This BSO concert featured some pieces by Miaskovsky and Knussen (Knussen was also the conductor). I must admit that I did not fully comprehend it (fell asleep midway through Miaskovsky), and so went back to review, mainly this and this — the last two on the program were probably audience appeasement and brought lesser difficulty.

I’ll go out on a limb and say those “difficult” pieces weren’t accessible for a lot of people, judging from the live reaction. In a pre-recorded discussion, Knussen said something about this: that they weren’t aimed for accessibility, something which he disdains, but they were also not deliberately obfuscating. This is already a better sentiment than expressed in Copland’s article on “modern music” (which this concert was), but I still take great issue with this, on the grounds of the purpose of art and especially, art performance.
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Didn’t know what the big deal was so I took a listen to this “Air and Simple Gifts” piece. So not only was it performed to recording, the piece itself is a cheap knockoff, quoting almost verbatim Copland’s use of a pre-existing shaker melody (“Simple Gifts”) down to instrumentation, plus some other less than appealing thematic fluff and unoriginal variations thereof.

Yo-Yo Ma told NPR’s All Things Considered that the piano keys had been decoupled from the hammers, and the bows of the stringed instruments had been soaped to silence them.

So much trouble for a … meh … piece. I’m disappointed. This isn’t even as good as the 40′s movie music “At Last” performed at the Ball in the ‘Hood.

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