Latest news with #Stravinsky
New York Times
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Puppet Theater Gets Weird, With Georg Baselitz as a Guide
On a rainy morning earlier this month, in a theater in Salzburg, Austria, a soldier danced to an offbeat march with exaggerated high kicks. Flanking him, a cornet player and a percussionist bounced to the rhythm. Suddenly, the soldier's foot flew off. It was lucky, though, that the soldier's head was made of crinkled metal and his limbs were cardboard tubes. A rehearsal ground to a halt, the music stopped. A hand emerged from the bottom of the stage and began to reaffix the foot, and a technician came to sit on the stage lip. The effect was jarring, as if giants had invaded the human world. These dislocations of scale are a specialty of the Salzburg Marionette Theater, where the rehearsal was taking place. This summer, the company is collaborating for the first time with a contemporary visual artist for a new production of Stravinsky's monodrama 'The Soldier's Tale,' opening July 29, with puppets and sets designed by Georg Baselitz. The marionettes usually perform to classic recordings, but this show, a co-production with the Salzburg Festival, will feature a live chamber music group. After eight performances at the festival this summer, it will be filmed in cooperation with the Japanese broadcaster NHK and will tour Europe in fall 2026. Baselitz, 87, a German artist known for his monumental paintings, especially the 'Heroes' series that expressed the complexity of German identity after World War II, approached the theater with the idea about two years ago. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Steve Reich: Jacob's Ladder; Traveler's Prayer album review – at nearly 90, he's as energetic as ever
Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich's collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich's most recent scores, Traveler's Prayer and Jacob's Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament. In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler's Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised. Those who associate Reich's music with insistent rhythmic movement will find little of that here, and Reich has described the result as 'closer to Josquin des Prez than Stravinsky'. The long, sinuously intertwining vocal lines for the pairs of sopranos and tenors make constant use of canons, yet harmonically the music stays rooted to the spot, without the magical shifts of tonality that give so much of Reich's music its allure. Jacob's Ladder, though, returns immediately to the propulsive, exuberant Reich, as the words from Genesis describing Jacob's vision of a ladder to heaven are intoned by the vocalists over busy, insistent string and wind figures whose gently clashing dissonances add just a little edge to the textures. This buoyant music is joyously, inexhaustibly energetic; it's hard to believe it was composed by a man who will be 90 next year. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
Korea Herald
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
The July Festival, born in pianist's home, expands across Korea
Stravinsky and Russian composers take center stage A house concert that began in a pianist's living room in 2002 and grew into an annual event, now known as 'The July Festival,' will expand nationwide this year. Organized by The House Concert, the July Festival will take place daily throughout July at the Artist's House in Daehangno, Seoul, while also reaching audiences across Korea. The festival will feature 31 performances with 237 participants, including Korea's leading musicians such as pianists Park Jae-hong and Park Jong-hae, violinists Kim Hyun-mi and Baek Ju-young, and cellists Lee Jeong-ran and Shim Jun-ho. Outside Seoul, 13 performances are scheduled at 10 locations nationwide, including Haman in South Gyeongsang Province, Busan, Daejeon, Cheongju in North Chungcheong Province and Seosan in South Chungcheong Province. On Tuesday, the festival is set to open with Stravinsky's 1918 works "Histoire du Soldat" or "The Soldier's Tale" in its original version. "The Soldier's Tale," is an hourlong theatrical work designed to be performed by three actors, one or more dancers, and a septet of instruments. Conductor Baek Yoon-hak leads the performance. The July Festival will close with 'The Rite of Spring,' a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer, under the baton of Jin Sol on July 31. The House Concert was launched by composer and pianist Park Chang-soo, who began hosting concerts in his living room in 2002. Known for its intimate setting that breaks down barriers between performers and audiences, it has provided a platform for nearly 5,000 musicians, including violinist Chung Kyung-wha and pianists Kim Sun-wook, Cho Seong-jin and Lim Yun-chan before their international debuts. Since 2008, the concerts have been held in different venues, settling into a weekly format at the Artist's House from December 2014. Launched in 2020, the July Festival has featured in-depth programs focusing on a single composer each year. This year's theme, 'Stravinsky and 20th-Century Russian Composers,' will spotlight works by Stravinsky alongside pieces by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Schnittke, Gliere and Weinberg. Recognized as one of the most innovative figures in 20th-century music, Stravinsky influenced diverse art forms, including ballet. The festival will present works suited to the intimate house concert setting, highlighting Stravinsky's broad stylistic range — from early nationalist and primitivist compositions to his neoclassical and later jazz and twelve-tone explorations. Ticket prices for The July Festival performances range from 40,000 won ($29) to 100,000 won.
Los Angeles Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Is there a Los Angeles musical style?
