Finland

Music

Trifonov Triumphs at the San Francisco Symphony with Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations. Vänskä conducts Sibelius’s Night Ride and Sunrise, Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 6

Whenever you attend an orchestral concert, I'm sure you will have noticed that "Double D" on your ticket stub represents not the seating of the audience by bra size (an intriguing notion), but something more like a banishment to Siberia! "DD" is the last row of orchestra seats in Davies Hall, and at that distance music can become less visceral. This time, though, I was happy to sit back in the hall, particularly for the music programmed on the second half.
Bard Music Festival

Sibelius II: Larry Wallach on the Bard Music Festival 2011 – Jean Sibelius and his World

Originality is a hard concept to get a hold of — there is no yardstick for measuring it, by its very nature. This makes the evaluation of composers, the assessment of their influence and historical position, one of the most subjective areas of music history and criticism. Contemporary writers have become impatient with their predecessors’ habit of rating composers in terms of “importance” or “greatness” based, at least in part, on their originality. And then there is the issue of “unique voice” — is that the same as originality? Is their any good composer who lacks either one? Can “uniqueness” be evaluated?
Bard Music Festival

Sibelius I: Bard Music Festival 2011 – Jean Sibelius and his World

One shouldn’t let anything get in the way of a Bard Music Festival—and the surrounding Summerscape opera, play, and dance performances, etc., least of all one’s preconceptions about composers. In one case only, Prokofiev (Bard Festival 2008), I approached the Festival with thoughts of taking a mildly rebarbative medicine, but I soon learned how wrong I was, thanks to the Russophile enthusiasm of my friend, Robert Kurilla, who has written about Prokofiev in the Review, and, of course, the lectures and programs of the Festival itself. In Prokofiev’s case the problem was that his best known works give an extremely limited, really inaccurate, idea of him and that his best work is little-known and rather challenging.
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