Recorded in 1946, Igor Stravinsky conducts the Woody Herman Orchestra in the Ebony Concerto. It doesn’t get much cooler than this.
I. Moderato
II. Andante
III. Moderato
Ebony Concerto: Stravinsky and the Woody Herman Orchestra
Stravinsky’s Tango
Performed by Michel Béroff, with score.
What you want for Christmas
Of course, if you’re reading this blog, you probably already have most of this. If not, now’s the time to jump. The set includes Kleiber’s recordings of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 5 and 7, Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, Schubert’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 8, as well as complete traversals of La Traviata, Der Freischutz, Tristan and Isolde and Die Fledermaus, all top drawer. The 12-CD set is budget priced. Here’s the link to the Amazon page.
The 50s, in verse, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the modern music
Originally penned in 2007, inspired by Alex Ross’ ‘The Rest is Noise’, a rhyming account of classical music history in the 1950s:
Boulez once said
That Schoenberg was dead,
And totaled his serial-ism.
Cage took to chance,
His music to enhance,
And thereby caused the schism.
Xenakis then found,
A brand new ground –
Buildings by atonal means.
Shostakovich, meanwhiles,
Put music in piles,
And filed away all his dreams.
Copland spoke to
The McCarthy zoo,
And never quite came back.
Stravinsky withstood
As well as he could,
By dint of 12-tonal tack.
Ligeti split
His music a bit,
Micro-polyphonic in style.
Stockhausen unwound
An interplanet’ry sound,
His hand on electronic dial.
The listener said wha?
The listener said huh?
I think that there’s something I’m missin’.
Babbitt said no,
It’s all in the row,
And who gives a crap if you listen?
Finnish music critic wins country’s top non-fiction prize
A music critic for the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has won the 2010 Tieto-Finlandia award, Finland’s top non-fiction prize, and EUR 30,000 to boot.
Vesa Sirén is his name and his book is called “Suomalaiset kapellimestarit, Sibeliuksesta Saloseen, Kajanuksesta Franckiin” (or, “Finnish Conductors: from Sibelius to Salonen, from Kajanus to Franck”).
As far as I can tell, there is no English-language edition yet available, though I’m sure it would be a bestseller in the U.S.
Sirén told his newspaper that he wrote the work “in the wee small hours of the night. As a rule, for two or three hours from the moment when I managed to get my child off to bed.” He also took a five month leave of absence, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Among the tidbits in this 1,000 page tome: Sibelius had a good conducting technique “unless he was drunk.”
Great moments in film music: ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’
The “Hula Hoop Sequence” from “The Hudsucker Proxy,” music by Aram Khachaturian.
Salonen’s return misfires
A year and a half after abdicating his throne, Esa-Pekka Salonen returned this weekend to the Los Angeles Philharmonic with the title of conductor laureate, the orchestra’s first.
He was greeted warmly by the large but less than capacity audience Saturday night in Disney Hall and immediately displayed his wonted charm, taking microphone in hand and providing cogent and droll opening remarks. It was good to have him back.
The magic pretty much stopped there. Blame the program. In hindsight, it seemed a miscalculation by a conductor (justly) celebrated for his programming. It happens.
On one level, the program was too modest. Salonen began with the U.S. premiere of his pal Magnus Lindberg’s “Graffiti,” a formidable chunk of busy blather that necessarily focused a listener’s attention on the music itself rather than the man conducting it. The second half featured a concert performance of Bartók’s only opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” which again, though supplying the maestro with some moments in the limelight, left him a secondary character in the proceedings for much of the time.
William Bolcom’s ‘Prometheus’ unveiled
Review: The Pacific Symphony, Carl St.Clair, pianist Jeffrey Biegel and the Pacific Chorale give the premiere of the new work modeled on Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy.” The Orange County Register, November 19, 2010. Click here to read my review.
Betty Zukov, choir director, makes the news
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a newspaper owned by the New York Times, has published a story about my mother, Betty Zukov, the wellspring of music in yours truly. She is the founder and director of the Healdsburg Chorus in Northern California, and an official “Living Treasure of Sonoma County.” Healdsburg is a charming little hamlet in the middle of some of the most beautiful wine country in the world and one of the state’s early villages. It is mentioned in Kevin Starr’s history of California.
The Chorus is a regular topic in our weekly phone conversations on Sunday nights. They’re also a very fine ensemble, which I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in rehearsal and concert. Click here to read the article and see my mom.
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