January 31, 2019 • 12:51 pm Comments Off on Caroline Shaw’s New Piano Concerto Premieres in Seattle
Very excited–especially after getting a foretaste in rehearsal–to hear the world premiere tonight of super-talented Caroline Shaw’s Watermark, her piano concerto for Jonathan Biss.
Check out the video above for the composer in a master class on her own music. And here’s an interview from yesterday with KING-FM’s Dave Beck on Watermark.
Filed under: Caroline Shaw, commissions, pianists, Seattle Symphony
January 27, 2019 • 12:32 pm Comments Off on Berkeley Symphony To Premiere Hannah Kendall’s Disillusioned Dreamer
Berkeley Symphony’s upcoming concert on Thursday 31 Jan. includes the world premiere of Hannah Kendall’s Disillusioned Dreamer, inspired by a passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Read my program notes for an introduction to this remarkable young composer’s new work.
Filed under: Berkeley Symphony, commissions, Hannah Kendall
January 19, 2019 • 1:38 pm Comments Off on Matthias Pintscher Premiere
Tomorrow’s program at the Boulez Saal in Berlin brings the world premiere of the new commission Nur by Matthias Pintscher, along with his early work Verzeichnete Spur and Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp. Here’s my essay for the program:
The complex phenomena associated with a dialogue—musical, social, intellectual, emotional—inform the core of Matthias Pintscher’s musical thinking, whether in his guise as composer, conductor, or teacher. In an interview with the immunologist Jacques Banchereau on the topic of creative inspiration, Pintscher remarked that “these musical objects start talking and erasing each other or clashing and transforming, and then you start developing the drama, the narrative, the story.”
Filed under: Matthias Pintscher, Pierre Boulez Saal
January 16, 2019 • 5:46 am Comments Off on On the Air! Juilliard’s Focus Festival Salutes Radio Commissions
For this year’s Focus Festival at Juilliard, titled On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissioning, Joel Sachs has curated six programs sampling this wealth of compositions from an international array of stations.
The opening concert is on 25 January at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater, when Sachs will lead the New Juilliard Ensemble. All six Focus events are free of charge.
Sachs explains what inspired the 2019 Festival:
I unexpectedly realized the role of radio in October 2017, while writing a program note about Argentinean-German composer Mauricio Kagel for a New Juilliard Ensemble concert. Because Kagel settled in Cologne, I began thinking about the extraordinary post-World War II new music scene that flourished there, where he and many other compositional giants, German and foreign, had settled.
Being reasonably acquainted with that Rhineland city and its institutions, I immediately recalled the German letters WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Broadcasting), the radio-TV public broadcast based there. An enormous operation, WDR generally considered the most important broadcaster in German, with five radio transmissions, television, internet broadcasts, and a group of external studios in various cities around Germany’s industrial heartland. Having had a professional relationship with WDR 3, I realized that it has had a vital role as one of the most prominent of European radio stations with its decades-old commissioning program.
Dots began to connect. I had performed or recorded at the BBC, Radio France, Swiss stations in Zurich and Basel, Austrian radio in Salzburg, but what had never struck me was that they all were busily commissioning composers, not just creating background music for radio dramas, but also music intended for live performance in concerts, and not just those composers who produced ‘comfortable’ music. Suddenly I had a topic for Focus 2019: “On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissions.”
more on the 2019 Focus Festival at Juilliard: 25 Jan-1 Feb
Filed under: commissions, Juilliard
January 7, 2019 • 1:07 pm Comments Off on The Adventurous Mahan Esfahani
Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani plays with the Seattle Symphony on Friday and Saturday, Jan. 11 and 12. (Kaja Smith)
Filed under: Bach family, Seattle Times
January 2, 2019 • 7:43 pm Comments Off on Brahms, the Consoler
January 2, 2019 • 12:00 am Comments Off on Michael Vincent Waller: Musical America‘s New Artist of the Month
Composer Michael Vincent Waller: photo by Alan Del Rio Ortiz
Congratulations to Michael Vincent Waller on being selected Musical America‘s New Artist of the Month at the start of 2019. Here’s my profile of this talented young composer:
The contemplative aura that gently emanates from Michael Vincent Waller’s music suggests a hard-won focus on the essential, distilled from long decades of reflection and experience. But the composer was already shaping this unique sound world while still in his 20s. Now 33, he’s poised for a breakout moment as his work draws increasing attention from international new music circles.
Filed under: Musical America, new music
January 1, 2019 • 12:00 am Comments Off on Turning the Page: Happy New Year 2019
Here’s one way to start the New Year: with this remarkable interpretation of Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Samuil Feinberg. The opening Prelude and Fugue in C major in particular sounds like a fresh start, yet already shadowed by experience.
Filed under: Bach, miscellaneous
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 