Twentieth Century

Remembering Composer Karel Husa

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Karel Husa, the influential Czech-born composer and conductor, passed away last Wednesday. He was 95. Husa emigrated to the United States in 1954, became an American citizen a few years later, and served on the faculty of Cornell University for 38 years. His composition students included such illustrious names as Steven Stucky and Christopher Rouse. Music for Prague, 1968 remains Karel Husa’s best known work. It was a programmatic musical response to the 1968 Soviet military …

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Remembering Soprano Elisabeth Carron

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American soprano Elisabeth Carron passed away last Thursday at the age of 94. Born in Newark, New Jersey to Sicilian immigrant parents, Carron performed regularly at New York City Opera in its heyday. She was widely respected for her roles in Puccini operas which included Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Mimì in La Bohème, and Liu in Turandot. Additionally, she performed prominent roles in contemporary American operas such as Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), Marc Blitzstein’s Regina (1958), and Kurt Weill’s Street …

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Candide at 60

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Last Thursday marked the 60th anniversary of the Broadway opening of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, a work based on the novella by Voltaire, which falls somewhere between musical theater and operetta. It isn’t often that an overture stops the show, but that’s one of the details Barbara Cook, who played the role of Cunégonde, remembers from the night of December 1, 1956. I am extremely proud to have been part of the original cast of Leonard …

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Lost and Found: The Rediscovery of Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, Op. 5

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It isn’t every day that a score by a major composer disappears for 108 years and then, miraculously, resurfaces. But that’s what has happened with one of Igor Stravinsky’s earliest works. The manuscript of the long-lost Funeral Song, Op. 5 was found at the St Petersburg Conservatoire last year. It was written as a tribute to Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, and was performed only once in 1909. That is, until last Friday when Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra …

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Remembering Pauline Oliveros, Composer and Proponent of “Deep Listening”

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Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening. Even though the newborn has trillions of neurons, by the time they’re eighteen months old they’ve lost quite a bit, because they’re focusing on exclusive sounds of speech. So that sort of takes you away from the sensation of sound. -Pauline Oliveros American composer, accordionist, and theorist Pauline Oliveros passed away last Thursday. She was 84. Oliveros was …

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Canto: Adam Schoenberg’s Dream-Lullaby

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“Canto is about family and love” writes American composer Adam Schoenberg, describing his 2014 composition commissioned by the Lexington (Kentucky) Philharmonic. The brief orchestral work was written after the birth of Schoenberg’s son, Luca. It opens with a sudden, colorful, mysterious cluster of sound, initiated by the strummed strings of the piano, which instantly thrusts us into its distinctly dreamy sound world. The tonal colors are soft and muted, but there’s a sense …

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New Release: The San Francisco Symphony’s Debussy Album

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Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have just released an exciting new Debussy album. The disk features two orchestral showpieces: the three movement Images pour orchestre (the interior movement, Ibéria, evokes the bright, sunny rhythms of Spain) and the ballet score, Jeux. The sensuous, gypsy-inspired waltz La plus sue lente rounds out the album. The performances were recorded live at Davies Symphony Hall. Jeux (Games), described as a “poème dansé” (“a danced poem”), was Debussy’s last orchestral work. It was written quickly in …

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