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kenjariI'm not going to talk about the election. Everyone else has already said it better than I could.
Instead, I'm going to talk briefly about the concert I went to tonight. It was a recital of contemporary works for soprano and piano, presented by Lucy Shelton and Karl Paulnack at Boston Conservatory (my alma mater).
I quite liked the first half. Both pieces used playing inside the piano on the strings in various ways. I liked Apparition by George Crumb the best of the two. I love Crumb's music. It doesn't sound like anything else. It's like music from another world, both ancient and new. It's always fascinating. Voices of the Autumn Wind made great use of bowing the piano strings, but I wasn't terribly thrilled with the vocal line.
The second half bored me to tears. Both pieces (Whitman Settings by Oliver Knussen and Of challenge and of Love by Elliott Carter) were in the same modernist, mostly atonal style. It's a style that I've heard a lot of and have never found terribly interesting. And for text settings, it can be kind of tiresome. As was the case in these two pieces, that particular style produces the effect of detachment from the text. All the poems sounded the same, despite the differences in poets and subjects. I was actually very disappoiinted in the Carter, because I like A Mirror on Which to Dwell, also for soprano, and also quite modernist, very much. I couldn't help feeling that he was coasting with this one.
Instead, I'm going to talk briefly about the concert I went to tonight. It was a recital of contemporary works for soprano and piano, presented by Lucy Shelton and Karl Paulnack at Boston Conservatory (my alma mater).
I quite liked the first half. Both pieces used playing inside the piano on the strings in various ways. I liked Apparition by George Crumb the best of the two. I love Crumb's music. It doesn't sound like anything else. It's like music from another world, both ancient and new. It's always fascinating. Voices of the Autumn Wind made great use of bowing the piano strings, but I wasn't terribly thrilled with the vocal line.
The second half bored me to tears. Both pieces (Whitman Settings by Oliver Knussen and Of challenge and of Love by Elliott Carter) were in the same modernist, mostly atonal style. It's a style that I've heard a lot of and have never found terribly interesting. And for text settings, it can be kind of tiresome. As was the case in these two pieces, that particular style produces the effect of detachment from the text. All the poems sounded the same, despite the differences in poets and subjects. I was actually very disappoiinted in the Carter, because I like A Mirror on Which to Dwell, also for soprano, and also quite modernist, very much. I couldn't help feeling that he was coasting with this one.
