A new Stradinterview with Gil Shaham about Premieres, his forthcoming album of violin concertos written for him by Scott Wheeler, Bright Sheng, and Avner Dorman:
Premieres, Gil Shaham’s new release on Canary Classics, brings together three violin concertos written expressly for him and realised in close collaboration with conductor Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now. Recorded at Bard College’s Fisher Center, the album reflects a network of long-standing artistic relationships and a shared belief in the concerto as a living, evolving form…
To open the season this weekend, Franz Welser-Möst leads the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the American premiere of Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s ambitious, nearly-hour-long Urworte, which sets Goethe’s famous stanzas to music.
Movements:
Daimon: Dämon (Demon)
Tyche: Das Zufällige (The Accidental)
Eros: Liebe (Love)
Ananke: Nötigung (Necessity) —
Elpis: Hoffnung (Hope)
Sunday’s concert will be livestreamed on Adella, digital home of The Cleveland Orchestra.
My introduction to the work can be found in the Cleveland Orchestra program notes here.
Composers often set aside ideas that strike them in a flash of inspiration, waiting until the right moment arrives to wrestle them down in detail and give them an enduring form. For Bernd Richard Deutsch, one such idea was to write a work exploring the elemental forces that shape our lives…. continue
And it begins! Ojai Music Festival launches its 79th edition today, 5 June, and will be streaming the concerts at Libbey Bowl on the OMF homepage at OjaiFestival.org and on the festival’s YouTube channel.
Writing the OMF program notes is always an immersive experience, but this year’s festival programming by Music Director Claire Chase has proved to be the most fulfilling since I began writing for the festival. The 2025 edition also carries a bittersweet resonance since Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian just announced that he will conclude his tenure with the 2026 OMF.
So many highlights to look forward to over this extended weekend, which showcases the incredible community of fellow artists with whom Claire Chase has chosen to collaborate. In the spotlight tonight are Marcos Balter and his epic Pan – a signature contribution to Chase’s ongoing Density 2036 project – and Annea Lockwood’s bayou-borne, an homage to the late Pauline Oliveros, her close friend, mentor to Chase, and a tutelary spirit watching over the music-making at Ojai.
San Francisco Symphony just gave the world premiere of Before we fall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s new cello concerto for Johannes Moser, with Dalia Stasevska on the podium.
My behind-the-scenes feature on its creation is the current Strings magazine cover story.
Here’s Lisa Hirsch’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Thorvaldsdottir’s new cello concerto, Before We Fall, is a banger, sonically and intellectually, dense with ideas and meriting repeat hearings. It launches explosively, which is not an unusual strategy for a concerto, but don’t be misled. This isn’t a conventional soloist-versus-orchestra showdown…. continue
Third Coast Percussion with guest artist violinist Jessie Montgomery. (Marc Perlish)
I spoke with Third Coast Percussion’s David Skidmore about their upcoming program on 3 May at Meany:
Think percussion is just about hitting things? Think again.
With instruments that shimmer, thrum, ping and even gurgle underwater, Third Coast Percussion has spent the past 20 years expanding horizons for what a percussion ensemble can do. The Chicago-based quartet returns to the University of Washington’s Meany Center for the Performing Arts on May 3 as part of a milestone anniversary tour….
Xian Zhang, Seattle Symphony music director designate, conducts the Symphony in its “Holst: The Planets” program March 27. (James Holt / Seattle Symphony)
I reviewed Xian Zhang’s first concert with Seattle Symphony since being named music director designate :
With just a few gestures, Xian Zhang began conjuring a cosmos.
Returning to Benaroya Hall for her first full program since being named Seattle Symphony’s incoming music director, Zhang drew the nearly sold-out concert hall Thursday night into her orbit with her focused, magnetic conducting.
A new interview for The Strad: I spoke with Ayane Kozasa and Paul Wiancko of the Kronos Quartet about the dramatic change in the ensemble’s lineup that began with the current season:
Having celebrated its 50th anniverary last season, the Kronos Quartet has already begun its latest chapter with a dramatic change in the ensemble’s makeup. Longtime members John Sherba (violin) and Hank Dutt (viola) retired at the end of June, leaving violinist David Harrington, who founded Kronos, as the sole remaining member from the early years. Dutt had been part of Kronos since 1977, while Sherba joined them in 1978. Cellist and composer Paul Wiancko began his relationship with the quartet in 2019 and took the place of Sunny Yang in February 2023. Violinist David Harrington, who founded Kronos, is the only member who now remains. ..
Michael Mayes (David), Brenton Ryan (CM), and Greer Grimsley (Paul) in The Righteous; photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
I reviewed Santa Fe Opera’s The Righteous for Musical America. The latest in the company’s distinguished history of commissions, The Righteous is an ambitious collaboration between composer Gregory Spears and poet-librettist Tracy K. Smith. The opera unfolds across the span of the Reagan era and features a large cast to tell the story of a charismatic Southwestern preacher who gets elected as state governor:
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 Concertosand 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.
On Tuesday 16 April, the Iranian American composer Gity Razaz’s new song cycle Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being will be introduced to Seattle. The program, at 7.30 at Meany Center on the University of Washington Campus, is being presented by the Israeli Chamber Project with Lebanese American tenor Karim Sulayman.
Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being is based on poetry and prose of Rumi and Rainer Maria Rilke and is scored for tenor, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, harp, and piano. Commissioned by the Israeli Chamber Project. Gity Razaz, who was born in Tehran in 1986 and now lives in New York, is deeply influenced by the constantly changing, at times tumultuous, realities of the world, including her identity and personal journey as an immigrant. This process of what Razaz describes as “uprooting and rebuilding” occupies much of her work, resulting in music that is emotionally charged and dramatic, while still maintaining mystery and lyricism. Her compositions are her means of responding to a hyperactive, disconnected world and offering transformation to listeners.
In an interview with I Care If You Listen, Razaz says why she chose to juxtapose the two poets in her new song cycle: “Rumi and Rilke lived about 700 years apart and on nearly opposite sides of the earth, and with completely different religious backgrounds. Yet their philosophical and imaginative perspectives on some of the most existential topics in the history of mankind are eerily similar. In the poems selected for this project, I was attracted to the almost identical poetic imagery they both used in the poems which I ended up selecting for this project: they both use the imagery of ‘widening rings and circles’ to describe life and existence. Rumi calls for embracing uncertainty and living the ‘questions,’ ‘flowing down the always widening rings of being’ while Rilke acknowledges life’s unyielding truth, and moves through it with the confession that ‘I live my life in widening circles.’ . . ”
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 