Rosen insisted that to understand music in particular, and art and literature in general, one must take a historicist viewpoint, as well as engaging with it on many levels simultaneously.
The democratising and destructive nature of 12-tone music, whereby the selected tone row is both liberating and tyrannical, and its relationship to architecture, literature, and the visual arts, has long fascinated me. And, conceptually speaking, the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the Christian cathedral and its sonorous rites.
One could imagine a Piranesi of the page constructing sonnets like carceri to shore against their ruins – and ours.
Nolan brings to them the same concentration one brings to a page of Celan: nothing is throwaway, everything is load-bearing...
On rue de Verneuil in Paris’s elegant 7th arrondissement, two buildings stand roughly opposite each other. At number 5 bis is the home in which Serge Gainsbourg lived out his…
This immensely enjoyable chamber music recital afforded a rare opportunity to experience the evolution of the piano trio across three distinct musical epochs.
This is a Mass in B minor where chamber-like sonorities go together with dramatic gestures as elegant as they are powerful, and where the instrumental and vocal soloists alike are allowed a high degree of latitude in expressing their individuality within the context of a highly disciplined vision of a highly variegated work.
John Potter (tenor), Christopher O’Gorman (tenor), Rogers Covey-Crump (tenor) Hyperion CDA67998. Released December 2013 This fascinating and beautiful release is the second in a three-volume series growing out of Cantum pulcriorem invenire:…
Here as throughout, soprano Frances Cooper proves the most able and beguiling of interpreters, her diction crystal-clear, her voice sweet and steady, her expression attuned to the subtlest affective potential of both music and the poetry.