Composer 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

The 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

One 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.

A couple of years ago, I touched off a full-blown shitstorm in these pages by asking what I thought was a fairly innocent question, which was:  Is Nico overrated?   I had not listened to much of his music at the time and the little I had heard was pleasant enough but not, to my taste, particularly interesting or distinctive.  It was competent, but not something I would bother to listen to again.  I was aware, however, that  young Nico was much beloved in some quarters of our small and incestuous little new music demimonde and not so much in

On August 22, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Barry Douglas, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard, presented the first performance of Kevin Volans’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which was a BBC Commission. Volans is quite proud of his method of composition, which he refers to as ‘anti-conceptual.’ What he means by this is that he does not think about what a piece will do until he starts it, and every day he starts at the point he stopped the day before, without reordering anything; he doesn’t say whether or not he revises. One assumes not. This is a little like a practice