don't forget. isn't it tommorrow, alistair?!
Oui, c'est vrai.
i'm really bummed i can't make it. what with braces on one child, community college tuition for the other, and the youngest wants swimming lessons.
I'm not being unsympathetic - and, of course, I have never had any children, so should probably keep quite on this - but I'm not entirely convinced that blaming the kids is necessarily always fair...
oh well. someday - jonathan powell will come to philly (maybe?) .
I hope so, in both cases.
i wish him the best of luck on everything
Thanks - I'll pass that on.
excepting the last piece. i hope it goes to hell in a handbasket. then, i'd say - 'see - i told you never to make fun of a piece that is about john the baptist's head getting chopped.' but, whatever - it's just a piece (not the head - the piece itself). so - in any case - even if he messed up on the exact place where the head gets chopped - it would sound like a grisly head chopping and nothing else. so - it really can't go terribly wrong. unless a string breaks at that exact moment.
But who would you blame? Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji? Richard Strauss? Oscar Wilde? Regardless of which of these or none, you should surely know if you've heard Strauss's magnificent musik-drama that neither he nor Wilde "makes fun" of the severing or serving of the head in question and it is, in any case, merely one event in an opera of which Sorabji's description is encapsulated in the following note (which is the one I've put in tomorrow night's programme):
"Subtitled
Konzertmäβige Übertragung für Klavier zu Zwei Händen, Sorabji’s “pianising” of the heady final scene from Strauss’s opera Salome dates from 1947, not long before Strauss’s death; it is his last and finest transcription. Sorabji’s motivation for it some thirty years after encountering the original is unknown; no correspondence between composer and transcriber has yet been unearthed. Sorabji’s deep respect and fulsome enthusiasm for Strauss’s first major stage work was, however, evident from the outset and never wavered. In his book Mi Contra Fa: The Immoralisings of a Machivellian Musician, published in the year of this transcription, Sorabji wrote of
“that astonishing drama of exacerbated eroticism, Salome, for which the composer finds a musical language of unparalleled power, suppleness and concentrated vitriolic intensity of expression”.
Sorabji’s remarks on it in his earlier book Around Music bear quoting in extenso:
“…wonderful music-drama…Salome…incomparably his greatest stage work…caught and expressed with amazing and almost baleful power the perversely exotic and Oriental voluptuousness of Wilde’s play and has woven around it music of such inevitability, such perfect rightness that henceforth never can one think of the play apart from Strauss’s music. The overheated tropical atmosphere and strained tensity that are maintained in this astonishing work from first bar to last mark it as one of Strauss’s masterpieces. It reaches a level that he himself has never passed. Supple, serpentine and insinuating, full of subtle suggestion, the music writhes and twists like a coil of smoke rising from an incense burner. From the taut, nervous opening to the astonishing climax, the score is a forest of intricate effects and details of instrumentation that sound as convincing in their superbly triumphant audacity today as they did twenty years ago”.
Sorabji gave his personal copy of the full score of Salome (which he had at some time had leather-bound together with that of Elektra in a single volume) to Alistair Hinton on his birthday (Sorabji’s birthday, not Hinton’s!) in 1973; it is now in The Sorabji Archive collection and was the source material for Sorabji’s transcription."
So - there ya has it!
Please therefore feel free to extend your wellwishings to Jonathan for his performance of this transcription as much as you have already done in respect of the other seven works on the programme, especially since this closing work will be its world première!
Best,
Alistair
Topic: jonathan powell's concert is tommorrow