Alex Ross, music writer for the New Yorker, who was Pulitzer shortlisted for his music history page-turner The Rest Is Noise, and blogger at the site of the same name, just wrote a review of the series presented at Carnegie Hall by the Brentano Quartet, which concerned the late works of a variety of composers.
How many classical music critics (or any other journalists for that matter) do you know who can regularly turn out such prose as this in the course of their beat?
Whatever it is that allows artists to maintain their powers of invention as they grow older, composers possess it more richly than most. Musical figures from Monteverdi to Messiaen have had careers that can be plotted as steadily rising curves. In old age, certain composers reach a state of terminal grace, in which even throwaway ideas give off a glow of inevitability, like wisps of cloud illumined at dusk
That’s seriously good stuff. Read the rest here.