Speaking of the very busy, very approachable John Corigliano, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic are finishing up a month of 9/11 tributes and memorials on September 30 with a performance of John Corigliano’s One Sweet Morning, a four movement song cycle each set to a poem from a different age and country, sung by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe. The first is Czeslaw Milosz’s “A Song on the End of the World,” written in Warsaw in 1944; though tranquil in feel, there is a hint of “chaos to come,” says the composer. A section of Homer’s Iliad provides the words for the
Read moreAfter a long summer, students have returned to the University of Michigan. With all the excitement surrounding a new year of school, I found myself most eager to resume my role as an audience member at the School of Music, Theater and Dance’s perennially fantastic concert and recital offerings. The season opened up in a big way last Friday evening when Joseph Gramley – Michigan’s beloved, charismatic and preeminent Professor and Coordinator of Percussion – graced the stage of the Moore Building’s McIntosh Theater with a program this concertgoer is not soon to forget. The evening’s theme, “Made in America”,
Read more[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/29161015[/vimeo] About to turn the ripe old age of 8, Matt McBane‘s crazy idea of a 20-something composer/performer creating an annual new-music festival in a bump in the road north of San Diego has not only survived but thrived. Something about a last late-summer outing, to an idyllic village parked right at a Pacific beach, seems to consistently draw a crowd from both Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to the south for this three-day affair. And, well, maybe it’s just a little about the music, too… Excellent string quartets, pianists and ensembles mix it up with rock
Read moreHouston’s Musiqa opens its season with the Houston premiere of composer John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man for amplified soprano and chamber ensemble and texts by one of the most influential lyricists of all time, Bob Dylan. Karol Bennett is the soprano, and Robert Franz conducts. The concert also includes a performance of John Harbison’s Songs America Loves To Sing and a reading by Justin Cronin, the award-winning author of The Passage. Musiqa’s five member Artistic Board will also premiere a series of Musiqa Minatures in celebration of its 10th anniversary season. The lyrics Corigliano chose for this song cycle, including
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Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York
Some festivals have a curatorial vision that takes pages and pages of press releases and program notes to explain. Other curators, like Glenn Cornett, revel in the whimsy of amusing composers’ names. Why organize a one-night Nono, Muchmore, and Warp(ed) mini-marathon? The names sounded fun together and the players are the bee’s knees. The evening will feature music by Italian modernist master Luigi Nono, New York cellist/composer and Anti Social Music member Pat Muchmore, and San Francisco based composer/sound designer Richard Warp. With a 7 PM start time, the show is three and a half hours long, and is full
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CDs, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, Festivals, File Under?, Interviews, jazz, New York, Performers, Video
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
Read moreThe Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert is fast approaching. This free event will be at Joe’s Pub on Oct. 25 at 7 PM (reserve a seat here). The American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) will perform a program that features composers selected from our call for scores. In the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from a number of the composers and performers appearing on the concert. First up is Jay Batzner, who teaches at Central Michigan University and contributes regularly to Sequenza 21. He tells us about his piece on the program: Slumber Music. I remember a lot about composing Slumber Music, which
Read moreComposer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Mark Campbell have teamed up with director Kevin Newbury and conductor Rob Fisher to create a unique musical view into the people who were affected by the Civil War. Co-commissioned as a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War by the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, Texas Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Arts Festival and Virginia Opera, “Rappahannock County” [will receive its Richmond*] premiere Tuesday, Sept. 13 at the Modlin Center of the Arts at 7:30 and run for
Read moreThe venerable Kronos Quartet brings its much-anticipated production of Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11 to Brooklyn September 21-24 as part the Next Wave festival. The program features works by Michael Gordon, Terry Riley, Osvaldo Golijov and Gustavo Santaolalla, and John Oswald—as well as arrangements of traditional songs from around the globe. It is a collection of pieces designed–as Kronos violinist David Harrington puts it–to restore “equilibrium in the midst of imbalance” in those instances where traditional language fails us. Thanks to the nice folks at Nonesuch Records, who just released Kronos’ recording of Steve Reich’s WTC’s
Read moreOne might assume that any work receiving its premiere this weekend – especially this Sunday – would have to be somehow related to the 9/11 memorials taking place around the country. One work, however, is being premiered on Sunday simply due to the natural schedule of the festival during which it is to be performed, and has no connection to the memorial whatsoever. The work in question is David Del Tredici’s String Quartet No. 2, set to be given its premiere performance by the Orion String Quartet at 3pm this Sunday at the South Mountain Concert Series in Pittsfield, MA.
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