Debussy, Lindberg, and Bartok on Classical Showcase

Friday evening at 7 on Classical 101, Classical Showcase continues with a series of concerts featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.  This week, former music director Esa-Pekka Salonen is back with a program of pieces from the end of the 19th century to just last year. Claude Debussy's Nocturnes is from from 1899. With its shifting harmonies and rhythms, it's a quintessential impressionist composition consisting of three movements: Nuages (Clouds), Fetes (Festivals), and Sirenes (Sirens). In the final section, women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale are heard representing the mythological creatures who lured sailors to their doom. The Cello Concerto No. 2 by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg was completed and first performed last year. In this evening's concert presentation of this stirring and sometimes dissonant work, Anssi Kartunen will be the cellist, expressing a creative synergy between the Finnish composer, conductor, and soloist. Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta from 1936 is a mysterious and sometimes unsettling five movement work with the eerie "night music" at its core in the third movement.  The other movements range from a tense calmness, if one can use such a phrase, to barbaric energy, expressing Bartok's unique musical language in a half hour composition completed just three years before the start of the Second World War. http://youtu.be/E5Y7mbfS5r8