A song without words to end all songs without words
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Felix Mendelssohn: “If I could express myself completely with words, I wouldn't need music.” It’s our good fortune that he did need music—and that we can listen to it.
Two visions of things Indian are featured in our first hour. Hei-Kyung Hong and Jennifer Larmore sing the exquisite Flower Duet from “Lakme,” an opera that offers Leo Delibes’s distinctly French take on the exotic color and culture of 19th-century Bengal. “Ragas in a Minor Scale,” on the other hand, is a collaboration between the famous Indian composer Ravi Shankar and the equally well-known American Philip Glass.
Brahms’s last set of piano pieces, Op. 119, once described as resembling “the golden luster of parks in autumn and the austere black and white of winter walks,” is performed with insight and brilliance by American-born Stephen Kovacevich.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, the feature of our final hour, is performed by soloist Viktoria Mullova and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Marriner. As the liner notes tell us, this concerto is a worthy successor to that of Beethoven as “it is a song without words to end all songs without words.” As we head towards the end of the evening, we hear pianist Jean-Marc Luisada playing Enrique Granados’s “The Maiden and the Nightingale,” one of his magical evocations of the paintings of Goya.
Two visions of things Indian are featured in our first hour. Hei-Kyung Hong and Jennifer Larmore sing the exquisite Flower Duet from “Lakme,” an opera that offers Leo Delibes’s distinctly French take on the exotic color and culture of 19th-century Bengal. “Ragas in a Minor Scale,” on the other hand, is a collaboration between the famous Indian composer Ravi Shankar and the equally well-known American Philip Glass.
Brahms’s last set of piano pieces, Op. 119, once described as resembling “the golden luster of parks in autumn and the austere black and white of winter walks,” is performed with insight and brilliance by American-born Stephen Kovacevich.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, the feature of our final hour, is performed by soloist Viktoria Mullova and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Marriner. As the liner notes tell us, this concerto is a worthy successor to that of Beethoven as “it is a song without words to end all songs without words.” As we head towards the end of the evening, we hear pianist Jean-Marc Luisada playing Enrique Granados’s “The Maiden and the Nightingale,” one of his magical evocations of the paintings of Goya.
