The posthumous reputation of Frank Vincent Zappa has taken an interesting turn. Now safely dead (he died 17 days short of his 53rd birthday, in 1993, from cancer of the prostate), Zappa has become a composer whom classical promoters love to programme. His tricky, late-modernist scores (with their wisecracking and/or scatological titles, such as Orchestral Favorites or Alien Orifice) have become genuine orchestral favourites. Or at least that is how it would appear from the sheaves of promotional literature pouring out about "Frank Zappa and the Fathers of Invention", a three-concert series of music by eight "American" composers – Zappa, Stravinsky, Nancarrow, Reich, Varese, Copland, Ives and Cage – being launched by the Britten Sinfonia, under Stefan Asbury, at the Corn Exchange, Cambridge, this Thursday. (read more)

Source: slime.oofytv.set