As a preview of a performance by Lev Theremin's great niece Lydia Kavina this Saturday night in Katonah, New York, the NYT recounts the history of the amazing electronic instrument. As part of the Caramoor International Music Festival, Kavina will be the soloist in Joseph Schillinger's First Airphonic Suite for Theremin and orchestra, completed 76 years ago. (Seen here, Caramoor co-founder and Theremin virtuoso Lucie Rosen.) From the NYT article:
Not two weeks before the fateful stock market crash of 1929, Joseph Schillinger, newly arrived on these shores from Russia, put the finishing touches on a short concerto with the outré title "First Airphonic Suite." A month later, as the country reeled in the wake of Black Thursday, the work caused a sensation at its New York premiere.
The buzz came not from the piece itself – which, perhaps mirroring the composer's migration, begins à la Borodin and ends up like "Rhapsody in Blue" – but from its electrified soloist, Lev Theremin, the inventor and namesake of the featured instrument.
The reviewer for The New York Times, Olin Downes, described the contraption as "a sort of a box on a tripod, with antennae," and so it is today. Theremin, Downes wrote, "moved his hands and fingers in mystic passes in the air, and a tone like a purified and magnified saxophone soared through the atmosphere and through the very loudest fortissimo."
