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Summer Up the Hudson

26 Feb

KORNGOLD AND HIS WORLD @ The Bard Music Festival/Summerscape, 2019.

Weekend One: August 9–11
Korngold and Vienna

Weekend Two: August 16–18
Korngold in America

The Bard Music Festival/Summerscape is “a highlight of the musical year” (Wall Street Journal) and “the most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals.” (London Literary Times)

The subject of this season is a composer who straddled the worlds of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Golden Age of Hollywood. “Korngold and His World” comprises an illuminating series of chamber, vocal, operatic, and orchestral concerts – as well as pre-concert talks, commentaries, and panel discussions – devoted to the life and times of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957).

Perhaps the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart, before turning twelve Korngold had already been proclaimed a genius by both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, while his concert and operatic works were routinely premiered and championed by the likes of Bruno Walter, Artur Schnabel, Jascha Heifetz, and Lotte Lehmann. Combining voluptuous chromaticism, soaring melodies, opulent orchestration, operatic leitmotifs, and a nostalgia for the Romanticism of his youth, Korngold’s distinctive compositional voice would revolutionize film music, winning him two Academy Awards along the way. His music was performed for European royalty and at both of Reagan’s inaugurations, while his influence continues to permeate the soundtracks of more recent films, like Star Wars, E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In light of this, he is surely “one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.”

Korngold’s first full-length score was for Michael Curtiz’s Captain Blood (1935), which not only established the template for the sound-era Hollywood swashbuckler but also marked Errol Flynn’s emergence as a major star.

www-broadwayworld-com.cdn.ampproject.org…

A TASTE OF SEA HAWK

— Tim

 

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