The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once defined American music as music written by Americans. There is no arguing with that. Less obvious, however, is figuring out what, if anything, describes L.A. music. Los Angeles is the home of film music. The two most influential classical composers of the first half of the 20th century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, lived here. (In Stravinsky's case, the Russian composer spent more of his life in L.A. than in any other city.) The composer with the most radical influence on the second half of the 20th century, John Cage, was born and grew up here. Ferreting out L.A.'s bearing on jazz and the many, many aspects of popular music, as well as world music, is a lifetime's effort. Yet these seeming incongruities of musical life are what fascinate the most. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for instance, flirted, if futilely, with writing Hollywood film scores. The money was a lure. The possibility of reaching the masses, irresistible. Picture Schoenberg, in 1935, in the office of Hollywood's prevailing film producer, Irving Thalberg, offering untenable requirements to score MGM's feature film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's 'The Good Earth.' Picture the composer, considered by many the instigator of the most daunting music of all time, asking for $50,000 (more than $1.1 million today adjusted for inflation) and full control of the movie's sound, including having the actors recite their lines to his rhythms and suggested pitches. Picture, again, eight decades later and 3,000 miles away, the head of the Opera of the Future project in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ultra-futuristic Media Lab, mulling over an idea for an opera based on that remarkable Thalberg incident as a way to examine the profound implications of art and entertainment had Schoenberg been given the green light. A new production of Tod Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood,' which had its premiere in Boston seven years ago, finally reaches L.A. on Sunday afternoon for the first of four performances by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music at the Nimoy. Those very names — Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944, Alpert and Leonard Nimoy — couldn't better illustrate the marvelous fantasy of L.A. musical juxtapositions. Also Sunday at First Lutheran Church of Venice, the Hear Now Music Festival concludes its 2025 season of three concerts. This festival is L.A.'s most dedicated resource for surveying local music. Over the last 14 years, it has featured more than 200 composers, from the most famous to the most obscure, from academia and from Hollywood, be they John Williams, an electronic wizard at CalArts or a kid fiddling away with a guitar in the garage. The idea of artistic place and physical place are at the heart of Hear Now. If L.A. music is anything, it is a music that challenges the notions of borders. The festival came about because its co-founder, composer Hugh Levick — who divides his time between France, Spain and Venice Beach — said the music that his L.A. colleagues were writing was easier to hear being performed abroad than in venues here. Composers in L.A. are far-flung. Looking at universities alone, UCLA, USC, CalArts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Pomona College and the Cal State campuses in Northridge, Long Beach and Fullerton are all centers of musical activity that have had widespread influence. The seeds of Minimalism, the most prominent style of late 20th century music as propagated most famously by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, can be traced to Los Angeles City College in the 1950s. That's where La Monte Young — while studying with, and finding encouragement from, pianist Leonard Stein (who had been Schoenberg's assistant) — began to consider what would happen if he radically slowed everything down. I sat down with Levick recently to discover what he had learned from the festival. Having coffee at a Santa Monica cafe, we were near a cottage where Cage had lived in the early 1930s, when he found his first music job. It was as an assistant to pioneering animator Oskar Fischinger, who came into artistic conflict with Walt Disney over 'Fantasia.' Cage didn't last long, falling asleep on the job and dropping a lighted cigarette on flammable celluloid. Levick has probably encountered a greater variety of composers in this part of the world than anyone else. The way Hear Now works is that any composer can submit scores, so I asked the obvious questions. Could he detect any commonality, as one might in, say, Paris or Berlin? Is there West Coast and East Coast music as there once seemed to be? Does L.A. have its own sound or maybe laid-back sensibility? 'Not really,' Levick said. 'There are people whom you could vaguely put together stylistically. They may have obvious influences, but mostly they have gone their own way. What is a little different about the West Coast and the East Coast is there is a certain fluidity and flexibility here and certain rigidity on the East Coast.' When asked what has surprised him over the years, Levick pointed to the fact that although John Williams, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès and Andrew Norman may attract audiences, curiosity also drives crowds. Of this year's festival, which features works by 28 composers, I've previously encountered only four. Even Levick was surprised by the great many submissions from composers he didn't know. Yet that turns out to be a draw. At this year's festival, the first two programs were sold out. I attended the first at 2220 Arts + Archives in March devoted to often arcane electro-acoustic music, and it attracted a diverse and enthusiastic audience taking pleasure in not knowing what to expect. No two works were remotely the same. If Levick shies away from generalization, he too is a composer not easily pinned down. He started out as a fiction writer who, while living in Paris, chanced upon avant-garde jazz and took up the saxophone. That led him naturally to classical avant-garde. The concert Sunday will feature his latest work, 'The Song of Prophet X,' for speaker/singer and piano quartet, a similar configuration that Schoenberg used in his antiwar 'Ode to Napoleon,' We cannot escape Schoenberg. This season has seen widespread celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Last year, on April 30, Hear Now ended its festival with a large-scale concert given at the UCLA music department's Schoenberg Hall and featuring the UCLA Philharmonia conducted by Neal Stulberg, the same forces tackling Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood.' The campus was on edge from news of a violent attack on a Palestinian protest that day just across from Schoenberg Hall. Hear Now, nevertheless, went on as scheduled. The concert was not a political statement, the music had nothing to do with protest movements. Even so, the symbolism of the occasion was impossible to ignore. Schoenberg, who had fled Nazi Germany, wrote scores of protest music such as 'Ode to Napoleon' and 'Survivor From Warsaw.' He also dallied with Hollywood. Schoenberg might ultimately be seen as the great juxtaposition. Leonard Stein and John Cage were in Schoenberg's UCLA classes. Film composers David Raksin ('Laura') and Leonard Rosenman ('East of Eden') studied with Schoenberg. Both Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman brought up Schoenberg when I interviewed them, and it was their world of progressive jazz that led Hugh Levick to Hear Now. Could we then define L.A. music as simply be music of, and open to, juxtapositions?
