Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Ojai, Percussion, Photos, Post Modern, Premieres

The West Coast premiere of Inuksuit at the 2012 Ojai Music Festival

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words, so consider this photo album a 26,000 word review until I file my story. Inuksuit was one of the most extraordinary pieces of music I’ve heard since–well, John Luther Adams’ orchestra and tape work, Dark Waves. (On Sunday, we’ll hear JLA’s two-piano version of Dark Waves.) Do read Paul Muller’s account of this concert and Thursday evening’s concert. To give you some idea of what the performance was like, here are some crude videos I made on my not-designed-for-filming camera. The mike on the camera did a reasonable job of capturing

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by Christian Hertzog
Concert review, Contemporary Classical

Ojai Festival 2012

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

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by Paul Muller
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Video

Tonight: Carter premiere at Contact!

103 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.

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by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

It Happened Last Night

Spotted 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.

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by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Klytemnestra Returns

On 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

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Premieres

The Gospel According to The Other Mary

[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

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by Christian Hertzog
Contemporary Classical

Philip Setzer (violinist of Emerson String Quartet) – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: An Outline of Memories

Attending 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

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by Emerson String Quartet
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, File Under?, New York, Percussion

Tonight: Amy X. Neuburg debuts at the Stone

This 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

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by Christian Carey