Night After Night

The road to Morocco.

As Phil Freeman is my witness, I swear that I had every intention of blogging in great deal on the subject of the punishing-in-a-good-way death-metal extravaganza on Monday night at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. The short version: Necrophagist really can play those insanely intricate heavy-metal bebop tunes live. The noises emitted from the throat of Travis Ryan, vocalist for Californian grindcore vegans Cattle Decapitation, literally defy description, but if you can imagine the sound of a 300-pound sow with one hoof jammed into an electric pencil sharpener, you begin to come close.

Arsis makes the best melodic-death records in the world right now, but doesn't quite bring that same level of charisma to the stage as yet. Montreal's Neuraxis, on the other hand, utterly owned this show, storming on like headliners, engaging the audience and, oh yeah, playing technically complex blasts with complete confidence. Australia's Alarum struck me onstage much the same as it does on record: two incredibly fluent guitarists playing aqueous, even lovely solos, with a handful of vocals tossed off as afterthoughts. (The link supplied for each of those bands leads to a record review I wrote for Decibel magazine; all three groups record for the Willowtip label, which is release-for-release probably the single most dependable extreme-metal imprint currently active.) The opener, Vicious Circle, pretty much got screwed; the posted door time for the show was 6:30pm, but this band's set time was 6:15pm...

The reason I wasn't able to write this up with my usual verbosity -- and a primary reason for my silence of late -- is that I've been manically working ahead in preparation for a major trip...my first substantial vacation in nearly six years, in fact. This evening, Dr. LP and I are boarding a plane bound for Morocco, where we and a number of other journalists -- including Anastasia Tsioulcas of Café Aman fame, as well as her MMFCC -- there to attend the Fès Festival of World Sacred Music. As Anastasia points out, this is a righteous mix of wonderful artists, including William Christie and Les Art Florissants, Jordi Savall, Salif Keita and Yungchen Lhamo. Guest speakers on a series of panel discussions will include Jacques Attali, Wim Wenders and the ubiquitous Bono.

More than that, however, it's a chance to break away from the regular grind, see some amazing sights and spend some quality time communing with the significant others. I have no idea whether I'll be connected to the Internet at any point during my travels, so in all likelihood, this is the last post until some time after June 11. Naturally, there will be plenty to talk about once I'm back. Until then...

Playlist:

Grateful Dead - Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, CA, March 16, 1968 (Grateful Dead authorized download series)

Antonio Vivaldi - In furore, Laudate pueri e Concerti sacri - Sandrine Piau, Stefano Montanari, Accademia Bizantina / Ottavio Dantone (Naïve)

Joseph Haydn - The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross - Sandrine Piau, Ruth Sandhoff, Robert Getchell, Harry van der Kamp, Accentus, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin / Laurence Equilbey (Naïve)

Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 3 & 8 - Minnesota Orchestra / Osmo Vänskä (Bis)

Augusta Read Thomas - Gathering Paradise*; Jacob Druckman - Summer Lightning; Stephen Hartke - Symphony No. 3** - Heidi Grant Murphy*, the Hilliard Ensemble**, New York Philharmonic / Lorin Maazel (New World)

Richard Wagner - Die Walküre - Astrid Varnay, Gré Brouwenstijn, Ramón Vinay, Josef Greindl, Hans Hotter, Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele / Joseph Keilberth (Testament)

Claudio Monteverdi - Vespers 1610 - The King's Consort / Robert King (Hyperion)

Frédéric Chopin - Valses - Alexandre Tharaud (Harmonia Mundi)

Grateful Dead - Palladium, New York, NY, April 30, 1977 (Grateful Dead authorized download series)

Word on a wing.

Yes, it's been quiet around here this past week, for which I apologize. Firstly, I've been up to my neck in work; second, I've been making up for lost time with Dr. LP. And third, I've heard almost no live music since the Met Parsifal I covered just over a week ago.

