Month: June 2010

Rite Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor Deutsche Grammophon CD True, Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps is a watershed work. It serves as many a classical listener’s jumping…

The Orchestra of the League of Composers (ISCM) presented the group’s “season finale” at Miller Theatre on Monday June 7, 2010. True, this is a pickup orchestra, but you’d never…

Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been named as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s next Music Director. His seven-year contract begins immediately, with Nézet-Séguin assuming the title of Music Director Designate for two seasons and…

Word of Jack Beeson’s death reached me yesterday;  very, very sad  news– and also shocking.  Not just because  I’d studied with Jack at Columbia  in my last year there and…

Kicking off in just a matter of hours, this year’s Ojai Music Festival has a schedule sure to make a number of East-Coasties feel they picked the wrong ocean to live…

Eclectic in their programming and superlatively talented, the Locrian Chamber Players have a unique mandate: they are the only new music ensemble which limits their repertoire to works composed in…

There’s a lot of shock and sadness in the Mexican classical community just now: last week one of the finest violists in Mexico and the world, Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, was found…

American composer Jack Beeson died of congestive heart failure on Sunday, June 6 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, at the age of 88. His family was with…

[Ed. — After many years in NYC but fresh to my own stomping ground of Houston, Chris Becker has offered to write some semi-regular musings on the new-music scene down thisaway.…

This was inspired by Alvin Lucier’s classic and still awesome work I am sitting in a room.