Tag: Contemporary Classical

ACO, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, New York, Orchestral

American Composers Orchestra Performs a New Work Crowd-Sourced by Dreams

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

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by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical, Songs

Lucy Fitz Gibbon/Ryan MacEvoy McCullough: here at the end of the world – art song of Pablo Ortiz

In 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

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by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Flute

Thanos Chrysakis: Vita Morgana

Vita 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.

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by Tyran Grillo
Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical

Theo Plath et al.: Zelenka Trio Sonatas / Ko Ghosts

Some 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

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by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical

Stephen Upshaw: Veneer

A 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.

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by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Ryan McCullough/Andrew Zhou: sedgeflowers/MANTRA

The 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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by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Piano

Alessandro Stella: Handsome Skies – Valentin Silvestrov

Valentin Silvestrov emerges from the late Soviet classical tradition as a figure of quiet resistance, not through overt polemic but by turning inward when history demanded proclamations. While many composers of his generation negotiated the pressures of socialist realism or the rigor of the avant-garde, Silvestrov gradually chose another path, treating music as an echo rather than a declaration. But he carried it further, dissolving form until what remained was remembrance itself. In his hands, composition became a kind of afterlife, where melody appears already worn by time, as if it remembers having been heard before. Handsome Skies, as realized

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by Tyran Grillo
CD Review, Contemporary Classical

Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes

Released on Thanos Chrysakis’s Aural Terrains label, Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes unfolds as a considered gathering of voices. The instrumentation itself suggests a downward gravity, an attraction to breath, wood, and string as sites of glorious friction. Across the program, Jason Alder, Tim Hodgkinson, Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, and Lori Freedman inhabit the lower reeds with an intimacy that borders on corporeal. Vincent Royer and Jill Valentine draw violas into their extremes in either direction, while Carla Rees and Karin de Fleyt allow flutes to hover, flicker, and occasionally wound the air. The album opens with Gérard

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by Tyran Grillo
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the 92nd Street Y

Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Recital 92nd Street Y November 19, 2025 Published in Sequenza 21   NEW YORK – Pianist Pierre-Laurant Aimard has had a long and fruitful collaboration with the composer George Benjamin. Aimard’s recital program this past Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y was conceived and built around two of Benjamin’s pieces, Shadowlines, a group of six canons for solo piano, and Divisions, a new four-hand piece on which the composer joined him for this New York premiere.    The other programmed works were meant to complement the Benjamin pieces and proved to be strong foils for them. Nikolai

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by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Commissions, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, jazz, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Premieres

NY Philharmonic Revels in a Rainbow of Colors

An expansive palette of colors was on display at the New York Philharmonic concert at David Geffen Hall on Friday. David Robertson shone a light on the performers and the scores, exposing nuances of hues, pastels, brights and brilliance. The entire program – Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the Violin Concerto by Wyton Marsalis and the world premiere of a new work by Caroline Mallonee – focused on color and mood. I had high hopes in particular for this performance of Petrushka, to erase my memory of a flaccid reading of the work a couple of years ago. The Philharmonic redeemed themselves,

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by Gail Wein