Concert description
Artists have always engaged in a creative dialogue with the past. The composers on our program have all been challenged and inspired by musicians who have come before them.
The clear structures of Baroque dances offered Ravel ready-made vessels for his inspiration. He applied his skills like a pointallist painter to imagine a “Menuet Antique” in vivid 20th-century colors.
Always the provocateur, Ned Rorem describes percussion as “strictly ornamental,” or even “superfluous.” But when virtuoso Evelyn Glennie asked him for a concerto, he wrote a work that stresses “chords and tune, but never rhythm for its own sake.” Soloist Ian Ding performs on five different instruments in Rorem’s “Mallet Concerto.”
Brahms, always a diligent student of past masters, makes reference to his musical idols in many of his works. Using a dark Romantic palette, Brahms looks back to the Baroque passacaglia, Bach and Beethoven in shaping the variations that bring his final symphony and our concert to a close. |
