, and leaving one grasping at free time with both dirty, bitten-off fingernails and a bewildered unfamiliarity with the concept—you probably could use some refreshment.

Staycation

Fill a tall glass with ice cubes. Add 2 oz. gin; ¼ oz. Bénedictine; and the juice of one lime. Fill the rest of the way with diet orange soda. Give it a stir.

Does it have to be diet soda? Yes. Yes, it does. And really, the more day-glo artificial-color orange the soda, the better. If you can't bring yourself to buy better-living-through-chemistry orange soda, you might try the Staycation's cousin: the Orbital Sunrise, which is just a mimosa made with Tang instead of orange juice. It is, if I do say so myself, delicious. Ad astra per aspera!

At a lid-flipping price!

The First Four Notes, my long-awaited (by me, that's for sure) book exploring the cultural history and misadventures of the opening gambit of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, is ever closer to being an actual thing. Proofs have been proofed, hilariously serious author photos have been taken, bound galleys are fanning out across the land in search of blurbs, all in anticipation of November 13, when the book drops. (Can a book drop like a record does when it's released? I will drop a copy on the floor myself, if necessary.)

One thing left to do is to get a website up to promote the book, but until that happens, this space will have to suffice, which is why you can now find, over on the right, some pertinent links and information. This includes a now-tiny-but-hopefully-at-least-slightly-longer-eventually list of author appearances. That's right, I might be coming to your town! (Unless your town is Brigadoon. No way I'm falling for that again.) As things are confirmed, I will continue to post more and more detail until the density of information reaches the Bekenstein bound and I find myself giving a reading inside a black hole. Where I bet the refreshment table is superb.

The image at the head of this post, incidentally, comes courtesy of my Boston Globe colleague Jeremy Eichler, who generously rescued it from an old Boston Symphony program book. If anybody out there actually still has one of these t-shirts, send me a photo, and you will be rewarded with all the fame that an intermittently-updated blog can provide.

Beethoven, Ludwig van, publishing negotiations, 276-7

As noted on Twitter this morning, The First Four Notes now has an index, which means it is pretty much finished. Beware the Ides of November! Now I just need to plan some book-release-related festivities between now and then. Party, we shall.

I was in Illinois all last week, so I ended up finishing the index in a hotel just outside of Buffalo, after which Critic-at-Large Moe and I had a beef on weck and then drove on through to Massachusetts. I have decided that my next book will be a 1970s-era noir thriller in which all the characters are named after exits on the New York State Thruway:

After his team is ignominiously bounced from the ABA playoffs, the last thing basketball journeyman Waterloo Clyde wants to do is turn his attention back to his off-season job: private investigator. But wealthy widow Auburn Weedsport insists that there's something fishy about her husband's death, and it's up to Clyde and his partner, martial arts expert Akron Corfu, to get to the bottom of it. Not a simple task, not with the likes of the late Mr. Weedsport's exotic, scheming mistress, Solvay Baldwinsville; Vernon Hamilton, Weedsport's ex-partner—and United States Senate hopeful; "Mohawk" Herkimer, Weedsport's old college buddy (or is he?); or even Mrs. Weedsport herself, a former Hollywood glamour queen harboring secrets of her own. And once Clyde and Corfu find themselves in the killer's sights, it becomes clear that this case will be anything but an easy layup.

It'll be called Waterloo Clyde and the Blindside Screen. I should totally Kickstarter this idea.

Magnetic personality

Reviewing the Parker String Quartet.
Boston Globe, June 18, 2012.

"The reason... is a remarkable one, or rather it is no reason at all"

I am a foolish person, and I am comfortable with that, but I at least have enough sense to be a little suspicious when something that seems terribly obvious to me nevertheless has seemed to escape the notice of everyone else. Full disclosure: this is one of those things. But it's something interesting enough to warrant temporarily casting such caution aside, and also something that, the more I think about it, has to possess some sort of significance. And the significance has a lot to do with just why it's so deserving of a cautious reception in the first place.

The thing in question is a quotation that Richard Strauss threaded into "Im Abendrot," the first-published but almost always finally-sung of the Vier Letzte Lieder, the Four Last Songs. Setting a poem by Eichendorff, "Im Abendrot" sings of a couple at the end of their lives, wistfully but peacefully coming to the end of their journey, walking in the sunset, as two larks symbolically flutter up into the sky. "Im Abendrot" is commonly interpreted as the composer's vision of he and his wife, Pauline, accepting their own mortality, a calm farewell to a long and sometimes tumultuous shared life. And anyone who knows anything about "Im Abendrot" knows about the quotation at the end of it, the motive from his own tone poem Tod und Verklärung that Strauss brings in as the soprano surveys the tranquil scene and asks ist dies etwa der Tod? ("Is this, perhaps, death?")

