(I remember her emotion when André Watts, a Black soloist, sat down at the piano in 1963.) There must have been music by Gustav Mahler, but I think of Mahler as a college discovery - and more important as a gay rite of passage, a composer I first took in because of Luchino Visconti’s film of “Death in Venice.” I already loved Mann’s tale: from high hopes to fading out. When we couldn’t go to Izler Solomon, my mother turned over our Sunday afternoons to Leonard Bernstein and the Young People’s Concerts on television. Atlanta didn’t have a symphony orchestra until my mother was graduating from college, in 1946, and were its performances segregated? To be the Black part of the audience - instruments of integration, and therefore God - was a civil rights duty, as well as a pleasure she’d not had when our age. Commissioned by a gymnastics festival in 1926, the Sinfonietta carries a celebratory, aspirational air - it inspires a joyful push toward our furthest limits as artists and humans.įor my mother, in the early 1960s, our tickets to hear Izler Solomon conduct the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra on Sundays mattered more than church. Murakami’s universe has two moons Janacek’s has 14 trumpets.
◆ ◆ ◆ Reena Esmail, composerĮven though I am a musician, I first encountered Janacek’s Sinfonietta the way I suspect many people have over the past decade: in the first sentences of Haruki Murakami’s brilliant novel “1Q84.” Just like the novel, the piece immediately grabs listeners, immersing them in a vibrant alternate universe. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy leave your favorites in the comments. Now we want to convince those curious friends to love symphonies, the sweeping musical statements at the foundation of the orchestral repertory. In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music and percussion.