The 66th annual Ojai Festival was kicked off with the West Coast premiere of Inuksuit, the 2009 composition by John Luther Adams. Staged outdoors and directed by Steven Schick, some 46 percussionists and 3 piccolo players performed the 60 minute piece amid a large crowd in Libbey Park. The audience was encouraged to walk among the many scattered percussion sets, making the experience more like visiting a sound installation than attending a concert. Inuksuit is named after the distinctive stone markers of the Arctic Inuit peoples and the printed score has the outline of one such sculpture. The piece begins
Read more103 year old Elliott Carter has written a new work, Two Controversies and a Conversation, which will be premiered tonight at the Met Museum as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! series. The concert, conducted by David Robertson, also includes a newly commissioned work by Michael Jarrell and Pierre Boulez’s …explosante-fixe… Carter discusses the piece in the video below. The Contact! program will be repeated on Saturday at Symphony Space.
Read moreSpotted at Keen’s Steakhouse: New Music evangelist and all-round wild-and-crazy guy Frank J. Oteri hovering with music industry macher Marc Ostrow. Is there a game-changing new website where classical, jazz and theatrical composers can easily publish and promote their work in the works? Can you spell ScoreStreet, boys and girls? Frank wrote two massive pieces recently that you should read if you haven’t already. One is a 8,000 word essay on Beach Boy founder Brian Wilson’s Smile and the other is on John Cage. That’s frank, brother.
Read moreOn June 10th, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston will host two performances of Klytemnestra, a chamber opera starring and conceived by soprano Misha Penton and scored by celebrated Houston-area composer/conductor Dominick DiOrio. Klytemnestra premiered in April 2011, selling out Houston’s Divergence Vocal Theater and drawing high praise from CultureMap Houston’s Joel Luks. As Ms. Penton described to me, Klytemnestra’s return to the stage is, “sleeker, redesigned, [and] semi-staged”, using the paintings of the Museum of Fine Arts’ Gallery 214 as backdrops for the production. The work’s creative team remains the same as in its first iteration, with pianist Kyle
Read moreOur friends at RCRDLBL are sharing an MP3 of “Lots” by indie classical composer Dan Deacon (embed below). Dan Deacon’s new full length recording, America, is out August 28th via Domino Records.
Read more[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPZU_fK4-J8[/youtube] Early reviews care of bloggers (one well-informed, one not so much) Boosey and Hawkes has a perusal score available–through an inadequate interface methinks–here. I was able to get some sense of the First Act by glancing at the score, and I wrote a preview for the LA Weekly here. I’m attending the Sunday show and will report back here. Did anyone see the premiere last night? Your opinions are most welcome in the comments section! Updates: Zachary Woolfe weighs in with the first professional review I’ve found online. His verdict? Moments of power and beauty, but Adams and Sellars
Read moreAttending my very first Lieder recital, and my first experience of hearing Schubert’s “Winterreise”, at Carnegie Hall in the early 70’s. Sitting up in the last row of the balcony—the cheap seats—listening to that gorgeous voice float up to me and bring me down to the stage, to his world, even his softest whisper, with a technique he used often and so effectively. Immediately going out to buy his historic recording. Literally wearing it out over those next several years. His work introduced me to the world of art song, song cycles, and, most especially, Schubert. After Schubert, there was
Read moreBest wishes to Pauline Oliveros, who turned eighty today! [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-X4raYLHPE&feature=related[/youtube]
Read moreThis month, Gyan Riley is curating for New York venue the Stone. One of the San Francisco residents that he’s invited to visit the Big Apple for a gig is avant-cabaret artist Amy X. Neuburg, who performs there tonight (details below). Neuburg eschews the usual instrumentation of a cabaret performer, instead using an electronic drumset. But the music isn’t isolated to percussive utterances; rather the synth drums serve as a control surface with which she can trigger live recording and overdubs. Thus, a drum hit might ‘sound’ like drums, or it might just as easily trigger backing vocals or synth patches. Using this
Read moreComposers and sound artists have only got a few days – until May 31st – to answer the annual Vox Novus call for 60-second recorded works for the 60×60 Project. What started as a gleam in the eye of composer and impresario Robert Voisey is now celebrating its tenth season of providing international exposure and multiple performances to composers of any nationality, age, or career stage. 60×60 was designed to showcase the diversity of the contemporary music scene by getting as many composers as possible before the largest possible audience. And it’s succeeded — 2000 composers have had their works
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