The versatile performing duo known as “The Kenners” played a terrific concert Saturday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The program featured works by Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jason Eckhardt, and premieres of one form or another by Kate Soper, David Brynjar Franzson, and Petr Bakla. The Kenners’ catch is that each musician plays more than one instrument. Saturday’s program required Eliot Gattegno to switch between alto, tenor, and soprano saxophones; Eric Wubbels alternated between piano and accordion. (Sometimes he performs live electronics as well.) Soper and Franzson provided the world premieres. I liked Soper’s I Had a Slow
Read moreThere was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe. If you don’t know BMOP you’re missing out on one of the best forces for new orchestral music around. There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, which is why you should read it for yourself, but it might be of particular interest to this crowd that they’re putting together their own record label “BMOP Sound” which will be launched in January “with five new releases adding to its existing catalog of 13 commercially released
Read moreFor your Thursday dining and dancing pleasure: [youtube]ARqKIw3vV3E[/youtube]
Read moreToday’s assignment: the perfect ghosts and goblins playlist.
Read moreThe New York Philharmonic is thinking of visiting North Korea next year and that has caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the nuke ’em, don’t serenade ’em crowd. The conservative position was captured rather nicely by Terry Teachout in a piece called Serenading a Tyrant in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday: “Why … is the New York Philharmonic giving serious consideration to playing in Pyongyang, the capital of what may be the world’s most viciously repressive dictatorship?” he wrote. “Attendance at the Philharmonic’s concerts will be carefully controlled. And of course any concert in Pyongyang can’t possibly reach the North Korean people, because only
Read moreThe biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following sentence: “Jazz’s turn to the avant-garde and exoticisms of the 1960s now seems as inevitable as the rise of atonal music after the breakup of the stable societies of 19th century Europe.” These days you’re likely to get stoned if you so much as hint that there was any kind of inevitability in the rise of atonal music (whatever that might be). Fancy not knowing that “we” all now regard
Read moreRecent postings here notwithstanding, I swear I’m not on a complete György Ligeti kick; but it just so happens that the German-news-in-English website Sign and Sight has printed the translation of a speech György Kurtág gave in remembrance of his great friend, fellow Hungarian and fellow composer. (The occasion was Kurtág’s receiving the Ordre Pour le Merite in Berlin.) The German version was originally published in August this year, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As a bonus, this article includes all the extra stuff that Kurtág never got to say during the ceremony. It’s a beautiful, intensely intimate memoriam.
Read moreHey, I think you and your readers at sequenza21 will like this piece we just published, by Richard Taruskin: It’s a provocative argument that the dire situation in which classical music finds itself is being made even more dire by the sentimentality and unreality of some of the music’s most ardent defenders. Here’s a link. Best, Barron YoungSmith The New Republic
Read moreSeveral good reasons to be glad you weren’t a child prodigy. Oops, forgot. Some of you probably were. Morton Subotnick. Discuss.
Read moreAfter his spectacular Spoleto Festival performance of the 16 piece Violin Futura set, Piotr Szewczyk continues to promote the series with a new video and an upcoming gig at the Santa Fe New Music Festival, February 2nd. [youtube]Ywd_mkPa8Oo[/youtube]. Check out the entire series, which was designed around short, exciting pieces for solo violin composed just for Piotr. My favorites include our own Lawrence Dillon’s Mister Blister, Piotr’s Cadenza and Carson Cooman’s The Doors in the Sky. Other composers featured include Mason Bates, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, and myself with Puce. Piotr’s use of YouTube videos and the web in general
Read more