Tag: 08.21.00

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

A growing number of artists are incorporating scientific techniques into their work – everything from X-rays and MRIs to anatomical drawings and bacterial cultures. “Reductive science collects more data than we can perceive. We need new ways of looking at the world around us. This is essentially what artists do.” – ABC News

REMEMBERING ALEC GUINNESS

One must resist the temptation of calling anyone the last this or last that; history – whether of theater, of film, or of the world — is far too cyclical for lasts. Still, with the passing of Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Alec Guinness, some sort of era seems to have ended. If actors were onions, the core of Richardson would have been shrewd common sense; of Redgrave, quirkiness and neurosis; of Olivier, romantic dash; of Gielgud, exquisite lyricism; of Guinness, all-encompassing humanity.” – New York Magazine

CYBER-ORCHESTRA

  • Last week Itzhak Perlman and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed the first live webcast under the new agreement with American orchestras to perform concerts on the web. How’d it go? Not ready for prime time, writes Detroit music critic John Guinn. – Gloff.net

THE MAKING OF MAHLER

“Is there a case to be made against Mahler’s legend, if not his music? How has his entry into Valhalla changed the way we listen and the way composers think? With his monumentalism, his fanaticism, his unstinting idealism, and his unstinting egotism, he has not always been what school counsellors call ‘a good influence’. He left in his wake a series of inimitable, much-imitated masterpieces and a great deal of confusion about what a composer is supposed to do.” – London Review of Books

REDOING BEETHOVEN

Mahler significantly “reworked” six of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. “Mahler’s editing of Beethoven generally pleased performers. But he made his changes in red ink on the printed music. Critics saw a lot of red ink and they raised the roof.” Now Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony plan to perform the remade 9th symphony. “For those who know this music well, you’ll have fun spotting the differences.” – Chicago Tribune (AP)

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

LA Times critic Mark Swed recently lamented that American orchestras don’t play enough American music. Conductor John Mauceri responds in a letter to the editor: “While I totally agree with Swed and his passion for playing more American music, I would just hope he could find a way of embracing a larger vision of what constitutes important and vital music written on these vast and complicated shores.” – Los Angeles Times

SING ALONG

John Eliot Gardner is performing and recording all of Bach’s cantatas this year. “Though Bach is best known now for his grand masterpieces like the “St. Matthew Passion” and the B minor Mass, it was the 340 cantatas composed during his five years, starting in 1723, as cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig that drew the most notice when he died on July 28, 1750. They were the only pieces of music noted in the first paragraph of his obituary.” – New York Times

PERLMAN CONDUCTS

Itzhak Perlman has begun conducting, making his Tanglewood debut this weekend. “Of course, as a virtuoso violinist Perlman can do anything he wants to. As a conductor, Perlman is not a virtuoso, but he turns that into a virtue by approaching everything simply and directly, never attempting to juice things up or impose himself on the music, and by releasing the musicians to play as personally, responsively, and expressively as he has always wanted to. They in turn carry him over the rough spots, and they had to.” – Boston Globe

“That’s not to say Perlman should quit his day job, should trade bow for baton, anytime soon – despite his appointment as principal guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra starting in 2001. His conducting style is certainly idiosyncratic.” – Boston Herald