Sequenza21

It’s funny how our own personal preferences can make it so difficult to review concerts objectively. Take Monday night’s American Composer’s Orchestra concert, at Zankel Hall in New York – all seven pieces were good, often impressive, sometimes subtle and complex. But the things I want to rave about were not, I suspect, the things that most of the audience would have raved about when they got home. Min Xiao-Fen’s Blue Pipa, for voice and the lute-like Chinese instrument named in the title, opened the concert effectively. Min performed the piece herself in a pool of light on an otherwise

Last night the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the premiere of Requiem by Christopher Rouse.  This is an excellent work.  It is beautiful.  It is emotional.  It is powerful.  It is dramatic, and it is peaceful.  This is a Requiem that sets a standard for composers of the future while holding its own against compositions of the past. Jerry Bowles gave us the link to the video recorded by Grant Gershon as summarized the work for his Board; it’s worth hearing again, so here’s the link.  David Salvage reported Thursday on his interview with Rouse, so scroll down and re-read

On the Verge Chamber Music by Sebastian Currier Music From Copland House Koch International With last year’s magnificent New World release Quartetset and this equally outstanding recording of four fairly recent chamber pieces (including the Grawemeyer-awarding winning Static), Sebastian Currier has elbowed himself into the honorary “little music” seat at the big table where the Glasses, Adamses, and Reichs go to chew the fat.  So he’s a minaturist, but would Vermeer have been Vermeer on a Frank Stella-sized canvas?  Currier is something of a music jokester, with performance directions like “almost too fast,” “almost too much,” “almost too little” and “bipolar” but it is his uncanny

Everybody likes to grouse about the weather, and East Coasters, who’ve moved to California, may expect sun 24/7. And though that’s never the case here in San Francisco, the climate, and especially the cultural climate on both coasts, does have one very definite thing in common — the dearth of welcome homes for new music, plus a congenial band to spread the word. New York has the long-running American Composers Orchestra, the S.E.M. Ensemble, and Bang On A Can, and the Bay Area, the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, which has been in operation for three years. Its March 10th

Consider this: Christopher Rouse does not compose every day; he starts every piece in full score, on measure one; he doesn’t use a piano much, because he can hardly play; he finds the entire process of composition miserable from start to finish and perennially aspires to artistic levels he believes he cannot attain; he only hears the bad things when his pieces get performed, and he is waiting for the day when people wake up and realize he’s no good. Rouse is, as in his music, unafraid to air his honest thoughts. He can appear neurotic and contradictory one moment,

Last night’s Monday Evening Concert was programmed by Kent Nagano:  “Bach and the Music of Today”.  This is hardly a fresh theme, and last night’s program didn’t reveal any fresh ideas of resonance across the centuries.  But it did let us hear works of four composers of today, and that was welcome. I first heard the music of Kurt Rohde when Nagano programmed his Double Trouble (2002) for the 2004 Ojai Festival.  Last night Rohde and his friend Ellen Ruth Rose performed the virtuosic parts for two violas, supported by a small ensemble of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano; I