Friday Miscellanea

I wanted to link to a couple of lovely livestreamed performances that I listened to this week from the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, but it appears that as soon as the concert ends they take it off the web. Too bad, because the concerts, conducted by a young Russian conductor (whose name I did not write down)  were very good. The strings of the orchestra joined by a young Belgian violinist, played music by Arvo Pärt, Tchaikovsky and a Latvian composer. Keep an eye out for more of these livestreamed concerts.

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First encounters with memorable music: a personal scrapbook

If you think of Classical Music as a vast and imposing monolith, with both words capitalized, it isn’t an easy thing to take on within a single encounter. Individual pieces, on the other hand, are like people — each one quirky and distinctive, and each one carrying the promise of a lifelong acquaintance.

What strikes me about this list, in fact, is that just as with people, not all of those acquaintances panned out. In other words, this is not at all a list of my favorite music (although there’s some overlap). Some of the works here have been a permanent source of joy and sustenance; some were the subject of intense but short-lived passion; some I communed with once and then never encountered again.

Read on for his interesting selection of several pieces that continue to play an important role in his listening experience.

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 Here is a pretty good discussion of just how revolutionary Philip Glass' opera was: Philip Glass and ‘Einstein on the Beach’: How one opera changed everything

Easily the most important opera of the last half century, “Einstein on the Beach,” at least at first, meant far more to those who witnessed it than to the art form itself, which couldn’t have cared less. Almost nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera.

“Einstein” has no narrative. “Einstein” has no Einstein, even though a great many onstage are dressed in the iconic image of frizzy-haired scientist. “Einstein on the Beach” has no beach. Glass’ relentlessly fast and loud score is four hard-driving hours of Minimalism. Spoken text comes from the sputtering of mid-1970s New York AM radio, cut up. Sung text consists of a chorus counting rhythms or the solfège syllables of pitches. Wilson’s images revolve around a train/spaceship, trial/prison and field, although at one inexplicable point, a revolutionary Patty Hearst, rifle in hand, finds herself in the action.

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The pickings are very slim this week and I was sick in bed for a couple of days so I didn't do as much preparation as usual. Here are a couple of nice envois. First the Vivace from the Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor:

 And now the Symphony No. 6 by Tchaikovsky performed by Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater: