Composer William Bolcom
William Bolcom's Octet: Double Quartet gets its Boston premiere tonight (a Celebrity Series co-commission, ahem) at Jordan Hall by the Guarneri and Johannes String Quartets. As if that wasn't enough, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Derek Bermel have quartets on the program, as well. The Globe's David Weininger had a chat with the venerable Mr. Bolcom for an article in today's Globe. Let's listen in:
"The Octet, which was premiered at the University of Illinois last week, has a
less freighted program. In some ways it's concerned with the tension between the
younger (Johannes) and older (Guarneri) groups for whom it was written. 'The
whole business is that over time they sort of come together into a group of
eight instead of one quartet and one quartet,' he says.
It's also Bolcom's homage to Mendelssohn's great Octet - also on tonight's
program - written when he was all of 16. 'It's one of the few pieces I know that
makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up. Even Mozart at 16 wasn't as
great as that. It's like angels wrote it.'"
Read all of He was eclectic before eclecticism was cool.
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