A case is made for Luke warm music
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Lukas Foss was a classmate of Leonard Bernstein’s at the Curtis Institute and a lifelong friend, though never an equal. While Bernstein blazed to national glory in his annus mirabilis of 1944, Foss was quietly composing his first symphony …
Read on here.
En francais ici.
If a conductor of stature really took on his music, I think it could have more prestige today. I remember Levine leading an amazing performance of Time Cycle with Dawn Upshaw, probably 2005 or 2006.
JoAnn Falletta is a conductor of stature.
Norman’s assessment of Foss’ music is unfair.
The ‘Three american Pieces’ are very good, it’s beautiful and well-made music by a classicist temperament and has nothing measured or lukewarm about it, but the freshness and purity of something inward and eternally new. Compared with Bernstein, the latter sounds outdated, vulgar and populist.
Foss was a formidable conductor and dito pianist. I met him years ago in the Netherlands where he conducted the Residency Orchestra in The Hague with, among others, a Brahms III which bursted from the seams (Foss: ‘I shaved his beard’), and in Amsterdam he gave a lecture about American music and demonstrated fragments on the piano with a dexterity and musicality rare in new music.
I heard him do Baroque Variations and the Prelude and Liebestod with the Halle in the late 70s – a really terrific concert. Also gave him a ride in my car once at Tanglewood – tremendously nice guy.
Yes, a great and superbly talented gentleman, of the rarest kind.
Actually, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project released *their* entire cycle of Foss symphonies (4, to be precise) a while ago.
Foss wrote plenty of gritty and difficult music, for those to whom that is the test of true modernity. And his Baroque Variations have lost none of their capacity to annoy.
Lukas Foss had the courage (and frankly the naive audacity) to try to turn Buffalo (at that time a blue-collar community) into a center for avant-garde music. His 1968 Festival of the Arts had Buffalo Philharmonic violinists bowing with carrot-scrapers, the percussionists popping balloons, and all sorts of other instrumental insanity that had the uninitiated audience members fleeing for the exits. But the antics made it into Time Magazine.
Have you read Renee Levine Packer’s book This Life of Sounds about the Creative Associates in Buffalo during those years? It’s fascinating.