Tap Dancing Tonight!
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Morton Gould wrote the “Tap Dance Concerto” for his friend Danny Daniels, the soloist we hear tapping this evening. Too bad we can’t see his performance, but we can hear it!
The unusual concerto for tap dancer and orchestra by birthday honoree Morton Gould (1913) is performed with the composer at the head of the Rochester “Pops,” dancer Daniels tapping and soft-shoeing away in our final hour. You won’t want to miss this one, folks!
Our first hour feature is Antonin Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (No. 12 in F), written in a mere two weeks during Dvorak’s first summer in Spillville, Iowa; its trio is said to have been inspired by bird songs he heard there. The Orion String Quartet members are the able interpreters. They can be heard again tomorrow evening when we bring you the BBC/WNYC Music Party special at 8pm.
Olivier Messiaen was also born on this day, but in 1908. We hear a few short works of his, as well as “L’accension,” Myung-Whun Chung conducting the Orchestra of the Bastille. Subtitled “Four Symphonic Meditations for Orchestra,” this work epitomizes what Virgil Thomson wrote about the composer: that he is “simply a theologian with a taste for the theatrical.”
The unusual concerto for tap dancer and orchestra by birthday honoree Morton Gould (1913) is performed with the composer at the head of the Rochester “Pops,” dancer Daniels tapping and soft-shoeing away in our final hour. You won’t want to miss this one, folks!
Our first hour feature is Antonin Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (No. 12 in F), written in a mere two weeks during Dvorak’s first summer in Spillville, Iowa; its trio is said to have been inspired by bird songs he heard there. The Orion String Quartet members are the able interpreters. They can be heard again tomorrow evening when we bring you the BBC/WNYC Music Party special at 8pm.
Olivier Messiaen was also born on this day, but in 1908. We hear a few short works of his, as well as “L’accension,” Myung-Whun Chung conducting the Orchestra of the Bastille. Subtitled “Four Symphonic Meditations for Orchestra,” this work epitomizes what Virgil Thomson wrote about the composer: that he is “simply a theologian with a taste for the theatrical.”
