Childhood Inspiration
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
While it was Stravinsky who said, “My music is best understood by children and animals,” many composers have turned to childhood as both subject and inspiration.
Chick Corea wrote a series of delightful children’s songs, so why not start the evening with one of them?? “Two” is performed by guitarist Manuel Barrueco. (We hear more from both Chick and Manuel later in the program, playing stuff related to Spain—olé!) Two famous pianists whose names start with H, Horowitz and Horszowski, bring us Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” and Debussy’s “Children’s Corner Suite” respectively. And David Allen Miller conducts the Albany Symphony in Roy Harris’s less-familiar “Memories of a Child’s Sunday,” in which Bells, Imagining Things, and Play form the three short and charming movements.
Tobias Picker’s opera, “An American Tragedy,” premiers at the Met in December, but we thought we’d bring you his work for oboe and orchestra, “Romances and Interludes,” which he based on Schumann’s opus 94 Romances. Robert Atherholt plays the oboe, while Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Houston Symphony.
Chick Corea’s encore is “Spain,” a work for piano sextet and orchestra that Chick says he arranged from his most-requested song. He is joined by the group Origen and the London Philharmonic. Following in his Hispanic-inflected footsteps, Barrueco plays “Three Spanish Pieces” by Joaquin Rodrigo.
Chick Corea wrote a series of delightful children’s songs, so why not start the evening with one of them?? “Two” is performed by guitarist Manuel Barrueco. (We hear more from both Chick and Manuel later in the program, playing stuff related to Spain—olé!) Two famous pianists whose names start with H, Horowitz and Horszowski, bring us Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” and Debussy’s “Children’s Corner Suite” respectively. And David Allen Miller conducts the Albany Symphony in Roy Harris’s less-familiar “Memories of a Child’s Sunday,” in which Bells, Imagining Things, and Play form the three short and charming movements.
Tobias Picker’s opera, “An American Tragedy,” premiers at the Met in December, but we thought we’d bring you his work for oboe and orchestra, “Romances and Interludes,” which he based on Schumann’s opus 94 Romances. Robert Atherholt plays the oboe, while Christoph Eschenbach conducts the Houston Symphony.
Chick Corea’s encore is “Spain,” a work for piano sextet and orchestra that Chick says he arranged from his most-requested song. He is joined by the group Origen and the London Philharmonic. Following in his Hispanic-inflected footsteps, Barrueco plays “Three Spanish Pieces” by Joaquin Rodrigo.
