For the past several years, classical music composers have gathered to share their more eclectic scores at the ‘Bang on a Can’ festival in North Adams, Mass. Jeffrey Brown explores the origins of the event.
solo piano
Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver
solo piano
For the past several years, classical music composers have gathered to share their more eclectic scores at the ‘Bang on a Can’ festival in North Adams, Mass. Jeffrey Brown explores the origins of the event.
“…the score is a model of how music can animate words. The text is set with impressive clarity, and Mr. Gilfry sings every phrase with crisp diction and dramatic point, delivering phrases with virile energy, sudden bluster, or, during vulnerable moments, an aching confusion that takes you by surprise.”
— Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
On February 8, in Benaryoa Hall, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony premiere David Lang’s first symphony: symphony without a hero, commissioned for the Seattle Symphony by the Lynn and Brian Grant Family. The 27-minute work is in one movement, with two related parts — two separate musical movements that are performed simultaneously: one heavy and oppressive and one light and hopeful. Lang explains that one doesn’t “really hear the light and hopeful music until the oppressive movement ends.”
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