Concert Review: The Shaper of Worlds

Mostly Mozart ends with Haydn's Creation.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

And lo he said, let there be light: Mostly Mozart music director Louis Langrée.
Photo © 2015 Mostly Mozart/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The 2015 Mostly Mozart Festival ended last week with two performances of Haydn's The Creation, that highly stylized oratorio built around the early events of the Book of Genesis. Haydn's work is one of beginnings and creation from the void, and was an apt choice to end a successful run by the oldest Lincoln Center event, one that has largely succeeded in reinventing itself and its image in the face of a challenging musical environment.

Concert Review: The Genesis Effect

The Oratorio Society of New York plays Haydn's Creation.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Kent Tritle leading the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall.
Photo by Tim Dwight © 2014 The Oratorio Society of New York. 

Franz Joseph Haydn is a pivotal figure in music. The father of the symphony and the string quartet, Haydn is too often pigeon-holed as a doddering relic, a composer who churned out similar works to keep a rich patron happy and whose music remains irrelevant today. With their season-opening performance of The Creation ("Die Schöpfung") on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, Kent Tritle and the Oratorio Society of New York showed that the truth about Haydn is something very different.

Superconductor Interview: From Genesis to Orchestration

He knows what he likes: Tony Banks.
Photo alteration by Captured Epoch. Source: Deviant Art.

Keyboard man Tony Banks now writes classical music.
by Paul Pelkonen
Over the 45-year career of the band Genesis, members of the British progressive rock group have crossed over into other endeavors with great success. Former singer Peter Gabriel is a rock icon, who does much to popularize world music. Phil Collins plays big-band jazz and, (like Mr. Gabriel) enjoyed a chart-topping solo career. Recently, keyboardist Tony Banks, a life-long (and founding) member of the group, has successfully launched his career as a composer of classical music.

"In Genesis, in the early days we played with form a lot more," he says in a telephone interview with Superconductor. "In the later years we were writing more conventionally in terms of how the songs were structured."

Mr. Banks has a new CD out. Six Pieces for Orchestra is his second venture into the classical stratosphere, a collection of orchestral instrumentals and "songs without words."  He adds, "I wanted to throw all structure out the window."