Sony's 25-CD set "Wagner at the Met: Legendary Performances" reminds us that when the Metropolitan Opera was a great Wagner house -- how times have changed! -- it was also a permanent home to great conductors. My "Remembering Artur Bodanzky," in the current issue of Barry Millington's excellent Wagner Journal, expounds: An abundance of evidence – written and recorded – … [Read more...] about Remembering Artur Bodanzky
Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony — Part Two
My last posting introduced the Hiawatha Melodrama, proposing a radical re-interpretation of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As a postscript, here is a visual rendering of the Melodrama’s fifth movement by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff. As concocted by myself and the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, the Melodrama aligns text from Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” with music by … [Read more...] about Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony — Part Two
Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony
Is Dvorak’s New World Symphony a programmatic Hiawatha symphony? With the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, I’ve composed a 35-minute Hiawatha Melodrama for narrator and orchestra that combines Dvorak with verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. A new Naxos CD, “Dvorak and America,” includes the world premiere recording, with PostClassical Ensemble conducted … [Read more...] about Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony
A Mexican Composer Whose Time Will Come
Gustav Mahler predicted, “My time will come” – and he was right. Anton Bruckner is another composer whose posthumous fame, decades after his death, far eclipsed scattered acclaim during his lifetime. The relative paucity of post-1930 canonized symphonic repertoire impels the question: who else is awaiting such discovery? The surest candidate I know is Silvestre Revueltas, … [Read more...] about A Mexican Composer Whose Time Will Come
What I Thought I Wrote about “Porgy and Bess”
Anyone who writes books learns sooner or later that a book has no fixed meaning. In my case, the discovery came in 1987, with Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music. The book was reviled and proscribed, extolled and prescribed. This was nothing less than I had expected, having assaulted a high icon. What … [Read more...] about What I Thought I Wrote about “Porgy and Bess”