The Summer 2015 edition of SYMPHONY (the quarterly magazine published by the League of American Orchestras) was timed to be available for the League’s annual conference (which just took place in Cleveland). The contents have now been published online as well.
This issue of SYMPHONY contains my feature on composers who are drawing on their Arabic, Turkish, and Iranian roots to enrich America’s orchestral life.
My new essay on Sergei Prokofiev’s fantastic and way-underplayed Third Symphony is now up on San Francisco Symphony‘s web site for the program Michael Tilson Thomas is conducting next week. Thank you, MTT, for championing this work!
Music depicting the ravings of demonic possession, eroticized spiritualism (or spiritualized eroticism), medieval witchcraft and sorcery, and a convent of nuns whipped into mass hysteria—no, it’s not the score to a Stephen King film but a work that has a decent claim to being Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic masterpiece: The Fiery Angel (Ognenniy angel in Russian). A labor of love—and great frustration—The Fiery Angel also served as the source for his Third Symphony (even including much of its orchestration). Prokofiev wrote that he considered the latter “to be one of my best compositions.”
To prepare for a new essay, I spent some of last week immersed in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s breakthrough composition from 1910, A Sea Symphony – also known as the First Symphony (though he didn’t get around personally to numbering the first three of his nine symphonies).
While it has its weak moments, I wish this work were performed more often, but it’s never really caught on with American audiences, and the score poses a huge challenge for the chorus. By a remarkable coincidence, A Sea Symphony premiered exactly one month after Mahler’s Eighth (that incredible amalgam of medieval Church hymn and the final scene of Faust). Both works represent unclassifiable hybrids of cantata, symphony, and oratorio, taking the “model” of Beethoven’s Ninth to new extremes. And five years before that, Debussy’s La mer was first performed in Paris. (There was also a growing body of sea-oriented compositions by Vaughan Williams’s compatriots.)
For Vaughan Williams, though, the real impetus wasn’t to somehow paint the sea in orchestral-choral terms but, instead, to give shape to the oracular insights he’d gleaned from his immersive reading of Walt Whitman. He chose texts from Leaves of Grass that use the sea to figure the human soul’s yearning for “restless explorations” and the like:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.
(Talking about our favorite VW symphonies, my friend Q said, “I think I often want Sibelius to be more pastoral, and Vaughan Williams less so, in the matter of symphonies.”)
What would a composer who was setting out today to write an ambitious work inspired by the metaphorical possibilities of the sea come up with, I wonder? Would it even be possible not to take account of the dire state of the oceans? There’s no escaping it, from the ongoing radioactive leakage at Fukushima to this recent study by Australian scientists concluding that “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.”
In this derivative but fitfully inventive fifth installment of the Jurassic franchise, our heroes try to rescue Isla Nublar's dinosaurs from extinction-by-lava, only to get their ash handed to them.
Despite a fascinating subject and an impressive cast, this tale of MLB catcher Moe Berg's stint as an OSS agent simply presents the facts without generating any insights.
Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki masterfully explores Presley's life as a metaphor for America as he drives the late singer's 1963 Rolls-Royce across the country, interviewing those he meets along the way.
In this goofy Wild West farce from the Zellner Brothers, a fop (Robert Pattinson) and his miniature horse (Butterscotch) set out to rescue a young woman (Mia Wasikowska) who needs no rescuing.
Journalist Emily Jane Fox focused on Trump's three marriages and five children when writing her new book. "His presence is overwhelming," she says of the president's role in the family.
Critic Maureen Corrigan recommends two books to expand your horizons: One is a cultural history of the great American road trip; the other an early 20th-century classic of Midwestern rural life.
We asked you to tell us about your favorite horror novels and short stories, and you gave us more than 6,500 titles. Now, meet the expert judges who'll take those parts and create a beautiful monster.
Katie Williams' debut novel follows a woman who works for a company that can tell you infallibly how to become happy — and a drifting group of characters who aren't really looking for happiness.
Pearl's under-the-radar recommendations include a children's fantasy, a murder mystery set in 1919 Kolkata and an entire book dedicated to the events of 1947.
The deeply goofy and weirdly sweet comedy series about two best friends (Veep's Sam Richardson and SNL's Tim Robinson) who love their city, and each other, is back for a second season.
