In August of this year, New Focus Recordings released New Music for Two Voices, an impressive collection of acapella vocal music by sopranos Susan Narucki and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. This lavish album features a full hour masterful singing of six contemporary works, including three world premiere recordings. Susan Narucki is an accomplished soprano who has appeared as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, among many other international appearances. She is presently on the faculty of the Department of Music at UC San Diego. Kirsten Ashley Wiest is an award-winning coloratura soprano who has
Read moreJust when Steve Reich’s ninetieth birthday celebrations appeared to be drifting towards an inauspicious conclusion, along comes Charles Hazlewood and the Paraorchestra to gatecrash the party, tear up the rulebook, let loose a posse of Dionysian dancers on the scene, and transform a routine Reich event into a Bacchanalian rave. This new take on Music for 18 Musicians provided a breath of fresh air amongst a raft of retrospective events—Reich remodelled and refracted through the prism of psychedelia and 1990s warehouse EDM, with perhaps a whiff of hippy idealism and transcendental meditation thrown in. I’m not sure whether the composer would have
Read more(Photo credit: Allen Cohen) Reaching Marlboro requires a gradual surrender of scale. Roads narrow, familiar coordinates loosen, and the forest exerts its own editorial influence, stripping away whatever feels extraneous until distance becomes a form of concentration. On September 20, 2026, that concentration gathered inside Ragle Hall at the Serkin Center, where the Marlboro Music Artist Residency Program presented The World of György Kurtág, an arresting sequence of works composed or arranged for soprano and double bass. Beyond the hall stood the wooded seclusion of southern Vermont; within it, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and bassist William Langlie Miletich moved
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Choral Music, Classical Music, Commissions, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral
A visceral work headlined the opening program of the NY Philharmonic’s 2026-2027 season at Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center on September 16: John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, a work written in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. As the 25th anniversary of the tragedy was just a few days prior, my gut was still tender from the echoes of the memories of that day. The work included a recording on which the names of some of the victims were spoken. Even a quarter century later, hearing the names put me right into
Read moreThe Prom on August 23, which was presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, concluded with a performance of Amérique by Edgard Varèses, having begun with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its 1947 version, The Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto, with Gautier Capuçon soloist, and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The title of the piece had dual meanings, just as Varèses’s intentions were multiple. The work was on one hand a sort of portrait of the active and bustling New York City, but it also had the intention of opening new, as it were, vistas
Read moreLive in Brooklyn, 1992-2002 opens a decade-long aperture through which sound flees its dates and resumes its unfinished conversation with the present. Guitarist Jeffrey Schanzer and pianist-composer Bernadette Speach turn performance into a social form where individual voices ply dreams that are startlingly alive. The duo began collaborating in Buffalo in 1982, joining free jazz and global traditions to the post-Cagean avant-garde. After moving to Brooklyn two years later, they entered an artist-led culture sustained by collective labor. Schanzer served as president of the Musicians of Brooklyn Initiative, founded by Lester Bowie and Oliver Lake with Cecil Taylor; Speach worked
Read more(Colin Currie Group perform Steve Reich’s Quartet) Steve Reich’s ninetieth anniversary year would not be complete without a world premiere. Or two, as was the case in this evening’s all-Reich concert at Usher Hall, Edinburgh. There again, a Reich premiere would not be complete without the Colin Curry Group either, with Quartet (also on the programme) and Traveler’s Prayer previous co-commissions for Currie’s group. Forming part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, these two new compositions – Two Pianos and the stirring, spectacular In All Your Ways – appeared in either half of the program. More on that later. The
Read moreThe Prom on August 20 commemorated the centennial of Miles Davis’s birth. Davis was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most important musicians of the 20th century, but he was not a composer and not just a performer. He was a composing performer, who probably never played the same thing the same way twice. His playing is known to many people, just about everybody now, through his recordings, which were a single example of how he would have done something, and which are also very much a product of his work with arrangers, most especially Gil Evans. It is their
Read moreThe stars appear first. Their light seems to have traveled through the interior of a violin before reaching us, gathering the grain of wood and the pressure of a human hand along the way. Throughout Maksimal, Daniel Temkin thus treats music as celestial mapmaking, drawing places where the horizon turns out to be an instrument played from both sides. The title composition, written in 2022, carries the genetic traces of the Baroque concerto grosso into a world of fractured memory and unstable terrain. Francisco Fullana is the violin soloist, giving the music its incandescent center. Ryan McAdams conducts the Maksimal
Read moreThe Proms concert on August 10 was presented by an orchestra consisting of students from the Juilliard School in New York and the Royal Academy of Music, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Vilde Frang as violin soloist. The program consisted of works by three of the most imporant composers of the early twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky (Symphony in Three Movements, 1942-45), Alban Berg (Violin Concerto, 1935, and Béla Bartok, Concerto for Ochestra, 1943-rev 1945). The Stravinsky, written after his move to California is a reaction not only to the ongoing world war (the program notes quoted Stravinsky in one of
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