Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Philadelphia Orchestra to perform the St. Matthew Passion
The Philadelphia Orchestra will perform the St. Matthew Passion three times during Easter week. They've brought in a stage director named James Alexander to add some lighting and movement. He spoke to me on March 15 by phone from Glasgow, and the resulting article may be read here.
I have little to add, except that Mr. Alexander was a very, very nice guy. At the beginning of our talk, I apologized in advance for my presumption and I asked him what the music of Bach would gain from a staging.
"Oh, no, it's not presumptuous," he replied. "It's a very good question."
We were friends after that. I am planning to attend the Good Friday performance.
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2 comments:
I am happy to have just stumbled upon your blog, thus proving that sometimes one gets blog traffic from "organic" Google searches and that sometimes those organic Googlers stick around and check it out.
Will you be reviewing the St. Matthew Passion performance you attended? I went on Thursday night and had the nerve to post a review on my blog. I was hoping to check my impressions against those of a professional music critic before posting mine, but I decided to risk ridicule and plowed into it. (I suspect that most of my blog readers are as uninformed as I, so I was hoping to fly beneath the ridicule radar.) I was supposed to be writing a freelance blog post about Hawaii, so the fact that I instead felt inspired to hold forth about the concert says something --- hopefully, something more than that I procrastinate about what I'm supposed to be doing ;-)
I do intend to talk about it, when I have the time and energy, but just to set your mind at ease: I am not a professional critic.
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