Music edges back: Schell’s picks for 2021
Taken collectively, this year’s list reveals the remarkable depth, breath and quality of what we call “new music”, but it…
Hannah Lash’s The Peril of Dreams premieres in Seattle
I was gratified to discover that Lash’s 45-minute work manages to avoid the clichés and sentimentality to which much of…
Music from behind a mask: Schell’s picks for 2020
Two years ago, the late Noah Creshevsky said "today's best seats are in our own homes or wherever we may…
Revisiting Tippett’s The Ice Break
When Michael Tippett composed The Ice Break, he was already in his early 70s. Set in a contemporary country (the…
Kopatchinskaya and Hong perform Kurtág in Seattle
Few composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his…
Closing out the twenty-tens: Schell’s picks for 2019
Though our decade technically has another year to go, the marketing appeal of “Hits of the XXs” type formulations tends…
Woody Vasulka (1937–2019): a musician’s appreciation
It’s tough to say goodbye forever to Woody Vasulka, pioneer of experimental video and co-founder (with his widow Steina) of…
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Seattle
Boulez and Berio highlight Morlot’s farewell [untitled] concert at Seattle Symphony
Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series was inaugurated in 2012 by its newly arrived Music Director, Ludovic Morlot. Three Fridays a year,…
Piano Drop at Seattle’s Jack Straw
Destruction and reclamation, gimmick and avant-garde One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual…
Noteworthy in 2018: Schell’s picks
Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end…