Monthly Archives: October 2001

The Philharmonic‘s presentation around Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra was a distinguished event worthy of the music — as the treatment accorded the Piano Concerto three weeks before had not been. Bold to the point of insolence, gorgeously color-splashed, this … Continue reading →

They’re still talking about it in Stuttgart — about the night, just over a year ago, when a capacity audience in that normally strait-laced metropolis went berserk for nearly half an hour at the world premiere of a 90-minute choral … Continue reading →

It will be interesting to see whether the efforts of our major cultural managements will succeed in turning Arnold Schoenberg into a media hero, as they did Igor Stravinsky last season. Schoenberg himself never made it, and the account of … Continue reading →

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS DEAD ONCE AGAIN, AND ITS CORPSE HAS never been livelier. The villains have been variously identified, and the saviors as well. Audiences dwindle. One faction says the defection has to do with too much worn-out, familiar repertory. … Continue reading →

Pierre Boulez brought his Répons here for its first — and, so far, last — hearing in the spring of 1986. It took another 14 years for a recording of the work to appear, in Deutsche Grammophon’s 20/21 Series, which, … Continue reading →

MaryAnn Bonino‘s Chamber Music in Historic Sites brings in superb small entertainments from around the world — chamber music, early music, solo recitals — and plunks them down in enhancing architectural settings — churches, mansions, classic lobbies. You hear a … Continue reading →

It didn‘t take too much gift of prophecy to recognize the fates that brought Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to a merger of their destinies. People still talk about his debut here (November 29, 1984) — a fair-haired … Continue reading →