Word: bache
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...formidable one, but right now it appears that Mutter and Mullova are in the ascendancy. Mutter's gifts include a consummate control of her instrument, gleaming intonation, ripe sound and an assured, nerveless stage demeanor. They seem to have come naturally. At age nine, Mutter coolly performed a solo Bach piece for Violinist Henryk Szeryng. The Polish-born master, dressed in shirt-sleeves, first listened dispassionately. When she had finished, he walked to his closet, donned a coat and tie and announced, "Now you can say hello to Uncle Henryk." Something similar happened when, at 13, she auditioned for Conductor...
Schickele is best known for his musical parodies. His work has strangely become synonymous with the humorous compositions of P.D.Q. Bach, the most deservedly forgotten son of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose works Schickele "discovered" nearly 20 years...
Schickele maintains that no form is too sacred to be parodied. Schickele--er, P.D.Q. Bach--pokes fun at operatic, symphonic and vocal as well as lesser known musical forms, such as the art of performing on dried manicotti ("Four Folksong Upsettings"). Yet he counters that he is "not into a Lenny Bruce kind of humor." He claims he is not out "merely to shock or offend." Says Schickele, "I want my concerts to be friendly and melodious affairs...
Generally audiences have reacted favorably to Schickele's less than solemn style of composition. Schickele admits that some misinformed concertgoers will "come expecting a Bach concert" and will leave "giving walking ovations." But rarely do such occassions occur. Schickele recounts only one ironic incident from a concert in Massachusetts where one disturbed patron approached the symphony ushers at the end of the performance complaining: "Are you trying to put some kind of joke over the audience...
This was not the well-trod turf of Bach, Mozart or even Beethoven that Norrington's crack London Classical Players were venturing onto, but the terra incognita of Hector Berlioz, the virtuoso French composer who in the 1830s revolutionized symphonic sound in such works as the hallucinogenic Symphonie Fantastique and the blazing choral symphony Romeo et Juliette. "Our goal is to present a view of Berlioz very different from modern received opinion," Norrington told the audience before the performance. "We're not like a symphony orchestra playing notes. We only play poetry here...