Reception
The performers of the New York Philharmonic were openly skeptical of playing with the two Japanese instruments, however, after hearing the first extended passage for the biwa and shakuhachi, concerns began to wane. Shouts of "Bravo!" came from the orchestra after the end of the first rehearsal. The first performance received compliments from Leonard Bernstein, Krzysztof Penderecki, Aaron Copland and other prominent musicians. Takemitsu expressed the view the positive reception of the work was proof that if a sound has value it will appeal to all people, not just to particular nationalities.
Shortly after the premier, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, under its conductor Seiji Ozawa, gave November Steps its second performance in Toronto's Massey Hall. The work was distributed widely in the West when Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony included it on the fourth side of an LP of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony recorded in December 1967. Under Ozawa, this orchestra also gave the work its first televised performance, in a 1970 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program, "East-West Concerto". In 1970 November Steps also had the distinction of being the only Japanese-composed music performed at Expo '70 when Ozawa conducted it in Suita, Osaka, Japan
Read more about this topic: November Steps
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)