Word: sprach
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More warily than their pop music colleagues, serious composers have taken notice. An instrument that can reduce the forces needed to perform Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra from a 100-piece symphony orchestra to a couple of keyboards, electrical outlets and multitrack stereo tape is obviously something to be reckoned with, even if its characteristically metallic tones and dispassionate air will never replace the luster or emotion of a Berlin Philharmonic. But experimenters such as Anderson, Glass, Pierre Boulez and Morton Subotnick are seeking to conjure new sounds in such works as Subotnick's Silver Apples...
...white pajamas, their costumes slit wide to flash inner forearms and thighs. Slowly they start to spin, hop and shuffle in smooth synchronicity. Out of huge loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling comes the foghorn blast of a low note-like the opening of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra-played by a synthesizer; later the music rises in a blast of brass to a Brucknerian apotheosis...
...Philadelphia Orchestra (during its Beethoven festival); at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's Berkshire retreat (during an all-Beethoven orchestral weekend); and at the Hollywood Bowl (during the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Beethoven festival). Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles are each playing Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Stravinsky's The Firebird this summer. Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto? The Cleveland Orchestra is serving it up, and so are the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The beat goes...
...large it is the young who spend all that money. Given the right impetus, they are not necessarily averse to the classics-as proved by what Elvira Madigan did for Mozart's Piano Concerto, K. 467, or 2001: A Space Odyssey did for Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. "If Elvira Madigan made Mozart a relevant experience for the youth generation," asks Munves, "why can't we make it happen for other composers...
...Strauss has always dwelt on the dramatic and realistic effects of his music. Wagnerians usually love it but followers of Schumann and Brahms are likely to find it crude and vulgar-"pleasure gas," a Viennese critic once called it. His mammoth tone poems-Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben and Also sprach Zarathustra-show him to be a peerless master of orchestral effect and a wizardly painter of tone color. But Strauss was the last man in a 400-year-old tradition of tonality, and it was his misfortune to work alongside the atonalists without sharing any of their discoveries. Halfway into...