In Tuesday’s (4/30) San Francisco Classical Voice, Brett Campbell writes, “Two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Philharmonic hosted its Brooklyn Festival, providing a West Coast showcase for the music of some of America’s hottest young composers, dozens of whom have congregated in the New York borough over the past decade. On Monday, the festival hosted the West Coast premiere of a song cycle featuring the music of maybe the most prominent of the young American composers, Nico Muhly, along with the well-known, avant-pop songwriter Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner, a key figure in the Brooklyn scene’s classical/art rock intersection … But the fertile interaction of classical and rock music evident in the Brooklyn Festival is hardly confined to that borough, or even to New York. It simply exemplifies a reality in which contemporary musicians work, and signals an imminent future in which even classical music’s flagship organizations—symphony orchestras and opera companies—will be forced to reconsider the genre boundaries that so long destructively divided classical and pop musics. … ‘The boundaries between the classical and rock worlds are hard to distinguish,’ says Chad Smith, the L.A. Phil’s vice president of artistic planning. … ‘It’s a really organic crossing over,’ says the L.A. Phil’s Johanna Rees, who co-planned the Brooklyn Festival and monitors the pop-rock scene for the Philharmonic’s non-classical shows at the Hollywood Bowl and Disney Hall. ‘Suddenly we’re in this moment where it’s all coming together in a beautiful way, where even the purists can say this feels good, exciting, challenging, authentic.’ ”
Posted May 3, 2013
