Music
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Jazz Pianist Chick Corea at 79
From Chelsea to the Berkshires
By: - Feb 12th, 2021The jazz pianist, Chick Corea, has died at 79 not long after the diagnosis of a rare cancer. His impact and influence was enormous with a career that included almost 90 albums for which he was awarded 23 Grammys as well as three Latin Grammys. He grew up in Chelsea a blue collar Boston neighborhood. We last heard him in the Berkshires at Tanglewood in 2016.
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Wave Theory Records Presents 3 Women
Legendary Score by Gerald Busby
By: - Feb 07th, 2021Wave Theory Records has released the original soundtrack from legendary filmmaker Robert Altman’s 1977 cult avant-garde film 3 Women, starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. The strikingly dissonant score was written by American composer Gerald Busby,
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Atlanta Opera Presents Love Letters to Atlanta
Jamie Barton Sings Georgia on My Mind
By: - Jan 29th, 2021Georgia has been very much our minds this year and last. The state significantly contributed to the return of Happy Days. The Atlanta Opera Company is offering Love Letters to Atlanta on February 14. Morris Robinson, Jamie Barton and Kevin Burdette.
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Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Boston Lyric Opera Streaming Philip Glass
By: - Jan 28th, 2021Boston Lyric Opera has boldly re-adapted Poe’s famous gothic horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” with music of Philip Glass. It streams on operabox.tv for seven days starting on January 29/
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Song for 2001:A Space Odyssey, Just Released
52 years later
By: - Jan 13th, 2021Mike Kaplan is a producer, documentary director, actor, award-winning poster designer and marketing strategist. He is known for co-producing The Whales of August, (Lilian Gish’s last film.) A Clockwork Orange, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and more. In addition, he is noted for his collection of historic movie posters that have been exhibited in Museums from Los Angeles to Jacob’s Pillow. He is also a songwriter.
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Wide Slumber at Prototype Festival
Gorgeous Music Combining Science and Art
By: - Jan 13th, 2021Wide Slumber is a taped work presented at the Prototype Festival. It premiered in Reykjavik in 2014. Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdsson adapted a much lauded poem by Canadian a. rawlings. In evocative, erotic and riotous words. rawlings shows us the night zone between sleep and dreams. Shakespeare dwelt there often – to sleep perchance to dream. Wide Slumber is a large work.
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Network for New Music Presents Extraordinary Measures
Composer Portrait of Richard Wernick
By: - Jan 11th, 2021Network for New Music gives us a delightful composer portrait of Pulitzer-prize winner Richard Wernick, a native Bostonian. He has studied at Tanglewood, and with Leonard Bernstein. Can you imagine a "Sunken Synagogue" replacing the Ys' cathedral of Debussy?
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Prototype Festival Opens OnLine
Modulation Startles and Stuns
By: - Jan 09th, 2021Undaunted by the constraints of COVID, the Prototype Festival launched its 7th annual event on January 8th. Modulation opened the week of new, streaming works. While the trailer and prologue look like the Hollywood Hills striped with waving geological lines, the three florescent doorways invite entrance to an interior. The inventive work, made up of 13 parts, is divided into three acts, Isolation, Fear and Identity.
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Hans Henze's Sailor Betrayed
Simone Young Conducts a Masterpiece at Vienna State Opera
By: - Dec 23rd, 2020The Vienna State Opera has recently streamed their live production of Hans Henze’s The Sea Betrayed, a title translated with the approval of Yukio Mishima, the famed author of the novel on which the opera is based. The opera premiered in Berlin in May of 1990. Audiences in this country were not initially attracted when it was produced the following year by the San Francisco opera. The War Memorial Opera House was half empty. The opera is a masterpiece.
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Experiments in Opera Delivers A Podcast Series
Aqua Net and Funyums
By: - Dec 09th, 2020Experiments in Opera (EIO) is the company that gives most hope for the future of the form. They are fleet, inclusive and steeped in the history of the opera. Most importantly, they have extended the camp story-telling which characterizes the form. For all the beauty of classic operas, let’s face it: they are camp. A new podcast series has just been released by the group.
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Richard Vacca's Bio of Jazzman Freddy Taylor
What, and Give Up Showbiz?: Six Decades in the Music Business
By: - Nov 27th, 2020Fred Taylor breathes life into this narrative, literally having a conversation with you, including many hilarious anecdotes, home-spun punch lines but also always making you feel like you were re-living the moment with him. The Taylor bio has been written by jazz historian Richard Vacca.
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James Darrah At Boston Lyric Opera
Creating Streamed Opera
By: - Nov 25th, 2020Boston Lyric Opera, ever on the lookout for startling innovations that work, has hired Darrah to produce a stop motion feature-length animated version of Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
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James Darrah At Boston Lyric Opera
Creating Streamed Productions
By: - Nov 24th, 2020Boston Lyric Opera, ever on the lookout for startling innovations that work, has hired Darrah to produce a stop motion feature-length animated version of Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
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Edward Smadone's Once and Again
A Recording for Our Time
By: - Nov 23rd, 2020Edward Smaldone is a contemporary composer of classical music. His distinctive textures include unusual combinations of instruments, odd beats, counterpoint and rich harmonics. These elements blend but do not merge. Rough edges combined with smooth melodic lines are ear catching. Lines often stretch wide and giant leaps leave gaping spaces between notes.
