Chekhov's Mistress
Now That’s Enthusiasm: re Alex Ross
In a time when cynicism too often trumps ardor in the voice of critics, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross is not afraid to enthuse over great music. See for example this recent piece on György Kurtág:
But what playing! Notes were placed with surgical care; inner voices gleamed in crystalline patterns; elusive emotional states were painted with quick, light strokes. At the heart of the “Játékok” selections was “In Memoriam András Mihály,” a gentle, halting funeral procession that ends with spread-out white-key chords; it is music that must have deep meaning for Kurtág, as he orchestrated and elaborated it in the final movement of his 1994 orchestral masterpiece “Stele.” In his own rendition at the piano, it sounded like a choir of lost souls singing behind a wall of ice. No composer has more convincingly approximated the feeling of everything coming to an end. Still, the music played on, full of crying, laughing, and murmuring voices, like a music box that still makes sound after its parts have stopped moving. To close, the Kurtágs performed an arrangement of the opening movement of Bach’s cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” which was—how else to put it?—one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.
emphasis mine
Classical music, like poetry in particular and art and literature in general, needs articulate champions like this to survive and spread. Classical music also needs a new name besides “classical,” but that’s another topic.
I also see from Mr. Ross’s blog, ”The Rest is Noise,” a good interview with Steve Reich at Pitchfork.
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