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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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Gesualdo Madrigals And Ligeti Atmospherics Regular readers know that the New York Times music critic, Anthony Thommasini, is one of UD’s favorite writers. Informed, witty, straightforward, and verbally inventive (In his latest review, he describes one composer as producing “12-tonish works for large casts.” At first I read this as 12-tonnish, as in heavy, over-elaborated; then I realized he meant in the manner of the twelve-tone scale.), Thommasini assumes you know more, rather than less, than you do. Unlike the writer UD quotes a couple of posts down there (A Haze of Praising), who thinks you’re dumber than you are, Thommasini assumes you’re smarter than you are. Reviewing a new opera based on Alice in Wonderland, he writes: Whenever the soprano Jennifer Winn, who portrayed Alice, sang a relatively unaccompanied vocal line, her pitch was true, despite the angular leaps in the vocal writing, and her diction clear. But for the most part she had to fight to be heard above the sustained, high-pitched singing of the chorus, which often sounded like some curious mix of Gesualdo madrigals and Ligeti atmospherics. This is the kind of writing that makes UD stretch. Angular leaps she gets, with a little thought -- it's twelve-tone music, after all, so there's no traditional rhyme or reason; and the singer’s doing it unaccompanied… Thinking about it, I can even hear it in my mind, having been brought up on Alban Berg and other atonals… But my favorite part of the paragraph is Thommasini’s description of the choral singing as a “curious mix of Gesualdo madrigals and Ligeti atmospherics.” To quote UD’s eloquent spawn, “I’m like, what?” …Okay, Gyorgy Ligeti, who died recently… I don’t really have a sense of what his music sounds like… I’ll have to listen to some… Madrigals I know intimately, but Gesualdo madrigals?… A writer like Thommasini, in other words, assumes a high level of understanding on your part, and because his attractive writing makes you want to be part of his world, you may well make the effort to attain that level, tracking down some of his allusions and learning a thing or two you didn’t know. |