MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

December 14, 2025 • 8:16 am 0

KUOW Adds a Classical Christmas Soundtrack to Its App

This holiday season, KUOW – Seattle’s public radio station – is offering listeners something gentler than the daily news cycle: a steady stream of seasonal classical music.

Through a new partnership with Classical KING, the Seattle-based classical music broadcaster, the KUOW app now features Classical Christmas, the organization’s annual holiday stream. The stream appears as an additional listening option, separate from the station’s live radio broadcast.

Rather than create its own seasonal programming, KUOW has collaborated with an organization long associated with classical music in the region to create a digital-only offering that expands KUOW’s role beyond broadcast journalism.

“We are delighted to partner with KUOW,” said Michelle Maestas Simonsen, Classical KING’s Chief Engagement and Content Officer. “This seasonal collaboration is a reminder of what becomes possible when organizations with shared values work together. Whether someone wants a break from the news or simply loves holiday music, Classical Christmas is here for them.”

Classical Christmas is available throughout the holiday season in the KUOW app, where it can be streamed alongside KUOW’s regular live and on-demand programming. The stream is also accessible via Classical KING’s own app, website, and Alexa skills.

Filed under: classical radio, music news

December 13, 2025 • 11:44 am 0

Holiday Baroque from Music on the Strait

Rachell Ellen Wong and MOTS co-director James Garlick

Music on the Strait is giving its first-ever concert on period instruments on Sunday 14 December in Sequim on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula. This looks to be a lovely program, featuring Baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, harpsichordist David Belkovski, and their Twelfth Night Ensemble in music by Telemann, Purcell, Vivaldi, Corelli, Johann Friedrich Fasch, and Francesco Durante.

The performance is Sun 12/14 at 4pm at Trinity United Methodist Church in Sequim:

🎟️ Tickets starting at $5 with our Pay What Makes You Happy pricing

📺 free Livestream on the MOTS website at musiconthestrait.org during the concert.

PROGRAM:

Telemann | Sonata No 4 in A Minor 
Henry Purcell | Suite from Amphitryon 
Antonio Vivaldi | Violin Concerto in E Minor, RV 278 
Archangelo Corelli  | Concerto grosso in G minor “Christmas Concerto”
Johann Friedrich Fasch  | Sonata No 5 in D Minor 
Francesco Durante | Concerto for 2 Violins, Viola, and continuo in G Minor 
Antonio Vivaldi | Sonata No. 12 in D Minor, RV 63, “La Follia” 

​Rachell Ellen WONG – baroque violin

James GARLICK – baroque violin

Alex GRIMES – baroque viola​​

Meeka QUAN-DILORENZO – baroque cello

John LENTI – theorbo/baroque guitar​

David BELKOVSKI- harpsichord

more

Filed under: early music, music news, Music on the Strait

December 11, 2025 • 12:34 pm 0

Toshio Hosokawa’s ‘Natasha’

Hiroka Yamashita and Ilse Eerens in Toshio Hosokawa’s Natasha; photo: Rikimaru Hotta

The New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT) presents Toshio Hosokawa‘s new opera Natasha, conducted by Kazushi Ono and directed by Christian Räth, via global streaming. Premiered in August 2025, the production drew wide acclaim and was named a finalist in the World Premiere category of the International Opera Awards 2025.

From Friday, 12 December 2025 at 7:00 p.m. (CET) to Friday, 12 June 2026 at 12:00 p.m. (CET), audiences can experience Natasha for free on OperaVision and NNTT Stream. Running time: Approx. 2 hours 35 minutes.

Natasha is the first opera by Hosokawa to be staged at the NNTT since Matsukaze in 2018, as well as his second opera to be premiered by Ono Kazushi.

“Reconsidering the relationship between humans and nature, Hosokawa Toshio’s music is a kind of prayer or requiem. Especially after the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, his works address humans’ repetitive history of destruction, drawing particular attention to nature’s fearsomeness and to the human arrogance of forgetting the awe nature deserves. Globally acclaimed author Tawada Yoko, who writes novels in both Japanese and German that examine the world from a German base and highlight themes of national borders and languages, is working on the libretto for the new work. The story focuses on an encounter between Natasha, a wandering immigrant driven out of her hometown, and a young man named Arato, as well as a Mephistopheles-like figure who shows and leads the pair through various scenes of human hells. Multilingual with Japanese, German and Ukrainian languages, the opera compares and contrasts the origins of modern civilization and humanity. The groans of the endangered earth resonate deeply throughout this opera that depicts destruction and hope with multiculturalism as the key to finding a path forward.

Hosokawa’s music resonates with meditative power—at once ritualistic and deeply human—evoking the cries of a wounded planet while offering a glimpse of hope.”

