In August of this year, New Focus Recordings released New Music for Two Voices, an impressive collection of acapella vocal music by sopranos Susan Narucki and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. This lavish album features a full hour masterful singing of six contemporary works, including three world premiere recordings. Susan Narucki is an accomplished soprano who has appeared as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, among many other international appearances. She is presently on the faculty of the Department of Music at UC San Diego. Kirsten Ashley Wiest is an award-winning coloratura soprano who has
Read moreJust when Steve Reich’s ninetieth birthday celebrations appeared to be drifting towards an inauspicious conclusion, along comes Charles Hazlewood and the Paraorchestra to gatecrash the party, tear up the rulebook, let loose a posse of Dionysian dancers on the scene, and transform a routine Reich event into a Bacchanalian rave. This new take on Music for 18 Musicians provided a breath of fresh air amongst a raft of retrospective events—Reich remodelled and refracted through the prism of psychedelia and 1990s warehouse EDM, with perhaps a whiff of hippy idealism and transcendental meditation thrown in. I’m not sure whether the composer would have
Read more(Photo credit: Allen Cohen) Reaching Marlboro requires a gradual surrender of scale. Roads narrow, familiar coordinates loosen, and the forest exerts its own editorial influence, stripping away whatever feels extraneous until distance becomes a form of concentration. On September 20, 2026, that concentration gathered inside Ragle Hall at the Serkin Center, where the Marlboro Music Artist Residency Program presented The World of György Kurtág, an arresting sequence of works composed or arranged for soprano and double bass. Beyond the hall stood the wooded seclusion of southern Vermont; within it, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and bassist William Langlie Miletich moved
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Choral Music, Classical Music, Commissions, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral
A visceral work headlined the opening program of the NY Philharmonic’s 2026-2027 season at Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center on September 16: John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, a work written in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. As the 25th anniversary of the tragedy was just a few days prior, my gut was still tender from the echoes of the memories of that day. The work included a recording on which the names of some of the victims were spoken. Even a quarter century later, hearing the names put me right into
Read moreThe Prom on August 23, which was presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, concluded with a performance of Amérique by Edgard Varèses, having begun with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its 1947 version, The Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon soloist, and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The title of the piece had dual meanings, just as Varèses’s intentions were multiple. The work was on one hand a sort of portrait of the active and bustling New York City, but it also had the intention of opening new, as it were, vistas
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