Music for a time of cancellation
Carlos Kalmar/Oregon Symphony: Music for a Time of War (2011): Opens with a version of Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” that achieves grandeur without sacrificing drama. Sticks to themes with Adams’s “The Wound-Dresser”, an adaptation of Whitman’s Civil War poem; Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, a pacificist message to Imperial Japan; and Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, an unprogrammatic work whose dissonances were interpreted as reflecting 1930s European uncertainty.
Childish Gambino: Culdesac (2010) and Camp (2011): Surrealist tenor Ghostface is too modernist for conventional questions of hardness to require conventional answers. Outsider tenor Emimem used his upper register to emphasise his alienage, then overcompensated by murdering everyone and everything. “Blerd” tenor Childish overcompensates too, but less hilariously: his gags are at the line level (come on, the Human Centipede hashtag is funny), not in his mise en scene.
El Rego (2011): Benin is the latest hunting ground for Westerners seeking Afrofunk of forty years’ vintage. Fortunately for Theophile do Rego, Daptone has reissued his hits during his lifetime. Rego is as consise and tasteful as a JB-wannabe can get away with.
Nigeria 70: Sweet Times (2011): Half of the zillionth comp of ’70s Nigerian music is above the median. The pleasures are all over the place: I’d rather have the funk, highlife, and juju on separate comps.
Joyce DiDonato: Diva, Divo (2011): To appreciate the concept — paired arias from female and male PoVs — on more than a superficial level you’d have to know the repertoire better than I do.
