Look Who it Was Random video

Naxos Backstage | Richard Danielpour on Toward the Splendid City

751 views · Published 11 October 2016 · 2:16 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: Naxos Music · 2016 · Music

Watch on YouTube

"While Toward the Splendid City was composed as a
portrait of New York, the city in which I live, it was written
almost entirely away from home. Work on the piece
began in Seattle in the spring of 1992 and was completed
in mid-August of that year in Taos, New Mexico. At the
time I was nearing the end of a yearlong residency with
the Seattle Symphony and had serious second thoughts
about returning to New York. Life was always complicated
in the city and easier, it seemed, everywhere else. I was,
however, not without a certain pang of nostalgia for my
hometown, and as a result Toward the Splendid City was
driven by my love-hate relationship with New York. It was,
needless to say, a relationship badly in need of resolution.
Eventually, upon returning to Manhattan, I began to
understand that the humanity and the difficulty of New
York were inseparable – and that if in the difficulties of
urban life humanity is to be embraced, then the
inconveniences must also be accepted.
 
The work’s title comes from the heading of Pablo
Neruda’s 1974 Nobel Prize address, in which he included
the following: “We must pass through solitude and
difficulty, isolation and silence, to reach forth to the
enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance
and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this
song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our
conscience in the awareness of being human.”
 
Toward the Splendid City is, in addition to being a
portrait of New York, a tribute to its Philharmonic Orchestra."

Richard Danielpour

More from this channel