The eminent Spanish conductor, Jesús López Cobos, passed away in Berlin last Friday. He was 78. López Cobos served as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1986 to 2001. As a teenager, I listened to a handful of his numerous recordings with the ensemble on the Telarc label. His Bruckner albums (Symphonies 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9) were especially notable. During his tenure in Cincinnati, the orchestra (the fifth oldest in …
The legendary Russian pianist Lazar Berman was born in Saint Petersburg on this date in 1930. At first confined to the Soviet Union and its satellite countries (the 12-year travel ban may have been the result of his marriage to a French woman), Berman burst onto the international music scene in the mid-1970s, following American and European tours. His playing often exuded a stunning dramatic power. In a 2005 New York Times …
On Wednesday, we heard the vague, dreamlike associations of light and water in Claude Debussy’s three orchestral Nocturnes. As a followup, here are three excerpts from a recently-released Debussy album by Korean pianist, and 2015 International Chopin Competition-winner, Seong-Jin Cho. The album includes three suites for solo piano: the Suite bergamasque, Children’s Corner, and Images, as well as the solo piano work, L’isle joyeuse. Debussy’s six Images were written between 1901 and 1905. The first, Reflets dans l’eau (“Reflections in the Water), …
Despite their descriptive, imaginal titles, Claude Debussy’s three orchestral Nocturnes transcend the concrete and the literal. Instead, they inhabit a colorful, atmospheric dreamscape in which senses blend together in the ultimate synesthesia. Debussy’s resplendent sonic world almost allows us to “feel” colors and “hear” light. This is music which floats in a sumptuous present, without concern for forward motion towards a distant, future goal. It’s also music which moves in a radically different direction …
Four ascending notes, repeated with hypnotic persistence amid a soundscape of restlessly shifting harmony and color…This is what we hear in the atmospheric Des pas sur la neige (“Footprints in the Snow”), the sixth piece from Book 1 of Claude Debussy’s solo piano Préludes. Written in 1909, this music seems to mirror the dreamy winter scenes of Impressionist painters like Claude Monet- paintings in which recognizable landscapes begin to blur into abstractions of color and light. …
“Wind passing through a graveyard…” This is how Sergei Prokofiev described the hauntingly ethereal passage at the end of the first movement of the Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor. Hushed, wispy scales rise and fall in the violin over a series of numb, ambivalent piano chords. This chilly passage, which is anything but definitive or conclusive, returns later in the final movement. It encapsulates the atmosphere of the Sonata, perhaps the darkest, most …
Today marks the ninety-second anniversary of the birth of American maverick composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Amid an increasingly loud, fast-paced contemporary world, Feldman’s music moves in the opposite direction. Frequently, it emerges somewhere just above silence. We’re forced to confront the nature of sound, itself. Many of Feldman’s works unfold gradually over incredibly long durations of time. His longest works- the five-hour-long String Quartet No. 2 (1983), and the eighty-minute Piano and String Quartet (1985), for …