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

["Steve Shaw" <moorcot@xxxxxxx>]

> 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

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