Word: tonalists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...music he loves best in smaller cities and with regional orchestras. Yes, that includes Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff and all the other romantic concerto merchants beloved of tradition-minded concertgoers. But his huge repertoire also includes an astonishing variety of other works, among them the challenging yet accessible "new tonalist" music of American composer Lowell Liebermann, the vaporously lyrical cameos of Spanish miniaturist Federico Mompou and Hough's own twinkling transcription of Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things...
Performers take to New Tonalist pieces like pols to an open mike, but many critics bristle at the pieces' crowd-pleasing traditionalism. An unsympathetic Dallas reviewer brushed off Liebermann's unabashedly tuneful Second as "excruciatingly conventional." Retorts the composer: "That's like criticizing a novelist because his grammar is correct...
...stopped paying attention to new classical music after Britten and Shostakovich died, it's time to tune in again. The famous flutist has put his weight behind one of America's most gifted "new tonalist" composers, with electrifying results. Liebermann's three concertos are custom-made for listeners who find 12-tone music ugly and minimalism simple-minded. The harmonies are savory, the scoring luminous--and, yes, you can hum the tunes...
Tilted & Contorted. A prize pupil of Twelve-Tonalist Arnold SchÖnberg, Berg set his opera in the tilted frame of atonality, or better, non-tonality-with no fixed key as a point of reference, or familiar chordal relationships. In his huge (110 pieces), often brassy orchestration, he painted warmly and painstakingly, missing no musical detail that would illuminate a character or a scene...
| 1 |