Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
Toward the end of a recent symposium celebrating hardcore musical creativity, someone asked what seemed to be a sensible and important question: How can a listener, confronted with an abstruse piece of new music, recognize what‘s going on? How do we,in other words, determine from our ears’ evidence whether this is a piece of chance [...]
Before there was Scrabble, there was the string quartet. The dinner dishes were cleared, and the company retired to the music room to try out the latest chamber-music delectation from the busy presses in Berlin, Vienna or Paris. Music for four — the “Divertimento a Quattro,” as it was first called — was the medium [...]
Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is so immediately lovable that we can forget what an original and important work it really is. It can bring out the best in a performer, as it did for Sarah Chang in her Philharmonic appearance last week. It can also bring out the worst, as it did for Bulldozer Nadja [...]
I would like to live long enough to see this happen: A pianist’s recital ends with Opus 111, the last of Beethoven‘s 32 sonatas; as its final cadence — music touched by an angel — merges into the surrounding silence, the audience shares that silence for some minutes and then, in silence, leaves the hall. [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.