“Last month, the online radio station Q2, a new-music adjunct of the New York classical station WQXR, hosted a twenty-four-hour marathon of contemporary orchestral music, entitled Symphomania,” curated by musicologist William Robin, writes Alex Ross in the April 11 edition of The New Yorker. “Robin’s enterprise affirmed the vitality and variety of recent orchestral writing…. At the same time, it implied a critique: audiences have relatively few opportunities to hear big-boned works…. Composers can easily obtain commissions for pieces of the overture or tone-poem type, lasting from seven or eight minutes to eighteen or twenty…. It is far more difficult to take control of an entire half of a program—to assume what might be called the Tchaikovsky position.… Still, the urge to paint on a large orchestral canvas remains strong. … The New York Philharmonic held its own version of Symphomania in March, presenting two contemporary scores that broke the half-hour barrier and commandeered the second half of a program: Thomas Adès’s Totentanz, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra; and John Adams’s Scheherazade.2 [whose] form is restless, unpredictable, yet ultimately confident … It has been said before, but it bears repeating: the beloved classics would never have existed if audiences of the past had taken … a dim view of the new.”
Posted April 16, 2015
