Avant-gardes Past and Present Music from Bach to Gourzi
Har r y Haskell
The avant-garde is a moving target: one generation’s musical maverick or cutting-edge style may seem tamely conservative to the next, and the long arm of history sooner or later brings yesterday’s rebels to heel. Consider the four composers represented on tonight’s program. Morton Feldman was one of the 20th century’s most intrepid musical innovators, a friend and soulmate of the arch-experimentalist John Cage and the pathbreaking artists of the Abstract Expressionist school. Konstantia Gourzi’s avant-garde credentials are equally impeccable, as reflected in her long associations with a raft of contemporary-music ensembles in Berlin and elsewhere. Bach, on the other hand, from our perspective appears to be a quintessentially conservative musician, even though generations of forward-looking composers, from Mozart to Gourzi herself, have turned to him for inspiration. As for Brahms, no less an authority than the radical traditionalist Arnold Schoenberg considered him one of the great “progressives” in music history. Novelty, like beauty, is in the ear of the beholder. Baroque Exuberance and Minimalist Quietude Unlike Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, which were known and performed in the 19th century, the six Suites for Solo Cello were virtually forgotten until Pablo Casals resurrected them in the early 1900s. Although presumably intended as technical studies, the suites are neither as difficult to play nor as
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