Instead, I've been rather consumed by words, many of them not my own. Last Friday night, I attended a lovely, intimate memorial tribute to the late British guitarist Derek Bailey at John Zorn's lower east side venue, the Stone. Sitting at a table adorned with roses, photos and other small curios, Karen Brookman, Bailey's longtime companion, started the evening by playing a Dean Martin recording of "That's Amore," citing it as a favorite of Bailey's. The sole performance was by Marc Ribot, who played an unpremeditated, atomized rendition of "Our Love Is Here to Stay" full of Bailey-esque plucks, rattles, shakes and pings, if far more clearly rooted in acoustic blues.

On Sunday evening, I heard words gentle, profound, fierce and infuriating at a reading/conversation by two of my favorite authors, Eduardo Galeano and Arundhati Roy, at Town Hall. Roy read a lengthy passage from the first chapter of her gorgeous novel, The God of Small Things, and Galeano shared a clutch of stories from his somewhat autumnal new collection, Voices of Time. (My TONY review of the Galeano book is here.) The two then proceeded to discuss current events, Galeano puckish, Roy seething. Particularly memorable was the moment when Roy cited Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, suggesting that it indicated the current state of affairs in India. She went on to offer her services as tour guide to Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, suggesting that there's no way he could have come to the conclusions he did in a recent series of op-ed columns, had he seen the true face of her nation.

[EDIT: I felt kind of lame writing so little about the Galeano/Roy event, but since I don't have time to expand at the moment, those who are curious should see this entry at Bill Kavanagh's Big Diamond Blog. One other thing I do want to mention is that, although it had been fully three weeks since I'd read the new Galeano book, I was amazed to note that as he read certain of its stories, I recognized every single one of them; details of each text flooded my mind even as he read them aloud. That is how vividly etched his stories are.]

There will be more to report before too long, as I'm currently filling the summer pages of my planner with all manner of musical diversion. Meanwhile, the main reason for this post is to warmly welcome soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird back to active blogosphere duty (as noted yesterday on Vilaine Fille.) The Concert, Bird's behind-the-scenes view of a singer's life is always enlightening and often inspiring. Go have another look...it's duly reposted in the blogroll, to the right.

Playlist:

Robert Fripp - Exposure (DGM expanded reissue)

Derek Bailey, Mick Beck and Paul Hession - Meanwhile, back in Sheffield... (Discus)

Ned Rorem - Pilgrims; Flute Concerto*; Violin Concerto** - Jeffrey Khaner*, Philippe Quint**, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / José Serebrier (Naxos)

Karol Szymanowski - Violin Concerto No. 1; Bohuslav Martinu - Violin Concerto No. 2; Bela Bartók - Two Portraits - Jennifer Koh, Grant Park Orchestra / Carlos Kalmar (Cedille)

Richard Wagner - Excerpts from "The Ring of the Nibelung" - Ben Heppner, Staatskapelle Dresden / Peter Schneider (Deutsche Grammophon)

Hellhammer - Triumph of Death (demo), Satanic Rites (demo), Apocalyptic Raids 1990 A.D. (Noise)

Celtic Frost - Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion, Into the Pandemonium (all Noise), Monotheist (Century Media)

Richard Wagner - Die Walküre - Astrid Varnay, Gré Brouwenstijn, Ramón Vinay, Josef Greindl, Hans Hotter, Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele / Joseph Keilberth (Testament)

Season's end.

The Metropolitan Opera still has a few more performances to go before it puts Joseph Volpe's final season to bed with a big, sloppy kiss, but this evening's Parsifal was most likely the last time I'll set foot in the house until Anthony Minghella's fancy puppet show hits the stage in September. And I'm happy to say that my Met season ended on a high note.

Ever since the Lohengrin broadcast, everyone wants to know whether Ben Heppner got through his latest performance okay. Apparently he did on opening night last Saturday, and I'd say that was true for the most part tonight, as well. Did he crack a note or two? Well, he dented a couple, but it's not the kind of thing that especially detracted from a stellar performance. Heppner's bound to be suffering from serious nerves lately, but he did just fine tonight.

