ArtsSF

What were the outstanding orchestral works reacting with eloquence to tragedy or major losses of life in the 20thcentury? Berkeley composer John Adams cited several of them in writing for New Yorker magazine (dated Dec. 11), pieces written by Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Britten and Richard Strauss, in reaction to massive losses of life in world wars. He also emphasized his own turning down a commission to write a 9/11 piece, saying it was too immediate for New York City itself, with…

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LOS ALAMOS, NM—-Well before the start of the bio pic “Oppenheimer” delineating the birth of the atom bomb, the historic mesa was the home of the Los Alamos Ranch School and little else. At 7,350 ft. altitude, the mesa was healthy enough, miles away from traffic, towns, congestion, drugs and booze, a good hour’s drive uphill from Santa Fe. In the words of Richard Colgate from the Long Island toothpaste family, one of the teenaged students boarding there, “It was…

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Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who in his last 22 years was widely recognized as the cream of the crop among the Soviet Union’s composers, arguably turned out most of his significant, insightful music after the 1953 death of his nemesis, dictator Josef Stalin. Stalin had turned music criticism into a personal tool of repression which threatened either gulag confinement or execution to dissidents of any stripe. Dmitri’s later compositions of greatest note contained his repeated musical signature, D-S-C-H, which indicated via…

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