Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

By Georg Predota, Interlude Works by Milhaud, Fleck, Van de Vate, O’Boyle, and Adams Darius Milhaud:  Concerto for Percussion and Small Orchestra Darius Milhaud Darius Milhaud  writes, “I have always been very interested in percussion problems. In the  Choéphores  and in  L’homme et son désir  I used massive percussion. After the audition of  Choéphores  in Brussels, an excellent kettledrummer, Theo Coutelier, who had a percussion class in Schaerbeek near Brussels, asked me if I would like to write a concerto for a single percussion performer. The idea appealed to me, and this is how I came to compose the concerto. The school at Schaerbeek had only a few orchestral musicians, two flutes, two clarinets, one trumpet, one trombone, and strings.” Composed in Paris between 1929 and 1930, “jazz was enjoying a decisive influence on my musical composition. I wanted to avoid at all cost the thought that anyone might think of this work in a jazz way. I ther...

This article is more than 10 years old In this luminous, miniature symphony, time goes backwards as well as forwards. It's an extraordinary work. The symphonic principle, as we've been discovering, can take in a gigantic range of interpretations. Anton Webern's Symphony, Op 21 for strings (without double-basses), harp, clarinet, bass clarinet, and two horns is a piece that takes the idea of symphonic self-referentiality to an intensely concentrated extreme, and it's so focused in its choice of notes and precise disposition of rhythm and texture, that the result is a distilled expression and extension of symphonic logic into every dimension of music that's pretty well unparalleled in the story of the symphony. The paradox is that this apparently tiny, pocket-sized piece (its full score is written on just 16 pages), does things with the most important elements of all, our old friends musical space and time, that much grander symphonies take ten times as long to achiev...

by Georg Predota , Interlude Anton Webern Throughout his short life—having been accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945—the music of Anton Webern (1883-1945) was almost totally unknown. With the end of WWII, however, the musical world was in need of revitalization and eagerly adopted Webern’s compositional style. His music began to serve as an often-imitated model, and Igor Stravinsky accessed Webern’s influence in 1960. “Of course the entire world had to imitate him, and of course it would fail miserably. Webern was simply too original, too purely himself to worry about the limits of his appeal. Nothing composed since can diminish his strength nor stale his perfection.” The cool and constructive side of Webern’s music, in which economy and extreme concentration reign supreme, provided the stimulus for young composers gathered for holiday courses in new music in the German city of Darmstadt. Hailed as the father of a completely fresh musical movement, Webern’s ideas spawned mu...