This Week in Classical Music-November 29, 2009

by: Randy Kinkel

November 29, 2009

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Marsalis vindicated with New Composition: Blue
•Brit youth composer competition
•Glass on Kepler

This week in classical music 11/29/09

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

Well, last week we reported that Wynton Marsalis missed his deadline for his “Blues Symphony” for the third time and was not yet finished with the piece; apparently that’s not the case! Jim Kelly, Marsalis’s copyist, reports that “I have the full score of the Blues Symphony complete with all seven movements. The piece is not being played in its entirety because of a lack of rehearsal time, not because the piece has not been finished. “ The whole piece is scheduled to be played in January by the Atlanta Symphony. There’s an interesting back-and-forth between Kelly and Atlanta Journal writer Pierre Ruhe here: http://artsatl.typepad.com/artscriticatl/classical-music/

London’s Royal Opera house is offering young composers a chance to write a piece of music and have it played at Covent Garden every night. The competition, open to composers between ages 11-to-14 in the UK, is to produce a fanfare, which will be recorded by the Royal Opera House orchestra, then will be played to signal the end of the intermission in the concert; they wanted something a little more classy that the current school-bell-like ring they use now. Entries will be judged by a panel of experts including music director Barry Wordsworth and others; Competition organizers hope that it will encourage young people to experiment with music.

Philip Glass, In an interview after the recent US premiere of his new opera, “Kepler”, about the astronomer whose analysis of the motion of the planets provided the foundation for Newton's discovery of the law of gravity, had this to say about the astronomer: “He was half poet and half scientist…. "One question he asked himself was, How does the face of the heavens influence the character of man? He said, when the soul of man is aligned with heaven, then everything happens automatically. He starts to use the word 'heaven,' doesn't use the word 'God' at all, and he almost sounds like a Taoist. And then he says, 'The first principle of the soul is Will. And for that reason, man is and always remains free.' It's an astonishing thing to say! And yet he's an astrologer. He takes the idea of the face of the sky and turns it into free will.” Glass’s “Kepler” continues it’s run in Linz, Austria, Kepler’s home town, through December 5th.

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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