Morton Gould / Spring Awakening

On this day in classical music: American composer and conductor Morton Gould was born in Richmond Hill, N.Y. in 1913. A child prodigy, Gould got his start playing piano in movie theaters and vaudeville houses. He later became staff pianist at Radio City Music Hall and began conducting and arranging orchestral programs for WOR radio in New York. Gould’s compositional output was quite large and included works for orchestra, chorus, concertos, ballet, musical theater and television. In 1994, Gould received a Kennedy Center Honor in recognition his contributions to American culture. The following year, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral work “Stringmusic.” Gould died at age 82 in 1996. Listen to the United States Air Force Band perform Gould’s “American Salute.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eQh_yCqEWY

On this day in the musical theatre: “Spring Awakening,” a musical based on the 1891 German play by Frank Wedekind, opened on Broadway in 2006. With music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater, “Spring Awakening” explored a wide range of delicate subjects, ranging from abortion, homosexuality and rape to child abuse and suicide. Set in late-19th century Germany, the musical follows a group of teenagers who begin to experience their sexual awakening. “Spring Awakening” was the big winner at the 2007 Tony Awards, winning eight nods, including one for best musical. The Broadway production ran for more than two years. Listen to the Broadway cast of “Spring Awakening” perform “Mama, Who Bore Me” and “The Bitch of Living” on the 2007 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEYV5bNMZVo

Musical musings: A straight shot of eroticism steamed open last night at the Eugene O’Neill Theater under the innocuous name of “Spring Awakening,” and Broadway, with its often puerile sophistication and its sterile romanticism, may never be the same. In “Spring Awakening,” with a ravishing rock score by the playwright Steven Sater and the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, flesh makes only a single, charged appearance. And for all its frankness about the quest for carnal knowledge, it is blessedly free of the sniggering vulgarity that infects too many depictions of sexuality onstage and on screen. But in exploring the tortured inner lives of a handful of adolescents in 19th-century Germany, this brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of 13, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. “Spring Awakening” makes sex strange again, no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age, in which celebrity sex videos are traded on the Internet like baseball cards. Mr. Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics, remains faithful to the play’s awareness that the discovery of sex can carry in its heady wake both salvation and destruction, particularly when it is coupled with ignorance. Mr. Sheik’s music, spare in its simple orchestrations, lush in the lapping reach of its seductive choruses, embodies the shadowy air of longing that infuses the show, the excitement shading into fear, the joy that comes with a chaser of despair. The singing throughout is impassioned and affecting, giving powerful voice to the blend of melancholy and hope in the songs. – Charles Isherwood in The New York Times

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