Sequenza21

The BBC marked the beginning day of the Beijing Olympics by offering the first performance of Olympic Fire, commissioned for the occasion from Chen Yi. All of Chen’s music uses Western modernist practices to evoke her native culture, but Olympic Fire deals even more directly in Chinese materials, using folksongs both from the predominant Han Chinese and from minority Chinese ethnic groups as well (Chen keeps to the Chinese government party line by considering Tibetans among those Chinese ethnic minorities), and imitating the sounds of Chinese instruments, particularly the lusheng (described by Chen as a “mouth pipe-organ”).  Olympic Fire begins with enormous energy and unrelenting febrile motion and considerable instrumental brilliance featuring the brass and the xylophone.  The initial ebullient activity continues for quite a while, to be interrupted by a slightly slower high ostinato music with a less thick texture, evoking bird calls and still featuring the xylophone, which turns out to be an accompaniment to longer lyrical tunes in the lower registers.

The opening celebratory activity is eventually regained, with the layering of different musics over a repeated rhythmic figures. The music goes driving headlong into a furiously explosive timpani cadenza which leads to a roaring ending.  The performance, by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, matched the exuberance of the music. (more…)

Here’s a big loss to the New York new music community.  George Steel, who has made Miller Theatre at Columbia University an essential venue since taking over as executive director in 1997, is leaving Miller to become General Director of The Dallas Opera, effective October 1.   It’s a great career move, of course, but New York is going to miss his adventuresome programming which has made Miller a reliably memorable concert-going experience,  and attracted large and notably young audiences.

Steel, a 41-year-old Maryland native and graduate of Yale University, is founder and conductor of the Gotham City Orchestra and Vox Vocal Ensemble and has programmed and/or conducted music that spans more than 600 years, ranging from Tallis and Byrd, to Lotti and Bach, to Brahms and Chausson, to Stravinsky and Ives, to John Zorn and Morton Feldman.

Back in June, I wrote about how the Metropolitan Opera snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the marketing of Satyagraha–how when classical music organizations employ the right kind of marketing (or any marketing at all) they see much better ticket sales than they are accustomed to. This year the Nashville Symphony is further reinforcing that point with their new marketing strategy for their season, which seeks especially to improve single ticket sales to younger audience members and other audiences they haven’t been effectively reaching in the past.

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On the shelf next to the photograph of Tibetan lama Galen Rinpoche, next to the framed Dalai Lama picture, next to the family photographs and statuettes of violins and goddesses, is a bevy of ceramic frog figurines, suspending a jet-black shirt with purple lettering. It reads:

Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work-
and what’s the work?
to ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.

(from “Memory Gardens” –Allen Ginsberg)

The makeshift shrine appears twice in Scott Hicks’s 119 minute-long documentary, “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts,” and gives as apt a snapshot of Philip Glass as any that can be distilled from the film. For hovering within the musician, the family man, the philosopher and the spiritual-seeker, is an artist who has devoted his life to his work. An artist who, at 71, has produced 21 operas, 9 ballets, 8 symphonies, 37 film scores and numerous other works in the following categories: theater, “world music,” songs, solo instrumental, keyboard, concerto, choral, chamber and non-symphonic orchestral. By the time this article is read, the compositional number will likely have increased. (more…)

In this age of Dobbsian-fueled immigration hysteria, what could be more timely than an opera about a beautiful Mexican drug smuggler who kills her lover after he betrays her and, in the process, becomes a folk heroine.

¡Unicamente la Verdad! ,  a “videoopera” with music by Gabriela Ortiz and libretto by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, is the story of the contemporary feminist heroine Camelia “la Tejana,” who has come to symbolize the idea of the strong woman in Mexican folklore and the subject of numerous   “corridos” — a form of Mexican ballad — popularized by Los Tigres del Norte?.

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George Benjamin, at age 48, is one of the grand old men of British music.  Considering a succession starting with Britten, and continuing with Oliver Knussen and Thomas Ades, and including Benjamin, one might consider that the tradition of rather young grand old men, all of them very fine performers as well as seriously talented and accomplished composers is a grand old British one.  Benjamin is a really good conductor, and the BBC Symphony orchestra clearly respected him and worked hard for and with him.  On Wednesday night the main event was one of his first big attention-getting pieces, and his first work for orchestra, written when he was 19, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, which was being played for the third time at the Proms.  (more…)