As the pandemic recedes in our rearview mirrors, the flow of new albums of radical music has returned to its pre-COVID level, as has the year-end ritual of Best of… lists from critics and other interested parties. Indeed, it’s that post-lockdown deluge of recorded activity, along with the resumption of live musicmaking, that saturated my inbox to the point that I’m combining two years of critical listening and Flotation Device curation into this one article, which endeavors to summarize where Western art music stands today as an integral, global practice that comprises improvised, composed and fixed-media music. Transcultural exemplars Heiner
Read moreIf you’re up for seeing Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s much-heralded Leonard Bernstein biopic, then try to do it now, in a movie theater, before it gets remanded permanently to Netflix. The big-screen experience is worth it, for reasons I’ll get to momentarily. But let me preface this by noting that—as was the case with Todd Field’s Tár—the last place to look for cogent analysis of Maestro as a film is the throng of classical music professionals offering strong opinions about its errors and omissions. Maestro—again like Tár—is permeated by music but is not primarily about music. It’s ultimately a Hollywood love
Read moreMichael Schell reconsiders the controversial legacy of composer Hanns Eisler for his 125th anniversary, with an in-depth look at his magnum opus: Deutsche Sinfonie.
Read moreOn the passing of Harry Belafonte (1927–2023), Michael Schell looks back at his dark 1970 urban drama The Angel Levine, in which he co-stars with Zero Mostel.
Read moreSeattle Symphony has unveiled its 2023–24 season. The contemporary music offerings are something of a disappointment, but there are nevertheless several highlights to look forward to.
Read moreTaken collectively, this year’s list reveals the remarkable depth, breath and quality of what we call “new music”, but it also conveys a certain tentativeness—one that perhaps befits a crossroads where observers cannot decide whether we’re poised for a new Renaissance or whether 2021 will turn out to be the most serene year of its decade.
Read moreI was gratified to discover that Lash’s 45-minute work manages to avoid the clichés and sentimentality to which much of the harp repertory is prone.
Read moreTwo years ago, the late Noah Creshevsky said “today’s best seats are in our own homes or wherever we may be, listening to music through speakers or headphones, in chairs of our choosing.” His proposition was put to a drastic test in 2020.
Read moreWhen Michael Tippett composed The Ice Break, he was already in his early 70s. Set in a contemporary country (the US is strongly implied), and with characters caught up in racial violence and drug use, the opera received a tepid reception upon its 1977 Covent Garden premiere. The consensus was that the composer’s insistence on writing his own libretto, coupled with what Michael Berkeley calls “his touching but naive desire to keep in touch with the young and their vernacular”, had driven his dramaturgy into irreparably sophomoric sentimentality. Thus, when director Graham Vick and conductor Andrew Gourlay focused Birmingham Opera
Read moreFew composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his earliest canonical work, the Op. 1 String Quartet (1959), he steadily built an international career entirely from bagatelles, usually written for small ensembles and gathered into collections linked by instrumentation and concept, and always unsurpassed in concentrated intensity. Kurtág’s commitment to epigrammatic potency reached an apogee with Kafka Fragments (1985–87), 40 brief German texts from the novelist’s diaries and posthumous writings adapted into an hour of music of such resolute focus that the composer limited its instrumentation to one soprano
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