by Kenneth Woods | Sep 16, 2008 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
I thought David Yang’s script to accompany our performance of Janacek’s String Quartet no. 2, “Intimate Letters,” would make a great blog post and a wonderful primer on a rarely heard masterpiece, so with his permission I’ve edited and reformatted it to fit these...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 20, 2008 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score, Nuts and bolts
On my desk today is Schumann’s 2nd Symphony. If you had assembled a panel of experts, including every major composer from 1825 to 1899, at the end of the 19th century to pick the most important symphony after Beethoven, Schumann 2 would probably have been the one,...
by Kenneth Woods | Mar 6, 2008 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score, Nuts and bolts
I’ve been putting a lot of work in on Paul Mefano’s Intererences in the run up to this weekends sessions. Because of the open form techniques Gordon described in Part II of our interview, the notation is about as thorny as it gets. The challenge for the conductor is...
by Kenneth Woods | Oct 2, 2007 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
What a frustration it must be for those composers who live to see their music go out of fashion. Mahler famously said just before his death that “my time will come,” but for his contemporary Strauss, it was not easy being something of an anachronism in his later...
by Kenneth Woods | Sep 26, 2007 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
Next week, the Surrey Mozart Players kick off their season (more on that soon). As the Strauss Romanze is something of an oddity, the orchestra asked if I would write some notes for the program. Richard Strauss- (1864-1949) Romanze for Cello and Orchestra in F major,...
by Kenneth Woods | Jun 9, 2007 | A view from the podium, Explore the Score
Dmitri Shostakovich- Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings, op 35 In many ways, Shostakovich was a quintessentially Russian composer. As a symphonist one can certainly hear the influence of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and even, to an extent,...
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