Montana native Christopher Stark has won American Composers Orchestra’s 2010 Underwood Commission, earning him a $15,000 purse for a work to be premiered by ACO in a future season. Chosen from seven finalists during ACO’s 19th annual Underwood New Music Readings on May 21 and 22, Stark won the top prize with his work Ignatian Exercises. Born in 1980, Christopher Stark spent his formative years in rural western Montana. His music is deeply rooted in the American West, always seeking to capture the expansive energy of Montana’s quintessential American landscape. In addition to ACO, he has worked with ensembles such
Read moreNaxos Records’ founder and CEO Klaus Heymann meets me in a café, downstairs in the midtown hotel where he’s staying in Manhattan. Heymann is on a trip to the US in which he’s doing press meetings and presentations in New York, followed by meetings with the Naxos America team at their base of operations in Franklin, Tennessee. Then he’s off to the West Coast for still more meetings. Finally, he gets to go back to his home in Hong Kong. When I remark about the seemingly whirlwind nature of the trip, Heymann says, “International travel is expensive these days. It’s
Read moreIf you’re an aspiring Wagnerian, this probably won’t interest you much but the nice folks at Hartford Opera Theater (HOT) are looking for scores for five short operas that will be learned, staged, rehearsed, and performed in the span of 48 hours, beginning on November 12 and culminating in a final performance on Sunday, November 14. Composers are asked to submit opera scores written for 2-3 singers, with at least one part written for a soprano or mezzo-soprano. HOT advises that scores with more opportunities for women will be more likely to be chosen for this event. The operas may
Read moreMy graduate history seminar on minimalism starts next week at Westminster Choir College. I’ll be teaching the course in a three-week intensive session – three hours a day/four days a week. In that time – just 12 meetings in all – we need to cover a lot of ground. There are three assigned texts: Minimalism: Origins by Edward Strickland, Repeating Ourselves by Robert Fink, and Music Downtown by Kyle Gann, as well as a number of supplemental readings (lots of Tom Johnson) and listening assignments. Each student will be required to make a class presentation and write a substantial research
Read moreWhy do some extraordinarily talented people never show up on the radar? Eric Lyon is one such unsung genius. I understand he’s been impressing folks in Brooklyn the past few years, and he wowed them at the Bonk Festival of Music in Tampa for over a decade (not to say that knocking them dead at the Bonk Festival is going to boost anyone’s career). But unless you go to ICMC or SEAMUS or have had the good fortune to live somewhere that Eric regularly presented his music, you probably don’t know about him. Whatever the reason, it is a cosmic
Read moreI found one of my favorite reviews from the 1990’s (Roger Reynolds’s Dreaming and Harvey Sollberger’s Passages), and posted it here. There was a minor controversy surrounding Roger Reynolds’s commission from the San Diego Symphony (his first from the Symphony after living in San Diego for over 2 decades). Dreaming had been on the schedule for performance the season before, but the premiere was cancelled. Theories about the cancellation, many involving Symphony Board intrigue, bounced around the UC San Diego Music Dept. Several months later I interviewed Igor Gruppman, the concertmaster for the SDS. He related that the musicians have
Read moreIt’s summer, it’s hot, and the music scene here in the Center of the Universe is fairly slow so I thought it might be a good time to get some feedback on an unfinished “piece” I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. It’s a website that looks like this: Actually, you don’t have to look at the picture; it’s already up on the web at Chamber Music Now so I guess you might consider this a “beta” launch. I built it because I love to play with new software and the nice Thracians who make the software I
Read moreThe Varèse (R)evolution is tonight and tomorrow at Lincoln Center. Thanks to Alex Ross for pointing out this YouTube clip.
Read moreNothing to do with music, but, hey. Who can add to the list? 1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) Romania – Directed by Cristian Mungiu – Young woman helps friend get abortion in 1980s Romania and discovers the truth of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. Not a single wrong note in this tale of friendship abused. 2. Pan’s Labyrinth (2007) Spain – Directed by Guillermo del Toro – Imaginative young girl retreats into a fantasy world in order to deal with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and a brutal facist stepfather.
Read moreThis coming Wednesday, Le Poisson Rouge is hosting a showcase for one of our favorite up and coming UK labels: Nonclassical. The concert features the music of label founder Gabriel Prokofiev. Grandson of the great Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, Gabriel is not only a mean turntablist; he provides a fascinating viewpoint on concert music with his “non classical” compositions. The Russian pianist GéNIA (great-great-grandniece of legendary pianist Vladmir Horowitz) will present selections from his Piano Book No. 1, which she recently recorded for the imprint. The Piano Book reflects Prokofiev’s uneasy relationship with classical music. His usual penchant is for blurring
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