At night, Central Park was full of "hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock's ticks syncopating with another's.
Watch the swimmers, runners, kayakers or canoeists on television, after all, and it's hard not to be distracted by the advancing digital figures in the corner of the screen, the furiously mounting hundredths of seconds, the swiftly advancing tenths, the steady accumulation of the seconds themselves.
Mozart is also playing with rhythm as well as dynamic at the start of this movement: the first violins are syncopated above the burble of the seconds, which means that the forte seems to come in a beat early when you first hear it.
The BR01 indicates time by three different markers: a '0' numeral on the outer disk displays the hours, a small white roulette ball on the middle disk indicates the minutes and the center of the roulette wheel turns at the rhythm of the seconds.
"You can solo individual instruments, you can have different camera angles, you can see the score, you can hear what the back of the seconds are doing, it's just mad!" At its heart, Recomposed is a conversation between past and present, between traditional composition andtechnology, between one extraordinary composer and another.
That orchestra was extraordinary at that time, with players like Barry Tuckwell (horn), who was our lodger for a while, Gervase de Peyer [clarinet], Hugh Maguire, Erich Gruenberg (leaders) and, as leader of the seconds, Neville Marriner [not yet a conductor].
