There are more wonderful conductors to day than ever before, but there's not a single one doing wagner that i really should care about. Why doesn't some orchestra, some opera company deviate from the homogenization norm? What is it people can't do any more? It's just such a highly professionalized field in terms of how players are chosen and training process. I would love to see certain orchestras, certain conductors,. really shake things up and and a sort of step away from that extreme concentration on the technical, pure technical standard....
To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. “When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music,” says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, explores the complicated legacy of Wagner, as well as how music shapes and is shaped by its cultural context.
Alex joined Tyler to discuss the book, what gets lost in the training of modern opera singers, the effect of recording technology on orchestras, why he doesn’t have “guilty pleasures,” how we should approach Wagner today, the irony behind most uses of “Ride of the Valkyries” in cinema, his favorite Orson Welles film, his predictions for concert attendance after COVID-19, why artistic life in Europe will likely recover faster than in America, Rothko’s influence on composer Morton Feldman, his contender for the greatest pop album ever made, how his Harvard dissertation on James Joyce prepared him for a career writing about music, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded August 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect