Richard Danielpour / Hairspray

On this day in classical music: Richard Danielpour’s orchestral work “Toward the Splendid City” was given its premiere by Leonard Slatkin and the New York Philharmonic in 1996. The work was commissioned by the Philharmonic for its 150th anniversary. The composer began working on the work in the spring of 1992 and completed it that August. The work’s title comes from the heading of Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize address in 1974. Listen to Lance Friedel and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra perform an excerpt from Danielpour’s “Toward the Splendid City.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc–_sZUsV0 

On this day in the musical theatre: The musical “Hairspray” closed in 2009 after a six-year run on Broadway. Based on the 1988 John Waters film, “Hairspray” featured a lively score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. The musical tells the story of Tracy Turnblad, an overweight Baltimore teen who dreams of dancing on a local television show not unlike “American Bandstand.” As her journey unfolds, she makes that dream a reality and in the process, also manages to integrate the cast. Best of all, Tracy proves that popular girls with perfect figures don’t always get the big man on campus. Listen to Marisa Jaret Winokur and the original Broadway cast perform “You Cant Stop the Beat” on the 2003 Tony Award broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9smuMQMDJc 

Musical musings: While “Toward the Splendid City” was composed as a portrait of New York, the city in which I live, it was written almost entirely away from home. Work on the piece began in Seattle in the spring of 1992 and was completed in mid-August of that year in Taos, New Mexico. At the time I was nearing the end of a year-long residency with the Seattle Symphony, and had serious second thoughts about returning to New York. Life was always complicated in the city and easier, it seemed, everywhere else. I was, however, not without a certain pang of nostalgia for my home town, and as a result “Toward the Splendid City” was driven by my love-hate relationship with New York. It was, needless to say, a relationship badly in need of resolution. Eventually, upon returning to Manhattan, I began to understand that the humanity and the difficulty of New York were inseparable — and that if in the difficulties of urban life humanity is to be embraced, then the inconveniences must also be accepted.  — From a program note by Richard Danielpour

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