Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Music sub categories : Recordings
The Rite of Spring: The Untold Story
Just in time for the celebrations marking the centenary of the first performance of The Rite of Spring, in Paris on May 29, 1913, a cylinder recording has turned up in a storeroom at the Hotel du Prince in Geneva. Probably unplayed for a century, it preserves with astonishing clarity a discussion involving the scenarist NICOLAS ROERICH, the impresario SERGE DIAGHILEV, the dancer-choreographer VASLAV NIJINSKY, and the work’s composer.
Marek Janowski Conducts the San Francisco Symphony in Schumann’s Manfred Overture, Rhenish Symphony and the Brahms Double Concerto with Steinbacher and Gerhardt
It has been about a hundred years now since classical composers automatically turned to literature for inspiration. Walt Whitman was perhaps the last universal philosopher of the written word to appeal widely to musicians. Expansive, idealistic compositions by Vaughan Williams (A Sea Symphony), Delius (Sea Drift), Hindemith (“When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) and many others are still vividly with us to prove the point… But in the decades since, our culture has veered off in realistic, therapeutic and scientific directions. Self-actualization of the dramatic sort depicted in romantic verse now seems naive and self-indulgent to us. We do not model ourselves any more on sweeping literary notions of heroism, duty and suicide. They embarrass us slightly. And this probably explains why one doesn’t very often come across Fountainhead Symphonies, featuring Howard Roark standing naked at the edge of a cliff, or tone poems devoted to Portnoy’s activities of self-discovery in the coat closet. Occasionally, somebody still thinks of himself with sufficient grandiosity to try pulling off a musical Hamlet or Macbeth, but these days we take it all with a grain of salt. Narcissism has migrated to opera, where it can become camp.
American Spring: Symphonic Landmarks from Albany and Detroit
A portion of the rich but sometimes neglected trove of American symphonies was given a welcome exposure during the valuable Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall in early May, thanks to the ongoing commitment to this repertory of music directors David Alan Miller and Leonard Slatkin. The beneficiary composers, Morton Gould and Charles Ives, both stand apart from the mid-century symphonic mainstream, also neglected, of Piston, Sessions, Schuman, Harris, Diamond, et al. It was a fascinating juxtaposition, particularly since Gould’s symphony has been largely absent since its premier in 1947, and most of Ives’s works had to wait lengthy intervals before receiving their first performances.
The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s All Mozart Program Including the C Minor Mass in Sydney
Since the resurrection of certain large and important Mozart works, Idomeneo being the main example which only came back to theatres and concert halls again around 60 years ago, much of his sacred music remains unsung or at least rarely heard. The Requiem mass, the C minor mass, the Coronation mass, Ave verum corpus are more or less ubiquitous, and do deserve many hearings. There are certain others a little less often heard, but there remain very many masses, mainly short youthful ones, litanies and fragments, starting from Mozart’s childhood in the late 1760′s through the ’70′s, with many fewer in the ’80′s when he was writing his finest operas. These sacred pieces, as well as the church sonatas which are thought to have been played as part of some of the masses, and also I might add Mozart’s ceremonial masonic music which also has a particularly strong and direct metaphysical sense (though masonic music has its own peculiar style), approach the universe in a very Mozartean way, surprisingly similar to his secular music, even though they respond to different texts or purposes. These sacred pieces’ clear dramatic sense makes them well suited to the concert hall, even if they can loose some of their gravity in the more modern workaday venues. Still they aren’t operas and obviously the separate religious importance matters greatly whatever the occasion which sees them played, even if both Mozart’s sacred choral and secular music span human existence with such deep and sensitive empathy. Mozart’s thoughts and music-making about the divine are al the more powerful when one considers that though he wrote less sacred music in the 1780′s, at the same time (or at the latest by 1790), he greatly desired the job of St. Stephen’s cathedral composer, to the point of volunteering to assist the aging incumbent.
Vladimir Jurowski Conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Prokofiev and Shostakovich
Crossing the color line. In the twentieth century Russian music became a standoff between revolution and counter-revolution, the irony being that the White Russian composers who fled the Bolsheviks were the true revolutionaries while the Reds who stayed to endure Soviet rule were forced to toe the line of backward-looking conservatism. But the music isn’t easily color-coded. Vladimir Jurowski led a concert of neoclassical Stravinsky and romantic Prokofiev that betrayed almost no revolutionary instincts, ending with the painful wail of the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony, whose Soviet credentials were never pure enough to satisfy the apparatchiks of the Composers Union.
Shostakovich’s Rediscovered Opera ‘Orango’ and the Fourth Symphony in London
By the skin of his teeth. As a bizarre offshoot of the workers’ paradise, Soviet ideology boasted of creating a New Man, with possible help from the apes — before DNA was discovered, crackpot experiments that involved interbreeding humans with lower primates were conceived. The only success was fictitious, a creature named Orango who began life as a French journalist before being injected with chimpanzee serum. He is the sullen, furry anti-hero of a satirical opera begun by Shostakovich in 1932, and although the weirdness of the libretto may have been a stumbling block, another was probably political: Orango spoofed the decadent West (the creature uses his intelligence to become a stock market manipulator but retains a King Kong-like appetite for blondes). Did Orango’s brutish manners shave a bit too close to Stalin? Or did he dangerously mock the promise of a New Man?
BSO Appoints Andris Nelsons as its New Music Director
Given some of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished elder statesmen music directors—Karl Muck, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine—it’s probably surprising that they have appointed 34-year-old Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons to succeed James Levine as the BSO’s 15th music director since 1881. Still, it’s useful to remember that the BSO also [...]
Blomstedt and Hadelich with the SF Symphony…Hats off to collaboration? Or, tell me it isn’t so!
The San Francisco Symphony Davies Hall, San Francisco Saturday, April 20, 2013 Herbert Blomstedt, conducting Augustin Hadelich, violin Beethoven – Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61 (1806) Nielsen – Symphony No. 5, Opus 50 (1922) Hats off to collaboration? Or, tell me it isn’t so! I didn’t know quite which to think on April 20th, [...]
