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ArtsJournal: music
2020-12-07 14:45:39
The Not-So-Hidden Literary Heritage Of Harriet The Spy
An ode to Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane? You bet. But also, “Harriet is a writer devoted to routine. She loves her tomato sandwiches, her egg creams, and her spy route and notebook both because they give her a lot of pleasure and because they ground her. Like a working artist, she doesn’t want to think […]
2019-02-12 20:35:53
Anglais - A New Opera: l'Enigma di Lea
Finally, after many years, Liceu has hosted the world premiere of an opera, L’enigma di Lea by Benet Casablancas with text by Rafael Argullol. Casablancas, born in 1956, is one of the main current Catalan composers. Although his catalogue is long and varied this is his first opera. Rafael Argullol, born in 1949, is a poet, novelist, philosopher, essay writer and university professor in aesthetics and art theory. The piece, described by the librettist as a ‘mythical tale’, takes place initially in an atemporal dystopia without any references and later in a psychiatric asylum in the present time. The piece presents the figure of Lea, a woman who was possessed physically by divinity, and who therefore accessed the secret of immortality. However, because of this, she is also condemned to wonder for eternity through time and space in an eternal present and to be nothing else but fire and […]
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Faces of classical music
2019-01-22 20:03:00
George Frideric Handel: Rodelinda – Jeanine De Bique, Tim Mead, Benjamin Hulett, Avery Amereau, Jakub Józef Orliński, Andrea Mastroni – Le Concert d'Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm (HD 1080p)
Even by usual standards of patently implausible baroque opera plots, "Rodelinda" reaches new heights of Delphic abstruseness. William Hartston in the London Express described Handel's 19th opera as "everyone wanting to marry or kill everyone else".Regardless of Hartston's hyperbole, confusion certainly abounds. A Penelope-esque wife erroneously thinks her husband is dead not once, but twice. The two principal protagonists mope around in a fiortura funk for most of the narrative. The imprisoned deposed-king mistakenly tries to kill his liberator. A betrothed couple separately renege. A cynical usurper is pardoned with "Clemenza di Tito-like" magnanimity. The names of many of the characters are unpronounceable and the happy ending beggars belief. That said, "Rodelinda" contains some of the most marvelous operatic music Handel ever wrote.Regisseur Jean Bellorini's solution to the manifold dramaturgical conundrums was to transform a quasi-Greek tragedy into a variegated Legoland kindergarten.In his program notes, Bellorini explains "We are in […]
Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium
2017-05-31 20:59:05
A new plugin for Sibelius and Finale music engraving software is taking the music world by storm. The new “Titleizer” plugin from Demisoft Technology systematically analyses a piece’s duration, instrumentation and pitch content and automatically generates a meaningless and unrelated title for the piece. “Since Haydn’s time, we’ve all known that music sells better when it has a completely meaningless title that is completely unrelated and irrelevant to the piece of music it is appended to,” said Demisoft CEO, Filbert Verdorbenham. “Post 1975, when composers world-wide realised the only way to get their music heard was to give their pieces catchy but meaningless titles, coming up with those titles has become an ever greater burden to the creative process. With so much at stake artistically and commercially, some composers spend minutes, even tens of minutes, struggling to come up with the right title for a piece they would otherwise have […]
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