This Week in Classical Music-August 3, 2008

by: Randy Kinkel

August 03, 2008

Ligeti
Ligeti

( Phoenix, AZ )
• What makes Ligeti so Great?
• Isserlis on kids/crossover,
• Sunlight comes to Boston Hall

This Week in Classical Music 8/03/08

It’s This week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

What made 20th century Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti so Great? Critic and author Jan Swafford thinks he knows; He gave the avant garde a human face. In a recent article for “Slate”, Swafford said, “Ligeti had his own singular and unpredictable parameters. Sometimes he's almost alarmingly funny, other times mesmerizing, uncanny, hyperbolic, touching, ironic—all the good stuff music used to do. It's characteristic of his individualism and rapport with the past that as a nominal "experimental" composer, he could bring it all off.” For me, Ligeti is the most interesting, most expressive, most important tonal artist to appear since Stravinsky died.” Ligeti is became known in pop culture when Stanley Kubrick stole some of his music for the ground-breaking film “2001”.

Increasing the audience for classical music is one of cellist Steven Isserlis’s main concerns. He has written two children’s books on classical music, and often plays to audiences made up of those under 12 years of age. "I love playing for children, they're so wide-eyed. They're not biased against it because of peer pressure or stupid media writing," he says. "And they ask fun questions." "Classical music is so exciting. I just want to give as many people the chance to listen to it. But you have to bring them in gently. You can't bring in a child and plonk him down in front of a Bruckner symphony," he says. He’s not a fan of Crossover projects to gets kids into the music, though. . "It's just people doing what they're not good at, which ever way you look at it," he says…” most crossover projects are just moneymakers." Steven Isserlis’s Children’s book, “Why Beethoven Threw the Stew” is KBAQ’s current book of the month. You can hear the review at kbaq.org.

Daylight will enter Boston’s Symphony Hall for the first time since the 1940s. workmen recently pried shutters off the 14 Half-moon windows near the ceiling of the hall had been covered over since the air raid scares of World War II; Facilities Director Mark Cataudella said, “I think it's going to bring a whole new light into the hall," …It's going to accent details that aren't easily seen." The century-old windows will be replaced with double-paned laminate glass that is flexible enough to move with the music. But it wasn’t the lingering threat of Bombing that led to not removing the shutters all these years; officials were afraid to remove them for fear of ruining the 108-year-old hall’s legendary acoustics. "Everything we do in the building is really critically analyzed acoustically," Cataudella said. "We don't want to change a thing.”

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-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.