Everything else I'm going to say simply echoes what you've already read elsewhere. René Pape's Gurnemanz was unusually lyrical; this role made for a long, long wallow in his gorgeous sound, and that's always something to celebrate. (His crochety physical mannerisms in the last act were overplayed, but so what?) Thomas Hampson made gorgeously pained sounds -- and a few deliberately painful ones -- as an achingly sad, overwhelmingly pitiable Amfortas. Nikolai Putilin sounded rightly ugly as Klingsor. Secondary parts and choruses were all beautifully sung. Peter Schneider conducted the orchestra more than serviceably; he defined less overall shape than Levine (or Christoph Eschenbach, for that matter), but he kept things moving, and expertly balanced Wagner's otherworldly orchestration.

And then there was Waltraud Meier, whose Kundry was simply one of the most jaw-droppingly stunning characterizations I've witnessed on an operatic stage. Her voice was solid and brilliant all night long: gorgeous most of the time, ugly in the few moments she meant it to be. Still more impressive was the sheer depth Meier brought to her conception. It's no surprise that she ruled the second act, where she had the most to sing and do. Her previously sad-sack Kundry was utterly transformed into a lascivious goddess in the seduction scene, yet when her attempt fails, the character essentially unravels right in front of your eyes, in harrowing detail. (Her delivery of the line in which "His" glance fell upon her was utterly chilling.) And even in the first and third acts, when she has less to sing, Meier still commanded the stage with the sheer electricity of her presence. There's not a single moment during this five-and-a-half hour stretch in which Meier's not "on," so to speak, and not since Joyce DiDonato's harrowing portrayal of Dejanira in Handel's Hercules at BAM have I been so shaken up by a dramatic performance on an operatic stage.

The Met's 1991 production, by the reliable Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen tandem, remains a marvel of stagecraft, but I hope that the new regime will consider another approach next time around. Like Lohengrin, Parsifal is short on action and long on exposition; an abstract setting serves the piece just as well, if not better. It's been roughly 15 years since I saw the Robert Wilson production at Houston Grand Opera; I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it again -- ideally conducted by Eschenbach and occupied by a cast of this caliber. Or one directed by Robert LePage, or Luc Bondy, or...

May in Paris.

Jeff Harrington of New Music reBlog is on vacation in France for a couple of weeks, but the addicts of the Analog Arts Ensemble have mounted an Emergency Reblog in order to prevent withdrawal symptoms. (We should all be blessed with such an impressive contingency plan.)

A Rose by any other name.

Suppose, for a moment, that Axl Rose decided to put the past behind him. Say, for instance, he admitted that the band currently backing him -- a very fine one -- was not in truth the group with which he'd immediately and permanently cemented his reputation as one of hard rock's most compelling frontmen. And that the new music's he's been coming up with -- some of it weirdly compelling in its juxtaposition of elements from a variety of disparate genres -- might actually be hindered by its association with an old brand name.

Suppose, in other words, that the band Rose fronted on Friday night at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom had been called, say, Chinese Democracy? It's a good name, a memorable clash of words laden with symbolic weight. But it would also signify that for all Guns N' Roses might have been a communal effort during its heyday, the current band is essentially Rose and a changeable committee of skilled assistants.

That's not to suggest that Axl and his hirelings didn't stir up a righteous arena-rock din on Friday night. From the opening bars of "Welcome to the Jungle" -- and the massive explosion that greeted the first verse -- the show packed a nostalgic rush as long as it stuck to tested and true material. Rose slithered and shimmied like it was 1989, and the way he raced around the massive, two-tier stage suggested that he'd overcome whatever torpor had reportedly marred an earlier return engagement in 2002. (See Jon Pareles's fine New York Times review of that event, here.)

The Guns Rose brandished -- guitarists Robin Finck, Ron Thal and Richard Fortus, keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Chris Pittman, bassist Tommy Stinson and drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia -- delivered the band's classics exactingly, although only Finck, Stinson and Mantia managed to exert their own stage personalities while performing songs originally created by other hands. Thal -- a New Yorker also known as Bumblefoot, who replaced another guitarist with an unlikely name, Buckethead -- offered a virtuosic unaccompanied solo midway through the set, which started with Van Halen-style finger-tapping before moving into lazy blues strums and virtuosic flamenco flourishes. All of this was undeniably exciting, and none of it seemed to have much to do with anything Guns N' Roses had performed in the past.

