Sunday Music: CD Samplers in the Era of Pandora Sunday Music Volume 4 Big Helium Records BHRSM004 / www.bighelium.com Unlike the album driven days of yore, today it’s all about the mix. From purchasing single tracks digitally at online stores such as Itunes and Amazon to the internet radio sensation Pandora, which tailors ‘stations’ to a listener’s preferences, music is presented as eminently accessible; instant gratification, inevitable. While all aforementioned methods of mix are exciting in their potential for discovery, surfing the impossibly commercial Itunes or using Pandora’s efficient but sometimes ham-fisted engine is unlikely to provide the enlightening swerves
Read moreIn 2002, Silas Huff moved to New York City for a girl, got a day job, and, while riding the bus into Manhattan, noticed a lot of folks getting on in Astoria carrying instrument cases. A composer and conductor himself fresh from a year in Germany, Silas started approaching these Astoria musicians, and, next thing he knew, he was holding auditions for the “Astoria Symphony.” But the symphony was actually his second ensemble. Back in 1995, as a classical guitar major at Texas State University, he wanted to put on some new music concerts. Now, new music concerts don’t get
Read moreGabriel Kahane performs Thursday, 9 October with Rob Moose at the Cornelia St. Café (8:00pm, doors; 8:30 Diane Birch, opening; 9:30 Gabe). This week, Gabriel and I exchanged some e-mail Q&A. The conversation got pretty deep. –David Salvage DS: Gabriel, I’m enjoying your album [Untitled Debut]. I’m wondering, as I listen, what non-musical sources of inspiration you might have. Like poets, artists, and so on. GK: I think that’s a great question. There are certainly some fairly explicit literary inspirations for some of the songs on the record. “The Faithful” was written as a kind of response to Claire Messud’s
Read moreAnother full house at Zipper Hall, and we enjoyed ourselves with the music of William Kraft and his “Encounters” series of works for percussion. This was the third and final program in the Kraft/Encounters retrospective given by Southwest Chamber Music, honoring Kraft for his 85th birthday. By the end of tomorrow the whole series will have been recorded, and next year a 3 CD set will be available of this important set of compositions by a man who has been such a major participant in contemporary music in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the conversations with Bill Kraft will probably not be
Read moreNew York’s NPR station WNYC has been doing a bunch of programming on Leonard Bernstein, and the other night when I was moving my car I heard a great story: Lenny was backstage in a greenroom in Vienna, and a little old lady approached him. She introduced herself as the widow of Alban Berg, and Bernstein told her how honored he was to meet her. Now Berg, as you will recall, died without completing his opera Lulu, and there was some question about who would finish it. Helene Berg, Alban’s widow, initially offered the job to Schoenberg, who accepted but
Read moreGloria Cheng opened the Piano Spheres season last night at Zipper Hall. Much of the concert comprised selections from her recent recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky and Lutoslawski, and if you don’t yet have this in your library, now is a good time to correct your omission. And here’s just one of its good reviews (just scroll down). Betty Freeman commissioned a new work from Gerald Barry for Cheng to perform, and this opened the second half of the program. Le Vieux Sourd [the old deaf one], Debussy’s nickname for Beethoven, starts with quiet fragments of classical themes, as
Read moreViolinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is continually creating something new – from concerti by Krzysztof Penderecki and Andre Previn to works by Sebastian Currier and Henri Dutilleux. Mutter’s latest project is a recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens, written in 2006-07 and premiered with the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2007. Selke Harten-Strehk has more background here on Mutter’s website. I spoke with Mutter about the new concerto recording and about working with composers, and even if she composed herself. Listen to our conversation here. That morning it was very difficult to get an international connection, and then about 10 minutes into
Read moreTerry Jennings: I was happy to hear two short piano pieces by Jennings at the M50 concert S21 co-produced. Played with great sensitivity by Joseph Kubera, both works were spare, dissonant, and full of luxurious silences. Pianists would do well to combine these with Webern Op.27 and Schoenberg Op.19: you’d have a satisfying, chill 25 minutes of music. Now, what Jennings’s music has to do with minimalism as we know it beats me. But, whatever. Martin Matalon: In the mid 90s, Matalon was commissioned to write a new soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Malthusian masterpiece, Metropolis. The Manhattan Symfonietta performance on
Read moreI must confess that composer Douglas J. Cuomo has only recently appeared on my radar screen. That may mean that I’m not paying enough attention or it could mean that I never watched Sex and the City and thus avoided the theme, which is Cuomo’s most famous, and probably lucrative, credit. In any event, Cuomo is currently having a career season in “serious” music. A few months ago, Allan Kozinn selected Cuomo’s Arjuna’s Dilemma–which previewed this summer at the Pepsico Theater in Purchase–as one of the top picks for the new season, describing the 70-minute multimedia work as “a compelling
Read moreI like the wider length. Shall I fix up the rest of the pages and go with the new look?
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