| Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique Ives: Holidays Symphony Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 | Thu, Oct 15, 2009 10:00pm Thu, Oct 22, 2009 10:00pm Thu, Oct 29, 2009 10:00pm |
Ten p.m. on Thursday nights: that'll attract new audiences, I'm sure.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Keeping Score on KQED
KQED once more demonstrates its commitment to supporting the Bay Area's musical institutions by putting the Keeping Score shows at the following dates and times:
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8 comments:
not to mention schoolchildren. . ..
If MTT talks about these works the way he talked about Tchaikovsky's Fourth (the only one of the previous series I saw), then the fewer people who see it, the better.
I like Keeping Score, which feels like a spiritual descendant of Leonard Bernstein's programs to evangelize classical music.
What needs to be learned about this kind of music is how to hear its story. It's an impressionistic artform, so the story won't be exactly the same from listener to listener, but it is there, and in the greatest works it is worth hearing again and again.
So it doesn't bug me if MTT's impressions of the Tchaik 4 strike me as weird. He's showing how the music contains a story, and I think listeners will hear their own story soon enough.
To Kate Mayer: no spam allowed, and that's what your comment was. It's been removed now.
If I were young and innocent, and thought music were supposed to be listened to the way MTT describes it, I'd never listen to it again.
Fortunately my exposure to music was late enough, and my reaction to it strong enough, and little enough of what I read about it was like that. But crap like that in school permanently alienated me from great literature.
That's why I don't think it's harmless.
I for one would d be interested to hear what MTT has to say about the Holidays Symphony. He's always been sympathetic to Ives, his recordings of the symphonic music are outstanding, and I think the composer can stand a little evangelizing.
Lenny B once claimed that Ives was the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln of American music.
What, all three?
Such hyperbole is enough evangelizing to last the average moderately important composer, like Ives, several critical generations.
Lenny was a master of hyperbole. I doubt that MTT would go that far, and he might even have something interesting to add about, oh, for instance, the composer's life, times, goals and methods.
And what the heck is a "moderately important" composer?
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