TSO celebrates Weinzweig The Barn Dance at Lumanito 2014
From Martin Knelman's article "Luminato's closing weekend hits high notes" published by thestar.com on Friday, June 13, 2014
As for the revered Canadian composer John Weinzweig, the TSO is playing catch-up, having neglected to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2013, even while paying a lot of attention to British composer Benjamin Britten, also born in 1913.
Now for the third consecutive year, Luminato is giving Toronto audiences a rare, free outdoor TSO concert. And Weinzweig’s The Barn Dance represents Canada on the playbill along with composers from Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.A. That’s because the evening is conceived as a musical travelogue touring the Western hemisphere in anticipation of Toronto’s hosting the Pan Am Games in July 2015.
The Barn Dance — part of a longer piece called The Red Ear of Corn — was commissioned by the Volkoff Ballet in 1949, and it’s his most performed work.
It was first played during the peak of McCarthy hysteria about the Communist menace. Once while crossing the U.S. border, Weinzweig was stopped and interrogated about his political sympathies. The U.S. authorities asked him whether it was true he had written a piece of music called The Red Ear of Corn.
Read the full article here.