Richard Brody on his favorite pianist, Patrick Cohen, who seems to have vanished: http://nyr.kr/W1EKYb

(Source: newyorker.com)

Alex Ross rounds up 10 of the best classical music recordings released in 2012:

Here is a selection of notable classical releases from 2012, which may be of assistance as you seek the perfect gift for your decadent niece who worships Wagner. A few audio and video samples are embedded. Two of the selections—the “Winterreise” and the Vivaldi—were, in fact, released at the end of 2011, but they reached my desk too late to make last year’s list…

Continue.

The world premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto, one of the more potent orchestral works of recent years, took place in the spring of 2009, during the final weeks of the composer’s epochal, seventeen-year tenure as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leila Josefowicz was the soloist. I wrote in my review:

According to a program note, it is a kind of musical memoir, with movements suggesting the wondering gaze of a solitary newcomer (“Mirage”), the late-night reveries of a husband and father (“Pulse I”), urban forays with a rock-and-roll beat (“Pulse II”), and a rich, long goodbye (“Adieu”). Josefowicz had the arduous task of standing in for Salonen’s questing self; out of two hundred and fourteen bars in the first movement, the violinist plays busily for two hundred and two. The up-tempo sections generate heat—at one point, a percussionist is instructed to “go crazy”—but what lingers is the bittersweet lyricism of the ending: the violin floats up into the highest reaches of its range, tuned gongs and a harp spell out a faintly chilling ostinato pattern (ticktock, ticktock), the strings unfold a featherbed of memories, and the orchestra comes to rest on a sweetly dissonant chord. Time is running out, the composer seems to say, and I must be going.

With the kind permission of Deutsche Grammophon, we’re streaming audio of a new recording of the concerto, with Josefowicz reprising the solo part and Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Click-through to hear the concerto, and more: http://nyr.kr/OomaZg

Alec Wilkinson catches up with the “hybrid classical musician and orchestral rapper from Montreal who lives in Paris,” Chilly Gonzales: http://nyr.kr/STqNXS

The New York Philharmonic honors French composer Henri Dutilleux: http://nyr.kr/MSRb43

Outside the Machine: The Best Classical Music Performances of 2011

I was haunted all year by a sentence that I read in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” These days you can’t live outside the machine for more than a minute. Contradictions invade every square inch of our physical and mental space; even the purest-seeming creations are in some way tainted by the radical inequalities of early twenty-first-century society. The most potent artistic work, though, doesn’t conceal such contradictions; instead, it makes us agonizingly aware of them. Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.

A Gesualdo Photojournal

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Alex Ross writes about the diabolically inventive Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who acquired eternal notoriety on the night of October 16, 1590, when he slaughtered his wife and her lover in a palace apartment in Naples. The murders were long thought to have taken place in the Palazzo Sansevero, on Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples. Werner Herzog shot scenes for his Gesualdo film, “Death for Five Voices,” at the above location. Recent researches suggest, however, that the murders happened in an auxiliary palace… For the rest of Ross’s photojournal: http://nyr.kr/vaGKnc

Cover Story: Music To My Ears

Jean-Jacques Sempé, the artist behind this week’s “Different Scales,” finds inspiration in music, especially jazz. “Cartoons are like jazz: their goal is only to suggest,” he adds. “I know it runs counter to everything else these days, where the mandate is to inflate the slightest thing, but in my drawings I strive for the beauty of ellipsis that I find in Debussy or in Count Basie.”

For more New Yorker covers by Jean-Jacques Sempé that celebrate the pleasure of music: http://nyr.kr/rSvpAc

(Source: newyorker.com)