June 27, 2019 • 10:07 am Comments Off on John Luther Adams: Become Desert
Become Desert by John Luther Adams — one of his most spellbinding and innovative compositions — has just been released. Here’s my review from the world premiere by Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot last year.
It’s a rare concert when a major work of Beethoven gets upstaged. Rarer still when the music responsible for the upstaging is brand new…
Filed under: John Luther Adams, Ludovic Morlot, Seattle Symphony
June 25, 2019 • 11:42 pm Comments Off on Ludovic Morlot Takes Leave of the Seattle Symphony (For Now)
Ludovic Morlot at his farewell Seattle Symphony concert; photo (c) Brandon Patoc
A look at Ludovic Morlot’s Seattle Symphony legacy:
SEATTLE — With the elegiac strains of the Mondscheinmusik interlude from Richard Strauss’s Capriccio as an encore, Ludovic Morlot brought his final program as music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra to an end over the weekend. Stepping back to let the spotlight fall on principal horn Jeffrey Fair during his incandescent solo was a characteristically generous touch. It reminded me of the moment at the end of his opening night concert in 2011, when Morlot descended the podium to join the violin section during Boléro — music making as a shared undertaking among equals.
Filed under: Ludovic Morlot, review, Seattle Symphony
June 23, 2019 • 6:20 pm Comments Off on Happy Midsummer Eve
Filed under: holiday, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare
June 22, 2019 • 12:53 am Comments Off on Ludo’s Farewell Concert
It’s already here: this weekend Ludovic Morlot is leading his final performances as music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The program is characteristically enticing and original: Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde followed by a suite from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (fashioned in 1983 by Marius Constant) and the Nocturnes, and a genuine rarity: Leoš Janáček’s cantata The Eternal Gospel, written on the eve of the First World War.
I’ll be putting together some thoughts on the significance of the Morlot era in Seattle soon. In the meantime, it will be a bittersweet occasion tonight, but with the consoling thought that Ludo should be back here with some frequency thanks to his new title as Conductor Emeritus.
Filed under: Ludovic Morlot, Seattle Symphony
June 21, 2019 • 10:01 pm Comments Off on Artistry and Humanity at the 2019 Concours Musical International de Montréal: Violin Edition
My report on the 2019 Concours Musical International de Montréal:
The 2019 edition of the Concours musical international de Montréal (CMIM), devoted this year to the violin, started off with added pressure – for the organisers, that is. Because of the convergence of several of the most high-profile violin tournaments elsewhere this spring – from Auckland to Augsburg, from Sendai to Brussels – the recently completed CMIM also had to compete with the competitions.
Filed under: competitions, music news, violinists
June 20, 2019 • 8:53 am Comments Off on Anthony Davis’s New Opera The Central Park Five
Cedric Berry as Yusef Salaam, Orson Van Gay as Raymond Santana, Derrell Acon as Antron McCray, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson, and Nathan Granner as Khorey Wise image (c) Keith Ian Polakoff
I was privileged to have the opportunity to review the remarkable Anthony Davis’s new opera on an urgently relevant subject. The Central Park Five opened this past weekend at Long Beach Opera and will again be presented this Saturday and Sunday.
SAN PEDRO — “Now, I am awake,” the protagonists of The Central Park Five sing collectively in the Prologue. Projected headline images telescope the timeline: these are the five men of color who were accused in 1989, while still only teenagers, of the vicious beating and rape of a white woman who had gone out for a jog in Central Park…
Filed under: American opera, Anthony Davis, Long Beach Opera, Musical America, review
June 19, 2019 • 1:58 am Comments Off on Europa: Mythos und Vision
Here’s the program book for the celebration this evening at Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin of the 50th anniversary of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (my contribution starts on p. 42).
Filed under: Europe, Pierre Boulez Saal
June 18, 2019 • 8:34 am Comments Off on Singing a New Song: The Power of Commission Consortiums
As part of its five-city tour to South Africa with Classical Movements, the Minnesota Orchestra performed the world premiere of Harmonia Ubuntu, commissioned by Classical Movement’s Eric Daniel Helms Program. © Travis Anderson.
Here’s an article I wrote for the spring issue of The Voice, published by Chorus America. The organization’s annual conference takes place next week in Philadelphia.
When major music institutions announce a season, increasing scrutiny is being paid to the commitment shown to new work. There is more widespread recognition that merely trotting out the familiar repertoire no longer suffices to sustain the art—and that fear of the new should be the exception, not the default setting….
Filed under: choral music, commissions
June 16, 2019 • 10:42 pm Comments Off on Yuval Sharon’s Radiant New Interpretation of Meredith Monk’s Avant-Garde Classic
Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, staged by Yuval Sharon; photo credit (c) Mathew Imaging
Yuval Sharon bid adieu this past week to his three-year residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic by boldly staging a work that changed his life: Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas, which before this had existed in just one production: the original, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera under David Gockley and staged there in 1991.
My review has been posted on Musical America (apologies for the paywall):
LOS ANGELES — A generation has already passed since Meredith Monk first charted an unprecedented operatic world in Atlas. Yet her ambitious stage work, which premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1991, retains an aura of singularity — not just in its radiant music and almost entirely wordless libretto, but in the process through which Atlas was shaped as well. Monk cast aside convention altogether, building her opera from performance practices she had pioneered.
Filed under: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Meredith Monk, new opera, review, Yuval Sharon
June 12, 2019 • 11:11 am Comments Off on Bernard Haitink Announces Retirement
Now it’s official: Bernard Haitink has announced that he will conduct his last concert on September 2019 in Lucerne. His farewell: Bruckner’s Seventh (along with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with Murray Perahia as the soloist).
Filed under: conductors, Lucerne Festival, music news
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 