ArtsSF

One of the boldest S.F. Symphony programs featured three works of average age 42, the anchor being the stellar Sibelius Symphony 5. While most of the interest was focused on the popular septuagenarian Berkeley composer John Adams, the work that really blew me away was “Radical Light” by the late Steven Stucky. The fact that Stucky, a master of sonic delights, has been virtually unknown is directly related to his being, for many years,  the composer in residence of the…

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Composer Igor Stravinsky had created a model hybrid with his “Oedipus Rex.” So why not hybridize further with brainstorms of the mercurial Stage Director Peter Sellars? We thus ended up with a Stravinsky-Sellars double bill of “Oedipus” and that deft choral-orchestral companion “Symphony of Psalms”—Old Testament visionaries and Greeks in a strange choral-orchestral amalgam. By dramatizing the two neoclassical works in semi-staged fashion, Oedipus got to play in both ends, though mute in the second, which has no solo roles…

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