Another full house at Zipper Hall, and we enjoyed ourselves with the music of William Kraft and his “Encounters” series of works for percussion. This was the third and final program in the Kraft/Encounters retrospective given by Southwest Chamber Music, honoring Kraft for his 85th birthday. By the end of tomorrow the whole series will have been recorded, and next year a 3 CD set will be available of this important set of compositions by a man who has been such a major participant in contemporary music in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the conversations with Bill Kraft will probably not be
Read moreNew York’s NPR station WNYC has been doing a bunch of programming on Leonard Bernstein, and the other night when I was moving my car I heard a great story: Lenny was backstage in a greenroom in Vienna, and a little old lady approached him. She introduced herself as the widow of Alban Berg, and Bernstein told her how honored he was to meet her. Now Berg, as you will recall, died without completing his opera Lulu, and there was some question about who would finish it. Helene Berg, Alban’s widow, initially offered the job to Schoenberg, who accepted but
Read moreGloria Cheng opened the Piano Spheres season last night at Zipper Hall. Much of the concert comprised selections from her recent recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky and Lutoslawski, and if you don’t yet have this in your library, now is a good time to correct your omission. And here’s just one of its good reviews (just scroll down). Betty Freeman commissioned a new work from Gerald Barry for Cheng to perform, and this opened the second half of the program. Le Vieux Sourd [the old deaf one], Debussy’s nickname for Beethoven, starts with quiet fragments of classical themes, as
Read moreEver browsed the books on your shelf, and had the sudden strange feeling they were telling you something? Nina Katchadourian selects a few spines to show you you weren’t so far off — including this succinct tale that gets a helping hand from none other than John Cage:
Read moreViolinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is continually creating something new – from concerti by Krzysztof Penderecki and Andre Previn to works by Sebastian Currier and Henri Dutilleux. Mutter’s latest project is a recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens, written in 2006-07 and premiered with the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2007. Selke Harten-Strehk has more background here on Mutter’s website. I spoke with Mutter about the new concerto recording and about working with composers, and even if she composed herself. Listen to our conversation here. That morning it was very difficult to get an international connection, and then about 10 minutes into
Read moreTerry Jennings: I was happy to hear two short piano pieces by Jennings at the M50 concert S21 co-produced. Played with great sensitivity by Joseph Kubera, both works were spare, dissonant, and full of luxurious silences. Pianists would do well to combine these with Webern Op.27 and Schoenberg Op.19: you’d have a satisfying, chill 25 minutes of music. Now, what Jennings’s music has to do with minimalism as we know it beats me. But, whatever. Martin Matalon: In the mid 90s, Matalon was commissioned to write a new soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Malthusian masterpiece, Metropolis. The Manhattan Symfonietta performance on
Read moreI must confess that composer Douglas J. Cuomo has only recently appeared on my radar screen. That may mean that I’m not paying enough attention or it could mean that I never watched Sex and the City and thus avoided the theme, which is Cuomo’s most famous, and probably lucrative, credit. In any event, Cuomo is currently having a career season in “serious” music. A few months ago, Allan Kozinn selected Cuomo’s Arjuna’s Dilemma–which previewed this summer at the Pepsico Theater in Purchase–as one of the top picks for the new season, describing the 70-minute multimedia work as “a compelling
Read moreI like the wider length. Shall I fix up the rest of the pages and go with the new look?
Read moreThe Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s music critic Donald Rosenberg has been taken off the Cleveland Symphony beat–apparently for saying what many people (myself included) actually believe: Franz Welser-Möst is pretty much an unimaginative hack in charge of a great orchestra. Today’s Times. UPDATE: Tim Mangan has more.
Read moreCongratulations to our pal Alex Ross, one of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows. There were three other music-related “Genius Grants,” as they’re more commonly called, for 2008: Violinist Leila Josefowicz, instrument maker and composer Walter Kitundu, and saxophonist Miguel Zenón. According to the MacArthur Foundation website “There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.” Prospective fellows are nominated anonymously by a group of Nominators, and are selected by an anonymous Selection Committee.
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