Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness
“I really don’t feel that it’s all necessary anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. “And so what I try to bring into my music are just a very few essential things that I…
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musical events
The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films
A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible…
“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation.…
At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital
In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute. The venue was a disused Anglican church where…
A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met
John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a blistering wail of orchestral rage. Strings play a…
Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons
How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily identified: Beethoven’s hammering three- or…
There Is More to French Opera Than “Carmen” and “Faust”
Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” savors the potential fascination of reading authors whom posterity has cast aside: “One likes romantically to feel oneself a…
Bach’s Colossus
Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as if figures in a cathedral frieze of the Last…
The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward, infiltrated late-nineteenth-century culture as an…