a Better Bubble™

Rene Spencer Saller

Luisi Conducts NegrĂłn, Beethoven, and Brahms

2 years 2 months ago
Angélica Negrón's distinctive style filters an eclectic range of influences—Arvo Pärt, Björk, Juana Molina, Meredith Monk, John Cage, and former DSO composer in residence Julia Wolfe, among others—through her unique and wildly fertile imagination.  Arquitecta, a song that features Colombian Canadian vocalist Lido Pimienta, was co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Bravo! Vail. Although Negrón has written several other major vocal works, both for chorus and solo voice, this is her first composition for voice and full orchestra. Augmenting Pimienta's live singing are sampled voices, an essential part of Arquitecta's sound world.  [...] Negrón explained that the sampled voices are "mostly in Spanish" or singing something that more closely resembles "sound and gesture than language," sourced from "the actual recorded voices of women I love and admire who have shaped in some way or another my life—family and friends."
René Spencer Saller

Saraste Conducts the Dallas Symphony in Sibelius and Shostakovich

2 years 2 months ago
In 1948, five years after its premiere, the Eighth Symphony still managed to make trouble for Shostakovich. Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet Minister of Culture and Shostakovich's most powerful nemesis, yanked it from obscurity just so he could denounce it at length. Another member of the panel, Vladimir Zakharov, a Soviet functionary and a minor composer, described it as "not a musical work at all" and "repulsive and ultra-individualistic," similar in sound to "a piercing dentist’s drill, a musical gas chamber, the sort the Gestapo used." Shostakovich was also condemned for the "pessimism, unhealthy individualism, extreme subjectivism, and willful complexity" of his symphony. Zhdanov ordered that all copies of the score be recycled and all recordings destroyed. I, on the other hand, have much nicer things to say about it.
René Spencer Saller

The Dallas Symphony performs a Katherine Balch world premiere, plus works by Borodin and Stravinsky

2 years 2 months ago
Composed in 2022, whisper concerto is true to Balch's style in that it sounds at once perfectly idiomatic and utterly strange. Beautiful—sometimes even conventionally tonal—melodies commune lovingly with shameless noise. Virtuosity gives way to entropy only to catch its breath and come back weirder and wilder, transformed by the volatile power of orchestral collaboration. Shards and fragments of free jazz mysteriously reassemble themselves, against all odds, into a peculiar chorale.
René Spencer Saller

Bruckner’s Fourth, plus a MacMillan U.S. premiere

2 years 2 months ago
For most of his life, Bruckner was badly underestimated. His worldly Viennese contemporaries ridiculed him as a pious dolt, a rural church organist with no redeeming cleverness. But despite his unfashionable accent and gauche manners, Bruckner was no country bumpkin. His music, which reflects his dual roles as church organist and composer of symphonies, revels in paradox: it's massive and nuanced, dense and subtle, ancient and modern. Intricate polyphony is draped in sumptuous Wagnerian orchestration. An expansive tone poem morphs into an elaborate fugue. Before our very ears, musical forms adapt and evolve in a state of transcendent flux.
René Spencer Saller
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