“Turangalîla is the work of my life,” Olivier Messiaen wrote in a letter to a young Leonard Bernstein, who was preparing to conduct the world premiere near the end of 1949. Messiaen thanked him in advance for agreeing to take on this formidable challenge, “since I know (having seen you in The Rite of Spring) that you will do it in a way that is marvelous and brilliant.”
Here’s my program essay for Juilliard Opera’s production of Dido and Aeneas at the Willson Theater, directed by Mary Birnbaum and led by Avi Stein, with choreography by Claudia Schreier. Closes tomorrow.
“Even this little boarding-school opera is full of [Purcell’s] spirit, his
freshness, his dramatic expression, and his unapproached art of setting
English speech to music.” This was the verdict that Cornetto di Basso (aka
George Bernard Shaw, using his pen name as a music critic) reached when
covering an otherwise less-than-thrilling performance of Dido and Aeneas
in 1889. Though two centuries old by then, the score had only first been
published in 1841; the opera would not be performed outside England until
1895, when the bicentennial of Henry Purcell’s death stimulated curiosity
about his work.
Here’s my story for the Julliard Journal on the phenomenal Barbara Hannigan:
Even as an internationally acclaimed soprano, Barbara Hannigan is unable to resist challenging herself to ever more-formidable accomplishments. In 2011 she made a bold leap to the podium, debuting as a conductor at the Châtelet in Paris with Stravinsky’s Renard.
The opening concert is on 25 January at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater, when Sachs will lead the New Juilliard Ensemble. All six Focus events are free of charge.
I unexpectedly realized the role of radio in October 2017, while writing a program note about Argentinean-German composer Mauricio Kagel for a New Juilliard Ensemble concert. Because Kagel settled in Cologne, I began thinking about the extraordinary post-World War II new music scene that flourished there, where he and many other compositional giants, German and foreign, had settled.
Being reasonably acquainted with that Rhineland city and its institutions, I immediately recalled the German letters WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Broadcasting), the radio-TV public broadcast based there. An enormous operation, WDR generally considered the most important broadcaster in German, with five radio transmissions, television, internet broadcasts, and a group of external studios in various cities around Germany’s industrial heartland. Having had a professional relationship with WDR 3, I realized that it has had a vital role as one of the most prominent of European radio stations with its decades-old commissioning program.
Dots began to connect. I had performed or recorded at the BBC, Radio France, Swiss stations in Zurich and Basel, Austrian radio in Salzburg, but what had never struck me was that they all were busily commissioning composers, not just creating background music for radio dramas, but also music intended for live performance in concerts, and not just those composers who produced ‘comfortable’ music. Suddenly I had a topic for Focus 2019: “On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissions.”
Sunday evening’s Byron Schenkman & Friends program looks delicious: focusing on two early cantatas by Handel (including Vedendo Amor from his sojourn in Rome), it also includes some of his instrumental music plus pieces by Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Caldara, and Anna Bon.
For some background, here’s my piece in this month’s Juilliard Journal on Handel in Rome (on p. 16).
Complete program:
George Frideric Handel:
Sonata in G Major, op. 1, no. 5, for flute and continuo
Domenico Scarlatti:
Four keyboard sonatas, K. 238, K. 239, K. 99, K. 100
George Frideric Handel:
Cantata “Vedendo Amor” for voice and continuo
Antonio Caldara:
Cantata “Soffri, mio caro Alcino” for voice and continuo
Anna Bon:
Sonata in F Major, op. 1, no. 2, for flute and continuo
George Frideric Handel:
Cantata “Mi palpita il cor” for voice, flute, and continuo
Performers:
Reginald Mobley
COUNTERTENOR
Joshua Romatowski
FLUTE
Nathan Whittaker
CELLO
Byron Schenkman
HARPSICHORD
Concert starts 7pm on Sunday 18 November at Benaroya’s Nordstrom Recital Hall.
Tickets here.
Nearly a year after bringing to a close his eight-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert reflects on another farewell—he’s stepping down as director of conducting and orchestral studies at Juilliard this spring. As announced in March, David Robertson will succeed him in the fall.
