feature | MEMETERIA by Thomas May

October 2, 2018 • 2:25 pm Comments Off on Hip To Be HIP

Hip To Be HIP

Enraged Alcina (Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, mezzo-soprano) casts a curse on the love of Angelica (Sharon Harms, soprano) and Medoro (Brian Jeffers, tenor); from Jonathan Dawe’s Cracked Orlando: dramma per musica e fractals at Juilliard, 2017; photo by Nanette Melville

My story on the creative connections between early music performers and contemporary composers is the current cover story in Early Music America Magazine‘s fall 2018 issue:

When early and new music intersect, alliances are opening up a sense of fresh potential for both sides …

continue

Filed under: early music, feature, new music

May 3, 2017 • 6:35 am Comments Off on A Visit with Composer Jennifer Higdon

A Visit with Composer Jennifer Higdon

Higdon-Composing My story on Jennifer Higdon is now out in the current issue of Strings magazine:

Jennifer Higdon is not only stunningly prolific but one of the most-performed American composers at work today. Her style offers an appealing balance of the accessible and the imaginative, and it attracts top-flight soloists, orchestras, and chamber ensembles—like Trio Solisti, which just premiered the composer’s Second Piano Trio, Color Through. Higdon, who turns 55 in December, also contributes to musical life through her teaching and residencies at such institutions as the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she is currently the Barr Institute Laureate…

continue reading

Filed under: American music, feature, Jennifer Higdon, Strings

October 10, 2016 • 6:49 am Comments Off on The Emerson String Quartet Celebrates 40 Years

The Emerson String Quartet Celebrates 40 Years

2783

My cover story on the Emersons is now out in STRINGS magazine:

The Emerson Quartet has been a dominant fixture in the chamber-music scene for so long now that it takes a considerable leap of imagination to picture what it was like for the ensemble 40 years ago, at the beginning of their adventure. The world was a vastly different place, of course, when they embarked on that debut season in 1976—though the sense of one crisis overlapping the next remains eerily familiar. The Watergate scandal still painfully recent, the nation faced its first election since Richard Nixon’s resignation, while the Fall of Saigon the previous year had just brought the bitter conflict in Vietnam to its traumatic end….

continue reading

Filed under: chamber music, Emerson String Quartet, feature, string quartet