Word: concertizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Innovation often disappoints us. Whether an old or a new style is the best is irrelevant: the tension between the two still exists. Such tension filled last weekend's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert...
...concert featured two of the classical music industry's most famous figures, conductor/composer John Williams and flutist James Galway. Maestro Williams is most widely known for his 75 film scores, including Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, the three Indiana Jones films, E.T., Superman, the Star Wars trilogy and, most recently, Rosewood. For these and others, Williams has accrued five Oscars, one British Academy Award and 16 Grammys. He has also composed many concert pieces, including several concertos, most recently a trumpet concerto commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra. Boston audiences are most familiar with Williams as the conductor of the Boston...
...performance produced ample evidence of the artistry behind the fame and of their notoriety in classical music circles. The concert consisted of three wood-wind concertos, a Flute Concerto in G by Johann Joachim Quantz, a concerto for bassoon and orchestra called The Five Sacred Trees by Williams and the Pied Piper Fantasy by John Corigliano. A small highlighted paragraph in the program booklet introduced this program as an experiment in concerto styles, setting forth the traditional three-movement Quantz concerto as a "control" for the more contemporary programmatic styles of the last two concertos. Even in this small paragraph...
Crossover is nothing new. The Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler recorded Irving Berlin tunes in 1927, around the same time that a Tin Pan Alley refugee named George Gershwin sent wigs flying with such concert scores as An American in Paris. What has changed is that today's listeners, raised in an era of shrinking arts education, are showing less interest in the classical standards. Meanwhile, younger classical performers, themselves suckled on pop, want to play it, not only to make big bucks but also because they like it. When Jean-Yves Thibaudet, famous for his interpretations of Ravel and Rachmaninoff...
...possible for serious composers to mix classical music with rock 'n' roll successfully? Though elements of rock can be heard in the works of such composers as Philip Glass, no one has yet produced a truly crowd-pleasing piece that brings rock into the concert hall or opera house the same way that Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein taught symphony orchestras how to swing...