Beach Music
Submitted by Jen Glagov on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 12:41pm.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music the last few weeks while getting ready for Music of the Baroque’s 2008-09 season (one of my greatest job responsibilities), but I’m starting to worry a little. No matter how hard I try to think about other things, there are two pieces that won’t stop running through my mind: this chorus from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which is full of brilliant text-setting (scroll down to find an audio clip), and the “Laudamus te” from the Gloria of Bach’s superlative Mass in B Minor. Oh, well. If my life now has a soundtrack, at least the music is good.
What about you? What are you listening to this summer?
Click here to continue reading
Posted in
When Antonio Vivaldi was working at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a screen between performers and audience guaranteed that the young girls' reputations would not be compromised in any way by the act of musical performance. Times have changed, of course-and I recently found myself in a conversation about whether or not sex is actually a valuable classical music marketing tool. I immediately thought of violinist Lara St. John's wonderful 1996 recording of Bach's Partita No. 2 and Sonata No. 3. I heard St. John perform live on WFMT, and was so impressed by her interpretation of these unaccompanied works that I went out and bought the recording. To my surprise, the cover featured an almost nymphette-like St. John sporting nothing more than a strategically-placed violin. "If it takes nudity to get people my age to listen to Bach," explained St. John in an interview, "then so be it."
ASIMO’s appearance with the DSO a week ago has been the subject of discussion on this website—and because I was lucky enough to attend the concert, I was asked to write about my experience. As Mark Stryker wrote of ASIMO’s “performance” in the Detroit Free Press, “Let’s say right away that the display was a technological marvel and as cool as all get-out. But it was conducting in only the most limited definition…” He was right, of course. But for me, the evening was about more than ASIMO’s conducting prowess. From the moment I handed my ticket to the usher, it was clear that this concert was something special. The back of the hall was crowded with reporters and television cameras, and there wasn’t an empty seat in the house (I heard several subscribers commenting that it was nice to see the hall so full). And while it was obviously great publicity for Honda—who recently gave the DSO $1 million to create The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund—conductor Thomas Wilkins made it clear that ASIMO’s appearance was a metaphor for the seemingly limitless capabilities of human achievement. It also set the stage for a great concert, and the biggest applause of the night was reserved for the humans—especially Yo-Yo Ma, who received huge standing ovations for Haydn and Saint-Saens’ first cello concertos.
