Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, on Monday, same as Bergman. Bergman and Antonioni. Contrast and compare.
Read moreSeems like only yesterday we reported that Matthew Cmiel, one of our favorite boy wonders, had put together a new band called Formerly Known as Classical. (Actually, it March 15, 2006, but let’s not quibble.) Looks like the group has done okay since last we checked in; on Sunday, August 5, they’re appearing in a concert at the Cabrillo Music Festival with Marin Alsop, the conductor and music director of the Baltimore Symphony and recent MacArthur Prize winner. Matthew–now a sobering 18-years-old–will conduct the group in Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, an exciting piece of music which gets its title from a story about boxing by Julio Cortazar and is
Read moreFrank Zappa has a street named after him in Berlin. Frank Zappa Strasse is in Marzahn, a district on the eastern fringe of the capital made up of communist-era housing blocks. Can’t think of any connection to music except for famous interviews with John Lennon and Johnny Rotten but Tom Snyder was the man for whom talk radio and TV was invented. Nobody did it better except, perhaps, for Dan Aykroyd doing his impression of Tom Snyder. Ingmar Bergman died at 89. There are lots of connections between Bergman and opera and classical music, both through productions he directed and the use of composers and
Read moreLincoln Center Festival presented last night the North American premiere of George Benjamin’s first opera, Into the Little Hill. Hill tells a version of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” story, wherein a mysterious stranger drives the rats from an infested town with his beguiling music. When the mayor reneges on his promise to pay him, the stranger kidnaps the mayor’s little daughter. Martin Crimp’s libretto assigns all roles – the stranger, the mayor, the mayor’s wife, the little girl, the crowd, and the narration – to two singers, a soprano (Anu Komsi) and a contralto (Hilary Summers). Benjamin and Crimp
Read moreFrom today’s Deutsche Welle: Germany’s annual Bayreuth Festival of Wagner operas began on Wednesday with a highly anticipated, make-or-break production by the 29-year-old great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner. And while the applause after the first two acts of Wagner’s only “comic” opera was friendly, the audience — which included a smorgasbord of German political and social elite — was less amused by the third and final act, which featured a few minutes of full frontal nudity, a bizarre sight of Richard Wagner dancing in his underwear and a bunch of master singers horsing around the stage with oversized penises.
Read moreDavid Rakowski has gone mildly YouTube crazy over the past few months, and has videos of 29 of his 80 piano etudes. Most of the performances are by Amy Briggs Dissanayake and Marilyn Nonken. [youtube]cNX6HPMCecY[/youtube] His etudes are true “etudes” in the sense that each is an exploration of a specific musical idea. “Martler,” in the above video, is an etude on hand-crossing; “Taking the Fifths” is on fifths; “Schnozzage” requires the pianist to play with her nose; “Bop It” bops; “12-Step Program” is on chromatic scales and wedges. And they kick butt. [youtube]Vsor316E90E[/youtube] (The title of this post, incidentally, is more of a Bob
Read moreAfter we arrived in New York in 1968, my first freelance gig was writing previews of upcoming art exhibitions for Arts Magazine. For five bucks a review, I would trot around the area that is now Soho, climbing rickety, dangerous stairs to look for the next Jackson Pollock. Lofts were illegal for living in those days so I learned a lot about fake walls and how to cleverly hide bedrooms and kitchens from prying building inspectors. I thought of those days this morning when I read the strange news of the lady who besmirched a bone-dry white Cy Twombly painting on exhibition in France by planting a lipstick-drenched kiss
Read moreMy copy of the Miller Theater Fall and Spring schedule landed on the window sill via carrier pigeon yesterday. As always, Columbia University’s indispensible new music venue has some humdingers on tap. The Composer Portrait series this season includes Esa-Pekka Salonen, Wolfgang Rihm, David Sanford, Gerald Barry (in the first large-scale New York exposure for the Irish composer), French spectralist Phillipe Hurel, George Crumb and Peter Lieberson. Except for Salonen and Rihm, the composers are set for pre-concert discussions, live and in color, so to speak. Also on the schedule for December 7, 8, 9 and 11 is the New York stage
Read moreA quick addendum to my recent “click pick” visit to the Eastern Front: My good and long-time i-friend Rudy Carrera pointed me in the direction of the young Russian composer Dmitry Subochev (b.1981), who’s posted a couple frenetically fun (and challenging) Moscow performances on video at YouTube. Cheglakov and His Shadow was made in collaboration with Subochev’s fellow composer and cellist Dmitry Cheglakov: [youtube]AhrU-CEk4uk[/youtube] As well, Subochev teams up with Tatiana Mikheeva to terrorize the inside of a piano in Pandora’s Box: [youtube]gbzi3LCQ1so[/youtube] Whether as something integral or as optional accompaniment, my very really grand prediction is that video will become ever-more essential to both performers
Read moreSurprisingly good news for all those who still harbor hopes of major orchestras as dynamic, living institutions: the New York Philharmonic has just announced that Alan Gilbert will be its new music director, beginning 2009. Alex Ross has more.
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