Celebrating the King of Swing: A Festival for Benny Goodman’s 100th Birthday
Week-long celebration September 22-29 highlights Goodman’s close ties to Yale, with concerts of classical and jazz repertoire
Goodman relaxes in a rehearsal in Yale's Woolsey Hall in 1985.
The Yale School of Music presents Celebrating the King of Swing: A Festival for Benny Goodman’s 100th Birthday. This series of concerts and other events explores Goodman’s enduring contributions to music, both classical and jazz.
On Tuesday, September 22 at 8 pm in Sprague Hall, YSM presents The Classical Legacy of Benny Goodman, a concert of music commissioned and/or premiered by the legendary clarinetist. While many people are aware that Benny Goodman made forays into classical music, they may not realize that he was in fact a major player. Goodman is known predominantly as a jazz musician and bandleader who helped usher in the Swing Era of the 1930s and ’40s, but he was deeply involved in commissioning, performing, and recording a sizeable body of classical works—many of which have become standards of the repertoire—by some of the 20th century’s greatest composers. The program will feature several of these works, including Bartók’s Contrasts, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, Alan Shulman’s Rendezvous, Morton Gould’s Benny’s Gig and Recovery Music, and Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. The program will be repeated at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, Sep. 26 as part of the Yale in New York series. (more…)
Yale in NY offers piano music for four and six hands
Featuring pianists Boris Berman, Claude Frank, Elizabeth Parisot, Wei-Yi Yang
The Yale School of Music presents “One and Two Pianos, Four and Six Hands,” a fascinating program of music by Mozart, Schnittke, and Stravinsky, on Wednesday, February 4 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. Eminent pianists from the School of Music include Boris Berman, Claude Frank, Elizabeth Parisot, Ilya Poletaev, Wei-Yi-Yang, and Dean Robert Blocker. Alumna Pei-Yao Wang and student Reinis Zarins will also perform. In reviews of recent Yale in New York performances, the New York Times praised Berman’s “fluency” and Yang’s “virtuosity.”
The first half of the program highlights works of Mozart, opening with the overture to The Marriage of Figaro arranged for piano six hands. This unusual transcription was created by the renowned piano pedagogue and composer Carl Czerny, who was born in 1791, the year of Mozart’s death. This is followed by Mozart’s Andante with Five Variations for Piano Duet in G major, K. 501, for piano four hands, and the Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448.
The evening’s second half opens with another novelty for six hands: the seldom-performed Homage to Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich by Alfred Schnittke. The evening ends with a masterpiece, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the composer’s own transcription for piano four hands. Months before the groundbreaking Rite premiered in Paris in 1913, Stravinsky himself played this four-hand version with none other than Claude Debussy, who later remarked that the piece haunted him like “a beautiful nightmare.”
Turangalîla Symphony
at Carnegie Hall garners rave reviews
The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale performed Olivier Messiaen’s epic Turangalîla Symphonie at Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, December 14, under the baton of guest conductor Reinbert de Leeuw and with Wei-Yi Yang at the piano and Geneviève Grenier at the ondes Martenot to close the Messiaen Centenary Celebration. The critical reception to the performance was overwhelmingly positive:
Allan Kozinn at the New York Times had this to say in his review “A Monumental Messiaen Speaks Many Languages“:
The performance was sensational: well prepared, solidly and precisely executed, and rippling with high-energy percussion and brass playing and a fluid interplay of polished strings as well as winds. If you were looking for a demonstration of how completely a conductor can convey an unusual work’s ideas in all their complexity and beauty, and inspire his musicians to play the piece as if it is the most vivid, original music ever written, you could hardly have done better than this.
……
But in a way the work’s inspiration, musical sources and relationship with Messiaen’s other music need not matter. Taken entirely on its own, this is a masterpiece of color, texture and peculiarly alluring turns of phrase. Mr. de Leeuw made every moment of it taut and exciting, and Wei-Yi Yang, playing the sparkling piano line, contributed significantly and virtuosically, as did Geneviève Grenier, who produced the score’s otherworldly electronic lines on the ondes martenot.
Other positive reviews include:
- Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com: “Yale Philharmonia in Messiaen’s Ecstatic Turangalîla“
- Scott Cantrell, Dallas Morning News: “Classical Music Review: Turangalîla Symphony“
- Heidi Macdonald, The Beat, Publishers Weekly: “Turanga Leela“
- James Marcus, House of Mirth: “Turangalîla or bust“
