[youtube]1ain4qftoM[/youtube] If the video doesn’t show up here, you can view it on the actual YouTube site here.
Read moreSpeaking of great American operas, Tobias Picker has written two of them; Emmeline, which is an unqualified masterpiece, and An American Tragedy, which I think history will regard more dearly than its contemporary reviews might suggest. Between those two landmarks, Picker wrote a kind of “forgotten” opera called Thérèse Raquin, an epic based on the Zola novel which, like Tragedy, involves an unwanted lover being chucked overboard in favor of a more attractive alternative. Picker’s psychiatrist, if he has one, could probably make something of that. Thérèse Raquin premiered at The Dallas Opera in 2001 and is now having its New York premiere run, in a revised
Read moreI don’t know Ricky Ian Gordon personally but he e-mails me frequently with updates on his projects, never neglecting to sign off with “xxxooo” which I find endearing although I’m sure he does the same for all the guys. I know and like his music mainly from Audra McDonald and a wonderful recording of his songs called Bright-Eyed Joy but nothing I’ve heard or read prepared me for the universal praise for the Minnesota Opera’s production of Gordon’s (with libretto by Michael Korie) The Grapes of Wrath. What we have here, apparently, is a real contender for the title of the Great American Opera.
Read moreMonday Evening Concerts are alive and well and being given in the great acoustics of Zipper Hall! And if you don’t know why that’s important you’re reading the wrong blog. Last night’s program was the most stimulating in four or five years, stimulating because it presented works by six talented composers, works that were fresh and alive and downright good music. One of the fresh approaches in the new MEC is to have a musician serve as curator for the program, selecting composers to bring to our attention and determining the works to support the rationale. In this first program
Read moreOne of the many pleasures of the brief (but free) all-Chinary Ung concert given earlier today at Juilliard by the Da Capo Chamber Players was the absence of any blathering about “East meets West.” I’m sure part of the reason for the absence was a simple lack of time for blathering altogether: the performance was given in conjunction with the school’s Composers’ Forum which apparently keeps to a pretty tight schedule. But whatever the reason, such cross-cultural discussion would have been out of place. Ung’s music does not sound eclectic; it does not sound as if it had some agenda
Read moreIt’s a monster week for our gaucho amigo Lawrence Dillon whose music will be showcased at the Music Now Fest 2007, February 21, 22 and 23 at Eastern Michigan University. This is EMU’s 15th biennial new music festival and it gets underway on Wednesday at 8 pm with a concert of pieces by EMU composers Whitney Prince and Anthony Iannaccone as well as works by Steve Reich, Alberto Ginastera and others. Faculty artists include David Pierce, Willard Zirk, Garik Pedersen, John Dorsey, Kimberly Cole-Luevano, Kristy Meretta, Julie Stone, Kathryn Goodson and guest Cary Kocher. On Thursday, there will a composer convocation
Read moreGordon Wright, a conductor who championed obscure composers and made music across the chilly climes of Alaska as founder of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, was found dead on Wednesday on the porch of his cabin in Indian, Alaska. He was 72. [more] In the autumn of her life, decades after she had last performed in public, the British pianist Joyce Hatto was rediscovered by a small group of musicians and critics who contended that her recordings of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and others ranked alongside those of the 20th century’s most exceptional virtuosos…But now Ms. Hatto’s reputation for excellence and originality
Read moreOur regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online: Caroline M. Breece (b.1977 — UK/US) Michael G. Breece (b. 1971 — US) Mike over at Avant Music News this week purely by chance beat me to posting about Caroline. I’d planned showing off her and her husband Michael, ever since I bumped into them on Myspace last summer. A number of married composer couples come to mind, but few
Read moreLast night’s Never-on-Monday Evening Concert at LACMA presented the Argento Chamber Ensemble in its sampling of German music. Lanier Sammons wrote a nice review of the concert’s performance in New York. As performed here, the program had a different sequence, separating the two pre-Expressionist works so that the Schoenberg Kammersymphonie ended the first half and the Wagner transcription ended the second. Despite Lanier’s good review (and that from the NY Times), I felt the concert made a strong argument that an ensemble of five strings and ten winds does not make for good balance and clean textures. Listening to the Liebestod made
Read moreOn Sunday, Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov won two 2007 Grammy awards—Best Opera Recording and Best Contemporary Classical Composition—for his opera, Ainadamar (Fountain Of Tears) starring soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with conductor Robert Spano. In August of last year, WGBH Classics in the Morning host Cathy Fuller sat down with Golijov at his home in Brookline, MA and discussed this award winning opera, his first. This exclusive, in-depth interview—complete with excerpts from the moving opera—can be heard online at wgbh.org/osvaldo. Ainadamer tells the story of dramatist Federico García Lorca and his muse, Catalan stage actress Margarita Xirgu (in
Read more