Music for the Theater
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Music for the theater by Schubert and Copland dominate this evening. Also, Robert Shaw and his Festival Singers take on Viennese airs with Brahm’s “Liebeslieder Waltzes.”
What is it that makes cowboys such great dancers? Tonight we’ll hear Aaron Copland’s “Dance Episodes” from his Cowboy Ballet, “Rodeo.” Copland himself draws an inspired performance from the London Symphony Orchestra in tonight’s historic recording from 1968.
Also, we can thank Sir Arthur Sullivan for the evening’s other “theatrical” feature. Schubert’s incidental music for the play “Rosamunde” lay interred in a publisher’s storeroom for nearly fifty years before being dug up and dusted off by Sullivan (with Sir George Grove). It seems the play itself was a miserable failure, but the music Schubert wrote for it took on a grand new life after rediscovery. Tonight, Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic perform excerpts from this artful score, which no less a personage than Albert Einstein considered to be among Schubert’s most inspired creations.
Johannes Brahms took modern songs of courtly love and set them in a salon atmosphere with his “Liebeslieder Wälzer” (Love Song Waltzes). Moving through a variety of moods and pictorial situations, these eighteen songs for chamber singers (with double piano accompaniment) evoke an intimate and delightful evening of social music-making. Robert Shaw leads his Festival singers with pianists Norman Mackenzie and John Wustman in this captivating work, which had its premiere at Carlsruhe on this date in 1869.
What is it that makes cowboys such great dancers? Tonight we’ll hear Aaron Copland’s “Dance Episodes” from his Cowboy Ballet, “Rodeo.” Copland himself draws an inspired performance from the London Symphony Orchestra in tonight’s historic recording from 1968.
Also, we can thank Sir Arthur Sullivan for the evening’s other “theatrical” feature. Schubert’s incidental music for the play “Rosamunde” lay interred in a publisher’s storeroom for nearly fifty years before being dug up and dusted off by Sullivan (with Sir George Grove). It seems the play itself was a miserable failure, but the music Schubert wrote for it took on a grand new life after rediscovery. Tonight, Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic perform excerpts from this artful score, which no less a personage than Albert Einstein considered to be among Schubert’s most inspired creations.
Johannes Brahms took modern songs of courtly love and set them in a salon atmosphere with his “Liebeslieder Wälzer” (Love Song Waltzes). Moving through a variety of moods and pictorial situations, these eighteen songs for chamber singers (with double piano accompaniment) evoke an intimate and delightful evening of social music-making. Robert Shaw leads his Festival singers with pianists Norman Mackenzie and John Wustman in this captivating work, which had its premiere at Carlsruhe on this date in 1869.
