Mr. Lehman was replaced by Robert Dean Smith for the fourth performance, and Mr. Heppner was well enough to appear in the fifth, which Ms. Voigt, who was ill, missed.
His String Quartet was first performed in Stockholm in 1965, followed the same year by the first performance of his orchestral song-cycle Paroles tissées.
It's going to be really good by the third performance!
By the third performance, what remained between the new dead spots was still in the main mildly ludicrous, unpunctuated by the relief of a good guffaw.
It will be preceded by the first performance of a trumpet fanfare he wrote as a birthday present to his son, Andrew Burgess Wilson.
But this may have been first-night jitters; he had a nice sense of the music, and some of these relationship problems, at least, could be ironed out by the second performance.
Then I'd had a really difficult time with the Saturday matinee, and the doctor gave me an antibiotic and some sort of decongestant, and by the second performance, my hands were shaking.
The young Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti made a dashing début as Edgardo in "Lucia di Lammermoor," and acquired a fan club in the upper balconies by the fifth performance.
But the sonata isn't just an incessant pianistic battering ram: in just seven minutes, the piece creates a gigantic drama, in which there's melody – listen to the top notes of each of the hammered-out clusters; there are tunes in this piece, I promise – and a ferocious emotional concentration, embodied by the first performance indication, "Espressivissimo" – as expressively as possible.
