The 14th annual Dog Star concert series rolled into The Wild Beast at CalArts on June 9, 2018 and featured the Los Angeles appearance of the noted Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt. A fine crowd assembled in The Beast despite a brush fire that shut down two lanes of the local freeway. Four contemporary solo piano pieces were on the program as well as Concert for Piano and Orchestra, by John Cage. Layers for Piano, by Nomi Epstein, opened the program and began with a series of soft, single notes followed by brief chords. A deep rumble was occasionally heard
Read moreJune 7, the opening day of the 2018 Ojai Music Festival, featured the usual welcome variety of lectures, interviews and pop-up concerts as well as performances of music by two notable mid-20th century Italian experimentalists. The first day of the festival was picture perfect and a large crowd milled about the outdoor venues, meeting and greeting. There was little evidence of the disastrous Thomas Fire of five months prior, and spirits were as sunny as the weather. At 6:00 PM, Luciano Berio’s challenging Sequenza IXa for Clarinet, played by Vincente Alberola, was heard from the Libbey Park gazebo, to good
Read moreThe 14th annual Dog Star Orchestra concert series kicked off on Saturday, June 2, 2018 at Automata in Chinatown. A new music tradition, the Dog Star series this year will present nine concerts over two weeks at various venues around Los Angeles. This occasion was a performance by the Southland Ensemble of Byzantine Rites, a new work by Laura Steenberge. A standing room-only crowd wedged itself into the cozy spaces of Automata to experience a remarkable exploration of medieval chant, contemporary music and a wide variety of engaging visual manifestations. Byzantine Rites is the result of research by the composer
Read moreThe much anticipated work The Cantata or, You are the star in God’s eye, by Wolfgang von Schweinitz was performed May 23, 2018 at the REDCAT venue in Disney Hall. A joint production of wasteLAnd and Microfest, the evening featured the wasteLAnd collective musicians conducted by Nicholas Deyoe and the recorded voice of Friederike Mayröcker’s original text with the English translation projected on a large screen. A fine crowd filled REDCAT to hear this extraordinary piece as it explored the intersection of Austrian avant-garde literature and 21st century music written in just intonation. The Cantata has its origins in the
Read moreA delightful interview with the about-to-be-nanagenerian composer Thea Musgrave. Don’t miss her 90th birthday concert by the New York Virtuoso Singers, the American Brass Quintet, and various soloists at The Church of St. Mary the Virgin (off Times Square) at 8pm on May 27 in a concert of choral, solo, and operatic works. The concert features the premiere of La Vida es Sueño and the American premieres of The Voices of Our Ancestors and Dawn. Get your tickets here.
Read moreCold Blue Music presented an evening of solos as the latest in the Soundwaves series of new music concerts held at the Santa Monica Public Library. Music by Daniel Lentz and Michael Byron was performed, with the composers in attendance. Pianist Vicki Ray and harpist Tasha Smith Godínez were on hand as soloists along with a nice crowd arriving on a perfect spring evening. River of 1,000 Streams (2016) by Daniel Lentz was first up, featuring Ms. Ray at the piano and accompanied by a prerecorded track of fragments of the piece that were played through two large speakers on
Read moreNEW YORK – On February 10th, 2018, Architek Percussion and TAK ensemble presented five US premieres in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Benzaquen Hall. The program, charmingly titled ArchiTAK, was composed entirely of new music by New York and Montreal composers. Walking into the hall expecting some sort of configuration to accommodate five percussionists, a flautist, clarinetist, violinist, and vocalist, I was instead greeted by nine chairs in a tight, even row behind nine microphones. I heard members of TAK ensemble behind me discussing the location of “the knives.” I was ready to expect the unexpected as the program
Read moreOn Cinco de Mayo, Art Share in Los Angeles was the venue for Music for Art Galleries, a concert of music by composer Nick Norton. The occasion was the completion of Norton’s Doctoral studies at the UC, Santa Barbara and a large crowd gathered to hear a program of no fewer than ten pieces of his music. A dozen of the top musicians in the Los Angeles new music scene were on hand to perform what proved to be an intriguing variety of original works. The program opened with Mix Bus 09, an electronic piece that filled Art Share with
Read moreAll of us at Sequenza 21 are saddened to learn of the passing of Matt Marks. A musical polymath, he was a composer, new music advocate, provocative Twitter presence, co-founder and key organizer of New Music Gathering, and a versatile performer, both a vocalist-actor in various projects and a founding member of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, in which he played French horn and for which he did imaginative arrangements. I met Marks on several occasions, but will allow his close friends and family to share reminiscences of a more personal nature. Among all those who knew and encountered him,
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Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Microtonalism, Music Instruments, Seattle, viola
This year’s Harry Partch Festival has kicked off at the University of Washington, where the original Partch instruments have been housed since 2014 under the capable direction of Charles Corey. On hand for the first evening concert on May 12, 2018 was composer-violist and Arditti Quartet alum Garth Knox who premiered his Crystal Paths, a concertino for viola d’amore and six Partch instruments. The work is basically a series of duets between Knox and, in succession, Partch’s Crychord, Bass Marimba, Surrogate Kithara, Chromelodeon and Harmonic Canon. An interesting twist is that once each duet has been underway for a minute or so, the
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