If you haven’t checked out Chamber Musician Today, the latest, greatest (and only) new addition to the Sequenza21 family, you’re missing some really good stuff. Some very talented people have signed up already and have added their blogs to the daily content flow and it’s starting to look like a web community for musicians and composers with real potential. If you were to run over there right now, for example, you could read a report from the Native American Composers Apprentice Project in Moab, Utah from Ralph Farris, violist of the terrific contemporary string quartet Ethel or a post by Matt Albert of eighth blackbird about how we all know the Italian words but just how loud is loud anyway? You could check out cellist Emily Wright piece about things that can, and do, go wrong during auditions or Chris Foley’s definitive post on how to build and maintain a repertoire list. For the more spiritually minded, there is a a piece by violinist Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi on how the world needs more conductors with bigger souls and less hair and a meditation of the hidden meaning of the low “A” by oboist Alison Lowell.   And that’s not to mention some inside dope on composing from Steve Reich and a wonderful meditation on sound by Jeffrey Agrell, University of Iowa prof and horn man extraordinaire.

Come on over, sign up (the green box at the top of the right sidebar), comment, post something, review a CD, add your blog.  It’s fairly straightforward but the “Help” section is helpful and if you need extra attention, send me an e-mail.

Apart from the usual nightly or more Proms concerts that happen in the Albert Hall, there were two subsidiary series which the BBC presented under the auspices of the Proms at Cadogan Hall in Sloane Square, a chamber music series on Monday afternoons and a Saturday Matinee series. The installment of the latter which happened on the 21st of August was presented by I Fagiolini (an early music vocal ensemble whose director is Robert Hollingworth) and the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, with Lawrence Power, violist, and Ian Watson, accordion player, as soloists. The very interesting program paired pieces of early music with modern pieces which were either based on that piece or somehow or other associated with it.  After a performance of Flow My Tears by Dowland (which is the version of his Lachrymae tune with words), Power and the Britten Sinfonia played Lacrymae by Britten. Even though the title suggest a connection with the Dowland tune in question, the Britten piece is actually meditative variations on another Dowland song, Can She Excuse (presumably Britten thought Lacrhrymae was a better, more evocative title). After I Fagiolini sang Tristis est anima mea and Moro, lasso, al mio duio by Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Britten Sinfonia played Carlo by Brett Dean. Carlo is a sort of memorial to October 26, 1590, which was the night on which Gesualdo’s unfaithful first wife and her lover were murdered, either, according to legend, by Gesualdo himself, or, at least, certainly at his instigation. It begins with a recording of Moro, lasso, which begins to expand as the orchestra enters, by the addition of bits of other Gesualdo madrigals. Over the course of the intensely dramatic piece, the orchestral music, which is more “modern” and impassioned, completely engulfs the tape of the actual vocal music by Gesualdo.

Betty Olivero began the work which became Neharo’t Neharo’t during the fierce war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon during the summer of 2006. Moved by the television images of victims, corpses, and mourners on both sides, she wrote a piece which was about laments and mourning. Her work uses the work of professional mourners in various Mediterranean countries, both recorded and transcribed for the instruments, along with music derived from Monteverdi’s Madrigals of Love and War and Orfeo’s lament from Orfeo. The earlier part of the piece involves impassioned, florid melismas exchanged between the viola and accordion soloists, accompanied by two string orchestras, building up, both in texture and volume, to the climax of the piece, which is the moment at which the actual recordings of the mourners are introduced. From that point the work unwinds its intensity. Olivero, in her use of the soloist in contrast to the orchestras, represents the relationship between the individual and the group to which he/she belongs. As the music recedes from the climax, occasional soloists from the orchestra detach themselves from the orchestra portraying the more personalized experience of other individuals in the collective. Neharo’t Neharo’t means Rivers Rivers in Hebrew, evoking rivers of blood and tears that are shed by mourning women in disastrous situations; however Olivero also intended to imply hope, since the root of the Hebrew word ‘nahar’(river) resembles the word ‘nehara’, meaning ‘ray of light.’ The rapturous intensity of Neharo’t Neharo’t was matched by that of the performance, particularly from the soloists, Powers and Watson. It was preceded on the concert by Lamento della ninfa and the end of Act Two of Orfeo by Monteverdi.

