MEMETERIA by Thomas May

August 25, 2018 • 1:57 am Comments Off on RIP George Walker (1922-2018)

RIP George Walker (1922-2018)

I’m devastated by news of the death of George Walker. It was just over a year ago that I had the opportunity to interview him at length for a magazine profile. I know he was eagerly looking forward to the live public premiere of his Sinfonia No. 5 (“Visions”) next April with the Seattle Symphony — his reaction to the 2015 church massacre in Charleston.

George Walker’s music remains woefully neglected and underrepresented. As the music world looks back over his remarkable legacy — as a composer and a pianist, whose career was stymied by systemic racism — I hope this situation finally begins to change for the better.

Filed under: George Walker, music news

August 24, 2018 • 10:14 am Comments Off on Live from Lucerne Festival: All-Ravel Concert

Live from Lucerne Festival: All-Ravel Concert

Tonight’s edition of Live from Lucerne Festival is an all-Ravel concert: Riccardo Chailly conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra starting at 7.30pm Lucerne time.

Filed under: Lucerne Festival

August 22, 2018 • 2:53 am Comments Off on Stockhausen at 90

Stockhausen at 90

Filed under: Karlheinz Stockhausen

August 19, 2018 • 12:32 pm Comments Off on Leonard Bernstein Countdown

Leonard Bernstein Countdown

It’s less than a week now until the official 100th birthday. Here’s one of my contributions to the celebration, in the form of my story for Strings magazine (August 2018 issue), which takes a look at Leonard Bernstein from a somewhat different angle.

Composer. Conductor. Educator. Humanitarian. Even the official leonardbernstein.com website attempts to cope with its namesake’s oversize legacy by parceling it into categories. The music world has yet again been attempting to reassess it all throughout this centennial year—when the absence of “the next Leonard Bernstein” seems to be felt with an especially intense pang….

August 2018-ST280 (story on pp. 16-22)

Filed under: Bernstein, Strings

August 17, 2018 • 12:01 am Comments Off on The 2018 Summer Festival in Lucerne

The 2018 Summer Festival in Lucerne

Tonight the 2018 edition of Lucerne’s Summer Festival opens with a program of Stravinsky and Mozart. Riccardo Chailly conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestral, with Lang Lang as the soloist in Mozart’s C minor Concerto.

The concert starts at 6:30 pm (Lucerne time), and its second half — Firebird — will be broadcast live on the Lucerne Festival Facebook page and YouTube channel. WQXR will also stream the second half on its webpage.

Additionally, Radio SRF2 Kultur will broadcast the entire concert (with a time delay, starting at 7:30 pm Lucerne time).

Filed under: Lucerne Festival

August 15, 2018 • 3:07 pm Comments Off on Taking Pictures

Taking Pictures

Filed under: photography

August 14, 2018 • 9:54 am Comments Off on Refugees and Opera

Refugees and Opera

Joshua Barone recently reported for the New York Times on a new production at Bavarian Staatsoper for part of its youth program that was “written for refugees, children of immigrants and born-and-raised Bavarians.”
The piece draws on Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, among other sources. “Theater about the refugee crisis has proliferated in Germany since migration into the country reached its peak in 2016,” writes Barone. “But rarely has the hot-button issue … entered the realm of opera, much less children’s opera.”

Actually, the Zuflucht Kultur Association has been engaging with these issues for several years, offering productions of Mozart’s Zaide, Così, and Idomeneo (which traveled to the Lucerne Festival last summer), Carmen, Orfeo, and, most recently, Don Carlos.

Here’s a radio interview (in German) with mezzo Cornelia Lanz, one of the association’s producer-performers, on their Orfeo production.

Filed under: directors, music news, opera

August 13, 2018 • 10:34 am Comments Off on Porgy and Bess in Seattle

Porgy and Bess in Seattle

An unforgiving work overload is keeping me from covering Seattle Opera’s just-opened Francesca Zambello production of Porgy and Bess, an opera I love. I did cover it the last time the company presented Gershwin’s work, in 2011, in a version directed by Chris Alexander — well before I had launched this blog, so I hope you will forgive me for posting that
piece here. Two of the singers cast in 2011 are back onstage for the current production: Mary Elizabeth Williams and Jermaine Smith):

Seattle’s version admirably digs beneath the surface of this elusive classic of American identity. It avoids sentimentalizing Porgy into a saint and brings more human focus to characters who can often become caricatures. But some pivotal moments are under-emphasized….

continue

Filed under: George Gershwin, review, Seattle Opera

August 11, 2018 • 10:44 am Comments Off on Wolf Kahn: Reaching Up and Bearing Down

Wolf Kahn: Reaching Up and Bearing Down

Pines Against Evening Sky (1996), oil on canvas: From the Wolf Kahn retrospective Reaching Up and Bearing Down at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.

This especially unusual exhibition features a never-before-seen group of 21 large-format pastels from various periods of his art-making career, as well as oil on canvas paintings—breathtaking, classic Kahn artworks that thrive in the liminal space between representation and abstraction.

These works reveal Kahn’s exquisite ability to express the beauty of nature and the land. Kahn calls pastel his “determining medium” and considers it to be foundational to all his work. This striking group of pastels demonstrates the artist’s fluency with a medium that he describes as one of “immediacy,” allowing him to make the most direct recordation of his experience of being in nature.

Online catalogue here.

Filed under: art

August 10, 2018 • 12:36 pm Comments Off on Daniele Gatti Replacements at Lucerne Summer Festival

Daniele Gatti Replacements at Lucerne Summer Festival

The replacement conductors for the two programs that the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had originally scheduled at the 2018 Summer Festival in Lucerne with their former, now-ousted music director Daniele Gatti have been announced.

Manfred Honeck takes the reins for the 5 September concert; the very interesting lineup of Wagner, Berg, and Bruckner’s Third Symphony remains unchanged.

And on the evening after that, Bernard Haitink will replace Mahler’s Seventh (which was to have been paired with Webern with the Ninth Symphony. Given the reception of his Mahler Ninth last year in London, this should be one for the ages:

Other conductors extract more pathos (or self-pity, depending on one’s view of Mahler and the conductor involved) from the final Adagio, but few usher it towards its faltering close with more care and gentle humanity than Haitink did here. If the Ninth is the work through which Mahler confronted his mortality and came to terms with it, then in this performance it was expressed unswervingly.

Filed under: Lucerne Festival, Mahler, music news

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