Transculturation
The San Francisco Symphony's 2006-07 season is up. It’s an okay lineup (I think the 2004-05 season was the best of late): Michael Tilson Thomas is cycling back through Mahler, someone is coming to conduct Shostakovich’s Tenth, there’s a parade of hot violinists (Bell, Chang, Hahn, Midori), a lot of nineteenth-century stuff that doesn’t set my pants afire, some contemporary material (Astor Piazolla, Osvaldo Golijov, Thomas Adès, a John Adams premiere) that may. The twentieth-century selections include a lot of Stravinsky, and also Kodály’s Háry János suite; though the copywriters were careful about the diacritics, they also noted that the piece “proclaims a proud Czech heritage.” Any bets on how long they’ll take to fix that?
