French-American Program on Next Classical Showcase

Friday evening at 7 on Classical 101, Classical Showcase presents the next concert of the Spring for Music Festival from Carnegie Hall in New York. This week, the Seattle Symphony with its French-born music director Ludovic Morlot will perform Become Ocean by John Luther Adams, Deserts by Edgar Varese, and La mer by Claude Debussy. There's an ecological theme to this concert opening with 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music winner John Luther Adams' Become Ocean.  It was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony and has been described as a "haunting work" that '"carries a cautionary message about the impact of climate change."  This 42 minute symphonic piece was inspired by the oceans around Alaska and the Pacific Northwest where the composer lives. John Luther Adams wrote a superscription on the score so we don't miss what the music is about: "Life on this earth first emerged from the sea.  As the polar ice melts and the sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean."  Alex Ross, in reviewing a performance of this work, said that it "may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history." French-born composer Edgar Varese spent most of his career in the United States and  is sometimes called "the father of electronic music."  Deserts is a modernist composition first performed in 1954 and contains sections of electronic music.  Varese said that it is about "not only physical deserts of sand, sea, mountains, and snow, outer space, deserted city streets...but also distant inner space...where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude." Claude Debussy's La mer (the Sea) from 1905 is probably the most famous of all impressionistic musical works expressing the ocean in its various moods.  The evocative titles of the three sections certainly help complete the picture: "From dawn to midday on the sea," "Play of the waves," and "Dialogue of the wind and the sea." Join us for Classical Showcase Friday at 7 pm on Classical 101.