The Sunday supplement: #41
New indie music for the Open, a trilogy of fiction (autofiction?) that maybe got ignored, why cars all look like wet putty these days, and suggestions on how to hear Rachmaninoff differently
I was reading about Missy Mazzoli’s new opera The Listeners that’s inspired by “the global hum” phenomenon (here’s a sneak peak of the opera) when I ran into Alex Ross’s recent short piece in The New Yorker “How Radical Was Rachmaninoff.”
It’s an interesting short run on staging works by the genius often derided as simply a schlock dealer, especially right now, considering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I’m a Rachmaninoff fan, who’s not, but I do often remember (as my friend Meave pointed out), those moments from The Seven Year Itch… “It shakes me! It quakes me! It makes me feel goose-pimply all over!”
Here’s Ross:
When classical-music organizations present Russian music these days, they often try to distance it, whether subtly or explicitly, from the brutal regime that is waging war on Ukraine. Denève, addressing the Santa Barbara audience before the Third, pointedly mentioned Rachmaninoff’s international connections. At Bard, the first person to come onstage was the formidable young Ukrainian pianist Artem Yasynskyy, who launched into an exceptionally grim, inward account of the C-Sharp-Minor Prelude. At a panel discussion, Frolova-Walker, who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1994, said that the Russian assault on Ukraine has changed her perception of Rachmaninoff’s time in exile. “I feel some of the anger and some of the bitterness that he must have felt a hundred times more,” Frolova-Walker explained. “It’s a sense of shame, a sense of horror, a sense of the tragic loss of a country which is still in you but which is doing these horrible things.”
Needs to be experienced in person but here’s Ukraine’s Anna Fedorova doing “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” also Monika Krajewska singing “Lilacs.”
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