Yasmin Williams – Acadia (Nonesuch) Guitarist Yasmin Williams displayed a number of unconventional methods for playing acoustic guitar during her first two recorded outings, Unwind (2019) and Urban Driftwood (2022). These were no mere tricks of the trade, instead serving as organic components in her creation of supple folk instrumentals. Acadia is her first recording released on Nonesuch, and features a number of collaborators. In another first, Williams also writes lyrics for her music. Although it is her primary instrument, on Acadia Williams doesn’t confine herself to the acoustic guitar. She also plays tap shoes, harp guitar, banjo,
Read moreBlack American composers dominated the programming at two of New York City’s major institutions last week — a 180° turn from the typical fare of Dead White Men at most orchestral concerts. On Wednesday, October 16, Carnegie Hall presented Sphinx Virtuosi — the flagship ensemble of the Sphinx Organization, an organization whose mission it is to encourage careers of Black and Latino classical musicians and arts administrators. Thursday at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall was New York Philharmonic’s program “Exploring Afromodernism” — a program which was repeated on Friday. Both concerts featured outstanding and committed performances of mainly 21st century classical
Read moreSplinter Reeds – Dark Currents (Cantaloupe) Splinter Reeds, the West Coast’s first wind quintet, has distinguished themselves as advocates for living composers. Dark Currents, their latest recording for Cantaloupe, features two twenty-ish minute long pieces, Tall Grass (2022) by the totalist composer and Bang on a Can member Michael Gordon, and Antenna Studies (2018) by Paula Matthusen, a professor at Wesleyan who is one of the finest experimental electronic composers of her generation; both works were written for Splinter Reeds. Gordon has steadily developed an eclectic musical language that exhibits fluency and variety in large scale forms. The
Read moreTuesday, October 15th: Sacred and Profane, Sirota and Clement at Symphony Space Tomorrow, Robert Sirota and Sheree Clement, two New York based composers, combine forces to present Sacred and Profane, a shared portrait concert at Symphony Space (7:30 PM, tickets here). Sirota may be best known for his stints as President at Peabody and Manhattan School of Music, but he’s remained active as a composer all along. Clement has also been involved as an arts administrator, having served as President of League of Composers/ISCM, Executive Director for New York New Music Ensemble, and, currently, on the board of Association
Read moreMiles Okazaki – Miniature America (Cygnus Records) Miles Okazaki – guitar Jon Ibragon, sopranino saxophone, slide saxophone, voice Caroline Davis, alto saxophone; Anna Weber, flute, tenor saxophone Jacob Garchik, trombone, bass trombone Matt Mitchell, piano; Patricia Brennan, vibraphone Ganavya, Jen Shyu, Fay Victor, voices David Breskin, producer Miles Okazaki’s latest recording, Miniature America, is one in which his compositional process has changed. He spent time sketching elements of sculpturist Ken Price’s work and was also inspired by the intricate line drawings of Sol Lewitt. The pieces created as a result of this research were coined “Slabs” by Okazaki, process
Read moreLouis Karchin: A Retrospective Merkin Concert Hall September 22, 2024 NEW YORK – Composer Louis Karchin has been prolific, even during the pandemic years. In a program at Merkin Concert Hall of chamber works and songs composed between 2018 and 2024, he was abetted by some of New York’s go-to new music performers, who acquitted themselves admirably throughout. Stephen Drury is an abundantly talented pianist. But even with a repertoire list as lengthy and challenging as Drury’s, Sonata-Fantasia (2020, New York Premiere) is an imposing addition. The piece is in four large sections combined into a single movement, with elements
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With his new solo program, Etudes/Quietudes, Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel celebrates the acoustic guitar, the instrument he switched to at the age of 13. (He had been trained to play classical music on violin.) The core of this new recording is a collection of concert etudes composed by .Muthspiel. Each of these 11 etudes explores a different aspect of the music for guitar, ranging from reflective to animated. The etudes are linked by four other pieces, such as Muthspiel’s heartfelt homage to Bill Evans (“For Bill Evans”); a sarabande by Johann Sebastian Bach (on which he improvises with elements from
Read moreVALIS 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
Read moreUntuxed, 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
Read moreBrett Dean Rooms of Elsinore BIS CD Jennifer France, soprano; Lotte Betts-Dean, mezzo-soprano Volker Hemken, bass clarinet James Crabb, accordion Juho Pohjonen, piano Andrey Lebedev, classical guitar Swedish Chamber Orchestra Brett Dean, violist and conductor Composer and violist Brett Dean has spent a number of years engaging with Hamlet, creating a controversial, successful, and musically compelling eponymous opera premiered in the UK in 2017 and subsequently produced at the Metropolitan Opera. Rooms of Elsinore (BIS, 2024) collects pieces serving as character sketches written in advance of the opera, those recasting material from the opera that premiered concurrently or subsequent
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