On August 23, The Swedish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard, gave the first UK performance of their compatriot Albert Schnelzer’s A Freak in Burbank, a tribute to the American director Tim Burton. While composing his work, Schnelzer was reading a biography of Burton; he tried to imagine and evoke Burton’s life in “the pastel-colored suburb” of Burbank,California, where Burton grew up, and to suggest the loneliness and sorrow as well as the manic, moderately destructive playfulness which he felt sure must have characterized Burton’s childhood. The other influence on the work was Haydn, and it in fact has the general outline of the first movement of a Haydn Symphony, beginning with slow music–or at least long notes, initiated by somewhat grotesque flurries of notes and sporadic short twitches, predicting the speed of the fast music that follows. The rollicking fast music is eventually interrupted by plaintive slower music, shimmering with hints of the fast tempo, which morphs into the introduction and is elided with the recapitulation. The climax of the work, almost at its very end, momentarily combines both the musics before ending with a bang. The language of the piece is neo-classical and tonal. Dausgaard and the orchestra performed it with energy and humor, and with obvious enjoyment.

On August 25, Leif Ove Andsnes and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra gave the UK Premiere of La mattina (Piano Concerto No. 2) by Bent Sørensen. There were several sources which suggested elements of the work: After a performance by Andsnes of the Mozart 17th Piano Concert in Vienna, he and Sørensen went to a piano-bar where late at night Andsnes played a Busoni transcription of a Bach Chorale Prelude.  Sørensen described the music as being ‘something from the abyss that floats upwards and in the end became a halo over our heads,’ and that experience provided the germ of the idea for the scenario as well as the character of the music of the work. The first of the work’s five movements begin with dark hued, quietly slow moving music low in the piano which is in the manner of the Bach-Busoni Chorale Prelude. It is surrounded, shadowed, if you like, by wisps of music in the orchestra, played at the very edge of inaudibility, which gradually becomes more present, leading without a break into the luminous, high scurrying music of the second movement, which enfolds the piano, playing fragments of music, whose occasional breaks leave shimmering motionless remnants of the orchestra’s music. The increasing intensity of the music leads first to a flurry of guitar-like pizzicatos, and soon after to the sound of claves, played by members of the orchestra. The slow third movement expands the register and enriches the range of timbre of the orchestra, even as musical argument intensifies, followed by a claves-accompanied cadenza. The more tentative fourth movement, where the piano plays in alternation with the orchestra, portraying a sort of sunrise, leads to the vigorous Presto finale, whose music and texture are radiantly Mozartian, which eventually spirals up into oblivion. The most immediately striking aspect of this work, as is the case with all of Bent Sørensen’s music that I have heard, is the delicately and carefully, one might well say ‘exquisitely,’ heard sound of it, which is instantly arresting. The subtle and compelling construction and argument of the work becomes clearer over its progress from beginning to end. Andsnes and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, who had played brilliantly the other works on the concert, by Mozart (Haffner Symphony and C minor Piano Concerto) and Greig (Holberg Suite), without a conductor (and, in the Grieg, by memory), were conducted in the Sørensen by Per Kristian Skalstad. That performance was enthralling.

Chamber Music America and ASCAP team up each year to present awards for Adventurous Programming to honor U.S.-based professional ensembles, presenters, and festivals that have “…demonstrated a commitment to contemporary chamber music through adventurous, distinctive programming.”

Ensembles (contemporary, mixed repertory, and Jazz) and presenting organizations (contemporary, mixed genre, and jazz) are considered.   The awards will be presented during the next CMA National Conference in New York City, January 13-16, 2011. Each recipient will receive a $500 award and a plaque.

This year’s deadline is October 1, 2010.  (This is an in-office deadline, not a postmark date).  For more information and to download the program guidelines, application and FAQs, visit the CMA website .

