Tag: Christian Carey

Choral Music, Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Orchestras

Adés Conducts the New York Philharmonic

Adés Conducts the New York Philharmonic David Geffen Hall January 24, 2026  Published in Sequenza 21 By Christian Carey   NEW YORK – Thomas Adés is best known as a composer, but he is a talented conductor as well. Leading the New York Philharmonic in a program of recent works and a neglected early twentieth century piece, his approach was effusive and commanding, with a versatile and fluid gestural repertoire. The orchestra’s musicians always play at a high standard, but their performance on last Saturday’s concert was superlative, and given the challenges posed by the programmed pieces, all the more

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concerts, Experimental Music, Other Minds, Piano

Cahill and Kubera play “Blue and Bob”

Banish the inescapable treacly holiday music with this palette cleanser for Boxing Day. Other Minds has shared this recital of music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Robert Ashley, performed by pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at Mills College. Much of the programmed music was premiered by the performers.  

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by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Ukho Ensemble Plays Grisey (LP Review)

  Gérard Grisey – Vortex Temporum Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, Luigi Gaggero, conductor Self-released LP   Composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) employed methods that often involved magnifying seemingly small details into overarching concepts. This is particularly true of spectrographic measurements taken of single pitches, such as the low E on a trombone, which revealed a series of overtones that he would use to craft harmonic systems for a number of pieces. This spectral approach, also employed by Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, James Tenney, and others, was an important feature of French music, and later that in other countries, from the 1970s onward.

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by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer

Tobias Picker, NOVA (Recording review)

Tobias Picker NOVA Various Artists Bright Shiny Things   Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism.    The title work is the latter, a riff

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by Christian Carey
Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Orchestra Concert

  2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra July 28, 2025   LENOX – This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music was curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz. Born in Mexico City, Ortiz is one of the most prominent Latinx figures in twenty-first century classical music. Among other honors, she is composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and the Curtis Institute. Revolucióndiamantina, a recording of her music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2025. This year, FCM has spotlighted music from Mexico, as well as that of women composers. After four chamber ensemble

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, File Under?, New York

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends Midsummer Musicfest at Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y July 9, 2025   NEW YORK – July often finds New York-based musicians playing in summer festivals well outside the city. The 92nd Street Y’s Midsummer MusicFest enticed a small handful of luminaries back to town to play chamber music at the venue’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. Violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk have joined forces before, but not for a while in New York. In 2024, to commemorate the one hundredth year of his passing, they toured programs of music by the French

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by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

The Met Orchestra Plays Ortiz, Blanchard, and More at Carnegie Hall

  The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director and Conductor Angel Blue, Soprano Carnegie Hall, April 18, 2025 Published on Sequenza 21  By Christian Carey   NEW YORK – Virtually since its inception, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Met Orchestra for short, has given concerts alongside its main role accompanying operas. For over a hundred years, this has allowed the ensemble to stretch itself, performing vocal works, unstaged or semi-staged operas, repertoire staples, and several premieres. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has relished the opportunity to work with the musicians in this capacity. On Wednesday night, the Met Orchestra premiered a suite from

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Music Events, New York, News, Premieres

Tonight: New York Premiere by Christian Carey

Tonight, the Locrian Chamber Players gives the New York premiere of Quintet 2 by Christian B. Carey. Sequenza 21 readers know Carey very well through his insightful reviews of concerts and recordings in this publication. He is also a superb composer with a lengthy catalogue of varied works. Quintet 2 is scored for oboe, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, and Carey wrote it for the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, who commissioned it and premiered it in 2016. In his program note, Carey writes that much of his music – including this work – is based on the idea of labyrinthine

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by Gail Wein
CD Review, Contemporary Classical

Yotam Haber – Bloodsnow (CD Review

Yotam Haber Bloodsnow Sideband Records Taylor Ward, Baritone; Don-Paul Kahl, Alto Saxophone Talea Ensemble, James Baker, conductor American Wild Ensemble   Composer Yotam Haber’s Bloodsnow is based on life events and contemporary concerns. The title work was from a harrowing experience. Haber was caring for a friend’s sled dogs during her first Iditarod, and sustained a serious injury to his finger. The blood mixing with snow, the fear of finding treatment for the wound, and the sense of dizziness from blood loss are all musically depicted with bracing verisimilitude. Talea Ensemble, conducted by James Baker, catches every nuance of its

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by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Piano

Hamelin plays Bolcom’s Rags

William Bolcom – The Complete Rags Marc-André Hamelin Hyperion Records   William Bolcom has been an important exponent of the ragtime revival. He helped to mount Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha, has performed Joplin and much of the ragtime repertoire. Bolcom may have had a hand in Joshua Rifkin’s famed Joplin recordings, which were used in the movie The Sting. As Bolcom tells it, he played Rifkin rags by Joplin at a party before the recording was made. Bolcom also encouraged contemporary American composers to return to ragtime, trading many rags with composer William Albright (one of the pieces on

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by Christian Carey