Click on Classical: An unforgettable performance, fugue for thought, and the new sound of space

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Every Monday at 9:15 I join John Birge on Classical MPR to talk about stories we're featuring on our website. Here are the stories we'll be discussing today.

​Last week, the classical world was abuzz about a controversy involving the pianist Dejan Lazic, who has asked the Washington Post to delete a largely negative 2010 review of one of his performances. The Post doesn't plan to grant the request, but the request itself is newsworthy because Lazic is invoking a new European policy granting "the right to be forgotten." How does that work?

So you want to write a fugue? That was the name of an eccentric composition by Glenn Gould, and it was also the question Cinda Yager's college professor asked her when Yager was struggling in a composition course. When Yager wrote a piece that she thought was in the style of Bach, her prof disagreed and called her on the carpet. Read what happened next.

What does space sound like? Absolutely nothing, of course — but even silent movies about outer space are given some sort of musical accompaniment. Garrett Tiedemann writes about how 21st-century composers are moving beyond Holst and Strauss to find new frontiers for music meant to evoke the vast expanses of space. In a related feature, Garrett takes the classic 2001​ as an example of how effective it can be when filmmakers start with music and make a movie to fit​ — instead of the other way around.