Creative Team
Libretto by Yoko Tawada
Composed by Toshio Hosokawa
Conductor: Kazushi Ono
Production: Christian Räth
Set Design: Christian Räth, Daniel Unger
Costume Design: Mattie Ullrich
Lighting Design: Rick Fisher
Video Design: Clemens Walter
Electronic Sound Design: Sumihisa Arima
Choreographer: Catherine Galasso
Cast
Natasha — Ilse Eerens
Arato — Hiroka Yamashita
Mephistos Enkel — Christian Miedl
Frau A — Mari Moriya
Frau B — Akiko Tomihira
Businessman A — Tang Jun Bo
Businessman B — Timothy Harris
Saxophonist — Masanori Oishi
Electric Guitarist — Gaku Yamada
Chorus Master — Kyohei Tomihira
Chorus — New National Theatre Chorus
Orchestra — Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra

Filed under: music news, new opera, Toshio Hosokawa

December 2, 2025 • 1:03 pm 0

A New Sound Takes Shape: Leonard Fu on Joining the Juilliard Quartet

Leonard Fu; photo: Eric Tsai

UPDATE: The concert on December 4 will be livestreamed here at 7.30pm EST.

The Juilliard String Quartet gives its first New York performance with new violinist Leonard Fu on Thursday. I interviewed him for The Strad about joining the storied ensemble and about the program they will perform:

As the Juilliard Quartet makes its New York debut in its new formation, newly appointed second violinist Leonard Fu reflects on tradition, renewal and shaping the ensemble’s evolving voice…
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Filed under: Juilliard, music news, string quartet, The Strad

October 26, 2025 • 12:43 pm Comments Off on Awards Announced at 2025 Honens

Awards Announced at 2025 Honens

The final results of the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition are in – and the Gold goes to Élisabeth Pion! 🎉

After a dazzling performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, the 29-year-old French Canadian was named 2025 Honens Gold Laureate in Calgary last night. She takes home CAD $100,000 and a three-year career-accelerator program valued at more than $500,000. She also swept up the Audience Choice Award (worth $5,000 CAD).

The final round featured all three finalists, each in a different concerto, with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra led by Elias Grandy.

Hearty applause as well for Silver Laureate Carter Johnson (29) and to Bronze Laureate Anastasia Vorotnaya (30) – and for all seven semifinalists who made this year’s Honens an inspiring, memorable festival. They included Ádám Balogh (28), Elia Cecino (24), Giorgio Lazzari (25), Sandro Nebieridze (24), Chaeyoung Park (28), Derek Wang (27), and Yuanfan Yang (28).

With performances this bold and individual, the Honens ideal of the “Complete Artist” feels alive and well.

https://www.honens.com/

Filed under: Honens International Piano Competition, music news, pianists

October 23, 2025 • 12:09 am Comments Off on BERBERIO BASH – Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian at 100

BERBERIO BASH – Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian at 100

Born just months apart in 1925, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian formed one of the most daring creative partnerships of the 20th century. Together, the Italian composer and American mezzo-soprano blurred the lines between composer and performer, intellect and emotion, experimentation and play. They expanded our understanding of what a voice could do and reinvented the relationship between music and theater itself.

The Seattle Chamber Orchestra opens its fourth season on Friday 24 October with a centenary tribute to these two kindred spirits. The program, designed by SCO Founder and Music Director Lorenzo Marasso, features Berio’s beloved Folk Songs, Sequenza for voice, and Sequenza for harp, alongside works by John Cage, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Claudio Monteverdi that were signatures of Berberian’s repertoire.

The concert takes place at 8pm at the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Seattle). Tickets here.

The Seattle concert is part of a global series of events celebrating Berberian and Berio throughout 2025.

PROGRAM

Luciano BERIO O King

Claudio MONTEVERDI Lamento della Ninfa

Luciano BERIO Autrefois

Luciano BERIO Wasserklavier

Giorgio Federico GHEDINI Arbero pecerillo from Quattro canti antichi napoletani

Luigi DALLAPICCOLA Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi

Luciano BERIO Sequenza II – for solo harp

John CAGE The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs

Luciano BERIO Sequenza III – for solo voice

Luciano BERIO Folksongs

w members of the Seattle Chamber Orchestra

Lorenzo Marasso – conductor & piano

Stephanie Aston – solo voice

Wendy Wilhelmi – flute

Kevin Morton – clarinet

Shelly Myers – oboe

Jordan Voelker – violin & viola

Rose Bellini – cello

Alison Bjorkedal – harp

Arx Duo – percussions

Filed under: Lorenzo Marasso, music news, Seattle Chamber Orchestra

October 7, 2025 • 1:19 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70

Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70

Yo-Yo Ma © Brantley Gutierrez

The legendary cellist was born on 7 October 1955. The Strad takes a look at some moments of the cellist’s unparalleled career over the decades…

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Filed under: music news, The Strad, Yo-Yo Ma

September 11, 2025 • 1:04 am Comments Off on Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival

Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival

Big and exciting news from the Ojai Festival:

Ojai, CA – September 10, 2025) – Ojai Music Festival Board Chairman Jerry Eberhardt announced today the appointment of conductor/composer/pianist Teddy Abrams as Ojai’s next Artistic and Executive Director effective September 1, 2026, with his first Festival being the 81st Festival in June 2027. He will join the ranks of such distinguished predecessors as Ara Guzelimian, who concludes his tenure with the 2026 Festival, Thomas W. Morris, Ernest Fleischmann, and Lawrence Morton. Mr. Abrams’ collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival will be concurrent with his post as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra….

