Remembering Michael Tilson Thomas

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American conductor, composer, and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas passed away at his home in San Francisco last Wednesday following a battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He was 81. Known widely as “MTT,” Tilson Thomas served as music director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years. He is credited with elevating the orchestra’s stature and championing adventurous new music. The grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, stars of New …

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Debussy’s “La Puerta del Vino”: A Dreamy Habanera

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Dreamy and seductive, La puerta del Vino (“The Gate of Wine”) is the third piece in Claude Debussy’s Préludes, Book 2 for solo piano, published in 1913. The work is said to have been inspired by a postcard Debussy received from Spanish composer Manuel De Falla, depicting a Moorish gate at the Alhambra Palace in Granada. For the performer, Debussy provides the interpretive marking, “With sudden contrasts of extreme violence and passionate tenderness.” …

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Mendelssohn’s “Ruy Blas” Overture: Thrilling Music for a “Ghastly” Play

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Set in Romantic verse, Victor Hugo’s 1838 drama, Ruy Blas, involves a nasty practical joke with tragic consequences. Ruy Blas is a common poet who is forced to disguise himself as a nobleman to fulfill the vengeful plot of his aristocratic master. He falls in love with the Queen of Spain, who appoints him Prime Minister. When the deceit is revealed, his fall is abrupt and humiliating. Ruy Blas kills his master, Don …

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“Polichinelle”: A Fritz Kreisler Miniature

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Derived from the Italian “Pulcinella,” Polichinelle is a French puppet character. A staple of French street theater since the late 1500s, he is known to be a vulgar prankster. There is no vulgarity in Fritz Kreisler’s charming miniature for violin and piano, Polichinelle—only an undercurrent of scherzando mischief. Kreisler (1875-1962) wrote the piece, subtitled “Serenade,” in the United States in 1917. It comes two years before the Broadway opening of his operetta, …

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György Kurtág’s “Stele”: A Musical Epitaph

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If Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio, is a story of imprisonment and heroic rescue, Hungarian composer György Kurtág (b. 1926) takes us deeper into the dungeon in his 1994 orchestral work, Stele, Op. 33. Stele is a Greek word for a decorated slab used as a tomb stone or commemorative monument. Set in three brief movements which unfold without pause, Kurtág’s Stele is a sombre musical epitaph for Hungarian composer, conductor, and teacher András Mihály (1917-1993). …

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Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 2: From Imprisonment to Freedom

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Beethoven was a composer who worked and reworked musical ideas in a painstaking series of sketches. His only opera, Fidelio, provides the most extreme example. Beethoven labored over it for over ten years, creating three distinct versions (1805, 1806, and 1814), and four different overtures. The overture we know as Leonore No. 2, Op. 42a opened the original 1805 Vienna premiere of Fidelio. Ultimately, Beethoven believed that the dramatic weight of the …

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André Previn’s “I Want Magic” from “A Streetcar Named Desire”: Renée Fleming

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I Want Magic is a key aria from the third act of André Previn’s 1995 opera, A Streetcar Named Desire.  With a libretto by Philip Littell, the work, premiered by San Francisco Opera in 1998, is based on the play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. Renée Fleming appeared in the role of Blanche Dubois, a promiscuous, aging Southern belle who escapes into a veiled fantasy world to avoid confronting the harsh realities …

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