Janacek, Britten, and Debussy string quartets

Why do so many chamber concerts include generic, forgettable classical and romantic pieces when there are later works like these that are so much more interesting?

Surprisingly good

In general, I'm not big on music that combines relatively conventional forms with weird melodic and harmonic content or instrumentation, but an organ concerto with an "orchestra" made up of piano, celeste, and a whole bunch of percussion is just so far out there it works surprisingly well. The 1st movement is (I think) more or less sonata-allegro, the 3rd movement is something like a theme-and-variations slow movement , and the finale is close enough to a rondo.

Also. Is all of the music on youtube now? I think this is a pretty obscure piece, and a quick search popped up at least 2 versions.

Oh, I take it back, the other piece I heard tonight (a setting of 2 James Joyce poems) isn't there. Shame on you, internet.

Slightly unfortunate

It is slightly unfortunate that "electronics" in a musical program usually means "macbook(s)."



John Cage can be criticized for relying on cleverness, or to put it another way, cleverness is too often his only virtue, so that "experimentation" often reduces to merely a clever idea. But his successors seem to amount to little more than mildly inventive noisiness, not even attaining the sublimely overwhelming, architectonic noisiness of a certain style of experimental rock.



Occasioned by this. They did in fact do several of the pieces simultaneously, even having the audience "perform" from a "score" during much of the middle of the concert.