Jonathan Berger receives National Endowment for the Arts commission for My Lai

Congratulations to our very own Jonathan Berger for a terrific write-up of the première of a new piece!

"Classical musicians face enormous expectations when they play a standard repertory work. Listeners have strong feelings about favorite pieces, even when they are open to fresh interpretive approaches.

The stakes are even higher with a premiere. Performing a new piece becomes an act of advocacy to pull an audience in.

Way to go, Dr. Selfridge-Field! Very interesting article about her work with master musicians suffering from dementia.

From the article: At first glance, she was elderly and delicate – a woman in her 90s with a declining memory. But then she sat down at the piano to play. “Everybody in the room was totally startled,” says Eleanor Selfridge-Field, who researches music and symbols at Stanford University. “She looked so frail. Once she sat down at the piano, she just wasn’t frail at all. She was full of verve.” Read more here...

All kinds of new buzz in being generated by our own Jonathan Berger's latest opera My Lai. Congratulations, Jonathan and the Kronos Quartet!

"In My Lai, a monodrama for tenor, string quartet, and Vietnamese instruments, composer Jonathan Berger had countless tragic elements at his disposal... In this immersive performance, we had the sense that, rather than defaulting to the story's obvious tragic details, Berger illuminate a single, more subtle element - the outraged bewilderment we often feel in the face of unimaginable horror."

 

#212 John Chowning 25.08.2015 (35' 26'')