Word: beethoven
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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...
...highlights of the musical comes at the beginning of the play when Harvard preps Jim (James P. Connolly) and Eric (Eric Pulier) try out for a fashion gang. Dressed in wool and corduroy the two lamely rap to the tune of Beethoven's Egmont Overture: "People ask us where we get our looks/ And we tell them the Brothers Brooks...
...audiences, Lloyd Webber's appeal is beyond dispute. "He may not be Mozart or Beethoven to the Germans," says Edda Sels, press spokeswoman for the popular production of Cats in Hamburg, "but he can combine classical and popular music in such a way that it appeals to audiences who want both 'entertaining' and 'serious' music." Director Keita Asari, whose Shiki theater company, the largest in Japan, has staged Superstar, Evita and Cats, calls Lloyd Webber a "genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music. That's the reason he is universally loved...
Some 2 1/2 centuries after Bach welded the twelve major and minor keys into a harmonious whole in The Well-Tempered Clavier, 185 years after Beethoven stretched the boundaries of the symphony with the "Eroica," and 65 years after Arnold Schoenberg exploded the tonal universe by unleashing the power of the twelve-tone system, classical music can still be a vital, potent art. But it needs a kind of panoramic energy, one that explores and prizes its past, frankly assesses its present and enthusiastically prepares for its future...
Artists and administrators need the courage to chart a more rewarding course, but audiences do too. Those who hailed the deaf Beethoven at the Ninth Symphony's unveiling, who lined the streets of Milan for Verdi's funeral, who wept as the dying Brahms took a final public bow at a performance of his Fourth Symphony, who rioted at the debut of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring were no more sophisticated than today's listeners. It is simply that no one told them they were listening to classical music. What they experienced was not the passive appreciation...