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Bard Conservatory Orchestra Features Wesley Sprott
Fanfares, Serenades, Concertina
By: - Nov 20th, 2020Count on Bard to bring us unexpected, deserving programs concert after concert. Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares Liturgigues opened this program. The fanfares were conceived as part of Tomasi’s opera Don Juan de Manara. They premiered as a stand alone a decade before the opera opened in Munich. What a splendid work.
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The Orchestra Now at Bard
Chamber Ensembles Intrigue
By: - Nov 19th, 2020Bard’s The Orchestra Now (TON) gives live performances in the time of Covid. Recently they performed a challenging and revealing program in Annandale, NY. Selections were made with attention to the number of instrumentalists required and ability to social distance on stage.
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Young Musicians Tune Out Covid
At The Monmouth Conservatory of Music
By: - Nov 10th, 2020Where once technology was thought to be the death knell of human social interaction, it is now bringing us together. During this pandemic, arts institutions worldwide have been regrouping and finding ways to keep going virtually. The Monmouth Conservatory of Music is no exception. Living in this altered reality, unable to gather in-person as they normally would, the school has gone all-out to ensure the beat goes on for its young musicians (some as young as 5!)
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Tyshawn Sorey Plays His Deck
Alarum Will Sound in Video Chat
By: - Oct 31st, 2020Newark, New Jersey has given us Philip Roth and LeRoi Jones among others. Now we have Tyshawn Sorey, moved south to a studio in Philadelphia, 'conducioning' at a triptych of computer screens on which seventeen performers have gathered to create one of Sorey’s Autoschhiams, a spontaneous composition.
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Visit the Atelier des Lumières, Paris, France.
A Magical Van Gogh Exhibit
By: - Oct 28th, 2020Missing Paris? Van Gogh? Music? Impresario and superb clarinetist Joseph Rosen points the way to a magical Van Gogh exhibit with "Vincent" sung by Jim van Der Zee. Enjoy!
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Composer Victoria Bond in Recent Works
Pianist Paul Barnes and Violist Martha Mooke Perform
By: - Oct 15th, 2020Victoria Bond brings a distinctive, rich ear to her musical composition in many forms. A recent commission provided a chance to collaborate with Paul Barnes, a go-to pianist for both Bond and Philip Glass. Bond's Simaron Kremata is based on a Greek chant and opens with a five note melody which repeats.
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Rob Kapilow Tackles the Appassionata Sonata
Orli Shaham Exposes a Sonata
By: - Sep 27th, 2020Rob Kapilow begins his “What Makes it Great” evenings with a discussion of special elements in a musical work to be performed in its entirety at the conclusion of the evening. Kapilow is a conductor and performer. Always responsive to a live audience, he draws us in, elucidating us as he instructs. Now he is streaming from an empty Merkin Hall. Yet you become addicted in one outing. Through Kapilow, listening to music has added whole new dimensions. Orli Shaham provides examples for a discussion of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 5. She also gives a deeply moving performance of the Appassionata.
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Ruth Bader Ginsberg Loved Opera
Our Very Own Brunnhilde
By: - Sep 20th, 2020Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died this week while still sitting on the bench, was a hero to American women. She believed above all that women could bring about a better world. She loved Beethoven’s "Fidelio," the story of Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison. She related to the opera's story as a woman and a feminist.
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More on Alex Ross, Wagnerism
Ross Captures The Meister's Voice
By: - Sep 14th, 2020Alex Ross’s depiction of Wagner in America, in his new work "Wagnerism," is focused at the start on the author Willa Cather. Ross finds Cather and Thomas Mann the most musically educated and sophisticated of the many literary figures who infused their work with the ideas of the Meister. The boundless scope of a work, its inclusion of ancient myth made present, and leitmotifs bound together to organize a story, are key elements of the Wagner style.
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More on Wagnerism by Alex Ross
George Eliot Absorbs Wagner
By: - Sep 10th, 2020When Wagner’s music crossed the English Channel, it attracted the attention of novelist and critic, George Eliot, who always took a great interest in music. Early on, she identified Wagner’s achievement as a path to the future, writing, “…anyone who finds deficiencies in opera as it has existed hitherto...” must admit that Wagner “…has pointed out the directions in which lyric drama must develop itself, if it is to be developed at all.”
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Ross On Wagnerism
The Intoxification of Baudelaire
By: - Sep 03rd, 2020Alex Ross whose Wagnerism is to be published on September 15th, first heard Wagner on a LP record borrowed from his local library. Listening to Lohengrin, he was neither transformed nor transfixed. The Meister is not a free pass to paradise. Yet many listeners have been instantly seduced by a steady procession of creeping chromaticisms.
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