Word: rochberg
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...avid proponent of new music, Fisk brought works ranging from Scarlatti to Rochberg to his program. In doing so, he demonstrated the guitar's unique position as a middle ground between the harpsichord and the violin; the guitar's strings are plucked like the harpsichord's, but it has a fingerboard like a violin. As a result, classical guitarists can create a wide variety of effects culled from the repertoires of both instruments...
Selections from George Rochberg's "American Bouquet" offered a completely different view of the guitar's capabilities. His adaptations of "My Heart Stood Still" and "I Only Have Eyes for You" lent an improvisatory, introspective tone to the guitar; it was much like viewing the old melodies through a kaleidoscope. Fisk would have done well to lose himself a little more in the ideas of these pieces, rather than focusing significantly on embellishment. He executed the last selection, a genuine if overly scripted "Notre Dame Blues," With appropriate gusto, smiling visibly for the first time while playing. Perhaps...
...20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last...
...composer has also indulged in one inside joke. As China is debating whether to accept Orchis' loan, the Angel of Bright Future appears to him in a dream, encouraging him to take the money in a siren song of harsh modernity that reaches back stylistically to Rochberg's use of atonality in the '50s. Bright Future (musical "modernism") holds out the promise of artistic redemption. But it proves to be an empty, cruel promise, best rejected...
...failure of The Confidence Man does not necessarily mean a corresponding failure of musical idiom. The quality of Rochberg's lyric invention is high, and the fast-moving sequences, such as the minstrel show, are handled with dashing technical assurance. Even the two scenes with the angel, ironic though they are, display a strong command of modern musical materials. Rochberg has issued a challenge in The Confidence Man, to both himself and other composers, a challenge to make modern music speak again in the language it inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it can be done persuasively...