Tag: 03.24.05

How far would you walk to see a concert? Probably not as far as Hilde Binford, a music history professor at a Pennsylvania college, who just completed a 33-mile trek with several of her students, ending at New York’s Lincoln Center, just in time for a performance of the Philharmonic. Why they did such a thing is a complicated question: suffice to say that it has to do with J.S. Bach’s own 250-mile pilgrimage to hear an organ recital, but also a lot to do with simple intellectual curiosity and the love of a challenge.

Composer James Dillon was very much looking forward to hearing one of his works performed in his hometown of Glasgow, by the renowned Royal Scottish National Orchestra. But at the performance, he was taken aback by what he says was the incredibly poor quality of the playing, as well as a palpable and aggressive disinterest on the part of the musicians and their conductor. The disengaged sound was also noted by both of Glasgow’s daily newspapers, and the BBC, which had planned to broadcast the concert recording, has changed its mind.

“More than 200 protesters from the pro-Kremlin youth movement Moving Together gathered outside the theatre, shouting: ‘Sorokin – out of the Bolshoi.’ Vladimir Sorokin, the postmodernist author who wrote the libretto, has been accused of dragging the famous theatre’s reputation into the mud. The opera features a scientist called Rosenthal, who creates clones of the famous composers Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Verdi. After his death, the composers are forced to busk outside a train station and Mozart falls in love with a prostitute.”