RE: [Harp-L] Changing the perception, one symphony at a time




PEORIA - A harmonica player? The blues? Selections from Elvis Presley?

This is supposed to be the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, right?

Among the cheering, clapping, appreciative audience members Saturday night, I suspect there were at least a few purists who left grumbling about the music of Richard Wagner and Bedrich Smetana having to share the stage with rock 'n' roll and a harmonica virtuoso named Robert Bonfiglio.

I was not among them. I liked hearing that artificial, arbitrary wall of separation dividing high art and popular culture totter and fall, if only this once. Grungy, nasty, foot-stomping, wailing harmonica blues made a fitting combination with the likes of Wagner, a composer hardly famous for his restraint.

At any rate, Bonfiglio is to the harmonica what Paganini was to the violin (Bonfiglio's long hair even reminded me a little of an artist's rendering of the Italian virtuoso), and I for one couldn't hear enough of him. Neither, apparently, could audience members, who responded with refreshing, low-art enthusiasm - clapping their hands, stomping their feet and cheering whether Bonfiglio was performing Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" or traditional blues.

Such is the harmonica's accustomed territory. A three-movement bona fide classical concerto isn't the harmonica's usual stomping ground, but you would be shocked how compelling the instrument sounds: as virtuosic as a violin but with a difference. The difference is a pure, eerie quality that composer Heitor Villa-Lobos exploits to the fullest in the opening of his Concerto for Harmonica. Bonfiglio's performance - full of slurs, rapid scales and percussive intensity - was a tour de force.


Nice one, Robert. Don't come to Cornwall without telling me. Only one thing missing.....a few Irish tunes..... (-;

Steve

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/trad_irish_harmonica
HEAR my CD clips: http://www.gjk2.com/steveshaw/cd.htm
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