July 2009 Archives

I'm on vacation. Be back to post on Monday, August 3. Buy the Doctor Atomic Symphony CD (release date July 28) and make it popular.

So there are these spheres of popularity, some that intersect one another, some that encompass others, and some that stand apart in disparate fields, the only thing connecting them being the fields themselves. Just as someone who knows the music of John Williams might not know the music of John Adams, a colleague wrote to me after reading yesterday's post and told me that she didn't know who or what Wilco was, and wondered if Bonnaroo had something to do with U2's Bono. From this we can assert that U2 is a universal popular.

There are levels of popularity. John Adams is presently the most popular living composer of orchestral music, meaning that his work gets performed more often by orchestras than anybody else writing today. However, this does not mean that the record sales of Doctor Atomic Symphony--which you can hear on KFUO-Classic 99 (99.1FM) tonight at 8pm, with David Robertson as host--are going to come anywhere near the new Wilco CD, also released by Nonesuch. There's popular and then there's popular.

There's a scene in the movie Laurel Canyon that keeps entering my mind lately. Frances McDormand plays a hedonistic music producer. Kate Beckinsale plays the fiancée to McDormand's uptight son. McDormand is busy producing a record with a rock band, and with her soon-to-be daughter-in-law visiting the studio, asks her opinion about one of the tracks. Beckinsale says "I really don't know anything about popular music." "You don't have to," McDormand replies, "that's what makes it popular."

Last week, my list of things to be excited about in the Lou following the departure of the All-Star caravan included Sonic Youth under the Arch (check) and the Nonesuch release of the Doctor Atomic Symphony CD on Tuesday.

This is the time of year in which, instead of musicians in comfy clothes taking rehearsal breaks outside the Hall, you see guys in work boots with sandwiches and thermoses of coffee relaxing before the next stage of overhauling and renovating the Powell interior (in this case, the women's bathrooms). A big Dumpster is filling up alongside the Delmar curb.

The St. Louis All-Star frenzy has abated. Next thing to get excited about is Sonic Youth doing a live show under the Arch on the 17th. And then... the July 21 Nonesuch release of John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony, David Robertson and the SLSO recorded live at Powell. Click here to know more.

SLSO Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin is indeed in town to take in the All-Star Game with his son Daniel. I'm sure that Leonard takes in a Tigers game now and then in Detroit, where he leads that town's orchestra, but he's not fooling anybody. Leonard will always be a Cardinals fan.

The summer projects this year include a new kitchen area on the seventh floor (if the banging gets too loud I put on my headphones and listen to Shostakovich) and the much-ballyhooed and long-awaited improvements to the women's bathrooms on the main orchestra and balcony levels. All are in progress now.

SLSO violinist Silvian Iticovici came through. As I posted here not long ago, I couldn't supply a recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Azul for Silvian to listen to and then write his 0910 Hot Pick; but when I suggested Janacek's Sinfonietta, Silvian took the bait. And responded eloquently:

 What a little music can do, or, what a few words about music can do. This is from Lorrie Moore's short story "Childcare," which appears in the recent New Yorker:

Last week I made an SLSO-Colorado summer connection, today I make an SLSO-New England summer link. Principal Cello Danny Lee and SLSO Communications Director Adam Crane (the same Adam Crane whose name was spelled out-loud by Robert Downey, Jr. in The Soloist) made the Boston to Maine and back to Boston tour, but not without an extended delay at Lambert Airport in St. Louis. Adam has a habit of this, having spent numerous hours on the tarmac at the Detroit Airport on the stuff-of-legend Carnegie tour this spring.

I thank my colleague Kathy Murphy for the following Tom Waits quote, which she applied to Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet: "I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things...."

Ward Stare conducts the beautiful and terrible in November.

Cellist Bjorn Ranheim, who the last time I saw him had shaved his head just before the last Casual Classics concert, sent me a note about the "intense music festival" he's already in the thick of in Boulder, the Colorado Music Festival, aka "Michael Christie's summer band."

I got a call from Silvian Iticovici, one of the three Romanian violinists in the SLSO. He wanted to write about something "exciting" for his 0910 Musician Pick, and asked if I had a recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Azul, which SLSO Principal Cello Daniel Lee performs with the orchestra on Opening Weekend. "Golijov is a composer who I find to be very interesting," Silvian said.