For the benefit of any out-of-towners reading these words, Luminato is a seven-year-old Toronto-based festival held annually in the month of June. It’s made a name for itself as a gathering together of new trends in the performing arts from around the world. But it also has its critics. There are those who feel that the ten-day multimillion dollar extravaganza pays too little attention to Toronto’s local artists.
A scene from L'Allegro.
I try to attend at least one Luminato event every year. And this year (on Friday night, to be precise) I took in L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, performed by New York’s Mark Morris Dance Group and Toronto’s Tafelmusik.
For the benefit of any out-of-towners reading these words, Luminato is a seven-year-old Toronto-based festival held annually in the month of June. It’s made a name for itself as a gathering together of new trends in the performing arts from around the world. But it also has its critics. There are those who feel that the ten-day multimillion dollar extravaganza pays too little attention to Toronto’s local artists.
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What would Nietzsche say about YouTube?
I feel sorry for Krystian Zimerman – really, I do. As is pretty well known by now, the Polish pianist became upset during a piano recital he gave a little while ago in Essen, Germany. It seems that someone in the audience was capturing his performance on a phone-camera – and when he saw this, he left the stage. A few minutes later, he returned and complained that unauthorized YouTube posts of his performances were damaging his career. (You can read more about it here.)
Wang and Oundjian with the TSO (photo: Dale Wilcox).
I hadn’t been to hear the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for a while. So on Wednesday night I went down to Roy Thomson Hall to hear the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang play Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the TSO. Except the word “play” hardly does justice to what Wang did when she sat down at the piano. Rather, she coaxed, caressed, cajoled and sometimes attacked the keys with enough energy to lift her slender frame off the piano bench. I don’t think there was a single note from end to end that she simply “played.”
Nothing less will do.
Last month, the good folks at WFMT radio in Chicago asked some prominent figures in the musical world an audacious and challenging question. “What piece of music written in the last 25 years do you think will still be heard in 100 years?” (You can find the quiz here.) A total of 13 respondents weighed in with opinions. And because this was an American quiz, the answers were weighted in favour of American composers. |
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I'm a composer based in Toronto – and this is my classical music blog, Eatock Daily. Archives
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