PERFORMANCE/TOUR: Banging out a Revolution in Just 91 Measures

MUSICAL revolutions often come in generous portions. Think of Monteverdi's operas; Beethoven's "Eroica" and Ninth Symphonies, C sharp minor Quartet and "Hammerklavier" Sonata; and Wagner's "Ring" cycle and "Parsifal." Compared to those monuments, the French-American composer Edgard VarA se's "Ionisation" barely amounts to a flyspeck. The work's 91 measures are generally dispatched in less than six minutes, hardly the girth of an epic...

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