Sunday Music: CD Samplers in the Era of Pandora
Sunday Music Volume 4
Big Helium Records BHRSM004 / www.bighelium.com
Unlike the album driven days of yore, today it’s all about the mix. From purchasing single tracks digitally at online stores such as Itunes and Amazon to the internet radio sensation Pandora, which tailors ’stations’ to a listener’s preferences, […]

[Read more →]

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is continually creating something new – from concerti by Krzysztof Penderecki and Andre Previn to works by Sebastian Currier and Henri Dutilleux.
Mutter’s latest project is a recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens, written in 2006-07 and premiered with the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2007. Selke Harten-Strehk has more background here […]

[Read more →]

Baritone Eric Owens is busy this fall - his Met debut as General Leslie Groves in John Adams’ Dr. Atomic is just a start to his performances this season in New York, Atlanta, London and Los Angeles.
Today is the release of A Flowering Tree on Nonesuch Records with Owens as the storyteller, another role he […]

[Read more →]

How does it sound – a double concerto written by a musician weaned on Beethoven, salsa, Stravinsky and Bulgarian folk music? In short – like nothing else!
The Danish composer Anders Koppel (b. 1947) is himself. “My music consists of the life I have lived,” is as close as he gets to a definition of his […]

[Read more →]

Just when you thought we’ve been musically laying low… There’s a brand-new online-only CD release by fellow S21 regular and composer David Toub, realized by yours truly (Steve Layton, for those of you who don’t read the bottom post tag). It just became available on iTunes (US, also now or very soon in UK/Europe, Australia and […]

[Read more →]

I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of movie music although the ability to produce useful art on demand appeals to my lifetime hack sensibilities.  I don’t think Bernard Hermann and Miklos Rozsa are overlooked concert hall geniuses who might have been among the greats had they not traded their souls for big houses in […]

[Read more →]

Big news on the time-marches-on front.  Deutsche Grammophon (DG) yesterday became the first major classical record label to make the majority of its huge catalogue available online for download with the launch of its new DG Web Shop.
The DG Web Shop allows consumers in 42 countries to download music, including–the press folks claim–markets where the major e-business […]

[Read more →]

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) has just become the latest classical music organization to launch its own CD label. BMOP Sound will debut in January 2008 and will be devoted exclusively to new music recordings, many of them pieces commissioned by BMOP.
BMOP Sound is scheduled to release five world premiere CDs at the start of […]

[Read more →]

From the NYT:
After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could […]

[Read more →]

The Metropolis Ensemble is getting set to record the complete collection of chamber orchestra concerti of Avner Dorman with producer David Frost but you don’t have to wait to hear it; the best little orchestra in New York will be performing the same repertoire live and in color next Thursday night, October 11, at  the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the […]

[Read more →]