Auburn Symphony’s Springtime “Rite,” With Strauss on the Side

Auburn Symphony’s Springtime “Rite,” With Strauss on the Side

The Rite is receiving many performances this season, one of them this past weekend by the Auburn Symphony Orchestra at that city’s Performing Arts Center. For this concert, conductor Stewart Kershaw coupled it with Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, a tone poem on essentially the same theme, composed some 22 years earlier. Continue reading Auburn Symphony’s Springtime “Rite,” With Strauss on the Side

Morlot’s Seattle Symphony Celebrates Rhythms of Stravinsky, Gershwin, Varèse

Morlot’s Seattle Symphony Celebrates Rhythms of Stravinsky, Gershwin, Varèse

The three works were all written within a span of about 15 years, Rite in 1913, Paris in 1928 and Ameriques between 1918 and 1922. It was a time of artistic ferment in Paris, even during WWI, beginning the same kind of musical upheaval which had occurred in Italy at the very end of the 16th and early 17th centuries when the Florentine Camerata and composers like Monteverdi realized that one could express all kinds of emotions dramatically in music, culminating in the birth of opera. Continue reading Morlot’s Seattle Symphony Celebrates Rhythms of Stravinsky, Gershwin, Varèse