March 8, 2016 • 7:05 pm Comments Off on Women’s Indelible Mark on Classical Music
The 29-year-old Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla gives hope that more women will have influential roles in classical music.
Here’s my Rhapsody piece for International Women’s Day:
It took until 1920 for the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to be ratified, guaranteeing female citizens the right to vote. But almost 100 years later, the status quo in classical music still needs a whole lot of shaking up if women are to have any chance of fair representation.
Filed under: essay, music news, Rhapsody
March 6, 2016 • 9:36 am Comments Off on A Bright Mahlerian Cosmos from Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic
My review of this weekend’s Mahler 3 by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic is now posted on Bachtrack:
No work is more emblematic of Mahler‘s symphonic philosophy than the Third. Or at least that version of his philosophy filtered by Sibelius, who recollected Mahler’s words decades after their meeting in 1907, long after his colleague’s death: ‘The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’.
But it was another Mahlerian statement that Gustavo Dudamel’s interpretation with the Los Angeles Philharmonic brought to mind – a statement reported by his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner referring specifically to the Third Symphony when it was still a work in progress: ‘To me, “symphony” means constructing a world with all the technical means at one’s disposal’.
Filed under: conductors, Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mahler, review
March 3, 2016 • 12:11 am Comments Off on Americans at Work
Here’s my program essay for the upcoming West Coast premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields, a remarkable oratorio:
“The thing I love about music is, it’s beyond words. But somehow the words crept back in — big time,” remarked Julia Wolfe in an interview on NPR’s Studio360 following the announcement that she had won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for Anthracite Fields. Wolfe’s moving and innovative new oratorio fuses music with words to tell a story deeply rooted in American history — and one inextricably connected to how we live today.
Filed under: choral music, Julia Wolfe, Los Angeles Master Chorale
March 1, 2016 • 9:39 pm Comments Off on David Jaffe: The Space Between Us
David Aaron Jaffe
Recommended event in Seattle: David A. Jaffe’s The Space Between Us on Saturday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. at the Chapel Performance Space.
Jaffe is a San Francisco-based composer and performer with a special interest in computer music innovation (Silicon Valley Breakdown); he’s also a software developer and writer.
The Space Between Us, commissioned by the San Francisco Other Minds Festival and dedicated to Jaffe’s mentor, the legendary Henry Brant, receives its Seattle premiere. The work mixes acoustic instruments with “robotic percussion instruments” created by sound sculptor and maverick composer Trimpin.
Jaffe offers this background:
Jaffe explains that Brant died before he could realize a collaboration he had been planning with Trimpin: “I was in Santa Barbara packing up for shipment the instruments that he left me in his will, and I got the idea of approaching Trimpin to see if he would be interested in doing a piece with these instruments in honor of Brant. He was enthusiastic so, at the very last minute, while standing at the UPS counter, I changed the destination address and sent the instruments directly to Trimpin….”
More info on the work, including reviews, can be found here.
The program will also include Jaffe’s virtuoso fiddle showpiece Cluck Old Hen Variations, “which sounds like what Paganini might have written if he were from Kentucky,” and Impossible Animals for computer voices, “in which the brain of a bird is transplanted into a wildly-gifted computer-generated soprano.”
The all-woman Lafayette String Quartet — for whom Jaffe has written several quartets — will additionally perform Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 9 and English composer Rebecca Clarke’s Poem.
Filed under: instruments, new music
February 29, 2016 • 8:16 am Comments Off on Five Not-So-Easy Pieces: Prokofiev at BAM
New York, NY – Feb. 24, 2016 — The Mariinsky Orchestra, lead by conductor Valery Gergiev, performs Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3: Daniil Trifonov soloist, at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. (credit: Robert Altman)
My review of Folk, Form, and Fire: The Prokofiev Piano Concertos — Prokofiev marathon with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra — has now been posted on Musical America (behind a paywall):
The Mariinsky Theater and its director Valery Gergiev launched their recent five-day residency at BAM February 24 with an ambitious orchestral program comprising the five piano concertos of Prokofiev. Trading the windswept rain … »Read
February 25, 2016 • 9:59 am Comments Off on Faust on the Brain
I’m still digesting Akropolis Performance Lab’s recent production, Ecce Faustus, which is now tangling in my head with Mahler’s Eighth. I need to sort this out.
February 24, 2016 • 5:02 am Comments Off on Handel Discovey
In time for Handel’s birthday on Tuesday, Gramophone magazine reports on the upcoming premiere in April of a cantata by the composer from his early period in Italy. The score was recently discovered in the private collection of early-music figure Ton Koopman:
Koopman’s website explains: ‘It is an earlier but very different version of the cantata [‘Tu fedel? Tu costante?’, HWV 171]. Only the first aria is substantially the same, while the three remaining arias are entirely new. HWV 171a, as the cantata will be known, also differs from the later version in calling for an oboe in addition to two violins and basso continuo. There can be no doubt about Handel’s authorship, because of numerous motivic connections with his other works, including the opera Almira, performed in Hamburg in 1705, before the composer left for Italy.
Filed under: Handel, music news
February 23, 2016 • 10:07 pm Comments Off on The Fountain of Ricola
Filed under: photography
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 