Thomas Ades is back in town, and this season he will have five different programs showing Los Angeles his range of talents as composer, pianist, and conductor. We saw the first of these yesterday: a performance of his opera “Powder Her Face” (1995), with Ades conducting, by the USC Thornton School of Music. This was fully staged, including full simulations of each of the sex scenes in the first act. A few older members of the audience debated leaving at intermission, but most stayed, finding the music to be worth being occasionally offended. And the music has real treats to offer,
Read more‘If you’re talking about “relevance to the wider culture” and “speaking to our times“, and all that Greg Sandowian stuff, I couldn’t possibly care less … People seem to forget that there’s always going an audience for whom Beethoven’s 5th or La Boheme is a brand new experience’ – writes Henry Holland today in Killing classical music in the US. Well worth the click, and my photo is of the audience queueing for core classical repertoire at the 2006 BBC Proms.
Read moreA Couple of Other Things: I meant to mention this earlier this week but kept putting it off because I found it just too depressing. Dawn Upshaw has breast cancer. Anybody here speak PHP? I mean, know it really cold. If you don’t know what that means, don’t apply, but if you’re the dude (or dudette), send me an e-mail. We could use a template tweak or two.
Read moreOur weekly listen 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: John Mark Sherlock (b. 1970 — Canada) I first discovered John’s work years ago on the venerable MP3 site Vitaminic. It’s often intimate, long, subtle and irrational; from some other things I’ve heard out of there, I think the breath of Feldman blew out of Buffalo, took a detour around Montréal, and ended up finding a home in Toronto. From an
Read moreWe’re just hours away from the first real-world Sequenza21 concert which begins promptly at 7:30 on Monday night at the Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center, 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. Admission is absolutely free and there will be wine and cookies. I hope to see you there. We are enormously grateful to the following folks for their financial contributions which have made it possible to actually pay the musicians and put together a program. Concert Sponsors: Bridge Records Metropolis Ensemble Contributors: Activist Music Anonymous Carrie and Yorke Brown Mr. Galen H. Brown Mr. Eric Bruskin Mr. Jeffrey
Read moreAll too often today, appealing menus of new music turn out to be measly meals relying heavily on technical gimmickry, self-serving cliques, bitchiness and cynicism. By contrast the Britten Sinfonia at Lunch project is a nourishing meal whose courses include imaginative commissioning, innovative and open-minded programming, a truly international perspective, and some damn hard work from the musicians.. But don’t take my word for it. Here are the words of clarinettist Joy Farrall (above) as she introduced the Huw Watkins first performance at today’s Britten Sinfonia at Lunch concert – ”It is great to see such a large audience for
Read moreFresh from the lede in a New York Times article this very morning (“provocative star turn”), Corey Dargel is performing tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street btw Franklin and White in Manhattan. Corey will perform new and unreleased material including “policy-anthems” in alternative tuning systems and a set of songs about the Virgin Mary. Joining Dargel are composer/violinist Jim Altieri and expert videographer Oleg Dubson. Kamala Sankaram and Squeezebox will present bloodletting, an original horror film with live music, depicting (it says here) the tension between artmaking and the daily survival of young working artists. Borrowing from the stylistic sensibilities of
Read moreWhen BMOP (the Boston Modern Orchestra Project), now in its 10th season, says “Project,” that’s exactly what they mean. Everything on their recent (Nov. 3) Jordan Hall concert — some six works by four composers — was slated for commercial recording immediately afterward. This done, the BMOP discography will have rolled up an impressive 20 releases. They’re strong on the “Orchestra” part too. One reward (or even danger) in a program like this one, where everything was so “for” such an ensemble — BMOP’s personnel positively drips with class — — is that a listener could sit back mindlessly, pull
Read moreI know I haven’t contributed much to the intellectual discourse on these pages since the new format of the site went live, but–believe me–it hasn’t been that I’ve lost interest. In one of life’s strange convergences, the reformat of Sequenza21 occurred almost simultaneous with my return from China at which point I have plunged myself into a torrent of freelance writing assignments in order to pay for the 82 CDs and suitcase of books I brought back. I’m only now starting to get unburied. Plus, of course, the NewMusicBox deadlines never go away but that’s the same no matter what
Read moreTania León, a wonderful composer and musician and one of the nicest people in this crazy business of ours, is the featured composer this week at a spectacular new classical music space called the Gatehouse, a beautifully renovated old Romanesque Revival building that once served as a pumping station for water flowing from the Croton Reservoir to the taps of New York City. The new space is operated by Aaron Davis Hall Inc., Harlem’s long time center for the performing arts, which has been re-named Harlem Stage. Of course, the actual Aaron Davis Hall, which is just across the road
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