Geoff Nuttall, violinist for the St. Lawrence String Quartet and Director of Chamber Music for the SpoletoUSA Festival in Charleston SC, just announced details of the 11 programs for the 33 concerts that will be performed at this year’s Festival . The series runs from Friday, May 22 through Sunday, June 7 and is sponsored by Bank of America. I’ll be taking in a few of the performances and giving you a report. Among the highlight of this year’s series is the world premiere of Control Freak for improvising singer and instrumental septet, composed by the 2015 composer-in-residence Mark Applebaum. A colleague of
Read moreThe joyous news from Philadelphia today is that Bird Lives! Opera Philadelphia is doing its first premiere in almost four decades and it’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, composed by Daniel Schnyder, whose “thrilling classical-tinged jazz blend…constantly pushes the envelope” (Jazz Times), to a libretto by award-winning poet and playwright Bridgette Wimberly. The new chamber opera was created for American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, a nominee for the 2015 International Opera Male Singer of the Year Award. Co-commissioned and co-produced with Gotham Chamber Opera, Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD was conceived and written for Brownlee’s agile, expressive voice, which Schnyder likens to the color and technical virtuosity of Parker’s music. As the New York
Read moreArt Share LA, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, was the scene of a concert Friday February 27, 2015 entitled Terrain featuring works by Brian Ferneyhough, Brian Griffeath-Loeb and Elizabeth Lutyens. The occasion was the first anniversary of the WasteLAnd ensemble and a nice crowd turned out for an evening of complex music and birthday cake. The concert began with Recomposition #4 (2012) by Brian Griffeath-Loeb and this featured Mark Menzies as solo violin. According to the program notes “… Recomposition #4 takes Ferneyhough’s iconic violin solo, Intermedio alla Ciaccona, and subjects it to an array of transformations.
Read moreThe London Symphony Orchestra announced today the appointment of Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director. He will take up his appointment in September 2017, following in the footsteps of previous Principal Conductors including André Previn, Michael Tilson Thomas, Sir Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev. As Music Director he will be involved in every aspect of the LSO’s work as well as championing the importance of music and music education. At the announcement of his appointment, Simon Rattle said: “During my work with the LSO over the last years, I noticed that despite the Orchestra’s long and illustrious history, they
Read moreMATA Festival celebrates its seventeenth year, Monday, April 13 to Saturday, April 18, 2015, showcasing the wild variety of today’s compositional climate with a sweeping range of original compositions by thirty composers under the age of 40 from seventeen countries around the globe. Curated by the newly appointed Artistic Director, Du Yun, the 2015 Festival received international submissions from nearly a thousand composers—increasing by hundreds each year and confirming MATA’s booming status as the leading international festival for emerging composer talent. Among the Festival’s featured works are eleven American premieres and nine world premieres—three of which are Festival commissions—representing voices
Read moreA week from today, the American Modern Ensemble will bring a brand new program to SubCulture‘s stage. Entitled, “BLUE”, this upcoming performance celebrates the release of AME’s latest album, Powerhouse Pianists II, which features pianists Stephen Gosling and Blair MacMillan performing works for two pianos by leading living composers including John Adams and John Corigliano. The program AME will perform at SubCulture will feature an array of the group’s talented players performing works by Margaret Brouwer, George Crumb, Robert Paterson, and Frederic Rzewski, among others. The evening’s music is arranged around the theme of “blue”, and spans from nautical evocations
Read moreThe Blue Whale in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles was the venue for a concert entitled “The Other Side of Valentines Day” by the group Synchromy – appropriately on Sunday, February 15, 2014. A nice crowd turned out to hear an evening of original new music performed by soprano Justine Aronson, Matt Barbier on trombone and pianist Richard Valitutto. In all, some ten pieces were heard, most of them by Los Angeles-based composers. The concert programs were handed out in envelopes in the manner of a Valentines card – a clever touch that added to the convivial
Read moreI see my friends in Houston just had a brush with rare, almost-freezing weather. All the better to get you in the proper mind-set for a wonderful concert coming up this week… This Saturday, February 21, 7:30 pm, at the South Main Baptist Church (4100 Main Street, Houston, TX), the one-and-only Paul Hillier will make his Houston debut leading the also one-and-only Houston Chamber Choir, in a program of music from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Hillier is a world-renowned and award-winning choral director at the forefront of both early and new music, often combining the two with highly inventive programming across
Read moreThe two living American composers who share the name John Adams were the big winners at last night’s Grammy Awards. John Adams, of Nixon in China and Death of Klinghoffer fame, won the Best Orchestral Performance for the second year in a row with the Saint Louis Symphony, conducted by David Robertson, being selected for its recording of his latest scores: City Noir and the Saxophone Concerto. Last year, the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of his Harmonielehre and Short Ride in a Fast Machine took home the award. The Seattle Symphony received the Best Contemporary Classical Composition award for its recording of John LUTHER Adams’s Become
Read moreCarnegie Hall will mark its 125th anniversary next season by launching a new music project that will commission 125 new works over the next five years. Carnegie will present 15 world premieres next season, two American premieres, and 19 New York premieres by composers including Magnus Lindberg, John Adams, Olga Neuwirth, Jonathan Leshnoff and the composing collective Sleeping Giant, which is made of composers Andrew Norman, Robert Honstein, Ted Hearne, Jacob Cooper, Christopher Cerrone, and Timo Andres. Carnegie named the Kronos Quartet its creative chair for the season and said that as part of the newmusic project it would jointly commission 10 new works a
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