This Week in Classical Music-September 20, 2009

September 20, 2009

Michael Christie, Rock Star!

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Rock Star Conductors named
•Palin and Biden debate inspires Opera
•Kirchner dead

This Week in Classical Music 9/20/09

It’s “This Week in Classical Music” an update on what’s happening in the Classical Music world; I’m Randy Kinkel.

Tina Brown’s online news site “The Daily Beast” has listed a dozen or so of the “Young Rock Stars of the Conducting World”; Heading the list is New Los Angeles Philharmonic Director Gustavo Dudamel; others elevated to rock star status include Our Own Phoenix Symphony Conductor Michael Christie; New York Philharmonic Artistic Director Alondra De La Parra (who leads the Phoenix Symphony later this month), Kazem Abdullah of the Sao Paulo Symphony in Brazil, and San Francisco Associate Conductor James Gaffigan. To see the whole list with bios and glamour shots, go to www.thedailybeast.com

Sarah Palin and Joe Biden’s Vice presidential debate during the 2008 Presidential Campaign is the subject of a new opera by Composer Curtis Hughes. The New work, “Say it Ain’t So, Joe” Premiered in Boston this weekend. The Composer says he was struck by the musical sound of Palin and Biden’s voices in the debate. ““I’m re-creating the exact pitches that were spoken,’’ he explains, “and I’m putting them in a musical context that will sound as though they were meant to be musical all along. Because that’s how I heard some of them during the debate itself.’’ The action in the opera begins in the debate and circles back to it repeatedly. In between come scenes derived from public interviews, Palin’s nomination speech, and a campaign rally. “About half the opera scenes are excerpts from the debate and half of them are other scenes both before and after which relate more or less directly to what’s being discussed in the debates,’’ Hughes says.

American Composer Leon Kirchner Died this week at the age of 90 after a long illness. The Pulitzer-prize-winning composer was a student of Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions and Arnold Schoenberg. He also taught many of today’s top composers in his position as Composition professor at Harvard, including John Adams. His music was characterized as “rigorously Chromatic and Atonal”. He won the Pulitzer prize for his string Quartet #3, which was the first composition involving electronics to win that prize. A talented pianist, he also won the Naumberg award for his first piano Concerto.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; be listening each week at this time for another update; and join me every weekday at noon for
“The Mozart Buffet” an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I’m Randy Kinkel for “This Week in Classical Music” on 89.5 KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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