Also included are excerpts from Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold; music from Philip Glass's Academy Award-nominated soundtrack to the Oscar-winning film The Hours; György Ligeti's Atmosphères for Orchestra; Ravel's mesmerizing Boléro; Danny Elfman's "The Overeager Overture;" and Prokofiev's Suite No. 1 from the ballet Cinderella. The concerts take place on Thursday, January 11 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, January 13 at 8:30 p.m.; and Sunday, January 14 at 3 p.m. at Orchestra Hall at the Max M. Fisher Music Center. Part of the "DSO Unmasked" series, all performances will feature large video screens on which live images of the Orchestra members, as well as Mauceri and Glover, will be projected in close-ups. Mauceri will also introduce each work to provide further insight into the theme of "Keeping Time."
These performances will premiere Glover's choreography for The River, which he will repeat in performances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in March with conductor Marin Alsop. This work replaces the previously announced World Premiere commission by Michael Torke, which has been postponed.
Performer, choreographer and director Savion Glover, now 32, shook up Broadway and took the world by storm when he won the 1996 Tony Award for choreography in the musical Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. His choreography and performance in that show also earned him the 1996 Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Obie Awards, two Fred Astaire Awards, and the 1996 Dance Magazine Choreographer of the Year Award. Since then, Glover produced and choreographed the ABC special "Savion Glover's Nu York;" starred in the Showtime movie The Wall; choreographed the HBO movie The Rat Pack; and starred in Spike Lee's feature film Bamboozled. In recent years Glover created a series of heralded performances titled "Classical Savion" in which he tap dances to the music of Vivaldi, Bach, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and other great composers as performed by a 10-piece chamber orchestra and his own jazz quartet, The Otherz.
Conductor John Mauceri served as the Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, a position that was created for him by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for 16 years. He retains the title of Founding Director. He has been the music director of four opera houses: Pittsburgh Opera, Washington Opera, Scottish Opera and Teatro Regio in Turin. He has also conducted the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Royal Opera House, the Deutsche Oper and many of the world's finest orchestras. Mauceri, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein's, is the recipient of numerous awards including the Tony, Grammy, Olivier, Emmy, Billboard, Drama Desk, and four Deutsche Schallplatten prizes. In 2006 he had two recordings released: Danny Elfman's "Serenada Schizophrana" and the original 1935 performing edition of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which recently received the Diapason d'Oor, France's highest recording award. He was recently named Chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts.
In his concerts with the DSO, Mauceri has chosen works by composers who have explored unusual manipulations of time in their music. The program opens with Richard Wagner's prelude to the opera Das Rheingold. According to Mauceri, "the prelude is linked to the musical depiction of the rainbow bridge and the entrance of the gods into Valhalla. Here Wagner redefines the way Western music can fill time with a single chord, slowly shifting in its internal motions."
The program continues with music from the Academy Award-nominated soundtrack to The Hours by Philip Glass. The Suite, arranged by Michael Riesman, is a three-movement work scored for piano, strings, harp and celeste that continues the stretching of time with Glass's carefully controlled use of harmony and texture.
Atmosphères for Orchestra, by the recently deceased Hungarian composer, György Ligeti, presents the ultimate in timelessness. The composer finds a way to take listeners on a journey in time with no melody, harmony or overt rhythm. What is left is music of shifting densities and dynamics.
Perhaps the most famous and popular experiment in time is Ravel's Boléro. Never intended to evoke a Latin dance, Boléro was inspired by the monotonous sounds of a factory. The constant rhythmic pulse supports a melody that repeats for over a quarter hour, with only changes made in the tune's orchestral colors, building to a spectacular climax.
Written by one of the world's great soundtrack composers, Danny Elfman's "The Overeager Overture" is a single tempo work (except for its coda) which maintains its energy by presenting many different themes. Variety called the work "half hoe-down, half diabolical." It was originally titled "Overture for a Non-Existent Musical," and had its world premiere at Mauceri's farewell concert at The Hollywood Bowl this past September.
Duke Ellington's The River was composed in 1970, during the same period of time when The New Orleans Suite was taking shape. At the premiere of The River in 1971, with choreography by Alvin Ailey, the piece was announced as Seven Dances from a Work in Progress Entitled "The River." Ten movements were finished by then, but only seven of these were ever staged, in spite of Clive Barnes' praise of the score in The New York Times as "the most considerable piece from Mr. Ellington since his Black, Brown and Beige Suite." In these performances, according to Mauceri, "Savion Glover adds his own time to The River. His taps create a superstructure of rhythm and time over the matrix left by the great jazz composer."
Prokofiev's sixth and penultimate ballet, Cinderella, was written sporadically between 1940 and 1944 and was first performed by Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet in 1945. The following year, the composer reorganized his ballet music into three orchestral suites. The excerpts heard in these DSO performances are "Cinderella's Waltz" and "Midnight," which Prokofiev himself described as "the fantasy of the twelve dwarves leaping at midnight from the clock and beating out a tap dance reminding Cinderella to return home."
By www.detroitsymphony.com
Posted December 28th, 2006 by ruzik_tuzik