But I'm not referring about that quotation. I'm referring, instead, to the one at the beginning of the song, a bar before rehearsal "C," on the line vom Wandern ruhen wir ("Now from our wandering we can rest"):



Take a look at the accompaniment there:



It's a quote from "Porgi, amor," the Countess's introductory cavatina in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro:



I am fairly sure this is not a coincidence. It's the same melody, the same harmony, the same key, even. Strauss knew his Figaro, certainly—he conducted the opera often, and even composed his own idiosyncratic reboot of it in Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss also had Mozart on the brain throughout the 1940s: his 1945 Sonatina no. 2 for winds (subtitled "Fröhliche Werkstatt"), for instance, was dedicated "To the spirit of the divine Mozart at the end of a life full of gratitude." So if one of his own songs, first sketched out a year later, suddenly clears the table to make room for a note-for-note amuse-bouche of "Porgi, amor," I think it's a safe assumption that it's happening on purpose. The question is what it might mean. Here's a recklessly speculative answer: what if it means that "Im Abendrot" isn't about Pauline Strauss after all?

Strauss had been through the mill of love before he finally married. In 1883, he had met Hanuš Wihan, the great Czech cellist, and his wife Dora. Dora (née Weis) was 23, pretty, an accomplished pianist, a friend of Strauss's sister Johanna. The 19-year-old Richard Strauss fell in love with her, and—the Wihan marriage being what it was: strained—Dora reciprocated, to an unknown extent. Even if it never passed beyond flirtation, it was blatant enough for Strauss's father to warn his son, via letter, of the possible professional repercussions of Munich gossip. Given Hanuš Wihan's inclination toward suspicion, the relationship probably contributed to the breakup of the Wihan marriage.

A teenaged whippersnapper in love with an older woman in an unhappy marriage to a jealous husband—where have we heard this story before? That's right, Figaro. No wonder Strauss liked the opera. No wonder, when he came to reimagine the opera in his own Rosenkavalier, it was the Cherubino-Countess pairing that took center stage, in the guise of Octavian and the Marschallin.

Strauss's own real-life version eschewed Mozart's catharsis for a gradual fade: after her divorce, Dora Wihan went into something of a self-imposed exile from Munich, visiting America, teaching piano for a time in Lixouri, on the Greek island of Cephalonia, traveling around Europe. Tracing the Richard-Dora romance becomes a string of hints at missed connections and unfortunate schedules, the ardor all the while cooling from the intimate "Du" to the formal "Die." Still, even though Strauss's affections transferred to Pauline de Ahna, Dora Wihan would always be his first serious love. One of the few extant letters between them dates from well after their romance ended, hints at how the thought of that romance may have lingered:

Dresden, 10 March 1893

My dear friend,
   Will you be very, very surprised, if a sign of life from me surfaces after such a long time? The reason that presses the pen into my hand is a remarkable one, or rather it is no reason at all, but only an impulse, but why shouldn't one follow an impulse once in a while, even at the risk of being laughed out of court? (Mirth is very good in convalescence, incidentally!) External circumstances: house arrest, sorting out old things, and the letters you sent me at Lixouri came to hand. Inner condition: recognizing the truth of the old saying that the greatest human happiness is the power of memory. Do not be afraid, dear friend, I am certainly not going to become sentimental, but the outcome was that I had to write you a few words, even though it is only a friendly greeting despatched to the far south to tell you how glad I am that you are now fully recovered. Are you very angry with me now, at this unexpected invasion of you retreat from the world? Then punish me and never reply to

Your old
(now truly old)
Dora

(Via.) So: is "Im Abendrot" about the prospect of a reunion with Dora as much as, or even instead of, a denouement with Pauline? Is the "Wandern"—together with the "Porgi, amor" quote—a reference to the vagaries of life and career and circumstance that caused Dora and Richard to drift apart? The marriage of Richard and Pauline was certainly something more and deeper than the customary caricature of a tempestuous wife and a bemusedly henpecked husband that has been perpetuated (including around these parts); but the veiled reference to the Countess's unhappiness, to mio duolo ("my sadness"), is still dissonant. At the end of his life (Dora had died in 1938), did Strauss, in some way, yearn to rewind the tape and run it again, to let Cherubino run off with his beloved Countess? Maybe not. Maybe the Figaro quote was a private reference (Pauline, after all, had herself sung the role of the Countess during her operatic career). Maybe it was an admission on Richard's part: a reference to Dora Wihan, after all, but an acknowledgement that the affair was something he had to journey past on his way to a life with Pauline. (The quote is near the beginning of the song.) Maybe it was a happy accident, one that Strauss left in the score because of its emotional congruence.[1]

In the end, we don't know what that quote is doing in "Im Abendrot." And what fascinates me most about the whole idea of this is that we can't know, not for sure. I would love to have found some telling connection, some piece of evidence that would tie "Im Abendrot" and Richard Strauss and Dora Wihan up into a satisfying knot, some smoking gun, but there isn't one—and for that, we can thank Richard Strauss and Dora Wihan. Both of them destroyed their letters to each other—in Strauss's case, an unusual move. The letter I quoted above is one of only four that managed to slip through, three from Dora, one from Richard, all of them dating from the tail-end of their romance and later. That's all we have left to get a grasp on. Everything else is purely circumstantial. The number of objections one can make to the Dora Wihan/"Im Abendrot" theory are formidable—I'm not even sure I believe it, and I'm the one promulgating it—but, then again, Strauss and Wihan made sure that any hypothetical counter-corroborations would be wildly outnumbered to begin with.

