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US Premiere @ Spoleto: Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

On June 3, John Kennedy and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra present the US Premiere of Michael Gordon’s monumental Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Commissioned by the Beethoven-Bonn Festival and premiered by the Bamberger Symphoniker in 2006, Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony filters one of the classics of the symphonic repertoire through the lens of the 21st-century. Not looking to improve on the work’s timeless quality, Gordon imagined “what if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?”

Gordon writes:

Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me…

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Biography

Michael Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of  The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”

Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio…

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