If you had attended either of the previous incarnations — or almost any notable indie-classical event during the last decade or so — you saw familiar faces onstage and still more in the audience, composers and admirers alike.
One gathers that his ideal musical world be one in which the music written by composers was performed by composers before an audience of composers, including critics who were composers.
The reaction from both audience and composer made all the challenges of getting to grips with the songs seem worthwhile.
The scatological repartee of Oliver Birch and John Biddle's Tweedledum and Tweedledee is enthusiastically embraced by younger members of the audience, and composer David Shrubsole's setting of the Lobster Quadrille is a delight.
But, says one of the composers, many more women are now coming forward for training in those disciplines, so the demographics of the profession could begin to change in the next few years.A third asks what target audience the composers have in mind and whether they hope to make a living out of their music.
After Lilliet performs an aria at the Senate Ball, she declares, "I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me.
Ravel's war horse "Tzigane," programmed as if to reassure the audience that the composer meant no harm with the Sonata in G, began with flair but descended into a muddle before ending in a train wreck.
The work, one of Haydn's final and finest essays in the genre, is full of gestures, harmonies, rhythms and various structural devices that would have surprised or even shocked an audience in the composer's own day.
Before embarking on the final two-hour work, Mr. Jacobs set the mood by reading to the audience from the composer's own words, which called for "a true music, that is to say, spiritual, a music which may be an act of faith; a music which may touch upon all subjects without ceasing to touch upon God; an original music, in short, whose language may open a few doors, take down some yet-distant stars".
BUFFALO — In a lecture on Saturday morning for an audience of student composers at Baird Hall on the University at Buffalo campus, Robert Beaser offered a brief but detailed overview of the travails of writing his Guitar Concerto (2009).