San Francisco Chronicle
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: S.F. Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero deliver orchestral showstoppers
Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero's two previous appearances with the San Francisco Symphony amply showcased his flair for colorful, dramatic music. After a two-year gap, he's back at Davies Symphony Hall with a program of glittering orchestral showpieces. The late Kaija Saariaho composed 'Asteroid 4179: Toutatis' in 2005 as a complement to a Berlin Philharmonic concert featuring Gustav Holst's 'The Planets.' The asteroid in question is tiny and irregularly shaped, and at about four minutes in length, the music matches the object's scale. In addition to the astronomical theme, there are the typical Saariaho trademarks: beautiful, ingeniously layered orchestration and power that wells up over the course of the work. The piece opens with crystalline transparency, a piccolo, percussion and celesta floating above the larger orchestra. Massed brass instruments interrupt, and after a brief climax, the orchestra dies away into silence. It was a thoughtful start to this flashy program heard on Friday, May 2, the first of two concerts at Davies, concluding on Saturday, May 3. Igor Stravinsky's great ballet score 'Petrushka' unfolds on a completely different scale, taking some 40 minutes to tell the story of three puppets brought to life by a magician. Guerrero led a taut, exciting account of the work, performed in Stravinsky's revised 1947 version. One of the Costa Rican conductor's superpowers is his ability to throw a spotlight on a piece's structure through knife-edge timing and control of dynamics. Another is knowing when to step back and let the musicians do their thing. Tight ensemble playing was a hallmark of this 'Petrushka.' At the same time, Guerrero gave associate principal flute Blair Francis Paponiu complete freedom in her beautifully played cadenza. The conductor's emphasis on sharply articulated rhythms paid off throughout the work, especially in 'The Grand Carnival' section, when competing bands seemingly play in different meters. Every crescendo and decrescendo was perfectly timed. Occasionally, a section or player was drowned out in the welter of sound. John Wilson's casual virtuosity on piano, positioned right in front of the conductor, was a highlight of the 'Russian Dance,' but Guerrero covered Wilson's playing too often in the opening tableau. The strings were sometimes obliterated by the brass. Nonetheless, this was a thrilling account of a great work. What do Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi have in common? Both composers studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, one of the great orchestrators of the 19th century, and both came away with enormous skill in handling huge forces. The second half of Friday's program was devoted to Respighi's 'Fountains of Rome' and 'Pines of Rome,' flamboyant blockbusters that have to walk a fine line to avoid turning into kitsch. (This is never an issue with Stravinsky.) Guerrero performed them with a straight face, and his enormous technical skill and ear for color and dynamics made this music sound better than perhaps it fundamentally is. The first work makes its way around Rome, picturing fountains in different locations throughout the day. The 'Valle Giulia' movement, with chiming winds and a prominent celesta part, seemingly pays homage to Richard Strauss' opera 'Der Rosenkavalier.' Special kudos to Marc Shapiro, whose celesta playing contributed beautifully to all four works on the program, and to principal oboe Eugene Izotov and principal flute Yubeen Kim for their work in both Respighi pieces. The brass, too, played brilliantly throughout. It's an oddity of 'Pines of Rome' that the splashy first movement, 'The Pines of the Villa Borghese,' sounds more like an actual fountain than anything in 'Fountains of Rome.' In 'Pines Near a Catacomb,' Guerrero finely judged every climax; principal trumpet Mark Inouye was magnificent in his moody offstage solo (and also in 'Petrushka'). Principal clarinet Carey Bell's long-breathed, introspective solo in 'The Pines of the Janiculum' was another highlight, as were the silken strings and oceanic sound Guerrero conjured. As for the last movement, 'The Pines of the Appian Way,' here Respighi generates excitement through some of the more obvious tricks in a composer's arsenal: antiphonal brass playing from the terrace, full-orchestra chromatic slides and an admittedly electrifying five-minute-long crescendo. The movement is intended to evoke marching Roman legions, but it might just as well be invoking Italian Fascists or Imperial Stormtroopers. We describe, you decide. San Francisco Classical Voice.
