The Beg­gar’s Opera is a point­ed exam­ple of unpre­ten­tious pop­u­lar art long out­liv­ing the “seri­ous” works of its day. In 1728, a rather unsuc­cess­ful Eng­lish poet, John Gay, penned a satire of the upper class’s taste for Ital­ian Opera, as well as the estab­lish­ment pol­i­tics of the day (then per­son­i­fied in First Lord of the Trea­sury, Robert Wal­pole). Using a klep­to­ma­ni­ac col­lec­tion of Scot­tish and French folk-tunes, Gay con­ceived a fast-mov­ing, tight-knit plot involv­ing, instead of the usu­al oper­at­ic cast of Clas­si­cal heroes and deities, the whores and thieves of the Lon­don slums. Read more »

Musi­cians have long been attract­ed to William Blake’s inter­con­nect­ed poems known as the Songs of Inno­cence and of Expe­ri­ence. Allen Gins­berg has assert­ed that a study of the rhyme and meter of the poems reveals that Blake intend­ed them to be sung. They cer­tain­ly have the feel­ing of Eng­lish tav­ern bal­lads strange­ly mutat­ed into moral and meta­phys­i­cal med­i­ta­tions. This mix­ture of seri­ous pur­pose and pop­u­lar form is exact­ly the stuff that best suits Amer­i­can com­pos­er William Bol­com. Read more »

As I’m begin­ning the year with a re-read­ing of the Kale­vala, the Finnish mytho­log­i­cal epic that has haunt­ed me since child­hood, it’s log­i­cal for me to begin the year’s musi­cal lis­ten­ing with Sibelius’ largest scale work based on it, the spec­tac­u­lar uni­fied sequence of tone poems about the Kale­vala hero Kuller­vo. I have two record­ings of Kuller­vo, Sym­phon­ic Poem for Sopra­no, Bari­tone, Cho­rus and Orches­tra, Op.7: Jor­ma Pan­u­la con­duct­ing the Turku Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra, and Paa­vo Berglund direct­ing the Helsin­ki Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra. They’re both fine, but I pre­fer the Berglund. Eeva-Liisa Saari­nen’s sopra­no in it is superb.
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