Clad in a loose leather shirt, tight jeans and boots, hair in tight cornrows and forehead preternaturally sleek even when viewed from the distant mezzanine, Rose looked the part of a rock icon for the ages more than he had in the oversize sports jerseys he sported four years ago. That he was also in excellent voice was something I mostly had to take on faith; the sound was muffled in the hooded mezzanine, and hundreds of voices sang along during the band's familiar numbers. Two women who made it upstairs from the floor late in the show -- a not unimpressive accomplishment, given the tight security at the venue -- reported that Rose sounded great downstairs.

After front-loading the set with "Welcome to the Jungle," "It's So Easy" and "Mr. Brownstone," Rose and his band played "Better," the first of the evening's new songs. As Ben Ratliff reported in his New York Times review of the Friday night show, none of these new songs are difficult to find on the Internet. Truth be told, these strange new numbers -- baroque constructions with trip-hop loops, sampled Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches and bombastic arrangements that wouldn't be out of place on albums by Elton John or Queen -- held up much better in a live setting than those weedy-sounding leaked demos and live boots had suggested they might.

I kept tabs on the body language of a quartet of diehards in the row in front of me. During older songs, they sang out loud, their grinding dance moves very nearly approaching something you don't normally see in public. But during "Madagascar," the second and most portentious of the new songs, one continued to sway haltingly, while the rest fell motionless. "The Blues" was better received, inasmuch as the piano-driven ballad could be mistaken for the oversize emotionalism of "November Rain" -- which came two songs later, accompanied by an impressive shower of sparks from the ceiling. Lines for the bathrooms grew longer even during "Chinese Democracy," the thundering new song that most resembles the classic Guns N' Roses sound.

It was the following number, "There Was a Time," that suggested a potential second act for Axl Rose. Like "Better," this song is also built on a relaxed electronic pulse, and features one of his more impressive new lyrics, as well. So long as Rose can refrain from referring to it by its impolite titular acronym (by which one friendly nearby fan called it every time he closed in for conversation), this song intimates that Rose's next Guns N' Roses record, the absurdly delayed Chinese Democracy, will actually prove worth hearing.

Still, Rose's former bandmates Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum have found success under a new name, Velvet Revolver. And even if much of that group's material suggests a slightly uneasy wedding of glam and grunge thank to frontman Scott Weiland, late of Stone Temple Pilots, its first New York show back in 2004 offered a much more substantial group identity than what was on offer Friday night -- and included a few classic Guns N' Roses songs "covered" authoritatively in the process. (An excellent Times review of that concert, by the far less convinced Pareles, can be found here.)

What if Rose took up the same tactic? Could he still command arena-size crowds on his own merits, were he to come out with a new band that also happened to play classic Guns N' Roses material complete with massive live-video screens, flashpots and billowing towers of flame? Based on Friday night's performance, I actually believe he could. (And there was no doubt that the GN'R fans turned out in full force for Velvet Revolver, including a clutch of hulking mooks who shoved their way through the crowd to the front of the stage, solemnly intoning that they had to get closer to "The Curls" -- a reference to Slash's trademark mane.)

But I have to imagine that Rose might be concerned that this wouldn't be the case. How else to explain his reluctance to part with a classic band name, when confronted with overwhelming evidence that he's more than willing to depart from the equally classic sound with which the name is associated?

The opening band, young Welsh metallists Bullet for My Valentine, is huge in Europe, where it will soon be supporting a Metallica tour, but hasn't yet made an impact here. Faced with a crowd of voracious GN'R fans who weren't exactly spoiling for new sounds, the group plowed through a nicely paced 50-minute set, in which its impressive musicianship, complete with finely tooled melodies and harmonies, could just be made out in Hammerstein's cavernous acoustics. Heard in a small club, this would surely have been a winning set, and praise is due to a quartet of lanky 20-somethings willing to take the stage while a hungry audience that arrived already knowing just what it wanted grew ever more ravenous.

