It’s exactly 130 years since Charles Ives was born, and his music sounds just as fresh and newly minted as if he had composed it yesterday.
We start with Ives’s “Ragtime Dance” No. 1, just to get ourselves into a good listening mood. A bit of Vivaldi as a palate cleanser, and then on to the Fugue from Ives’s Symphony No. 4, Tilson Thomas at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony. More Ives will be heard much later, when the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra takes us on a tour of “Three Places in New England” as conceived in Ives’s ear.
More American music is spread throughout the evening: William Grant Still’s “Miniatures” will be piped by the Calico Winds; Gwyneth Walker’s “An American Concerto,” with its flavors of rock, folk, and jazz will be brought to us by violinist Melissa White and the Czech National Symphony under Paul Freeman.
The British composer John Tavener, whose religious convictions led him to be received into the Orthodox Church, often uses the sacred tone systems of the Orthodox liturgy. In love with Greece, he moved to the island of Evia, where he composed “. . . Depart in Peace,” a setting in Greek of the “Nunc dimitis.” The work is dedicated to the “eternal Memory” of Tavener’s father, and is performed this evening by the same folks who premiered it: Clio Gould as violinist and conductor of the BT Scottish Ensemble, along with soprano Patricia Rozario and Matthew Rooke, who plays tampura.
And a touch of the unusual: three old Corsican polyphonic chants, sung by young Corsican singersin a style authentic to their island of the 17th and 18th centuriesunder leader Marcel Pérès, who helped resurrect and preserve this all-but-lost music.
We start with Ives’s “Ragtime Dance” No. 1, just to get ourselves into a good listening mood. A bit of Vivaldi as a palate cleanser, and then on to the Fugue from Ives’s Symphony No. 4, Tilson Thomas at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony. More Ives will be heard much later, when the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra takes us on a tour of “Three Places in New England” as conceived in Ives’s ear.
More American music is spread throughout the evening: William Grant Still’s “Miniatures” will be piped by the Calico Winds; Gwyneth Walker’s “An American Concerto,” with its flavors of rock, folk, and jazz will be brought to us by violinist Melissa White and the Czech National Symphony under Paul Freeman.
The British composer John Tavener, whose religious convictions led him to be received into the Orthodox Church, often uses the sacred tone systems of the Orthodox liturgy. In love with Greece, he moved to the island of Evia, where he composed “. . . Depart in Peace,” a setting in Greek of the “Nunc dimitis.” The work is dedicated to the “eternal Memory” of Tavener’s father, and is performed this evening by the same folks who premiered it: Clio Gould as violinist and conductor of the BT Scottish Ensemble, along with soprano Patricia Rozario and Matthew Rooke, who plays tampura.
And a touch of the unusual: three old Corsican polyphonic chants, sung by young Corsican singersin a style authentic to their island of the 17th and 18th centuriesunder leader Marcel Pérès, who helped resurrect and preserve this all-but-lost music.
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