Contemporary Classical

Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Performers, Premieres

San Diego New Music’s soundON Festival: Evening 1

Full disclosure: I co-founded San Diego New Music in 1994, served as its first Executive Director, and have been a board member since 2000. This isn’t a review or a comprehensive report so much as some of my impressions and observations about what’s going on at The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, this weekend. If you think I overlooked anything, please feel free to contribute more in the comments section below. After core members of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music, dispersed across the continent (flutist/director Lisa Cella to Baltimore; percussionist Morris Palter to Fairbanks), it became

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by Christian Hertzog
Contemporary Classical

You Know You’re a Heartbreaker…

If you read S21 regularly (and why wouldn’t you) you probably know that my all-time favorite composer Leoš Janáček had one of the greatest third acts in the history of musical composition.  Most of  his extraordinary late-life production was inspired by a certain sly and aloof–but nonetheless foxy–married lady half his age named Kamila Stösslová.  One of the works that she inspired is the opera The Cunning Little Vixen which, as fate would have it, the New York Philharmonic is doing a fully-staged production of on June 22-25.   The Vixen is being sung by the stunning and incredibly talented Isabel

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by Jerry Bowles
Brooklyn, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Smooke’s “nonopera” premieres in Brooklyn on Friday

This Spring, Baltimore-based composer David Smooke composed Criminal Element, a “nonopera” in a fabricated language, for Rhymes with Opera, a company devoted to presenting opera in nontraditional spaces. Alongside works by Martin Zimmerman, Ryan Jesperson, and George Lam, it premieres Friday, June 17th in Brooklyn at Cafe Orwell. The program, titled Criminal Intent (hopefully Dick Wolf won’t sue), will be repeated in Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston. As if it weren’t hard enough to compose an opera, non or otherwise, in the midst of a busy semester teaching at the Peabody Institute, where Smooke is a faculty member, the composer decided to

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by Christian Carey
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Orchestras, Philadelphia, Recordings

Symphony Space Celebrates Andrew Rudin

Andrew Rudin is well known to the Philadelphia new music community, both as a composer and, for many years, as a professor at University of the Arts. One of his former students, Amanda Harberg, introduced me to Rudin some years back at a post-concert reception in New Jersey. I remember being struck by his piercing intellect and wide-ranging knowledge of music. I’ve greatly enjoyed interacting with him via Facebook in recent years. Although direct in his opinions, sometimes in irascible fashion, he’s a font of information about composers (particularly Ralph Shapey), opera, poets, and tasty baked goods. On Tuesday, Rudin’s

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by Christian Carey
CDs, Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, Philadelphia, Strings, Twentieth Century Composer

It’s a Short Six Hours

Tomorrow from 2-8 PM in Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, FLUX Quartet plays Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. The concert is the last event in American Sublime, a two week long series that has spotlighted Feldman’s late music. FLUX has been performing the piece since 1999, and their rendition runs around six hours. Feldman himself suggested that the piece could run anywhere from 3 1/2 to 5 hours. But one senses that FLUX’s more expansive time frame doesn’t contravene his intentions. String Quartet No. 2, like many of Feldman’s late works, is about breaking past the boundaries of form and instead shaping

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by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Mallonee and Snowden featured tonight as part of Nief-Norf Summer Festival

Tonight will feature the two winners of the first annual Call-for-Scores that the Nief-Norf Project put together this year as part of the first 10-day Nief-Norf Summer Festival going on down at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. The brainchild of percussionist and Artistic Director Andrew Bliss, the festival presents five concerts that focus on new music for percussion, including works by Cage, Reich, Applebaum, Bresnick, Zorn, and this year’s composer-in-residence, Christopher Adler. In addition to works for percussion by Mario Davidovsky, Stuart Sanders Smith and Alexander Lunsqui, Caroline Mallonee’s North South East West and Steven Snowden’s A Man with

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by Rob Deemer
Contemporary Classical

Ensemble Dal Niente finish their season with fire and subtlety

[Apologies for the delay on this posting – laptop illness kept me from completing it till today.] During my week stay in Illinois, I was lucky enough to catch several concerts that proved how strong the new music scene is in Chicago. On Saturday May 28, Ensemble Dal Niente presented a rich and varied concert at the Music Institute of Chicago that featured several new and established works and a wide array of talented performers. Ensemble Dal Niente has been steadily gaining ground as one of several new music ensembles (including ICE and Alarm Will Sound) that has taken the

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by Rob Deemer
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York

The toy that grew up

Many instruments have their 99-cent toy counterpart: tiny play trumpets, cheap plastic recorders, pint-sized accordions, even mini drum-kits with cymbals the size of espresso saucers. But it’s only the toy piano that has graduated to the big leagues, with an large and diverse repertoire and even a dedicated group of high-caliber performers to boost its status. I really think this all came about from two sources: John Cage‘s modest 1948 Suite for Toy Piano, and the instrument’s inclusion in George Crumb‘s highly influential Ancient Voices of Children (1970). Both of these works had (and still have) a certain vogue; pianos

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by Steve Layton