Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” three times in a row, is an exercise in endurance. Not just for the musicians – it’s an athletic feat for them – but for the audience, too. Alan Pierson’s staging at the Park Avenue Armory (through Oct. 18) runs three and a half hours and gives the piece to three different groups, back to back: Steve Reich Ensemble (the OG), Manhattan School of Music students (the next generation), and Alarm Will Sound (somewhere in between). The staging coincided with Reich’s 90th birthday, and it’s one of many celebratory concerts this fall in New
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Choral Music, Classical Music, Commissions, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral
A visceral work headlined the opening program of the NY Philharmonic’s 2026-2027 season at Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center on September 16: John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, a work written in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. As the 25th anniversary of the tragedy was just a few days prior, my gut was still tender from the echoes of the memories of that day. The work included a recording on which the names of some of the victims were spoken. Even a quarter century later, hearing the names put me right into
Read moreThe stars appear first. Their light seems to have traveled through the interior of a violin before reaching us, gathering the grain of wood and the pressure of a human hand along the way. Throughout Maksimal, Daniel Temkin thus treats music as celestial mapmaking, drawing places where the horizon turns out to be an instrument played from both sides. The title composition, written in 2022, carries the genetic traces of the Baroque concerto grosso into a world of fractured memory and unstable terrain. Francisco Fullana is the violin soloist, giving the music its incandescent center. Ryan McAdams conducts the Maksimal
Read moreAlthough primarily known as a Bach interpreter, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and her string ensemble, Baroklyn, find a natural affinity for the music of Philip Glass, the subject of Hourglass, her first recording for the Naïve label. Yet affinity alone hardly explains the uncanny sense of inevitability that permeates these performances. What emerges instead is a meeting of imaginations preoccupied with the strange elasticity of passing moments and the hidden variations between them. In the album booklet, the ensemble’s leader observes that every repetition in Glass reacts to what preceded it while anticipating what follows. Nothing remains static. “We hear it
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ACO, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, New York, Orchestral
On March 11, 2026 at Carnegie Hall, the American Composers Orchestra will perform the world premiere of Cosmologyscape by the composer and violinist Kite. The work was commissioned by the ACO. An essential aspect of the work is crowd-sourced: the audience is invited to submit descriptions of their dreams ahead of time via the Cosmologyscape website. These dreams will be translated by an AI app into a visual language of Lakota symbols, which will be projected on stage at the performance. The composition is a concerto grosso of sorts, as the Cosmology Ensemble (Marilu Donovan, harp; Nava Dunkelman, percussion; JJJJJerome
Read moreIn this album, which gathers art songs by Pablo Ortiz (b. 1956), one encounters a coastline of sounds where fragments arrive through tides of memory: a piece of driftwood, a coil of rope, a shell whose interior still whispers of the sea that shaped it. Melody, rhythm, and dynamic inflection refract through the texture of the music, producing a spectrum that unfolds across the horizon, colors emerging through proximity. In Ortiz’s hands, words are not pressed into musical molds; the music grows from them. The poems breathe because the composer allows them space. In soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist
Read moreVita Morgana is the latest album devoted to the work of Greek composer and producer Thanos Chrysakis, released on his own Aural Terrains imprint, a label name that already gestures toward topography, strata, and the slow intelligence of landscapes. The program gathers three earlier works alongside more recent compositions, most of them written for solo flutes in varied incarnations. Performed with unwavering focus and artistic integrity by Wilfrido Terrazas, this recording offers an experience that invites one to wander rather than to map. For listeners attuned to contemporary practices in which sound behaves as an ecology, Vita Morgana is essential.
Read moreSome composers refine the language they inherit. Others trouble it, bend it, and compel it to confess what it would rather conceal. Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) belongs to the latter lineage. His music does not decorate Baroque convention so much as interrogate it from within, testing how much strain the form can bear before it reveals something truer than elegance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the six Trio Sonatas, ZWV 181. To encounter them is to overhear the composer thinking aloud: restless, contrarian, devout, and faintly dangerous. Zelenka came to Dresden as a virtuoso of the orchestra’s lowest
Read moreA veneer is a promise made by surfaces. It is the thin layer we polish so the hand does not snag on splinters, the face we present so the wound can breathe without being seen. Stephen Upshaw’s debut recording understands this double bind with unnerving clarity. Across four works, his viola does not seek to anesthetize pain but study it as a corporeal fact, as memory lodged in muscle and bone, as a story retold until it becomes survivable. The cumulative effect is that of the self in rehearsal, learning how to carry its history forward without collapsing beneath it.
Read moreThe first rule of MANTRA is “You do not talk about MANTRA.” The second rule is that if you find yourself unable to stop thinking about MANTRA, you talk around it, circle it, cultivate the soil from which it grows. That is how this album begins, not with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s looming monolith, but with John Liberatore’s Sedgeflowers, a choice that feels both mischievous and deeply principled. Pianists Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou do not kick down the door. They plant something. And what emerges is an astonishingly inventive and coherent program that understands that radicalism is a spirited little ouroboros
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