Word: bolcom
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COMPOSER: WILLIAM BOLCOM...
...Joan Morris and began accompanying her around the country in dear old ditties like Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May? They married in 1975, and still give nearly 50 concerts a year. "Performing this stuff with Joan had an enormous influence on my music," Bolcom says...
Eclecticism of this kind is not, of course, Bolcom's invention. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the Civil War-era virtuoso, wrote symphonies as well as show pieces. Charles Ives, whom Bolcom greatly admires, embedded folk songs in his massive orchestral works. Gershwin composed both opera and musical comedies, and in later years Kurt Weill, Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein, among others, have distinguished themselves as musical magpies. Some think, in fact, that eclecticism is what is now fashionable in this unideological age, and that is partly what accounts for Bolcom's recent success...
...Bolcom cheerfully quotes a colleague as saying that he is the only serious composer who drives a Cadillac. But he has worked hard for his popularity, and he still does. His tenth string quartet premiered last year, and Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will tour four cities with his cello-and-piano sonata in May. Casino Paradise (an opera about a gangster "that's more or less like a musical") premieres in Philadelphia in April. Other coming works: a "baby opera" about Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte; a song cycle of poems by American women for Marilyn Horne...
...Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...