In Thursday’s (9/6) New York Times, Zachary Woolfe asks the newspaper’s arts writers and editors and “some artists we admire: What are the five minutes or so … that you’d play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music? Here are our selections. Esa-Pekka Salonen (Ravel’s Mother Goose: ‘The Fairy Garden’): ‘Every time this piece ends, I feel devastated, as I do not want to return to the physical world.’ Caroline Shaw (Jessie Montgomery’s Break Away: ‘Smoke’): ‘I love the lucid textures here, and how the lines twist around each other as they climb.’ Julia Wolfe (Steve Reich’s ‘Tehillim’): ‘An uplifting and exuberant setting of Hebrew psalms…. We are engulfed in an optimistic, joyful rush of voices.’ Anthony Tommasini (Stravinsky’s The Firebird: Finale): ‘The last scene still gives me chills. The villain’s death, depicted in jagged, fractured bursts, leads to a passage of shimmering, shifting chords.’ Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: ‘Liebestod’): ‘An example of music, text, expression, human voice and instrumental color blending together … to generate such a powerful and emotional sensory experience.’ ” Also cited were works, accompanied by audio clips, by Beethoven, Berlioz, Cage, Chin, Clyne, Couperin/Adès, Gibbons, Harrison, Janacek, Messiaen, Ravel, Reich, and Strauss.
Posted September 7, 2018