History is made out of what is left behind. We think of Beethoven as a composer of painstaking struggle because his sketchbooks survived; we think of Mozart as an effortless divine amanuensis largely because his sketches were mostly destroyed. In some way, the reason that the proposal to link "Im Abendrot" with Dora Wihan is a pretty shaky one—because there's no paper trail left, it is by definition speculation, and because it's about people's personal lives, it is by definition foolish speculation—only increases my affection for the proposal, even as it triggers my skepticism. It's a little re-enactment of the nature of history and historical investigation, the way that, because we rightfully demand evidence for historical arguments, there's an awful lot of actual history that disappears as soon as it happens—simply because it's never recorded—or that disappears down some accidental or purposeful hole along with whatever scrap of document happened to catch its echo. In all too many cases, such disappearances are terrible things, tragic or mendacious or downright criminal. In the case of "Im Abendrot," though, it feels more like a gentle reminder that history is, for the most part, a lot of locked doors, and that it's a minor miracle that we jimmy open any of them at all.

The last glimpse of Richard Strauss and Dora Wihan together that we have comes from 1911, in the run-up to the Dresden premiere of Der Rosenkavalier—in which, tellingly, Octavian, the Cherubino stand-in, does not end up with his older, married lover. Johanna Strauss arranged a get-together between her brother and his wife and Dora, who had settled in Dresden and who, one surmises, Johanna would have preferred to have as a sister-in-law. Pauline's reaction, understandably, was prickly enough that Richard was left to smooth over the family friction. "[Pauline] was very put out in Dresden by the fact that you were always in the company of your friend D.W., whose constant presence even in the most intimate family circle was bound to be burdensome," he wrote his sister (again, via.). "At all events, it was not her intention that you should notice her mood, but it is very difficult for her to disguise her feelings when something has upset her." And then, ironically or not, depending on how much one is inclined to read into a passing quote of Mozart: "She has probably already forgotten the matter: so there is no need for you to refer to it again."

[1] On the Pauline-symbolism side would also seem to fall Timothy Jackson's theory that the earlier lied "Ruhe, meine Seele!," which Strauss orchestrated just after composing "Im Abendrot," was intended to be included in the Vier Letzte Lieder as a prelude to the final song. (For details, see Jackson's essay in Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss and His World.) "Ruhe, meine Seele!" was, of course, the first of the four songs published as opus 27, which Strauss presented to Pauline as a wedding present. Then again, the actual composition of "Ruhe, meine Seele!" came on the heel of a series of reckonings for Strauss, not only his engagement to Pauline (which was left in an insecure limbo for a number of weeks as the bride-to-be entertained second thoughts), but also the failure of his opera Guntram—and I have always found it intriguing that Strauss's wedding gift included a song, "Cäcilie," that could just have well as been written for another of his former lovers, actress Cäcilie Wenzel. Perhaps Strauss was in a stock-taking mood: if (and this is even more wildly speculative than the speculation in which I've been indulging) one were to regard op. 27 as one last look at Strauss's pre-Pauline amours, then "Morgen," the last of the set, becomes even more of a departure—having bid farewell to the life that late he led, Strauss takes a deep breath and steps into the tomorrow of marriage. Unlikely, but entertaining to consider nonetheless.

Filling out, filling in

Some recent shouts into the wind you may have missed:

New England's Prospect: Yard Work. MusikFabrik at Harvard; the Boston School at the Cantata Singers.
NewMusicBox, May 17, 2012.

Close-Reading Donna Summer. "Love to Love You Baby," disco's 17-minute sit-down protest.
Boston Globe, May 27, 2012.

New England's Prospect: Space Is the Place. Grisey in Vermont.
NewMusicBox, June 4, 2012.

The Plight of the Page Turner. In which more than pages get turned.
NewMusicBox, June 6, 2012.

I promise to be more punctual! If I can't be bothered to properly blog, I can at least put in the effort to improperly blog.

Sweet spot

Reviewing Emanuel Ax.
Boston Globe, May 14, 2012.

It's bigger on the inside

Reviewing Boston Baroque's Orfeo ed Euridice.
Boston Globe, May 7, 2012.