Michael Rose, composer and pianist who’s normally found teaching at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, has been on a Fulbright-sponsored stay at the Kerala Kalamandalam, a performing-arts school in south India. The nice folks over at the music & audio review site La Folia are hosting Michael’s report on the highs and lows of his adventure. Not least among the lows is his current opinion of the whole Fulbright biz… The link will take you to part one of his — both entertaining and cautionary — adventure, with links there to parts two and three.
Read moreThe big news in London this weekend is a £1 million (almost $2m) tie-up between English National Opera and Sony PlayStation to put games consoles into the foyer of the hallowed London Coliseum. This is an opera house renown for its shock tactics, as the production shot from their Don Giovanni here shows. Of course, anything to reach a new audience must be praiseworthy. Or must it? On An Overgrown Path isn’t so sure, and also has the full story.
Read moreOur 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, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online: Cecilia Arditto (b. 1966 — Argentina / NL) Cecilia will tell you: I have always been struck by the sensuality of sound, I have always loved it. The infinite possibilities of instruments constitute a source of inspiration and research. However, the exploration of sound would just be an empty category, a cosmetic idea, if it were not tied to the
Read moreGian Carlo Menotti died today at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95. In the days before television became a total waste of time, NBC commissioned him to write the first opera specifically for the new medium. For many years, Amahl and the Night Visitors was played every year at Christmas and it introduced millions of people, including me, to the idea of opera. I haven’t heard it for years and thus have no adult opinion of whether it is good or not but it was a very good thing for NBC and Menotti to have done.
Read moreThe County Museum of Art didn’t cancel all serious music: just the Monday Evening Concerts. Under new management, the music program now offers occasional concerts on any night but Monday. They try to relate the bookings and programming to the art. Thanks to one other difference — being willing to do some PR — a good crowd came to LACMA to see eighth blackbird. The ostensible tie-in to the art was with the smashing special exhibition on Magritte and art he influenced. (Unfortunately the museum is closed on Wednesdays so that for the attendees the art was limited to a distracting
Read moreOur favorite techno-geek pianist Hugh Sung has come up with a really neat new way to integrate live music with dynamic imagery, animations, and synchronized video clips, all of which can be controlled by the performing musician directly a simple foot-switch. Think Arditti Quartet meets the Joshua Light Show. (Perhaps too old a reference for most of you.) Hugh calls his system the Visual Recital which seems as good a name as any. You can catch Hugh’s next Visual Recital live on Saturday night at the Darlington Arts Center, 977 Shavertown Road, Boothwyn, PA (610-358-3632) or if you can’t make it you can watch this sample
Read morePhilip Glass turns 70 today and it seems to me he is doing so without much of the hoopla that surrounded Steve Reich’s attainment of that milestone a few months back. No mention of the event in today’s New York Times and Google News turns up only a brief note about a birthday concert in Nashville. Underwhelming reaction for a man who is America’s best-known living composer and one whose music is so widely available in so many forms–CDs, films, concerts and so on. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that Glass had written so much music that critics assume
Read moreWhile we’re all sitting around waiting for the big event (Can you guess what day tomorrow is, boys and girls?), let’s talk about movies. I’ve only seen two of the Academy Award nominees–Letters From Iwo Jima, which is almost great and has some haunting, low-key music by Clint Eastwood’s son, Kyle and the alleged comedy Little Miss Sunshine, which is the single most depressing movie I have ever seen and that includes To Live, The Ballad of Narayama and the one about the Guatamalan kids crawling through the sewer across the Mexican border and being bitten by rats and one
Read moreLast night’s Los Angeles Master Chorale concert in the Walt Disney appeared to be sold out. The only thing that might surprise outsiders was that the advertising had emphasized that the program would be two works that were actually written in the twenty-first century. Oh, it was a good concert! The two works were by Steve Reich: “You Are (Variations)” which the Chorale premiered in 2004 and performed in New York as part of the Reich birthday party, and the recent “Daniel Variations” for which this was the West Coast premiere. Reich was at the sound controls handling the amplification. “You
Read moreMajor props to young Master Salvage for his outstanding work attending to the front page over the past couple of weeks while I attended to some pressing matters of commerce. Big up yourself, David. Well done. So, let’s go to the mailbag and see what’s happening. Ah, here’s something. Our regular Rob Deemer has just launched a new radio program called The Composer Next Door on Oklahoma City’s classical radio station KCSC-FM. Rob, who lives and teaches in OC, approached the general manager of the station last summer with the idea of a locally-created show that focuses on living composers and new
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