by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. All quiet on the concert front
. Charnofsky spins Górecki, Beach, Chávez, Reiprich & Hilton Jones on WRUW
. Signups for Summit Choral Society children’s programs, Bolcom revisits the piano concerto
. Anniversaries of the Longy School and why John Cage chose 4 minutes and 33 seconds as the duration for the most famous work nobody’s ever heard
TODAY’S EVENTS:
From 2:00 –4:00 pm today, hop on the WRUB feed from Case to hear Eric Charnofsky host music by Henryk Górecki, Douglas Anderson, Amy Beach, Carlos Chávez, Bruce Reiprich and Hilton Jones.
NEWS BRIEFS:
Summit Choral Society announces open registration for its children’s programs K-12. Follow this link.
INTERESTING READS:
William Bolcom has completed and premiered his second piano concerto, written for Igor Levit, four decades after the first. The work was debuted by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra last April. Read Seth Colter Walls’ story in today’s New York Times print edition. An excerpt:
For Levit, the concerto has “a great mastery of writing and level of seriousness and dedication to every little detail.” But for all that refinement, Levit said, it also shares a key trait with music of American artists like Esperanza Spalding, Fred Hersch and Frederic Rzewski — all of whom Levit cited as carrying a form of the colloquial spirit that is also present in Bolcom’s music.
“They never lost the connection to the people who would listen to the music,” Levit said. “This wire to the audience, the wire to the dimension in the hall, is really something which I find deeply inspiring.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1868, French oboist, conductor, music educator and composer Georges Longy was born in Abbeville in the north of France. Lured to the U.S. in 1898 by the Boston Symphony to become its principal oboe, Longy spent 28 years with the ensemble, and founded the Longy School of Music in Cambridge in 1915 (now an outpost of Bard College) before retiring to Abbeville to tend his two hundred head of cattle and poultry. He left a distinctly French imprint on Boston’s musical life which is still evident today.
Avant-garde composer John Cage, frequently influenced by Zen Buddhism, wrote that he set out “to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long — those being the standard lengths of “canned” music and its title will be Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.” The three-movement, work, titled 4:33, and scored “for any instrument,” was first experienced in Woodstock, N.Y. in 1952. Here’s a performance by William Marx (pictured).