As those of you who come round here regularly know, I’m not a composer or musician but I am an experienced listener with limited patience for things that take too long to get to the point. As a practical matter, that means that music I’ve never heard before has about 30 seconds to grab my attention. I’ll listen to the whole thing but if doesn’t have that “Holy shit” thing happening in the first few bars, chances are the earth is never going to move for me. Call it the Jerry Principle: musical masterpieces announce their masterpiece-ness in 16 bars or less. Go ahead, prove
Read moreOn Aug 9 The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton, presented the first performance of …onyt agoraf y drws…(…unless I open the door…) by Welsh composer Guto Puw. The title of the piece refers to a Welsh saga in which, after suffering heavy losses in a battle with the Irish, and the death and beheading of Bedndigeidfran, his men, having been enchanted, return to Harlech and feast happily for seven years entertained by the singing of Rhiannon’s birds and cheerfully conversing with Bendigeidfran’s severed head, without any recollection of their past troubles. Eventually they move on to
Read more9 P.M. (Lifetime) LOVE NOTES When a classical music critic becomes pregnant from a fling with (gasp!) a country-music singer, she decides to give her baby to her infertile best friend. But will she undergo a change of heart, or at least a change in musical tastes? Laura Leighton and Antonio Cupo star. A female classical music critic? Must be a fantasy.
Read moreTwo of S21’s favorite people are getting married…to each other. One of them is Brian Sacawa. The other member of the wedding is playing it coy but feel free to guess. Unless, of course, you know for sure, in which case hold it down until the intended makes the news public. Steve Smith gets credit for making the shidekh.
Read moreWith at least 135 recordings (by my quick count) now in circulation, one would think there wasn’t much Philip Glass music that hasn’t already been submitted for the judgment of history. One would be wrong. Orange Mountain Music has just released the second of a planned series of 10 CDs winnowed from the vast archives that Glass has assembled over the past 40 years. The recordings—most of them captured during live performances–span the entire range of Glass’ work and include music for film, theater, dance, and concert hall in a wide variety of scores including chamber music, solo instruments and orchestral
Read moreConlon Nancarrow died 10 years ago today in Mexico City. Pliable has a nice writeup, and quotes György Ligeti praising Nancarrow as the most important composer of the second half of the twentieth century. I like Nancarrow but that strikes me as generous and raises the question–important to whom? To other composers? Maybe. To the small percentage of human beings who like contemporary classical music? No way. UPDATE: Here’s the Kyle Gann link I was looking for.
Read moreI don’t ski. Asthma. And fear. Mostly fear. I used to party a bit though and because many of my companions were ski buffs, I have socialized, but not skied, at some of the best places in the world. I have not skied Kitsbuehl and Chamonix and Lillehammer, for example. I have not skied Aspen and Telluride and Jackson Hole. Especially, I have not skied Verbier, the favorite hangout of some rowdy Norwegians of my acquaintance. We have been thrown out of the Feed Club, Verbier’s most lively nightspot, not once, but twice over the years, not a record I’m sure but respectable
Read moreSeems like only yesterday we reported that Matthew Cmiel, one of our favorite boy wonders, had put together a new band called Formerly Known as Classical. (Actually, it March 15, 2006, but let’s not quibble.) Looks like the group has done okay since last we checked in; on Sunday, August 5, they’re appearing in a concert at the Cabrillo Music Festival with Marin Alsop, the conductor and music director of the Baltimore Symphony and recent MacArthur Prize winner. Matthew–now a sobering 18-years-old–will conduct the group in Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, an exciting piece of music which gets its title from a story about boxing by Julio Cortazar and is
Read moreFrank Zappa has a street named after him in Berlin. Frank Zappa Strasse is in Marzahn, a district on the eastern fringe of the capital made up of communist-era housing blocks. Can’t think of any connection to music except for famous interviews with John Lennon and Johnny Rotten but Tom Snyder was the man for whom talk radio and TV was invented. Nobody did it better except, perhaps, for Dan Aykroyd doing his impression of Tom Snyder. Ingmar Bergman died at 89. There are lots of connections between Bergman and opera and classical music, both through productions he directed and the use of composers and
Read moreFrom today’s Deutsche Welle: Germany’s annual Bayreuth Festival of Wagner operas began on Wednesday with a highly anticipated, make-or-break production by the 29-year-old great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner. And while the applause after the first two acts of Wagner’s only “comic” opera was friendly, the audience — which included a smorgasbord of German political and social elite — was less amused by the third and final act, which featured a few minutes of full frontal nudity, a bizarre sight of Richard Wagner dancing in his underwear and a bunch of master singers horsing around the stage with oversized penises.
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