Twentieth Century

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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New Release: Lisa Batiashvili plays Tchaikovsky, Sibelius

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Georgian-born violinist Lisa Batiashvili’s newest album offers a surprisingly fresh take on two standard pillars of the violin repertoire- the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius Concertos. Batiashvili is joined by conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin on this Deutsche Grammophon recording. Batiashvili’s interpretation of the Tchaikovsky is full of fluid tempo changes. It’s generally more contemplative than the classic performances of Heifetz and Oistrakh. (For example, listen to the burning intensity just below the surface of the second movement’s hushed stillness or …

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The Cohen Variations

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The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. -Leonard Cohen Pianist Simone Dinnerstein describes The Cohen Variations, written in 2009 by New York composer Daniel Felsenfeld, as a nocturne- music which evokes the atmosphere of the night and suggests the wildly adventurous harmonies of Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes. (For a particularly magical example, listen to the Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27). The Cohen Variations are based on Leonard Cohen’s song, Suzanne. The …

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Angela Hewitt Plays Ravel

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Many of Maurice Ravel’s shimmeringly colorful orchestral compositions were written originally for solo piano. One example is Le Tombeau de Couperin, which we explored in an earlier post. This six-movement suite, written between 1914 and 1917, pays homage to the elegant, dance-like keyboard music of François Couperin (1668–1733) and other baroque composers. Ravel dedicated each movement to the memory of a friend or relative who died fighting the First World War. But the music doesn’t …

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