The big news in London this weekend is a £1 million (almost $2m) tie-up between English National Opera and Sony PlayStation to put games consoles into the foyer of the hallowed London Coliseum. This is an opera house renown for its shock tactics, as the production shot from their Don Giovanni here shows. Of course, anything to reach a new audience must be praiseworthy. Or must it? On An Overgrown Path isn’t so sure, and also has the full story.
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: Cecilia Arditto (b. 1966 — Argentina / NL) Cecilia will tell you: I have always been struck by the sensuality of sound, I have always loved it. The infinite possibilities of instruments constitute a source of inspiration and research. However, the exploration of sound would just be an empty category, a cosmetic idea, if it were not tied to the
Read moreGian Carlo Menotti died today at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95. In the days before television became a total waste of time, NBC commissioned him to write the first opera specifically for the new medium. For many years, Amahl and the Night Visitors was played every year at Christmas and it introduced millions of people, including me, to the idea of opera. I haven’t heard it for years and thus have no adult opinion of whether it is good or not but it was a very good thing for NBC and Menotti to have done.
Read moreThe County Museum of Art didn’t cancel all serious music: just the Monday Evening Concerts. Under new management, the music program now offers occasional concerts on any night but Monday. They try to relate the bookings and programming to the art. Thanks to one other difference — being willing to do some PR — a good crowd came to LACMA to see eighth blackbird. The ostensible tie-in to the art was with the smashing special exhibition on Magritte and art he influenced. (Unfortunately the museum is closed on Wednesdays so that for the attendees the art was limited to a distracting
Read moreOur favorite techno-geek pianist Hugh Sung has come up with a really neat new way to integrate live music with dynamic imagery, animations, and synchronized video clips, all of which can be controlled by the performing musician directly a simple foot-switch. Think Arditti Quartet meets the Joshua Light Show. (Perhaps too old a reference for most of you.) Hugh calls his system the Visual Recital which seems as good a name as any. You can catch Hugh’s next Visual Recital live on Saturday night at the Darlington Arts Center, 977 Shavertown Road, Boothwyn, PA (610-358-3632) or if you can’t make it you can watch this sample
Read morePhilip Glass turns 70 today and it seems to me he is doing so without much of the hoopla that surrounded Steve Reich’s attainment of that milestone a few months back. No mention of the event in today’s New York Times and Google News turns up only a brief note about a birthday concert in Nashville. Underwhelming reaction for a man who is America’s best-known living composer and one whose music is so widely available in so many forms–CDs, films, concerts and so on. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that Glass had written so much music that critics assume
Read moreMajor props to young Master Salvage for his outstanding work attending to the front page over the past couple of weeks while I attended to some pressing matters of commerce. Big up yourself, David. Well done. So, let’s go to the mailbag and see what’s happening. Ah, here’s something. Our regular Rob Deemer has just launched a new radio program called The Composer Next Door on Oklahoma City’s classical radio station KCSC-FM. Rob, who lives and teaches in OC, approached the general manager of the station last summer with the idea of a locally-created show that focuses on living composers and new
Read moreMy pal Christopher DeLaurenti — composer, field-recordist, improviser, and writer on Seattle’s classical and new-music scene in the weekly Stranger newspaper — is happy to announce the release of his latest CD, Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven, Stravinsky and Holst. Chris’ short description: “Secretly recorded at orchestral concerts across the country, this collection of intermissions teems with unusual soundscapes, startling (and unintended) collective improvisations, and surprising, sometimes gritty sonic detail from the sacred space of the concert hall. [….] Why record intermissions? One duty of the composer is to expose the unexpected, overlooked, and hidden skeins of music
Read moreJohn Ogdon was born, seventy years ago, on January 27th 1937. The following words were written by him in 1981. “Here then…are some of the harsh facts behind the words ‘severe mental illness’ and ‘serious nervous breakdown’ which the press has been using about me so often lately. Not that I am complaining about the press! – I was thrilled by the sympathetic and wide spread media interest that came my way both before and after my return to the … concert stage”. Ogdon (photo above) was an extraordinary pianist, composer, and new music visionary whose close friends and musical influences included Peter Maxwell
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: Bun-Ching Lam (b. 1954 — China / US) — Born in the Macau region of China, Bun-Ching Lam began studying piano at the age of seven and gave her first public solo recital at fifteen. In 1976, she received a B.A. in piano performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She then accepted a scholarship from the University of
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