Classical and Copland served up on Thursday
JAKARTA (JP): Sometimes it's feast or famine for Jakarta music lovers. It is the former this Thursday, when they will have to make their minds up between two concerts, one displaying young classical music talent from these shores and the other celebrating a great American composer.
A chamber music concert with Ade Simbolon on piano, Bagus Wiswakarma on violin and Leonard van Hien on cello will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday at Erasmus Huis, Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said Kav. S-3, Kuningan, South Jakarta (tel. 524-1069). They will perform Haydn's Piano Trio in G, Mozart's Piano Trio in B flat and Beethoven's Piano Trio Opus 70 ("The Ghost).
The other treat is from the Bel Canto singers. They are dedicating their sixth concert this season, also at 7:30 p.m., to Aaron Copland, who was born a hundred years ago but made such modern music that in the eyes of the world he is regarded as a giant among composers of his time.
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Copland was born on a drab street in Brooklyn where music was the last thing anyone would have connected with it. It was an older sister who taught him the piano and by the time he was 15 years old, Copland knew that he wanted to be a composer.
During the period that he was strongly influenced by Igor Stravinsky's neoclassicism, he turned toward an abstract style he described as "more spare in sonority, more lean in texture".
The importance of Copland lies in the musician's ability to keep abreast of important trends of his time. He no longer wanted to just imitate past masters but attempted in his own experimental way to simplify music so that it would have meaning for a larger public. Toward the middle of the last century he realized that the new media of radio, phonograph and film scores were attracting a new public for modern music and he did not want to continue writing as if they did not exist.
He is loved and respected because the audience always came first for him. He was dissatisfied with any chasm that might exist between the music loving public and the composer.
"I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms," he once said.
Copland, who died in 1990, achieved a distinctive musical characterization of American themes working with jazz rhythms, piano variations and short symphonies. Inspired by American folklore he produced three ballets including Billy The Kid, Rode0 and Appalachian Spring.
At the Bel Canto concert he will be interpreted by sopranos Binu D. Sukaman and Aning Katamsi, who will sing from Copland's Old American Songs.
The other pieces chosen for the classical music concert of American composers include compositions by John Cage, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Ives. Indonesian pianist and lover of contemporary music Ananda Sukarlan will also participate in the Jazzy and Funky musical evening that will be held at the grand ballroom of The Dharmawangsa, Jl. Brawijaya Raya 26, Kebayoran Baru (tel.8316808). (Mehru Jaffer)