Some composers refine the language they inherit. Others trouble it, bend it, and compel it to confess what it would rather conceal. Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) belongs to the latter lineage. His music does not decorate Baroque convention so much as interrogate it from within, testing how much strain the form can bear before it reveals something truer than elegance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the six Trio Sonatas, ZWV 181. To encounter them is to overhear the composer thinking aloud: restless, contrarian, devout, and faintly dangerous. Zelenka came to Dresden as a virtuoso of the orchestra’s lowest
Read moreBanish the inescapable treacly holiday music with this palette cleanser for Boxing Day. Other Minds has shared this recital of music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Robert Ashley, performed by pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at Mills College. Much of the programmed music was premiered by the performers.
Read moreElliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, by Laura Emmery, Cambridge Elements, Music Since 1945, Cambridge University Press. Laura Emmery has done a great deal of analytical research on the music of Elliott Carter, and her book on his string quartets is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning how he composes. Emmery’s latest publication is part of Cambridge University Press’s Elements series, one of several slender and specific books that each deal with a particular topic. Here, it is Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, which was composed in 1950-’51 and is widely regarded as a watershed work
Read moreIt’s rare for a new work to have even a second performance, but Kati Agócs’ Rapprochement received nine plays in a single day. Agócs was commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition to write a composition that each quartet would be required to play in the 2025 competition. The title of her nine-minute piece means “to bring together.” Agócs, in a pre-performance conversation with BISQC director Barry Shiffman, explained that it is in variation form, in which the harmonic underpinning is important to the melodic line. It’s a lyrical piece, and the instructions call for a lot of fluidity
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Chamber Music, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Percussion, Women composers
2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood – July 24 – July 28, 2025 Every summer since 1964, the Tanglewood Music Center presents its Festival of Contemporary Music. According to Tanglewood’s materials: The Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) is one of the world’s premier showcases for works from the current musical landscape and landmark pieces from the new music vanguard of the 20th century. FCM affords Tanglewood Music Center Fellows the opportunity to explore unfamiliar repertoire and experience the value of direct collaboration with living composers. Over the four FCM concerts (of the total of six) I heard carefully honed performances
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CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer
Tobias Picker NOVA Various Artists Bright Shiny Things Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism. The title work is the latter, a riff
Read moreBell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends Midsummer Musicfest at Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y July 9, 2025 NEW YORK – July often finds New York-based musicians playing in summer festivals well outside the city. The 92nd Street Y’s Midsummer MusicFest enticed a small handful of luminaries back to town to play chamber music at the venue’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. Violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk have joined forces before, but not for a while in New York. In 2024, to commemorate the one hundredth year of his passing, they toured programs of music by the French
Read moreUnseen World is a new release by composer Mara Gibson on the Mark Masters record label. The album consists of five works composed between 2020 and 2024 that are inspired by vivid visual art that is both expressive and complex. Various instrumental ensembles are employed including a piano and cello duet, a brass quintet, trumpet duet, woodwind duet and a large chamber orchestra. The meticulous writing present in the scores, the outstanding technique of the musicians and remarkable efforts by the soloists make Unseen World an impressive realization of contemporary musical expression. The first piece on the album is Swansongs
Read moreThe Canadian pianist/composer Adam Sherkin shares music from his home country on an extensive program at Merkin Hall in New York on March 15, 2025. “Composers in Play XV” is presented by Piano Lunaire, an organization launched by Sherkin and his colleagues in 2018. On this occasion he joins forces with the American pianist Anthony de Mare. Together the two perform music by (mostly) living Canadian composers for one and two pianos. Each of the performers has connections with some of the creators. In Sherkin’s case it is himself as the composer of Ink from the Shield for two pianos,
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Canada, Cello, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Composers Now, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, New York, Orchestral, Premieres, viola, Violin, Women composers
On Thursday evening in New York, Momenta Quartet’s October festival – now nine years running – closed with an assorted program, enthusiastically curated by violist/composer Stephanie Griffin. Griffin is the last founding member still actively performing with the group. Noting that this festival has ever featured the opportunity for each member to have curatorial carte blanche on one night only, Griffin nodded to the overall 2024 theme – Charles Ives at 150 – while admitting that “this is not a thematic program, but rather a joyous collection of pieces that I saw fit to celebrate the genius of Charles Ives
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