Lots of music composed for this ensemble. Some of it atonal. Nico, you should check it out.

Are my sentences in real good english? Perhaps you coiuld give me some pointers, too!

Melnikov’s performance underlined the transcendental difference that beats in the soul of performers. He conveyed that prophetic struggling and inner tensional state to perform these pieces, which interweaved the classical vision by a visible irony blended with a musical speech that oscillated between the bitterness and steeled nostalgia. The thunderous applause at the end was well justified. Three Chopin encores ended proceedings.”

“Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata was a standout. Powerful, hard-driven with plenty of fire, Melnikov’s account was breathtaking. The second movement contrasted well with the outer movements, subtle and deceptively witty. He captured through the dissonant pasages, all the horror, repulsion and rage of Prokofiev’s surroundings in the midst of war. He read the whole bitterness, acidic score with percussive accents that clearly evoked the obstinate bells of anguish and impotent desperation hidden in the score.

Melnikov’s performance underlined the transcendental difference that beats in the soul of performers. He conveyed that prophetic struggling and inner tensional state to perform these pieces, which interweaved the classical vision by a visible irony blended with a musical speech that oscillated between the bitterness and steeled nostalgia. The thunderous applause at the end was well justified. Three Chopin encores ended proceedings.”

I’m going to be very disappointed if there isn’t a band or a song called “Lesser Grinding with BOYMIND” out in the universe soon.

This post put me in mind of this jewel from the selfsame DN, writing about Chris Rouse’s Requiem a couple of years ago:
“Baritone Sanford Sylvan was given the distinction and responsibility of opening the performance with several minutes of singing Heaney’s ode “Mid-Term Break” sans accompaniment, with a melody that wandered a bit and quasi-atonally to the final line, “A four-foot box, a foot for ev’ry year” at the memory of the accidental death of a little brother. Sylvan’s voice is supple, expressive and responsive to the challenges of the work. Sassoon, in his poem, celebrated the suicide of a “simple soldier boy” who elected death over sharing a cold trench with “crumps and lice and lack of rum.” After the deed, “No one spoke of him again.” Why he was remembered in poesy and music begs the question. One suspects that contemporary politics underlay the words and music, if not the commission. To raise a teenage suicide to the same level of importance as the accidental death of a small child begins to form a structure of celebratory and undeserved iconography that is discernable.”
Words fail (though not for lack of trying).

As Father Mulcahy once said, “Do not drink thee strong drink thee.”