Playlist:

Brian Eno and David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Nonesuch expanded edition)

Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Arc/Weld (Reprise)

Velvet Revolver - Contraband (RCA)

Guns N' Roses - "Oh My God" (from the motion picture End of Days, via iTunes)

What they played.

For Antonia -- who I don't know personally, but admire professionally nonetheless -- the set list for the show Guns N' Roses played at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom on Friday, May 12:

Welcome to the Jungle
It's So Easy
Mr. Brownstone
Better*
Live and Let Die
Sweet Child O' Mine
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Madagascar*
You Could Be Mine
The Blues*
Out Ta Get Me
November Rain
My Michelle
Chinese Democracy*
There Was a Time (T.W.A.T.)*
Patience
I.R.S.*
Nightrain

Encore: Paradise City

(* unreleased song, from the allegedly forthcoming Chinese Democracy)

This was a much better performance than anyone had predicted or probably anticipated -- in fact, it was pretty close to a full-on arena-rock spectacle. Even so, for a pretty big portion of the audience this was visibly a nostalgia trip occasionally marred by the introduction of unfamiliar songs.

I've got more to say, and had we not been operating in Axl time -- in which a show scheduled to start at roughly 9pm gets going two hours later -- I'd say it now, while the impressions are still vivid and my ears are still ringing from explosions the likes of which I've not encountered in some years now. But since everything ran by Axl's chronometer tonight, my report will come just a bit later. (Not Chinese Democracy later, but, you know, after I get a little sleep.)

[Update: Per Darcy, Brooklyn Vegan has a few words and some nice photos.]

Playlist:

Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction (Geffen)

Guns N' Roses - Greatest Hits (Geffen)

Sitting and spinning.

Ever since I started this blog last year, I've ended almost every post with a playlist. These have generated some delight, some curiosity, and the occasional question. The latest comes from reader Doug Gary, who asked in the comments field of last night's post about Janine Jansen whether my playlists imply recommendation of the items mentioned.

The short answer is yes. And if you'd prefer not to follow me into something of a solipsistic ramble, start scrolling down the page now, and stop when you come to the next photo.

My playlists actually predate this blog. Back when I was a frequent contributor to the lively jazz-related bulletin board Speakeasy on the Jazz Corner website -- where I posted hyperactively under the nom du pixel "Other Steve," because I was one of about ten Steves there and also because so much of the music to which I referred was "other" than jazz -- the forum to which I contributed most frequently was one simply called "What Are You Listening To?" This was, and continues to be, a place where contributors simply rattled off lists of the discs they'd been spinning lately. More-ambitious posters might also include capsule reviews. But mostly it was one list after another, as well as discussions sparked by a reader inqiring about an item on someone else's list.

At Speakeasy, I tended to list pretty much everything at first -- the good, the bad and the ugly. (Sometimes, if something I'd spun was truly awful, I might add that I'd only made it through a few cuts.) But over time, I listed only those discs that had truly contributed something to a day's mental or emotional ambience. I came to look upon these tallies as something of a diary in code. Some lists seemed to imply a mood, especially those all-death metal days. Some provided a clue to one or another project I was working on at the time, while others revealed time spent with old friends or new acquaintances. Most were a combination of all of these things.

One reason I drifted away from Speakeasy was that I came to view my obsessive list-making as overly narcissistic within a social context -- whereas on a personal blog, they seemed to make perfect sense. So when I launched Night After Night, the playlists came along, but they evolved.

(A digression: Since I listen to music for a living, there's something ringing in my headphones almost constantly during office hours, and I also carry a CD player with me for the commute to and from work. I've been outright ridiculed for not converting to iPod, but my absolute commitment to instant access ties me to the old platform. If something new arrives in the mail, I don't want to have to import it and then sync my external device in order to walk around with it. If somewhere between Point A and Point B I'm seized with a sudden urge to hear sounds I don't have on hand, I want to walk to Virgin or ride the subway to Tower, and walk out satisfied. Granted, these days there's maybe a 50/50 chance I'll be thwarted -- especially when it comes to classical recordings -- but I nevertheless demand the luxury of that option.)

