§ || ¶Year's Pick of Four
I've been asked to identify the best recordings of the year. Well, here are four of my picks. (Four seems to be the magic number these days.) They are chosen only from the CDs that have come across my desk this year. They weren't necessarily released in 2005. And the process by which CDs come to my attention is random at best. Here they are, in no particular order:
Peter Garland's LOVE SONGS, released on Tzadik in Feb 2005. It includes Coyote's Bones, the six Matachin Dances, and Love Songs, performed by Heather Heise, Carla Kihlstedt, Roy Malan, Timb Harris, and the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio.
The music on this recording is quite varied, but still within Peter Garland's minimalist center, but spiced with a Mexican native accent. This music stays with you.
David Lang's release on Cantaloupe, ELEVATED, contains both a CD and a DVD. Videos on the DVD accompany the three pieces on the CD. The best is a 1935 16mm film of street scenes
in New York City, and the soundtrack is provided by one of the pieces, MEN, on the CD. It provides a fascinating visual reference for Lang's 45 minute funeral for 9/11.
David Behrman's MY DEAR SIEGFRIED took me by surprise. Live electronics accompany readings of texts by Siegfried Sassoon and letters between Sassoon and Behrman's father before and during the second world war. A very impressive work.
Alvin Curran's massive piano piece, INNER CITIES, was another surprise. Performed by Daan Vandewalle, this monumental work combines long and short solo piano pieces in various styles. Deeply intriguing and wonderfully engrossing. It takes a couple of sittings to get thru it all, but it's very rewarding. Like a great 1000 page novel.
That about does it. There were others to choose from, but I said I'd limit it to four. And these rate pretty high on my scale of new and unusual. For what that's worth. And with just these four, 2006 is looking good.
§ || ¶Trekking to Seattle - Taking a Break
Time to take a break from all this, pack up the van, and drive north to Seattle to spend a week. It's been raining here for days it seems. It's raining there too. Life on the Pacific coast in winter. At least it's not snowing. And this storm seems to be coming from the southern Pacific, so it's warmer than those Arctic storms we sometimes get.I've put the photo blog on hold, and the radio show on repeat. For the next six weeks I've stacked up rebroadcasts of some of this year's shows. Amazing to consider that I started last January and completed 50 programs. I'll have a new series starting Feb 3rd (which will be program 51).
The drive up may be rough going. Weather conditions are severe on I5 around the Cal/Oregon border tonight. Maybe it'll calm down by tomorrow. We plan to take it easy up I5 and spend tomorrow night at one of the rest stops (pop the roof, roll out the bed and the sleeping bags, and call it a night). We discovered last trip that you can stay 6-8 hours at the rest stops along the Interstate, as long as it doesn't look like a campsite.
This will be the first time in decades that either of us have been away from home and hearth over the holidays.
Best wishes to all. Back in a week, maybe with something to say.
§ || ¶EUROPE CENTRAL - VOLLMANN!
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So I've started reading William Vollman's 800-page novel EUROPE CENTRAL, mainly because it seems to revolve around the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. But it's a very strange book. Because, it seems, a lot in this historical novel is actually fabrication. In fact, in his 54 pages of notes, he admits that many of the scenes and characterizations he made up entirely. He even apologizes to the memory of Shostakovich's long suffering wife, Nina, and their children "for any misrepresentations which this book's objectives required". This is the part I find troubling. I've already ran thru the 2 or 3 Shostakovich biographies that I have, searching their indexes for Elena Konstantinovskaya, who Vollmann portrays as the love of his life. So this is the part that Vollmann seems to have made up. (Naturally, all the hits on Elena Konstantinovskaya that Google turns up are from reviews of this book!) |
§ || ¶JL - Dec 8, 1980 - RIP
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§ || ¶Séanced
The New Music Séance last weekend was a tremendous success... we sold out each of the three performances. The hall proved to be quite intimate and appropriate for this type of music. And the performers were outstanding. One of our volunteers, Mike Strickland, took pictures and created a weblog about the experience. Rather than duplicate what he has already done, I've cobbled his blog entries together into a single narrative here. There are even a couple of pictures of me.
In the end, the afternoon and evening were amazing. And we owe it all to these wonderful performers, Sarah Cahill, Kate Stenberg, and Eva-Maria Zimmermann.
Hey. Let's do it again!