Author: Jerry Bowles

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Tom Steenland’s Passion

Props to our amigo Tom Steenland who has been producing great avant-garde recordings on his Starkland label from Boulder for many years now.  It isn’t every day that a CD from a small label makes the New York Times but Phillip Bimstein’s Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica caught the attention of Steve Smith, who has livened up the Times immeasurably since he started writing over there.  Steve reviewed it yesterday, opining that “… the irresistible charm of Mr. Bimstein’s music has less to do with technology than with his uncanny knack for finding the music of everyday life.”  If you prefer, Tom has prepared a spiffy pdf file of the review and left it for you here.  Daniel Gilliam reviewed the CD for us here.

Elsewhere, another friend of the family, Marco Antonio Mazzini has posted a video of Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint (in which he plays the bass clarinet) here and here.  I hope he got permission.

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Music Events

Women’s Work 2007 – Three Wednesdays in March

Beth Anderson is hosting Women’s Work 2007, a series of three Wednesday concerts in March at  Greenwich House Arts.  The dates are March 14, 21 and 28 and the venue is the Renee Weiler Concert Hall at Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow Street, New York City (between Seventh Avenue South and Bedford St.).  Beth has pulled together a terrific package of recent chamber instrumental and vocal music by prominent contemporary women composers from Asia, the U.S. and Europe, and how their work has been influenced by folk music, poetry and even new technology.  To do our part, the crack Sequenza21 team has put together an event blog with programs, notes and pictures.  The gals have also built themselves a multimedia site at MySpace with some lovely musical samples.  Hie thee thither. 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Onward and Upward With Social Media

Based mainly on my accidental success in building such a lively, tight knit and fun little community here, I am now getting a few paying gigs from people who want to know how to build “social networks.”  I’m not sure it is possible to duplicate the level of passion and involvement that we get here (because you’re all so damned weird) but I’m willing to giving it a shot for paying customers to cover my Starbucks nut.

As part of my research, I’ve been playing around with Ning, which is Marc Andreessen’s latest venture.  Ning is basically WordPress for social networks–a brilliant, perfect and very simple online application that allows anyone to build a fully-functioning social network for free.  (There are some advanced features–more bandwidth, more control–that cost a little extra but it has everything that businesses pay design firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.  But, I digress.

For educational purposes (my own), I just built in about a half-hour a companion site to this one called Sequenza 21 at Ning, using RSS feeds to pull in some content to lure new people over here.  You can all join if you like and put up your pictures and bios–maybe we’ll get some additional eyeballs.  If anyone wants to blog over there, I’ll turn on the blogging feature. 

And don’t miss Social Media Today, which is another of my endless stream of online ideas.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Eight Million Stories in the Naked City

Columbia University’s School of the Arts has given John Zorn the William Schuman Award, a major recognition given periodically over the past twenty-five years.
    
Named for its first recipient William Schuman, the award, in the form of a direct, unrestricted grant of $50,000, is one of the largest to an American composer. In the language of the gift establishing the prize, the purpose of the William Schuman Award is “to recognize the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.” It is awarded by the Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. The award was established in 1981 by a bequest from the Schuman family. Previous winners have included Schuman, David Diamond, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and Hugo Weisgall, and, most recently in 2001, Steve Reich.

I don’t think that Zorn is quite in that league but, hey, what do I know?

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera

The Good, the Bad, and the Anal

Gérard Mortier, who is famous for painting lipstick on corpses and taking them to the ball, will become general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera after he retires from the Paris Opera at the end of the 2008-2009 season.   Mortier ran the  Salzburg Festival in the 1990s  where he mounted such customer-unfriendly provocations as Hans Neuenfels staging of  Die Fledermaus, in which Orlofsky was a drug dealer who sold cocaine, Nazi thugs appeared on stage and Eisenstein had incestuous children who commit suicide.   Can’t wait to see what he does with Lulu.

Reminds of one of my favorite lines, from Charles T. Downey in ionarts, a couple of years ago:  “I suppose that opera all comes down to that eternal question that must be answered: anal rape or elaborate wigs?”  Indeed.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Metropolitan Opera, New York, Opera

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?

The Metropolitan Opera announced that its co-production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha with the English National Opera will debut next season on April 11, 2008.   The ENO is doing nine performances of Satyagraha this April.  Written in 1980, Satyagraha is based on Gandhi’s formative years in South Africa, as he developed his philosophy of nonviolent protest as a powerful force for change. It is the second work in the ”portrait” trilogy by Glass, which also includes Einstein on the Beach (1975) and Akhnaten (1983-84).  Satyagraha involves the director Phelim McDermott and the designer Julian Crouch, two of the three artistic directors of the visionary British theater company Improbable.

On the bad news front, the Met has dumped a scheduled revival of Tobias Picker’s honorable An American Tragedy in favor of Tan Dun’s terminally lame The First Emperor, apparently because it has a chance to take the production on the road to China. 

