I have often thought back to "Shards" (1987), a bleak but startling work of his that hasn't been seen in 20 years.
Oliver Messiaen, who composed the "Quartet for the End of Time" while starving in a Nazi prison camp, closes his startling work with a solo violin—"Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war".
In December, I'll be back to see Ballet Hispanico, another favorite of mine, and then in January I'm planning to return for the New York debut of Diavolo Dance Theater, a Los Angeles-based company known for its visually startling work performed on enormous tilting platforms.
I am so grateful that art directors now are thirsty for fresh perspectives, but I will say -- I've noticed a tendency for guys with really fresh, startling work to be given way more credit as wunderkinds than girls who are making comparable work.
A startling late work, "Hydrangeas Spring Song" (1976), heralds a new style, with swift patches, squiggles, and glyphs (crosses, crescents) in two blues, energetically scattered on white.
"Confessions of a White Racist" (1971) is a startling autobiographical work about the impossibility of expunging the racial bias ingrained in him as a boy and the complicity of every white American in the maintenance of the status quo.
To those of us rooting for classical music to build a thriving future upon its storied history, nothing is more exciting than the introduction of a startling new work.
Not for every taste, to be sure, and hampered occasionally by its low budget, but still a startling, uncompromising work.
I suppose I should briefly outline the first act of this startling work, when we meet Vera Stark working as a maid to a feather-brained, young, blond actress, Gloria Mitchell (played by Amanda Deymer), known as "America's little sweetie pie," the Lindsay Lohan of her day.
