Contemporary Classical

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

Takács Quartet Gives Birth to the Universe

How does a composer write music? Whether she pulls interesting sounds out of the air, or creates an elaborate scheme of hieroglyphics – can an uninformed listener tell the difference? Sometimes not, as was the case Wednesday night at the 92nd Street Y where the incomparable Takács Quartet gave the New York premiere of Flow by Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama. Flow was backed up by an elaborate set of program notes that described inspiration ranging from the sound of the Big Bang to the breathing discipline “Pranayama”. Even with that knowledge in hand, for the most part I couldn’t detect the

Read more
by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical

Percussionist Lisa Pegher Presents A.I.RE – A One-Night Only Musical Journey from Acoustic to A.I. Generated Music

premiering multimedia works by composer collective ICEBERG New Music Friday, May 17th @ DiMenna Center, New York City Known for reaching new heights in percussive music, pioneering percussion soloist, drummer and software engineer Lisa Pegher premieres A.I.RE (Artificial Intelligence Rhythm Evolution), an evening-length multimedia concert on Friday, May 17th at Manhattan’s DiMenna Center. In a groundbreaking collaboration with New York-based composer collective ICEBERG New Music, Pegher seamlessly melds new works by 10 different composers into an explosion of technology and sound, complete with stunning live video and sound processing installations. Audience members will be taken on a musical journey of percussion music’s evolution starting with

Read more
by AMT PR
Canada, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Martin Arnold – Flax (CD Review)

Martin Arnold  Flax Kerry Yong, piano Another Timbre   Martin Arnold’s solo piano work Flax has a sad backstory. It was originally commissioned by the abundantly talented new music pianist Philip Thomas, who shortly afterward became seriously ill and was unable to premiere the work. Kerry Yong performs the piece in his honor on an Another Timbre CD. The piece was already well underway when this transpired, but one cannot hear the considerable poignancy and elegant gracefulness of Flax without connecting it to Thomas’s loss of health.    Arnold is a Canadian composer whose work is influenced by Morton Feldman

Read more
by Christian Carey
Birthdays, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Happy 87th Birthday Philip Glass!

Happy 87th birthday Philip Glass! Composers who live into their late octogenarian years would be justified in resting on their laurels. Glass, however has returned to playing his earlier piano music, releasing a new recording, Philip Glass Solo (Orange Mountain) of older pieces such as Mad Rush, Metamorphosis, and Truman Sleeps. Below is the video for Opening. 

Read more
by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Commissions, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Lincoln Center, Music Events, New York, Orchestral, Women composers

NY Philharmonic – Unpacking the Spring 2024 Season for New Music Lovers

A few months ago, I wrote an article that distilled the New York Philharmonic Fall 2023 season into enticing programs for contemporary music lovers. “When you see New York Philharmonic’s glossy brochures and online ads, you might be hard pressed to spot the new music offerings that are in nearly every program. For instance, “Trifonov Plays Schumann” hides the fact that there is a work for strings by the Lithuanian composer Raminta Šerkšnytė, a composition which Gidon Kremer referred to as ‘the calling card of Baltic music.’” Here is my annotation of Philharmonic concerts in Spring 2024 for the tiny

Read more
by Gail Wein
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Jeffrey Mumford – Echoing Depths on Albany

Jeffrey Mumford Echoing Depths Albany Records Jeffrey Mumford’s music channels high modernism into imaginative works that are luminously textured. His latest Albany release, Echoing Depths, features two pieces for orchestra and another for piano and ensemble. All three are concertos, a form that befits Mumford’s penchant for virtuosity.  The cello concerto Of fields unfolding … echoing depths of resonant light is dedicated to the composer Elliott Carter, a centenarian who passed away in 2011. Carter has been a key influence on Mumford’s music and was one of his composition teachers. Christine Lamprea is the soloist with the Detroit Symphony, conducted

Read more
by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, Film Music

Skjálfti on Sono Luminus (Recording review)

Skjálfti  Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson Sono Luminus SLE-70031   Today, where the list of practitioners frequently overlap, how does film music translate to concert music adaptation? On the Sono Luminus release Skjálfti (translated: Quake), the Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson present a compelling album length suite that is more ambitious than the clip show often heard on soundtrack recordings.    The cello concerto Quake is Pálsson’s best known piece, but Skjálfti doesn’t feature music from it. Instead, it is from Tinna Hrafnsdóttir’s film of the same name, for which Pálsson and Egilsson composed the soundtrack.

Read more
by Christian Carey
BAM, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera, Strings, viola, Violin, Vocals

“Angel Island” by Huang Ruo at the Prototype Festival

The special sauce that has made Prototype, the annual opera/theater festival, a success for over a decade is a straightforward formula: socially relevant, edgy vocal works that are high on drama. Angel Island, a theatrical work with music by Huang Ruo, fits that description. The speck of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay known as Angel Island served as an immigration port in the first half of the 20th century . Hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrants from Asia were interrogated and detained, some of them for years, in the decades from 1910 to 1940. It’s not a

Read more
by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical

Music and openness: Schell’s picks for 2022–23

As the pandemic recedes in our rearview mirrors, the flow of new albums of radical music has returned to its pre-COVID level, as has the year-end ritual of Best of… lists from critics and other interested parties. Indeed, it’s that post-lockdown deluge of recorded activity, along with the resumption of live musicmaking, that saturated my inbox to the point that I’m combining two years of critical listening and Flotation Device curation into this one article, which endeavors to summarize where Western art music stands today as an integral, global practice that comprises improvised, composed and fixed-media music. Transcultural exemplars Heiner

Read more
by Michael Schell
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Strings

Gerald Cohen – Voyagers (CD Review)

  Gerald Cohen Voyagers Innova Records   One can think of few chamber ensembles better suited to contemporary music than the Cassatt String Quartet. Their intonation, musicality, and interpretive powers are superlative. Composer Gerald Cohen has enlisted them to record three of his pieces on Innova, two originally commissioned for Cassatt.    Cohen describes himself as a storyteller, both in his vocal and instrumental music. The three distinct narratives here are populated by musical quotations relevant to them, yet they never seem like pastiche. The title work is about the two Voyager spacecrafts, which were sent out into our solar

Read more
by Christian Carey