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Western music has absorbed influences from other cultures at highly specific junctures. Mozart encountered Turkish Janissary music when he came to Vienna in 1781, and it found its way into his next opera’s percussion section. Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition and it transformed his concept of harmonic progression. When the American composer Philip Glass encountered the North Indian musical tradition through sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1960, the musical style we call Minimalism began to form in Glass’ musical imagination. On Tuesday (March 5) at the San Diego Museum of Art, the intrepid Art of…
BALLETX from Philadelphia closed the ArtPower! dance season at Mandeville Thursday with outstanding performances in three works informed by lighting and shifting mood. Dramatic lighting gave Tobin Del Cuore’s Beside Myself the feel of headlights from an old Chevy truck on a country road. Cuore was born and raised in rural Maine, so that makes sense. But he now lives in Chicago, which may explain the shift. Two men dressed in hoodies slinked out of the inky blackness in deep second. Combined with an ominous score, the dance created a sense of creatures hiding in the woods or street thugs looking…
On rare occasions, during a rapturous performance of great music, I am tempted to think that I will never again hear this work played so well. This has happened while hearing Yo-Yo Ma play an entire recital of J. S. Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suites; Christopher Taylor play Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus,” and recently when Gil Shaham performed Bach’s E Major Partita for Solo Violin. Saturday (March 2) at the Balboa Theatre, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the touring ensemble of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields were only moments into Joseph Haydn’s familiar Cello Concerto in C Major…
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