Posts From Author: igor stravinsky

Review: Scheherazade.2 (World Premiere)

Scheherazade.2 — Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra (2014) by John Adams New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall; conducted by Alan Gilbert; soloist Leila Josefowicz World premiere: Thursday, March 26, 2015 Insights at the Atrium — Artist and Muse: John Adams and Leila Josefowicz David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center Monday, March 23, 2015 John Adams isn’t sure if his latest composition can be played by a man. Scheherazade.2, described as a “dramatic symphony for violin and orchestra,” emerged from a collaboration with the violinist Leila Josefowicz, and after seeing her play it, it’s certainly difficult to imagine the same work essayed by a male soloist. In a talk ahead of the world premiere, Carol Oja, the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence, suggested to Adams that he had written “a feminist concerto.” And while he confessed that he never had a coherent “libretto” for the piece in his head, he did concede that she’s “like Isolde or Elektra. I can’t think of a concerto that’s that dramatically specific.” (To note, he rejects “concerto,” preferring the Berliozian construction “dramatic symphony”.) In Scheherazade.2,  the line between actor and violinist blurs. To perform it, Josefowicz prepared much as an opera singer would. She memorized the work, internalized it, began thinking of it […]
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Reading 2014

Being a collection of disordered thoughts on new writing from the last year or so. There were lots of books about books. I enjoyed Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014) and Joanna Rakoff‘s My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014), which both fused literary criticism and autobiography into what Joyce Carol Oates called, reviewing Mead, “bibliomemoirs.” “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” wrote Mead of Middlemarch, locating George Eliot’s greatness in her broad imaginative sympathies. Mead’s is a lovely book, mixing biographical detail about Eliot with an introspective analysis of how her work might be read and re-read on the journey through life (review here). Rakoff’s book, meanwhile, is more straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the author’s first job in publishing, in which she became a sort of gatekeeper for J.D. Salinger. Until then, she’d not read him (“I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita”); but before long, she’s hooked. After a century of literary modernism, its central characters continue to haunt the pages of new work. Kevin Jackson‘s Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is novelly conceived, taking 1922 day by day, dropping […]
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1922 and All That: Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius

Let’s try to imagine the reactions of an unprepared, average reader of 1922, content with his beer and skittles and his Kipling. Suddenly, enter a skinny, shabby Irishman and a natty, quietly sinister American between them hell-bent on exploding everything that realistic fiction and Georgian poetry held dear. Enter also Pound, Proust, Freud, Hemingway, Kafka, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Le Corbusier, Chaplin, Buñuel… The cast list of Kevin Jackson’s marvellous journal of a watershed year, Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One, certainly justifies its title. It was a year bookended by the publications of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but to isolate the two would be to cut them senselessly adrift and Jackson wisely immerses us instead in context. He moves day by day, noting the major and minor biographical details of his subjects and the principal political events of 1922, from Mussolini’s rise to power to the Irish Civil War. Letters and diaries are ransacked for their contemporary insights. And there are some great one-liners, too (January 20, Iowa: “Christian K. Nelson took out a patent on the Eskimo Pie”). Here are ten things I learned: André Breton helped Proust with the corrections […]
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