Fast forward a few decades and John Wilson is still hand-picking musicians and still serving up performances so polished they leave critics scrabbling for superlatives. These days Wilson's main outfit is the Sinfonia of London, and he is as likely to be conducting the symphonic mainstream as showtunes.
When wonderful scores of music have been rediscovered after being forgotten for 350 years, it's akin to finding doubloons that were lost at the bottom of the ocean in a shipwreck. Yet the result of musical rediscovery is much better than finding long-lost gold, because musical treasures can be shared with a world of listeners.
Any composer's relationship to music is intense, but Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose debut opera, Hildegard, receives its world premiere at the LA Opera this week, ratchets that intensity up to a higher, more metaphysical level. When Snider hears music, she says, she sometimes wants to eat it that's how deep the desire goes. She's not traditionally religious, but she has come to see music as a mysterious, divine force within her.
We began in the world that was-in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the "Fugitives" concept was inspired by Zemlinsky's "Meeraugen," or "Sea Eyes," which tells of a "person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean." You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history-war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism-made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths.
Barbara Strozzi was a true 17th-century revolutionary. The adopted and quite possibly the natural daughter of poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, she grew up in the bosom of the Venetian intelligentsia, taking part in debates from the age of 15. Her tally of 120 published works for solo voice was unequalled by any of her contemporaries. Despite remaining single, she managed to support four children on the income from her music alone.