And thus: If I namechecked absolutely everything I stuck into my ears in a given day, the lists would be absurdly long. They would include items to which I have no intention of ever returning, and they would also include a lot of things listened to partially, or in a cursory manner. So nowadays, the basic rule of thumb is that my playlists include everything that made an impact during the day (or days) since the last post, everything that taught me something, every morsel of nostalgic comfort I retrieved from the archives. Basically, everything I enjoyed.

In that sense, the playlists can be construed as recommendations. But I also know that my tastes are far too catholic (and idiosyncratic, probably) for these tallies to serve as consumer advocacy. I reserve that particular function for my CD reviews -- some of which appear here, but most of which appear elsewhere -- while hoping that you'll continue to indulge playlists that really don't tell you much about anything other than me.

===

On the other hand, I'm never one to shrink from singing the praises of a truly noteworthy recording. And I hope that more than just jazz fans will follow this link to my TONY review of Twin Falls, a gorgeous new CD of piano and electric bass guitar duets by Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow that's just out on the Sunnyside label. Rodman is the pianist for fabulous pop combo the Lascivious Biddies (familiar to Terry Teachout regulars), and leads a big band that includes Jazz Passengers Roy Nathanson and Curtis Fowlkes, as well as other larger-than-life characters. Her lovely new CD offers impressions of a recent trip to her home state of Idaho, along with deeper emotional resonances I'll allow you to discover on your own. My review cites Rodman's "knack for crafting melodies as simple and timeless as gospel hymns or folk songs," and positions this pair's interplay as being somewhere closer to Bill Evans and Jim Hall than to the typical piano/bass duo session. (Which is not to say that they play like Evans and Hall.)

New Yorkers, please take note that Rodman and Swallow are playing at Joe's Pub on Friday, May 12 at 9:30pm. Were it not for a previous engagement, I'd surely be there myself.

And, having spent most of tonight explaining why I prefer to maintain some bit of ambiguity about the playlists, I'll close by mentioning that the final item on tonight's list -- Basic Blythe by saxophonist Arthur Blythe, issued in 1988 -- was spun in tribute to the late, great pianist John Hicks, of whose premature passing I learned earlier today at Do the Math.

I don't outright disagree with the Bad Plus assessment that Hicks was never heard to full advantage on record. But this particular disc -- the "with strings" session that concluded Blythe's Columbia label stint, and a major-label release so relatively obscure that Gary Giddins, a constant Blythe booster, once confessed in the Village Voice that he'd never heard it -- has long been a favorite of mine.

This session was likely a pressure point in Blythe's Columbia tenure, and the saxophonist has rarely sounded so completely alive and impassioned on disc since then. The version of his yearning composition "Faceless Woman" here has never been bettered, before or since. Hick's contribution to the track is right there on the leader's level; the strings offer a smoothed-out version of the countermelodies and harmonies that might once have been provided by guitarist James Blood Ulmer and cellist Abdul Wadud, while the rhythm section of Anthony Cox and Bobby Battle keeps things at a boil. The result is one of my most cherished recordings -- and naturally, it's long out of print.

Rest well, Mr. Hicks.

Playlist:

Martin Tétreault and Otomo Yoshihide - 4. Hmmm (Ambiances Magnétiques)

Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (Columbia)

Rush - R30 (Zoe/Rounder)

Corey Dargel - Less Famous Than You (Use Your Teeth)

Jelloslave - Touch It (Sugarfoot Music)

Depeche Mode - Speak & Spell (Sire/Rhino "Deluxe Edition" reissue)

Guns N' Roses - Greatest Hits (Geffen)

Arthur Blythe - Basic Blythe (Columbia)

A foolish consistency.

This is a photograph of violist Stephanie Griffin. She's one of New York City's finest, busiest new-music performers, as well as the musical director of Hi Art!, a laudable program that introduces very young children to contemporary art. I heard Griffin play with the Argento Chamber Ensemble on Sunday night at Miller Theatre during last weekend's IRCAM residency. She was terrific, and I said so in two separate posts.

Trouble is, I got her last name wrong. Both times.