The Merry Wives of Windsor at The Juilliard School (photo by Richard Termine)
By a strange coincidence, the swan songs of two 19th-century composers, Giuseppe Verdi and Otto Nicolai, are dazzling comic operas that are based on the same play: Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was first registered in 1602. ..
It may be hard to imagine that there was a time when pre-Baroque figures were generally treated as an obscure footnote to the alleged master narrative of Western music history. But when it comes to the lifework of individual composers, a similarly myopic attitude is still sometimes found…
Here’s a piece I wrote for this month’s Juilliard Journal about Agrippina:
In one of Agrippina‘s pivotal scenes, the Emperor Claudius—at first presumed dead at sea by the scheming title character, only to be inconveniently rescued—crows in triumph over “conquered Britain” as a “new subject” for the Roman throne. That wouldn’t exactly be music to Brexit supporters—but, then, international migrants like George Frideric Handel (né Georg Friedrich Händel) would have had a harder time in a Europe of zealously policed borders.
Juilliard’s Focus! Festival for 2017 is devoted to the music of Latin America. Complete schedule and programming here.
Longtime Juilliard professor, conductor, and scholar Joel Sachs, who organized the entire festival, writes:
In the fall of 1992, I was offered the directorship of MoMA’s Summergarden, then a two-month long festival of new music. Since the museum was preparing a major show of Latin American art, I was asked if my first Summergarden in 1993 might explore Latin American music. I assented, not realizing the challenge of finding the best music of a high swath of the world whose composers were hardly known. I quickly learned that the resources were huge.
As my knowledge of the music of Latin America has increased in the ensuing years, so has the number of composers. A Latin American Focus! festival seemed badly needed, even if six concerts could only scratch the surface. I wanted to emphasize composers still living in their home countries, but could not exclude the Latin America diaspora – composers who went abroad for education, opportunity, and in many cases, to escape the persecution and violence of the 20th century military regimes.
For months I have consulted extensively with composers in Latin America and elsewhere, assembling lists especially of young composer. The quantity of composers is truly staggering, and I have had to create limitations, favoring the living and those who remain in their home countries, while including some émigrés. Three of the pioneers are heard on the opening and closing programs.
Above all, I want to illustrate the stylistic diversity that makes to term ‘Latin American composer’ difficult to define other than geographically. The breadth of styles is truly amazing. The audience should not expect only ‘Latin-sounding’ folklore-based compositions. Since the primary aim of Juilliard’s Focus! festival is to give Juilliard students opportunities to extend their experience and skills, I have excluded purely electronic music, or music requiring indigenous instruments.
Cartoonist Peter Bagge takes on the life of another independent woman in Credo, his biography of pioneering libertarian Rose Wilder Lane (also known for being the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder).
In our latest "Missed Connections," Helen Chapple, Saul Blair and Graham Hinton reunite to talk about how a humanitarian trip to Africa 50 years ago changed the trajectory of their lives.
A new HBO show takes on the life of Anne Lister, a real-life British landowner of the 1830s whose voluminous coded diaries detailed her extensive — and sometimes open — love affairs with women.
Ilaria Tuti's crime thriller, set in the mountains of northern Italy, stars a classic odd couple of cops: A gruff, aging, unhealthy veteran detective and her young whippersnapper of a partner.
Author Anna Merlan's recitations are chilling, as are her warnings that fringe beliefs tend to go mainstream — and how their rise is seen against a resurgence in nationalism and white supremacy.
Charles Nix, Mitch Goldstein, and Sarah Hyndman talk to NPR's Scott Simon about a recent face-lift to the typeface Helvetica, which recently got its first redesign in 35 years.
To celebrate the centennial of the modern-dance pioneer's birth, dancers at theaters in London, New York and Los Angeles performed a total of 100 solos that the master choreographed.
Duanwad Pimwana is one of Thailand's preeminent female writers, and this newly translated story collection — while not uniformly flawless — lets readers watch her grow into a true master of the form.
Moms perform heroic tasks every day, but they rarely get portrayed as superheroes. Fast Color tells the story of three generations of black women and the supernatural powers they inherit.
A century after the birth of quantum mechanics, no one is sure what it is telling us about the nature of reality — and Lee Smolin's book adds to a stream of excellent works on the topic.
