Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
1/4
KMFA, the independent public classical radio station in Austin, TX, is such a treasure.
They don't just stick to old warhorses, but instead make sure to balance well loved and widely known pieces with new or lesser known works.
So just a little while ago I was pleased to hear Quinn Mason's Princesa de la Luna for Harp and String Orchestra, which received its premiere in 2021:
2/4
Although Quinn Mason is not yet thirty, he has already established a reputation for himself as both composer and conductor.
Mason was the KMFA's first composer in residence, and his work shows how the station does not only broadcast music but also catalyzes its creation.
3/4
Before "La Princesa de la Luna", KMFA played Christian Sinding's Symphony No. 4, rhapsody for orchestra (‘Frost and Spring’), Op. 129 (1936).
I only knew the Norwegian Sinding (1856 - 1941) through his "Rustle of Spring" (Frühlingsrauschen), a short piece for piano that later became an emblem of middlebrow salon music.
Although Sinding was from Norway, he spent much of his career in Germany, so it is not surprising that the symphony I heard earlier sounded distinctly Wagnerian and Straussian at points.
It's the sort of late romantic music that twentieth century modernists deplored. Sinding's reputation was not helped by his enrollment in the Nasjonal Samling, the party of Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi collaborator who headed a puppet government during the German occupation of Norway. Recent research has brought forth evidence that this enrollment was made without the sick and aged composer's knowledge in the last weeks of his life, but this revelation came too late to save his work from effective banishment from the Norwegian airwaves in the postwar years.
Having a largely forgotten piece like this broadcast reflects well on KMFA. Although I doubt that I will be playing it again much, I was pleased to have heard it and to have been spurred to learn a smidgeon of Norwegian musical history.
