July 31, 2024 • 2:57 pm Comments Off on Ani Aznavoorian’s Family-Made Cello
A new post for The Strad on this month’s just-concluded Summer Festival presented by Seattle Chamber Music Society:
With its roster of several dozen internationally prominent musicians, the just-concluded 2024 edition of the Summer Festival presented by the Seattle Chamber Music Society involved a de facto summit of priceless string instruments in action….
Filed under: cellists, luthier, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Strad
July 27, 2024 • 10:41 am Comments Off on RIP Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024)
The eminent German composer Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers in Europe and a longstanding pillar of the Lucerne Festival Academy, has died.
From Lucerne Festival’s obituary:
“It is with sadness and at the same time with deep gratitude that we take leave of one of the greatest artists of our time and of one of Lucerne Festival’s most influential companions. Wolfgang Rihm was closely associated with Lucerne Festival not only as a composer but, since 2016, as Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy as well….”
And from Rihm’s publisher, Universal Edition, comes this tribute to the artist:
“With Wolfgang Rihm, the music world loses not only a gifted composer, but also a universal scholar, who was as concerned with the promotion of young talent as he was about his personal commitment to cultural policy…”
“Music resembles life, is a reflection of its processes.“– Wolfgang Rihm
Filed under: composers, Lucerne Festival, Lucerne Festival Academy, music news
July 23, 2024 • 9:35 am Comments Off on How “Jubilee” Is Bringing Spirituals to the Opera Stage
My preview of Seattle Opera’s world premiere of Jubilee, created and directed by the extraordinary Tazewell Thompson, has been posted at Opera Now. Jubilee will run on 12-26 October 2024 at McCaw Hall in Seattle.
In 1903, in his classic The Souls of Black Folk, the influential sociologist and activist W E B Du Bois famously declared that the African American spiritual ‘stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas’. Du Bois singled out a group of performers for their role in bringing widespread attention to this legacy: ‘The Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again’….
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Filed under: American artists, commissions, new opera, Seattle Opera
July 18, 2024 • 1:12 am Comments Off on Happy 90th Birthday to Roger Reynolds
A toast to the luminously imaginative composer and musical thinker Roger Reynolds, who celebrates his 90th birthday today — and is still going strong. Within this year alone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has presented his latest opus, KNOWING / NOT KNOWING, described by Ken Herman as “a 21st-century secular oratorio … that deftly fuses recorded and live media, alternates chorus and the spoken word, and juxtaposes live drama with instrumentalists in order to pose probing questions about the nature and range of human knowledge.” (Here’s a vimeo link to an excerpt from KNOWING/NOT KNOWING.)
As Roger Reynolds continues into his tenth decade, the urge to extend the limits of musical perception and meaning beyond those previously known remains as powerful a motivation as ever.
In March, the Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a colloquium and concert celebrating this milestone birthday year. The Center describes Reynolds, who has also been an influential mentor at UC San Diego for more than half a century, as “a composer, writer, producer, and mentor, pioneer in sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts … [and] an inveterate synthesizer of diverse capacities and perspectives. … [His] projects with individual performers and ensembles, theater directors, choreographers, and scientists involve challenging interpersonal collaborations.” He has been, for decades, a sought-after mentor at UC San Diego.”
Some (by no means all!) other recent projects include his latest “sharespace” work, Persistence (for cello and computer musician), the ongoing Passage series, and Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House, a collaborative book exploring the evolution of a house design by the Greek composer/architect for him and his partner Karen. Reynolds is also a member of the international, Montréal-based consortium ACTOR, and the originator of the Bridging Chasms initiative, which seeks to improve cross-disciplinary communications. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023.
Reynolds has also been collaborating with the Danish percussionist, and conductor, and producer Mathias Reumert on the release of no fewer than four new albums. The first two these, Wind Concertos and Watershed V, have already been released on Reumert’s Ekkozone label; still to be released later in the year are The Promises of Darkness and Watershed V/’O’o.
Here’s a link to the booklet essay I wrote for the extraordinary two-CD set For a Reason, which appeared last year on neuma records. (The neuma label, which prizes itself on offering “food for the mind’s ear,” has an extensive catalogue of music by Reynolds.) For a Reason includes examples of Reynolds’s longstanding collaborations with violinist Irvine Arditti (whose own eponymous string quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) and percussionist Steven Schick.
from Watershed V:
Filed under: music news, new music, Roger Reynolds
July 12, 2024 • 8:37 pm Comments Off on Damien Geter’s “American Apollo”
Damien Geter’s much-anticipated new opera American Apollo will be unveiled this weekend at Des Moines Metro Opera. The librettist is Lila Palmer and revolves around Thomas Eugene McKeller, a Black hotel worker who became a model for the painter John Singer Sargent.
