Diminutive new-music giant Julie Steinberg played heck out of York
Holler's "Daydreams" tonight at the Yerba Buena Center, and then mentioned
casually in a conversation that she never even heard of the German
composer before (making me feel a lot better about my own ignorance).

Both "Daydreams" and the other Holler on the SF Contemporary Music Players
concert, "Ex tempore," were US premieres.  Both are accessible, complex,
good works.  At 62, Holler should really be known here more...  or at
all.

His bio says his best-known work in Germany is the opera "Der Meister
und Margarita," composed in the 1980s, performed in Paris and Cologne -
"takes its text from Holler's own drastic abridgment of the last novel
of Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov...  Combines his interest in electronics
with directly expressive vocal lines and an intricate orchestral fabric
reminiscent of Wagner." That sure doesn't sound like the Adriana Holszky
type trash Stuttgart and some other German houses foist off on opera
fans.

Has anyone heard this or other Holler operas? (And what kind of a German
name is "York" anyway?...:)

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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