Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online: The British — reserved wet-blankets all, right? Ha! There’s an ecstatic light that burns in each of these composers’ work, though in very different ways: The laser: Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) “Brian Ferneyhough is a composer whose every work probes afresh and ex nihilo the extremes of the musically and technically feasible and stretches the limits of notation. His music is conceived as an ongoing process of transcendence,
Read moreSome interesting fodder for conversation in this month’s Gramophone. Item #1, there are more than 4,000 one-handed piano pieces for the left hand but no more than 75 for the right. Jeremy Nichols reckons that it’s because when great pianists are injured it is invaribly their right arm. His evidence is purely anecdotal, but convincing. Item #2 is related to this week’s big Focus on Death meme. We all know that cigarette smoking killed Webern but did you know that Enrique Granados died after the ship he was on was torpedoed by a U-boat and he jumped out of a lifeboat to
Read moreCheck out Frank J. Oteri’s great interview with Indie rockers Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, aka The Fiery Furnaces, over at New Music Box. Thanks for the shout-out, dude.
Read moreMichelangelo 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
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