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appreciation music the orchestra world

more reactions to crosscut OSO article

You can read them here.

A couple more things that occurred to me as I was reading the comments: during the last seasons of the DePreist music directorship, the programming became more and more conservative – it was wall-to-wall Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.  Yet the subscription numbers continued to fall.

In the first years of Carlos Kalmar’s tenure, we have performed music by Benjamin Britten, Steven Mackey, György Ligeti, John Adams, Bohuslav Martinu, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Harrison Birtwistle, Luciano Berio, Henri Dutilleux and Alban Berg, among others.  Many of these composers’ works had never before been performed by the Oregon Symphony in its history.  In addition, less often performed works of old masters were also given their due in Portland: the Barber Cello Concerto, Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, and Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations come immediately to mind.