Sequenza21

VALIS by Tod Machover Opera Review By Dana Reason, Oregon State University & Paris Myers, MIT Media Lab  The lights dim. Nothing. Then pink. Sophia, played by Kristin Young, a NY based lyric coloratura, emerges in a neon pink bodysuit. She paces what appears to be a cat walk; both aware of and unbothered by the audience’s presence. Subtly, one of the pianists, Emil Droga, beautifully shapes improvised, ambient atonal phrases–a teaser warm up of sonic whimsy. The opera has begun. In composer Tod Machover’s 2023 production of VALIS, frequencies of sound and light are woven together with advanced, algorithmic

Untuxed, a series of informal, intermission-less Friday-night concerts, returned to Seattle Symphony last night in the hands of its inaugurator, Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony’s former Music Director and current Conductor Emeritus. The program consisted solely of Shostakovich’s wartime Eighth Symphony (1943), a massive piece that can betray a deficient ensemble, with its multitude of lengthy and exposed solos for woodwinds, cello and violin (whose associations with death and funeral music in European are readily embraced by its composer), and by the perennial balance challenges posed by Shostakovich, whose legacy is littered with the corpses of performances that conveyed only two

On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer. Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in

The Prom on August 10 was presented by The National Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alexandre Bloch and Tess Jackson. The 160 members of the orchestra, who completely filled the stage, were joined by the almost as large cohort of NYO Inspire, who were in various places in the hall, including the gallery, some boxes, the choir seating areas behind the stage, and, eventually, in the aisles of the stalls. The program began with the Overture to The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, and concluded with the Symphony No. 1 of Gustav Mahler. In between those were two works, Orpheus Undone

The late-night Prom on August 9, presented by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment, conducted by Chloe Rooke, was devoted to a single work, Songs of Wars I Have Seen by Heiner Goebbels. The work was written in 2007 for those same two groups, on commission from the Southbank Centre, for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall after its two year-long renovation. Songs of Wars I Have Seen is based on Gertrude Stein’s book detailing her life in occupied France during World War II. The ins and outs of how Stein and her companion