Mark Likes Music

To commemorate Samuel Barber's centenary, t he Metropolitan Opera broadcasts a performance from the first run of Samuel Barber's Vanessa on Saturday, and it's worth pointing out how momentous an occasion the 1958 premiere was. Just as people had always been on the lookout for the great American novel in the first half of the twentieth century, so were music fans waiting for an American opera to enter the classical music canon. At first, it seemed that  Vanessa  ( synopsis here ) would fit the bill. Local critics were quick to praise it, emphasizing that the work was not just good, it was homegrown. Barber won his first of two Pulitzer Prizes on the strength of the work. But after word got back to the US that performances at the Salzburg Festival were unsuccessful and small audiences in the 1958-1959 season, Vanessa was out of the Met's repertory. The company presented a revised version of the opera in 1965, but by then Vanessa had lost its luster. I've been g...

Vampire Weekend's Contra  is out tomorrow. You can listen to it on their website, vampireweekend.com . I don't know why you'd want to, though. It sucks. At least they're not Kings of Leon.

Tonight in Charlotte, the  North Carolina Dance Theatre hosts its Light the Knight gala event  at the  Knight Theater .  The North Carolina Dance Theatre just finished up its perennial run of  Nutcracker  performances, and it will be opening its new Patricia McBride & Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance on Tryon Street, just uptown from the Knight Theater, later this year. The Dance Theater gala comes on the heels of the January 2 opening of Charlotte's new  Bechtler Museum of Modern Art  (photos  here  and  here ), part of the  Wells Fargo Cultural Campus. This two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street includes the  Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture  and the  Mint Museum  uptown expansion, which is set to open in October.  

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings has been repeatedly popping into popular consciousness to signify tragic loss since its auspicious 1938 premiere on an NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast with Arturo Toscanini ( which you can hear courtesy of NPR.org ). Originally composed as part of Barber's second string quartet, the Adagio for Strings was heard on the radio when FDR died. Barber arranged it in 1967 for choir as an Agnus Dei. Adagio for Strings is part of the soundtracks for 1980s classics The Elephant Man and Platoon . On September 15, 2001, Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra closed London's annual Proms concerts with the piece. Barber's centenary is this March (the composer died in 1981), so now is a perfect time to get to know (again) his most famous music , a work that has become an almost universal musical symbol for catharsis in the face of loss.