In August of this year, New Focus Recordings released New Music for Two Voices, an impressive collection of acapella vocal music by sopranos Susan Narucki and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. This lavish album features a full hour masterful singing of six contemporary works, including three world premiere recordings. Susan Narucki is an accomplished soprano who has appeared as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, among many other international appearances. She is presently on the faculty of the Department of Music at UC San Diego. Kirsten Ashley Wiest is an award-winning coloratura soprano who has
Read moreOn November 1, 2025, the Ventura College Symphony Orchestra presented “Celebration!”, a concert of contemporary music marking the Centennial of the founding of the school. Yunker Auditorium filled with a capacity crowd and the College Symphony – some 70 players strong – sprawled across every inch of the concert stage. Over two hours of music was programmed, featuring four world premiers and including compositions by past and present music faculty. Highlight of the concert was the premiere of Encantos, a piece by New Zealand composer Mark Menzies commissioned by Conductor Ashley Walters. Appropriately, the concert concluded with George Gershwin’s popular
Read moreMicrofest Records has released My Dancing Sweetheart, a new album that features music by composers Ben Johnston, Bill Alves and Helmut Oehring. The performers are all first-rate Los Angeles musicians and include Stacey Fraser, vocals, Aron Kallay, keyboards, Shalini Vijavan, violin and Nick Terry, percussion. Subtitled “Just Songs”, My Dancing Sweetheart is an accessible and engaging introduction to the world of Just Intonation and contemporary tonal palettes. Just Intonation is a tuning system that is based on optimizing the frequency ratios between the notes in the scale. Our conventional 12 Tone Equal Temperament tuning, by contrast, assigns specific frequencies to
Read moreCold Blue Music has announced the release of Plain Songs: “Love Comes Quietly”:(after Robert Creeley), a new CD album by composer Peter Garland. As the title explains, Plain Songs consists of seven movements of pipe organ music inspired by the poetry of Robert Creeley. The album artfully blends the simple plainsong traditions of the early church with the later development of the pipe organ. Peter Garland is quoted in the liner notes: “I wanted to write an organ piece that would be intimate and mostly quiet, emphasizing the nature of the organ as a wind instrument capable of long, sustaining
Read moreThe Friday evening concert was titled The Holy Liftoff, continuing the theme from the morning. There was a solo viola piece by Leilehua Lanzilotti, the USC Cello Ensemble led by Seth Parker Woods, with music by Sofia Gubaidulina, Julius Eastman and Terry Riley. The ever reliable Steven Schick conducted and the JACK Quartet joined with Clare Chase in the final work. First up was ko‘u inoa by Leilehua Lanzilotti, a composer, violist and interdisciplinary artist based in Hawaii. “ko‘u inoa” means “my name” or “in my name” and is a Hawaiian term freighted with identity, ancestry and community. The piece
Read moreAttending the Ojai Music Festival in person is one of the great musical experiences on the West Coast. The mountains, the town, Libbey Park and great music make Ojai the place to be in early June. One of the festival’s best kept secrets, however, is that the concerts in Libbey Bowl are live-streamed over the internet. Not only that, the sound system is exceptional and the camera work excellent. If you can’t get to the Ojai Festival in person, the next best thing is to watch the streamed video. This is what I did this year and it was a
Read moreBeaufort Scales is a new CD by Christopher Cerrone recently released by Cold Blue Music. Commissioned by the Lorelei Ensemble, this album explores the musical expression of the wind at sea in eleven beguiling vocal tracks. The composer writes that each of the pieces “…comment on the state of the weather at one point in time, serving as both a reprieve and a reflection upon the surrounding movements.” Developed in 1805 by British Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort and still in use today, the Beaufort Scale describes the velocity of wind using a value from 0 to 12 to indicate sea
Read moreMimi Hilaire On June 8, 2024 Synchromy presented a workshop reading of My Wings Burned Off, an opera by Jason V. Barabba opera with libretto by June Carryl. This was in conjunction with the 2024 Opera America conference held at various venues all around Los Angeles. The conference is a place for opera musicians, composers, conductors and administrators to meet each year to exchange ideas, techniques and to pitch new productions. This reading of My Wings Burned Off was held in the Grand Rehearsal Hall at the USC Colburn School of Music downtown. A twelve-piece string orchestra was on hand
Read moreCold Blue Music has released Waves and Particles, a new CD by John Luther Adams featuring the JACK Quartet. This new album by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams explores the deeper levels of elemental nature through extraordinary musical expression. The composer writes: “Waves and Particles was inspired by quantum physics, fractal geometry, and noise – which function as elemental metaphors in my music.” This is realized by the renowned JACK Quartet who artfully extract new and exceptional sounds from the standard string quartet. This new album follows three previous CDs by Adams, released by the Cold Blue label and recorded by
Read moreOn Saturday, May 4th, 2024 the Ventura College Department of Performing Arts presented Ad Astra, a concert by the Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra. The program had something for everyone: the US Premiere of a new chamber work by Mark Menzies, a Shostakovich string quartet, part of a Prokofiev violin concerto featuring soloist Alex Fager and a full-bodied Star Wars suite for orchestra. A sizable audience filled Yunker Auditorium in the VC Performing Arts Center and the musicians completely covered the roomy stage. The concert opened with the US premiere of Wai-rā-rawa, by Mark Menzies. This piece was inspired by
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