George Rochberg: Music for the Magic Theater

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Catalogue No: NW80462
Label: New World
Length: 48 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Rochberg: Music for the Magic Theater

Work length26:45

$4.50

$6.30

New York Chamber Ensemble
Stephen Rogers Radcliffe

Act I

Track length9:01

$1.50

$2.10

Act II

Track length8:03

$1.50

$2.10

Act III

Track length9:41

$1.50

$2.10

Rochberg: Octet - A Grand Fantasia

Work length21:51

$12.00

$16.80

New York Chamber Ensemble
Stephen Rogers Radcliffe

I. Declamando, tragico

Track length1:08

$1.00

$1.40

II. Largo; recitando

Track length0:51

$1.00

$1.40

III. Tranquillo; flessibile; rubato molto

Track length1:04

$1.00

$1.40

IV. Allegro marziale; rigoroso

Track length2:07

$1.00

$1.40

V. Adagio molto - Tempo primo

Track length4:55

$1.00

$1.40

VI. Lento; tranquillo

Track length2:25

$1.00

$1.40

VII. Cadenza (horn and violin)

Track length0:50

$1.00

$1.40

VIII. Cadenza (flute and viola)

Track length1:02

$1.00

$1.40

IX. Cadenza (clarinet and cello)

Track length1:38

$1.00

$1.40

X. Molto adagio

Track length3:47

$1.00

$1.40

XI. Allegro marziale; rigoroso

Track length0:53

$1.00

$1.40

XII. Largo, recitando

Track length1:11

$1.00

$1.40

About
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About

"I understood it all. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter.” George Rochberg (b. 1918) cites this passage from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf as a backdrop for his Music for the Magic Theater, for fifteen players. The central theme in the book—a magic theater meshes reality and fantasy, past and future, in search of new apertures to a living present—inspired Rochberg to embrace “a kind of sound-collage in which the past and present are quite literally juxtaposed.”

Rochberg summons a wide variety of composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Webern, Varèse, Stockhausen, Miles Davis, and of course Rochberg himself. Despite sharp contrasts and what some may take for a complete absence of logic, Rochberg combines his materials in such a manner as to suggest their inevitable association in a dreamscape that is paradoxically anchored and realistic.

In his Octet; A Grand Fantasia, Rochberg adopts the traditional ensemble of mixed strings and wind octet, dating from the time of Schubert, and designates the work a “Grand Fantasia” to emphasize formal freedom and transformation of melodic content.

George Rochberg: Music for the Magic Theater

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