Music director Thomas Søndergård had scheduled a program of Ethel Smyth and Tchaikovsky. When he fell ill, Chad Goodman jumped in.
The concert was included a fascinating interval discussion between members of the orchestra and how they found acceptance.
The US jazz bassist Barre Phillips, resident in…
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We’re hearing that the Vienna State Opera has…
Message from the Vienna-based Russian soprano: “I am…
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The American empire’s state religion is all pervasive and demands observance.
You probably couldn’t find a single broadcast in the last 80 years where, during the interval, orchestral musicians were asked how they celebrate Jesus Christ.
Could the answer lie in the fact that Christians in the US have no recent history of their lifestyle being illegal?
Wouldn’t that be great??
No.
Sad that you can’t find it in you to celebrate others!
It’s not celebrating “others”. It’s a coerced, state level demand from nearly every institution that I celebrate a sexual lifestyle.
I don’t celebrate anyone blindly; they have to earn that. Anal sex, until very recently, wasn’t considered a terribly high achievement.
“Anal sex, until very recently, wasn’t considered a terribly high achievement.”
So you’re OK with lesbians…
And anyway, by nno means all gay men go in for anal sex, so I infer you’re OK with them, too.
You don’t celebrate anyone blindly? How about your allegedly all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful invisible sky wizard? Probably quite a bit of blind celebrating going on there, I would guess.
There’s this big long thingy with chorus almost every orchestra on the planet plays almost every winter… the name is on the tip of my tongue… at the end everyone stands up and sings a song that goes “Al Aloha” or something like that… can you remind me what that’s about?
Oh wait Al-Aloha must be a Muslim thing… never mind I figured it out.
I was waiting for this stupid comment- I knew someone would make it.
Is all of your reading comprehension this bad?
Seek help. Immediately.
It would help ‘reading comprehension’ if you would kindly indicate which comment you were describing as stupid, and also explained what you thought was stupid about it.
And Handel was gay. As were/are a lot of composers…
It’s a scandal!
Sally
The US has no state religion. By design.
So, when the Feds print “In God we trust” on the US money, what kind of God do they mean?
Blame Eisenhower for that. In the wake of anti-communist McCarthyism, he and Congress decided to put ‘In God We Trust’ on the money.
That slogan was added in the 1950s by right-wing reactionaries opposing “godless communists.” The founders were deists and not “Christian” in the modern sense. And they firmly supported separation of church and state.
Though you are correct about the 50s, you misunderstand how this works in the USA. The “separation of church and state” is a catchy phrase, but in reality there is a catch: only the state is separated from church, not vice versa. Thus, “In God we trust” on the money does not violate the US Constitution. This also allows the Senate to pray before their sessions and BTW they have an official Senate Chaplain (currently this is Barry C. Black who belongs to Seventh Day Adventists). I once listened to this pray broadcasted by NPR and the grandma of all the progressives Nancy Pelosi prayed like everyone else.
Curiously, in Latvia the situation is the opposite: church is separated from state but the state can mess into the church affairs, which they sometimes do.
Monetary units are not the Constitution.
You don’t need them to.
They’re playing Christian Masses and Christian Te Deums and Christian Oratorios on the concert programs.
Wow, you sure have a lot of ugly, mean spiritedness in you. Usually those are the ones with the most insecurity and self hate.
What a mean spirited, intolerant person you are. Usually a sign of insecurity and self hate.
And it will start in 3… 2.. 1.
Give a listen to Ethel Smyth’s “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” (32:50). The Prelude to Act 2 of her opera “The Wreckers,” it shows her enormous talent as a composer, while begging the question as to why her music is not performed more often. Beautifully played by the Minnesota Orchestra and admirably conducted by Chad Goodman.
There we go again – classical music as a platform for social issues.
Wrong!
A classical music concert is for the music.
It is patronizing to ‘use’ the music of Smyth and Tchaikovsky to make a point that has nothing to do with their achievements.
