Contemporary Classical

A Rose By Any Other Name

There was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe.  If you don’t know BMOP you’re missing out on one of the best forces for new orchestral music around.  There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, which is why you should read it for yourself, but it might be of particular interest to this crowd that they’re putting together their own record label “BMOP Sound” which will be launched in January “with five new releases adding to its existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs, and 28 more albums in progress.”  Later in the piece we also learn the interesting statistic that Rose receives upward of 150 unsolicited scores every month–so if you’re wondering why James Levine and Essa-Pekka Salonen aren’t returning your calls this may give a sense of how overwhelmed with submissions a music director with a national profile and a known interest in new music must be.  (It also makes Bang On A Can’s claim that “we will listen to everything” all the more impressive.)

BMOP inaugurates its 10th season at 8 PM tomorrow night (November 2nd) in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall with a concert of piano concerti.  Nina Ferrigno, Anthony Davis, Joanne Kong, and Marilyn Nonken will be playing the pianos, and the program consists of pieces by Elliott Schwartz (the premiere of a new revision), Anthony Davis, Michael Colgrass (the U.S. premiere), and David Rakowski (world premiere).  I’ve heard parts of the Rakowski, and it rawks.

by Galen H. Brown
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Serenading the Glorious Leader

The New York Philharmonic is thinking of visiting North Korea next year and that has caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the nuke ’em, don’t serenade ’em crowd.  The conservative position was captured rather nicely by Terry Teachout in a piece called Serenading a Tyrant  in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday:

“Why … is the New York Philharmonic giving serious consideration to playing in Pyongyang, the capital of what may be the world’s most viciously repressive dictatorship?” he wrote. “Attendance at the Philharmonic’s concerts will be carefully controlled. And of course any concert in Pyongyang can’t possibly reach the North Korean people, because only the elite, for the most part, are allowed into Pyongyang.”

Here’s my thought.  If a goodwill visit by an American orchestra opens the door for even a single sliver of sunlight to shine on one of the planet’s darkest lands, it will be worth it…even if it means letting the world’s most obnoxious dictator claim a propaganda victory.  Music has survived a lot worse.

What do you think?  Or, if you don’t want to think, go over to the New Yorker and read Alex’s brilliant piece on Philip Glass. (Somehow that didn’t come out right.)

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Somebody didn’t get the memo

The biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane:  The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following sentence:  “Jazz’s turn to the avant-garde and exoticisms of the 1960s now seems as inevitable as the rise of atonal music after the breakup of the stable societies of 19th century Europe.”  These days you’re likely to get stoned if you so much as hint that there was any kind of inevitability in the rise of atonal music (whatever that might be).  Fancy not knowing that “we” all now regard “atonal music” (whatever that might be) not only as not being inevitable, but as being a downright aberration or perversion (if they’re different things).  How did Pankaj Mishra fail to find that out?

by Rodney Lister
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths

A Tale of Two Györgys

kurtag & ligetiRecent postings here notwithstanding, I swear I’m not on a complete György Ligeti kick; but it just so happens that the German-news-in-English website Sign and Sight has printed the translation of a speech György Kurtág gave in remembrance of his great friend, fellow Hungarian and fellow composer. (The occasion was Kurtág’s receiving the Ordre Pour le Merite in Berlin.)

The German version was originally published in August this year, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As a bonus, this article includes all the extra stuff that Kurtág never got to say during the ceremony.

It’s a beautiful, intensely intimate memoriam.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Piotr Szewczyk’s Violin Futura Rocks On

After his spectacular Spoleto Festival performance of the 16 piece Violin Futura set, Piotr Szewczyk continues to promote the series with a new video and an upcoming gig at the Santa Fe New Music Festival, February 2nd.

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Check out the entire series, which was designed around short, exciting pieces for solo violin composed just for Piotr. My favorites include our own Lawrence Dillon’s Mister Blister, Piotr’s Cadenza and Carson Cooman’s The Doors in the Sky. Other composers featured include Mason Bates, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, and myself with Puce. Piotr’s use of YouTube videos and the web in general for promotion of the series is a model for any new music superstar wannabe.

by Jeff Harrington
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #39

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing musicians that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Strange and intimate places via Myspace

Rather than go in-depth on one or two musicians, we’re going to play epicurean. The back-stories and other works of each of these musicians may (or sometimes, may not) be found easily enough with a few clicks around; I’ll leave that up to you. Right now, it doesn’t matter; I only want to lead you to a specific track on their individual Myspace pages, tracks that keep echoing around in my mind long after the first encounter.

None of these are truly “classical”; yet none are quite pop, jazz, etc. etc… they all inhabit the cracks in between, with no apologies or justifications other than that they exist. They’re also each one “intimate”. By that I mean we feel a kind of “beside-ness” with the artist, drawn into their space rather than simply presented to. Simple or complex, across all cultures, that drawing-in is one of the greatest achievments of any art. So simply find the suggested title on the flash player on each page, click and listen, and see where each leads you.

10-D PJ  (UK)  “My tears are for you” — Exquisite mix, match & mash of completely different Asian-and-otherwise recordings, creating some entirely new place in the world.

Charles Reix  (Montréal) “Contemplation” — Brilliantly dark, serpentine duo for shakuhachi and ‘cello.

Thomas Leer  (Scotland)  “Blood of a Poet” — The voice of Charles Bukowski, placed just so into the perfect “frame”.

Sylvain Chauveau and Felicia Atkinson (France)  “How the Light” — The simplest of songs: a few chords and figures, no sung melody. Yet a completely absorbing emotional “space”.

Olivia De Prato  (Wien-Venezia-NYC)  “Ageha Tokyo” — Over and over, a nervously unstable play of string and electronics suddenly refracts into hopefully radiant textures.

Samson Young[Update: Due to the flaky options Myspace offers for putting anything other than pop songs on the site, I passed over the tiny bit that tells me that “Ageha Tokyo” is actually a piece by the composer Samson Young (Hong Kong, but currently finishing his study at Princeton). A wonderful piece nonetheless, and Olivia’s is a fine performance. Samson’s own website, with much more information and listening is at http://www.samsonyoung.com/.]

Maxim Moston (Moscow-NYC)  “Myrtle Blue” — A solo guitar, with just a few chords, out-Harold-Budds even Harold Budd.

by Steve Layton