The NEH Music Unwound consortium, which most recently brought Dvorak’s New World Symphony to an Indian reservation, has been re-funded by the Endowment with a $400,000 grant, bringing the total NEH investment to $1 million since the inception of Music Unwound in 2010. The consortium has quickly evolved into a major opportunity and challenge for American orchestras to rethink themselves as “humanities institutions.” It funds thematic, cross-disciplinary concerts linked to high schools, colleges and universities, and museums. The premise is … [Read more...]
Dvorak on the Reservation
March 9, 2016 by
Sisseton, in the northeastern corner of South Dakota, sits within a Dakota Indian reservation called Sisseton Wahpeton. The population – 2,500 – is half Native American, half non-Native. Last Monday night, Sisseton hosted the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in a program, “Dvorak and America,” at the local high school auditorium. This multi-media production, which includes a “visual presentation” extrapolating the American accent of the New World Symphony, has been seen throughout the United States for a decade. Unique to South … [Read more...]
Gergiev and the Vienna Philharmonic
March 1, 2016 by
Last Sunday afternoon’s Vienna Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall began with a Valery Gergiev moment. Mounting the podium, he turned to the concertmaster and shrugged his shoulders to acknowledge that (as sometimes happens to Gergiev in particular) he had arrived a little late and kept the musicians waiting. He then took a deep breath and launched an unforgettable reading of the Prelude and Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal. The second half of the concert, with Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, was incendiary – a rare musical … [Read more...]
What Texas City is a National Cultural Showcase?
February 23, 2016 by
For the past decade I have enjoyed the privilege of regularly collaborating in “Dvorak and America” festivals with Kevin Deas, one of the supreme African-American concert artists of our day. His performances of “Goin’ Home” and the “Hiawatha Melodrama” invariably make a great impression. Kevin’s self-evident generosity of spirit is as vital to his appeal as his luscious bass-baritone. But he has his foibles, one of which is a chronic reluctance to sign CDs. For the recent El Paso “Dvorak and America” festival, I instructed both the El … [Read more...]
Celebrating Bernard Herrmann
February 12, 2016 by
A towering figure in twentieth century American music, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) has long been pigeon-holed as a “Hollywood composer.” Though he is widely acknowledged the supreme American composer for film (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, North by Northwest, etc.), his concert output remains virtually unknown. Working with the young Orson Welles and later with the legendary radio and screenwriter Norman Corwin, he was also America’s foremost radio composer, and conductor of a radio orchestra – William Paley’s visionary CBS Symphony – … [Read more...]
American Music — An Alternative Narrative
November 3, 2015 by
Bernard Herrmann, whose film credits include Psycho, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and (his most Romantically charged score) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, is one of eight featured composers on PostClassical Ensemble’s all-American 2015-16 season. The others are Harry Burleigh, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Lou Harrison, and Daniel Schnyder. The season begins this Saturday night in DC with “Deep River – The Art of the Spiritual” – a multi-media exploration of how Harry Burleigh transferred spirituals into the concert hall. (To see the entire … [Read more...]
The Real Vladimir Horowitz
October 30, 2015 by
Sony’s new 50-CD compilation, “Vladimir Horowitz: The Unreleased Live Recordings 1966-1983,” is a startling exercise in candor three times over. 1.It argues that a series of “live” Horowitz recitals, released on RCA between 1975 and 1983 and edited by RCA’s Jack Pfeiffer, misrepresent and diminish those concerts by fixing wrong notes. 2.It frankly documents Horowitz’s artistic nadir: the disastrous 1983 concerts he played while heavily medicated. 3.It blames this debacle on the publication of Glenn Plaskin’s unnervingly unsympathetic … [Read more...]
“Music Unwound” — The NEH and the Music Education Crisis
August 4, 2015 by
Processing a terrific performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Piano Quintet at this summer’s Brevard Music Festival, I found myself pondering both musical and extra-musical paths of engagement. Elgar, born in 1857, became Britain’s most famous concert composer, an iconic embodiment of the fin-de-siecle Edwardian moment. From its retrospective relationship to Imperial England, his music derives its singular affect of majesty intermingled with anguished nostalgia. Added to that, the Great War shrouds the … [Read more...]
Charles Ives and Huck Finn
May 1, 2015 by
“Music Unwound” is an orchestral consortium supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It funds contextualized symphonic programs in collaboration with colleges and universities. To date, two topics have been in play. “Dvorak and America” explores the quest for American cultural identity ca. 1900; the central work is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, supplemented by a “visual presentation” aligning the music with Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and the canvases of Frederick Church, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. “Copland and … [Read more...]
Prokofiev’s Happy Ending, and Further Thoughts on Conducting Ballet
April 22, 2015 by
In 1936 Sergei Prokofiev decided to move with his family to Stalin’s Soviet Union. He had first returned to Russia in 1927 and had written in his diary: “It’s a shame to part from the USSR. The goal of the trip was obtained: I have certainly, definitely become stronger.” Subsequent visits were also fortifying. In Europe, he had felt his creative gift atrophy. He discovered that he needed to compose on Russian soil. Though the Soviets had coaxed him with prospective commissions and performances, and with promises that he could continue to … [Read more...]
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