Search Results for: music unwound

Having just spent a week taking part in a “Dvorak and America” festival presented by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about how an orchestra can serve an entire state. The NCSO travels the length and breadth of North Carolina – more than 12,000 miles annually, offering more than 150 concerts. And it’s done that for a long time. In all … [Read more...] about North Carolina’s State-Wide Symphony

The most vivid writings about composers' lives, I find, are the ones they produce themselves: letters, articles, books. A case in point is Gustav Mahler -- a copious and gifted correspondent. I have yet to find a Mahler biography that as vividly or poignantly limns the man as Gustav Mahler: Letters of his Wife, as edited by Henry-Louis de La Grange and Gunther Weiss in … [Read more...] about Presenting Mahler’s Marriage

With the fate of American orchestras in the news, the National Endowment of the Humanities has recently awarded $300,000 for a symphonic project -- "Music Unwound" -- that dramatically explores new templates for concerts and new missions for institutions of performance. The NEH public programs division funds orchestras once every decade or two. That the Humanities Endowment is … [Read more...] about Something New and Necessary for Orchestras

For the second time in two weeks, I've heard an unforgettable symphonic performance fortified by intense religious conviction. In Pittsburgh, Manfred Honeck delivered Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony as a profession of faith in God and mankind (see my blog of Feb. 13). Never before had I heard this work's problematic finale so infused with liturgical resonance, so distant from … [Read more...] about Bruckner and Religion