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Filed under: music news, Ojai Festival, Teddy Abrams

September 5, 2025 • 1:22 am 1

Salonen with the Parisians in Lucerne

Big news this week: just after Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up his Lucerne Festival visit with the Orchestre de Paris, it was announced that he has been named the ensemble’s Chief Conductor starting in 2027. Parallel to that, he’ll become the take up the new Creativity and Innovation Chair of the Philharmonie de Paris. Salonen’s collaboration with the orchestra in Lucerne offered a vivid taste of that future partnership in two very different programs last weekend.

In the first, Augustin Hadelich was the soloist in an account of the Brahms concerto notable for its shadowed lyricism and spacious pacing, illuminating the score’s darker hues. Hadelich played his own cadenza and his arrangement of a Carlos Gardel tango as a steam-vent of an encore following such intensity. If Salonen brought structural clarity to the Brahms, the suite from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that followed surged with dramatic sweep. The episodes seemed to unfold as part of an inexorable tragic arc rather than a set of contrasting miniatures.

His second evening with the Paris musicians revealed a touch more humor alongside the testosterone of ‘Don Juan’. But all that Straussian horn-iness set the stage for the much-anticipated world premiere of Salonen’s own Horn Concerto written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal Stefan Dohr. It’s a big piece, heroic in its way and abounding in the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature across music history, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner (Salonen also trained as a horn player). He colorfully remarked that these moments from the musical past ‘appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again’.

The concerto teems with exposed solo passages that seem to test the limits of breath and control — not to mention imagination, indispensable to giving expressive shape to Salonen’s fertile ideas. Around the horn, the orchestra cast a kaleidoscope of refined colors. The concerto will travel widely in the coming months, so I hope to get a chance for more encounters.

Horn sounds resounded still again, sublimely, in the Sibelius Fifth. Salonen’s control of the art of transition, with subtly judged but dramatically thrilling accelerando, was a marvel. For all the monumentality of the closing chords, I fancied amid their awe an echo of mortality, like the trees being felled at the end of ‘The Cherry Orchard’. But the solace of Sibelius’s glorious Swan Theme circled in the mind’s ear as the swans on Lake Lucerne outside the KKL glided serenely by in serene silence.

Filed under: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lucerne Festival, music news, Sibelius, , , , ,

June 25, 2025 • 9:25 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday to João Carlos Martins!

Happy Birthday to João Carlos Martins!

João Carlos Martins at Carnegie Hall Farewell Concert, 9 May 2025; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias

Happy 85th birthday to o Maestro, João Carlos Martins! Born on 25 June 1940 in São Paulo, Martins established himself as one of the most brilliant keyboard interpreters of Johann Ses=bastian Bach in the second half of the 20th century.

Yet his Bach legacy is just one component of an artistic journey marked by both acclaim and adversity. João Carlos Martins’s story is as much about resilience and reinvention as it is about musical brilliance. Following prodigious beginnings – he made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 20 – repeated injuries to his hands forced Martins to step away from the piano, just as he was reaching the height of his international career. But rather than retreat from music, he redirected his focus to conducting, bringing the same fervor and eloquence to the podium that once defined his playing.

Martins additionally became an enormously influential cultural force in Brazil. Through his Bachiana Foundation, he has brought classical music to thousands of young people, many from underserved communities, creating access where there was none. Alongside this work with the Fundação Bachiana, Martins has also been a champion of Latin American composers.

His initiatives have blended high artistic standards with social impact, forging a vision of music as both an expressive art and a tool for transformation. Under his leadership, the Bachiana Filarmônica SESI-SP has become one of Brazil’s most dynamic cultural foundations – a platform for emerging talent and a vehicle for national pride, performing everywhere from favelas to major concert halls.

Martins’s late-career return to the keyboard – made possible by specially adapted bionic gloves – has added an inspiring new chapter to an already remarkable artistic narrative. Following his moving farewell concert at Carnegie Hall last month, Martins continues to extend a career that has continually defied limitation as he devotes himself to a broad new initiative to improve music education across Brazil.

Feliz Aniversário, Maestro! Your artistry continues to resonate far beyond the concert hall.

João Carlos Martins at Carnegie Hall Farewell Concert, 9 May 2025; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias

An archive of JCM videos can be found here.

Filed under: Bach, Brazil, music news, , , , ,

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