Maurice Ravel / American Idiot

On this day in classical music: Maurice Ravel’s piano four-hand version of “Ma Mere l’Oye” (Mother Goose) was premiered in 1910. Listen to frequent collaborators Martha Argerich and Nelson Friere perform the third of five movements, titled Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdVZAkHac_Y 

Maurice Ravel

On this day in the musical theatre: Broadway added one more musical with a rock score to the record books when “American Idiot” opened in 2010. The show was based on the punk rock band Green Day and its concept album of the same name. The show, which won Tony Awards for scenic design and lighting design, managed to run just over a year. 

American Idiot - Original Broadway Cast

Theatrical musings: Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage in “American Idiot,” the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster pop-punk album by Green Day. “American Idiot” jolts you right back to the dizzying roller coaster of young adulthood, that turbulent time when ecstasy and misery almost seem interchangeable states, flip sides of the coin of exaltation. It captures with a piercing intensity that moment in life when everything seems possible, and nothing seems worth doing, or maybe it’s the other way around. – Charles Isherwood writing in The New York Times.