“As a work of historical fiction, the opera imagines the story behind Sargent’s spare, nude portrait and sensual sketches of McKeller, whose image was transformed by Sargent into white-skinned Greek gods featured prominently in murals throughout Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Themes of erasure, the white gaze, and the intimate relationship between the two men are explored in this powerful new work,” according to DMMO’s website.
In the cast are baritone Justin Austin as McKeller, tenor William Burden as John Singer Sargent, soprano Mary Dunleavy as Isabella Stewart Gardner, with David Neely conducting and Shaun Patrick Tubbs directing.
Writes Geter in his composer’s note: “As a composer, one of my goals is to help bring to life stories that have long been ignored in the traditional canon, and more largely, across the spectrum of human experience. It is safe to say that many of these unknown or forgotten stories belong to Black people and other folks of color who, because of white supremacy, have not been represented to the fullest extent with regards to the vast array of personalities, emotions, and multi-dimensions that we see in real-life people. Stereotypes tend to run amok in opera when it comes to people of color. ..”
Synopsis here.
Info sheet on American Apollo here.
Discussion from 2020 of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s rediscovery of Sargent’s drawings of McKeller:
Damien Geter’s recent Richmond Symphony commission, Sinfonia Americana, is available here, conducted by Valentina Peleggi:
Filed under: American music, American opera, commissions, music news
July 11, 2024 • 6:25 am Comments Off on “Urlicht” with Samuel Hasselhorn
I reviewed baritone Samuel Hasselhorn’s latest harmonia mundi release, Urlicht, for Gramophone:
Samuel Hasselhorn’s first orchestral release, this album follows his inaugural instalment of the ambitious ‘Schubert 200 Project’ (Harmonia Mundi, 11/23). Die schöne Müllerin, which won the 2023 Diapason d’Or, launched the young baritone’s collaboration with the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz to record all of the lieder penned by Schubert in his last five years, with the undertaking to culminate in the bicentennial of the composer’s death in 2028….
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Mahler
July 10, 2024 • 12:58 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Marcel
“…même quand j’eus écouté la sonate d’un bout à l’autre, elle me resta presque tout entière invisible, comme un monument dont la distance ou la brume ne laissent apercevoir que de faibles parties. De là, la mélancolie qui s’attache à la connaissance de tels ouvrages, comme de tout ce qui se réalise dans le temps.”
(“Even when I had heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the melancholy inseparable from one’s knowledge of such works, as of everything that acquires reality in time.”)
— from A l’ombre des jeune filles en fleur by Marcel Proust, born on this day in 1871
Marcel Proust, premier mouvement from Radio France
Filed under: literature, Proust
July 8, 2024 • 6:52 am Comments Off on Käthe Kollwitz in New York
Born this day in 1867 in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia (Königsberg in Prussia at the time), the great artist Käthe Kollwitz is the subject of a retrospective at MOMA in New York that traces her development over several decades, from the 1890s through the 1930s — a period with all-too-familiar resonances to our current moment.
From the brilliant Philip Kennicott’s review: “As other artists working in Germany during the same period steeled themselves with irony and satire, rendering the worst of the world in lurid shapes and hues, Kollwitz stared it down without flinching… She committed a number of sins against artistic orthodoxy, making art for a large public, making art that was figurative rather than abstract, making art focused on the emotional lives of women and narratives of motherhood and loss.”
Here’s an appreciation (in German) from SWR Kultur.
Filed under: art exhibition, art history
July 1, 2024 • 12:14 pm Comments Off on 2024 Summer Festival with Seattle Chamber Music Society
Tonight is the opening concert of the 2024 edition of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s annual Summer Festival. I wrote a preview for The Seattle Times here:
Sure, the Seattle Chamber Music Society has a menu of the usual star composers — Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák — for its Summer Festival running July 1-26. But this year, the festival is boasting an actual menu that will be designed onstage by Seattle star chefs. …
Filed under: James Ehnes, music news, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Seattle Times
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 