National Symphony Orchestra Forces Pan Cogito To Postpone His Virtual-Musical Trip To The Bavarian/Austrian Alps This Week

N. and I have been receiving many evening calls kindly pleading that we subscribe to various opera, theater, orchestral, and performing arts series for the coming season. These organizations see from their records that we attend many programs (as well as make some donations), without actually subscribing. We generally inform the younger callers that each of us are out of the country or the city for periods of each performing season, and that the subscription model does not serve us well.

Yesterday, I was given another reason that we cannot pre-commit months in advance.

Last summer, I noticed the following highly promising program for the National Symphony Orchestra for the current week:

Einojuhani Rautavaara Manhattan Trilogy (the Finnish composer studied at the Juilliard School in New York City in the early 1950s.)

R. Strauss Three Hymns with the great Soprano Karita Mattila

...

R. Strauss Alpine Symphony Op. 64

*

The recently revised again program, setting aside the issue of a replacement conductor, is:

Delius "The Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo and Juliet (which I remember performing with the Montgomery County Youth Orchestra)

R. Strauss Four Last Songs with the great Soprano Karita Mattila

...

R. Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30

The opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra may be popular, but the work is not the extended masterpiece of late Western European Romanticism that the much more rarely performed Alpine Symphony is. Also, Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius. Hence, the replacements are a net loss for the cultural life of our city.

Photo credit: (c) Copyright controlled. All rights reserved. Via the Kennedy Center web-site.