Should you find yourself in the vicinity of Williams Hall at the New England Conservatory tonight at 8:30, the Callithumpian Consort is playing Alvin Lucier’s Small Waves for string quartet, piano, trombone, and feedback, an hour long investigation/hallucination of microtones, sonic beatings, and water pouring. (Sounds like your tax dollars at work on a normal day at a CIA detention camp.) Survivors of the water pouring and sonic beatings will then get to hear John Luther Adams’ Strange Birds Passing for 8 flutes and …And Bells Remembered for 5 percussion Alvin Lucier will be present to explain himself.
Read moreThe Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra announced the schedule yesterday for its usual four concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and there’s great news for contemporary music lovers, especially those who have a jones for the didgeridoo. The season opens on February 3 with two works by the Australian composer Peter Schulthorpe–Earth Cry and Mangrove–plus Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Music director Michael Christie, now in his second season, was formerly director of the Queensland Orchestra, which explains the ‘Roo connection. The second concert, on March 10, pits Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round and a new orchestration of Dreams & Prayers of Issac the Blind against Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. My
Read moreDeutsche Oper said it will scrap planned showings of Mozart’s Idomeneo because of warnings by Berlin security officials that a scene in the current production depicting the head of the Prophet Mohammed (along with the heads of Jesus and the Buddha) present an “incalculable security risk.” Actually, they said references to “world religions” but we know which one is the problem. This is the kind of infuriating capitulation that can push otherwise rational people at least temporarily into the nuke ’em back to the Stone Age camp. But, we need to remember that Death of Klinghoffer and the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Silver Tassie suffered similar fates
Read moreMalcolm Arnold died over the weekend. He was a deeply troubled man who had a remarkably productive life against the odds. He was, in my view, the most underrated symphonist of the post-war 20th century. New York Times obituary. A far more colorful obituary from Australia. Guardian. BBC Tributes. An excellent interview/profile from last year by Pliable.
Read moreMark Swed, who is (perhaps wisely) ignoring our attempts to stir up trouble over his incoherent Jefferson Friedman review last week, is wild about the Michael Gordon/Richard Foreman opera What to Wear which is now playing a limited run at REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in beautiful downtown L.A.. A couple of snippets: “What to Wear” — with dazzling, hard-hitting music by Michael Gordon and words, staging, design and equally hard-hitting and dazzling zaniness by Richard Foreman — is being called a rock opera. It’s not. If it were, rock opera could, after the premiere of this arresting new
Read moreAlex Ross has a moving tribute to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in this week’s New Yorker. “She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard,” he writes, and it’s hard to argue with that. Speaking of Alex, he’ll be chatting with Mason Bates, Corey Dargel, Nico Muhly, and Joanna Newsom at BargeMusic at 10 pm on October 7 as part of the New Yorker Festival. Alas, the event seems to be sold-out. Alan Rich in L.A. Weekly on why he didn’t hang around for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana at the Hollywood Bowl: The night had turned cold; the gin had run low;
Read moreThe Philadelphia Orchestra unveiled this morning an online music store where you can download archival recordings, commerically released CDs and, coming soon, recent Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Other orchestras have done the same thing but the orchestra says it is first major American ensemble to market directly to the public without a distributor. There are 26 pieces currently available on the site, including eight Beethoven symphonies conducted by Christoph Eschenbach over the 2005-06 season, plus Wolfgang Sawallisch’s Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 from 2005 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 from 2000. For a limited time, you can download Beethoven’s Fifth (can’t get too many copies of that
Read moreGloria Cheng opened the season of serious music-listening in her position as opener of the Piano Spheres series of concerts. The program was oriented the program to two-musicians works, and there was a gracious lead-in to the guest appearance to be given by Thomas Ades in December, with performances of two of his early works. Cheng began the concert with Ades’s Opus 7, “Still Sorrowing” (1992-1993), written at age 21. This is a more restrained work than many of his, with the prepared piano dampening the middle range of the piano, creating a hollowness to support its feeling of loss. The middle
Read moreMichael Gordon’s new post-rock opera What To Wear opens tonight at the Redcat Theater in downtown LA. Richard Foreman wrote the libretto and directs the stage production. According to our sources (Michael, who “guarantees a good time will be had by all”), What to Wear is a raucous and bitingly funny work about fashion. There are 4 main characters (all called Madeline X) and 2 ducks, a small one and a big one. There are ten singers, ten actors and 7 musicians all under the musical direction of David Rosenboom. “What to Wear postulates a world in which military tanks and nightmare
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