Philip Glass is 75 today. The American Composers Orchestra gives the American premiere of his 9th Symphony at Carnegie Hall tonight. My interview with Dennis Russell Davies, who is conducting the ACO concert, is up on Musical America’s website (subscribers only). If you’re looking for a terrific way to celebrate PG’s birthday, Brooklyn Rider’s latest CD on Orange Mountain Music includes Glass’s first five string quartets. The earthiness with which they play the music may surprise you at first, but it provides a persuasive foil for some of the more motoric, “high buffed sheen” toned performances of minimalism that are
Read moreOn Monday, January 16 at Carnegie Hall, Distinguished Concerts International New York brings together over three hundred musicians to give the world premiere of The Peacemakers by Karl Jenkins. The composer will conduct this work for choir, orchestra, and instrumental soloists. It is the first world premiere of one of his large-scale works to take place in New York. TICKETS: www.carnegiehall.org or 212-247-7800 or in person at the Carnegie Hall Box Office. The recording of The Peacemakers just came out this past Tuesday on EMI Classics. It features the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra and three choirs: the City of Birmingham
Read moreBang on a Can is celebrating twenty-five years of music making in generous fashion. Between now and Jan. 25th, you can download their new album, Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, via bangonacan25.org. In exchange, they ask for an email address and a memory of a BoaC moment: the former is kept confidential, the latter is published in a scrapbook commemorating the album. Think this is marketing against one’s own self-interests? Probably not. The iTunes version is for sale from 1/31, and features a bonus track of the ensemble performing Philip Glass’s Closing, with Glass, live. When the physical streets on
Read moreOne of my favorite projects this past Fall was writing the program essay for American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC festival. I had the chance to interview several composers (though only a small sampling of the many fine participants) featured on SONiC, including Hannah Lash, Anthony Cheung, Keniji Bunch (an old friend – one of my classmates at Juilliard), and the National’s Bryce Dessner. All of the interview subjects proved diverting. But I was particularly glad to have a chance in the essay to spotlight Ensemble Klang, a Dutch new music group that performed Oscar Bettison’s O Death on SONiC. Their performance was critically acclaimed as one
Read moreCongratulations to: Kyle Lynch Ulysses Tone Everette Minchew Mark Wilson Winners, please send me a quick email with your preferred mailing address. Best, Christian
Read moreCourtesy of Boosey and Hawkes, Bridge Records, and Naxos Records, we have another special giveaway that will benefit those not able to attend Elliott Carter’s 103rd birthday party on Thursday in New York. We’re giving away two signed CDs of “Music of Elliott Carter: volume 5” (Bridge 9128), and two of String Quartets Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (featuring the Pacifica Quartet; Naxos 8.559363), along with a signed 8×10 photo to accompany each. Once again, I’ll be selecting the winners via a random drawing. If you’re interested, send me an email at: S21managingeditor@gmail.com. The contest will be open until noon
Read moreOn the File Under ? blog tomorrow, we’ll be discussing Landscapes, Toshio Hosokawa’s first portrait CD for the ECM imprint. The new recording features an orchestral arrangement of this 1993 work, originally scored for shô and string quartet. I certainly wouldn’t want to be compelled to prefer one to the other: Landscape V is a haunting tone poem in both its intimate and fuller incarnations.
Read moreOn Requests A guest post for File Under? Back in 2003, the incredible pianist Amy Briggs (and if you don’t know her playing, you should check out some of her performances of the David Rakowski Etudes on YouTube) was approached by the music department at U.C. Davis to engage in a residency built around the idea of new tangos for piano. As part of the project, they asked Amy to build an entire concert program of tangos, each of which needed to be no longer than three minutes. She could use completed pieces and have others write for the project,
Read moreOne of our featured composers on the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert (on October 25 at Joe’s Pub) is Dale Trumbore. In the following post she tells us about the work ACME will perform on the program: a piece that was premiered in 2009 by Kronos Quartet. How it will go (2009) is a quirky little 6-minute work for string quartet; its first descriptive marking is “maniacally cheerful.” Although the piece is a rondo, the piece has a frantic, slightly unpredictable quality, as if it doesn’t know which way it’s supposed to go, or when exactly it should return to its main
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Songs for Persephone: Mimi Goese & Ben Neill Take a seductive voiced art-pop singer and a post-jazz/alt-classical trumpeter. Add fragments of nineteenth century classical melodies, electronics elicited by a “mutantrumpet” controller. Then add influences ranging from ancient Greek mythology to the Hudson River Valley. What you have are the intricate yet intimate sounds on an evocatively beautiful new CD: Songs for Persephone. The Persephone legend is one of the oldest in Greek mythology, with many variants that provide twists and turns to the narrative and subtext of the story. In the myth, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and the harvest
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