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ation:
Tickets range from $10 - $48. Students 50% discount. Seniors 10% discount. FREE preconcert talk @ 7:00pm. For tickets, call BMOP at 617.363.0396 or visit www.bmop.org. Tickets are also available for sale at the Jordan Hall Box Office three weeks before the concert and at the door, subject to availability.
]]>In both solo and duo piano formations, Gosling and Coleman will perform György
Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata and Steve Reich’s mesmerizing Piano Phase, among
their own compositions.
Merkin Concert Hall, 129 W. 67th St. 10023
]]>I wonder what the history of performers playing 2 keyboards at the same time is? People around in the 1970s remember Keith Emerson playing an entire stage of keyboards. Here Korla Pandit amazes us with his multi-keyboard virtuosity and exotic scales and sounds.
Getting Aphrodite Off the Ground
In the surreal virtual universe of Mel Shapiro’s “Homer in Cyberspace,” the gods of ancient Greece have been deposed, “shrink-wrapped and imprisoned” by a new race of digital/electronic deities known as the iGods.
Struggling to return home to his loyal wife Penelope, the wily war hero Odysseus (”O” for short) has been condemned to wander aimlessly for years, his punishment for blinding the one-eyed bully Sy, the iGod son of La Belle and Bernie Klops.
Obviously, the epic poet of ancient Greece has been put through a few changes on his way to UCLA’s Macgowan Hall Little Theater, where radically modernized simulacra of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus will make their singing and dancing debuts.
“Homer in Cyberspace” will be presented at 8 p.m. on May 29, 30 and 31 and on June 4, 5, 6 and 7, with additional 2 p.m. performances on May 31 and June 7. Ticket and parking information can be obtained by calling UCLA’s Central Ticket Office at (310) 825-2101 or visiting www.tickets.ucla.edu.
[From UCLA TODAY, 5/15/2008, read the entire story here.]
Download audio file (21b-this-boy.mp3)
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“This Boy” (from HOMER IN CYBERSPACE)
Music by Roger Bourland
Lyrics by Mel Shapiro
(Accompaniment only)
The singers have not been given their wireless mikes yet, so they were singing with a temp sound system which consisted of Jeremy playing back the musical cues from his Mac, cued by Lindsey. No more just singing with the piano-vocal score, this was the real thing, and the actors are finally starting to see how the music will REALLY sound. And as far as I can tell, they love it even more. I have had many touching moments already where an actor will tell me how moving my music is for them to sing and hear. At the end of rehearsal last night, I had conversations with several of them discussing how NOT to cry. The closing duet is a killer. I was so touched to look over and see three rows of beautiful college students listening and watching, with their eyes filled with tears, and the room was filled with sniffs and noses being blown. A good sign.
Mel continues to tweak and edit the story making it better and better and the actors are remarkably adept at learning the new lines. Yesterday I had to recast four measures of choral writing that had different rhythms and words: the actors learned the changes that day and had them memorized by the evening. The musical talent of the group of actors has been thrilling to observe and appreciate.
I still have five more transition cues to compose, a few numbers to slow down and a couple to speed up, as well as a huge amount of the score to update, and all about half of the cues still need to be exported for our sound crew. In that the show opens a week from Thursday, I know there is an end in sight, but whew! it’s been a busy time here.
Wilfrid Mellers, a wise, passionate, deeply generous writer on music, has passed away at the age of ninety-four. I treasure his books on Percy Grainger and Poulenc, his twentieth-century survey Caliban Reborn, his not entirely convincing but always captivating studies of Dylan and the Beatles, and, above all, his 1965 work on American classical and jazz composers, Music in a New Found Land. It's a scandal that the last-named has long been out of print. I've quoted before and I'll quote again Mellers's visionary salute to Morton Feldman:
The tones [in Durations 1-5] are always isolated, immensely slow, and delicately soft, and when instruments play together, because the durations overlap, the simultaneous sounds are often unisonal or concordant. An infinitely slow drone on muted tuba, a major third on muted string harmonics, sound as though the players are creating the tones out of the eternal silence, and we are being born afresh in learning to listen to them. Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman's work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear. The music's passive, rarefied tenderness seems to have the therapeutic property of making us saner, rather than more mad. Since the question of sanity or madness can hardly be decided, however, without some human criterion as reference, it may be that the cycle of "consciousness" has, willy-nilly, started again.
In his honor I'm playing Grainger's "Shallow Brown," with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Country Gardiner Orchestra (Philips/ArkivMusic):
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News from Minnesota: Osmo Vänskä, the genius music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, has been composing a bit in recent years, and William Schrickel, who leads the Metropolitan Symphony, another Twin Cities orchestra, commissioned Vänskä to write a piece titled The Bridge, which will be played this Sunday, May 18th. The piece is connected to the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge last summer. It is also designed as a bridge to the Mahler Seventh Symphony, which will directly follow it on the program. Schrickel sees quite a bit of Vänskä in his day job: he is the Minnesota's assistant principal bassist.