It’s great to see that Peter Gelb is going with artistic merit and not being tempted by the possibility of big crowds and big bucks.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Tom Myron on Performance Today

Here’s a programming note to remember.  Performance Today will broadcast Tom Myron’s Violin Concerto #2 on Tuesday’s program. 

The performance–by the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra–was recorded on 5/14/06 in Alexandria Virginia; Elisabeth Adkins, soloist.

Performance Today is carried on 250 member stations around the
country.  For info on where and when you can hear the show in your area, visit www.performancetoday.org.  The show will also be available for on-demand listening through the website for seven days.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Miller Theater, Opera

Lost in Translation?

Since it’s opera week here at Sequenza 21 and there’s a lot of chatter in the comments about transplanting operas between cultures and Galen has raised the topic of fugues in the invisible YouTube video below, it seems somehow fitting to mention that  Miller Theater and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music are presenting tonight and tomorrow night the U.S. premiere of Lost Highway by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, a multimedia opera based on the weird and wacky David Lynch film of the same name.  Film buffs will recall that Lynch’s film involves sex, murder and a character named Fred Madison who mysteriously becomes Pete Dayton through a mental disturbance known as “psychogenic fugue.”  Can you dig it? 

Timothy Weiss conducts the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and an all-student cast.  Anybody going?  Write us a review.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Opera

Man (or Woman) Overboard! Tobias Picker’s Back in Town

Speaking of great American operas, Tobias Picker has written two of them; Emmeline, which is an unqualified masterpiece, and An American Tragedy, which I think history will regard more dearly than its contemporary reviews might suggest.  Between those two landmarks, Picker wrote a kind of “forgotten” opera called Thérèse Raquin, an epic based on the Zola novel which, like Tragedy, involves an unwanted lover being chucked overboard in favor of a more attractive alternative.  Picker’s psychiatrist, if he has one, could probably make something of that.

Thérèse Raquin premiered at The Dallas Opera in 2001 and is now having its New York premiere run, in a revised chamber version prepared by Picker, from Dicapo Opera Theatre.

The opera has three more performances this coming weekend: Friday and Saturday, February 23 and 24, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, February 25, at 4 p.m. Dicapo Opera Theatre is located at 184 East 76th Street in Manhattan, just off Lexington Avenue and directly underneath St. Jean-Baptiste Church. 

I haven’t seen Thérèse Raquin yet and don’t have any critical guidance to offer but Picker is one of the very best American opera composers and his music is never less than compelling.  Get on down to Dicapo this weekend.

Here’s a message from Rama Gottfried:

//

at last!  here it is. tomorrow night::

::envelopes for orchestra::
5 minutes of mercury wobbling in space for a 57 piece orchestra
+ and a stacked concert of works by my extremely talented friends at
the manhattan school of music

friday, 2.23.07 –  7:30p
borden auditorium, manhattan school of music
122nd/Broadway (take 1 train to 116(downhill walk) or 125(uphill))

it will be good, you should come.

*** don’t forget to sit in the balcony, it sounds best from there.
the stairs are just as you enter the hall on both sides.

\\

high 5s to all,

 


rama

 

 

 

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera

Is Grapes of Wrath the Great American Opera?

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I don’t know Ricky Ian Gordon personally but he e-mails me frequently with updates on his projects, never neglecting to sign off with “xxxooo” which I find endearing although I’m sure he does the same for all the guys.  I know and like his music mainly from Audra McDonald and a wonderful recording of his songs called Bright-Eyed Joy but nothing I’ve heard or read prepared me for the universal praise for the Minnesota Opera’s production of Gordon’s (with libretto by Michael Korie) The Grapes of Wrath.  What we have here, apparently, is a real contender for the title of the Great American Opera. 

Listen to the often cranky Mark Swed: “As far as I was concerned — and this is a minority opinion — the nearly four-hour opera was too short. Had Gordon and Korie been allowed to follow their original bliss and create a two-night or more American “Ring” cycle, I would have gladly returned for more.”

Or Variety:  “Gordon and Korie have produced a bit of a conundrum: a very long show about suffering and endurance that leaves the viewer enlivened. The intelligence and compassion of their work, combined with the evident vitality and belief of the cast in this opera’s merit, supply high emotion with depth and compassion. This is not a happy story, but its telling is nothing short of incandescent.”

St. Paul Pioneer Press:   “Ten years and $2 million in the making, the Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of “The Grapes of Wrath” turns out to be well worth the time and expense: It’s a grand, sprawling, politically astute and musically compelling affair that amply and accessibly answers the rhetorical question:  ‘An opera about Okies?'”

Bernard Holland?  Well, Bernie’s been sour grapes (not to mention irrelevant) for some time now.

by Jerry Bowles