Links
Archives
Saturday, June 10, 2006
|
Mahlermania Better than Life By this point, if attending tonight’s performance at the Kennedy Center of Mahler’s Eighth, Anna Livia Soltan front and center with the Washington Children’s Chorus, doesn’t totally terrifically transcendently transform my life, I’ll demand my money back. Talk about a build-up! "We're all excited in a way we don't normally get," says Mr. Slatkin, music director of the NSO. "This is a piece that's bigger and better than life." 'There are no tickets left at the box office, so you will have to be creative if you want to attend. If you can get in, it will be worth your time to be lifted out of this lowly earth by the redeeming power of love for 80 transcendent minutes'. Highlighting …'But just preparing for the Mahler Eighth can cause some incipient panic on its own. It's a work that is a good deal more difficult to sing than say, a Poulenc "Gloria" or a Handel "Messiah," requiring doubling of parts and independent musical lines that appear and disappear like so many will-o'-the-wisps floating around the Concert Hall. My kid’s score is indeed all highlighted up. The director of her chorus hoped the singers would be able to memorize the piece for the performance, but it was too hard. "We've memorized all the notes," says the kid. "It's the entrances that are killing us." UD’s Two or Three or Whatever Degrees of Separation UD’s father in law succeeded Walter Gropius  as architecture chair at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Mahler’s wife Alma had an affair with Gropius, marrying him shortly after Mahler’s death. The Rest is Silence "In obedience to his last wish, [Mahler] was buried in silence, with neither a word spoken nor a note of music played." |