So I am posting this photo of Griffin, as well as a link to her impressive bio, in order to make amends for my gaffes. Both of the posts in question have since been corrected, but it's surely those blunders that accounts for their recurrence on Jeff Harrington's terrific New Music reBlog site. (Hope I'm not driving the property value down, Jeff.)

I hasten to add that Griffin did not in any way compel this public confession. That's all me.

On the radio.

Remember when I posted about catching the lovely, talented young violinist Janine Jansen performing Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto with Neeme Järvi and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in Newark last December? Sure you do. (But if you don't, the original post is here.) I bring this up tonight because I just found out that the concert I heard is going to be broadcast Thursday, May 18 [date corrected] at 9pm EST on WQXR-FM 96.3 in New York City. Tune it in or set a timer on your recorder if you're in earshot; check out the live stream on the station's website if you're not. Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten, the Arvo Pärt piece that opened the concert, was quite good, as was the Beethoven Symphony No. 7 that closed it. But that Britten concerto was something else entirely, and the reason was Jansen's gorgeous tone and horsehair-shredding passion.

Pulling up that old essay, by the way, reminds me that John Beck tagged it a few weeks ago with a comment that bears repeating. I mentioned in the earlier post that Jansen has regularly taken on music of the 20th century with Spectrum Concerts Berlin, which has recorded works by John Harbison and Robert Helps for Naxos. Turns out the ensemble, Jansen included, will be performing at Zankel Hall in New York on Friday, November 3 and Sunday, November 5. The repertoire will include Helps's Nocturne for string quartet, Brahms's Clarinet Quintet, Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Penderecki's String Sextet and Schubert's String Quintet in C. (The Schulhoff, Brahms, Helps and Schoenberg make up the group's upcoming June 14 concert at the Philharmonie in Berlin, so perhaps we can assume that will be one of the programs here, as well.)

Since these aren't Carnegie Hall presentations, you won't currently find them on the venue's website, and advance tickets aren't yet available. But these concerts are pencilled in on my calendar already. My thanks to Mr. Beck for the detailed information.

===

The blogroll keeps growing...Per ACD, I, too, would like to welcome Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register to the blogosphere. Mangan's Classical Life apparently got underway when he accompanied his local Pacific Symphony Orchestra to Munich. It was Mangan, you might recall, who caught Pinchas Zukerman waxing splenetic about period-instrument ensembles and music critics back in January, in the interview that touched off my rant here.

Playlist:

Thursday - A City by the Light Divided (Island)

Balún - Something Comes Our Way (Brilliante)

Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast (Matador)

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 2; Witold Lutosławski - Symphony No. 4; Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 - Los Angeles Philharmonic / Esa-Pekka Salonen (Deutsche Grammophon download)

Camille Saint-Saëns - Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 2 - Florestan Trio (Hyperion)

Plainchant - Pange lingua; Josquin des Pres - Missa Pange lingua; Missa La sol fa re mi; Praeter rerum seriem; Ave Maria; Anonymous chanson - L'homme armé; Josquin des Pres - Missa L'homme armé Super voces musicales; Missa L'homme armé Sexti toni - Tallis Scholars (Gimell)

Passing the buck.

I was supposed to see Pelican and Mono Tuesday night, but I didn't. I've been planning to catch the MET Chamber Ensemble celebration of Milton Babbitt's 90th birthday on Wednesday night, but I probably won't. And the rest of the week is most likely shot, too, including a second encounter with the tenor not yet widely known as G-Fil. (See also Vilaine Fille.)

I have to remind myself that a week from now, I'll have a TONY review of Eduardo Galeano's gently brilliant new book and a feature on VH1's fun documentary series Heavy: The Story of Metal to show for my abstinence. The week after that, interviews with Ihsahn of Norwegian black metal band Emperor and Bang on a Can's Julia Wolfe will follow in TONY's summer music extravaganza. And Dr. LP will come home to a clean apartment, to boot.

So in the mean time, I'll direct your attention elsewhere. To start with, my Time Out Chicago counterpart Marc Geelhoed has re-emerged with a whale of a live-concert post, including pointed words for David Zinman and a killer quote from Shulamit Ran. Get going. (And watch out for a report from Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus about that Babbitt concert at Do the Math.)