For the past week I’ve been in residence at the 2010 2010 Interamerican Festival for the Arts This is doubly significant for me: for one thing, and most obviously, it’s an excellent professional opportunity providing a very fine orchestral performance (and a second performance of an orchestral work at that!). For another, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Although I have been active in the U.S. and have lived most of my life there since the age of 16, Puerto Rico is still my home in a very real way and being performed by my hometown band is a source of great pride.

I don’t want to toot my own horn here, however. PRSO Music Director Maximiano Valdes , beginning his second full season in this post, is determined to turn this festival into a major contemporary music festival for the Caribbean and Latin America, and, thus, the programming this past week has consisted primarily of new music with tonight’s performance by the PRSO consisting entirely of music by living composers, all of whom will be in attendance. Besides my own 2007 work, “Colorfields,” we are hearing premieres of works by Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble founder David Stock and University of Puerto Rico professor and festival co-director Carlos Vazquez, who presents a guitar concerto that pays tribute to the folk music of Panama, for whose principal symphony orchestra the work was written. The most impressive composer by far on this program, however, is the Argentinian/Spanish composer Fabian Panisello . Panisello, who was trained in Argentina and throughout Europe, is the director of the Plural Ensemble in Madrid and has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments in Europe but remains largely unknown in the U.S. (although upcoming residencies at UC Davis and Stanford should hopefully begin to change this). His music, at times spectral, at times straightforwardly tonal, is always impressive, always evocative and often horrifying in its power and transcendent in its beauty. More than having the chance to build a relationship with my hometown band and to hear a large piece of mine again, it has been encountering Panisello’s music that has made the biggest impact on me this week.

So, two things to watch out for: Fabian Panisello and his music and the Interamerican Festival for the Arts, which, if Maestro Valdez is succesful in his endeavors (and his panache, ambition and musicianship suggest to me that he will be) will become the major venue for contemporary music in the Caribbean and Latin America, and a bridge between composers and interpreters throughout the Americas.

The catalog for New York City Opera’s 2010-2011 arrived by post yesterday and, as usual, the Met’s poor cousin on perpetual life support has cobbled together a few interesting-looking programs to accompany the usual Donizetti and Strauss crowdpleasers. There is the long-delayed premier of A Quiet Place, Leonard Bernstein’s final stage work, the New York premiere of Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the first opera of Stephen Schwartz who did the Broadway hits Wicked, Godspell and Pippin, and–most intriguing of all–an evening called Monodramas–three one acts by John Zorn, Morton Feldman and Arnold Schoenberg.

But, what caught my eye was the news (to me) that the New York State Theater, the NYCO’s home, is now called the David H. Koch Theater. David Koch is a familiar figure on the New York social and philanthropy scene, with weitere Infos hier detailing his and his brother’s ownership of Koch Industries, the second-biggest private company in the United States. He is a multi-billionaire who trails only our esteemed mayor as the wealthiest man in New York. He has given millions of dollars to various arts organizations over the years. He has given many, many more millions of dollars to fund radical right-wing causes. He and his brother are the deep pockets behind the “grassroots” Tea Party Movement and virtually every other campaign to destabilize the American government and purge it of “liberal” influences.

When Koch ran for vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket, his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools—in other words, as Frank Rich notes, “..any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes.” Further proof that the acorn does not fall far from the tree, the Kochs’ father–Fred–was on the governing board of the John Birch Society. Fomenting civil unrest and paying entertainers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to  confuse the rabble about who their true enemies are has been a Koch family enterprise for at least 50 years.  In tandem with Rupert Murdoch, they own the mind of every new Timothy McVeigh and abortion clinic bomber this country will produce in the next several decades.

Many artsy-fartsy New York beneficiaries of Koch’s arts benevolence were aware of his conservative leanings and although they widely considered him a jerk on a personal level, they chose not to delve too deeply into his other causes for fear of losing a sugar daddy. I didn’t know is not a legal defense but it makes a convenient excuse sometimes. That changed last week with Jane Mayer’s devastating profile of the Koch brothers in the New Yorker.

Nobody in the arts and music world can now claim they don’t know.  What will be most interesting is how they choose to react.