Children's Games
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Bizet’s “Jeux d’enfants” (Children’s Games), originally for two pianos, is a delightful twelve-movement work depicting things like Blind Man’s Buff, The Doll, and Soap Bubbles.
Pianists John Ogdon and Brenda Lucas have a great time romping through the “Games” with panache and aplomb. The symphonies of John Knowles Paine may not be the first in the medium written by an American, but they are among the first to be recognized both here and abroad as belonging to the grand symphonic tradition. Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic in a luminous performance of the First Symphony, which premiered in 1876, and was called by Gunther Schuller “the best Beethoven symphony that Beethoven didn’t write himself.”
I Musici give us a spirited Concerto grosso No. 11 in A by George Frederick Handel in our third hour, and later yet we enjoy a historic recording of the Overture and Bacchanale from Richard Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra and the Occidental College Choir.
Pianists John Ogdon and Brenda Lucas have a great time romping through the “Games” with panache and aplomb. The symphonies of John Knowles Paine may not be the first in the medium written by an American, but they are among the first to be recognized both here and abroad as belonging to the grand symphonic tradition. Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic in a luminous performance of the First Symphony, which premiered in 1876, and was called by Gunther Schuller “the best Beethoven symphony that Beethoven didn’t write himself.”
I Musici give us a spirited Concerto grosso No. 11 in A by George Frederick Handel in our third hour, and later yet we enjoy a historic recording of the Overture and Bacchanale from Richard Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” Bruno Walter conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra and the Occidental College Choir.