It would be something very different if there were preconcert talks explaining about the lives of the composers and their private struggles, and how that may have influenced their style. But that is a different approach.
Who are you to say that the theme of this concert has “nothing to do with their achievements”? Make your own concert series if you don’t like it and if anyone is being patronizing, it’s you for claiming to know what these composers’ achievements are about and what a concert “is for”.
“One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.” Oscar Wilde, ‘A few maxims for the instruction of the over-educated’.
“Who are you to say that the theme of this concert has “nothing to do with their achievements”?”
He is YOU, expressing a view on this board!
Spot on. I would add that to not know Tchaikovsky’s operas is to not know Tchaikovsky. I was lucky to have played multiple performances of three of them.
There actually were pre-concert talks, John, as well as program notes discussing those very things.
OK, but why the revelations in the interval by the players?
And then: where will it end?
Imagine that in every interval of a concert, players will reveal their personal experiences: after a performance of the Eroica, players will share their hearing troubles of being seated in front of the horns or their concerns about their deaf grandma; after or before the Sacre du Printemps a percussionist will explain why he hates his mother-in-law so much that he imagines the gran cassa being her when he hits it at rehearsel nr 105; a player from the backrow of the 2nd violins will share her frustrations about 13 years without promotion to the front, two viola players will vent their critique of the conductor who neglects their entries, etc. etc.
You missed the irony here: back in 2022 Tchaikovsky’s music was frequently cancelled because he was a Russian composer (remember the phrase “inappropriate at this time”?); now his gay fame took the upper hand.
I didn’t know that Ethel Smyth had been imprisoned. I was fascinated to hear the story of Sir Thomas Beecham’s visit to her in prison, finding her conducting some of the inmates.
Zu viele Worte.
…und nicht genug nachdenken.
Yes we must all celebrate in public our choice of bedroom sex partners and fetishes; we must push this LBGTQxyz agenda without regard for other people’s feelings and beliefs in the presence of adults and impressionable kids.
I wonder whether the gay people in that video were really pleased at being forever compelled to dwell under the “LGBTQ+” unbrella.
Why don’t you ask some of them? You may or may not get the answers you were expecting, but it’s always good talk to somebody instead of about them.
I don’t know any of them and in any case they might be scared to give a truthful answer.
Why would they be scared to give a truthful answer?
Fear of being cancelled as terfs and suchlike.
Terf is rather a specific term, not generally known to anyone except those who are truly and irretrievably bigoted…and disturbed.
You seem to know it so I infer your diagnosis applies to yourself.
I’m always deeply disappointed that we as QWERTY people get hardly any attention at all.
Sally
Assuming you´re speaking of yourself in the pluralis majestatis, it´s more an issue of the quality of your work and your social skills.
What do you know of my tiping skils?! I have a full-time PA job and nobody complains. Apart from my boss but he doesn’t count.
Sally
Basically, Miss Emma’s approach to music. It’s so boring, pass me a drink, and let us talk something really interesting.
Thomas Sonderbar
Gratuitous insults involving mucking about with a person’s name are the sort of intellectual manoeuvres one associates with ill-bred 10-year-olds.
Or Donald Trump.
Spot on.
Great! Some old fart goners might whine on again.But their time is over,anyway.
These old fart goners landed the man on the Moon, built the Golden Gate Bridge, and discovered the double helix. What can you brag about? Oh, I almost forgot: they also created internet.
Don’t worry about German ‘professional musicians’. They passionately long to be recognized as respectable.
Something you´ll never will achieve…talking about you with professional Dutch musicians …well ….i´ll rather stay mum. But indeed very funny stuff coming up always.
Those old farts i am talking about didn´t have anything to do with those achievements…They´re content with posting some homophobe,racist , musically risible nonsense on SD
And how much entertaining that is than German frustrated ‘professional’ musicians.
And not a single post about how well Chad Goodman conducted the concert…
But that is what you get when a concert is apparently instrumentalized for something else, for social justice.