ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON - The pre-performance corridors of the Fisher Center at Bard College appeared to have been invaded by The Radical Faeries – a madly colorful, gender-ambiguous subset of the gay community. Maybe it was a typical day in the life of a liberal campus? No. The cast of Christopher Alden’s production of Peter Pan - the Leonard Bernstein version - was revving up for … [Read more...] about Leonard Bernstein: Free from gender with nothing to prove or lose
Music from the attic: The Revelers return with a mellifluous secret garden
Attic music speaks quietly - and with wide-open possibilities. A secret garden, perhaps? Stacks of printed music found in closets and attics - having survived the decades by accident or design - often lose their purpose along with the last person who sang or heard the music. And re-discovering that purpose can confound the smartest historians with pages stored out of order … [Read more...] about Music from the attic: The Revelers return with a mellifluous secret garden
The creative arc of Kile Smith: Do opportunities make the piece? Or does the piece create the opportunity?
The surprisingly large number of thriving Philadelphia composers is only partly about the city's relatively low cost of living and great conservatories. It's also about great opportunities that don't depend on the Philadelphia Orchestra. Certainly, composers such as Jennifer Higdon have had that lucky break with the Fab Philadelphians. But no realistic composer can put their … [Read more...] about The creative arc of Kile Smith: Do opportunities make the piece? Or does the piece create the opportunity?
The Crossing’s Month of Moderns : A masterwork is born
The great but tragic American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) can’t help but exert a magnetic attraction to composers with his fusion of lyricism, modernism and mad, extravagant fantasy. Of course, no two composers are going to approach this material the same way - until, for a quick, curious moment, they do. Crane’s six-part love poem Voyages became a pair of polar opposite … [Read more...] about The Crossing’s Month of Moderns : A masterwork is born
Simon Rattle’s high-def 3-D Mahler festival with the London Symphony was a landmark in the New York season
So often when star musicians such as Simon Rattle hit a golden spot in their late 30s and early 40s, you stand back and ask, "Where can they possibly go from there?" Everybody's darling conductor in the 1990s, Rattle certainly invited that kind of speculation, though his Berlin Philharmonic years (2002 to the end of this summer) left only provisional answers: You never knew … [Read more...] about Simon Rattle’s high-def 3-D Mahler festival with the London Symphony was a landmark in the New York season