I've heard the Berg Violin Concerto, but I didn't mention it because it falls too squarely in the "I don't like most violin concertos" buckets, so my opinion on it vis-a-vis a lot of other modern violin concertos is meaningless.
If music is supposed to reflect the age in which it is written ...
Bernard Levin had the response to that:
"What these people forget is that the world has always been ugly, cruel and capricious, yet only in very recent times has art begun to insist that those qualities are the most significant and that art must take on their nature. Do you suppose that Shakespeare didn't know that the world could fly apart at any moment, and that the Wars of the Roses had ended only eighty years before he was born? Do you imagine that Rembrandt, because he lived in Holland, had never heard of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, only thirty-four years before he was born? Do you think that Bach would have enjoyed himself if Charles XII had come to tea? Do you believe that Dostoyevsky thought life was a bowl of cherries? Of course such artists knew that they had to assimilate suffering and refine it into their art, that they had to face ugliness before they could conceive beauty. ... Artists like these do know the artist's duty: to face the void without flinching and to weave their single strand of the great rope that holds the universe together."
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Date: 2009-01-09 04:55 pm (UTC)If music is supposed to reflect the age in which it is written ...
Bernard Levin had the response to that:
"What these people forget is that the world has always been ugly, cruel and capricious, yet only in very recent times has art begun to insist that those qualities are the most significant and that art must take on their nature. Do you suppose that Shakespeare didn't know that the world could fly apart at any moment, and that the Wars of the Roses had ended only eighty years before he was born? Do you imagine that Rembrandt, because he lived in Holland, had never heard of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, only thirty-four years before he was born? Do you think that Bach would have enjoyed himself if Charles XII had come to tea? Do you believe that Dostoyevsky thought life was a bowl of cherries? Of course such artists knew that they had to assimilate suffering and refine it into their art, that they had to face ugliness before they could conceive beauty. ... Artists like these do know the artist's duty: to face the void without flinching and to weave their single strand of the great rope that holds the universe together."