In Friday’s (1/24) Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed reviews the St. Louis Symphony’s U.S. premiere of a work by John Cage: “The St. Louis Symphony … is, in its ninth season under David Robertson, a happy and increasingly important orchestra in a golden age. By happy I mean that Wednesday night, in a sight not likely to be seen elsewhere in the classical music world, [David Robertson], the SLSO’s fit, 55-year-old music director from Malibu joyfully jogged from one end of a gallery at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts to the other. He had two young conductors in tow. He picked up two more young conductors and led them all in a victory run back across the gallery to gather for their bows after the U.S. premiere of John Cage’s ‘Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras.’ An audience of about 200—as many patrons as could possibly be squeezed in the long, narrow space where Robertson curates and conducts a wildly popular new music series with his orchestra—stood and cheered these five grinning maestros.… Robertson gets Cage in a special way, one in which he honors the composer’s radical philosophical intent and yet brings tremendous character to everything he touches.”
Posted January 28, 2014
