Dmitri Sitkovetsky, Ayana Tsuji (winner of the 2016 first prize), Matt Haimovitz, and Kim Kashkashian at Maison symphonique (Concours musical international de Montréal)
Filed under: Bach, photography
May 31, 2019 • 12:00 am Comments Off on Walt Whitman at 200
Walt Whitman at 200
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.–Song of Myself, V
Born two hundred years ago in the town of West Hills on Long Island, Walt Whitman embodies a voice that Americans are in dire need of hearing and heeding again.
Mark Edmundson has written a perceptive reflection on Whitman’s legacy in this month’s Atlantic:
“Whitman speaks to our moment in many ways. One of them is quite simple: At a time when Americans hate one another across partisan lines as intensely perhaps as they have since the Civil War, Whitman’s message is that hate is not compatible with true democracy, spiritual democracy.”
His poetry has inspired a remarkable range of composers. Here’s a sampling of my favorites:
–George Walker, Lilacs
–Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Sea Symphony
–Frederick Delius, Sea Drift
–John Adams/The Wound-Dresser
–Paul Hindemith/When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Please share your own favorites!
Filed under: poetry, Walt Whitman
May 29, 2019 • 3:01 pm Comments Off on Yuval Sharon on Three Years with the LA Phil
Yuval Sharon on Three Years with the LA Phil
Looking forward to his upcoming Meredith Monk project:
Filed under: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Yuval Sharon
May 25, 2019 • 10:59 pm Comments Off on Innovations — and Results — at the California Symphony
Innovations — and Results — at the California Symphony
Based in the Bay Area suburb Walnut Creek, the California Symphony has been getting some amazing results from its outreach programs in recent years, according to the story Shaking Up the Symphony by Laura Fraser in the April issue of Southwest: The Magazine. Since being “on the brink of financial collapse” in 2014, writes Fraser, “ticket sales have increased by 70 percent, concerts are frequently added to keep up with the demand, and the number of donors has nearly quadrupled” — all since Aubrey Bergauer began her tenure as executive director.
Fraser interviewed music director Donato Calabra as well, who said: “People think that to bring in younger audiences you need ‘The Symphony Meets the Beatles,’ but a Beethoven symphony is amazing to anyone. You don’t have to ‘symphonize’ pop music. We needed to change the experience, not the repertoire.”
Jeremy Reynolds of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette follows up on the story in this article. Even though the California Symphony’s budget and audience are a fraction of PSO’s, he explores possible lessons that may be drawn for much larger organizations from California’s success.
Filed under: music news
May 21, 2019 • 1:50 am Comments Off on Heinz Holliger at 80
Heinz Holliger at 80
“My entire relationship with music is such that I always try to reach its limits.”
The extraordinary Swiss oboist, composer, conductor, teacher, and all-around musical personality Heinz Holliger turns 80 today — his creativity undimmed.
Later in the week, ECM is releasing Zwiegespräche, an intriguing gathering of “dialogues”: works for oboe by Holliger and György Kurtág, who share a strikingly similar aesthetic. Both studied under Sándor Veress and, notes Roman Brotbeck in his liner notes, “both use the entire history of music as a frame of reference, both love miniatures, both speicalize in homage to friends and colleagues and cultivate a living ‘Davidsbund’ with living and departed soulmates.”
Holliger plays oboe, English horn, and piano on the album and is joined by fellow oboist Marie-Lise Schüpbach, bass clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, soprano Sarah Wegener, and Philippe Jaccottet reciting seven of his poems for another remarkable dialogue here: Holliger responds to the poems with various formal strategies in Lecture pour hautbois et cors anglais (2015-16).
Last year at Zurich Opera I was mesmerized by Holliger’s latest stage work, Lunea. In this opera to a libretto by Klaus Händl, Holliger returns to one of the figures who has haunted him throughout his creative life: the Romantic poet and polymath Nikolaus Lenau, who was institutionalized in his final years. Holliger’s exquisitely refined musical sensibility and aesthetic of fragmentation, indirection, and dislocation work to tremendously powerful effect here in depicting the search for love and longing for eternity.
Holliger has been a formative presence for decades at the Lucerne Festival. Here’s an insightful interview (in German) with Christian Wildhagen.
And here a radio interview with Dorothea Bossert for SWR.
Filed under: anniversary, Heinz Holliger, new music
May 16, 2019 • 10:18 am Comments Off on The Parting: New Opera by Tom Cipullo and David Mason at MOR
The Parting: New Opera by Tom Cipullo and David Mason at MOR
Miklós Radnóti
Here’s a Seattle Times preview of the upcoming world premiere of the new opera The Parting by Tom Cipullo and David Mason this Sunday.
The Parting is set during the final evening the poet Miklós Radnóti spends with his wife Fanni Gyarmati before he is sent into forced labor during the Holocaust. It’s the second commission from this team by Music of Rembrance, following their remarkable opera After Life four years ago.
When Mina Miller founded Seattle-based Music of Remembrance in 1998, she could hardly have foreseen that its mission would become even more distressingly relevant over two decades later…
Filed under: commissions, Holocaust, Music of Remembrance, new music, new opera
May 11, 2019 • 6:40 pm Comments Off on Tod Machover on City Symphonies
Tod Machover on City Symphonies
Filed under: new music, Tod Machover
May 9, 2019 • 7:34 am Comments Off on Martinů: Harpsichord Concerto
Martinů: Harpsichord Concerto
Thank you, Mahan Esfahani, for a lovely concert with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Bohuslav Martinů’s Harpsichord Concerto was the scintillating highlight. The clip above features Esfahani’s beloved mentor, Zuzana Růžičková, who championed this work.
The Martinů was especially welcome since I had been looking forward to his Concerto for Two Pianos last week with the NY Phil, only to have it replaced by a decidedly less satisfying Max Bruch rarity.
Another treat was Brett Dean’s chamber version of Till Eulenspiegel, a witty and fluent arrangement of Strauss’s orchestral tone poem for nonet.
Filed under: harpsichord, Mahan Esfahani, Martinů
May 7, 2019 • 6:26 am Comments Off on Bruch Plus Strauss: Curious Pairing, Inspired Playing in Semyon Bychkov’s Latest NYPO Engagement
Bruch Plus Strauss: Curious Pairing, Inspired Playing in Semyon Bychkov’s Latest NYPO Engagement
Semyon Bychkov © Umberto Nicoletti
For his recent pair of programs guest conducting the New York Philharmonic over the past two weeks, Semyon Bychkov has made a point of combining familiar repertoire with new discoveries. At the end of April, it was a Brahms symphony with the American premiere of Thomas Larcher’s Symphony no. 2 (Kenotaph), a response to the tragedy of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean. The Russian returned to the podium for a second program that placed Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben side-by-side with a piece that might as well have been a premiere: the last time the NY Phil performed the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (Op.88a) by Max Bruch was in 1917.
Filed under: Max Bruch, New York Philharmonic, review, Strauss
MEMETERIA 